Geoff Page

My mother’s God has written the best of the protestant proverbs: you make the bed you lie in it; God helps him who helps himself. He tends to shy away from churches, is more to be found in phone calls to daughters or rain clouds over rusty grass. The Catholics have got him wrong entirely: too much waving the arms about, the incense and caftan, that rainbow light. He’s leaner than that, lean as a pair of grocer’s scales, hard as a hammer at cattle sales the third and final time of asking. His face is most clear in a scrubbed wooden table or deep in the shine of a laminex bench. He’s also observed at weddings and funerals by strict invitation, not knowing quite which side to sit on. His second book, my mother says, is often now too well received; the first is where the centre is, tooth for claw and eye for tooth whoever tried the other cheek? Well, Christ maybe, but that’s another story. God, like her, by dint of coursework has a further degree in predestination. Immortal, omniscient, no doubt of that, he nevertheless keeps regular hours and wipes his feet clean on the mat, is not to be seen at three in the morning. His portrait done in a vigorous charcoal is fixed on the inner curve of her forehead. Omnipotent there in broad black strokes he does not move. It is not easy, she’d confess, to be my mother’s God.

The story keeps on coming back, a man my father knew, that grazier across the river up north a mile or two, a story that my father spun to last me all my life of how a man should not behave when burying a wife. All through the funeral he’d wept . . . the priest there going on about St Peter and the gates through which his wife had gone. His sobbing at the grave, Dad found, was harder still to bear. Then men in suits, the women in the best they had to wear knew deeper down it couldn’t pass, no matter who had died. Extravagance like this was always better kept inside. At last the man who sent his beasts to die on Tuesday gave one final, high unseemly cry and leapt into the grave. ‘Mate,’ he yelled. ‘Don’t go. Don’t go!’ And scrabbled at the wood. A friend reached in to fish him out as any Christian would. The women in their hats stood back. Two men jumped in the trench and skidding on the polished lid contrived at last to wrench him out and lead him to his car. The clergyman intoned ‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.’ They heard the broken moans coming from a side window. He hammered at the wheel. ‘Mate,’ he yelled. ‘Don’t leave me mate.’ Not knowing what to feel, the mourners now were drifting off towards their dusty cars. My father always finished here as if he’d gone too far. But I could hear the slamming doors, the hearse without much chrome and dual decisions made to miss the wake and head straight home. ‘Mate, oh mate!’ the man had cried, releasing all their fears. The sound of boots on coffin wood survives them down the years.

This synod is convinced that the forces of the Allies are being used of God to vindicate the rights of the weak and to maintain the moral order of the world. Anglican Synod, Melbourne, 1916. Bit weird at first, That starey look in the eyes, The hair down past his shoulders, But after a go with the ship’s barber, A sea-water shower and the old slouch hat Across his ears, he started to look the part. Took him a while to get the way A bayonet fits the old Lee-Enfield, But going in on the boats He looked calmer than any of us, Just gazing in over the swell Where the cliffs looked black against the sky. When we hit he fairly raced in through the waves, Then up the beach, swerving like a full-back at the end When the Turks’d really got on to us. Time we all caught up, He was off like a flash, up the cliffs, After his first machine gun. He’d done for three Turks when we got there, The fourth was a gibbering mess. Seeing him wave that blood-red bayonet, I reckoned we were glad To have him on the side.