The Last Garden

The pastor made Glühwein jokes in his sermon and cautioned people about excess. Scheidling, Nebelung and Christmond had become quite bibulous months. People toiled in the longer days and mild nights, working their market gardens and their brides gardens, usually in that order. Tradespeople opened their doors and the workshops hummed and tapped and proffered wine to visitors while they selected wares, for every house was aligned with one of the winemakers, with the exception of the Hallehaus.

In the evenings, oak barrels were opened and tested, older barrels bottled and neighbours bragged to each other over the previous vintage, their soil, their secrets and their wines, and invited each other to tastings, at which everyone invariably praised what they tasted but privately thought their own superior. Small amounts of wine were now sold to Luthertown with the Wahrheit stamp on the glass, and all the winemakers could sense a great change coming. ‘A gold rush!’ Ulli Weimann said. He was the first to plant his whole allotment with young vines.

Pastor Helfgott could not shake off his discomfort with all this. It weighed on him too that Hannelore stopped drinking wine altogether, as if she knew something he didn’t, and was separating herself from everyone; which, no matter how foolish people were, he considered wrong. We must all sing together, Lord.

People sang, indeed, all the time, and when Wahrheit rang with hammers, laughter, playing children and songs shared as soon as heard, he almost felt nothing was wrong.

Benedict fossicked, turning over beams and charred furniture, scuffing rubbish. He had begun exploring the ruin, finding many useful implements and the occasional disturbing relic. It was all so altered that at times he found it hard to identify which room he was in, for the interior walls had been wattle and daub under the plaster and were all but gone. Parts of the floor were intact, parts burnt through to the joists beneath, and this underlying skeleton now seemed more substantial than anything it had once carried on its back.

Kicking now along a stretch of blackened floor, he suddenly found a familiar ring of metal, recessed into the floorboards. The cellar. He had completely forgotten it. He passed a length of pipe through the ring and levered the trapdoor open.

He went down to the barn and fetched the kerosene lantern from the hook in the stable where it had hung since the night Lucie was born.

The cellar smelled faintly of charcoal and must, but was undamaged. His yellow light played over the empty apple barrels and the wonderful laden shelves of preserves, then the wall of dusty bottles. His father’s secret hoard. This had once seemed his father’s only secret, a secret they all shared.

‘It’s because he associated freely with Romans and Anglicans,’ Ada once said, her voice censorious but eyes amused more than shocked.

Romans, Anglicans, Nederlanders, Wittenbergers. Such a stupid way to talk. Benedict had associated freely with the lot of them at school, and they weren’t particularly odd, dangerous or alcoholic. As he shook clove apricots from a jar into his mouth, he pulled out a bottle of wine and wiped the layer of dust and ash from its face. He could make out the word Kaiser. He giggled and licked syrup from his chin. He would associate freely with Wittenbergers today.

He lay in the spring sunshine out in the overgrown oats paddock, the bottle beside him. He had had a sip or two, and yes, Wittenbergers were hard to take standing up.

He could see the ruthlessness of trees: their struggle against each other for light and the slow battles lost and won, the wars that leave no trace of the vanquished. He waved the bottle in salute to the grace of trees: grace of the fierce, grace forged through repulsion and antagonism. They reminded him of magnets and iron shavings and other cold powers.

The biggest red gum was a marvel of wild symmetry. He loved it the more for its being at war with itself. He had not forgotten the other tree mirrored darkly beneath it.

A widow maker. All would have made sense if only his father, tired out one summer’s day, resting just so, had been squashed. Grief, tears, love remembered, shared with the widow. His arms around his mother, each of them the other’s solace, each of them the other’s all. Benedict, spreadeagled in rags under the savage tree, was lost in a daydream of that lesser tragedy—a desirable, a sensible, a reasonable tragedy. He yearned for it, imagined its detail, using his own body as a prop. Such a clean tragedy. It left a past and a future altered but where they should be, one ahead, and one behind. How lovely it would be to grieve!

He had several days drinking wine and dreaming of soothing tragedies. In all he killed his father, not his mother. The widow maker was so possible: he stared up at several unbalanced trees. Snakebite was a good one too; also more than likely. Kicked in the head by a wild horse (he couldn’t bear to make Fell responsible, even though, in his exuberance, Fell’s hooves must have come close often enough). A flood. All these disasters killed off his father’s body, not his soul; and all left the past—the loving husband, the wonderful father, and the promising son—untouched. All buried Matthias beside the Hall.

When the Wittenberger was finished, he took the empty bottle back to the cellar and found a Roman. It tasted rather as fuel for hell-fires might taste, and was even harder to take, but made him sleep blissfully that night.

He began yabbying. Every time Felice caught a mouse and gave it to him, he cut it open along the middle, folded it inside out around its tiny ribs and tied it with twine to a stick.

Lucie played, visited him at the creek, then raced off to play again. Under her tutelage, all the foals became friendly with him, and he saw again how little he had known.

Memories assaulted him now, and he stumbled, almost knowing, into their waiting snares. He half-wanted them, even though they sapped him and left him either stretched on his pallet or roaming indolent and purposeless through the fields—or, purposeful, to the cellar.

What happened to Widow Hare’s Man?

The Snake got him the Snake got him

What happened to Widow Snake’s Man?

The Kestrel got him the Kestrel got him

What happened to Widow Kestrel’s Man?

The Fox got him the Fox got him

What happened to Widow Fox’s Man?

The Tree got him the Tree got him

And the Tree stands all alone!

Despite the child’s rhyme, a song he too had danced and mimed, Benedict thought little of the widow maker, other than avoiding the underworld beneath it. He forgot his glimpse of it as a slower, larger life, and forgot what it could do.

At an unalterable moment in time, the great tree, towering over the buzzing short lives of beasts and boy, struggling ever for and against slower things, tore apart. The long battle was over.

A rending of sinew and fibre, a shattering fall, a compound, impossibly loud concussion. A shock wave of birds tumbled into the sky, rising in wild flocks from woodland, grass and water, calling in alarm. Nests were flung from the canopy, possums crushed in hollows; a koala writhed feebly in the shuddering leaves.

The horses wheeled as one, panicked, wild-eyed, not seeing Benedict in their path. Everything slowed. The thunder of the fall was taken up in the rolling thunder of hooves. He could not hear himself yell, roar, as he waved his arms at the oncoming wave of muscle, hoof, hair and bone. His scalp crawled: he reeled with a shocking sense of himself and the horses as adversaries. But at the last minute the wall parted and, in a sudden pulse of sweat and dust, they were gone, flinging clods into his face. He recognised none of them until they turned at the end of the Forty Acre, where, instead of turning into the crush of his mares, Fell went through the bullwire.

The fence whined and squealed through the eyes of the fence posts, then twanged a crazy note; posts cracked and clattered as the wire slithered, sang and caught. Fell was down and tangled; the others leapt and stumbled through wire that sprang and coiled at them like a living thing. Somewhere, a horse was shrieking in an unnatural voice.

Fell threshed in the wire, rose to his feet and plunged, dragging the fence with him until he tore himself free. He galloped away, steps even, head high in terror and delight at his escape. Benedict ran towards the mares milling in the Forty Acre, still hearing screaming. Fell had joined the others and was snorting around, high stepping, seemingly unhurt. Benedict was sick with relief.

His breath snagged as he ran. The mares shied away from him as he rushed through them. A black foal was down in the wire, and now he felt rather than saw Melba behind him.

Lucie’s mouth was open. He realised she had not stopped shrieking. Her eyes were wide, transfixed, and, as if all energy went to her voice, her struggles were feeble. Benedict touched her face, her neck, but she couldn’t feel him, couldn’t return from her terror. For the first time, he was glad that the strange permeability of creatures had sealed over and closed him out. He knew with his hands on Lucie’s shuddering body that he did not want to feel what she was feeling. She could see something he could not. He began bending bullwire, feeling it heat, weaken and give way. He could see blood under her, pooling around her.

Life left her slowly at first, like a candle steadily diminishing, then with absolute suddenness. Benedict, waiting in the blood with her head in his lap, knowing what was coming, wishing even that it would come more quickly, was still jolted. He awoke from some far stasis to a disgust with her body and the blood and clay that covered him. He staggered out of the mire and away, leaving Melba to her pawing and hopeless whickering. He shed his horrible clothes, leaving them to the ants and grass and earth, until he was walking naked and blood-streaked to the pump by the well. He washed, knowing full well that he still had to bury her.

Melba sniffed Lucie once more, silent now, then walked away. At the far end of the paddock she called, head high, sending her neigh far into the hills, calling for the foal whose body was cooling on the blood-churned earth.

Much later, washed for a second time and dressed, Benedict trailed slowly back up to the tree. Birds wheeled, magpies came in to land and called in alarm at the sky-filled absence. The remainder of the tree loomed above him, creaking and rustling, looking, if anything, refreshed. The fallen half, resting in debris, seemed larger than when it had carved and defined the sky. The impact had shaken the earth loose all around.

He clambered through the shattered limbs to stand close to the bone-white trunk. The fallen part had the girth of a small horse, bigger by far than Lucie. All branches from it had shattered, leaving red but bloodless wounds. He sat on a branch and looked down at his clean hands. He sniffed them. They were still potent somehow with the raw and metallic residue of blood.

