They arrived at the slide with its yoked and waiting bullocks.
‘You best tell me what all the fuss is about.’ Maggie’s tone was cautious. ‘It isn’t the mad nun, is it?’
‘Sean was caught up in some trouble last night. The village will be out searching for the culprits. I just thought it best we all leave,’ explained Brandon.
‘Some trouble?’ Maggie stamped her foot. ‘You come into my room uninvited, punch my Niall and then expect me to leave because Sean’s been in some trouble?’
‘This is serious, Maggie,’ said Brandon.
‘How serious? Serious enough for me to lose my job? For it will be hard going to find another here. Or do you expect me to go cutting trees with you? If so, then you’re stupider than I thought you were, Brandon O’Riain. And I’m no better for listening to you. I’m going back.’
‘To Hackett’s son? You’re not getting entangled with him, Maggie,’ said Brandon firmly.
‘We’ll be married. He promised me.’
Brandon moved closer, squeezing her arm. ‘Promised you? How long ago? If there’s no ring now then why would a boy his age bother with one when he’s already got what’s on offer so cheaply?’
Maggie slapped him hard across the face. ‘I hate you.’
He dragged her towards the slide. ‘I know.’
Sean shook his head at Brandon and then, moving to stand next to the bullocks, cracked his whip, pressing the team to action.
Brandon lifted a struggling Maggie into the rear of the moving slide. She clasped its wooden side, her knuckles white with fury. ‘I don’t have all my belongings.’
‘Then you should have gathered them when I told you to,’ said Brandon. ‘That boy’s father is the leader of the Brotherhood, Maggie. And Sean’s got caught up in a scrape of their doing. I can’t believe that you’d honestly want to be entangled with people like that, in a fight we can’t win.’
Sean’s whip cracked again, flicking the back of the lead bullock.
‘And how do you know we can’t win?’ said Maggie. She jumped from the slide and ran around to walk beside her cousin who had positioned himself next to the bullocks.
Brandon’s mouth dried at her words. He’d thought Wirra a good place for Maggie to stay while he and Sean worked in the forest. Wirra was increasing in size and importance due to growing demand for cedar and pine, but it was still a tiny village. And he’d believed it safe. Safe because of its smallness. Its isolation. Not once had he considered the possibility of Maggie being caught up by Irish Brotherhood sentiment, and certainly not with Brian Hackett’s son. What he’d seen in that cramped room made him ill.
Brandon walked around the rear of the slide and then to the front where Maggie and Sean kept pace with the bullocks. They stopped speaking when Brandon joined them, his stepsister’s features growing stiff and controlled. He felt his separateness distinctly. In trying to do what was right, he’d suddenly become the outsider.
‘We best not collect the rest of the timber from the base of the hill. We’ll leave it there for a few weeks until things quieten down,’ Brandon said to Sean.
‘So what do we do? Go cedar-cutting and take Maggie with us? It’s a rough life for a girl.’
‘I don’t know,’ admitted Brandon.
‘What about the English squatter’s offer of work? An honest job with a Protestant might help us in the long run,’ said Sean.
‘It’s said that he won’t have single women on the run.’
‘Don’t be daft. Of course he will,’ argued Sean.
‘Truby won’t. Except the cook and the girl, Hetty, who is his niece’s companion.’
‘Well, Maggie can stay with her, then,’ said Sean.
‘And who are you to say what can and can’t be done on another man’s property?’ said Brandon.
Maggie let out a loud snort. ‘You’ve become boringly righteous, Brandon O’Riain. If this man needs labourers, then he’ll hardly turn you away for fear of a young girl. After all, haven’t you just proven that I can barely look after myself, nor be trusted to choose a husband? Surely, then, you can convince this Truby that I need caring for and that I’m of no harm.’
Maggie could never have been thought meek, but Brandon was still astounded by the sharp way she pronounced the word ‘righteous’, as if it were something to be ashamed of.
