Thea stared at him. ‘I don’t know what to think.’
‘You think I’d care about anything Christiana Radtke said?’
‘I have no idea what you think about Christiana Radtke.’
‘Not much,’ said Hans. He placed his hat back on his head. ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to tease . . .’
‘People are saying things?’
‘Oh.’ Hans shrugged. ‘You know the Radtkes.’
‘No.’ Thea shook her head. ‘No, I don’t. They have never been friendly to my family.’
Hans hesitated. ‘You shouldn’t worry. Pastor Flügel has welcomed you into this congregation. He is the authority here.’
‘My mother is not a witch.’ Thea paused. ‘Nor am I.’
‘I know.’ Hans’s voice was gentle. ‘Well, would you let me know if you see her? She did run off this way. But then I found you instead.’
‘Yes, well. Sorry to disappoint you.’
Hans smiled and I was struck by the warmth in his face. ‘I’m not disappointed,’ he said.
Thea nodded and, without saying goodnight, returned to the shelter.
Hans remained by the dying fire, looking at the place Thea had been, then slowly turned and walked off into the dark, looking back every few steps as though he expected to see her still standing there, wrapped in firelight, all uncertainty.
The moon was a hanging gallstone. Salt water trickled out of my nostrils and down my chin.
May arrived and brought the last of the families and their possessions, as well as days of rain that greened the land and washed the air of dust thrown up by the clearing of the valley, already begun in earnest. After the dry heat of summer, it was with a mixture of relief and consternation that the congregation received the change in weather. I spent each night by Thea’s side, sitting between the comfort of her warm back and the wall of rough saplings. Some mornings dawned white with frost, and when I tucked myself into the heft and tower of a nearby blue gum I felt the thrill of ice melting upon our leaves.
With each new bright, crisp day, I walked to see my own family. My father prided himself on being the first to wake in the valley. Each morning, after pissing at the base of the same wattle, steam rising from the ground, he bent low at the entryway to his hut and thundered, ‘What more has man to do than to labour and to pray without ceasing? Hm? Beten und arbeiten. Pray and work!’ Mama and Matthias would emerge moments later, faces haggard with want of sleep, Hermine well wrapped and stirring in irritation on my mother’s shoulder. After prayers by the dead char of the previous night’s fire, Matthias would walk Hermine to Augusta, then return to work. Mama hauled the bag of wedges and sledgehammers from tree to tree for my brother and Papa, sawing smaller branches herself when needed. The grass was scythed short, the smaller wattles and gums felled with axes. The larger red gums took days. I watched Papa and Matthias labour through the hours, digging trenches, cutting as many roots as possible to weaken them. There were three magnificent trees bent together, so tall they seemed to commune with the sky, and each day Papa stared them down while scratching his beard. They stood in the middle of the land he intended for wheat, and I could see that they irritated him in their disruption. I sang my way inside the smaller of the three to watch my father circle below, muttering aloud about ringbarking, fire, while we felt hollows within ourself, filled with the soft turning of furred babies. In the end, the magnitude of the gums seemed to intimidate him, and he let them be, although not without several evenings of vented irritation to my mother about the inequity of his being allocated a section so sat upon by giants.
I was glad my father left the three sister gums alone; I took to keeping sentry within the smallest. Together, we were alive and thrummed with sap. We were scarred with old feeding tracks of termites, heavy with years, pathed with nicks from the claws of creatures who rested within and upon us. The comfort of a sleeping koala nestled in our forks was akin to the weight of a hand upon a weary shoulder. From our height, we felt the congregation burn and dig and scrape the land down. Drizzle kissed us. Smoke fires billowed over us. And always, below, the hypnotic pull and thrust of the saw, the relentless swing of the adze. As the days grew ever shorter and colder, everything smelled of fire and turned earth and the heady, brutal tang of new-felled wood.
At night, again myself, I felt my teeth ache in memory of the bone-deep reverberation of trees hitting the soil and consoled myself by sitting at the Eichenwalds’ fire, listening to Thea tell her parents what she had planted from the seeds provided to them. She stored them in paper within her canvas ship’s bag, kept dry within the hollow of the trunk next to their campsite. I listened to her recite the names of plants like answers to a catechism.