Lucie had been hard to bury, slippery. Her burial seemed a cold reversal of her birth. She had been bulkier, too, heavier and more cumbrous than she had ever seemed alive. He had had to bend and soften the taut sinews of her stiffened legs to fit her into the hole he had dug, for leaving her legs poking upwards had seemed both indecent and an invitation to the fox to try to dig her up and pull her out again. When he finally had her in, she looked like a dead spider, legs all angled and tucked in. And then, once the earth was mounded and tamped, he had seen her, for the first time, in that other world, bones curled low, nose down over the thin colourless grass. He wished he had remembered flowers.

He looked out across the paddock. Fell and the horses were gone, perhaps across the creek by now, running wild under the escarpment. Melba alone stood at the end of the Forty Acre. Well, they could stay where they were, he thought morosely. They would have to until he fixed the fence.

He jumped: his branch was crawling with frantic ants. The whole tree was a scene of disturbance and disaster. He picked his way gingerly through the twisted and smashed crown.

He sat in the darkness with Mardlaapanha, crouched against Ngaminha’s bare legs under her possum-skin cloak. Mardlaapanha’s broken arm was almost healed, and she told him stories in the warm darkness about how soon his would be healed too. Ngaminha rustled her feathers now and then and he and the child both chittered in contentment.

He woke in the predawn with a limpid clarity of mind. Each of us on an unknowable, mysterious journey. Hidden from each other. The tree could not hold one moment more. He had a vision of the overweening limb falling; he saw Fell rising unhurt from the bullwire, leaving Lucie struggling in her own blood. Melba straining to give birth to a single leg of a foal. The koala dying in the leaves. His clarity faded, but left him peaceful.

Melba’s grief was a muted thing, buried deep in her body. It didn’t show but he thought he could feel it. It hummed in her breath, in her heartbeat, in the sluice and chug of her guts. She liked him milking her, and he listened to her grief with his cheek to her flank and his fingers rhythmic. He could feel her remembering Lucie’s lips and eager suck, and tears rolled down his face. She didn’t call or seek Lucie. She knew. He was amazed that she knew.

Milking was an embrace, for he wrapped his arms either side of her leg and used just a thumb and forefinger on each of her tiny teats. Often she lifted the leg from the pain or tenderness, and he cradled it with his knees, murmuring softly to her all the while. She nuzzled the air, now and then, where Lucie’s rump would have been. She smelled his fingers afterwards, sometimes licked them.

Slowly her milk dried up. He couldn’t keep her drained the way Lucie could, and she made less and less. Her sugar milk that had kept him so strong faded away to a memory.

Benedict had a path through the grime and mess of the barn worn by his padding feet. Banked to either side, old tins, bottles, broken tools, worn-out clothes and broken harness mouldered in a humus of apple cores, peelings, carrot tops, old straw and cat’s piss. He had shed anything his body or hands no longer needed and had paid no further attention to it, other than to kick it aside if it fell in his path. The barn had a cosy, composting warmth that intensified to a stench as the season turned. Bit by bit the smell tugged at his attention, but he did no more than wrinkle his nose now and then and vaguely ponder. Closer to his pallet, the bark peelings and skinned sticks piled high. Curls and ringlets, strips and tatters, giving off a faint hint of yeast and eucalyptus.

He saw the red fox picking his way through the rocks, intent upon his unknowable concerns, and he pelted rocks at him, shouting tentative and stagey curse words, his voice croaky and strange in his own ears. The fox flickered like flame in the dappled light under the sheoaks and was gone. Benedict sat down, feeling foolish. If he was going to curse, he had better practise.

‘A pox on you, you, you…you bloody…fox,’ he murmured. He lay back in the sun and stared at the sky, feeling oddly happy. He croaked out curse words from school:

His own voice was beautiful and powerful, and he sang everything he could think of in English, German and all he could remember of Ngaminha’s language. He felt marvellous, enlarged.

Benedict, the fox called. Oh Benedict. A man is just a man. The chickens are just chickens.

Benedict started awake. The moon was high, tossed upon stormy seas. Tlot tlot, his heart said, tlot tlot as he ran along the road, as the fox came riding, riding.

Where Ada plucked in silence, her fingers deft, but each gesture electric. A pall hung over the house; an unusual silence pressed in from the outside. The mound of vari-coloured corpses on the marble bench gradually diminished, and the acrid soapy smell of boiled feathers filled the house. The platter of plucked chickens would be a pyramid before she was finished. Matthias slunk through silent rooms, prowled the verandah, hovered indecisively in doorways. When Ada needed the copper filled, she pointed at it wordlessly, refusing to look at him.

Once dunked in the scald, the feathers lost all beauty, but enough had fallen to leave the kitchen turbulent with spotted, speckled and iridescent detritus, blue-black, buff, white. Benedict collected them silently, his heart pounding with the awfulness of it, wondering why his father had done something so mean to the chickens. To Ada.

When the chickens were all plucked and cleaned, Ada sent Benedict to hitch Heine to the trap and deliver carcases to the neighbouring farms. Benedict had never hitched or driven alone, but he obeyed silently. As he fumbled with the harness, struggling to reach over Heine’s broad back, Matthias appeared soundlessly at his side and helped him, then took the reins and drove him until the job was done. They didn’t speak of it, but Matthias was so quiet and gentle with the horse that Benedict was reassured.

Ada didn’t speak to Matthias for a week. At the end of that week Matthias disappeared for a day and a night, and Ada hovered, pale and awful, in the silent house. Benedict felt ill from the moment he woke to the moment he managed to sleep.

Matthias reappeared on the afternoon of the second day, trotting Hilde gaily up to the house, the trap laden with crates. He didn’t look at Ada, who was standing on the verandah with her hands on her hips, but something in his demeanour gave off pride and mystery and Benedict knew, with a leap of his heart, that somehow the shadow was over. Matthias didn’t stop in the carriageway but trotted over the lawn, churned flamboyantly over the garden beds with outrageous assurance, and drove round to the chook run, with the clucking crates jolting and exclaiming with every lurch.

He had found Ada a collection of chickens beyond any flock Benedict had ever seen. He produced each squawking specimen with a flourish, as a magician might, made it flap for Benedict, then tossed it this way or that into the pen. Benedict laughed with delight, and Ada, standing and watching, looked up first at the willow tree, then the pine tree, then smiled. Each shrieking chicken was more spectacular than the last. The final crate held a single enraged rooster. Matthias mimed the danger, wrestled, and then extracted the most spectacular of them all: he had a speckled tuxedo, a trailing tail, black and white and a yard long, and magnificent spurs. Matthias swirled him, the tail feathers flying like streamers, then hurled him like a firework into the pen. The rooster righted himself and spun, neck feathers fluffed for battle, to attack the fence near where they stood.

‘Shokoku,’ Ada said, in awed delight; then, pretending annoyance: ‘And now I’ll have to keep the run clean just to stop those tail feathers from getting mucky!’

‘Look what he got for me! I don’t know how he did it!’ Ada stood, her arm draped over Benedict’s neck, her hand on his ribs, pressing his small body to her skirts. With her other hand she pointed out the different kinds among the angry chickens. The run was a battleground. Ada pointed out Lakenvelders, Leghorns and, with a squeal of delight, Faverolles. Barnevelders fought Totlegers; Orpingtons were in affray: two ridiculous Celestials in affright. Ada giggled, her hand over her mouth. Her eyes sparkled as she and Benedict searched their fluffy heads for eyes.

‘Some of them aren’t even in the Universal Book of Modern Fowl,’ Ada said. ‘I looked them all up!’

When the Shokoku crowed, it lasted longer than any rooster Benedict or Ada had ever heard. And rather than annoying Matthias, as their old Totleger had done, each crow, as it swelled and yodelled, on and on, brought a satisfied smile to his face. He told Ada outrageous tales of exotic chickens, and then found them for her as presents whenever he returned from travelling.

‘Not in words, son. It’s more that I speak to Him all the time, and I receive solace and guidance from His Word. He can speak to you through the Book.

‘Not torments, Beni, surely: you are in torment, yes. We cannot know His reasons, but He knows all things. His love is boundless.’

‘You are wrong, Benedict! You have been chosen for this suffering—He tests you.’

‘If that’s what you call it when he takes my chickens and boasts about it,’ Benedict said, staring at his own filthy feet.

‘Oh, Beni. You and the chickens belong to the Lord.’ Bless his gentle heart, Lord. You’ve got him grieving for a chook.

It was the longest conversation the pastor had dragged from the boy—and Lord, that is a start.

Benedict liked the pastor’s visits. The pastor called him child, son, boy, and Beni, and nagged him about cleanliness, food, faith, the Devil and social graces. The pastor berated him for cursing. None of this ruffled him, although he felt himself to be less and less a boy. The pastor was gruff and kind, and the pastor brought meat more often than not; but his pleasure was in much more than this.

The simple act of exchanging words was wonderful. These elliptical conversations pleased him inordinately. Hearing his own mouth utter meaningful sounds, feeling his tongue curl to his hard palate, press behind his teeth, hiss air through just so, then block it—all this felt familiar yet miraculous. That his tongue knew! His breath was so well trained, unerring, like Melba between his thighs. And whatever these precision parts produced could be received, could garner sensible response!

Oh, the bliss of profanity! The wonder of praise! Each as miraculous as the other.

He chattered to himself, giggled. All his life, words words words, and now all of a sudden he could see them like goddamned birds flying from his mouth and into the pastor’s ears. Ods bodlikins.

