The Bride of Almond Tree

by Robert Hillman

  ‘Dear God, you can speak. What…how?’

  Her voice was thin and whispery. ‘Don’t know.’

  ‘Beth darling, it’s wonderful. Kiss me.’

  They kissed, at first tenderly, then more voluptuously.

  ‘Marry me?’ she said.

  ‘Yes!’

  ‘Soon?’

  ‘As soon as ever.’

  ‘A Quaker marriage?’

  ‘Certainly. We have beautiful marriages.’

  They continued on to visit Vinny; Beth allowed him to kiss her on the cheek. He said: ‘They tell me you saved me.’

  Beth said: ‘Learn to swim.’

  ‘Oi! You’re talking.’

  ‘Yes, I’m talking. Learn to swim.’

  Not so complicated, arranging a Quaker wedding. No officiating clergy, and a lot of silence. Wes and Beth had informed Sylvie Farebrother of their desire to marry, and Sylvie, as clerk of the gathering, had passed the request to the oversight committee and the clearness committee (to make sure that neither of the two parties wishing to marry was already married, or a felon, and so on) and the clearness committee took only two minutes to authorise the marriage. The oversight committee made all the legal arrangements with the court and the shire. The wedding was set for March 10th 1960. Usually, cakes and sausage rolls were not offered at a Quaker wedding, but this wedding was a hybrid, and the Cunninghams, at whose home the gathering would meet for the wedding celebration, thought it a nice touch to send plates of food around after the service. The sausage rolls would have to be outsourced to Noleen Addison, an expert, since nobody in the Quaker congregation knew anything at all about their production.

  Two weeks before the wedding, Wes took Beth to a Quaker gathering at the Richardsons’, and something happened that had never happened before. As soon as Beth walked in, the entire gathering stood and applauded, children as well. Beth blushed to her hairline. Two seats had been left vacant for the couple and, before sitting, Beth thanked everyone and even stretched her gratitude to God in heaven, without hypocrisy, since she had over the past year come to concede that something or someone with divine attributes was hovering over her. Possibly.

  Silent prayer, then Wes sang. One of the Richardson dogs, a black Labrador, wandered in and sat at Wes’s feet, and Wes took the opportunity to sing, ‘The Dog Sat on the Tucker Box’. Not appreciated by the full gathering, but certainly by the kids.

  Chapter 31

  AS A QUAKER bride, you could be married in a cardie and the daggiest skirt in your wardrobe if you wished, but Lillian Hardy insisted on something more traditional: white silk tulle, full length, lacework at the hem, and a fully shaped bodice. She was a brilliant sempstress and put her whole heart into the gown. Fittings galore. Beth said: ‘Mum, I’m not a beauty queen.’ Franny, who was helping, told her to shut up. ‘You’re going to look regal, just put up with it. Can you imagine how gorgeous Wes will look in his new suit? Woman, you have to measure up.’

  Wes and Beth entered the house together for the ceremony. Seventy people in attendance, half of them Quakers, half a mixture of other faiths, mostly Catholics, since the Hardy family were Catholics, of a very nonchalant sort, and the relatives they’d invited were also Catholics, also fairly nonchalant. A few foot-washing Baptists were scattered about, looking censorious. Chairs of all sorts had been provided and an aisle left for Beth and Wes to stroll down to their rather plain Quaker seats at the front. No flowers, and the living room was unadorned. Beth looked nothing like herself in her trailing wedding dress; but, yes, pretty.

  The silent worship part of the service was abbreviated for the sake of the Catholics, who were not used to going for more than thirty seconds in their services without a voice or voices filling their ears. Without anyone officiating, it was left to Wes and Beth to stand and face each other and make their vows, which were brief, more or less a version of, ‘Met you, married you, and I’m sticking around.’ Beth had been tutored in what to say. Wes had also been asked to sing after the vows, and he sang his old favourite ‘The Water Is Wide’.

  The water is wide, I can’t cross o’er

  Nor do I have light wings to fly

  Build me a boat that can carry two

  And we will row, my love and I.

