‘Lettuces, green peas, radishes, cabbages. Turnips. Spinach and cress.’
At first light she stalked the rows like a bird, eyes sharp for signs of growth in the soil. When the seeds sprouted, tender miracles of green appearing, she kneeled and gave thanks to God, and even my own disbelieving heart was filled with awe. I sat in the earth beside her as she prayed and I rubbed that giving dirt across her forehead so that the garden would know she belonged to it.
It was strange to see the land so quickly transformed. On Sundays, when the congregation gathered around the humble daub church, Elder Christian turned his Bible to the Book of Joshua, and the bush was compared to the wall of Jericho. God would help them bring it down. I could see the triumph in the shoulders of the men when they were able to finally wrest the more stubborn of trees from the air, and I understood that had I, too, been clearing the soil each day, I would have felt the hot dash of relief in my body when progress was made. But from my deep abiding within heartwood, root and leaf vein, I could more clearly feel that to clear the land was to scar it, and to triumph in that scarring seemed sinister and unholy. I did not sing the praises of felled trees. I did not sing the glory of sown seed potatoes, bags of wheat at one pound a bushel.
I do not praise it now. It has been a long time since I sought out the life flowing in the sapwood of a river red gum, but my memory of it remains acute. I know more now. That is why I no longer do it. I have no desire to sweep the earth clean of trees.
Winter settled in, squatting over the landscape and pissing down more freezing rain until the creek took on a wild, agitated look, creeping up its banks and threatening to flood. Often, after a heavy rain, small groups of ‘Eingeborene’ walked through Heiligendorf, looking in the makeshift shelters and observing the clearing of the land, before gathering by the creek to remove fish from traps they set there. They never stayed long and it was presumed by the elders that the valley was not favoured by them. When MacFarlane, one of the landowners who had negotiated the contract, drafted men from the congregation to fence his station, Matthias and Hans returned describing campsites they had seen higher up in the ranges, snug homes of stone and others abutting tree hollows built from branches, bark and leaves.
‘Cosy as you like,’ Hans said to Thea, visiting one Sunday afternoon. ‘Beds with possum skins, all sewn together. Much better than the hovel we’re living in.’
‘I heard Rosina complaining about it yesterday,’ Thea admitted.
‘I told my father we ought to spend the time making a better shelter, but no. “Wheat first, a house later.”’ Hans rolled his eyes. ‘Now he asks me why I’m doing so little to keep out the weather.’
‘I’m sorry,’ Thea murmured.
‘That’s why I’ve come,’ Hans explained. ‘I was wondering if your father might let me take some of those saplings by the border?’
‘Ask him yourself,’ Thea said. ‘You don’t need to go through me.’
Hans smiled, and there was something in it that unsettled me.
‘I also wanted to give you this.’ He handed her a small cat, whittled from wood.
Thea turned it in her hands.
‘You can have it, if you like.’
‘What good is a false cat to a witch?’
‘Keep it,’ he said. ‘I made it for you.’
Thea did not speak of Hans to her mother. The wooden cat was placed in her canvas bag and not drawn out again, and although I watched her carefully for the flush and self-consciousness that attended Christiana and Henriette when they spoke of marriage and dowry chests and children, Thea seemed unruffled. Still, it wasn’t until I walked the track through the village and saw Magdalena Radtke yoked to their family’s new cow, Samuel Radtke behind, pipe in one hand and reins in the other, that I was able to distract myself from a lingering sense of discomfort. Christiana, following the plough with a basket of seed potatoes, was so red-faced with embarrassment that I sang myself into the Radtkes’ vegetable garden for the joy of it.
Sweet euphoria, to be an onion seedling in well-turned earth. To feel the swelling of our tiny bulb was to feel the universe within.
The valley grew damp with a rising water table and mornings soon brought a chorus of coughing from those who had been unwell on the ship. Passengers whose teeth ran bloody, or who hobbled around on ankles fat with sickness, stopped work altogether. The leftover rations from the ship had dwindled, and there was no Sauerkraut left, only rice which was ground and mixed with ever-smaller amounts of wheat flour. Matthias mentioned to Mama that Augusta’s husband was unable to work his own land. I noticed that he began to take a portion of his own breakfast for Wilhelm.