‘Yes . . . That is what Matthias said.’
‘And your son.’
‘Ja, he will need a man to look up to.’
The women shouldered their baskets and continued walking in companionable silence.
‘How do you feel?’ Thea’s voice was a feather in the night.
‘Relieved,’ Augusta admitted, steadying the yoke on her shoulders. ‘The allotment is too much work for me alone.’
‘Yes, and now Matthias will live next door to his parents. He shall have much land, combined.’
Augusta shrugged. ‘I think of my future, Christiana. As must you.’
In the greying hours before dawn, the women reached a stream in the foothills and paused to rest and soothe their feet in the water. Then, as the sun slipped over the horizon, they walked down into the foothills. The inhabitants were pleased to see them, and although none of the Heiligendorf women spoke English, I was relieved for Thea’s sake to see that the prices for their eggs and butter and produce – conveyed by holding up fingers, pointing to coins offered in an open palm – were accepted without question. There were happy exclamations over the fresh vegetables, with even the gruffest speculators eagerly paying a shilling for two carrots, a shilling sixpence for three onions. By mid-morning, the yokes and baskets had been emptied of every item and, under Elize’s guidance, the girls exchanged some of the unfamiliar currency for sewing thread and needles and sugar. After tobacco had been found and bought for Gottfried Volkmann – ‘He insists upon it,’ Henriette apologised – Elize directed them to the brickworks on the banks of the river, where she purchased a small number of bricks.
‘They’re for the church,’ Elize said, passing them two apiece. ‘Elder Pasche has asked us to bring some back each time we come here. The pastor suggested it.’
‘Small church,’ muttered Amalie, hoisting her basket up onto her back.
Elize rolled her eyes. ‘In time we will have enough.’
‘How many bricks will it take?’ asked Elsa Pfeiffer.
Elize shrugged. ‘It’s not for me to question Pastor Flügel.’
‘In the meantime,’ Thea mused, weighing the heavy bricks in her hands, ‘we stand a better chance against the Tiersmen.’
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?