The Cedar Tree

by Nicole Alexander

  Stella leant against the cupboards. Crossed her arms and then uncrossed them.

  ‘And you can sit down, you know.’

  She helped herself to another glass of wine and joined him at the table. Outside, insects bashed against the flyscreen. He downed the contents of the glass as if it were water. Stella noticed the red tinges in the day-old growth on his cheeks and thought of Joe.

  ‘Did you bring that?’ He nodded at her drink.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Our grog not good enough for you?’ he asked.

  ‘I don’t drink beer,’ she replied.

  ‘Fair enough.’ He took a long sip. ‘There’s probably a bottle of red in that cabinet.’ He pointed. ‘How was the drive?’

  ‘Long.’ Ann’s earlier fall, it seemed, had been forgotten.

  ‘That washing you did. Waste of time. It’ll be covered in ash from the fire. The women never hang clothes out when we’re burning.’

  ‘Oh,’ she replied, a little deflated.

  ‘Well, you’re not from here, are you. You were a Sydney girl. I remember Joe telling me when you two first met that your ancestors were part of the same mob that fell for that dodgy French fella’s settlement scheme.’

  ‘The Marquis de Rays expedition,’ said Stella.

  ‘That’s the one,’ said Harry. ‘And what about your parents? What line of business are they in?’

  ‘They have a café and a greengrocer’s,’ said Stella.

  ‘Good business?’ asked Harry.

  ‘I guess. I became a typist straight out of school.’

  ‘Yeah, you never looked like the sort to be waiting behind a counter.’

  ‘And what sort do I look like?’ Stella asked, not sure if she was being complimented or condemned.

  He cleared his throat. ‘It was a big risk back then, your family sailing all the way from Italy.’

  ‘No greater than your family coming here. Joe said that your father arrived here in the 1860s from Ireland. He must have had a good selection of land to choose from, getting here so early.’

  Harry drank some more beer, his swallowing loud in the quiet room.

  ‘You have a nice farm. What size is it?’ Stella was trying to make amends for the difficulties of their earlier meeting, however her brother-in-law snorted in response.

  ‘It’s not big enough.’ He peered at her over the rim of the glass, his blunt gaze more suited to someone who’d just been provoked rather than praised. ‘I never could understand why Joe went out west. Bastard of a place.’

  ‘Joe wanted to run sheep. A person goes where they have to. Where there’s opportunity,’ said Stella, finding comfort in the level of wine in her glass. After all that had occurred, she still felt the need to defend him.

  ‘We could have had two cane farms by now. It’s good country here,’ said Harry.

  ‘But not good for sheep.’

  ‘It’s the wrong climate for them. Cattle, he could have run some cattle. I would have been prepared to let him do that,’ admitted Harry. ‘Forty head in the river-bend paddock. That’s what I offered him. We haven’t got the grass for a larger number.’

  Joe once told her that he couldn’t work with his brother. Listening to Harry, Stella wondered if his bossy nature hadn’t been one of the causes for the rift between them. They were similar – driven to work, to succeed. She imagined the two of them side by side, pushing, cajoling, striving to be the best. It made her wonder what they may have been able to achieve if they’d shared a single ambition. She recalled Ann’s words, about how the brothers’ relationship was far from close. A confirmation of what she already knew.

  ‘What did you two fall out over?’ she asked quietly.

  ‘I don’t remember. It was a long time ago,’ replied Harry.

  ‘Sure you do,’ she probed carefully. ‘You and Joe rarely spoke after our wedding.’

  Harry took his meal from the oven and sat down again. ‘It’s unimportant.’

  ‘Do we owe you money?’

  ‘“We”?’ he queried.

  ‘You know what I mean,’ she replied, more tightly than intended.

  ‘Stella, just drop it.’ Harry tasted the meal, and then, cutlery gripped in one hand, he added salt to his vegetables, shaking the container vigorously. ‘Don’t you cook with salt?’

  ‘Never,’ she replied adamantly.

  Harry raised an eyebrow. ‘Well, I like salt. How’s Ann?’

  ‘Asleep.’

