‘To love you.’
Tegwyn groans. ‘I thought you said you were alright.’
‘Did you get our names from God?’ I ask him. ‘How did you know our names? You knew all our names, and you knew about Dad.’
‘He was living down at the bridge spying on us. He watched us swimming —’
‘But —’ I start.
‘And I had no clothes on. Did God tell you what me fanny looks like, too?’
Mum stands up, skraking the cane chair. ‘Tegwyn, go to your room.’
Tegwyn slaps the back door against the wall. The fly-wire pops out the frame. We hear her door slam. After a bit, Henry Warburton keeps talking and we listen. He talks and talks about this bloke Adam and this bloke Eve who had no clothes on and it didn’t matter ’cause they ate fruit and talked to a snake and it was a bad thing, and everything went wrong-oh. And how you can see God but you can’t. And all these stories about God in burning bushes and piles of fire and tornadoes and little clouds. Stories! Piles of ’em. He tells stories like you’ve never heard, boy. About God getting sad when no one loved him, and him just waiting around keeping things going, waiting for someone to like him, and then getting angry and crying and making a flood with his tears. This bloke Noah and his boat. I know that story from school. Another one about a kid fighting a monster, and this one about a bloke trying to run away from God and how he got swallowed up by a big fish and chundered up again. I saw that on telly. All the time he’s talking about this bad in people and God wanting people to love him but they can’t because of all this black bad in them like in an apple. And this real long story about God making a kid in a girl’s belly. This kid grows up and some like him and some don’t. He can do crazy things like walk on water and then make it into plonk, make crook people better and dead people alive. People didn’t like him because he was so good to them. They killed him by sticking him on a tree. They put him in a hole but he got up afterwards and went up into the sky with God.
At the end of the story it’s real late, but I feel like I just got out of bed. My head’s ticking away and me hands are all tingly. All the red eyes of the rabbits out near the fence are dancing. Mum sighs.
‘So. You’re a preacher.’
‘Yes. An evangelist, I suppose you’d say.’
‘Well why wait until now to start preaching?’
‘I’ve been preaching since the moment I arrived. I’m sorry, I don’t do it well.’
Mum sniffs; she does when she’s thinking.
‘So, God’s up there?’ I say, pointing to all those wonderful stars. ‘A someone?’
‘Everywhere, Ort. He’s in everything. The trees, the ground, the water. Everything stinks of God, reeks of him.’
‘But he’s up there a lot?’
‘Well, they call him the Father of Lights.’
‘He sees everything?’
Henry Warburton sighs, and then again. ‘Yes, Ort, every little thing.’
‘Then he knows the secrets.’
‘What secrets?’ Mum says; she sits up straight.
‘All the secrets. All our secrets.’
‘Yes,’ he says.
‘And he saw who killed Errol.’
‘Ort.’
‘And what happened to Dad. What he’s thinking. And he knows what Grammar’s always thinking.’
‘All . . . all the mysteries. All secrets.’
Sounds right to me.
Mum sniffs. Henry Warburton laughs. Out over the forest, a star tumbles out of the black eye into the trees. Tomorrow I’ll go and look for it.
‘Did you make a wish, Ort?’ Mum says.
‘Yes.’ Not true. I forgot.
For a while it’s quiet, like everyone’s thinking. There’s lots of questions in me, and this feeling right down that makes me feel like I’m jumping in the air, or like when you hit a bump going real fast in a car. Butterflies, bellyrolls.
‘You never mentioned any of this before,’ Mum says to Henry Warburton. ‘When you talked about yourself. Not a word. Why did you do that?’
‘Because,’ he says, real quiet, ‘because . . . I’m weak.’
‘Yes, I can see that now.’
‘You don’t like weak men.’
‘No,’ she says, ‘all men are weak. A woman’s got no time to be weak. It’s not that I don’t like weak men. I just get sick of them. Bill Cherry, for instance. He takes out his weakness on children.’
‘And Sam?’
‘I count Sam with the children.’
‘I don’t understand.’
Mum sniffs. ‘Sam is a child in a man’s body. He trusts people. He thinks the best of them. He sees the way things should be, not always the way things are.’
