The Bride of Almond Tree

by Robert Hillman

  One Saturday, with Beth at her bedside, Patty said she felt much improved. The sun flowed into her room with a creamy gentleness, as if the goodwill of the heavens had come to visit.

  ‘I think I’m getting better.’

  ‘Really?

  ‘The pain has gone. Beth darling, can you drive me around Almond Tree? I want to see the trees in fruit.’

  With the kids in the back seat of Beth’s new Falcon sedan, since the old Ford had given up the ghost, they drove up and down the rows of apple trees at Ma Parkinson’s orchard (with Ma’s permission), the Johnnies flushed red, then to Cooper’s pear orchard, with permission once again. Finally to Harper’s raspberry spread. Leo Harper told the kids they could pick and eat as many as they liked, and they took him at his word. Patty and Beth sat on the grass, watching.

  ‘This must be the most beautiful place on earth, Almond Tree,’ Patty said.

  ‘Just about.’

  ‘I knew a Zen monk in Hiroshima. A master. I told him that Almond Tree was paradise and I was thinking of going back. He said I had to stay in Hiroshima and care for the victims of the bomb and the radiation. He said my god expected it of me. My god, not his. He had no god. He said paradise is nothing. So I stayed. Francis suffered because I stayed, and poor little Esther, and now me. But we did save a great many people, lots and lots of kids. He was right, the master. God expected it of me.’

  ‘Well I don’t know what God expects of me. Signing blokes up to the union, probably. Your god, Patty, is he a unionist?’

  ‘Oh, sure. You get to heaven, you pay your dues at the Pearly Gates to Saint Peter. Actually, Beth, we Quakers don’t put much store in heaven. Heaven is here, such as it is.’

  ∼

  Feeling better didn’t last long. Beth had to drive Patty and the kids home after Harper’s. She made simple sandwiches of cheese and tomato for lunch—working within her limitations—then asked Patty if she’d like to be read to. ‘The New Testament, maybe?’

  ‘Oh God, no. I’ve had all the wisdom I can bear. No more wisdom. You know what I’d like to hear? Do you think you could go and get my Just William books from my old bedroom at the house? Loved them even though I was fifteen when I read them. That’s what I want to hear.’

  Beth took the kids with her and fetched the Just William books, then returned and read the first in the series aloud to Patty over a period of days with kids nestled on the side of the bed.

  Later, Wes took the kids for a picnic, then he showed them Chinese Town—Feenix—completed, and pointed out how the brick houses were closer to the forest than the wooden houses, and explained why. Back at the house, Esther wouldn’t get out of the car but sat picking at her cardigan. She had seemed a bit bleak all day. Wes got in beside her and pushed his hand though her long, chestnut hair.

  ‘What’s the trouble, sweetheart?’

  ‘Mum shouldn’t die.’

  ‘She shouldn’t, sweetheart. She shouldn’t. None of us should. It’s a rotten system.’

  ‘She shouldn’t of let herself be sick.’

  Wes picked her up and carried her inside, and upstairs to her mother.

  ‘She’s upset about…well, you know,’ he told her.

  Patty took her and cuddled her and crooned endearments. She revived and agreed to go down to the kitchen, where Beth would give her a glass of orange Tarax. But now it was Patty who was in tears.

  ‘Wes, it’s so difficult to die.’

  ‘I told her it was a rotten system, and so it is. A rotten system.’

  ‘The Zen monk I knew in Hiroshima, he told me that the ground you are buried in is the only heaven we can know. I want to be buried, Wes. My piece of heaven. And the children can come to my grave and kiss my headstone. The Zen master died and I went to his grave and kissed his plaque, it was made of wood. And Wes, I knew he was right.’