And yet it was all so precise and fragile. Were he to say, ‘Inhawaartanha Ngaminha Vapinha!’ the pastor would think him crazy! Only Ngaminha and Vapinha and their children would know him then. He soared now, with his words. As he flew close to the world once known by a boy who went to school, as he all but alighted with his words, he could sense that the smallest deviations and abuses made him stand out as mad indeed, even if every word was understood.

Pastor Helfgott tried to stay blank in the face of the new deluge of words. Speech had been reborn in the boy, but—Lord, it is as though no sense of right and wrong has come with it. The boy’s face remained just as calm, almost expressionless, as it had with the first curse that passed his lips, as if he savoured some inner taste, or was experiencing some relieving bowel shift.

‘Fuck God and his wily ways. Fuck the Devil too, that little yes and no man,’ Benedict said one day, as if he were debating theology.

Pastor Helfgott blinked. ‘Don’t speak lightly of the Devil, boy. And don’t blaspheme. You are inviting evil into your soul, son.’

‘I don’t think so,’ Benedict said, as though it were a point to argue. ‘I have seen the face of God. I have heard His voice.’ His tone suggested that neither face nor voice commanded as high a regard as the pastor ascribed to them.

Pastor Helfgott looked at the boy askance, shocked. Benedict’s face had again its serenity, its still beauty, the azure eyes clear and gentle. He was of course not right in the head, but his words shook the pastor badly. It was one thing to be a grieving young man struggling with events difficult—impossible—to fathom without faith. It was another thing altogether to be some foul-mouthed and simple-minded saint.

The empty Hall on a spring afternoon was a place of solace and subtle challenge. The interior space was both austere and lustrous. Something about its dimensions was just right, just exactly the space a mind needed.

Pastor Helfgott had never felt quite equal to the Hall. He had always been more at ease in the garden. But when he had thoughts larger than his purview, and problems beyond his wisdom, he sought the Hall as a space for thinking, a space for enlarging and improving himself.

But today he could find no enlargement, no relief. His confusion and mistrust only churned within him more chaotically than before.

He picked up the Book of Seasons. As he read, he could hear his father’s voice filling the Hall. Such a glorious, ringing voice, so subtle and delightful. Even children sat spellbound. He too had sat, then, his heart swelling with feelings larger than himself, when the old pastor shook the air with his marvellous voice. The old pastor could turn words from the grand to the ridiculous, could make people weep in joy and hope and then laugh the next second. Out of grief at the loss of his wife, the old pastor had made a book of comfort, guidance and little jokes. A gift. Some of it was serious, and taken seriously. Some of it was dire.

There shall be seven seasons in the four: The Dry and Cold, Disease and Pestilence, Flood, Plenty, Fire, Fear and Madness. My children, He will come! And He will come here, if not in my time then in yours, or in the time of your children, for what place on earth has seven seasons? And what seasons! The fury and fires of Hartung and Hornung; the dry waiting of Lenzing and Ostermond; the cold of Maien and Brachet, disease and pestilence of Heuert, and then floods, oh yes, floods in Heuert and sometimes Ernting! Then we have plenty, the temptations of ease and mildness: Scheidling, Gilbhart. But in Nebelung and Christmond what we fear begins, the heat can kill our harvest and the blight strikes the tomatoes and cucumbers and our loneliness and exile sits heavily upon us, and the mothers cry for their lost children and that is when we shall see madness when the time is nigh. Make ready your houses and your gardens and your souls, for the Lord will be your house-guest and the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth is upon us! Ready your gardens to be part of the Last Garden! Be ready for the signs! And do you think the Other will wait, playing his fife and drum among far-off wars? Do you think the Other will not know the signs? Watch for the Devil, for he will be here in Aletheia when the time is nigh!

‘Lord,’ he murmured, his throat aching with grief, ‘how is it that I doubt my father’s words and wisdom?’

It was the pastor’s fault that Benedict thought so much about God. For a long while the pastor was his only human contact, and the pastor talked about God all the time. And if a boy whose parents have died suddenly by means of murder and suicide has thoughts about God that differ from those of a pastor, we should not be surprised. Pastor Helfgott, however, was surprised and dismayed mainly because he trusted God to have a plan for Benedict, and so had not thought through all the implications of Matthias’s act.

Benedict rose from his perch in the rafters, shook himself, and leapt down, catlike. He was stark naked. He unfolded from his crouch on the floor and stood, a thin flame, a white flash of eyes, in the gloom of the barn. Pastor Helfgott could see his smile: Lord, the boy is naked even of his beard.

It was long since the pastor had seen the naked body of a living adult. His breath caught in his throat and he turned away, tears in his eyes. Life was so very different from grey death. Youth so different from age. Clothing somehow expressed, translated the body in different lines, divisions. Each area fenced off for a different purpose, like a little farm. This long, complete, sinuous creature looked unfamiliar, barely recognisable. The scars that marked his arms and chest made him seem almost animal.

‘Father, for your sake. But I feel no shame, not in anything!’ Benedict touched his penis gently, his nipples, and his lips, and then, as he turned, he stretched to touch the rafters with fingertips. ‘Thus was I born! I am the Goddamned mare-suckled warrior, the hero of old!’ He cackled in glee and disappeared into the end bay of the barn.

‘You’d be feeling pretty silly if I had come with Frau Helfgott,’ the pastor called.

‘You are right, Father,’ he said soberly, but he stayed in wild, high spirits for the whole visit. His shaven face was pale and boyish. Leaner than before, but Oh Lord, he has his mother’s beauty.

Most good things came with the pastor. The cooked or cured meats, the wurst, the boots, the pickles and preserves and baskets of fresh fruit or vegetables. But the best and worst was Helene Katz. The pastor turned up with her sitting neatly next to him in the chaise. Fell squealed for the pastor’s mare, and then snorted and tore off at the sight of Helene Katz’s skirts as the pastor handed her down.

Benedict froze for a second, staring Helene in the face, and then fled, as frightened as Fell, and having much less fun with it. He hid in the sheoaks, his face burning, and watched as Helene and the pastor unloaded some baskets, then disappeared inside. Helene Katz. She had grown. She had a bosom and a small waist under taut blue cloth. Her skirts moved in the wind and pressed softly against her legs.

He waited, ashamed of his hair, his hands, his clothes, the pain deep in his belly, and his stink. Oh most of all, his stink. He could not go to them. Not like this.

The pastor shaded his eyes and searched the fields, hoping the horses would give Benedict away, but Fell was back by the yards, cavorting at skirts and showing off as Helene fed him apples. The boy was gone. He waited, but he had to take Helene back.

As his mare’s steady trot ate up the familiar miles, he asked the Lord for forgiveness: he had thought to bring his own niece, but had thought better of it. Hannelore would have been furious, and marital harmony must be preserved. And Hannelore was right, in a way: he too had not wanted Katti to see Benedict. Even filthy, somehow Benedict might not be disgusting to an impressionable girl.

What he had wanted was a steady sort of girl. Helene Katz, self-contained and quiet, had agreed when he asked her. Such kindness, Lord, must be encouraged, surely. But he had not wanted his own niece to be kind. The boy’s anger and beauty were both dangerous.

Helene said little, other than how lovely the black colt was, and that it was a pity that Benedict Orion could not be at home. This too was kind, for the boy had been face to face with her, and then he who felt no shame in anything had run like a rabbit. And the home she had seen was a barn and a disgrace. She had worked away inside while he trawled around to flush Benedict out. He saw that she had, unbidden, tidied up a little and unpacked the baskets with a nice sense of order and aesthetics.

The mare trotted, the chaise rocked and creaked and Pastor Helfgott lapsed into a silence that Helene didn’t fill. Her face was turned to the passing scenery and her bonnet obscured her from his sight. He sighed. Her shape was pretty, her manner unassuming. He had hoped to goad the boy into life, and this unmarried girl was after all one of his childhood companions, but unless a brief wide-eyed glance was enough, it had been for nothing. He wondered what silent Helene thought, but Pastor Helfgott had no confidence that she would tell him. He was used to a silent woman, and had not really considered that there might be very different kinds of female silences.

Helene jumped so violently at his voice that he thought she had seen something and he leaned to look out of her side of the chaise. Then he realised he had startled her and he patted her hand. He sensed her stiffen briefly at his touch and was dismayed. She had not shrunk from him before! He scrambled to reassure her.

He chattered to her all the way home to make sure he erased her fright. Her hands crept softly to her lap, holding each other, something he had seen her mother do. Maybe Helene was not quite a steady sort of girl. He would ask Hannelore. Helene helped her in the Hall. All the girls did.

When he dropped Helene at her doorstep and handed her out of the chaise, she rested her small strong hand in his big one without qualm.

‘Come and talk to me if you are ever troubled, child,’ he said, and she gave him a rare smile in acknowledgment.

When they were out of sight, Benedict slunk home. On his cleaned workbench there were apples and pears, bratwurst, some cheese and fresh rye bread. There was an astonishing thing, a Mohnstollen. And there was a small jar of flowers: snapdragons, gillyflowers and tiny yellow roses. He touched them with cautious fingers.

On his chair he found a brown paper pack tied with string, containing clean, well-worn trousers and two shirts. Wolf Katz’s, no doubt. On top sat two of Widow Katz’s faintly scented rose glycerine soaps.

Oh, Helene Katz. He had not thought of her since last summer. He had thrown potatoes at her for no reason he could think of and she had neither smiled nor thrown one back. He had blushed at being so misunderstood and gone home angry. They had played as children. Why had she been so rude?