‘This isn’t just about harm being done to you. It’s a mighty enticement to men knowing there’s a single woman about. Mr Truby will be more concerned about you causing trouble, disrupting things. He doesn’t give a damn about your precious wellbeing.’ He’d not meant to mock her, and he saw now that he’d cut deep. But she rallied quickly, offering a sickly smile.
‘Then you’ll have to do your best to protect me. Anyway, I’ll only be staying for a little while. I’ll not be packed away like a child. I intend on sending word to Niall once we’re settled and he’ll come for me. You’ll see.’
Chapter 26
Kirooma Station, 1944
The homestead, with its empty rooms and structural groans during the long, pitch-tar nights, was not the only hurdle Stella encountered in her third year of marriage. Joe’s periods of camping out on the property became more frequent and the intervals Stella spent alone grew until time began to slip away and the days merged silently into the next.
She lived for the six-weekly shopping trips to Broken Hill, where the bustle of the country town with its shops and milk bars were like a salve to her spirit. Shopkeepers knew her now, although there was little opportunity for conversation when Joe was always by her side. She envied the ease with which other shoppers stopped and chatted, and she looked forward to the exchange of a friendly smile and a few brief words with the local grocer, Mrs Andrews. There was little other contact with the outside world. Her mother wrote once a month, managing to ignore Joe’s existence, but the satisfyingly gossipy letters from Carmela and Angelina were dwindling in frequency now that they were both involved in the strict courting regime of their marriages.
The isolation was made harder by the ongoing war. Joe continually advertised for staff, but rarely received any responses. However if the search for willing hands was difficult, keeping them for more than two or three months proved an impossibility. There was a huge demand for labour and Kirooma was very remote; the men’s quarters were rundown and Joe’s expectations of his stockmen were extreme. Men worked from dawn until dusk and ate their meals in the mess room attached to their quarters. Stella rarely saw them. At least at shearing time the government could be relied upon to send a team of contractors. For six weeks of the year, Stella was assured of Joe’s presence, and of the politeness of men who tipped their hats or nodded when she entered the shed simply to sit on a freshly packed wool bale and soak up the hum of life.
She had argued with Joe about his prolonged absences, wanting to make him understand how unwanted and neglected they made her feel, but this made no difference. Stella came to recognise the holding for what it was: a woman, fresh and new, with cloistered valleys and unexplored paths, enticing in her unpredictability and harsh beauty. Here was a different love challenging her for Joe’s affections, and in the heady months of this all-consuming attachment, she couldn’t compete with the wind-shunted land that drew her husband like a siren’s call. So she conceded defeat. Temporarily. Instead, she hoped that the novelty of their surrounds would eventually lose some of its sparkle and in time, Joe would come back to her.
Stella served herself a few slivers of cold mutton at the sink before placing a domed meat-keeper over the joint to keep the flies away. Joe had returned from ten days out on the property and she noted his arrival in the diary kept in the kitchen.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked, from where he sat at the table eating.
‘Writing down the date you came home,’ said Stella, placing parentheses around the words ‘four days overdue’. She underlined the fact not once but three times, each stroke becoming deeper and darker until the lead tip of the pencil broke.
She rested the pencil on the page and retied the apron at her waist. ‘Did you see Mr Davis this trip?’
‘Nope.’
‘No news, then?’
‘Nothing,’ replied Joe.
Her husband’s journal sat next to hers. Placed on the bench the moment of his arrival home, it was a leather-bound volume purchased at great expense. No shoddy pocket notebook for Joe. This was a work unto itself, noting planting and harvesting times, phases of the moon, along with animal husbandry notes and first-aid advice. Stella flicked back through the pages, reading the entries; the time of the year a mob of sheep were moved to another paddock, the date shearing was to commence, the particular day a fence was repaired, the number of hours a hollow-eyed orphan lamb was fed before it died. She read one passage:
May 1944
Ram KR10. Found today on the western edge of the Pope’s paddock after three days’ search. I am so disheartened by his loss and by the length of time it took to find him. Perhaps he could have been saved. I should have known he would be here, wanderer that he was. He is on the leeward side of a tree, slanted sideways by the wind, within sight of a narrow channel that might carry water were it to rain. The sand has massed about his body shrouding his thick fleece in a mantle of red. I thought to move him and then decided that he should stay where he lay. He chose the spot of his dying, after all.
