Salt Creek (19 page)

‘My mother said something like it to me just before she died.'

‘A sensible woman then. Wise. Don't forget.'

‘I must stay. There are my younger brothers and sisters.'

‘Even so,' Mrs Robinson said. ‘When the time comes, and it will, don't miss it.'

It was a long row back despite the current being with us this time. Papa sat away from Mama's little body and drank from a bottle that Mrs Robinson had thrust into his hand. I took the oars twice and the boat was heavy with all the bodies it carried.

There was nothing but sadness to meet us at the other end. Hugh and Fred dug a grave halfway up a slope a short distance from the house. Addie and Tull drifted around after Mary who kept looking for Mama, like a lost calf. The dismal sound of Papa hammering as he made the coffin in the shed rang out for the rest of the afternoon. That night he sat on his own in the parlour and when I went in to light the fire he watched while I arranged sticks over cones of she-oak. I took some coals from the stove in the dining room and the heat of them spread through the metal pan and up its handle and made me shiver. I felt I would never be warm again. When I returned with it to the parlour, Papa's glass was full again.

‘Have you ever considered this room, Hester?' he said. ‘What would you say it resembles?'

‘I don't know, nothing but what it is.' I couldn't say that it had once reminded me of a byre.

‘A ship's cabin, I would say,' he said. ‘A weighted line will hang true, and yet see this lamp?'

‘Yes, Papa.' It swayed a very little in some draught.

‘It reveals to me that the house is not true, was not built true, that I am no builder nor ever will be. It is I and not the line that has failed. The walls and the floor and the roof conform in their wrongness – see? – while the lamp, which is true, appears the liar.'

He was right in what he said. The lines of walls and door and windows were not parallel with the lamp line, the same as in Mama's room. ‘Papa,' I said.

He watched while I put the coals around the kindling and bent and blew, sending sparks and then flames crackling. A pleasant smoke pulsed into the room and sucked back up the chimney. It was a smell of life to me. We needed to be warm because we lived still.

The light of the flames that Papa now stared into threw shifting gleams and shadows across the lines of his brow and cheeks. It was getting dark. I picked a long twig from the wood basket and lit its end and went to light the lamp.

‘Please don't, Hester. Leave me here like this. I prefer not to see the lamp line. On a night like this it makes me feel at sea. At any moment I expect a wave to roll beneath the house and rush the gap at the door and smash a window.' His voice moved like the sea itself, slow and regular and inevitable. He lifted his head. ‘Smell the salt?'

We buried Mama the next morning. Papa spoke the words of the service. I could not help noticing the horror on Tull's face when we lowered her rough coffin into the ground and threw handfuls and then spadesful of earth over it and tamped it down.

CHAPTER 12

The Coorong, June 1858

PAPA SAID, ‘WE COULD HAVE CLEARED THE PATH
if we'd discovered the branch sooner.' The smoke from his pipe was thick around him and he stared into it as if answers might be found somewhere within. ‘It wasn't there two days before she— I should have thought. I should have looked.'

‘Why would you? It's never happened before. That part at least is not your fault.' Oh, I should not have said that.

He swung around. ‘I beg your pardon?'

‘I meant only that it was night, Papa. It would not have changed anything.'

His gaze was fixed on me. ‘It would have given us a chance.'

‘No, Papa,' I said. ‘I think it would not, a branch that size.' I was almost out of patience with him. His brooding could not restore Mama to us.

Tull had been gone for some days already. He had been mystified by us – not by our sadness, rather by our actions. He had watched us carefully after we buried Mama, as if expecting something more to happen or to discern more in our quiet. It was such a settled muffling thing. We were finished so quickly with disposing of her.

Papa wrote to Grandmama and Grandpapa to let them know the terrible news. That winter we dwelled in quiet, even Addie. It was a study to watch us all, as I sometimes did, but not an amusement. We never mentioned Mama except by mistake, and did not use favourite things of hers: a spoon, a tea-cup, a serving dish. Perhaps the others did as I did – found somewhere private when sadness struck. Except for Mary. She was like a small boat adrift and there was nothing we could do to settle her. Sometimes Addie had red eyes. She collected posies of winter flowers and laid them on Mama's grave – a solitary task.