  ‘I told her to leave the gutters alone. That I’d do them when I had a moment. She’s the most impatient person I know. Everything has to be done yesterday. I’ve got enough problems keeping up with today.’ He cut into one of the chops, sawed at the meat and chewed quickly. ‘So, you said when we spoke on the telephone that you were nearly bankrupt. You either are or you aren’t.’

  Stella hadn’t wanted to share the news about Kirooma’s financial troubles, but she had to tell someone and her parents’ predictable lecture on her poor decision-making was not an option worth choosing at the time. She already had enough regrets. ‘The bank has taken over Kirooma Station. I could have tried to sell it myself, but it seemed easier to pass it on to them to handle and apparently there’s someone interested in purchasing the property. There won’t be much left over from the sale.’

  ‘Made a fortune and then lost it, eh?’ said Harry, the side of his face distended from the hunk of meat he was chewing.

  ‘We never made a fortune,’ said Stella quietly.

  Harry scratched at the stubble on his cheek. ‘Do you have anything? Apart from what you brought with you. Any money?’

  Stella thought of the furniture she had dragged from the homestead along the cracked concrete path. The red dirt outside the back gate that had banked up against every item like stubbornly persistent waves. A screeching Watson. Odd tables and chairs. A standard lamp and boxes of books. Their wedding gifts. The terrestrial globe from the library. She’d taken what she could, loading them into the trailer and then sold some of the belongings to second-hand shops along the way in exchange for fuel money. Any profit was a bonus.

  Harry waited for an answer. She could have lied. ‘I have about one hundred pounds until the estate is sorted. Everything was in Joe’s name.’

  ‘Boracic, eh? Well, there’s a bit to do around here until Ann’s up and about again, but I can’t pay you. As I said on the phone, this gets you out of a spot and us as well.’

  ‘I don’t know how long I’ll be able to stay for, Harry. The bank’s frozen our account.’

  ‘Debt does that to a person,’ said Harry matter-of-factly.

  ‘The bush does that to a person,’ countered Stella, beginning to take offence at her brother-in-law’s attitude.

  ‘You people hardly lived in the bush. The bush is scrub and trees and wildlife. The type of place where there’s a better than average chance of scratching out a decent living. But Joe never settled for what was right. He refused to be a part of anything. He set his sights on his own little kingdom far away from his family and he chose a property on the outer limits, where barely a woody plant could grow. There was nothing there.’

  Stella thought of the life she had carved out of Harry’s ‘nothing’. There were orange trees in the homestead garden now. A band of lawn outside the kitchen window that she’d prided herself on keeping green. And a well-trodden dirt path leading from a garden tap to her cherished tomatoes. It wasn’t much. Lawn, trees and a few vines, and land, surrounding them like a never-ending moat. Stella had never quite made it to the outer reaches of what they’d once owned. No one would ever understand what it was truly like at Kirooma Station. No one.

  She finished her wine and stood, clutching the back of the chair. ‘Well, there’s something out there now, Harry. Two graves.’

  Her brother-in-law set his knife and fork down on the table. ‘He never should have taken you there.’

  Stella stemmed the trembling in her voice. ‘Maybe I shouldn’t have agreed to go.’

&n
bsp; ‘He would have gone regardless, Stella. He loved you, but—’

  ‘I know.’ She swallowed the pain that threatened to embarrass her. ‘He loved his sheep more.’

  Harry considered her. It was a deep-seated stare. Not the kind his wife had subjected her to at their first meeting, where a woman sums up another based on her exterior – face, clothes and the styling of her hair – but the kind that probes beneath the surface of the skin, where the object of scrutiny knows that an investigation is underway that delves into their heart. Stella held the eyes of the man opposite. She may have been shattered by the recent past, however she was not quite ready to fall.

  ‘My father’s first cousin, Brandon, loved sheep,’ Harry finally said.

  ‘Joe told me that.’

  ‘Did he now? And what else did he share with you?’

  ‘Only that Brandon and your father Sean had a disagreement,’ said Stella.

