Then the drain man arrived, his square red truck with the caged-in tray rolled to a stop outside our house. He surveyed the damage from the cabin, taking note of the empty room, the fallen tree, and with some relief my mother’s mood as she came across the road to him. There was intensity in their greeting. That was it, my brothers and I thought, this is going to be our future. Our mother will be skipping out with the drain man. It wasn’t better, it wasn’t worse, we had no control over anything, that was all I remember thinking.
It took us the entire day to clear away the tree. Gradually as the hours wore on and more of the branches were taken away, the space opened up before us and we were all intrigued by the view. You could see the streets of trees stripped bare to the horizon, the jacarandas and the frangipani and a gum two blocks away full of lorikeets screaming. Still we felt self-conscious without our green cloak to shield us. It would take us a long time to get used to the open space left by the tree. The view was one thing, we could even see the sun set now, but the gap left by the tree, symbolic and otherwise, we felt in many ways. We were on show now, everyone was watching us to see what we would do next.
The devastation of our house seemed too much in the beginning. The idea that no matter what, even if your father died, you were always safe in your own house, that security was gone too. It represented more pain and another death.
There was emptiness in our lives now which we had managed to put off for a year. Even for Edward and James who had never really believed in Dad’s presence in the tree, because we had, we had kept him alive for them.
Gerard and I went with Mum and the drain man on one last trip to the dump. She felt scrawny, my mum, I remember thinking that, as I slid along the bench seat in the front of the drain man’s truck to sit beside her. I felt bigger than she, like she was so frail I wanted to pick her up like one of my old dolls and wrap her in a blanket. We drove through the streets of devastation.
Along the river the picture was different. The water had taken whole houses. The scenes were more bizarre, a caravan halfway up a tree and dead animals ebbing in the floodwaters. The roads were rivers and people were rowing along them as if they were in a Venetian canal.
Then we saw our bearded tree man, slicing his way through a jacaranda that had fallen across a street. We waved to him, but he was busy slicing a corridor through the trunk to create a passage wide enough for cars to get through. Now he didn’t appear so like the grim reaper with a chainsaw for a scythe. He was a Samaritan helping the victims of the storm. I wondered if he even remembered he had a date at our house. Maybe he would call round later and see that his job had been done.
‘When are we getting the next storm?’ Gerard asked excitedly, unaware of the anguish on people’s faces and the smell of death in the air.
We rattled down the hill into the dump. The man stationed in the corrugated-iron shed waved us in, then ushered us along the aisles of junk to where the rest of the tree lay dying in the wet heat. We jumped out and watched the drain man manoeuvre the truck back and lift the tray. The logs clattered down and joined the heap of tree.
The drain man jumped down from the truck and joined the dump man. They stood apart from us, the dump man scuffing his work boots in the orange earth watching my mother. Mum was standing by the tree having a cigarette, farewelling the giant that had been with us for all my life. It would no longer be our witness, no longer stand guard over us.
The significance of the moment was lost on Gerard and me. We were chasing each other over the pile of wood, our feet skating out from under us as the logs rolled and slid under our feet. Mum was so preoccupied she didn’t even bother to yell at us. She threw her cigarette into the dust and squashed the life out of it with the heel of her shoe.