Salt Creek Read online

  ‘We do not do things for the ease of them. We do not avoid every obstacle, every impediment in our lives. Imagine if we went around every tree when making a road. The expense of the extra distance; slowing for a winding track.’

  ‘It’s winding already,’ I said.

  Stanton leaned towards Papa. ‘I just meant this one tree, because it’s on our track not the main route, and because of its size.’

  Papa put his hand to the table and I could not help studying his slender fingers, and how our life here had coloured them and scarred them and chipped their nails. ‘No,’ he said, quiet still. ‘We deal with them, not retreat. We overcome them. I would hope that you could see the importance of that.’ And he gave one of his looks of sorrow and disappointment, which we all hated so.

  There was no point in further talk. He had set his mind to it as he had when he said we must move to the Coorong or face ruin. He reminded me of a picture of an Old Testament prophet I saw in Adelaide. Elijah perhaps. I do not remember. It was the cast of his features and the fixedness of his gaze, his outflung hand of command. It could not be opposed.

  The work of felling the tree began. It was the largest thereabouts, with a dense canopy that the cattle liked to stand in the shade of on hot days. Each morning we made our way up the track in expectation. We were captivated by the excitement of the task, also by a wish to forget about Mama even for a short while. Despite our anticipation, melancholy grew. It was a noble tree. Its tips of wet winter growth were green gold and bright as stained glass. And it was so various in its structure; its branches were formed by wind so it seemed they were trying to drag the tree free and flee towards the inland desert that Charles and his father had told of. There was a great scar all down one side where the surface of the trunk had been cut away, and a thick rind of new growth, muscular, bulged about its edges.

  ‘One of their canoe trees,’ Fred said.

  ‘How do you know?’ I asked.

  ‘I’ve seen them. You must have too – on the lagoon.’

  ‘I didn’t know. How would I?’

  ‘They have no saws. They are very clever with what they have. Don’t tell Tull I said that.’

  ‘No, I won’t,’ I said, remembering the offence that Fred had caused over the fish pen.

  It was a perilous task. There was the long two-handed saw, which Stanton and Hugh sweated with the effort of using, and Papa directing the angles of the cuts, chopping in at the corners with his axe, and Skipper running between the two groups of us, the cutters and the watchers, as if reporting important news. Sometimes the boys wiggled the saw free and began worrying away at a different place. It reminded me of a picture I saw once of a bear being baited by bulldogs. The tree appeared to tremble sometimes, but perhaps that was my imagination. In the evening Papa sat at the supper table and announced with great purpose and a rubbing of his hands that he thought, he really thought, that tomorrow would be the day when it would finally fall. ‘Isn’t that right, boys?’ Hugh and Stanton would nod.

  It was only after a few days that I began to see Stanton’s fear. He shied away at creaks and groans or in gusts of strong wind. Papa’s voice would carry, louder, all the way to us, ‘Come, Stanton. The saw won’t go with only one of you,’ and he would be dragged back in. As the week drew on and Papa made his nightly prediction of success for the morrow, Stanton needed to be coaxed to agree.

  ‘We should leave it to the winter storms. They’ll bring it down soon enough.’

  ‘We can’t. It could fall on someone,’ Papa said.

  ‘He’s right,’ Hugh said.

  ‘It could fall on us,’ Stanton said.

  Papa set his knife and fork down. ‘We will finish the job we have started, and I’m afraid, Stanton, that you must help. Let that be an end of it.’

  We wanted it to be done by then. We were tired of keeping an eye on Mary and running to rescue her and save her from all the consequences of her curiosity. She was so fast now and could disappear in a moment.

  The next day Stanton set his course towards the ruin of the trunk, its wedges and gouges and the long wounds ringing it. He and Hugh commenced sawing downward to meet another cut.

  Finally after all those days there was a deep creaking groan and something higher, screeching, and Papa bellowing, ‘Away, away. Leave the saw.’ It was as if the tree paused and gathered up its final energy, and there was in Hugh’s face a mixture of excitement and terror, and in Stanton’s just terror and his mouth open in a yell, and all of them fleeing as the tree fell with a great cracking, its branches and leaves rising and subsiding and rising again like waves in a storm, and Stanton submerged beneath. It stilled. It had been large while standing; it was vast now, bigger than our house, bigger than our house in North Adelaide even.