  For the next two verses, a surprise, the Quakers in the gathering stood and joined in, while the non-Quakers looked about in bafflement. The signing of documents was quick, and that was it. Beth and Wes were husband and wife. Sandwiches were passed around on genuine crockery by Bernice Richardson and her sister Eloise without any to-do, but when it came to the cakes, the Tudors, Quaker mother and four daughters, put them on plates as if they were hot coals being handled with bare fingers. In the Tudor household, cakes were regarded as the sort of food demons were weaned on. Beth helped in the distribution of the cakes and sandwiches, and Wes knew who to avoid in offering cakes, perhaps half the Quakers, but not the Farebrothers, who ignored tradition, and gobbled down eclairs with gluttonous enthusiasm.

  Without alcohol, the feasting could not become as protracted as a reception among Catholics, or even Presbyterians, and the whole event was over in two hours. Beth and Wes waved goodbye, drove back in Wes’s ute to their house, undressed rapidly, fell into bed and made love with inexhaustible appetite.

  ‘We’re not doing anything about birth control, darling.’

  ‘Okay, after this you have to use condoms. That’s all right?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘I’m hoping I can still have children. They used to punch me in the stomach and more than anything, I worried about my womb. But they didn’t rape me, Wes. They weren’t allowed to rape the foreign women. They didn’t want them going home and telling stories of rape in a Russian prison. They raped the Russian women every time they came.’

  ‘Ewan Thomas in London says he doesn’t think there’s been any damage to your womb.’

  ‘I think of Patty’s courage, having babies in Hiroshima. And baby Esther’s poor little fingers. That’s courage.’

  ‘Patty has always had guts. At school one time she stood up at her desk and told off a teacher who had been humiliating a boy because of his awful handwriting. She called him a fat, ugly bully.’

  ‘Good for her!’

  ‘But she’s also in Hiroshima because of God. Quakers believe that God gives each Quaker a task in life and once he or she understands the task, it’s permanent. Patty believes that God wants her to help the people of Hiroshima. She can never escape that task.’

  ‘What’s your task from God? Me? Please say no. I don’t want to be a task.’

  ‘No, no, darling. I haven’t discovered my task yet.’

  The next day, Wes left for work late and said he wouldn’t be home for lunch. ‘You might like to do some shopping, Beth. You can take the old Ford in the garage. The keys are in the ignition.’

  Once he was gone, Beth wandered the house, so beautifully made, trying to imagine what a housewife did. There was not a housewifely bone in her body. What, cook and clean, wash clothes? She couldn’t cook, she couldn’t clean, and the only laundering she had any experience of was at a laundromat years ago. In Pentridge, your uniforms were washed and returned to you; all you had to do was rinse out your knickers and bras; same in Moscow, only less frequently. When she was in university and working for the union, she was living at Di’s and being cooked for. She couldn’t be a housewife.

  Wes had the phone on. She called her mother.

  ‘Mum, I don’t know how to be a housewife!’ she wailed.

  ‘I’ll come round tomorrow, sweetheart.’

  Beth drove to the shops and asked Ruth at the butcher’s what she should buy to make a meal for dinner. Ruth was Herb the butcher’s wife, a burly woman who looked as if she could carry half the carcass of a pig over her shoulder with ease. She said, ‘Sausages.’

  Beth bought eight sausages, then four potatoes from the greengrocer, Lukey Phelps, and from the grocer, Ern Morrison, a high-tin loaf and a can of Monbulk strawberry ja
m. Also a large bottle of Rosella tomato sauce.

  She could see that the sausages would have to be fried in a large pan, and found one in a cupboard. The stove was electric, so that was easy. She let them bake on the bare surface of the frying pan. The potatoes were more difficult. She found in a drawer what she assumed was a peeler, but couldn’t make it work, so she boiled a pot of water and dropped the four large potatoes in unpeeled. She set the table with bowls, knives, forks and spoons, and placed the can of jam in the centre with a number of slices of bread, cut haphazardly to various thicknesses. The can would have to be opened by Wes. She had tried but couldn’t get the can opener to work.

  When Wes arrived home from work she served the sausages, which she’d forgotten to turn, charred side up, and the potatoes.

  ‘I overcooked the sausages a bit. But maybe with some tomato sauce?’

  They were inedible, and the potatoes were raw. She tried a sausage herself, and attempted a piece of potato, then whisked Wes’s plate away and emptied both plates into the rubbish bin.

