Uncle Jack rang late that night to check we were all right, then he peppered every evening for the rest of the week with his phone calls, making sure my mother was going to do what she promised. We listened to her side of the telephone conversations and imagined Uncle Jack calling from his house in the middle of a hot sugarcane field in far north Queensland.
Eventually my mother did make the call and a great hairy man came to our house with skid marks of green foliage staining his grey overalls and under his finger nails were brown slivers of bark. He seemed nice enough but we all kept our distance from him. We watched him from the back door walk a ring around his victim. And he eyed the tree up and down and said:
‘It’ll be a shame to lose it.’
We all nodded.
‘But I understand,’ he said. ‘It has to be.’
He would come on the weekend, Saturday morning, he said, if that suited. Yes, my mother replied and the deal was done. Thanks be to God. My brothers and I all sighed, and I wondered if my father had heard the transaction.
‘If she doesn’t go through with it, I’ll do it,’ Edward had said.
‘How?’ James and I asked with legitimate interest, not knowing he was maybe just trying to sound big.
Edward gave James a sharp punch in the arm and he pinched my leg hard. Even though James and I were both crying, it was a relief to be fighting again. Since Uncle Jack had left, the tension had been mounting between us. Gerard had found the three of us on the sofa the previous day, sitting close together. He didn’t trust it and he went and told on us and Mum yelled and sent us to our rooms. She’d assumed because we weren’t arguing that we were up to something. We hadn’t been. It wasn’t that we were being friendly or plotting some misadventure, we were just too lost and too numb to fight.
Mum took us all to church that Sunday. Twice in the same month, I heard Mrs Drummond comment, too deaf to know how loud her own voice was as Mum pushed us into a spare pew by the side altar. We were pleased though, my brothers and I. I felt they were thinking the same as me – she’s come to pray one last time for Dad’s lost soul, a final beseeching before she gets rid of him.
Now beside her I saw my mother’s prayer floating up to heaven. A tiny, bead-sized package, it made its way up, a filigree finer and more magic than a spider’s web, high up into the roof of the church. It continued its journey through the glass sky lights towards heaven and God’s ever patient earpiece. Inside the package was a pearl and on the pearl was inscribed her prayer.
It said, God, tell me I have made the right decision – if you’re there.
Even though the prayer disintegrated into a personal question of faith there was a feeling of movement in her request that excited me.
I gave James and Edward a sideways look, the five of us were hunkered together along the pew like the losing team at a hockey match, but something was going to change, that’s all we could hope for. Even if it was going to be for the worse, it would be for the better because it would be different from how it was now. Not static like a picture, like the world during the day that waited for the cool air from the sea to animate it, to lift its limbs and change its shape, anything now to create that wind that would move things and make it different.
She knew something was going to be taken if the tree didn’t go, we all knew that, and it didn’t feel to me like Dad was being cruel or terrible or acting like the cross father that he sometimes had been. The power of the tree and its encroachment on us felt more like the behaviour of a child that suddenly grows up and doesn’t know his own strength. Like a boy in the playground three heads taller than the rest of his classmates. It wasn’t vindictive behaviour. Dad was just that frustrated boy with all that strength and nowhere to use it up. He wasn’t being mean because he never had been. I knew that because my mother would criticize my father for being too generous. She would treat him like a criminal when she thought he had been unnecessarily kind to someone. It had never made sense, but she was jealous of his ability to want to share what he had.
It was still easier for them, my three brothers, for me there was more at stake. They had never talked to Dad in the tree. I was going to lose any chance I ever had of talking to him again and I didn’t know what I would do exactly without at least the chance of it.
Then a door slammed and the congregation jumped as one and the panes of orange glass in the side door that had blown closed shuddered. A tiny breeze had sprung up and a crystal vase at the feet of Our Lady had toppled and the gladiolis fell like fiddle sticks at her feet.
Mrs Beatty in the seat in front ran to rescue the vase and flowers and her husband moved to fasten the door back. There was a breeze coming in from the Bay. It was late January, there was no air and the summer had been with us for months. The tropical fronts that could drop a dam load of water in an afternoon and ease the heat at the end of every day had still not arrived. So we were desperate to feel the air on our necks and to let it cool our heads at the roots of our hair. Sniff at it to see if it contained even a drop of water, but it didn’t.
My mother, I felt her think it, that the wind was the mighty force of God and she knew her prayers were answered. She had made the right decision.