  Addie clung to my arm and screamed, ‘Stanton.’

  Papa and Hugh ran back and began burrowing into the leaves, calling and calling, and we ran to help, darting around like so many terriers after a rat. Closer to I could see the torn red heart of the trunk. There was a voice from somewhere inside.

  Stanton.

  Albert found him. ‘Blood. He’s all over blood. He’s bleeding, Hettie.’

  Papa and Hugh were in a frenzy cutting him free, the branches flying away behind them, Fred and Albert pulling them out of the way, and they came to Stanton and heaved him beneath his arms out and upright. Thick red blood welled over one eye and eased down his face in slow ribbons, which he wiped at. Papa gripped him by both shoulders and peered into his eyes.

  ‘You can see? Your eye? Close the other eye now. Here, let me,’ and he put a hand over Stanton’s undamaged eye.

  Stanton jerked free and away and was on the point of shouting something, and his arms rose as if he might shove Papa but he didn’t. He was still and then he swayed – as the tree had done on pleasant days – and Papa forced his head down. He put his hands to his knees.

  ‘Water,’ Papa said.

  Albert ran in with a beaker from the pail. Papa took it and pushed it into Stanton’s hands and he gripped it and staggered upright, Papa holding his elbow, and drank. Papa said something I couldn’t hear and Stanton blinked and wiped his eye again and stared ahead and nodded. He was as bloodless white as Mama had been in death.

  Papa shut his eyes and murmured something, a prayer of thanks or some such. Fred and Albert stood back. It is strange the respect with which an encounter with mortality is greeted. Stanton had always before gone about in a cloak of invincibility.

  ‘You are going to have a terrible scar, Stanton,’ Addie said.

  ‘Be quiet,’ Stanton said.

  ‘Quickly now,’ Papa said. ‘We must get you back home and Hester can stitch it. It’s too big to leave.’

  ‘Please no,’ Stanton said.

  ‘It’s Hester or Adelaide.’

  Stanton looked with horror at Addie.

  ‘A tree has just fallen on you and you’re scared of a few stitches. Brave Stanton,’ Addie said.

  Stanton blazed now. ‘Shut up, Addie. No one will want a tease and a shrew like you.’

  Addie flinched. ‘And who will want you now your pretty face is ruined?’

  ‘Stop,’ Papa said. ‘Quickly now, Stanton.’ He pressed a grubby handkerchief against Stanton’s brow.

  We blundered down the slope. I shoved Mary at Addie to mind so then Mary cried.

  ‘Take her for a walk or something. Think, Addie,’ I said.

  ‘The chickens, Mary. Shall we see the chickens?’ Addie said, and Mary was diverted.

  We went into the house. Papa fetched Mama’s workbasket and left the house again.

  Hugh stood at Stanton’s side. ‘You said it wasn’t safe. I’m sorry for it,’ he said.

  ‘There was no stopping him,’ Stanton said.

  I washed his face clean with water from the kettle and a little soap and dabbed it dry as best I could with one of the cloths prepared for the baby we never knew. The cut was to the bone and more than an inch long through the brow and the b
leeding would not stop. Stanton gripped the table edge then crossed his arms, folding them in front and holding them tight, caught between bravado and fear.

  I lifted the needle. ‘You must stay still now, Stanton.’

  Flesh is not like cloth: it is slippery and thick and resistant and fits snug there on the brow. The sewing of it is a finicky task. I didn’t know how to approach it. Should I do a running stitch or cross-stitch, and how tight and how to keep the sides matched? Separate knots so the stitches wouldn’t pull against each other, I decided, and I would start in the middle to keep the edges matched up. I pinched the skin together and pushed the needle in and through one flap, then the other and pulled the thread through and tied a knot and cut it. The blood kept seeping, more at each new puncture I made. I gave a bundle of the baby cloths to Hugh and a bowl of warm water. ‘Here,’ I said. ‘Give me the cloths when I say, wet then dry between stitches, else I can’t hold the skin.’