‘And he can hear every word, Mum,’ I say, grabbing hold of his hand. ‘You forget.’
She looks at me. I can see the water in her eyes in the light from the roof. Her hands are all tight and twisted together the way two brown, fighting spiders would be. She nods, real slow.
‘Even kids’ve got ears,’ I say.
‘Sometimes their ears are too big for them and they hear too much,’ Warburton says, like he’s not in a good mood.
‘Not as much as some,’ I say, pointing up there into the night.
Henry Warburton gets up and for a sec I don’t know what he’s gonna do, but he just steps off the verandah onto the dirt and walks out into the middle of the yard with his hands in his pockets, kicking with his feet, whistling some tune or other. He stops and turns around, looking up, looking round with all that black and white winking behind him.
‘Afraid I can’t see your light anywhere, Ort.’
‘It’s there,’ I say.
‘I can’t see it.’
‘I can’t see what you see, either.’
‘I’d say you’ve got a match, here, Henry,’ Mum says, laughing like she feels better all of a sudden.
I squeeze Dad’s hand, worm me fingers between his and squeeze. There’s no squeeze back, but that doesn’t make me feel different.
‘Anyone for a cuppa?’
We all say yes except Dad who never says no to a cuppa. We go in when the kettle’s boiled, and bring out the pot and the cups and a tin of Mum’s bickies – the ones made of bran and oatmeal that go through you like the charge of the life brigade. We sip and dunk and I help Dad. It’s not that his hands and mouth and eyes don’t work; it’s just like he’s not interested in using them any more. It’s like he’s given up. We eat and drink and go quiet again; the tea and bickies makes us friendly.
Mum makes herself a second cup, and me too; makes you feel real grown-up, two cups. She looks like she’s gonna say something for a sec, and then she looks at Henry Warburton and then at her cup of tea and says nothing. He smiles.
‘I was converted, if that’s what you were going to ask.’ Mum smiles and looks kind of embarrassed. ‘God is a mystery. He plants his love in the path of all our plans.’
‘Aren’t you tired, Ort?’ Mum says.
‘No, is this secret?’
‘Of course not,’ Henry Warburton says. ‘Of course not. What was I saying? Oh, our plans. I had a lot of plans after Bobo died. Plans to get a job. To go away again. To buy a farm. To kill myself. One morning I woke up with this awful haze in my eyes. It was like looking into a sixty-watt bulb. I had it for three days before I went to the first doctor. This terrible light in front of my eyes. It hurt. I had headaches, I couldn’t see properly. I couldn’t continue a normal life, couldn’t keep a job. I went to doctors, eye specialists, even a psychiatrist. None of them could help, though they all had different explanations for the same phenomenon. It went on and on. I was staying in this boarding house in Brisbane. The landlady was a crazy old thing with a hearing aid like 1950’s TV – almost big enough to have to strap it to her back. She used to climb the stairs day and night, shouting: ‘In my father’s house are many rooms!’ I just thought she was a nut. I ended up completely immobile in my room with this shocking light and pain and this feeling o
f not quite being attached to myself, and she came in, morning, noon, and night, nursing me and cashing my dole money for herself. I got worse. I fought it, thought I was going blind, so I fought against it, and it was like a cramp when you’re swimming – the more you fight it, the worse it gets, the quicker you drown. It brought on nightmares and I must have been out of my mind in the end, fighting it, fighting it, all the time this white light burning into me. I don’t recall much of it. It was a week or so of it. I think I just gave up, something inside of me just broke and surrendered. I was utterly exhausted and it went away. I looked around for a moment, at the cobwebs in the corner of the ceiling, the brownish curtains, and I just fell asleep. Woke up two days later and there was the landlady – Mrs Sims was her name – with a bowl of soup, ready to feed me. She didn’t smile. She just said, “God has been with you” and stuffed an iron spoonful of her awful soup in my mouth.
‘Recuperating was almost as bad as going through the experience itself. I was constipated to the point of no return. Concrete laced with razor blades.
