Devotion(110)

Thea stood up. ‘Let’s plant them now.’

‘Now?’

‘Let’s plant them for us. For Hanne.’


Thea and Hans planted the walnuts in their little orchard, creamy flowers already spasming on fruit trees. I climbed into the branches of a nearby stringybark, lay my cheek on its peeling surface and looked down on Thea and Hans, not knowing what to feel; feeling everything, Thea’s assertion that she loved me illuminating me like a flame within a glass.

Perhaps the mystery is deeper than I know, I thought. Perhaps, the mystery is not to be unravelled. A fathom not to be plumbed. Perhaps there is still grace for me, I wondered, and the thought was a raindrop on my forehead, a finger down my spine, snow on my tongue.

‘Hans?’ Thea’s voice called out below, concerned.

I looked down. Hans was still, leaning hard on his spade. He spat into the dirt.

‘What is it?’

‘Nothing,’ Hans said, straightening. But then he vomited, and I could see, as I slid down the tree and started towards them, that it was salt water. As Thea helped him back to the house, I could smell it. The ocean, brackish against the gathering wind, blowing over the crops, slate clouds scudding low.


Hans was bed-bound by evening, groaning from a great pressure in his head, unable to eat. He complained of loose bones, of sand under his tongue. As Thea flipped pages in the Book of Moses, I sat on the edge of the bed and urged Hans to recover. Thea placed a cold compress on his brow and he cried out that his skull was a chalice of sea water, that there was a darkness coming for him.

‘Time curves upon itself,’ he moaned. ‘The hole in the heart of God.’

‘Hans,’ Thea said, holding the compress in place with one hand and the book with the other. ‘Hans, lie still. Try to rest.’

He spluttered and sea water fell upon his chest. ‘I can’t breathe,’ he said. ‘I’m drowning.’

Oh God, I thought to myself. I did this. I have killed him.

Thea paused in her turning of pages and abruptly got up. I watched her as she found their Bible and tore a page from the endpapers, muttering, ‘Almighty Lord, forgive me,’ then proceeded to write something down. I got up and stood over her shoulder and read: ‘So says the Lord: I will look for what is lost again, bind what is wounded, replace what is weak for what is firm and strong. I shall protect thee.’



Thea smoked the paper before sunrise for seven mornings, and each dawn rose upon a grimmer picture than the last. The fever mounted until Hans could not speak at all, his nightclothes ringed with tide-ebbings of salt. Water ran from his ears. Thea tucked the paper under his clothes, upon his chest. It was damp from the ocean rising in him. Still, she persisted, and after the seventh day, she buried the smoked, stained paper a little distance from the planted walnuts.

For weeks I watched her work their farm alone while Hans lay in bed. After lighting the kitchen fire, Thea went outside to feed and milk their cow, driving it down the track for the shepherd to take to pasture, then spent the morning setting milk in pans and collecting water from the creek for the animals, garden, fruit trees and vines. She chopped firewood, boiled, scrubbed and wrung Hans’s salted, evil-smelling clothes, and, once, screamed into the empty air when the washing line toppled and the laundry fell into the dirt.

Thea turned herself to work, and as wretched as I was at bearing fault for Hans’s suffering, I could not help but marvel at how the yoke, the axe, the pans, the scythe, the spade became extensions of herself. So much time had passed since I had carried weight, I had forgotten what it was to work with my whole body. Thea appeared to me as a wonder. Silver, silent miracle of vigour and determination.

Then, seven weeks after the burial of the smoked paper, as summer stretched itself over the valley in a skein of pale heat, Hans recovered. One day he was lying in bed, tongue dry with sand, and the next he rose and ate a little Schlippermilch. The following day he did not return to bed until nightfall, and soon there was nothing about him to indicate he had been so long unwell, apart from a lean frame and a persistent smell of tidal water.

‘You seem better,’ Thea said that night. She watched as he wiped his plate clean with bread.

Hans smiled at her. ‘Do you think so?’

‘I do.’

‘I feel better. I feel as though it was all a bad dream.’ He shook his head. ‘A nightmare.’

‘You see now, about the book. Its power.’

Hans drank deeply from his mug of wine, looking at her over the brim, eyes crinkled. ‘I always believed you. It is not for me to judge the ways the Almighty works upon the world.’ He wiped his mouth. ‘You’re not eating.’

‘No.’ Thea pushed her plate across the table towards him. ‘Here.’

‘You need to eat too.’ He kept looking at her, head to one side, hand wrapped around his wine.

Thea looked pale. She stared at the two plates slick with animal fat.

‘What is it?’ Hans put down his mug. ‘Thea?’

‘Please, eat,’ she murmured, pushing her chair back. ‘Eat.’ And she rushed from the room, hands over her mouth.


Hans found her by the outhouse, on her hands and knees. Thea stirred as he approached and I could tell she did not want him to see the mess she had made.

Hans’s voice was soft. He helped her to her feet, placed her arm around his shoulders, and lifted her.