  Once, I remarked, ‘When Mama taught me to sew, I don’t believe she had this in mind,’ which made Hugh snort. I will say this for Stanton though: he did not flinch or jerk away when I was working on him despite the effort it took to force the needle through his swollen flesh. There was just a trembling of him as of a frightened animal. I did not judge him for that. I would not be so calm. Addie would be in hysterics. Stanton’s eye was half-closed in the end, and all about it was puffy and bruising up and there were the stitches creeping across it like beetle legs across a seam of meat.

  ‘Perhaps I should have used another colour. Pink, something that showed less,’ I said, standing back to consider, as if he were a sampler I had been working on.

  Stanton leapt up and made for the parlour. His shirt was torn at the back and the skin showed through paler than his arms and face which had become so brown. He had a gash on his arm too and scratches everywhere. I followed and found him looking at himself in the looking glass on the barley twist chest, as best he could in the room’s poor light, angling his head and the mirror.

  ‘It will mend,’ I said. It was not the moment for teasing. He looked at me with narrowed eyes as if he suspected I was mocking him. But the horror when he disappeared beneath the tree and the silence and his courage in the kitchen were with me still. ‘It is only now that it looks bad. I truly think so. The swelling will go down.’

  ‘People will laugh.’

  ‘The stitches will come out and the black eye will go. The scar will fade. It will, Stanton.’

  Stanton looked back at the mirror. ‘It wasn’t safe. He knew it wasn’t and yet he would not stop. He is mad, Hett. If you had heard him out there. It was like the tree was, was possessed. I don’t know what. What was he thinking?’

  ‘Of course he isn’t mad.’

  ‘What would you say then? What would you call it?’

  ‘He is determined. He will not be opposed. In such a mood he cannot admit defeat. He will not.’

  ‘He is not safe to be around. He would let us die on a point of principle if he had to.’ I had the feeling that he was speaking from a distance, even though we were but a foot or two apart.

  I put my hand on his arm. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘I tell you I will not be put through such a thing again. I will leave before. I had time while the tree was falling to know that he had killed me, I was sure of it. Not again. Not for me, not ever.’

  I went back to the table and began setting Mama’s sewing basket to rights, which in my haste to find a fine needle and thread had become a tangle. At the bottom of the basket, among bobbins and spare buttons, I came across a flint arrowhead – one of Mama’s childhood collection from England – and went in search of the rest of them, finally going out to the stable to ask Papa, where he was sitting on a stool cleaning a harness.

  ‘In the dresser drawer,’ he said. ‘In our— Wait.’ And he dropped his work and went into the house, not speaking, with me following behind, and into his room for several minutes – enough so that I began to wonder whether I should knock – and returned with the small black velvet bag that I did not remember until that moment. ‘Here.’ He handed it to me expressionless and went outside, not even pausing to look at Stanton, who had come out of the parlour and now stood at the table pressing the swelling on his brow.

  ‘Leave it be,’ I said.

  ‘There was no need,’ Stanton said. He had said it already, but it still made no sense.

  ‘No.’ We all knew what Papa was like when he had the bit between his teeth, how we could not resist from habit and from fear of something within him. Not one of us would cross him lest he revealed something at his core that we could not help dreading and did not like to be reminded of, even though we could not have agreed that it existed much less said what it was. It was relentless. It would yield to nothing.

  I did not know what more could be said about it. I spread a cloth on the table and emptied the bag onto it. Oh, I remembered the little flints so well, all their shapes: some smooth and flat and oval, with a ridge down the centre on one side so that they fitted cunningly into one’s fingers and hand, or that had one smooth edge and one fine and serrated and seemed ready for something that I could not tell. Others had clear purpose: two arrowheads and a small spearhead with murderous points and raised veins and serrations down their edges. All of these intention-filled things inside a velvet pouch.

  They had belonged to the people who lived around Chichester. Mama used to tell us how the Romans subdued them with their superior numbers and skills and weapons. I played them about in my palms. They made a dry sound, musical almost, as they rubbed against each other in my hand and again when I dropped them into a china bowl, and were translucent when held to the light.