Stella carefully turned back to the present day’s page, wondering at the man that could express his thoughts so eloquently and yet was unable to be depended upon in the most basic of ways.
‘Why don’t you sit down?’ he said.
Stella carried her meagre plate of food to the kitchen table and braced herself with a steady, pleased smile, a response practised in the mirror.
‘Aren’t you hungry?’ he said.
‘Not really.’ She’d grown used to eating on the move, picking at pieces as she worked, enjoying the lightness of her body. The change had happened gradually, borne out of the dissatisfaction of continually eating alone, but she was beginning to feel a benefit. It was as if her body needed to purge the heaviness she felt. It seemed right to her, for hadn’t the church from its earliest days taught the need for self-denial? It was a test, she decided. God was testing her. In this empty place.
‘The orange tree’s pretty healthy. I hoed around the edge of it and gave it another water,’ Joe told her.
Across from her, Joe ate mutton and pickle sandwiches. Six slices of bread. Orange cordial. Three large glasses. There was a sketchbook on the table and in a row beside it a collection of shrivelled weeds, a broken bird’s nest and three stones of varying colours. Once they were noted in the book, Joe would spend a half hour or more arranging the motley assortment into the groupings of discoveries that cluttered every available surface in the station office. Stella chewed on the meat, watching as he examined one of the limp plants with a yellow flower and then began to draw it. Beneath the forming picture was a neat handwritten description of the subject.
‘I saw it out near the dingo fence in the dunes,’ he said, adding feathery strokes to the stem. ‘No idea what it is, but it’s good to have a record of things. Dealing with the absence of water makes for some interesting specimens. Some of the plants I’ve seen have surface roots that spread out over large areas, or deep tap roots to suck up every bit of available water. I’ve even watched a plant roll up its leaves to protect itself from the sun.’
Deep creases marked happy lines around Joe’s mouth, and she envied him his uncomplicated joy.
‘I could watch our country every day. Watch it change and change again and still remain the same,’ said Joe. ‘The light is so clear and bright. I’m sure it makes our patch of sky seem bigger than it really is.’
‘Yes, there’s certainly a sameness about it.’ Stella selected another stringy piece of mutton and ate it.
‘Watson seems well,’ said Joe.
‘He is.’ The cockatoo had the run of the meat-house. The gauze was now patched and the carcass hooks replaced with perches that Watson was currently doing his best to chew through.
‘Good. And that rain we received last month really helped the grass,’ said Joe.
‘Did it go far west?’ asked Stella.
‘Nope.’ He pushed the chair out from the table, stretching his legs. ‘Pity about that. With a few showers we could get a bit of rough feed further out.’
Stella willed herself to be happier. Joe was home, for a while, at least. There were preserved tomatoes and mutton. They could have a feast and, later, dance in the library. She needed to spin and twirl. To know happiness. To feel Joe’s arms about her. Feel him totally, obliviously. She went to the pantry and began gathering ingredients: the canister of flour and a scoopful of salt from the sack leaning against the back wall. She would wait for the dough to prove, and then roll and roll and roll it until her arms ached and it was a hair’s breadth in thickness. She tripped on the way back to the kitchen and spilt the salt on the floor.
‘Throw some over your left shoulder,’ said Joe, with a smile.
Stella was quick to obey, although she didn’t need to be reminded. As a child she’d been shown a picture of Leonardo da Vinci’s painting The Last Supper. There was Judas Iscariot, the betrayer, and the scattered salt he’d knocked with his elbow. She tossed the grains.
‘There. You’ve blinded the devil,’ said Joe, biting into his sandwich.