  ‘We’ll go down the shops and get some fish and chips from Alec Di Roma’s.’

  On the way, she fretted, ‘I’ll get better. Only I don’t know anything about cooking. Mum’s coming round tomorrow to help me.’

  Lillian turned up in the middle of the next morning with bags and baskets of food and a big baking dish. ‘Doesn’t help you to cook, communism, does it? Anything in Marx about casseroles?’

  She had a leg of mutton with her. ‘Gonna make him a roast. I hope Quakers enjoy a roast. Gave him one at our place one time and he gobbled it down.’

  ‘Wes is not a very observant Quaker, Mum.’

  ‘One thing’s for sure, you don’t see any fat Quakers. Must live on peas and turnips.’

  She went on, after she’d unpacked everything: ‘Now you serve your mutton baked. You know what baking is, sweetheart?’

  ‘Mum, I’m not completely stupid. In the oven.’

  ‘Good. In the oven. So we’ll preheat the oven to 350 degrees. While the mutton’s baking, you peel your taters, about five of them and cut them into quarters because you’re going to bake your taters while you’re baking your mutton, also your pumpkin, so you’ll want to cut up your pumpkin into sections.’

  ‘Only Mum, I don’t know how to peel potatoes.’

  ‘Oh Gawd, it’s like teaching a little child. Here, give me a spud and the peeler.’

  Lillian instructed her daughter in the mystery of peeling, and made her practise until, after fifteen minutes, she had succeeded in ridding one large potato of its peel. Then another.

  ‘It’s hard, Mum.’

  ‘About as hard as pouring a glass of water. Now let me see you cutting up the pumpkin.’

  This was a real challenge. Beth had to use the largest knife in the drawer to cut the big piece of pumpkin in half, then cut each half into three and scoop out the seeds.

  ‘And next?’ said Lillian.

  ‘Cook it?’

  ‘What about the peel? Do you want to eat pumpkin peel?’

  Then came the leg of mutton, big. Lillian showed Beth how to coat the baking dish with dripping, then placed the mutton in the dish. ‘Put it in the heated oven at about three in the afternoon and let it cook for an hour before adding the potatoes and pumpkin and let the whole thing bake for a further forty-five minutes. Fifteen minutes before you take the cooked mutton and vegies out, boil some beans and peas and cauli. Then put it all together and serve it. Oh, and the gravy. Add a little bit of flour to the juices left in the baking dish and stir it. Pour the gravy over the mutton, then your salt and pepper and away you go. Okay?’

  ‘Okay,’ said Beth, disguising her confusion.

  ‘Have to go and get Dad’s lunch. Call me if you get into any strife.’

  Beth followed the instructions as best she could, and made a fair job of it, although blood oozed from the middle of the leg of mutton when she attempted to slice it.

  On the way home from the shops the next day with two tomatoes and a can of peaches, she pulled over on Mason Street and said aloud, ‘I can’t do this.’ She turned the Ford around and drove to the mouth of the channel, where Wes was working, installing a new gate. She found him and embraced him and said that if he wanted a divorce she wouldn’t make any trouble but she couldn’t be a housewife. ‘Wes, it goes on forever. It’s impossible. I feel as if I’m suffocating. I don’t know how other women do it, but I can’t, I just can’t.’

  He took her aside from where the other men were at work. ‘Dear heart, of course you can’t be a housewife, any more than I could be a ballet dancer. I didn’t fall in love with you because I wanted a housewife. I fell in love with you because of your convictions. What you want to do, you work it out. It’s your task, not mine. You work it out. I have to get back to the channel gate.’

  She worked it out. A couple of days later, she phoned Di Porter and asked her if she knew anyone at the Australian Forestry Union. She knew Audrey Hirst. Why? ‘I’ll tell you later.’

  She phoned Audrey and asked if she could come down to the city and see her about the possibility of becoming an organiser for the AFU. ‘I’ll explain it all if I can see you.’

  Audrey said: ‘I know what this is about. John Li’s hundred and fifty un-unionised workers?’

  ‘Yes. We have a situation here.’

  ‘I can’t say no to someone with your experience. We thought you were dead, Beth.’

