I placed my hand on top of hers, splayed my fingers between her knuckles.
‘Today there was a fire burning. I smelled the smoke first. There were ashes in the air. I climbed the rise and saw the plume, some flames beneath it. Papa thought it was a wildfire and became anxious – Pastor Flügel’s warnings and so on. “The breath of the Lord, like a stream of brimstone . . .” But it was a ring. The fire was burning inwards from all directions. Coming together upon itself. And when we had climbed the next rise and could see again, the fire was out.’
She turned towards a tree and placed her forehead against it. ‘Hanne,’ she whispered. ‘Hanne, that is what I feel like when I think of you. A fire closing in upon itself.’
I did not dare speak for fear of missing a word, a breath, a hesitation.
She closed her eyes, turning her head so that her cheek lay upon the pale trunk. ‘Show me,’ she whispered. ‘Show me you are here.’
I do not know how it happened. Not that first time. I shivered at her voice in the dark. The tree she was touching was smooth, radiant in the moonlight, and all I wanted was for her to rest her hand upon my face as she rested it upon the tree. I wanted to feel her touch me. The longing grew in me until I felt a strange trembling at the edges of myself, as though I was dissolving into air.
Thea’s skin pressed against the tree. The tree. Silver streak soaring into night sky, dripping with leaves still and slender, foaming fragrance into quiet air. I could feel that tree and its deep sinking into soil. I could feel it sending its hum deep under the earth, felt the air between its branches and knew that the tree was not only itself but many others, that the growing of the tree was the growing of everything else around it.
And then I was the tree. Rivers of sap rolled through us; I could feel everything we were and everything we would be. Leaves not yet unfurled, blossom capped in gumnut, roots needling moisture from the soil. We were everything that had passed, and we were what would come, the waited-for. Oh, we were waiting. Waiting for fog. Waiting for leaf-drop. Waiting for drip and bird call and waiting for heat and soaring and touching of sky.
I was the tree. It was sharing itself with me.
And somewhere, in the great unbellying of time, we were aware of the pressure of a living thing.
Little pale sapling. Her shiver at all night-shifting and wind-stirring. Breathing against us.
Thea.
I wanted to touch her. I wanted to bend to her.
All living wood, all stem and years ringing the heart of us bent to her breath, bent to her voice, and there was a giving-way, a crack, and as the branch fell, I fell with it. I blacked out and passed out of time.
I was the tree, and then I was not.
When I woke, I was alone, curled on the floor of the bush, moonlight making a mockery of the darkness. I sat up and felt oddly faint, and when I brought my palms to my face they were beaded with sap, blossom threads suspended in sticky trails. My feet ached. I cradled one in my hands and examined the sole. Beneath each toe a whisper of fibre. A tendril of root.
I did not understand it at all. It was a dream. A strange temper. But Thea was gone and around me, broken in several places, was a large branch upending its leaves at head-height.
I ran my hands over the jagged end where it had snapped from the trunk, every splinter sharp with desire.
Voices then, from the dawn unclawing yonder. Thea and her parents dragging their parcels ahead, marvelling still at the near miss. I rose to my feet and ran to the sound of Thea’s voice exclaiming, ‘A miracle it did not touch me.’
‘It would have broken your back.’
‘But it did not touch me.’
I reached them as Anna Maria brought her arm around Thea’s shoulder. She bent low and said, ‘You understand now. The book.’
That day, the sap and fibre upon my body fell away, and if it weren’t for that lingering feeling of tree-soar, the otherness of it, the memory of life running through me, I would have wondered if it had happened at all.
For the next three days, as the Eichenwalds climbed ever higher into the hills, I stood at the base of cup gums and tea-trees and native cherries, wattles and blackwoods, and I placed my hands upon their branches and leaves and trunks, and I willed a shaking back into life.
Nothing happened. I couldn’t understand it.
I tried wrapping my arms around the white trunks of candle barks. I waited for nights. I asked God to join me to the green-grey fronds of acacia and placed my mouth over beading sap. Nothing.
And then. And then.
One day I stood beside a banksia loud with honeyeaters and nectar. The music lifting from the tree was so joyful, I joined my voice to its singing, and as I sang, I thought of Thea. I yearned for her and I yearned to be absorbed by the banksia, and in the rising key of all the strains of growth, I felt the banksia admit me and we were together. We knew what it was to bud and blossom and eat the light. I felt the birds upon me like a visitation from God.
That is how it happened.
In the valley below, the bell is tolling for sundown. Time to put down tools and shut in the animals returned from pasture. Time to go indoors and breathe heavily of the Bible. The end of another day.
How is it that days keep coming?
I will stay up here and recite my own grace. Gratitude for that first time where I learned what might be possible to me, when I once thought I would be forever shut off from life.
Stringybark, red gum, blue gum, I give thanks. To know what it is like to ache as a root divining water. What it is to hold time’s soft circumference within me. Thank you for the pleasure-hunger of that journey next to Thea, when I was able to be her canopy.
beten und arbeiten
It was a red-gold valley, gentle-sloped, and when I first saw it, arriving with the Eichenwalds in the dying days of April, it was bronze with kangaroo grass that caressed the waist. Unlike much of the forest across the ranges, the valley was open country, expansive, interrupted only by immense gum trees that drew the eyes skywards and stretched the throat. They stood in weight with arms raised, bearing the knobbed scars of lost branches, bark peeling from gargantuan trunks that soared, twisting upwards, outwards. Some of the gums stood leafless yet screeched white-raw with cockatoos. Others were hollowed. As I walked beside Thea, following a tributary of the river we had passed earlier, I saw that a family had set up home in one of these trees, canvas strung to extend the shelter. Washing draped over nearby fallen branches, drying. I peered in and saw someone sleeping in bedding laid over heaped grass. A ship’s trunk had been turned into a cradle in one corner, the detached lid in use as a table at the entrance, next to a mound of ashes ringed with stones. I placed my hand on the lip of the hollow, on the outside of the trunk. Thought of what it was like to be fleshed with wood, tender-hard and rippled with years.