Papa sat at the table or on the veranda if the weather was not too cold after the day's work was done, staring at nothing at all. When Mary put her hand to his knee and commanded, ‘Up, up,' he looked at her, sometimes hauling her up absently. She clambered about his lap, patting his cheeks and teasing his whiskers and exploring his pockets until finally she had his attention. But she couldn't hold it. She wandered about looking behind doors. I found her part way up the track once on my way out to the washing lines, and she just a pale shape, a spent rose with its petals lolling in a breeze. When I called to her she ran faster and I had to chase her. And when I caught her and was holding her hot little body to me and smoothing her wispy hair from her face and asked what she was about, she said, ‘Looking for Mama.'

‘But she is gone, Mary. Quite gone. She won't come back, not ever.'

‘I want her.'

‘She can't be here, sweetheart. She's in heaven.'

‘I want to go.'

‘You can't. You're not dead.'

Meals were solemn occasions. Skipper was plush with the good fortune of our misery. Papa began to drink a little in the evening. He rode to the Travellers Rest for supplies and on his return reported that Mrs Robinson had married a Mr Martin, who was helping to run the inn now. We clung to Papa's presence; he was the only parent we had left. We avoided the parlour. It reminded us too much of Mama, with her sewing put by on a side table where she might pick it up when she had a moment to spare and her shawl tossed over the arm of her chair where she had dropped it during her first pains of birth. No one had moved them. The dining room was warm, and if it was overfull with people and furniture, the light within and the company let us forget the darkness closing outside.

A letter arrived from Grandpapa. We watched as Papa read it.

‘What does it say?' Addie asked.

‘He asked if we would care to live with them in Adelaide.'

‘May we?' I said. My mind moved so swiftly. In less than a second I was in town.

‘Naturally not. We cannot live on their charity.'

‘Oh.'

‘They wondered if they could visit us here. But I think not.' He nodded his head. ‘I think not. The journey is too rough and we have nowhere to accommodate them. So, I will write to let them know.' He threw the letter in the fire.

Papa placed his knife and fork down one evening and drew himself up and cleared his throat. He had our attention. ‘We will fell the tree. We should have done it before. We will do it now so it cannot happen again.'

There was a moment of silence. I wondered if there were more, but from his expectant look around the table it seemed that was all.

Papa said, ‘We cannot have the path blocked. In another emergency we could not get through.'

‘But you cleared that branch.'

‘It might happen again.'

‘We could move the path around the tree,' Stanton said. ‘Easier by far.'

‘We do not do things for the ease of them. We do not avoid every obstacle, every impediment in our lives. Imagine if we went around every tree when making a road. The expense of the extra distance; slowing for a winding track.'

‘It's winding already,' I said.

Stanton leaned towards Papa. ‘I just meant this one tree, because it's on our track not the main route, and because of its size.'

Papa put his hand to the table and I could not help studying his slender fingers, and how our life here had coloured them and scarred them and chipped their nails. ‘No,' he said, quiet still. ‘We deal with them, not retreat. We overcome them. I would hope that you could see the importance of that.' And he gave one of his looks of sorrow and disappointment, which we all hated so.

There was no point in further talk. He had set his mind to it as he had when he said we must move to the Coorong or face ruin. He reminded me of a picture of an Old Testament prophet I saw in Adelaide. Elijah perhaps. I do not remember. It was the cast of his features and the fixedness of his gaze, his outflung hand of command. It could not be opposed.

The work of felling the tree began. It was the largest thereabouts, with a dense canopy that the cattle liked to stand in the shade of on hot days. Each morning we made our way up the track in expectation. We were captivated by the excitement of the task, also by a wish to forget about Mama even for a short while. Despite our anticipation, melancholy grew. It was a noble tree. Its tips of wet winter growth were green gold and bright as stained glass. And it was so various in its structure; its branches were formed by wind so it seemed they were trying to drag the tree free and flee towards the inland desert that Charles and his father had told of. There was a great scar all down one side where the surface of the trunk had been cut away, and a thick rind of new growth, muscular, bulged about its edges.

‘One of their canoe trees,' Fred said.

‘How do you know?' I asked.

‘I've seen them. You must have too – on the lagoon.'

‘I didn't know. How would I?'

‘They have no saws. They are very clever with what they have. Don't tell Tull I said that.'

‘No, I won't,' I said, remembering the offence that Fred had caused over the fish pen.