  Her brother-in-law cleared his throat noisily, as if the word ‘disagreement’ barely did justice to what had occurred. ‘Let me tell you about Brandon. My father told me that Brandon herded sheep in the hills of the old country for a bastard Protestant while the rest of them grew potatoes and cabbages and tried to forget their hunger. There’s a story that’s told of a winter that was especially cruel. One of those sheep would have fed both families for weeks, but Brandon would have none of it. He guarded that glorious meat like it was his very own. Tied a bell about the neck of the lead wether to keep track of the flock’s wanderings, probably slept with them for all I know. ’Course, to be fair, if he’d slaughtered one and been caught the worst would have occurred – they’d have been evicted, the lot of them – but my father Sean went hungry. And starvation can’t tell the difference between right and wrong. The sheep herd remained intact, if you’re wondering. My grandfather and Great-Uncle Liam ensured it. Later on they joked that not one sheep ever went missing under Brandon’s watch. He was an honest man, in the beginning.’ Harry paused. ‘That’s where Joe inherited it, this obsession with sheep. I can see no other explanation that would make him turn from the family business and become fixated on something that the rest of us knew nothing about. The genetic strain that lodged itself in Brandon somehow managed to worm its way into my brother’s blood. That, along with a nose for opportunity. But I’m not telling you anything that you aren’t already aware of, Stella. Joe never bothered who he trod on in the pursuit of his goals.’

  Harry glanced at his meal and rested the cutlery sideways on the plate. He appeared to have lost his appetite.

  ‘I think you’re a little harsh,’ said Stella. ‘It’s true, Joe was ambitious. But I don’t think that’s a bad thing.’

  ‘That depends on what you’re willing to do to obtain your prize. People like Joe – and Brandon – don’t see the world through another person’s eyes. They simply don’t have that perspective. They’d rather see it from their own viewpoint, because that’s all that is important to them. How their decision-making affects other people doesn’t really concern them. I loved Joe, he was my brother, but I haven’t liked him for a very long time. Anyway, I still can’t understand why Joe left us, but he had Brandon’s blood in him and that’s the only explanation I can think of.’ He lifted the empty beer glass, peering into the bottom as if searching for a reply.

  Stella sat back down. ‘Maybe you should tell me what Joe did to disappoint you so much.’

  Harry ran a charcoal-blackened fingernail around the rim of the beer glass.

  ‘I know very little about your family, Harry,’ Stella continued. ‘Joe and I were married so quickly and once we moved to Kirooma, well, life out there overtook us and Joe never was one for idle chat.’

  ‘Perhaps it’s best that way. Dredging up the past isn’t going to change things.’

  ‘You told me about Brandon,’ she persisted.

  ‘Yes.’ He stood up, pushing out the chair with the force of his legs. ‘I did. I thought it might help, hearing that Joe’s father’s cousin was a shepherd, but I see I was wrong. Brandon was my father’s best friend, but he threw everything dear to this family into the mud. And Joe did exactly the same.’

  Chapter 5

  County Tipperary, Ireland, 1864

  He was still a child, really. One only intent on getting home to warm himself by the fire for a moment or so while the rest of the family were working in the fields or at school. It was late morning, early spring. Slate sky. Snowmelt in the hills. Biting wind. Fourteen-year-old Brandon turned up the collar of his jacket and trudged homewards, the turf softening underfoot. The greening of the plains was not yet completed. Winter brown still mantled the distant grasslands and skirted their thatched cottage, where a slight twist of grey from the chimney suggested the fire needed fuelling.

  They lived by the seasons and by the grace of Mr Macklin, whose sheep Brandon shepherded for a good part of the year. Another five lambs born overnight and more due to drop by this afternoon would please most owners. However, their landlord was a moody man and, on occasion, as sour as rotted cabbages, with scarcely a single expression crossing his features to let a person know where he stood. He would be expecting a better lambing, an increase in the number of twins at least. Brandon decided to wait until tomorrow before telling Mr Macklin about the new births. The day was too fine to be seeking out the ruin of it.

  His father, Liam, was inside the thatched cottage, one leg slung over the edge of the table, his finger tapping his thigh. Brandon noted immediately that the fire in the hearth was licking at a tally stick. Its length was filled with notches, each one representing the use of the old language.

