With time and medicine, Dad slowly recovered, but the mossy air only served to exacerbate Mum’s condition. By now she had become immune to the antibiotics the doctors fed her, and the flu now developed into full-blown pneumonia. She was feverish and pale and her cough reverberated up the valley thoughout the day and night. It was only now, confronted by the heightened pleas and tears of family and friends and the looming threat of mortality, that Mum and Dad finally decided that it was probably best if they were admitted to hospital.
But for Mum it was too late. The day that Phillip drove his grandparents down the driveway in the back of his Commodore was the last glimpse I would ever take of the one who brought me into the world, nursed me, surrendered to my whims; that fount of wisdom and knowledge; my Mother. Albert came to me on the night of her death after he and the rest of the family had returned from the hospital where they had sat at her side while she breathed her last. He talked to me, outpoured his soul to me like he had done all those years before.
Margie came to me the next morning as she wandered aimlessly through the dawn frost. It had been years since she had stood beside me and felt my warmth. Sometimes I would catch a glance from her when she visited Mum and Dad, and while I guess time moves people in different directions, I know that she never forgot me. Those glances never meant less than ‘I love you and miss you’.
But on this day she came to me and sat and leaned against my skin in the embrace of a fold of my buttress as the sun tickled the curled hairs of the trees that made the horizon. In the songbird silence of dawn she took out a notebook and a pen and started to write. She wrote a tender note of love, of loss, of regret and reassurance and just as she had done when she left the first time she buried it in a shallow grave beneath my root. And without a word uttered she stood and returned home as daylight advance and movement stirred at the house.
Two days after they buried our mother, our father died of a broken heart. And three days later they reopened the hole that contained the shell of my mother and lowered that of my father down on top. As he requested they buried him face down so that they may hold each other forever.
It was many years before I could speak with my parents through a series of Chinese whispers and catch up on all the time we lost from each other. Their spirits- so long trapped inside their coffins- had to be fed upwards and outwards through the food chain to take flight. Through the decaying of all the worms, insects, rodents and birds that had nourished their own lives on the flesh of my parents their spirits were freed and absorbed back into the earth to be remodelled into flora so that their spirits reside together in the form of an old oak tree growing at the edge of the cemetery.
In the wake of the clean up and once everyone had made note of what they had lost, farmers throughout the valleys and district started the long and difficult process of getting their lives back into some resemblance of normal. Fences had to be mended, sheds and stockyards rebuilt, and machinery and infrastructure replaced. Nearly everyone had to mortgage or remortgage their homes and lands to pay for it all. The first white heads of grass had emerged from the blackened soil within a few days of the fire, but for that first year extra feed had to be brought in from outside the Shire to help feed the stock that had been bought to replace those lost. Some of the animals that had been turned loose as the inferno hit were found roaming the backtracks through the forest, and it took a month or more for everyone to sort out which stock belonged to who.
But eventually people started to get back onto their feet. The wave of melancholia that had broken across the countryside had receded and been replaced by a resurgent tide of humour and vigour as people knuckled down and devoted their energies to getting things back to how they were. It was heartening and exciting to watch.
In the cleanup, Albert had salvaged my arm, laying it on the ground under the awning of the house. Sarah badgered him for days to ‘move that bloody tree from my verandah’, but my brother had loftier plans. He reassured her that he would move it in time, once the new shed was built it would be moved there to be his own special project.
Whenever he found himself with a spare half hour Albert would head on out to his shed and take to my arm with the chainsaw, the handsaw, the plane and the lathe. With his bare hands he formed me and smoothed me. Slowly but surely and with tenderness and care he shaped me into something proud and strong- a coffee table. Sure, it may not be perfect or the best, but it was made with such love and patience and care that such things can no longer have any bearing on it price. It sits now in Phillip and Beth’s living room, a thing beyond value, an heirloom.
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