He curled up on his bed with a rose and the two soaps. Helene Katz had given them to him. Maybe she was apologising.

Stupid! Of course she wasn’t. What was he to her? Just some boy who threw potatoes. If she had thrown one back, then he would not have been just some boy. Same if she had apologised. But now she had given him two soaps and some roses, gillyflowers and snapdragons. A very feminine kind of gift.

He completely forgot for a time that he was an unshaven man in filthy clothes lying on a hay bed in a barn. He forgot too the reasons he was there, and he forgot the horses, the chickens and the fox. He forgot that she might be giving him gifts for the self same reason the congregation sent things with the pastor, indeed that most likely there was something from her in every collection (which there was).

Helene Katz had a broad pale face and smooth skin that now filled his thoughts. Her eyes were often hidden, for she looked down a lot, as if worried about her footing. But he knew they were blue, like his. Like her dress. Her waist was much finer than his, but her shoulders were wide and strong, and her arms short and powerful—she was strong from stirring soap vats, probably. She stood very straight, unlike her mother and her brother. Her hands…he couldn’t picture them. He looked at his own, and imagined hers at the ends of her arms looking rather like his, but cleaner. Broad, long-fingered hands. Deft and clever. Very clean, from making soap. He saw them placed in his own, the fingers squeezing for a secret moment, a moment far beyond any return of a potato, and he felt dizzy.

The first few days of his affair with Helene’s soaps were quite chaste. But in his imagination Helene was quietly and mysteriously amenable to all his advances, and filled with secret desires all her own. Her soap-smelling hands touched his cheek tenderly now and then, and she lifted her eyes to his in brief, hot glances. He was early abed, yearning through the day for the touch of the precious soaps. His bed smelled of her, and he sank into it in a daze, strung taut with desire. He turned from her, from the perfect soaps, to hold himself in secret and have her wonder at his forbearance.

The moon shone through the half-doors, flooding the velvet dark of the barn with stark pools of light. Between his sheets, Benedict was naked. The warm night air was like silk, and a breeze stirred the mosquito net above him, sending a frisson through the cobwebs that anchored it to the rafters. He held the soaps, one in each hand, and with one stroked his own cheek—a kiss, a gentle, rose-scented kiss, that slid around to press his lips fleetingly, as if she could not prevent herself from stealing one. That soap flitted away, abashed, but the other touched his forearm so gently, pleading for consideration for her passion and her temerity. She pressed the forearm, and was not repulsed, so she slid, soft as…soft can be, to nestle against his neck, to rest there for a moment, safe in the knowledge of his regard. She felt his pulse there, felt its strength, its intensity, felt his restraint, and suddenly, unable to stop, both soaps trailed from his throat to his chest, passion sweeping all decorum away. He rolled onto his back, inviting her touch, his muscles filled with a sweet tension. Both soaps could not help themselves—one settled on each erect nipple, and he gasped as their soft rose touch seemed to reach right into him, sending a current through him that tightened his belly and thighs. All control was gone. He moaned as both soaps caught at the hair below his navel, pressed hard to his belly and then…

She could not but hold him and hold him, pressing her strong rose-glycerine scented hands to him.

Pastor Helfgott waited for a sign. There had to be a reason. There had to be. Am I impatient, Lord, that I want his suffering to end? He knew hardship and struggle to be lifelong, really, but perhaps he had always imagined a slower, drip-drop suffering, not this acute deluge. Even Job’s trials ended. He prayed. He wrote sermons to clear his head. He watched Helene Katz for impressionability and unsteadiness. But Helene did no more than ask after Benedict’s health. He had asked Hannelore for her advice: in his experience the only way to get her to disclose much. She had looked at him with an odd sadness.

‘A good girl. A good choice. That girl could have given much, but she is stifled by her brother.’

Pastor Helfgott was reassured, even marvellously encouraged that Hannelore had, in silence, approved his choice. She knew the girls, after all, better than he did.

As the sun warmed, and Benedict worked half-naked around the barn, the pastor could see how suffering had truly tempered him. The boy was muscled and sinewy, the very image of masculine beauty. Pastor Helfgott’s hair stood on his nape, even as words of praise rang in his heart. Benedict’s beauty had to have a meaning. The refashioning of his body out of the refining fires of suffering: this too had to be part of it all, part of a destiny.

And he no longer looked mad. Nor seemed it, if he said nothing. Maybe bringing the girl had done some good after all.

Benedict needed to buy oats. He had grown none, harvested none, and the vast supply he had had was nearly gone. He had the pasture seed and could feed the horses that, but it seemed wrong to do so. What was so hard about putting Melba to the wagon, doing up harness buckles, bridling her with that dust-covered blinker headstall, and clip-clopping the eight miles to town? It was so simple, and yet he could not. He stared at the cobweb-swathed wagon. He raised a hand to the shafts, then went outside.

But the idea returned, day by day stronger as the oats dwindled. He had more money than he had ever seen in the Arnott’s tin. He could buy rolled oats, even. A ham. Honey. Gherkins, oil. Flour. Beer. Each day some long-forgotten staple or luxury presented itself to him, lengthening the list. He could buy ordinary soap, to wash with.

He could buy chickens. He missed his chickens bitterly. The fox had taken the last one and then gloated over it.

He cleaned the harness and wagon. He berated himself for cowardice, yet did nothing.

He realised one day that his vacillation was postponement. He would most certainly sooner or later go.

He took one of the pastor’s folded notes from where several were nailed to a wooden beam. This note said Benedict, your esteemed Aunt has notified me that she will visit this Ernting 25th, afternoon. He wrote his list, setting out the items for each store or dealer in his neat copybook.

He could not go without a hat. There had to be a hat, any hat, somewhere. He was sure he had seen one at some time or other, a battered felt hat. He ransacked the barn for it, rummaging, tossing everything from the edges to the middle: tools, sawn-off rail ends, empty tins, sticks he had whittled, peelings and more peelings and old sapling pieces, bones, feathers, hay, horse hair. He had despaired by the time he rolled his own hay bed over and found it. It was squashed, battered and stained, but it was a hat.

The barn was a sight. He changed the hay of his bed. Inspired by the sweet smell, he grabbed pitchfork, broom and rake, and he cleaned out every bay, working all day until his space was charming in its enlarged dimensions and its newness.

Benedict was delighted and a little unsettled at how easy it was to leave the farm. He had roamed the farm for nearly a year as though it were as removed from the world as Heaven or Hell. As though only the pastor had the means to cross over between his world and the one before. And yet this road, so familiar, had been here all the time. His mind slid towards the last time he had walked this road, and then the mad ride to the Hall, and he scrabbled for other images, impressions.

Home farms either side, now. Amsel, Linden, Hirsch, Rettig. He knew them all. It was just ten months since he had last seen them, but it seemed a lifetime. The settlement of Wahrheit was ahead, and the tradespeople’s smaller gardens around him. Each house had its brides garden. He passed a newlywed garden with its neat lines and tiny trees: an Amsel had married a Nagel—he could read the orchards without thinking. Other gardens had the variegated green domes of trim ten-year-old pears and apples. Here the rich, wild intertwined garden of gnarled trunks and stately heads: the garden of the grumpy Fuchses, who had been Fuchs and Fuchs. He passed the neglected shaggy garden of a widower (everyone knew widows kept theirs going) and was jolted: this garden had been trim last time he saw it.

Soon he would meet people. He blushed, suddenly acutely miserable about his hat. He sat up straight, stilled his heart as he passed the dairies, the shared groves, ryefields and vineyards. He willed his hat invisible. He watched Melba’s shining haunches swinging rhythmically, her body rolling slightly, side to side; the arch of her neck and the flick of her mane. The purple and copper sheen that shimmered and rippled over her muscles. Her ears were pricked, alert, but he could tell she was happy.

It was an insult to a horse like Melba to be in the shafts of a wagon. Heine or Schatzi would have suited better, but they hadn’t worked for more than a year, and Melba, after all, had harder feet. They needed shoes.

He thought how ridiculous he must look. Melba with her magnificent trot and refined head, her long mane and tail followed by this farm implement, this slatted, rough-hewn yokel’s cart. And noddling above it all, his hat.

By the time he entered the street he was in agony. He stared straight ahead as people turned to stare. He aimed for the outfitters, which was unfortunately at the far end of town.

Benedict aroused pity and fascination in the townsfolk. With his father and mother, he now belonged on the other side of some natural and absolute divide, and so he was worthy of compassion, and a little apprehension. And in all that time, only the pastor, Hannelore Helfgott, Ilse Amsel and Helene Katz had seen him. To have such tragedy visited upon him: and to lose the house as well! People murmured and worried away at the wound in their flank. The Orion tragedy bled still, for somehow they had not gathered together and staunched the wound. They had not taken the boy into the heart of the community and tended him in his grief. They had not gathered axes, saws, adzes and the women, and marched out to the farm to clean up and rebuild his house. No one yet blamed the pastor, but somehow they all felt a vague disquiet and sense of culpability. The shock of Matthias’s act had paralysed them, and Benedict had himself become part of the wound.

Everyone knew he had gone crazy, lived wild in his barn (oh, but it is a fine barn!). He was reputed to be like an animal, filthy. Oh, you wouldn’t think it to see him there, handsome and clean! The erect boy holding the reins, with his ragged golden hair and his serene face, his beauty so like his mother’s, hurt them afresh, and many stared, guilty with the sudden discovery that he was theirs. He looked remote, as he had never done before, when his face had been animated, cheeky, youthful.

