Devotion, p.24
Devotion, page 24
The pastor opened his hands in a gesture of appreciation. ‘We are pleased to welcome all believers of the true faith. It is one of the reasons I would like to speak to you, Frau Eichenwald.’
I noticed Thea glance at her mother.
‘You would like to speak to me?’
‘Frau Eichenwald, it has come to my attention that, on the journey here, you engaged in homeopathic medicine. Is that true?’
Anna Maria straightened her back. ‘I am a midwife and a healer. There is no shame in that.’
‘No, I understand.’ Pastor Flügel placed a hand on his chest. ‘I, too, put great store by homeopathy. I have benefitted enormously from its wisdom. I recognise, however, that amongst herbal crafts there is variance, and that such things can – if one is not careful – descend into immoral practices.’
Anna Maria did not take her eyes off the pastor. A smile stretched across her face.
‘Frau Eichenwald, I will ask you outright, and I urge you to answer in truth. Should your answer be affirmative, it would bring me great joy to pray for you, to hear your confession, and to facilitate steps towards public contrition so that the congregation may trust and commune with you and your family. Grace is for all.’
‘What is your question, Pastor Flügel?’
The wind dragged at the flames beneath the pot. Unsteady light shone across Anna Maria’s face.
‘Do you have in your possession a book of the occult?’
‘No.’ Anna Maria’s answer was swift and sure.
Pastor Flügel paused, blinking, then sat back. ‘What do you say to those who believe they saw one in your possession?’
Anna Maria picked up her spoon and stirred the rice, eyebrows raised in an expression of tired forbearance. ‘I would ask that they remember the six things the Lord doth hate, yea, seven are an abomination unto him.’
The pastor’s mouth twitched in uncertainty as Anna Maria continued, gaze level, spoon stirring. ‘“A proud look, a lying tongue, and hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that deviseth wicked imagination, feet that be swift in running to mischief, a false witness that speaketh lies, and”’ – she smiled at the pastor – ‘“he that soweth discord amongst brethren.”’
‘You know your scripture, Frau Eichenwald.’
Anna Maria placed a hand on Thea’s back. They looked the image of each other, mother and daughter, veiled by steam, both looking blue-eyed at the pastor, now rising, already replacing his hat on his head.
‘We love the Lord with all our heart, Pastor Flügel. We did not spend six months in the belly of a ship for any other reason.’
the tree
Learning small amounts of English from the bullockies from Adelaide was the only thing that seemed to distract the congregation from the anxiety that soon shivered over the port. After the joy and exhilaration of arrival, there was suddenly little else to do but talk of the terrible soil at Neu Klemzig, debt, and all the things that would need to be bought on credit. It was with visible horror that people learned the exorbitant price of provisions in the colony. Sixpence for ten potatoes. Cucumber seed more than a shilling. Traugott Geschke came back from an exploratory trip into Adelaide white-faced. A pair of bullocks cost more than forty pounds. So, when the captain summoned everyone together and told them he had secured temporary work for them at the port, the news was received with relief. Surely there was no harm in working while they waited? Surely Flügel could not begrudge them the money and occupation? The captain had arranged for unmarried daughters and sons to ferry water from the new spring on the Adelaide road, saving the bullockies the trouble of drawing water from the Torrens, and for married women to work as laundresses. Men would labour in the nearby district and town.
The next day I watched Christiana, Matthias and Hans rig up sledges from she-oak trees and set off inland on the dray track. They returned by midday, dragging heavy casks of water through the sand, promptly sold it all, and set off again so that Magdalena, Emile, Beate, Eleonore and my mother would have water for laundry. I would have followed them – I was interested to see something more of the place than the blasted port – had Thea not been told to remain by her mother. Anna Maria had volunteered to cook for the working families and had insisted Thea stay back to help her, but I could see, in the way she kept her eyes on the women laundering, that she did not trust Magdalena. Having Thea there was the only way to ensure their belongings might never be left unattended.