  On the Monday, with her kids in school, Gus took a turn caring for Patty. When she came by, Patty was up and about and saying once more that she felt so much better. She didn’t look better. She walked in the garden with Gus, then said she’d like to be by herself for a few minutes. Gus let her go and Patty walked around the corner of the house, but after ten minutes, hadn’t returned. Gus went, and came upon Patty on hands and knees with blood bubbling from her mouth and nose. Gus helped her to her feet and got her inside and stretched her out on the sofa. She found a tea towel and wiped her mouth and nose and begged her to please hold on. She called the hospital and asked for an ambulance, but the ambulance was miles away on another call. She was told a doctor would be sent. Gus next called the Cunninghams and told Patty’s mum to get to Wes and Beth’s place straight away. Then her own parents and gave them the same message. Beth and Wes were at work and a long way out of contact.

  The Cunninghams and the Hardys arrived at the same time. Patty was breathing, small bubbles of blood escaping from her mouth. All sat by her side where she lay on the sofa. They expected her to die, and so she did, her eyes open and still glittering.

  The Cunninghams sat in silence. The Hardys sobbed and wrung their hands. When the doctor arrived, a locum, he introduced himself as Cyrus Fate, no recognition of the irony. He looked about sixteen and just out of high school. He examined Patty, felt for a pulse, put his stethoscope to her chest, and announced that she was indeed dead. Patty’s mother rose from her chair, and closed her daughter’s eyes and crossed her hands on her chest.

  Beth arrived home in the middle of the afternoon from a forestry concession fifty miles away, saw the cars gathered, and knew what had happened. She walked into the living room where Patty’s body still lay, nodded to the Cunninghams and to her own mother and father, then went straight back outside to weep. When Wes drove up, half an hour after Beth, he saw her still weeping on the front porch and he, too, knew instantly who the tears were for, and why. He parked and walked over to her.

  ‘Patty?’

  Beth nodded. ‘I have to pick the kids up.’ She left him to farewell his sister.

  Francis and Esther could see that something was wrong with Beth, but didn’t ask. She waited until she was back with the kids, still in the car, before turning in her seat to face them.

  ‘Mum has died. While you were at school and at Nanny’s.’

  Francis nodded. ‘That’s what I thought,’ he said, and he climbed out of the car and hurried inside. Esther stayed where she was. ‘Come inside, lovely,’ said Beth.

  ‘I don’t want to see.’

  ‘I know. But you have to. You have to say goodbye to Mum.’

  Esther opened the door and in a flash was running down the driveway toward the road. Beth chased after her but stumbled and fell headlong and by the time she was on her feet again, Esther was standing on the side of the road while a car approached, Frank Dyson’s big black Humber. Esther waited until it was close then stood in its path.

  Beth screamed at Esther but it was only Frank’s acute swerve at the last second that saved the girl. It put him in the ditch under the cypresses, the engine still ticking over. He called to Beth from the Humber, ‘Beth, Jesus, what the fuck?’

  Beth had grabbed Esther and was holding her close. ‘Some strife, Frank. I’ll get Wes to haul you out.’

  She carried the child back to the house. Those inside had heard her scream and were waiting outside.

  ‘Leave her to me,’ she said. ‘Wes, go down with the ute and haul Frank out of the ditch. If there’s any damage to the car, tell him we’ll pay for it.’

  It was possible to get to the stairs inside without passing through the living room, and Beth took Esther that way, up to her room. She sat her on the bed and closed the door. Then sat beside her, holding both her hands. Esther was howling.

  ‘There now, sweetheart, shush, shush.’

  It was shush, shush for fifteen minutes. Only clichés came to mind, best avoided. Patty was dead. It couldn’t be diminished in its finality by something like, ‘Mummy would be sad if she knew you were crying for her.’

  Patty had told her a
month before: ‘Esther will be inconsolable, I’m afraid. Let her cry.’

  The child’s distress gradually ebbed, until she was no longer howling but sobbing softly.

  ‘Do you want to kiss Mummy goodbye now?’

  Esther nodded.

  Beth led her down to the living room and space was made so that the child could kiss her dead mother’s forehead. Then Esther went to the furthest corner of the room to sit with her legs drawn up and her face buried in her dress. Francis, meanwhile, sat with his head on his mother’s lap.