They turned and nudged each other and remarked sotto voce how he had grown. He had always been a boy who would break hearts, as they said, but no one said that now—although many felt the awful gulf that had opened up, as it were between the blessed and the damned, and felt fleetingly broken-hearted.

Benedict could feel the people stop and stare, could feel the faces pressed to shop windows. He didn’t need to look to know that he was attracting attention. A year ago, people would have stopped him, asked after his schooling, asked after his parents’ health, given him little gifts for Ada, paid small debts to the Orions in Apfelsaft, gherkins or Kompot. He didn’t want any of this, but the silent attention on him and his hat was unbearable. He sat up and willed his hat, himself, the wagon and Melba invisible.

He quailed and stared rigidly ahead. Helene Katz was walking with Wolf on the street. She was wearing the blue bonnet, the taut-bodiced blue dress—the same one she had worn when she came with the soaps. He blushed as he thought of the soaps. Oh, his hat! His clothes that were her brother’s! His eyes caught hers and fled, then returned. She had gone pale, he thought, or was it the shadow from her bonnet? She would not look again, and he was snared by a hostile beam from Wolf. Is he angry that I am wearing his clothes?

Benedict drove on without looking back. His heartbeat settled and the blush faded. He had looked into Helene Katz’s face, and she had looked back. It was a return glance much greater than a potato. She was so very pretty, but it was not only that. She had a stillness of face, a control, that made him think: she too is at war with her god.

It was a happy thought. He hummed an old tune, then, a Christmas carol, and forgot for a moment his awful hat.

Her hands looked nothing like his. He had seen that too. Hers were much narrower. Small, reddened and chapped, like her mother’s. He imagined her chapped hands in his, a new image entirely, and his voice strengthened with a glorious certainty that now filled him.

As he hummed, he passed the Bierhaus. Men within were singing, unaware of his passing by. He slowed and sang with them. The chords of the mountain song, bittersweet with centuries of ancestral voices, thrummed though him and from him as though he were strung like an instrument. A few voices on the street lifted and sang softly with him, and those nearby began to weep. It was only a moment before the Bierhaus door opened, the singers appeared, and fell silent at the sight of him. The voices failed.

Sulzbach’s Outfitters. He parked Melba and almost ran inside, ripping the hat from his head and crushing it in his sweaty hands, then tucking it almost out of sight in his armpit. He chose a fine grey felt hat and then went to ask about a rifle.

A young man whose father is a murderer and a suicide can be troubled buying a gun. The house had sequestered and then melted down several guns, one in particular. Benedict had not considered that he would find himself face to face with the gun. But there it was, in front of him on the counter. That’s it, no mistake, Matthias said. Benedict placed his shaking hands in his pockets.

He had asked for a longsighted rifle for a damned fox, and Gustav Sulzbach, delighted to be having something like normal intercourse with the Orion boy, had recommended the obvious choice.

‘The Magazine Lee Enfield .303 is even better, Mr Orion. By far the best rifle for that accurate long-distance shot, is the Emily. And see, the stock has been cut back on her for greater ease in the lift,’ and he swung the rifle up and away from them both to dispel the awareness of the other purposes, pointed the other way, that other guns could have.

Benedict’s calm returned. ‘I’ll have the Emily, then, Mr Sulzbach,’ he said, his voice steady.

Outside, some children were patting Melba admiringly. They wilted at the sight of him and then fled. He placed his beautiful hat on his head and looked after them. Why had they run away?

Gustav Sulzbach appeared at the door. He fussed, fidgeted with the coats in the window, searching for something more to say.

‘Magnificent mare, that,’ he said clumsily. ‘I’ll be coming out your way one day for a horse, I think, if you have another like her.’

At the fodder store faces appeared around every corner to stare at him. He tried to greet people properly now that he had a hat, and was Mr Orion, but he received too many whisked-away glances or stony faces. His spirits dampened and his voice faded. He purchased sacks of oats and three chickens: two hens and a rooster to give the alarm and protect them. They cackled next to him on the seat from their woven basket, and he cackled back, softly so no one would hear.

No dogs around horses, Matthias said in his ear, and that almost made him get a dog. A dog would be good guarding the chickens.

On the way back up the street he doffed his hat shyly a couple of times and looked for Helene, but she was gone. He let Melba walk home. He sat hunched on the wagon drive seat, thinking over every face and the children who had run away. Widow Jäger had clutched an Emmaus figure to her chest and had even followed him. He liked Mr Sulzbach, though. Mr Sulzbach had praised Melba and called him Mr Orion. He liked those who had sung with him, but he had not looked around to see who they were. He thought of Helene; imagined she was in this moment returning the thought, as she had with her glance; and he knew, suddenly, that Wolf was his enemy.

Benedict’s visit to town marked a turning point for the small community. Those who had sung on the street went home troubled. How had it come to this? How had they let it? The boy was no outcast. His farm was part of Wahrheit. Yet he had been left alone to grieve, to live, to work the farm. Alone! In no living memory had anyone been so abandoned.

The boy they saw was grown to a man, as beautiful as his mother and as tall as his father. He was not the crazy madman Ilse had described, nor the grief-struck recluse they pictured from the pastor’s sermons.

If it had not been for what came next, the town might have gathered and marched to the Orion farm to rebuild his house and give him the new house feast.

The fox was all around in his waking and sleeping. His new chickens were gone the next day, leaving blood and feathers, and the fox taunted him either in an indistinguishable mumble or in voices, Matthias’s usually, but occasionally Ada’s, often its own.

‘I blame Matthias,’ the fox said. ‘Then again, I blame Ada. She stormed and shouted too much. Where are you going! Why must you go again, leaving me to look after everything! But why her? Why not you? It’s no easy thing having a lumpen, stupid, blind son like you. Going blind over a couple of soaps! Ha! Zounds, no wonder she shouted. I am all but certain that you could have prevented it, if you had but opened those peepers.’

The fox was ahead, red as red. His brush trailed on the ground, his ears joined the mountains, making serrations against the sky. Then he turned, and the beam of his glance swung, snagged Benedict’s eyes and held. Benedict knew he would follow. The fox turned and trotted ahead, his tail glowing like fire. Benedict ran after him, urgent with questions.

‘Bene-DICT!’ the parakeet said, and there it was, dressed like a clown and tinkling beside him. Benedict scrambled and his footing slipped.

The fox didn’t look back but swelled in size and redness. The ground became uncertain, slippery with loose rock and shards. The fox didn’t look back but gave off an aura of power and glory. Benedict stumbled after him over the sliding stones, then through scrub—kangaroo thorn, blackberry, gorse, boxthorn—until he found himself on an unfamiliar gleaming road. The fox was ahead in a nimbus of awful splendour and Benedict ran to catch up. The road was suddenly familiar, the fox already slipping in through the familiar door. The house rushed up, engulfing Benedict and the parakeet before he could slow his running feet. ‘Ach Benedict,’ the parakeet called, and there it was, a bird again in its cage in the hall. The fox stood by the door to that room and smiled as only a dreamed fox can.

The pastor could see Benedict and the horses under the escarpment. The boy was running, leaping over rocks, hair flying. The horses flowed around him, eddied, turned as the boy turned, his arms flung wide like a conductor of a thunderous orchestra. Pastor Helfgott’s eyes prickled, for it was a sight that would move anyone. His trust returned. The Lord knew better than he what was right for the boy. The half-rejected thought that this was not an ordinary story, not an ordinary tribulation, and not an ordinary boy, returned to him. Sometimes he sensed that he, Edmund Helfgott, was witness, disciple, helpmeet to a saintly personage and every decision he had made—it was he who had isolated the boy, allowed his excesses, his destructive madness; he who had been his rock in the storm—all had been God’s will.

Benedict saw him and waved. The horses dispersed and began to graze as the boy ran and leapt down the trail to the causeway. He was breathless and flushed when he finally appeared.

‘I saw you!’ Pastor Helfgott said, waving in echo of Benedict’s wild movements.

Benedict laughed, panting. ‘They hardly ever listen to me like that! Only when the spirit takes them.’

Oh Lord, I praise Thee! Pastor Helfgott thought, his heart filled with revelations. The boy’s laughter was infectious, and he laughed too. He clapped a hand to Benedict’s hard sun-warmed shoulder.

‘I have made us a salad to go with the bread and cheese,’ he said. ‘Come! Eat!’

His palm tingled where he had touched the boy. Sunshine and a beloved’s flesh and blood burned on in his hand as though telling him something, and he was reassured and filled with wonder. Watching Benedict eat, his heart swelled and he buried his fear that he had failed somehow. That he had made the boy what he was.

How holy and pure and gifted did a person really have to be to show the signs? Was Benedict a saint? One will come first who knows the seasons, and is at one with the birds and the beasts: will you know the signs and welcome him?

This should have been a possibility that evoked wonder and joy, but Pastor Helfgott found himself feeling deeply unsettled as his mare trotted home. So long a collective hope, so stark a rock in their lives and decisions, but it felt suddenly rather like an abyss, a rent in everyday life so great that nothing could continue on its course. When did saintly become saint? Such a gulf stretched between adjective and noun. Such a gulf stretched between holy and Holy. Could he trust his father’s words?

Yet they had lived three generations waiting for it and preparing. And it had to be soon, for they could not make many more generations.

