RALF.

‘I did not kill my wife. She was possessed of 10 demons and died while we were casting them from her.’

Ralf Vomer was born in Germany. He migrated to Australia with his parents in 1948 and was initiated into the State school system at Caulfield Public.
They were not happy days. To the other kids, German equated with Nazi and he wore the name, Kraut, until the day he left.
Working double shifts on the production line, Ralf’s Mum and Dad managed to scrape enough together for a down payment on a small property in Wimmera County. There, Ralf found his element; Earth.
Together, the family worked the land and Ralf was always first up, ‘Before my Father, even.’Regarding his farm labours not as chores, but, ‘My duty.’
The farm prospered and the family bought more land. Ralf met a girl at a dance in town and according to The Wimmera Times, after a whirlwind courtship- married her and settled down to make a go of it on a gift parcel of land from his father.
Ralf can smile about it now."Roma was town girl and not used to farm ways."
"Bull shit," Roma, still living in the town of Horsham, said.’ I was brought up on a farm and Vollmer’s idea of a farm in the country was a piggery and pigs smell. Also, he had some very strange religious views… of a personal nature… I would prefer not to get into?’
Ralf next met Joanne, ‘the true love of my life,’ at a country-dance. ‘She was so small, like a little sparrow. Yet seemed to stand out from the rest of the girls.’
Ralf married Joanne and Joanne left brothers, sisters and all her kith n kin to live with him in his piggery.
As H.Gilchrist Avery. Secy Gen of the Victorian Pig Breeders Federation notes, ‘Pigs are labour intensive. Their little legs and pointy toes are not conducive to walking around all that much. Their pink skin doesn’t take well to sun. Consequently they spend their days wallowing in baths of mud and shit and their nights rooting around in hay making lots more pig babies to root around in more mud and shit and hay.’
After a hard day sluicing down the pigs, Ralph’s idea of a nice night’s entertainment was the Bible. ‘All knowledge, everything you need to know, is in the Bible.’
And when Ralf wasn’t reading the Bible he was dragging Joanne off to meeting halls and groups where others would read from their Bibles and abjure against the wickedness of the World. All of which could be attributed to Satan, the great deceiver; whose pomp and wiles were all too apparent in the transient world of pop fashion, culture, politics and religion. Especially religion which, making so much embrasure to accommodate liberality, had opened the floodgates and strayed more than somewhat from the path of its fundament. Which was to,’ praise God and live life within the parameters of his true plan, revealed to those who study the Bible, in an attitude of humility and sincerity, in their search for truth.’
With amens and halleluiahs ringing across the fields and valleys, Ralf prospered on his pig farm. However, Joanne his,‘little sparrow’ was a worry. She had, on more than one occasion expressed her boredom at their nightly bible readings.
"How can you be bored with the Bible?’
‘There’s more to life than the bloody bible, Ralf!"
And she drew attention to ’her body’ by dressing in light summery things she made up herself; swanning around, deliberately trying to distract him from his study of the good book.
And restless? Couldn’t sit still for a minute. Arranging and rearranging furniture so much that Ralf sometimes didn’t know what room he was in, or what he’d gone there for in the first place. Then there was the herb garden she built and tended with such manic energy. And decorated with little statues of Bambi and Thumper and cats and plaster gnomes. Ralf didn’t like the gnomes, or the cats. Gnomes were evil little things and it was well known that witches kept cats as familiars. He didn’t care for the herbs either. Witches used herbs and he wouldn’t have them in his food, convinced that they could,‘inflame the passions’.