Strange waiting days, on the cusp of a new life and unable to seize it. A month of dirty handkerchiefs. Four shillings each time my mama scrubbed the English sweat from a shirt, until the skin of her knuckles split when she closed them over the money. Hans and Matthias came with their buckets of water and left again like the tide, endlessly, three times a day or more, until their feet grew as hard as boot soles, and my brother’s arms twitched in sleep with remembered weight. A month of splinters from driving posts, ship-soft muscles hardening with hauling and splitting and sawing and lifting. Hans’s cat shed the last of her kitten belly and coiled with lean muscle. A month of sun on Thea’s face until her cheeks patterned with freckles that I studied until I could have found them in the dark.
And then, a piece of paper held aloft by the captain, a broad smile on his face. Moved by the plight of his passengers, he had negotiated a contract on their behalf. Promises in exchange for debt and industry and interest. Captain Olsen had secured one hundred and fifty acres of land to be rented by those who had come out on the Kristi: those from Kay, as well as families from Tschicherzig, Klemzig and Züllichau. They would rent the land as a group; it would be divided into fair and equal portions for each family. The captain had also arranged credit and allowances for a church and school. The debt would be shouldered by them as a collective, a community responsible for each other. Those already settled at Neu Klemzig could choose to remain there or join the new congregation.
German tongues laboured over the names of English landowners, English prices, English measurements, against cries of: ‘God will reward you, Captain!’ Dutton. MacFarlane. Finnis. ‘You are the Lord’s messenger!’ Poultry. Cattle. Pigs. Surely Flügel would see that this was God’s providence? Seven pound sterling an acre. ‘Let us prosper under Him. Möge Gott Sie segnen!’
The sound of this country is one long sustained note that does not end. It is a humming that holds all the other music of this place in harmony. Every other sound is threaded upon it.
It was at the port that I began to curate new litanies. Between the bullock drivers that rumbled in from Adelaide, the sailors, the merchants, the English come in search of labourers, I found words given to the music I heard against the constant run of the wind amongst the rushes and sand dunes.
She-oak for the tree with long, scaled needles, whistling the wind in a way that made my skin lift.
Magpie lark for the two-shriek calling peep in changing hours.
Salt paperbark for the crooked trees groaning wooded, cupped fruit.
Mangrove, wattle, saltbush.
In the months that came afterwards I learned new words as the congregation did, as they crossed the dusty, ticking plains of Adelaide. I placed them next to one another upon the deeper vibration of this country.
Galah, cockatoo, lorikeet.
Kangaroo, wallaby, possum.
Emu, goanna, quoll.
Now, years later, sitting on the lip of this valley, I can make prayer beads of the trees that crown me, the small living things glimpsed if I am still and silent. Red gum, blue gum, quandong, stringybark. And the birds, ever here, ever singing, a liturgy to govern the hours towards gods of cry and shriek and call.
Kookaburra, magpie, shrike-thrush, wagtail.
Currawong, crow, boobook.
Scripture may no longer roll off my tongue in smooth certainty, but my mouth is still full of spirit. Holy Writ of living things, each one a prayer against the teeth.
The pilgrimage to the promised land took months. No family was able to carry all their possessions at once, and so were forced to trek back and forth, carrying what they could in a day’s journey, and then returning the next for another load. Sometimes it took two weeks to complete a distance that would otherwise have taken less than a day.
As the congregation slowly advanced forwards, following the dray tracks of the plains towards the lush blue-green distance of the Mount Lofty Ranges and its promise of cool, I sprawled on my father’s handcart, letting my head loll on its hard edge, and studied the sky. I could not fathom such impossible blue. The sky was higher, bigger, a cloudless wonder of vastness. Everything seemed small under its endlessness. Everything would die one day, but the sky would remain, and under such timelessness all time-tied things seemed sweeter for their impermanence. My throat tightened thinking about such things, and I slid myself off the handcart and walked from person to person, running my hands over their hot foreheads in wonder that they existed at all. You are all here, alive, all at once. What miracle, I told them. You will be gone one day. May the sky that has steepled over you hold you in its memory like a spark! I shouted this at Herr Pasche. Even dour-faced Christian seemed to me, in that moment, a marvel of life.