Oh Lord, a great trouble is upon me. Show me Your will. A sign. He was conscious still of where his palm had pressed sun-soaked skin. He was conscious too of how deeply he loved this boy; and how much he wanted to see him return to health and happiness and an ordinary life. Ordinary, not this.

His own wife would be against him. Already Hannelore thought the boy crazy and lost. How many of his flock would believe that the dream that had cost their parents everything was now come to pass? The dream that had pushed them to endure exile, famine, grief and utter rejection, loss of root and soil: who would believe that it was now upon them?

He knew, too well. He could call them by name. A few souls. Widow Jäger, who had identified a messiah every year or so. The empty, the unhinged and the still grief-ridden would believe him, but the rest would cast him out. He could picture their brightly painted doors, adorned with evergreen wreaths, shut to him.

He suddenly imagined his congregation undergoing judgment. Had he been right to reassure his flock that planting flowers in window boxes, keeping clean bright houses, working their fields and growing fine cucumbers were righteous efforts and pleasing to the Lord?

And what were the signs, really? For there was no reference to his father’s Seven Seasons in that other Book, the Holy Bible.

Pastor Helfgott went to Luthertown rarely but when he did, he enjoyed the markets, bakeries and commercial bustle. He enjoyed the ingenuity of man, the way Luthertown clacked and smoked with the new engines driving pumps, saws and mills. He enjoyed the sound of his mother tongue spoken in the modern way. He listened to street talk and bought medicines and books (which only Hannelore read), and imagined what life might have been like had they never left the Old World. At times in Luthertown, he felt a great love for the Wittenbergers, almost a yearning, and he suppressed doubts about the coming Time out of Time.

Surely, Lord, You have a plan for them too, and their hearts will join the chorus. It was a nice thought, one he cherished as a secret hope.

It was in Luthertown at this time that he first heard of Tickleman Jesus, a wild man with golden hair supposed to live alone out beyond the settled lands and lakes. Tickleman was a generic term for Germans among some of the natives of the mid-north. The natives had wild little men, wild magic men, feather-footed bird men, all sorts, but this was different. So specific. His own thoughts and images of Benedict rang so clarion a chord with this legend that he was very shaken.

At this moment he felt as though he was being told, loudly and repeatedly, something he was choosing not to hear.

Helene Katz sat opposite the pastor, her hands folded on her lap. Her face was unnaturally still. The pastor didn’t know what to say to her. When his people came to him in anguish, he would give them his little bit of yes and little bit of no, and they would go away guided and trusted and walking towards goodness. Now he was the one lost, just like that. His heart was wretched, his mind racing.

Surely this was something she should be telling her mother. He wished his ears deaf, his mind closed. It was too much and he shrank from it. It would not be the first conception before a wedding, but…

Oh, Benedict. Benedict who knew not good from evil: Benedict who ran with horses, watched all their carnal abandon. Oh Lord, he felt no shame! Not in anything! Benedict who could not be…was…not…

What have I done? Oh Lord, forgive me, for I took her there, knowing…that he is not…contained…as we are. His body is not the small farm that the rest of us have made of ours.

Helene waited. He looked at her closely. A tear slid down her otherwise impassive face.

He watched her as she prayed. He thought suddenly that he should have noticed Helene’s stillness before. It was not right. He had thought her steady, but now she looked wounded, self-protective. What was happening to the children of today?

Prayer done, he tried to feed her but, despite her apparent impassivity, she could not eat.

He couldn’t hold on to his compassion for Helene. His mind was filled with thoughts of Benedict. He felt as though his heart was breaking, for he could see clearly that he had neglected a flawed, human Benedict in thinking…What had he thought? He could not see clearly anymore what path might be ahead for the boy.

He had had strange, grand dreams. In all Benedict was tested, yes, but was a creature of both supreme beauty and goodness.

Her eyes flew to his face, her cheeks bloodless. He saw for the first time that her broad, closed face was beautiful, her eyes huge.

She leapt from her seat, clutching her shawl and made for the door, but he grabbed her arm.

‘Child, child! Sit! I am so sorry! I should never…’ He pushed her to her chair, trying to mask his elation, conscious of the sweat prickling under his smock and the smell of his own body as he loomed over her. ‘Child, I am here to help you. Let me help you. Who is the father?’

‘You have sinned, child,’ he said gently, sitting back, obscurely ashamed of himself, body and soul. Look at Your servant there, Lord, trying now to fit back into his right self with this girl!

The pastor was tired and low in spirits. He sat on the edge of his bed, staring across the room at Hannelore’s. He was a deluded old man who had, he suspected, caused more trouble than he was going to be able to handle. He knew he had been a gruff and kindly pastor, beloved of his flock, if ridiculed for his ways. He was nothing like his father, nor had he aspired to be. However, he too was a charismatic preacher and he had believed passionately in each of his sermons at least at the time of giving it. He had helped people. He had served.

And he had almost believed in a chosen one among them, a saintly boy. And now he had a pregnant girl on his hands who had not sinned. He felt exposed, ridiculed by an authority far greater than the flock.

And, in a simple, earthy way, Helene was probably right. Pastor Helfgott was not without insight, belatedly. She meant she was forced. He knew the one person she would not be able to name. The one person who would have forced her. That coercive voice; those unhappy, almost accusing eyes, that misplaced laughter.

Pastor Helfgott had a sudden memory, not of the man, but of Wolfram as a small figure in white. Head tilted, mouth open. A voice like an angel, a gift from the Lord. The old pastor had chosen him, seemingly from birth, cultivated him for great things. Wolfram had been so favoured.

School. Death. Failure. Unmarried, with a widowed mother. And in the future? Wood carver. Choirmaster. Disappointment. And ungodly with it. He had chosen a bad name, one that violated their rules. Had Wolfram Katz expected something else? Pastor Helfgott had never thought of this, but the thought swelled, almost made a huge sense, and then dissolved. None of it fitted together to make this thing with Helene imaginable.

This too faded unanswered, and Benedict, golden arms raised and laughing with the horses, appeared.

Had he really imagined the significance of all that the Lord had vouchsafed to him? What did it come to, really? A grieving boy who was beautiful, in fact had always been beautiful, in body and spirit. Alone with just animals for comfort. A boy he had kept to himself, sequestered away from the clumsy practicality and nosy kindness of people.

And today: this last was the worst, the image he had been keeping away from conscious recollection. There it was now. The image of himself looming over Helene in glee.

His shame was overwhelming. He had felt relief when Helene had led him to knowledge of a most awful sin. No. He had felt actual joy. What gross error had entered his soul! Lord, help me now, for I have wronged those I love.

He could not remain sitting. A physical pain coursed through him, and he had to move to allay it and think at the same time. He left the house and walked out onto the darkened street. Aletheia stretched before him, twinkling under its mantle of wood smoke. The smell of flowers from his own garden spread in an invisible nimbus out to where a current of cool air flowed past and dissipated it. He could hear music: beautiful voices in harmony, capturing in their strains the many variations of longing and belonging.

All his confidence now crumbled away, and with it his sense of certainty in anything. Lord, am I alone, truly? Is this all an illusion?

He did not know what to do. Pain spread from his heart outwards. What he did know: he had three young people, each in deep travail, and all entangled and abandoned, somehow, by his bungling.

He woke in the night and stared at the dim ceiling plaster. Hannelore snored gently, her back to him. She formed a dim shapeless mound in her bed, at odds with the shapeliness of her daytime corseted form. Hannelore always seemed different asleep, almost as though he could reach out and comfort her. His father had worried about unhappy women. Close observance, relief for idle talents, especially in young women, and husbanding. Had he failed the women in his flock? Had his father done better? He realised in that moment that he had had a benign contempt for his father’s way, and had thought himself superior.

Let no woman become a cipher among you. Blessed is the man whose wife has homely talents, but if her talents lead her to teach in the Hall, then she shall teach! If one becomes as a cipher, from grief or disappointment, then many should visit her and bring gifts, that she may unburden herself in conversation. If a woman must be cast out, then her father, brother, husband or son must go with her, and be denied, with her, the glory to come! So I say unto you all, let no woman become a cipher among you.

Helene had become a cipher, truly. He did not know her. Neither her strengths nor her weaknesses; nor her joys, hopes or sorrows. And what if they demanded she be cast out? Wolfram would go with her, he had no doubt. Brother on sister.

Hannelore had said something at dinner that further unsettled him. She had sat with a faint defeated air across from him, her face closed, and said nothing when he told her Helene was pregnant. They were eating—good food, comforting, well-cooked food. She set her fork and knife down, and then said the last thing he could have imagined her saying, under the circumstances.

Helene didn’t come to see him again, and he felt that she had sensed his failure, his wandering attention, his shameful delight. His utter disregard for her. As he pruned tomato shoots and thinned carrots, the smell of the soil reminded him of some of his own sermons. ‘Breathe deeply as you till the earth, for there you are close to God.’ He had made much of dirt. What had he done with his father’s legacy? With the bravery and suffering of those early years? The dead babies, diphtheria, the famine, his own dead mother, all that song in the darkness: the sound of communal voices giving praise despite utter desolation, the chord that rang through his childhood. These people, his father’s beloved Aletheia, his own life’s work.

He went inside with a basketful of baby carrots and cut flowers, thinking of the filth in Benedict’s barn as the songs of his youth played on in his head. Rather than being pure, these young folk were twisted, stunted souls, bereft of home soils, cut off from nourishment by their isolation. Their language, like his own, was withered, lost, left behind. Not some glorious flourishing of an uncorrupted source. Their prayers were mere dried and pressed flowers. They were marooned, all together, out of time, out of step, cut off and getting stranger by the hour.

