Hill of Grace Read Free Page A

Nathan’s history teacher at the Lutheran school, ‘Arthur is on his way.’
    The kegel club was a single-lane bowling alley built in the form of a long shed. Wives took it in turn to stand at the far end of the alley, re-setting the wooden pins and returning the balls down an angled gutter lined with white cotton. The men stood about in the shed proper, drinking, telling lies about their working weeks and wishing there was another kegel club for them to compete against.
    But there wasn’t. They only had each other, week after week, taking turns to tabulate the same pitiful scores on the same commandeered blackboard, courtesy of Julius.
    â€˜What sort of history are you teaching these kids?’ William joked to Julius. ‘Too much of the Austrian. Not enough of the Prussian.’ Referring to Hitler, the upstart who’d been responsible for the demise of their social club and the Goethe Institute.
    Arthur entered, dropping the new pins on the wooden floor. ‘Let’s look at these,’ began Trevor Streim, president of the club, as he picked them up and ran his hands over the oak Arthur had sanded smooth.
    â€˜An exact copy,’ Arthur smiled, putting down his beers and producing the original he’d used as a model.
    â€˜Good.’ Trevor smiled, holding up a copy against the original.
    â€˜But how will they perform?’
    â€˜The same properties,’ Arthur defended.
    â€˜Still,’ Trevor half-sung, motioning for Rechner’s son to run them up to the ladies.
    â€˜Oak develops a ripeness with age,’ Arthur continued, trying to bring perspective, seeing how Trevor Streim was intent on stacking his pins up against others which had been used since the club opened in 1858.
    Mrs Trevor Streim, the first and best matriarch of the Tanunda Kegelbahn, replaced three of the nine pins with Arthur’s and stood back. The room fell quiet as Trevor took a ball and launched it down the lane. It was a strike, of course. As the pins tumbled Arthur pretended to listen but only Trevor could actually hear the dead lignin in the very heart of the pin. As they clattered and settled all eyes turned to the president. ‘Close,’ he said, ‘but I can still tell the difference.’
    Rubbish, Arthur thought, having spent endless hours choosing the right wood and turning it on a lathe in his workshop. ‘You must have the ears of a bat,’ he said, lifting his eyebrows – and for a moment everyone sensed an insurrection.
    â€˜It takes a Weidemann hand,’ William said, to break the silence and lighten the mood, referring to Arthur Blessitt as Artur Weidemann, another of the valley’s name-changers who wasn’t yet comfortable changing back.
    â€˜Of course,’ Trevor said, retreating. ‘Only Arthur could make such a precise copy. Prosit, Arthur.’
    And with this they all toasted Arthur, although Arthur himself was unhappy with his work being thought of as a copy, compared to its true status as a thing unto itself . In the same way his crucified Christs and scale-model Rx 93 steam were things unto themselves, representing the familiar but in a style which was distinctly Arthur’s. This is what the Streims of the world couldn’t understand.
    The carpet of wood-shavings and saw-dust on his workshop floor attested to this – the finely sharpened chisels and his grandfather’s well-oiled lathe. Precise, razor-sharp pencil marks which were followed to the thousandth of an inch, his leather tool-belt and half moon bifocals – these were the signs of a true artisan.
    Arthur and William walked home through the showgrounds, set up for Angus cattle the size of elephants and the dill cucumber championship which Trevor’s wife regularly won. Passing through the Langmeil graveyard Arthur stopped to show William his grandfather’s headstone, cracked neatly down the middle but refusing to yield. The vineleaf-entwined anchor still