Nature had always been my whetstone, had always made me keener, and after the congregation reached the foothills, I felt myself sharpen to life. The landscape on the ascent to the ranges was unlike anything I had ever seen before. I had thought the pine forest back in Kay a place of divinity, but this country was infinitely more sovereign. Each morning, while it was yet dark, the birds filled the air with singing so that the sun, when it rose, brought light as symphony. The birds were everywhere: hosts of raucous angels, black-bodied, yellow-topped messengers of shrieking delight. Soot-streaked choral masters. Feather-fat kookaburras suddenly, alarmingly, proselytising to the dawn. Even the trees grew in such a way as to welcome the sun to the world. In Prussia canopies were dense and thick. Forest floors were deeply shadowed. Here was a place of lightness. Leaves dappled thin and shiny, fluttered pink, grey, green. I crushed them in my palm and smelled medicine. Healing. Hot, still days dropped branches, all bone-crack, and brought the sounds of bees. Sometimes I smelled honey warming the air. Animals were muscled fur and liquid eyes, or scaly thicknesses, tongues darting. All of it, trees and possums and kangaroos and bright beads of ants circling trunks, veered from stillness to flashing movement in an instant. There was energy here. Rough-softness. Sometimes it rained and, when it stopped, the air was perfume, a clean scent of wet leaf and damp sweetness. I wanted to drink that washed summer air. I imagined it tasted of reprieve.
My father, too, was invigorated by everything he saw. He ran his fingers along the ground and filled his nails with soil. ‘God’s gifts,’ he said, smiling at Matthias. Papa’s voice in prayer was the first to interrupt the dark. He scaled the ridges with kingdom-come strides, and remarked aloud upon the extravagance of sunlight, the yawning orange of rock faces, the views that suddenly appeared, paradisiacal, when the trees fell away to vistas that stretched to a shining belt of sea. He wore the hardship of the journey like a hair shirt: the wonder and the deprivation and the physical toll were bringing him closer to God. It was all sanctification.
No one else seemed to find such joy in the journey; the to-and-fro soon became tedious. While the Pasches, Radtkes and Volkmanns had, like my own family, bought small barrows from workers at the port, other families from Kay had no choice but to carry their possessions on their backs, and as the journey grew harder and heat settled into the days, the trail of Old Lutherans thinned. I decided to leave Papa’s barrow to walk beside the Eichenwalds, and I soon noticed that some of the women seemed to be avoiding Anna Maria.
They have heard rumours, I thought to myself, watching as Beate Fröhlich ignored Anna Maria’s request for help and let the Wend’s bottles of dried herbs – fallen from a rip in her canvas bag – roll down the track. Magdalena has troubled them against her.
Whether by design or accident, the Eichenwalds found themselves moving through the gullies and ranges largely alone. They often made camp early and spent the last few hours of daylight examining their surrounds. Friedrich felled trees to examine the wood and Anna Maria, her bag already filled with samphire from the port, picked plants to smell and taste them.
‘They dry my mouth out,’ Friedrich said one night, chewing some small red berries she had kept.
Anna Maria threw a spoon at him. ‘You don’t trust me?’
‘I like them,’ said Thea. She examined one in her fingers. ‘Like a cherry, only the stone is on the outside.’
‘Topsy-turvy, like everything here,’ Friedrich said, spitting the stone into the bush behind them.
I noticed that the Wend had suddenly stilled. ‘Friedrich?’
‘Hm?’
Anna Maria placed a hand on Thea’s knee and I noticed, then, what she had seen. Behind Friedrich, standing a little way off behind the trees, was a group of people regarding them in silence. Three women stood, cloaks draped over their shoulders, with two men and a few small children. Even in the gloaming their bodies shone, hair greased and reddish. I was struck by their upright bearing.
‘Eingeborene,’ Friedrich whispered. He had gone very still and serious. I watched his eyes flick to the small hand axe that sat in the dirt at his feet.
Thea noticed. She shook her head at him, eyes alarmed.