Some days she considered it might be worthwhile dragging the bag of salt outside and methodically throwing the whole lot behind her. It was a month since they’d made love. Joe had come down with a dry cough on his last visit home and had slept in one of the spare rooms, concerned he might make her ill. Stella couldn’t have cared less if she’d been on her deathbed afterwards.
‘You seem different,’ said Joe.
‘I just miss you,’ she replied, sweeping up the salt.
‘The bush woman’s lament.’ Joe stuffed more food into his mouth. ‘I’m going to have to head out again this afternoon. There’s a ewe I’ve been keeping my eye on. Picked up some sort of sickness. I’d like to save her if I can. She’s carrying a fine fleece.’
But you’ve only just come home, she thought. ‘Can’t you bring her back here to the yards?’ She was trying hard not to seem needy.
‘You know what sheep are like – finicky. They lie down and give up the ghost at the earliest opportunity,’ said Joe.
She turned her bottom lip, feeling the pressure of her teeth in the soft skin. ‘And what are you going to do? Camp beside her?’
‘Maybe.’
Stella couldn’t tell if his reply was meant to intentionally rile her. ‘You won’t even stay the night? Don’t you ever miss me?’
Joe walked to her side, kissing her lightly on the top of the head. ‘A couple of days. I promise.’
She grabbed at his arm, pulling him downwards until their lips met and they kissed properly. Joe pulled away first with a silly grin on his face.
‘Lucky one of us has some self-control,’ he said. ‘Have we got any of that meat left from the last lot I cured? It was a good salty brine, that one.’
‘No, we don’t.’ She pushed back the chair and stood. ‘I’ve learnt to do quite a few things in the time I’ve spent by myself. However killing and cutting up a ration sheep isn’t one of them.’ At the sink, she stared out at the sun-blasted land. She opened the canister of flour and began spooning it into a bowl, her fingers shaking.
‘Have you enough meat for while I’m away?’ asked Joe.
‘I’ll manage.’
‘Goodo.’ Joe left the kitchen whistling a tune.
Stella looked down and noticed weevils crawling across the mounded surface of the flour.
‘Damn it,’ she cursed, swiping the bowl of flour from the sink so that it smashed on the floor.
That night after Joe left, Stella stripped off her clothes. There was a bucket of water on the floor and she dunked a sheet in it and then lay on the bed, draping the wet material over her body. She cou
nted the length of their summer nights by this ritual. Sixty minutes of cool relief before the fabric dried and the heat stirred her from sleep, and then the procedure of dunking and draping resumed all over again.
She kissed the cross on the silver chain about her neck. The night sky was moonless and starry. She slipped from the bed to her knees.
‘Mother Mary, I have been your most devoted child. I’ve prayed and attended church all my life until I came to this barren place. Please, don’t desert me now. Don’t leave me alone. I know I’ve wished away a child in the past in order to spite my husband. But I swear to you that I’ve not done the things that a woman can to stop a child’s life. I understand that would be a mortal sin. Instead, I have prayed to you, and in my devotion I’ve not fallen pregnant. So I know that you hear me.
‘I prayed not to have a child to protect the baby. I didn’t want to bring a child into this world. But now I understand that I was wrong. That a child is the one thing that will bring us together and keep Joe at my side. So, I ask for your forgiveness and blessing, Mother Mary. And I pray that now is the right time for a baby, for what man can turn away from his own child?’
Stella crossed herself and then lay prone on the floor, her arms outstretched, a supplicant to the wooden cross on the dressing table opposite.
‘Come, little one,’ she whispered into the night. ‘Come and find me.’
Chapter 27
Richmond Valley, 1949
Stella turned on the car’s ignition and let the motor idle. It was three weeks since her arrival on the cane farm and she worried that the battery in the station wagon might well go flat if it sat for too long unused. The vehicle was parked next to Ann’s sedan in the carport, which was a flimsy structure with a corrugated roof, thin metal posts and no sides that had the potential to blow away in a storm. She rested her head against the seat and closed her eyelids.
The Cedar Tree Page 17