It was a perilous task. There was the long two-handed saw, which Stanton and Hugh sweated with the effort of using, and Papa directing the angles of the cuts, chopping in at the corners with his axe, and Skipper running between the two groups of us, the cutters and the watchers, as if reporting important news. Sometimes the boys wiggled the saw free and began worrying away at a different place. It reminded me of a picture I saw once of a bear being baited by bulldogs. The tree appeared to tremble sometimes, but perhaps that was my imagination. In the evening Papa sat at the supper table and announced with great purpose and a rubbing of his hands that he thought, he really thought, that tomorrow would be the day when it would finally fall. ‘Isn't that right, boys?' Hugh and Stanton would nod.

It was only after a few days that I began to see Stanton's fear. He shied away at creaks and groans or in gusts of strong wind. Papa's voice would carry, louder, all the way to us, ‘Come, Stanton. The saw won't go with only one of you,' and he would be dragged back in. As the week drew on and Papa made his nightly prediction of success for the morrow, Stanton needed to be coaxed to agree.

‘We should leave it to the winter storms. They'll bring it down soon enough.'

‘We can't. It could fall on someone,' Papa said.

‘He's right,' Hugh said.

‘It could fall on us,' Stanton said.

Papa set his knife and fork down. ‘We will finish the job we have started, and I'm afraid, Stanton, that you must help. Let that be an end of it.'

We wanted it to be done by then. We were tired of keeping an eye on Mary and running to rescue her and save her from all the consequences of her curiosity. She was so fast now and could disappear in a moment.

The next day Stanton set his course towards the ruin of the trunk, its wedges and gouges and the long wounds ringing it. He and Hugh commenced sawing downward to meet another cut.

Finally after all those days there was a deep creaking groan and something higher, screeching, and Papa bellowing, ‘Away, away. Leave the saw.' It was as if the tree paused and gathered up its final energy, and there was in Hugh's face a mixture of excitement and terror, and in Stanton's just terror and his mouth open in a yell, and all of them fleeing as the tree fell with a great cracking, its branches and leaves rising and subsiding and rising again like waves in a storm, and Stanton submerged beneath. It stilled. It had been large while standing; it was vast now, bigger than our house, bigger than our house in North Adelaide even.

Addie clung to my arm and screamed, ‘Stanton.'

Papa and Hugh ran back and began burrowing into the leaves, calling and calling, and we ran to help, darting around like so many terriers after a rat. Closer to I could see the torn red heart of the trunk. There was a voice from somewhere inside.

Stanton.

Albert found him. ‘Blood. He's all over blood. He's bleeding, Hettie.'

Papa and Hugh were in a frenzy cutting him free, the branches flying away behind them, Fred and Albert pulling them out of the way, and they came to Stanton and heaved him beneath his arms out and upright. Thick red blood welled over one eye and eased down his face in slow ribbons, which he wiped at. Papa gripped him by both shoulders and peered into his eyes.

‘You can see? Your eye? Close the other eye now. Here, let me,' and he put a hand over Stanton's undamaged eye.

Stanton jerked free and away and was on the point of shouting something, and his arms rose as if he might shove Papa but he didn't. He was still and then he swayed – as the tree had done on pleasant days – and Papa forced his head down. He put his hands to his knees.

‘Water,' Papa said.

Albert ran in with a beaker from the pail. Papa took it and pushed it into Stanton's hands and he gripped it and staggered upright, Papa holding his elbow, and drank. Papa said something I couldn't hear and Stanton blinked and wiped his eye again and stared ahead and nodded. He was as bloodless white as Mama had been in death.

Papa shut his eyes and murmured something, a prayer of thanks or some such. Fred and Albert stood back. It is strange the respect with which an encounter with mortality is greeted. Stanton had always before gone about in a cloak of invincibility.

‘You are going to have a terrible scar, Stanton,' Addie said.

‘Be quiet,' Stanton said.

‘Quickly now,' Papa said. ‘We must get you back home and Hester can stitch it. It's too big to leave.'

‘Please no,' Stanton said.

‘It's Hester or Adelaide.'

Stanton looked with horror at Addie.

‘A tree has just fallen on you and you're scared of a few stitches. Brave Stanton,' Addie said.

Stanton blazed now. ‘Shut up, Addie. No one will want a tease and a shrew like you.'

Addie flinched. ‘And who will want you now your pretty face is ruined?'

‘Stop,' Papa said. ‘Quickly now, Stanton.' He pressed a grubby handkerchief against Stanton's brow.