‘When I got better, I went out and stole a Bible from a shop that sold heavy Catholic theology and plastic Marys. I started travelling again. Met farmers, wanderers, bush philosophers who were believers. Blokes in road gangs. Barmaids. And I realized that the Church did exist. The kingdom without walls. Family of Man, or whatever. It was a terrible shock after being brought up by a High Church agnostic. I learnt a lot of things. Lived in a community in Gippsland for a year. There we were, God was with us and in us, without us having to say the secret formula. We didn’t need to conjure God up with wafers and wine. He’s always been there only we never look. All you need to do is open your eyes. You see, and then you either want it or you don’t. If you believe, the Spirit helps you to believe more. Helps you to love more.’
‘But you had to have them opened.’
‘Sometimes we need a bit of prompting.’
‘And now you’re out here prompting the Flacks,’ Mum says smiling over her cup. I suck on tea leaves.
‘Yes, here I am. Proselytizing the heathen Flack.’
‘You could actually say you’ve seen the light,’ Mum says, with a laugh.
‘I suppose so.’
‘I can’t figure you out,’ she says, shaking her head.
He laughs. ‘You know what my middle name is? Esau. I think it was a joke my father thought I’d appreciate when I was old enough to understand. He used to call me Esau the see-saw. Up and down. Yes and no. Good and bad. The blind leading the blind.’ Again, he laughs. ‘Esau selling his birthright for a pot of lentil stew. Literally. We ate a lot of lentils in northern Queensland.’
‘They’re good for you,’ I say.
‘Yes,’ he says grinning, ‘but they make you fart something awful.’
‘Everything has a price,’ Mum says. We all laugh. The chooks shuffle on their perches and the rabbits move red eyes in the dark.
Chapter Eleven
IT’S REAL EARLY in the morning. The creek is flat brown and the swimming hole looks like someone just painted it for us, like God just did it. Down here at the bridge it’s real quiet. Mum, Henry and me are standing in the water, and Henry is talking. Everything’s stopped except us.
‘Do you believe, Alice?’
Mum looks at me. ‘Yeah. I reckon.’
‘Then I baptise you in the name of Father, Son and Spirit.’ And under she goes, with Henry holding her. When she comes up, her dress sticks and her hair is flat. She splutters and laughs a bit.
I stand there, nervous. Think about what Henry told us that night a couple of days back. Yep, it still sounds right. He turns to me. I feel the mud in my toes. I see a bird frozen still in a tree behind Henry, and up by the bridge, Tegwyn hiding to watch. I feel sad a bit.
‘What about you, Ort?’
‘Yeah. I believe it.’
He crosses my hands on my chest and holds me big and strong and I go back like I’m falling out a window, out into the sky forever, and I keep my eyes open under the water and it’s like tea and it all goes up me nose and then I’m rushing up to the surface like out of a dream. And there’s the sky. All over. And it all starts again. That bird calls out and chops off somewhere, and it’s quiet under the sky. And I laugh a bit too.
Chapter Twelve
THIS MORNING WHEN all the birds were starting to make their heep-beeb waking-up sounds, Henry Warburton rode off on the old yellow bike. He had a white shirt on and black pants, and shoes. He rode down towards Bankside. I saw him go, and I don’t think he saw me. A couple of weeks, he’s been here now. Things are different. The sky was all pink. Everything was still. I knew then it would be a cooler day; could smell it in the ground. Mum was up and getting breakfast when I went in. I told her Henry was gone and she looked like she was worried but trying hard not to look like it.
‘What about the Lord’s Supper and the praying and the Bible story?’ I said.
‘Oh,’ she sighed and put more wood in the stove. ‘I s’pose we can do it ourselves. That’s what Henry said. Don’t need anyone to do it for us.’
I was a bit nervous, but we did it. We sat down at the table while the eggs were on and the bacon, and I read.
In this you greatly rejoice, though now for a little while you may have to suffer grief in all kinds of trials. These have come so that your faith – of greater worth than gold, which perishes even though refined by fire – may be proved genuine and may result in praise, glory and honour when Jesus Christ is revealed. Though you have not seen him, you love him, and even though you do not see him now, you believe in him and are filled with an inexpressible and glorious joy, for you are receiving the goal of your faith, the salvation of your souls.
