Devotion(96)

Alone, Thea’s smile vanished. I stared at her as she studied her shaking fingers. She was trying not to cry.

And then, as I reached for her, sought to hold her to me and find reassurance in her closeness, in the smell of her skin, Thea ran splashing into the water, skirts billowing out with air as she waded in. Her face disappeared below the surface and she emerged again, gasping, chest racked with sobs, wet hair slick across her forehead, surrounded by a distorted reflection of eucalyptus and reed.

I could not tell if she was crying from happiness or sorrow. My own heart was broken.



I walked. I walked away from the waterhole, up past the celebrations and onwards through the wheatfields. I walked until dusk fell, groping my way up the escarpment, away from the village, not knowing where I was going, following only an urgency to move, to flee. I stumbled through the bush beyond Heiligendorf until it was dark, and then I sank to the ground and curled into a ball. My suffering was so acute I felt that I was on the cusp of tearing, as though my skin would rend and my insides come blowing out like feathers. Thea does not love you as you love her, I told myself. Thea does not love you. She does not love you.

And yet, and yet.

Again and again I remembered Thea throwing her arms around me, her laughter making me feel the same as when I saw light glance off a body of water. The sun warm on our shoulders. Hands brown from summer, fingers entwined with my own. Her face before she bent to me in the forest.

She had kissed me.

A sudden memory of Thea in our berth, in the darkness, burned through me. Neither of us speaking, our heads so close together I could feel her breath upon my skin. Thea slowly sliding her finger across my cheek, then her tongue.

‘Salt.’

One word whispered, hot and held. In the morning I had woken with my heart racing, wondering if it had happened at all, unable to ask her, the thought of it knotting inside me so that I felt tight and bound and waiting.

Her hands briefly, wondrously upon my body in the darkness of the ship.

I felt betrayed and ashamed and unsure about everything. The thought of her wedded to Hans made me feel utterly forgotten.

Dawn came. I watched sunlight split the land from sky and then, in the corner of my eye, I saw a black creature emerge from behind a blue gum, something wet and feathered in its mouth.

Hans’s cat, I thought.

She stared at me, a growl wavering in the back of her throat, before vanishing into the bush.

The ocean rose in my mind. I thought of my bones in that vast coldness, and when the darkness came, I let it take me.

That was the first time I came up here. And now I am here again, waiting for an end.



The summer continued despite my constant, aching grief. While I cried for my own broken heart, the congregation of Heiligendorf filled every damned hour with work. While I spent days singing myself into the scaly leaves of she-oaks for the consolation of keening with the wind, knowing I was harming them but, in my misery, caring not, the mood amongst the congregation lifted.

The cows were giving good quantities of milk and the fields of wheat turned from green to gold. Labour outside the settlement – shearing, laundering, fencing – quietly addressed the collective debt, and soon Fachwerk frames of red gum walled with pug replaced the little shelters of saplings. Adzed slabs were turned into tables and chairs, animal pens improved with sod. Matthias began building a home from the wood of the fallen sister gum for himself and Augusta. Wells were dug under the watchful eye of Mutter Scheck, and Samuel Radtke constructed a wagon in the image of the one he had regretfully left behind.

I watched it all, ever in orbit around the one I loved.

Believing a Schwarzekuchen a stupid idea in a land so hot, Anna Maria enlisted Thea’s help in making an oven and smokehouse outside her back door, cutting curved branches then applying stones and a thick mud plaster before firing it into hardened clay.

‘I need to show you these things now,’ Anna Maria said to her, scraping out the ash from the burned wood. ‘You’ll have a home of your own before long. When will Pastor Flügel return?’

‘This Friday,’ Thea replied, picking fragments of dried mud from her wrists. ‘Hans will speak with him then.’

‘How are you feeling?’

Thea shrugged.

‘You don’t talk with me like you used to.’

Thea came up behind her mother and, wrapping her arms around her, laid her head on Anna Maria’s back. ‘There’s nothing to say,’ she murmured.


That Friday evening Thea and Hans walked to the church. They lingered by the doorway until Flügel appeared and shook Hans’s hand.

‘Come in,’ he said, turning back inside and seating himself on a chair between the pews. I sat next to Thea, sick to my stomach. She was anxious – I could see it in her jaw, in the way she pressed her feet into the floor – but I still did not know if her nerves spoke to fear or excitement.

The pastor leaned forwards, gaze moving from Hans to Thea. ‘You wanted to speak with me?’

Hans cleared his throat. ‘Thank you, Pastor. We would like to be married. In the autumn,’ he added. ‘After harvest.’

Flügel smiled at him. ‘You would like to be married. Let us do this with the necessary formalities.’ He rose from his chair and took out a sheet of paper, a pen and ink from an inkstand at the side of the room. ‘Your full Christian names?’