Devotion(100)

The Eichenwalds returned the next day at dawn, Thea bleary-eyed, her parents excited for the work ahead. The rope was untied, the carcass hefted onto their shoulders. I followed them as they carried it into the house and placed it on the table like a body to be waked, amidst a scraping hymn of knives on whetstone.

Rosina was puffy-eyed, sleeves-rolled. ‘Strange creature,’ she said, scratching the mole on her arm.

‘I always say, nothing wasted but the squeal,’ Anna Maria observed.

‘Odd, wasn’t it? The way it ran up to Hans.’

‘No squeal to be wasted.’

‘Glad of it,’ Thea muttered. ‘I hope I never have to hear another pig squeal in my lifetime.’

I left them all to their ordinance of meat.


Outside, Georg and Hermann were lighting the smokehouse. The damp chips of red gum wept such sweet smoke; the tang of them upon the cool dawn air was consolation. The sky was already clear, high. But all I could think about was the moment of dying. And before it, that strange dissolution into the body of another. I could slip into the bark of a tree. Could I now slip into skin, also? And if a tree withered and sickened and perished, would an animal die, too?

The day was tranquil and I let my feet walk me out into the unspoiled bush, passing the Peramangk as they dug in a clearing of yellow flowers, gathering the same tubers Anna Maria had taken a liking to. Two women looked up in my direction, and I wondered if they sensed me there, and quickened my steps to move beyond their gaze. I walked from tree to tree, to rock to earth, placing my hands on the ground and letting the hum of the place soothe me. The longer I stayed still, the more life I saw around me. The tiny movement of leaves as ants trailed amongst them, and birds – birds everywhere. The sky was a chorus. The trees a low and pulsing metronome.

If I had heard the noise of trees and rivers and open fields in Kay, it was nothing to what I now heard, my entire being opened and attentive. I listened to the music spilling from the leaves around me, and then to the smaller sounds of the insects, the koala that stared at me, eyes half lidded, wedged in the fork of a stringybark, the wagtail flit-dancing. If I had sung well in my living years, it was nothing to the harmonies I now sang against the chitting, sprouting, slow-tongue lolling, clawedness resounding, against the steady chant of soil, the murmur of water.

At first there were glimpses. Briefly a butterfly, gravity pulled me after each great uplift of wing. I fought for nothing more than suspension; thought, Flyingisfallingisflying, before I was again upon the ground, fingers soft as dust. I was a cossid grub, and that was hunger. And then, as dusk fell, I remembered again the pig, relived the bright press of life briefly felt, and tried again with a wedge-tail.

An eagle on the wind is an apostle speaking in tongues: Pentecostal, filled with Holy Spirit.

I woke to limp bodies, feathers fanned out in salutation to flight.


That autumn, the people of Heiligendorf gathered to slaughter their pigs, and not once did any of those pigs cry out. Each time a slaughter day was announced, I slept with the pig in its snuffle-mud-warmth and shivered into it morning-come. I urged us to go placidly to the knife. Even when the blade bit and we felt panic throb in our pig-heart and we longed to buck and run screaming from what was coming, I throttled the impulse and we leaned into it, and we went quietly. I did not want them to suffer, and I did not want Thea to hear us squeal.

I took a dark liking to sacrificing myself in this way. When all the doomed pigs had been killed, I inhabited unwanted roosters, the occasional goose. I walked into the hands of women and placed my chicken neck between their fingers, closed my eyes for the break. I told myself I stopped the creatures from fear and distress. But that immediate close of death, the blank oblivion – that is what I sought. Oh God, the glory of that brief immolation when I forgot the looming wedding and my own struck heart! It was my panacea against the constant upswelling of love that threatened to suffocate me.

When Anna Maria and Thea sewed the wedding dress in the evenings, moths dancing around their candle, I let the flash of their needles act as a mesmeric until I, too, felt dazzled by the light and mothsong and forgot everything but the euphoria of the flame’s brilliance. Oh, that exquisite sizzle. I was a mosquito thirsty for the slap.


Stupidly, I thought that these small, ill-fated returns to life would be hardly noticed. But in the days after each Schweineschlachten doorways and kitchen tables filled with quiet marvel that each pig had gone in silence. Soon, no one could speak of anything else. I hovered around the circles of men and women after Sunday services, listening to them remark upon all the ways I had died in the week.

‘It’s about time we planted a yew tree in the churchyard,’ Henriette said, bending low to Christiana.

‘What is a yew tree to a witch?’ Christiana muttered.

Several nearby women glanced at her.

‘You heard me. These are supernatural deaths. Who amongst you ever heard of a pig lifting its neck to the knife? A rooster placing his head on the block at first sight of the axe?’

‘It’s strange, I’ll grant you,’ said Elize. ‘But what harm is in it?’

‘What harm?’ Christiana repeated. ‘It shows that there are those amongst us who might bewitch. It shows that there are some who have false texts here in this congregation.’

Elize sighed. ‘We all know who you are talking of.’

‘I saw her give it to Thea!’ Christiana said. ‘It was a witches’ bible.’