by Judy Pascoe
In the following silence we heard the axe drop. We could just make out her figure staggering into the strip of light my window cast on the back yard. Then we saw there was a shadow by her side. It was Vonnie hovering over her, a great guardian angel. She was steering Mum away from the tree, towards the house. She led her up the back stairs and past us into the kitchen. At the same time Uncle Jack pushed open the front door.
‘Just cut the stupid thing down!’ Edward yelled. He’d taken enough of her madness, he was finally blowing. ‘I’m going to, if you don’t.’ He stormed out of the kitchen and made for the back door.
‘No!’ my mother screamed after him.
Uncle Jack went straight to Edward directing him back to the kitchen.
‘It’s been a long day, troops.’ He held Edward by the shoulders and spoke softly to his dark hair. ‘I suggest we all hit the sack and reconvene for a debrief at 11.00 hours.’
No one had any better suggestions so we nodded and drifted our separate ways. Vonnie stayed on though. I could hear her talking to my mother in her small intense voice under the interrogating fluorescence of the kitchen light.
25
Jack went back up north that week. He swore he would come again soon, but it had been five years since we’d seen him before that, not counting Dad’s funeral, so I figured it would be five years till we saw him again. As he carried his bag out to the waiting taxi we followed in a solemn file.
‘Look after your Mum,’ he said over his shoulder to Edward, trailing just behind him. ‘Don’t you give her any trouble, you two.’ He turned to James and me.
‘And you, little fella.’ He picked up Gerard and patted his tiny broken wing folded into his chest. ‘No more tree climbing.’ Gerard slid down Uncle Jack’s side and dropped back to the grass on the footpath.
Jack wrapped his giant paw around Mum’s back.
‘See ya, Dawn,’ he said.
Mum replied caustically, trying to hide how abandoned she felt by his departure.
‘Yeah.’ She said it to the grass at her feet.
‘Remember we have a deal,’ Jack reminded her.
Jack had found a phone number of a tree surgeon the previous evening, he had made the initial call and organized for the man to ring my mother and agree a date.
‘I’ve told him to come within the week,’ said Jack.
‘This week?’ Mum protested. Then she nodded. ‘Yeah, all right,’ she added, trying to convince us all that she was ready now.
‘What will it take?’ Jack yelled at her. ‘He’s lucky to be alive.’ I knew he meant Gerard.
Mum inspected the footpath as Jack told her off. He reduced her to age twelve.
‘All right,’ she agreed, ‘I’ll do it.’
‘Dawn!’ He looked into her eyes.
‘I hear you.’ She said it quietly, but there was meaning in the words.
‘I’ll call the cops if I hear you haven’t cut it down.’ They were Uncle Jack’s final words.
He said it in front of us, so we heard it too. I knew it was his crude way of letting us know that he didn’t want us to feel like we were being deserted, which is exactly how we felt.
‘I can’t do all of it, Dawn. If I cut it down, you’ll punish me for ever,’ he said.
That was true enough. My mother could be bitter and irrational and Jack wasn’t interested in the role of scapegoat. He was big enough to occupy the role, but he wasn’t going to, even when our lives depended on it.
‘You have to take the last step, at least, Dawn,’ he said.
It was a long way down for Jack to stoop from the footpath to the cab. He threw his bag into the back and plunged down into the front seat next to the driver. Then he hauled the door closed. I thought he was looking at me as the taxi took off up the street, but I knew he had eyes like the Sacred Heart, they looked at everyone at the same time and followed you wherever you moved. We raced the taxi up the hill, but by the time we got to the hibiscus trees it was pulling away from us. I stopped because I knew there was no point chasing it. I would never get Uncle Jack back now.
We drifted back to the house all feeling lost. Mum was sinking her fury into the saucepan cupboard. She was crashing around like a Sherpa warding off the mountain spirits. An air of destitution sunk over the dinner table that night, apart from Mum dropping plates on the table and Gerard asking for Uncle Jack, we sat in silence.
