Devotion(83)

I did not understand it at all. It was a dream. A strange temper. But Thea was gone and around me, broken in several places, was a large branch upending its leaves at head-height.

I ran my hands over the jagged end where it had snapped from the trunk, every splinter sharp with desire.

Voices then, from the dawn unclawing yonder. Thea and her parents dragging their parcels ahead, marvelling still at the near miss. I rose to my feet and ran to the sound of Thea’s voice exclaiming, ‘A miracle it did not touch me.’

‘It would have broken your back.’

‘But it did not touch me.’

I reached them as Anna Maria brought her arm around Thea’s shoulder. She bent low and said, ‘You understand now. The book.’



That day, the sap and fibre upon my body fell away, and if it weren’t for that lingering feeling of tree-soar, the otherness of it, the memory of life running through me, I would have wondered if it had happened at all.

For the next three days, as the Eichenwalds climbed ever higher into the hills, I stood at the base of cup gums and tea-trees and native cherries, wattles and blackwoods, and I placed my hands upon their branches and leaves and trunks, and I willed a shaking back into life.

Nothing happened. I couldn’t understand it.

I tried wrapping my arms around the white trunks of candle barks. I waited for nights. I asked God to join me to the green-grey fronds of acacia and placed my mouth over beading sap. Nothing.

And then. And then.

One day I stood beside a banksia loud with honeyeaters and nectar. The music lifting from the tree was so joyful, I joined my voice to its singing, and as I sang, I thought of Thea. I yearned for her and I yearned to be absorbed by the banksia, and in the rising key of all the strains of growth, I felt the banksia admit me and we were together. We knew what it was to bud and blossom and eat the light. I felt the birds upon me like a visitation from God.

That is how it happened.


In the valley below, the bell is tolling for sundown. Time to put down tools and shut in the animals returned from pasture. Time to go indoors and breathe heavily of the Bible. The end of another day.

How is it that days keep coming?

I will stay up here and recite my own grace. Gratitude for that first time where I learned what might be possible to me, when I once thought I would be forever shut off from life.

Stringybark, red gum, blue gum, I give thanks. To know what it is like to ache as a root divining water. What it is to hold time’s soft circumference within me. Thank you for the pleasure-hunger of that journey next to Thea, when I was able to be her canopy.





beten und arbeiten


It was a red-gold valley, gentle-sloped, and when I first saw it, arriving with the Eichenwalds in the dying days of April, it was bronze with kangaroo grass that caressed the waist. Unlike much of the forest across the ranges, the valley was open country, expansive, interrupted only by immense gum trees that drew the eyes skywards and stretched the throat. They stood in weight with arms raised, bearing the knobbed scars of lost branches, bark peeling from gargantuan trunks that soared, twisting upwards, outwards. Some of the gums stood leafless yet screeched white-raw with cockatoos. Others were hollowed. As I walked beside Thea, following a tributary of the river we had passed earlier, I saw that a family had set up home in one of these trees, canvas strung to extend the shelter. Washing draped over nearby fallen branches, drying. I peered in and saw someone sleeping in bedding laid over heaped grass. A ship’s trunk had been turned into a cradle in one corner, the detached lid in use as a table at the entrance, next to a mound of ashes ringed with stones. I placed my hand on the lip of the hollow, on the outside of the trunk. Thought of what it was like to be fleshed with wood, tender-hard and rippled with years.

Not one, but many. Older than old.

‘This must be it,’ Friedrich said, setting the trunk down on the track and taking the hat from his head. Thea and Anna Maria paused, breathing hard. A flock of parrots burst out of a nearby tree and they smiled at each other.

‘We’re here, then,’ Anna Maria said quietly, taking in the valley. ‘A new home.’

Thea swung her burden onto the ground. ‘Someone is coming.’

I turned and saw my father wading through the high grass towards the Eichenwalds. My heart leaped to see him, although I was struck by the way his shirt hung from his shoulders.

‘Welcome, pilgrims,’ my father announced, removing his hat and lifting it in greeting. He wiped his palm on his shirt before shaking Friedrich’s hand. I noticed the dirt sunk deep into his nails. ‘Welcome to Heiligendorf.’ He turned and, fingers to mouth, whistled hard. Soon after, I saw Matthias, followed by Hans, pushing through the grass towards them.

‘Here, boys,’ Papa called, nodding at the Eichenwalds’ belongings. ‘Give them a hand, would you?’

Matthias and Hans greeted Friedrich and Anna Maria, smiled at Thea. She seemed as shocked as I was to see how lean they were. I threw my arms around my brother’s neck as he stooped to pick up the rope handle on the side of the Eichenwalds’ trunk and breathed deeply of him. He looked like Gottlob but smelled as I remembered, of grass and chaff and sweat. I ran a hand down the side of his face, feeling the beginnings of a beard beneath my fingers.

‘Hello, Thea.’ Hans heaved the other side of the trunk into the air and he and Matthias began carrying it along the track. Papa picked up the bundle from Thea’s feet, swinging it onto his shoulder.