  A scraping noise drew him to the corner, where his stepsister Maggie had pushed aside the stool she’d been sitting on and was stepping into the light.

  ‘Oh Maggie,’ said Brandon. The cuts on the tally stick suggested she’d received a whipping as punishment and been sent home early from school.

  ‘What?’ She tossed back long red-brown hair, the thick lengths crinkled by continued plaiting, and stared at him, her dark eyes widening.

  ‘Why do you do it?’ he asked.

  ‘What gives them the right to tell me what I can speak? I’m Irish, not English. I hate school anyway.’

  ‘No you don’t.’

  ‘Oh really?’ She moved towards him, her fists rounding. She’d always been prone to sudden anger.

  ‘Maggie. Stop it.’ His father’s mouth was settled in a grim, defiant line, which was unusual for a man whose frame was bent and bowed by the burden of living. Brandon noticed the cut above his left eye. The blood from it had caught in the dense eyebrow beneath and hardened there.

  ‘What happened?’

  Liam gave his son a curt nod and walked out of the cottage.

  Brandon looked to Maggie but she hunched her shoulders. ‘I don’t know anything.’ She flicked her hand. ‘Well, go on then.’

  Brandon kept by his father’s side, silent. Speculating on the injury. Anticipating the direction in which they were headed, knowing the Rock of Cashel was five miles away. On the right, in a little less than two miles at the end of a well-used path, Brandon’s Uncle Fergal lived. They stepped over the rocky mound of a wrecked cottier’s house, frightening three quails sheltering on the leeward side. The small, round birds lifted into the air, and then dropped back onto the ground a short distance away before scattering into the grass.

  Liam O’Riain marched on, unspeaking. He covered the next mile and the next, right past Brandon’s uncle’s farm, without breaking his stride. Brandon undid the buttons on his jacket. His father was keeping up a fine pace.

  ‘I have to get back to the sheep.’

  His words ignored, Brandon tailed his father up the side of the hill, their boots slipping in the springy new growth. He grew worried as the crest was reached and the downwards slope presented itself. And still they kept moving, crossing another rise. The land swelled in size as they climbed and then grew small again on the leeward side, another mound blocking the country ahe
ad. It was strange enough to have an unspeaking father, but it was their destination that bothered Brandon the most. He’d been here before, of course, with his cousin, Sean. But only once before with his father, and there was good reason for that.

  They finally stopped at a crumbling stone wall. His father sat on its edge and stared into the distance, pushing an anxious thumbnail back and forth along the length of a trouser seam. Others rarely came here with his father. And everyone knew not to disturb him once he was here. This was the place Liam O’Riain visited when disaster befell the family. It was here that he thought on their problems. Deaths. Failed crops. Bloodsucking rent-gatherers. The types of disasters that made Brandon wish for the comfort of his sheep. The wind blew strong and fierce and he shivered with its arrival. Although the day had grown bright, the distant ruins were outlined starkly against the sky.

  He’d grown up in the shadow of Carraig Phadraig, the Rock of Cashel. A huge limestone monolith, crowned by ancient ruins that rose from a broad plain known as the Golden Vale. It was rich, fertile land – if you held enough of it. But the O’Riains were poor and even the pagan gods that his stepmother, Cait, prayed to were of no help to them.

  ‘We once had fifty acres in my father’s time. Fifty acres. Such a tract of land you never did see, Brandon. We grew potatoes and cabbages. And we had sheep and cows. There was an old milker and my mother would spoon the cream off the top of the pail and slop it into our bowls. I think back now to those wondrous years and try to make sense of where it all went. It’s impossible, of course, for change can sneak up on a man, and it only takes a handful of bad times to make the good curdle. And there’s been plenty of bad times.’ He knuckled an eye and the folded skin at the bottom of the socket drooped severely so that pink flesh showed. ‘It’s been a slow, hard slide into poverty.’

  ‘Father?’ Brandon had never heard his father speak this way. It unsettled him.

  Liam brushed his palms together. ‘Which is why things must change. We’ve hardly enough land left to keep one family.’