It wasn’t until the girls returned to Heiligendorf that I understood what had happened. What I had done.
As soon as they were all walking down the track into the valley the next day, Magdalena Radtke appeared, sweeping an arm around Christiana. ‘Now, he’s all right,’ she said, casting an inscrutable eye back to where Thea followed behind, ‘I don’t want you to worry for him, but your father had a very near miss this morning.’
Elize, hearing the last of this, stepped forwards and placed a hand on Magdalena’s shoulder. ‘Elder Radtke?’
‘A tree,’ Magdalena spat out. ‘A great tree nearly crushed him to death.’
Christiana paused, eyes wide. ‘What?’
‘By God’s grace, it missed him,’ her mother said. ‘But by inches.’
The girls glanced at each other.
‘Which one?’ ventured Thea.
Magdalena turned to face her. ‘One of the gums on Herr Nussbaum’s allotment.’
As the women made their way back into the heart of the village and Thea peeled off to her parents’ allotment, I could hear the distant rasp of saws ringing out on the air. Thea stopped at the fence line. The smallest of the sister gums had fallen to the earth with such force that its huge branches now lay gouged deep within the wheatfield like an abandoned plough, the root ball lifted high into the air, exposed in a vast, tangled mass of earth. Matthias, Papa, Samuel Radtke and Hans were already at work, sawing the huge trunk into rounds. I noticed my mother hauling smaller branches into a pile, thick with dead leaves, ready to be burned.
My sister gum. The tree I had been. I stood next to Thea and remembered running with rivers of sap. I felt, too, the falling of wood, as though it were a memory held within my own body. A crack upon the earth, a boom that sent birds screeching into the air. I imagined the reverberation in my own bones, felt them splinter into dust.
I had done this.
The broken branch. The dead onion seedlings. And now, the sister gum. As these trees and plants had admitted me and let me join to them, had let me feel again the rush of being and let me swallow light and grow, I had poisoned them with my own lifelessness.
I thought of the banksias and the tea-trees and the stringybarks along the old trail from the plains to the ranges. I had moved from one to another to canopy Thea since the night of the tree, to love her with leaf and blossom and gumnut. Were they all dead now?
I had not known.
pig
Matthias and Augusta were married by Pastor Flügel under the remaining two sister gums on my father’s allotment. Stumps and rails from the fallen tree were used in the absence of proper church pews, the men and women separated with an aisle between. I climbed up into a crook in the lowest branch of one of the trees and watched Augusta walk towards my waiting brother in her best black dress, given away by Elder Pasche in the absence of a father. Matthias, I noticed, wore Papa’s Sunday trousers, and I smiled to myself imagining my mother hemming them to suit his smaller stature. As Pastor Flügel conducted the long and sombre ceremony, I picked gum leaves and dropped them spiralling down upon the heads of the bride and groom, each a blessing.
May you learn to love her, I thought.
May she learn to love you.
Giblets and bacon.
I pulled apart the fibres of blossom and sprinkled them upon the air. And if you do not love each other, I hope you are happy in the soil she gives you. I hope you are happy, brother.
‘“Two are better than one,”’ intoned Flügel, ‘“because they have a good reward for their labour. For if they fall, the one will lift up his fellow: but woe to him that is alone when he falleth; for he hath not another to help him up.”’
Matthias lifted his gaze to the trees towering above him and I saw his gap-toothed smile. A vision of him spitting at me from between his teeth, eyes almost shut from laughing so hard, came back to me, and I had to grip the branch to stop from falling in a sudden welling of love.
I hope you can find happiness with her, brother, I whispered, and my tears, when I tasted them, were salt.
The wedding breakfast was boiled parrots and new potatoes eaten on sheets and blankets spread under the trees. In Kay, even in lean times, wedding feasts had been extravagant. Giblet noodle soup, chicken, goose and duck. Wine and beer and hot plum cake if fruit were in season. Still, Matthias seemed content, sucking parrot meat off tiny bones, Augusta next to him, Wilhelm on her lap. The day was warm. Insects were loud in the wheat. Below me, Gottfried Volkmann held court in a group of men, pipe smoke issuing from his purple lips. ‘The track goes right past my door, you know! All these men and their animals on the way to Melbourne and what do they have to drink? Water from the creek. What do they eat? Whatever filthy English food is rolling around in their saddlebags. I would be a fool – no, it would be a disservice to God not to take advantage of such opportunity!’
‘But what do you know about coffee shops?’
‘Make it fresh and pour it hot!’ shouted Gottfried.
‘But what if it does not succeed? How will you eat while you try to finally clear your patch?’
Gottfried smiled and pointed to the trees. ‘I can spend another year boiling these little noisy parrots. The more I eat the less noisy they will be! These stockmen will be throwing their shillings at me. Have you tasted Eleonore’s bread?’
Some of the men rolled their eyes as Gottfried grinned and looked about him. He gestured with his pipe then, raising his eyebrows, and I noticed that he and several other men were watching Hans approach Thea as she kneeled on a blanket next to Henriette.
Something stilled in me. I was sunk in a mire of sudden, dreadful understanding. Then, panicking, I half climbed, half fell to the ground and threw myself down next to Thea just as I heard Hans ask if he might walk with her a little. I wrapped my arms around her middle, pulling her close to me. ‘Don’t go,’ I whispered in her ear.
Henriette nudged Thea with her knee.
‘Don’t go. Please.’ I placed my lips against Thea’s earlobe.
Thea picked at the stitches of the blanket’s hem, colour creeping up her neck. ‘If you like,’ she murmured.
‘Sorry?’ asked Hans. ‘Sorry, you speak so quietly today.’
Don’t come so close to her, I thought. I was scowling. I felt myself as a blackening in their midst, and as the women smirked at each other, I glared crow-black at Hans until he glanced to where I thunderstormed.
‘What is it?’ asked Henriette, turning.
‘Nothing,’ he said.
‘She said you’re welcome to walk with her,’ Henriette announced, slyly squeezing Thea’s elbow.
Christiana stared, mouth open.