All the responsibility was with my mother again and she exploded in the end.
‘He’s got a family, all right. He’s someone else’s father.’
We knew he had a family that needed him, but we felt we needed him more.
26
Uncle Jack rang late that night to check we were all right, then he peppered every evening for the rest of the week with his phone calls, making sure my mother was going to do what she promised. We listened to her side of the telephone conversations and imagined Uncle Jack calling from his house in the middle of a hot sugarcane field in far north Queensland.
Eventually my mother did make the call and a great hairy man came to our house with skid marks of green foliage staining his grey overalls and under his finger nails were brown slivers of bark. He seemed nice enough but we all kept our distance from him. We watched him from the back door walk a ring around his victim. And he eyed the tree up and down and said:
‘It’ll be a shame to lose it.’
We all nodded.
‘But I understand,’ he said. ‘It has to be.’
He would come on the weekend, Saturday morning, he said, if that suited. Yes, my mother replied and the deal was done. Thanks be to God. My brothers and I all sighed, and I wondered if my father had heard the transaction.
‘If she doesn’t go through with it, I’ll do it,’ Edward had said.
‘How?’ James and I asked with legitimate interest, not knowing he was maybe just trying to sound big.
Edward gave James a sharp punch in the arm and he pinched my leg hard. Even though James and I were both crying, it was a relief to be fighting again. Since Uncle Jack had left, the tension had been mounting between us. Gerard had found the three of us on the sofa the previous day, sitting close together. He didn’t trust it and he went and told on us and Mum yelled and sent us to our rooms. She’d assumed because we weren’t arguing that we were up to something. We hadn’t been. It wasn’t that we were being friendly or plotting some misadventure, we were just too lost and too numb to fight.
Mum took us all to church that Sunday. Twice in the same month, I heard Mrs Drummond comment, too deaf to know how loud her own voice was as Mum pushed us into a spare pew by the side altar. We were pleased though, my brothers and I. I felt they were thinking the same as me – she’s come to pray one last time for Dad’s lost soul, a final beseeching before she gets rid of him.
Now beside her I saw my mother’s prayer floating up to heaven. A tiny, bead-sized package, it made its way up, a filigree finer and more magic than a spider’s web, high up into the roof of the church. It continued its journey through the glass sky lights towards heaven and God’s ever patient earpiece. Inside the package was a pearl and on the pearl was inscribed her prayer.
It said, God, tell me I have made the right decision – if you’re there.
Even though the prayer disintegrated into a personal question of faith there was a feeling of movement in her request that excited me.
I gave James and Edward a sideways look, the five of us were hunkered together along the pew like the losing team at a hockey match, but something was going to change, that’s all we could hope for. Even if it was going to be for the worse, it would be for the better because it would be different from how it was now. Not static like a picture, like the world during the day that waited for the cool air from the sea to animate it, to lift its limbs and change its shape, anything now to create that wind that would move things and make it different.
She knew something was going to be taken if the tree didn’t go, we all knew that, and it didn’t feel to me l
ike Dad was being cruel or terrible or acting like the cross father that he sometimes had been. The power of the tree and its encroachment on us felt more like the behaviour of a child that suddenly grows up and doesn’t know his own strength. Like a boy in the playground three heads taller than the rest of his classmates. It wasn’t vindictive behaviour. Dad was just that frustrated boy with all that strength and nowhere to use it up. He wasn’t being mean because he never had been. I knew that because my mother would criticize my father for being too generous. She would treat him like a criminal when she thought he had been unnecessarily kind to someone. It had never made sense, but she was jealous of his ability to want to share what he had.
It was still easier for them, my three brothers, for me there was more at stake. They had never talked to Dad in the tree. I was going to lose any chance I ever had of talking to him again and I didn’t know what I would do exactly without at least the chance of it.