He had a vision, stark and awful, of them all as lost souls, stranded in a wilderness with just one blind man’s rather inadequate little book to intervene between them and a raw, unknowable earth and sky.

Nothing could now allay his gnawing grief and self-blame. These children were real and there was something truly awful about where each of them stood in his conscience.

Lord, show me the way forward. If the time is to come, the time must be nigh. Already cousins must marry cousins, and how many now are double cousins? We did not heed Earless Elsa when you sent her to us.

Now brother is upon sister. Will He come, and make us again pure? If more time passes, must we marry Wittenbergers, in the end, and be dispersed? Will You gather us again?

He imagined, then, a future: generations more before the Messiah. They had to marry Wittenbergers at the least. Some families might contemplate it. Not all. But even if some families changed, all would fall apart in rancour and ancient grievances. The marriage ties and contracts between specific families, knotted ever tighter every year, woven ever closer with wool of the same fleece, had consolidated landholdings and handcrafts and their youthful labourers. What of the child who marries outside those two families? Outside Wahrheit? Even Ada and Matthias had married along accepted and established family ties, Jäger to Amsel. What of inheritance, building of new houses away from the parents? His head hurt. He could not begin to think of all the implications, the complications. The friction.

Why had they been made so exclusive? Why had his father made them so? Separation and purity went together, so his father had said many times. Trials in the wilderness. He had been his father’s son, for he had separated Benedict and seen goodness in it. But all he saw now was impoverished, stunted souls, conscribed by the walls of their ostentatiously modest houses, their bountiful gardens and Toggenberg’s market prices. What could grow here, what spirituality could this place make? Richer with each season, yet they had starved and withered.

Their children were weak in spirit; yet just thirty years before, they had faced this alien soil, cleared and tilled and planted, had built their houses to stand a thousand years, their barns too, and all had borne witness to their great strength. Every death had seemed a repulsion, a mortal wound struck to test their purpose. Children had died as part of one great and terrible chorus: Thirteen were called, oh Lord: one by the tree, two by the snake, three by the fen and three by the furnace, four by the waters of lake and flood…Babies too, stillborn, sick, or too sleepy to live. Or earless.

And if they dispersed, and the bonds that had tied them together dissolved, what did that mean?

The Book could give him no comfort. Its pages seemed filled with trite and fanciful nonsense, for nowhere did it contemplate people strung generations on from when it was written. His father’s face in death had frozen in a look of utter amazement. All commented upon it in wonder, but even then Pastor Helfgott knew that his father had expected never to die.

Wahrheit was buzzing, as agitated as a disturbed bull ants’ nest. Helene Katz’s pregnancy was the biggest thing to happen since the Orions, and no matter the pastor’s certainty and the pastor’s exhortations—who has not sinned among us, do not judge lest ye be judged—Wahrheit knew the two events were linked.

Benedict had lived apart too long. He was Matthias Orion’s son, known for his beauty and his strangeness and not much else. He was the source of the seed in Helene Katz’s belly, and the pastor was responsible. Some said the pastor had spent so much time with Satan’s beautiful godson that he had been corrupted. Pastor Helfgott had taken the innocent girl out to the accursed farm as a sacrifice, as if under a spell.

No one could pass the time of day with Benedict Orion and not like him, as no other than Gustav Sulzbach had said, and what did that tell you?

It didn’t matter that Helene never went anywhere without her brother Wolfram at her side. She had done it the once, and what happens once openly can happen again in secret. The Devil didn’t need much purchase on a soul to do his work. Hadn’t the great leader said the Devil would be among them?

A more experienced and wilder town might have thrown its pastor out and lynched Benedict, but Wahrheit could not agree and in any case had no habit of violence. Most believed Benedict to be the father, although some didn’t put it past Matthias from beyond the grave. Helene’s silence fuelled their certainties. For some, Benedict was Satan’s child and the time was nigh. Others felt that really their town was too little and ordinary to be chosen for something of such theological magnitude, despite what the Book said, and that there might be a simpler explanation. Some didn’t want the story of Matthias Orion to be eclipsed, for it was already more than a small town could digest in a decade, and the children needed only one Scissor Man. Some were kind, in principle; others were mean. Many were torn by having sung with Benedict on the street that day. The problem was what to do.

Gustav Sulzbach, Hannelore, Widow Katz and the Bachs led a small but powerful faction advocating, over strüdel and apple juice, marriage—and swiftly. Gustav Sulzbach even voiced the notion that it all showed the boy was not all that strange after all. The Thalers and the Jägers thought this was exactly what Satan wanted, while Wolf Katz and most of the men from the Choir advocated, over beer and bratwurst, beating Benedict senseless and burning down whatever was left of his house.

As the congregation watched obliquely, Pastor Helfgott continued his visits out to the farm. He told Benedict nothing of the uproar, hoping it would die down, and hoping for guidance. He felt abandoned, he with his three accusing figures.

And yet. And yet…Benedict, despite his strangeness, was growing more wonderful and wise each day. Pastor Helfgott no longer believed in Wahrheit, but there was a wild and sacred beauty to the boy, healing slowly in the very palm of his Lord.

Quite possibly, Benedict thought sagely, as he balanced a fine and friendly Wittenberger on his chest, everyone has a different god. He waved the bottle affectionately at the sky, which was being particularly blue. Pastor Helfgott’s god appears to him as a…koala, exhorting him to sleep more. Many believed, oddly, in the lamb, but if they thought about it long and hard, a private, thinking vigil, with privations and away from all the Books and bottles that might steer them one way or another, they might come to see this lamb as standing in place of many creatures: merely simplifying matters for books.

You’d be in trouble with a horse god—as flighty as Fell, egotistical, not worth listening to. Run, a horse god would say. Run away and then show off! An importunate and foolish god.

Ah, no. Helene’s god is the widow maker. That is why Helene is so calm and quiet. Hers is quiet and dangerous. Cruel, arrogant and ruthless; and at war with itself. Promising salvation it cannot give. Helene’s god has a slower, colder sap.

‘So how did God appear to Matthias?’ The fox asked suddenly, in broad daylight. ‘What did Matthias’s god say to him?’

He watched the grass grow tall. Rich and green, with nodding flower heads. He saw it with the horses’ predilections in mind, saw with satisfaction the rich growth of their favourites: Glanzgras, rye, orchard grass.

He watched the colts. He now had five yearlings. They troubled him, on and off, because he did nothing with them. He had run with them and brushed them and then drifted to attend to other matters and by now they were again naively wild. He should bring them in to school before too long. They played chasey, bowed to each other in elaborate and charming struggles for grip on each other’s forelegs, reared up in tandem or in threes, or just raced each other over the eighty acres of lower range, prancing and snorting at the end for the joy of wind and speed. Other times, as now, this bachelor herd groomed each other and snoozed together under the most ancient widow maker, as though they would be sufficient unto each other forever and the world was safe.

His father would have put them with the pregnant mares, to teach them respect and humility. Colts were usually gelded or sold young. And Hilde’s mob had more, two colts and two fillies, all Löwe’s too from what he could see. Lucie had been quite different. Next year they would have Fell’s, and so it would go. He had work to do, and it could not be ignored much longer.

After, he said to himself, I will begin Fell’s training properly and he will be my joy like Melba.

After, he thought, I’ll break those colts. I’ll take them to town, and they will be the wonder of the week. Four blacks and a chestnut. The four black brothers would make…a fine team for a hearse. He laughed to himself. He was a wit these days! He thought the fox would say something. He knew the fox was there, watching him unseen, but it had been silent for days. Maybe the fox knew what he was planning. (Of course the fox knew!)

No, by then all will be settled. They’ll make a handsome four-in-hand. And I’ll sell the chestnut to Gustav Sulzbach. There I’ll be, with colts like these trained and for sale. Then Fell’s youngsters in the coming years: foals like Lucie, horses with grandeur and courage and beauty…

The work horses had done nothing for nearly a year, other than pound an enthusiastic last behind the range horses when they ran. After, he told himself, I’ll bring Schatzie and Heine in, and bring in a small hay harvest, to start with. Just enough for winter in the stables.

He checked the sickle bar cutter of the hay mower, cleaned and oiled it. The rake and tedder, although dust-covered, were fine, but the harnesses needed repairs. He spent two days taking them apart, cleaning and oiling them, restitching parts and polishing the brass buckles. Next year, he thought, I’ll do the oats. The field’s had a rest.

He stopped and looked up, as if he were a horse alerted to something. It was a most unusual, extraordinary thought: he had not thought of a next year for longer than memory. All this thinking about after had led him out into next year. And once you think of an oats harvest next year, there is no end of years ahead to be contemplated.

There was Helene Katz to be contemplated. He ached at the thought, awash with feelings as strong and as hopeful as any colt’s.

‘I’ll be away a while…hunting,’ he told the pastor. ‘I have left everything so it will take care of itself. There are no chickens. The cat will mind the barn. I may be back in a day or two, or…a week. Yes, I have everything I need. I can hunt for food, but have packed stores too.’

He felt guilty, now and then, for all the worry he had caused the pastor. The pastor had seen him at his worst and might have a certain opinion about him. He was mortified at what the pastor might have thought when he ran away from Helene. That the pastor might refuse to marry them tormented him. He tried now to appear manly, well-spoken and thoughtful around the pastor. Blasphemy and cursing had lost their charm.