  The ceremony was simple in the Quaker tradition, held at the Cunningham house. George Farebrother spoke first, and was brief: Patty had done service to God, which God surely recognised, and had honoured the example of Jesus. Those among the gathering of seventy who felt moved to speak were encouraged to do so, and a number did. The Japanese Government had, at very short notice, sent a representative, a man of sixty or so who had known Patty in Hiroshima when he was employed as an administrator in the Ministry of Health and Welfare. He said of Patty: ‘Mrs Patty brought justice to Hiroshima. Hundreds of people are alive today because of her.’

  Usually, Quakers choose cremation, but Patty had made her wishes plain. A second short service was held at the grave side in the cemetery. Wes spoke. He said, ‘My beloved sister, farewell, and since we are where we are, forever farewell.’ Francis and Esther stood silently until the end of the service, then Francis said in Japanese a very few words. He translated for the gathering. ‘I said, “This is a sad day for me and for Esther.”’

  Chapter 35

  IT TOOK six months for them to become a family. But Esther still had to be taken to the cemetery each day to kiss her mother’s headstone and tell her about the household, and about Nanny. ‘Wes is blowing up holes in the ground so people don’t fall down them. It’s a bit dangerous for him. Beth is having arguments out in the bush. I went with her one day and heard her shouting at a man in a sawmill. She’s very angry at work but she’s never angry at home. I did this at Nanny’s.’ She displayed a drawing in coloured pencils of a sheep.

  Francis was more philosophical. He didn’t need to go to the cemetery more than once a week. He did a lot of reading and was enjoying the William books that Beth had been reading to Patty. When Esther spoke of her mother, he had only the one comment: ‘Everyone dies.’

  It was true that Beth spent a lot of time shouting in the bush. She had discovered an appetite for thumping the desks of mill managers and leaning forward with her teeth bared. Her nickname among the senior executives of forestry companies and among mill managers was ‘the dingo’. She had taken union membership in the ten concessions she oversaw to a hundred per cent. The members trusted her; they knew she would fight tooth and nail for their rights.

  But among the union members there were some who were capable of making secret deals with management, cutting corners here and there for a bonus. Whenever she found out—and she usually did—she was furious. She sat two of the workers she’d uncovered working in cahoots with a mill owner on a log and walked up and down ranting like a maniacal school principal who’d caught two students drawing dirty pictures on the toilet walls. ‘Isn’t it enough that you have the highest rates of pay in the industry? Isn’t it enough that you have a safe workplace? You have to go under the counter with that pig in the office? I’m ashamed of you, yes that’s right, ashamed.’

  It had occurred to her that her fierce advocacy of the men’s rights was related to what she’d endured in Moscow—that the justice she had to do without in prison now filled her to bursting with the need to see that what was right was recognised. It was possible she was a bit mad. She still considered herself a communist, but the gentle, charitable communist she’d been as a teenager, as a young woman, that was gone. In prison, she had seen a woman twice her age hung by her hair for an hour when she was caught reciting the Lord’s Prayer. The image was in her mind forever. It was there when she thumped the table in the offices of mill managers: anger and a type of distress. At home with Wes and the kids, she never raised her voice and her devotion to Francis and Esther could not have been more tender.

  And yes, the work Wes was doing for the shire was dangerous. The abandoned shafts had to be blown up with gelignite, collapsing them, then the remaining depression filled with gravel. Wes had hired a long conveyor belt that ran from the truck loaded with gravel up to thirty yards to the collapsed shafts. The spur road had been built way back in the day by gold miners searching for veins of quartz, and they’d extended the track as they moved along. All the shafts were within thirty yards of what was no longer a track but an unsealed road—all the shafts Wes was going to bother with, at least. The miners had tried east and west of the track, never going too far up or down.

  It took Wes and his crew two days to close a shaft completely. The downhill shafts were easier—the men could stand above the shaft when the gelignite exploded and the rubble would all roll away further from where they stood. The uphill shafts were dangerous. The explosion would loosen rocks well above them and they would need to keep wide of the shaft to avoid the inevitable avalanche. Wes would hook up the conveyor belt to the engine and steady it at the other end with metal pegs driven into the hillside with sledgehammers. Wes was usually the last to get clear of the avalanche, making sure all the men were safe.