  The tree was too big to clear or saw through. Without saying anything more about it or involving Papa the boys cleared a new path around it and the tree began its long decay. Tull came back not long after, towards the end of winter. He asked Fred about the tree. But what could Fred say? That our father had gone mad? It didn’t make sense to us either.

  ‘We told him not to,’ Fred said.

  ‘It’s been there a long time,’ Tull said.

  ‘I don’t doubt it,’ Fred said. ‘I’m sorry for it. We tried to stop him. Tell your family that.’

  Tull stared at him as if he was trying to decide what to say next, and when he couldn’t he turned around and strode back up the path. I wonder now if he had gone to tell his people.

  Papa stopped sitting on the settee that he and Mama had shared on mild evenings. He began something new in the shed on his quiet own. It was made from driftwood, that much we knew. As winter turned to spring and the sky was again filled with birds he took an interest in wood pieces we brought back from our roaming, tossing almost all in the wood basket, placing a very few other pieces neatly – as neatly as could be for twisted branches and twigs that had turned to bonewood in seawater or salt air. We began to see without speaking of it or knowing their purpose what he would save. The sound he made in his throat like a dog’s low growl was the only sign of him taking pleasure in anything in those days.

  Finally one day, it – a chair made for one – was done and he and Fred carried it down from the stable. The thing had a wild Viking air, as did he sitting on it. The top of its back curved, its ends twisting away like antlers, and its arms were attenuated at the ends and fingered the air. In the half-light they could have been part of him. He sat so still, as if he had been transfixed by the seat and the waterish kingdom before him. Once or twice I stood at his side and aligned my sight to his and stared down the lagoon and felt as close to him as I ever would again, for a fleeting moment understanding how his reluctance to leave might be as much to do with pride as bitterness. I could not hold the thought.

  Things happened in the midst of monotonous sadness. The great wonder was the mail boat, which began regular trips down the lagoon. ‘I call it providential,’ Papa said. ‘Imagine how much cheese it will be able to carry.’ The sight of it chugging forward and its steam an
d smoke trailing back was a spectacle. A whistle alerted us to mail and one of us would row out to collect it. It was a cord that tied us to the world in a way that the track did not. Letters and papers arrived from town occasionally. If Mama had lived to see it, I think she might have felt better. Grandmama and Grandpapa invited us to visit them if we wished, which Papa would not allow, and they had a little news about town life. And I had a letter from Charles, which I took away to read in private. It began: Dear Hester, I hope you are well, and continued in a similar vein. That is, it said nothing, except that he had been on another expedition inland with his father, who was doing quite well with his business ventures, and how he, Charles, wished to become an artist, which aim, he said, Father does not approve. He finished: Yours, Charles, which could have been taken any number of ways. I carried it around in my dress pocket to keep it from Addie’s curious eyes. I did not wish for anything from him, yet I could not help thinking of him and sometimes touching the letter in my pocket. It made me feel less lonely.

  There were letters in a strange hand and with no direction other than Papa’s. I handed them to him and he took them.

  ‘What are they about, Papa?’ I asked one day when he opened an envelope and, seeing its contents, shoved the whole into his inside jacket pocket.

  ‘Business. I borrowed a little to purchase the cheese moulds, from a gentleman farmer on the lakes, Mr Baker, who sold them to me.’

  ‘You mean you bought them on credit.’

  ‘Well, yes. But there will be no problem in the repaying. He has a guarantee in any case. He is just reminding me that the payment will soon be due.’

  ‘What could you guarantee?’

  He looked away. ‘Never worry about that. I have it in hand, my dear.’

  Of course I worried after that, but he would tell me nothing more.

  Once Albert came galloping down the track: ‘The Celestials. Come see, quickly.’

  He was in such a lather that Addie and Fred and Tull and I rode bareback up the track after him, Fred fortunately shutting Skipper inside or I don’t know what might have happened. It was a long line of men with jet black plaited tails of hair, identically robed in sailor-like pants and light, loose collarless jackets, each carrying a pail suspended at either end of a yoke of wood. This flexed with their movement: all those rhythms and their appearance presenting a curious sight among the sheets of sky and sea and land. The ground thrummed with their movement. They spared us hardly a glance and what they would have thought of a band of ragged children with their legs hanging down the sides of their bare horses I could not imagine.