  ∼

  That night, after a meal of cold cuts and a tomato, she told Wes. He said, ‘Darling, it’s dangerous. He only allowed a unionised workforce at Chinese Town because I told him I wouldn’t oversee the whole thing unless he did. If you end up going to the site, I have to go with you.’

  Beth drove down to the city the next day in the old Ford and parked in Lygon Street. Audrey’s office was on the second floor of the trade union building. She was a woman in her fifties who’d been working for the unions for thirty years. She said, ‘God, Beth, I saw a picture from the News of the World of you in hospital. I thought, “Beth’s a goner.” Now look at you. You’re lovely. Now, you want to become an organiser on John Li’s operation. The concession is on Crown land. You can’t exclude anyone from Crown land, concession or not. But we sent a man up there and he was chased away by two stooges with guns. We decided to leave it until the concession ran out.’

  ‘What about the cops?’

  ‘They don’t want to get involved in union stuff.’

  ‘So the workforce don’t even know their rights?’

  ‘John had them recruited in Italy and Greece and signed them up as soon as they got off the boat. They were at Station Pier one day, up in the bush the next. He put them in a camp with tents and told them anyone who joined a union would be sacked, the slimy bastard. It’s illegal, but these poor buggers don’t know that. He pays them twenty per cent below the union rate. And safety rules don’t exist. You’re not supposed to fell two trees at one time unless they’re two hundred yards apart. He’s got them felling trees side-by-side. That’s how those two blokes were killed. The coroner sitting was Bobo Watkins, anti-union from way back, the arsehole. We can pay you ten quid a month at first. Is that okay?’

  ‘Yep. But I want you to halve the monthly subscription for the men I get to join up. Three shillings for the first six months, and no joining fee. Also, I’ll need a document to say I’m an official of the union.’

  ‘We can do that, but Jesus Christ, Beth, I don’t like your chances.’

  Chapter 32

  PATTY’S MOTHER-IN-LAW died in Hiroshima early in 1960, and her father-in-law one month later. Both had been ill for months and were very aged and there was no need for autopsies. Patty and the children went once again to the master to ask him to bless the spirits of the children’s grandparents. But Patty found the master himself in very poor health, not yet bedridden but capable of only hobbling about with two walking sticks. He smiled to see her and the children. ‘It would be better,’ he said in English, �
��if you came to bless me. I am two hundred and fifty years old, and my dear friend Hero has died. He was five hundred years old. Come, I will show you where Hero is buried.’

  With difficulty, the master led Patty and the children behind the stable to where a broad area was set aside for beans and capsicums and peas. An area, a big square, was the last resting place of Hero. A board with carving on it was set upright at one end of the square. The lettering, in classical Japanese read: Hero, a horse, our beloved friend. He worked hard every day and never once complained.

  Patty and the children watched as the master wept.

  ‘Now he is in heaven,’ said Patty, mainly for the children’s benefit.

  ‘Is he? I thought he was in the ground,’ the master said. ‘No, Missus Patty. In the land where your body rests, that is heaven, if you wish to have a heaven. Hero’s life came to an end. He is not running around in green fields in the sky. He is in the ground. He cannot think or see or feel anything, because his heart has stopped.’

  ‘Is he not in the cosmos?’

  ‘The cosmos?’ The master chuckled. ‘No, he is not in the cosmos. He is in the ground. I come here to mourn him because that is where he is. In the ground. Where the cosmos is, I wouldn’t know.’

  The master took his guests to the kitchen, where four novices were preparing lunch for the fifty-five monks. The novices quickly formed a line and bowed to the master when he entered. He chuckled again. ‘Here, I am boss. In the world, nobody.’

  The monks were preparing what appeared to Patty to be a salad of fruit and capsicums and beans.

  ‘Will you eat with us?’ the master asked, and Patty thanked him and said yes, they would. The monks carried stacks of wooden bowls from the kitchen to an adjoining hall where long, beautifully carpentered wooden tables were arranged in lines of four. Patty and her children were given seats on benches side by side while the four novices who had prepared the food carried in large, deep terracotta bowls of the salad and served each monk. The meal was to be eaten not with chopsticks but with narrow, silver spoons with flat ends. Before they sat to eat, the monks bowed to their guests, and Patty and the children, familiar with the custom, stood and bowed in turn.