  It was boring work. You found a hole in the ground and filled it in. Wes was used to seeing something more substantial as a reward for labour—a construction. And really, only two bushwalkers had ever fallen down the shafts; one died, the other suffered cuts and bruises. You’d have to be half-asleep to fall into one of the shafts, with their square-yard opening.

  It was probably his lack of enthusiasm for the work that led to the accident that almost killed him.

  On the day of work on the last shaft, the avalanche came so quickly that he was caught by the rocks and rubble and buried. He was the only one struck by the rocks. The other men worked with furious haste to dig him out, and found him still breathing but unconscious with a huge gash on his head.

  No way of calling for an ambulance, so they lifted him as gently as they could up the slope and laid him out on the back seat of Charlie Camp’s big old rusty Chev parked on the side of the road. Then Charlie drove down through Chinese Town like a bat out of hell and along Gold Road to the highway, and so to the Almond Tree hospital. With Charlie on one end of a stretcher and Doctor Fate on the other, they carried him in and Doc Fate checked him over. ‘No broken limbs.’

  Wes was now conscious. ‘What the hell?’ he said. Doc Fate, much more competent than his boyish looks suggested, examined the gash on Wes’s head and declared no fracture to the skull. Charlie and the doc stripped Wes naked and found him covered in bruises all over. ‘Could of been worse,’ said Charlie. Doc Fate had a nurse shave around the head wound, then sutured it, fourteen stitches.

  It was four in the afternoon before Beth arrived. Wes was now in a ward. His bruising had been treated with an ointment and his body, still naked except for his underpants, glistened.

  Beth burst into tears the instant she saw him. ‘Oh, you idiot. You utter idiot.’

  His head was bandaged. She kissed his lips, which had been left intact. ‘You look like me in Moscow. No more of these jobs with explosives. I mean it. No more.’

  ‘It was a freakish thing, darling.’

  ‘I don’t care. You have to keep alive. I’m pregnant.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re going to be a father, you oaf. I’m not doing it all by myself.’

  Chapter 36

  THE CUBAN Missile Crisis of October 1962 scared the daylights out of everyone in Almond Tree, except for Beth. She told Wes, ‘The Russians won’t go to war to get a few missiles into Cuba. They know perfectly well that the Americans would win a war.’ It was no surprise to her when the Soviets backed down. She understood the Soviets, and what they were bluffing about and what was vital to them, as she hadn’t in the days when she worshipped them. She alw
ays needed to believe with all her heart in something, and in those days it was communism and the Soviets. Now it was justice for working men and women. And communism. And her husband. And the baby.

  She kept on working for the first seven months of her pregnancy and as soon as she began to show, was treated to the hearty best wishes of the senior managers of the timber companies and mill owners, who couldn’t wait to be rid of her. The work she was doing was going to be taken over by Herby Crenshaw, who was crooked as a dog’s hind leg and could be relied on to endorse all sorts of under-the-table arrangements. As soon as Beth found out it was to be Herby who would be her stand-in, she reduced her time off to two months after the birth. She would take the baby with her.

  She enjoyed being pregnant. Despite the discomfort, she liked the idea of it: out of the wreckage of Moscow, her body had made a baby. Also, her sex drive soared, for some reason. She couldn’t keep her hands off Wes and was forever leaving the children with colouring books and little chores while she bustled him into the bedroom.

  Lillian told her, ‘I won’t lie to you, childbirth is bloody painful. You were the worst, and they say if your birth was especially painful for your mum, when you give birth it will be awful for you. But the thing is, two minutes after the birth, you can’t remember the pain.’

  Franny said, ‘Piece of cake, Beth. Don’t worry about it.’

  In the event, Franny was right. The baby was born after a single hour of labour. A fair bit of pain but nothing compared to being kicked in the stomach in Moscow.