The pastor was quiet and a little sad these days, and Benedict, who knew very well that the pastor had a different god, had not told him the true purpose of his ride. He knew that a man with possibly a koala for a god would not comprehend his intended violence. The pastor might think him mad, or even evil. He was vaguely conscious that he was in some sense both. Nonetheless, as he prevaricated with wholesome and sensible phrases, he felt guilty, and he wondered whether the pastor was quiet because he guessed something.

He had a clear, if not very detailed, plan. He would ride out, find the fox, and exact—vengeance. The very thought of it was a delight. He would track the fox until the end, no matter whether it took one week or six. He might never return, for this was God, after all. Not as impressive as everyone thought him to be, but powerful beyond comprehension nonetheless. The range was huge, and he would need to get to know the territory, the boltholes, and the true lair. The fox might even head into the wilderness to test him, out into the desert where he might find Ngaminha and Vapinha.

He could not imagine what the fox would say when he found him. How in Heaven or Hell was God to explain Matthias?

Do the boy good to camp out and hunt like a normal young man, the pastor thought sadly, as he harnessed his hard-muscled mare to the chaise. Get some meat into him too. He was troubled by the perfect courtesy that had sprung up between him and the wild young man. The politeness was painful after the raw suffering of the past year. But the changes he could see about the barn were cause for hope. The polished machinery, the scythed grass. An air of industry, almost tidiness. Surely, in moderation at least, Lord, tidiness is good.

Let him return, Lord, the stronger for it. Let him find his sanity again. Let him return. My blessed boy. My beautiful God-given son. Lord, let him come back strong enough to deal with the angry flock.

The congregation attending the Hall on Sundays had dwindled. The Jägers stayed away first, followed by some of the Schäfers. His sermons, to his ears, were inadequate and bloodless, and he felt as though he were wading through treacle to get his daily rounds done. Hannelore was silent, her mouth thin and rarely open. He noticed that her sighs had become nasal. Even for food, she seemed to open quickly, and small. He knew she was controlling herself, refusing the words gathering and threatening to burst forth. He trod carefully in her company and watched too what he said. When finally he timidly suggested that Benedict might come and live with them at the Hallehaus for a while to help smooth things over, Hannelore had stared at him, eyes popping, and then rushed from the room. He tried to imagine her swearing the way Benedict did, eking out the pressure she felt, but he could not. One day soon, Hannelore would explode.

He tried to shame Wolfram Hofmeister into contrition, confession, repentance, into leaving town, but was unprepared for Wolfram’s response. Wolfram didn’t look up from the Emmaus messiah he was carving into a butter mold. His hands angled the chisel, the small hammer struck, like a ticking clock, and the pastor’s questing and accusing words hung as though meaningless between them. The chisel made wet crisp sounds. The hammer tap-tapped. The pastor stared at the rows of messiahs. Most houses had one, and still Wolf made them. Wood chips flew, taking wing in the silence between them in that cedar-scented barn, and then Wolfram looked up. His eyes were moist and he was laughing.

Widow Katz came to see him. She was an ungainly, awkward woman—evasive. She sat and exchanged glances between him and an empty space beside her.

He waited, but she said nothing more for long minutes. Then she cleared her throat. ‘Widow Katz would like them to marry, out of season,’ she said to the empty space, then looked at him for his reaction.

She was a strange woman, hard to treat with as an adult. She was looking away again now, her body writhing under her shawl. How could he tell her?

‘Helene, she’d be safe, then. She’s a hard worker, too. Widow Ka…’ her voice faded, then returned, ‘could rest.’

‘Some say he is kind to animals,’ she added, wistfully. ‘Widow Katz hopes he is…kind.’ She looked at him sidelong, leaned in slightly as if to say more, then retreated and stood patting one chapped hand with the other.

‘Father, Wolf is…’ She wrung her hands. ‘The old pastor, your father…’ She would say no more. She nodded and stood to go.

As he held the door for her, some mute entreaty, some intense communication burned in her eyes and then faded unsaid.

The pastor sat in the Hall alone, trying to remember something that hovered in the darkness of his mind, a memory that had stirred when Widow Katz looked at him so. But it slipped from him, and he could not recall even her eyes or face of five minutes before once the memory stilled and faded. His mind skipped over its inventory of mysteries and troubles in the settlement, as if this was the reason he had come here to think.

Now he recalled his father, standing up there, singing with such certainty, his hand on the shoulder of his favourite chorister, Wolfie Katz. He disliked that hand on that shoulder but could not have said why. He had never aspired to be Choirmaster, although he did have a good voice. Wolfram Katz would be Choirmaster: all were certain of it, then and now. Wolfram Whatever-his-name-is-now, despite his youth, would lead and preserve their songs. Wolfie Katz and before him Matthias Jäger had had angelic voices. Matthias too had been a favourite. His father had wept the day Gotthilf Jäger and his family were cast out.

Oh Lord, my father led us here. Oh Lord, I hope this was all Your idea, not his.

Bibles and hymnbooks lay on polished timber ledges set shoulder height around the Hall. As he walked towards the lectern, he saw various families’ copies of the Book of Seasons among them, here and there.

He now recalled something quite extraordinary about Helene. Her white face, her plaits flying, driving the trap at a full careening gallop with a snake-bitten child tied to the seat. She was about eight years old. How could he have forgotten? The child was tied with the harness breeching, and she was using the block brake alone.

He felt better immediately. With such strengths, courage and practicality, she would survive in soul as well as mind. And he could help her, for she was no cipher, not really. No one recalled her courage because the child, little Steffi Amsel, had died, and knowledge of her bravery died with him.

He stood awhile at his lectern, staring across the empty hall. As always the floor was cleared, with tables pushed to the edges and long blackwood benches stacked, leaning against the wall at intervals on either side. He could smell beeswax. Everything gleamed. The Hall had a pleasing simplicity, made to exact specifications. The lectern under his hands, too, was made by rule, the craftsmanship exact, strong enough to last a thousand years.

He looked down at his hands and the sermon that lay open on the lectern. His father’s, one of those copied so beautifully by Hannelore for their wedding. The sermon on brothers. He had not given this sermon, not ever.

He was somehow unsurprised that they smelled of rose glycerine and cedarwood. The parable of the three brothers. The brotherly virtues: loyalty, humility, acceptance, love. He felt a wave of irritation. Yes yes yes. They were all brothers, all sisters.

What did she want? That he allow Wolf to stay? He could not, that was certain, even if he had to name the sin for all to hear. Indeed he would have to name the sin, in the Hall, and that would be that. The last sin naming had been the strange day the Jägers left.

He quailed at the thought. Sending Wolf Katz away would be the beginning of the end of life as they knew it, for they could not go on, after such a thing. His mind slid away from that larger fear.

No one else had what it took to be Choirmaster. Elder Schneider had no voice and relied on Wolfram even now. Wahrheit was unimaginable without a Choirmaster.

No, no—that was irrelevant. He forced himself back. Something had gone wrong, somewhere, and they had left the true path. He had left it too, with them. Helene’s closed and damaged spirit guided him in this, and the wrong he had done her drove him. Helene, Hannelore, Widow Katz. All of them ciphers. He was dizzy.

If one must be cast out, then let him be cast out, with all as witnesses. He will tarry among the lost and the damned. In Aletheia there is no neighbour against neighbour, or family against family, no brother against brother! If one is thus, then let all repair it, and speedily, before the next month’s reading!

Oh the grief in his heart. How did building lovely Aletheia in the wilderness prepare for the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth? He now did not believe for a moment that the little souls of Wahrheit were the only companions for the Lord. There had to be more, worldwide, and he realised now, for the first time in his life, what this might really mean.

He had a sudden image of the Messiah, a shadowy Emmaus figure come to life, walking with dusty feet into Aletheia: one of Wolf’s figurines come to life. He would not find a nest of ready disciples, but a nest of vipers. The naked black families that drifted through were more ready than the souls of pretty Aletheia.

Oh Lord, what have You led me to? Did You send me Benedict for this? That I must see the smallness of all that was great? That I must destroy what my father made?

He thought it, again and again, and his hands felt like dead weights at the ends of his arms. He stood and dragged himself out of the Hall, up his ridiculous winding garden path to the back door and then the kitchen for the distraction of cider and Apfelkuchen. Apples apples apples. Everything was apples. The cold cellar could not keep them any longer and they were cooked in every way imaginable. They tasted cloying in his mouth and sat heavy in his belly.

It was the apples that did it. Apple cake sat in his belly and churned, recalling every time he had had indigestion from apple cake; and then, one time in particular. A question he had never asked appeared like a lost migratory bird in his mind.

Edmund, Matthias, Wolfram. But in reality one was a murderer, one a sister fornicator, and one an idiot. He wanted to weep but was a dry well. What could a dry well give anybody?

One sunny day, soon, when he had dealt with his god once and forever, he would back Melba between these ebony shafts. No. No, not Melba—Fell! Gleaming blue-black and no longer scared of carriages. He would wash himself (perhaps even with one of Widow Katz’s soaps) cut his hair, shave, and dress in clean clothes (clean linen and wool clothes that he would own) and he would go into town and, just as he was passing by Helene, who would be struggling along the footpath with a heavy load of girlish things, he would rein in, park Fell (the very picture of proud docility), and he would hand her into the phaeton and then drive away at speed, taking her wherever she willed in the wide world and away from all widow makers.

Fell was never going to make a harness horse, at least not yet. It would have to be Melba.