Anna Maria was silent. She glanced in my direction. ‘You see something?’
Karl nodded.
I leaned forwards, body prickling, mouth dry. ‘You see me?’
‘She speaks,’ he said.
‘What is she saying?’ Anna Maria’s voice was quiet. Careful.
I placed a hand on his leg. Felt it twitch beneath my palm. ‘Karl?’
Karl’s eyes crinkled into a smile. ‘Nun ruhe ich in Gottes H?nden. Now I rest in God’s hands.’
I scrambled closer, leaning over his face so that my hair fell onto his forehead. ‘Sie sehen mich?!’
He closed his eyes. ‘I see it all,’ he said softly, and then he began to cough.
When the fit passed, he lapsed into unconsciousness.
‘What is it?’ I heard Augusta ask from outside the tree. ‘Anna Maria, what is it?’
Thea crawled into the hollow clutching radish tops in her hand, hair misted with rain. She was breathing hard. ‘I ran,’ she explained to Anna Maria, glancing down at Karl before giving her mother an uncertain look. ‘Is he dead?’
Anna Maria gave a little shake of her head. ‘Soon,’ she whispered.
Augusta’s face appeared. ‘He’s sleeping?’
Anna Maria crawled out from Karl’s side. I could hear her directing Augusta away from the tree. ‘He might become better,’ she was saying. ‘But he might not, too. He has been unwell for some time, I think.’
Thea sat still, staring at Karl. She picked up a corner of his blanket and wiped the rain from her face, then gently tucked him in. I saw her look around the hollow. Shiver.
I touched the ends of Thea’s brilliant hair, lit with water. Put them to my lips.
Sour wine on the hyssop.
Anna Maria remained with Augusta all afternoon. As they boiled radish tops, I crouched over Karl within the hollow tree and willed him awake. Every time he shifted or groaned, I spoke to him.
‘Wake up,’ I whispered. ‘Wake up.’
But Karl did not rouse back into consciousness. That afternoon his breathing became strangled and Anna Maria gently advised Augusta to summon the elders. I watched the man’s chest rise and fall with wet breaths as Papa prayed over and blessed him. I thumped my fist on Karl’s heart. ‘Wake up. Tell them you see me! Tell my father you see me!’
The rain began to fall in earnest. Wilhelm’s cries were drowned out by the sound of the downpour upon the canvas.
They left Karl’s body for three days, covered with a sheet that gathered a detritus of unfamiliar flowers and leaves as the congregation paid their respects. I spent every hour of daylight at his body’s side, wondering if Karl would reappear as I had. But when the body was finally lowered into the ground beside the church – the first, lonely grave in that cemetery – I remained alone.
If others are here, as I am, we are as unseen to one another as the living. The lonely dead, wishing for ghosts of our own.
hunger
Night is falling now. There is an empty feeling to the land below.
Once I found a coastline and walked the shore for weeks. I remember it as a cold time. The ocean raged against rocks and land; I saw the way salt worked upon the world. I passed a place where river met sea, and there were many people living there who read the country like my father read his Bible: in assurance of its graces and knowledge of how they might be found. I sat at a distance and watched them cook in ovens of stone. There were shell middens there, so old they shared the hum of the land. But some of the faces of the people bore evidence of affliction, and the more time I spent there, the more I saw ugly shepherds of smallpox and violence force an unnatural migration upon these people, away from the country they belonged to.
I spent the nights curled in dunes amidst the grasses. Every morning-come I was covered in sand.
I found a whaling station that smelled of death and disruption, white men missing teeth, their faces greased mean with hunger for seal pelt, and even though the coastline there was a deep love song of granite submitting to time and weather, I felt uneasy. I continued on and later, when the wind blew up from the south, it was a mouth filled with horror and it said dark and urgent things I could not understand, though it raked fear through me. That afternoon, walking along the coast, I saw an Aboriginal woman half in the water and half out of it.
She fled the island, the sea said as it flowed through her hair. She wanted to return home. We carried her the distance she could not swim.
I knew nothing of those things when I first came to the valley. I had no understanding of the world.