The bloke who wrote that once cut off someone’s ear. You’d think that someone who went round cutting off people’s ears could tell a better story. Anyway, the eggs and bacon were ready by then, so I stopped and Mum said a prayer.
‘Thank you Jesus for this good food please make us good and Sam better Amen.’
And then we ate breakfast. At the end of breakfast we did the Lord’s Supper like Henry Warburton’s been doing with us since we got baptized last week. Mum got the sherry and some bread. Then she said the words she could remember.
‘Take it, it’s my body.’ She gave me some bread and took some herself. We ate it. ‘Drink all of it,’ she said, pouring some sherry in my tea mug. There were tea leaves floating. ‘It’s for forgiving sins.’
Then I said: ‘We love you God Amen.’
That was this morning. We did it all again at lunch ’cause it’s as often as we meet, like it says. It’s not really the blood of Jesus. Any dumbo can see that. Henry says it’s just to remember. It’s no use eating Jesus. Ha! He’s in you already.
And now I’m here wiping up for Mum. Christmas is five days away. Maybe Henry Warburton’s gone off to buy us prezzies, eh. I can hear the forest sighing like it sleeps in the day and wakes up at night. Mum scrubs away at a pot, her arms all red.
‘How big’s a soul, you reckon?’ I ask. She blows a bit of hair out her eye.
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ she says. ‘Big as your fist.’
‘He fits in small places.’
‘Who?’
‘God.’
‘Well, he’s a mystery,’ she says. ‘That’s what Henry reckons.’
Getting baptized was real weird, but kind of fun. Henry asked if we were into it, if we believed all the stories and stuff, and I said yes real quick, specially after him talking about being born twice and coming back from the dead. I know about that stuff. So does Dad. We’ve both come out of comas, and I was dead twice. I had to learn to walk and talk again. Dad will too, if he ever gets better. So, I was into it. Mum said yes in the end. She said she didn’t know. He explained it all again. Took ages. In the end she said yes. Tegwyn said it was a load of crap and ran out the room. Henry Warburton shrugged and looked sad.
And now we’re Christians. Things change fast round here. Henry Warburton
turning up out of the blue like that, giving us all this stuff about Jesus, me going to high school next year, busting up with my best mate Fat Cherry. And Christmas real soon. Feels like I’m growing up. You can’t be immature for ever.
We finish up the dishes and then go in and get Dad out of his bed for a bath. With Henry Warburton away, it’s gonna be real hard looking after Dad again. He’s hard to move; he falls all over like a bag of chook poop. Mum and me get him on the floor and drag him. The wheelchair is in the corner, but Mum won’t have a bar of it.
‘Berrrrgfh!’ Dad burps.
‘Beaudy, Dad.’
‘Morton,’ Mum says, ‘pull your weight.’
We drag him down the hall and leave tramlines in the dust with his heels. The water is going already – thunder in the bathroom.
‘Is that you, Lil Pickering?’ Grammar calls out.
‘No, it’s just us, Grammar!’ I yell.
We get Dad out of his PJ’s and in the water. His head goes under. Mum pulls him up by the hair.
‘Yer swimmin’, Dad,’ I say.
‘Sorry, love,’ Mum says.
We get out the flannels. Dad’s chest hair goes like grass in the wind.
‘You think he knows about his soul?’ I ask.
‘He used to always talk about his heart speaking to him,’ Mum says. We always say ‘used to’, like he’s in the past now.
‘He must know about God,’ I say, soaping his face. He looks at me with those inside-of-himself eyes. ‘He’s into trees and animals. And you reckon he’s like a kid. Henry says we’re s’posed to be like kids. It’s easier for kids to be like kids, though, isn’t it?’
‘You talk too much.’
‘You mean I hear too much.’
She chucks a flannel. It hits me in the gob. I chuck it back. Then it’s on, me and Mum mucking around like kids, chucking water and sending it all over the asbestos walls and flying in Dad’s face.
Then I get an idea. I stop flicking water.
‘All these baths Henry gives Dad. You reckon he’s baptizing him all the time?’