Joanne, at home with another of her ’sick headaches’, Ralf was now spending a lot of time with a charismatic group. Led by Leanne Reichenbach, who had recently been excommunicated by the Lutherans, their core belief was that all disease, mental, physical was caused by a body being infested with devils. These devils could be exorcised by the laying on of hands and by prayer.
After attending some meetings and witnessing the efficacy of the rites of exorcism, Ralf became convinced that Joanne’s behaviour was consistent with the symptoms of demonic possession.
His belief was reinforced when he took a call one afternoon from a neighbour.
"Hey, Ralf?"
"Yeah?"
"Your wife’s out naked in the field again."
Ralf looked around, called out,’Joanne!"
"Hello, Ralf? I said…"
"Yes. I will come."
"It’s just that some of the kids saw her from the school bus and…"
" Thank you. I will take care of it."
Ralf pulled a raincoat from its hook and went to the field. He found Joanne there; as naked as he had found her that time before. Wrapping his wife in a raincoat, he led her back to the house. Putting her to bed, he drew the blinds and locked the door behind him as he left.
Ralf put on the kettle, made tea and sat in the kitchen drinking it as he fingered the bible for an answer.
The pills, he suspected – knew- Joanne had stopped taking, obviously were not working. Her four week stay at Lakeview a complete waste of money. Pills, psychiatrists- no remedy against demons.
He reached for the phone.
*
"I just knew this was your house soon’s we drove up the lane,’ Leanne Reichenbach said.
"How?" Ralf took her bag. It was heavy. Something inside clinked.
"The, DON’T BOTHER THE LORD, sign painted on the side of the barn."
"I did that,’ Ralf said, " to remind me not to bother the Lord with trivial things."
Leanne got down to business immediately. After blessing the house she made a cursory examination of Joanne. Diagnosing her to be possessed of at least seven devils, she bade Ralf tie her to a chair. And Ralf, because he loved his wife, tied her to the chair as gravel crunch from the drive signalled that more exorcists were arriving.
*
The house was wrapped in Gladwrap to keep out any passing devils.
’I had to keep driving into town for more,’ Ralf remembers.’ Cleaned Woolies out.’
Clearing the furniture from the kitchen, they washed down the walls and floor. After blessing the four corners of the room, they placed Joanne, still tied to her chair, in the middle facing the east.
There, shaking their Bibles at the devils within her, they quoted Scripture and attempted to physically force them from her.
For seven days and seven nights, the exorcists battled the demons. Sometimes in unison, or singly while the others rested, ‘we took it in turns to give no rest to those devils inhabiting her body.’
However, the devils gave as well as they got. Using Joanne’s body,‘which they had impregnated with their seminal seed and cancer spore.’ they harrangued the exorcists in return. Ralf had never before heard his wife, or any other woman, or person, use such language. From below the gutter, it could only come from Hell.
The exorcists took a tally of all the different voices they had heard Joanne speak in, combined with the perceived changes to her face and posture as the various devils used her body to give their presence form. The count came now to 10.
The exorcists, girding their loins, settled in for the long haul. And, watching, Ralf felt Joanne’s pain as those ten devils were forced from her one by one.
*
That was a very tiring time for Ralf. The farm, calling him away from his sacred duty, still had to be attended and, as host, his fellow workers had to be fed and provided for.
Between sluicing the pigs and praying before his wife, Ralf made lots of tea to sustain the labourers in the vineyards of the Lord. And sandwiches, mostly ham, for there was no lettuce; the vegetable garden having gone the same way as Joanne’s devil herb garden, Ralf had crushed beneath his boots along with all the little statues on the orders of Leanne.
Occasionally, during her deliverance, Joanne’s face would turn blue and a creamy fluid gush from her nostrils as the devils were forced from her. But as soon as one was forced out, another would be clamouring to be heard. And, once heard, had to be beaten, like the others, to submission. So Ralf and the others bate and bate and bate until at last all the devils were subdued, expelled, exorcised.

*

Ralf looked down on his ‘little sparrow’ as Leanne pressed again on Joanne’s chest. Only minutes before she had announced they had exorcised the last of the devils and that, one would have thought, should have been an end to it.
However, as Ralf watched, Leanne continued pressing from Joanne’s belly, where the devils had been lodged, to her chest. And the more she pressed, the more of that fluid bubbled and frothed from Joanne’s mouth and nostrils. Until, when it seemed, having been expelled of the last of the devils, nearly taking in air again, soon to be up and prancing as of old; Leanne, who did look so exhausted, ceased, at last, her ministrations.
The exorcists took a consensus. It was that, although the devils apparently had left her, Joanne’s body seemed to have ceased breathing.
Ralf helped unbind the ropes strapping his wife to the chair. He felt her arm, or leg nudge him, as in life, as he carried her from the kitchen and laid her in her bed in the big room. There, although the temperature was high in the 40’s and although her body was already beginning to stink, Ralf kept vigil over her for two days and nights in anticipation of her resurrection to come.
The authorities, when finally called, came and took Joanne’s yet to be resurrected body away. ‘There were blowies coming from her mouth,’they said.
When the Crown Coroner at last released Joanne’s body for burial, she had been dead for 3 weeks.
Ralf made the arrangements. Which were that Joanne’s body would be buried in Horsham cemetery, ‘No flowers by request.’and that the coffin be uncovered as he led the cortege to the grave, from where Joanne would, this time, surely rise triumphant.
Much to his chagrin, the authorities denied the request for an open casket. Ralf led the cortege anyway. Dressed neatly in country formal of sports jacket and flannels, he stood by the grave as his wife, ‘the love of my life was lowered into her grave.
And Ralf waited as the diggers thuddered clods on her closed coffin. Waited as they patted them flat with the backs of their long shovels. He tipped them and they left him, still waiting by the grave for the ‘little mouse’ to arise.
Long after all the people, cameras and cars had gone; Leanne took Ralf by the arm and led him home.
She made tea and sandwiches- ham again- and left him there.
Within 6 months, Ralf sold the pig farm and moved to Queensland. He has since remarried.



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