Hill of Grace by Stephen Orr Page B

William.’
    Doctor Hamilton couldn’t believe his ears. From The Overlanders to the Amish. More Fritz than the Chapman’s factory, and a group discount too. Still, they’d paid. Goebbels was dead and part of being an Aussie was to take people as you found them.
    â€˜So,’ Ron continued, ‘you, William Miller, above all other men, know the exact year, month and day?’
    â€˜Kookaburras,’ Doctor Hamilton whispered, as he pointed.
    â€˜According to the Jewish calendar,’ William replied, ‘it would be March twenty-one.’
    â€˜Nineteen fifty-two?’
    â€˜I believe.’
    â€˜What do you make of that, Pastor Henry?’
    Henry stopped in his tracks, a confused Moses leading his tribe towards emus. The others stopped and looked at him. Even Doctor Hamilton stopped.
    â€˜As dry as a nun’s nasty? Is that correct?’
    Doctor Hamilton smiled, but everyone else was shocked.
    Henry sighed. ‘Well, at least that’s one thing I know.’ And smiled, walking on, taking the lead from Doctor Hamilton.
    As they continued on through denuded scrub, overgrown with potato weed and horehound, Ron Rohwer took William aside and said, ‘Just because someone exploded a bomb, doesn’t mean the world’s going to end. Every time’s had its bomb.’
    William was silent.
    â€˜There’ll be a sign.’
    â€˜What sign?’ William barked.
    â€˜Churches with Christ’s face in the plaster.’
    â€˜Rubbish. Signs for idiots. Haven’t come to nothing . . . anything.’ Whereas William’s path had been logical, mathematical, as well thought-out and balanced as an algebraic equation. He continued on without looking at Ron. ‘We’re all entitled to our own views, Ron.’
    â€˜Not to brainwash others, though.’
    â€˜Brainwash!’
    Ron stopped but the others kept moving. ‘“No man knows,”’ he whispered to himself, seeking higher consolation than Pastor Henry, who was caught up in a vision of someone harvesting their pubic hairs.
    They were marched past an enclosure containing three lame wallabies that had been orphaned by a Holden. ‘My daughter nurses them,’ Hamilton said. ‘When she’s not busy in the ticket booth.’ The Doctor explained how a Chinese panda, sitting motionless in a grassy enclosure, would be dead had Dinkum World not purchased it from the Chinese government when some zoo or other was about to close.
    The pentothal narrowly avoided, thought William.
    But suffering a sadder, slower form of euthanasia, as lorikeets and galahs from an adjacent aviary mimicked the sounds of his apocalypse.
    The social committee settled in for their free sausage sizzle and the Doctor encouraged them to carve their names into a roughly hewn outdoor setting. ‘Carved by our neighbour,’ Hamilton said. ‘A Yid, but by far the nicest Red Sea pedestrian I’ve ever met.’
    Eventually it was time for a group photo. The Doctor stood beside William, smiled and said, ‘Meine freundes, ha?’
    William looked at his watch and sighed once again.
    William lay in long grass in the late afternoon, watching drops of water trail down split tomatoes he’d told Bluma she never should have planted. Dusted regularly, but dying anyway. Turning a winter yellow of everything gone weedy, setting seed in a garden no one would bother about until spring.
    He looked up, but then closed his eyes, his ears alert to distant trucks and sheep, a breeze through stray, wild oats. A Cessna over the High Eden Ridge transformed into the stukas of a nearly forgotten World War Two newsreel, screened for the town’s benefit during the war in the Tanunda Institute. Then, days later, there were the trucks full of new street signs: overnight Bethanien became Bethany, and the Kaiserstuhl, Mount Kitchener. Pastor Henry had been ordered to pray in English and the Holy Cross and Gnadenberg