Then a door slammed and the congregation jumped as one and the panes of orange glass in the side door that had blown closed shuddered. A tiny breeze had sprung up and a crystal vase at the feet of Our Lady had toppled and the gladiolis fell like fiddle sticks at her feet.
Mrs Beatty in the seat in front ran to rescue the vase and flowers and her husband moved to fasten the door back. There was a breeze coming in from the Bay. It was late January, there was no air and the summer had been with us for months. The tropical fronts that could drop a dam load of water in an afternoon and ease the heat at the end of every day had still not arrived. So we were desperate to feel the air on our necks and to let it cool our heads at the roots of our hair. Sniff at it to see if it contained even a drop of water, but it didn’t.
My mother, I felt her think it, that the wind was the mighty force of God and she knew her prayers were answered. She had made the right decision.
27
The next morning I woke to the curly call of the magpie. I opened an eye and saw through the dusty fly screens the wide blue sky and began my plans for the day. Then I remembered with a terrible thump in my guts that it was the first day back at school.
Our feet hated it, back in shoes after months of freedom. Itching seams and sleeves, confinement and words again. Still the rain hadn’t come. It started and stopped the night Mum had attacked the tree. It was unheard of, people were twitching and going mad waiting for the rain. Someone had been shot in a nearby suburb. A young father had started up his mower on a Sunday morning and the noise had sent his neighbour into a rage and he’d pulled a rifle from his cupboard and confronted him.
By the end of the week Megan and I had made up. We sat on our giant swing with one foot on the grass rocking us back and forward.
‘Dinosaur followed by three little pigs,’ said Megan, thrusting her head back to see what she could read in the frothing clouds.
‘There’s a tiger I can see,’ I said. ‘And an old woman with only one eye.’
‘And a man on an emu.’ Megan pointed behind my head.
‘We stayed in a house surrounded by sand,’ I said turning to see if I could find the picture she described in the sky.
‘We stayed up till late every night,’ said Megan. We both watched her man riding bareback across the sky on an emu.
‘I wish we were always on holidays,’ she said. ‘Just forever at the beach.’
I thought, I’m so glad we’re not, but instead I said, ‘We’ve got a new teacher, Mrs Britton, and she’s got moles and bristles on her face.’
‘We’ve got Mr Turnbull,’ said Megan.
‘A man!’ I said. I couldn’t imagine that. I could barely conceive of anyone other than Mrs O’Grady teaching me. I’d seen her that morning standing in front of her class with her angel pink lips and her bedroom eyes heavy with pearl-white eye shadow. We’d been lined up to go into church for first communion practice, so I could only admire her from afar.
Gerard had started school that day. I had to walk him home. Mum was at the gate waiting for him and he skipped the last bit home and ran into her arms.
‘How was it?’ she asked, and he didn’t know how to answer.
‘Can I have a drink?’ he said.
‘Of course you can,’ Mum answered. I hurried past the hibiscus bushes full of grasshoppers, then I dawdled the last bit down the hill. I got lost staring through a frangipani tree, into the dark space under the house behind the trees. It was an old Queenslander, the only one in our street, like the one, I guessed, where Ab had found Dad the day he died.
Ab told Mum he thought it was a weird place for Dad to have a nap under the verandah of the house they were moving. Then Ab had cried. I’d never seen a man cry. It looked so wrong, like it must really hurt. I had seen Dad shed a tear, though never about his ticker as he called it. His tears had always been tears of joy. At the beach on a glorious day, he’d say:
‘God’s own.’ He’d indicate the plate of dark breakers before him and the moon rising over the dunes.
He was definitely the wrong person to die. It was God’s mistake, Mum called it. A big mistake and she spoke like she was going to get her revenge on God and take him on somehow in a dual. I knew when I saw her looking up to the heavens that she was thinking, ‘So that’s your best shot?’ Like it hadn’t crippled her. I could imagine my mother in the ring goading Him, a featherweight light on her feet and mean, pitched against the Almighty, but not frightened by Him at all.