The group calmly looked across at the Eichenwalds before one of the women nodded at the unlit pile of twigs and fallen wood in the centre of the camp. She inclined her head and muttered something to the other women.
It was Anna Maria who moved first.
Eyes not leaving the group, she got up and walked to where she had heaped their belongings for the night. She gave the women a quick smile, hands shuffling in a canvas bag, and then removed a wrapped parcel of ship’s biscuit.
‘Brot,’ she said, approaching the group.
One of the women said something in a language I could not understand and glanced down at the biscuit in Anna Maria’s hand, then back to the pile of kindling. She did not take it.
‘Give them some real bread, Mama,’ Thea whispered. She reached for the crust of rice and wheaten bread she had been eating and offered it. The bread hung in the air for a long moment, before one of the other women stepped forwards and, with a few words to Thea, took it. In the twilight I saw that this woman was the same age as Anna Maria, perhaps a little older. With her free hand she reached up and gestured towards Thea’s hair. Thea removed her headscarf, and the woman peered at her pale braids, looking back at her companions and making some comment that made the other women smile.
‘You can go away now,’ Friedrich said. ‘Off you go.’ He had gone pale. ‘Weggehen.’ He motioned them away from the clearing. The smiles vanished and the men stared him down for a few moments before making their way back onto the path.
They do not look at their feet when they walk, I thought.
Thea and Anna Maria stared at Friedrich as he kicked apart the pile of kindling. ‘Best not to light a fire tonight.’
‘Why?’
‘Well, we don’t want them to come back, do we? What do you think will happen? Were you planning on giving them the rest of our food?’
‘Papa . . .’
‘I suppose I was the only one who saw the spears the men were holding?’
‘You have an axe.’ Thea pointed at it.
Friedrich opened his mouth as if to speak, then thought better of it. He shook his head.
‘It was only a matter of time,’ Anna Maria said, lips thinning as she stood over her husband. I watched her as she wrapped the ship’s biscuit and tucked it back into their bags. ‘We saw them on the plains. Did you expect they would make themselves scarce up here? This is their home, too.’
‘If it is their home, then why can’t they find their own food?’
Anna Maria looked askance at her husband. ‘Doubtless they do.’
‘But you thought it wise to show them they needn’t?’
‘Oh, Friedrich, it was a little bread!’
Thea leaned her forehead into the palms of her hands. She glowed like a ghost in the gloom. Night was falling.
‘A little bread, and then a lot of bread,’ Friedrich continued. ‘And then what else?’
Anna Maria glared at him. ‘This selfishness does not suit you.’
Friedrich looked as though she had slapped him. ‘You call me selfish?’
Thea closed her eyes.
‘Yes!’ exclaimed Anna Maria.
‘I would seek to protect my family.’
‘From what? Families such as ours?’
‘From starvation!’ shouted Friedrich. He stood up, flinging his arms wide to the murmur of bush behind him. ‘Do you see where we are? We are in the wilds! Look. Look! All we have is in that little pile. We have no livestock. We have no money.’ He counted on his fingers, spittle flying from his mouth. ‘No home. All we have is debt!’
‘Friedrich, the Lord –’
‘Do not dare to talk to me about faith. I am not Heinrich Nussbaum, drunk with God.’ Friedrich’s chin trembled. ‘Our daughter nearly died.’
There was silence.
‘I know,’ Anna Maria said, anger draining from her voice. ‘But the good Lord preserved her.’
‘The good Lord, or your witchcraft?’
Anna Maria’s hands rose to her mouth.
Friedrich shook his head. He glanced wearily to Thea, the anger fading from him. ‘You heard me,’ he muttered. ‘You and your goddamn book. You think I don’t see the way some of the others look at you? Anna Maria, we cannot afford to fall out of the fold. We need this settlement.’
‘That book is God-sent.’
‘You forced it on her,’ Friedrich said.
Anna Maria lowered her hands and stared at her husband, eyes cold. She turned to her daughter. ‘You know I did no such thing.’
Thea stood. ‘I’m going to sleep now.’
‘Did she ask for it? You were creeping about in the middle of the night. Pulling it from your bag, hiding it in your clothes.’