I could see she was working it out, God was going to pay for this. My mother even suggested it, but never said it out loud, that Ab, a man with a nervous laugh to cover all occasions, should have been taken instead of our father.
I imagined Dad’s last minutes under the dark verandah, blue light falling on him through the gaps in the verandah floor. He’d known how it would go in the end. His heart would flutter, then stop. It would gasp for breath like a fish hauled in and slapped on the deck, it would gasp and flap and finally stop.
Megan’s foot pushed off the ground and the swing rocked gently.
‘Don’t be surprised,’ I said to Megan, ‘if tomorrow morning you see a man with a beard in our back yard.’
That was the only way I could tell Megan and remind myself that the date that my mother had organized with the tree man was almost upon us.
‘Who is the man with the beard?’ Megan asked.
‘The man who is going to cut our tree down.’
‘Oh,’ Megan said, and I wondered if she cared.
Then we both saw it together. The decapitated head floating above us. That head looked so real, cut off at the neck, lying back on its mass of grey curls. It seemed a great crime had been committed somewhere in the heavens and we were witnessing the brutality of it and the head of the victim tumbling down to earth.
‘Mozart!’ I said. ‘It looks like Mozart.’
‘Or Beethoven,’ said Megan.
We looked around us, we couldn’t believe the world wasn’t stopping to gasp at the sight of this head rolling to earth. It lost none of its shape as it floated towards the horizon, not like other clouds that changed expressions, divided into parts, blew away in wisps. This cloud head stayed intact until it dropped below the house line, appearing as if it landed on their roofs, deflating like a punctured balloon.
Then the wind came in, the first hint of a storm, and a string of cloud rabbits raced with the speed of the mechanical ones they use at the dog track, round and round the bottom of the sky.
We should have recognized the signs in the sky that day. We should have known it was an omen, that something was going to happen.
Heads don’t roll across the sky like that for no reason, I remember thinking.
And the line of rabbits kept racing in a fading strip round the inside of the sky’s great dome, like a blue mixing bowl turned upside down, ringed with a pattern of racing bunnies.
The scraping of Mr Lu’s spade sounded heavier than it had all summer, like he was tired of his digging. The sun went behind a purple cloud and the world went suddenly green.
Megan was already skipping down the path towards her house.
The drill of the cicadas slowed to a purr and the frog symphony began. There was a flurry of activity now it was dusk. Doors opened, sprinklers came to life and across the fence Mrs Lucas was dragging in her forgotten laundry.
With the cool change came an explosion of sneezes as the changing wind affected the sinuses of the housewives of the suburb. There was a tightly packed chain of nasal blasts from Mrs Lucas, a sort of, ‘Achar, achar, achar, achar.’
Then a discharge from Mrs Johnson that sounded like a blood-curdling scream. It went on for minutes while every woman in the neighbourhood cleared her nasal passages to adjust to the weather front.
You would have thought we would have recognized all these cues.
28
But the first thing I heard that night was the rattle of rocks against the wall outside, right behind my head. They sprayed against the weatherboarding with such force I thought Megan’s brother had fired them with his slingshot. That woke me up, that and the door slamming as a gust of wind went through the house. I felt a fine spray on my face: it was the rain hitting against the window so hard it leaked around the edge of the frame. A wall of windows along the back of the house blasted closed in the next gust of wind and that woke the rest of them. I stayed in bed a long time listening to the wind and rain, trying to gauge their strength. The drought had broken, that much I knew.
I finally dared to look out the window into the back yard. Outside the tree was dancing, like a mad skeleton. Arching and folding in two with the force of the screaming wind. The branches were tugging at the power lines, they pulled and wrenched at them, straining them to their limit. A few attempts later they snapped and their ends sprayed about in the dark air, hissing like a basket of live cobras. A second after that the house plunged into darkness, all my fear jumped to my throat and I ran into Mum’s room.