The Tree (10 page)

When we saw him lying at the bottom of the tree in a heap, little Gerard, I was surprised how sick I felt. My mother screamed and ran to him and Uncle Jack grabbed the phone.

Seeing her child twisted in a damaged ball was the last straw for my mother. She wailed and howled even after she'd discovered that he was alive. He would mend but not my mother. Whatever had snapped inside her when she saw his body heaped at the bottom of the tree could never be fixed. And she was furious that she had been forced to witness that moment. Those slimmest seconds when she had believed him dead and the acid of that image had already burnt her guts and by later that afternoon her clothes were hanging from her body, the weight seemed to have dropped off her in a few hours.

She bellowed at the Neighbourhood Watch women to leave. She cursed them for not wanting to play under the tree. She blamed them for his fall, for losing the game, for allowing her to win the tree she didn't want.

Her prize was above us, all around us, and she shouted at it like a mad woman until the ambulance arrived for Gerard and Jack took her under the house to calm her down. She yelled at everyone randomly, but mostly the tree because she believed it had called to Gerard, beckoning him into its arms. His youngest, the delectable innocence, who could blame Dad for calling to Gerard and who could blame Gerard for seeking out his father.

I felt my stomach fizz when I saw his arm twisted back, bare white bone exposed, shattered and sharp like a broken teacup. I thought, who would I fight with? Who will I poke when I'm feeling angry? I feared I would never do battle with Gerard again.

The Neighbourhood Watch women moved up the drive in a wavering line that lapped towards the front gate as the ambulance arrived. I'd heard the siren coming, as I had months before when the fire engine came for me stuck in the tree, scooting down the main road, parting the traffic at the lights at the bottom of our hill. Then I saw the drain man's van flash by behind it. My mother saw it too. The longing and bewilderment came into her eyes and the old aunts posted themselves at intervals around her, like a force field that was meant to keep her in and him out. All of them chattering and asking questions like a line of sparrows on the telephone wire. Twittering on about fractures and breaks, arthritis in later life. I wished someone would take an air rifle to them. Then suddenly they went quiet, their prattling hushed. They were monitoring her mood, she had gone into shock, and they tightened in around her.

The drain man was still waiting for her to signal him, to give him permission to open the door of his van and step down the drive, but she didn't. He must have seen the helix of old women around her and assumed it was one of them that was injured. The gravel crunched under the tyres of his van and he drove off as the ambulance men trotted down the drive carrying the stretcher.

The coil of relatives wrapped around my mother was an unwieldy mass. It moved with her wherever she went. It hung with her over Gerard as the ambulance men placed him on a stretcher. It hobbled up the hill with her to the back of the ambulance which is where attempts were made to remove it, but there was no arguing with them, they were as one and they climbed in beside my mother and Gerard to protests from the ambulance men saying it was against the law, there was no room, they just couldn't do it. All cautions were ignored and the posse was locked in the back of the ambulance. It took hours at the other end to move that many old ladies in high heels up and down hospital corridors.

What happened to Gerard is that he broke his arm and his collarbone and he was unconscious, but he would be fine, he would mend, but not my mother, she was broken and possessed.

She came back from the hospital to find the drain man at the house. Jack had stayed with Aunt Cath in Casualty. Cath had fallen off her heels hobbling down a ramp and had been admitted for observation. With Jack absent the drain man must have sensed an opening, but his timing, which had been so sensitive and impeccable to date, was way off the mark. My mother took one look at him and bawled she never wanted to see him again. That was just her opener.

‘Or any man as long as I live,' she followed with.

He tried to defend himself. He'd seen the ambulance, he said, and he needed to know what was going on. It had worried him for the rest of the day not knowing.

I could see how difficult it was for her, she was touched by his concern, but she didn't want to allow herself to be.

‘Go,' she said. ‘And never come back. Ever! You make everything worse,' she said, though her eyes said something different. Her eyes said confusion.

He left, the drain man, looking so defeated. For the first time I could remember, I felt sorry for him.

Her real anger though she held back for the tree. It was the sight of Gerard with his arm in a sling, his collarbone and ribs strapped, her perfect child damaged that sent her back into a temper.

She watched him playing on the floor with a pile of toys and that triggered something.

There was a distant trembling of thunder and the clouds were gathering in the west. My mother's mood matched the brewing storm. The stirring, the rumbling. She had been holding something in that was near eruption. It was oozing around the corners of her sanity.

I heard her then in the kitchen, in the cupboard under the sink, then in her bedroom, flinging open the cupboard doors and tearing garbage bags from a roll. She began to throw all his belongings into them. Last time they had been packed away with tenderness. Now there was no order to the way she was doing it. Clothes, papers, books were all mixed together, nothing was going to be recycled or handed on, it was being treated as trash. She thumped around her bedroom and slammed the doors and drawers making no secret of the fact that everything was going.

When she had finished and the garbage bags were brimming, two deep along her bedroom wall, the wind began to pick up bringing with it the first sprays of rain. She moved through the house then, on the prowl, and glided down the back stairs. The weight in her movements increasing as she flung open the lid of Dad's tool box. I heard the scraping of metal on cement. She was dragging the heavy head of the axe across the cracked cement floor and out into the garden. Then she picked it up and swung it at the trunk of the tree.

Inside we put our pillows over our heads and tried not to listen to her while she bellowed at him at the top of her voice. She blamed him for what had happened to Gerard. The neighbours, everyone in the suburb, heard.

The drought broke that night and between the cracks of thunder and the plops of rain we could hear her screaming at him. She accused him of taking her child, or trying to, of calling to him and forcing him to climb the tree. Then the neighbourhood knew what the tree was about, if they hadn't before, they did now.

I couldn't bear it any longer. From my window I could see her taking wild swings at the tree with the axe. I was terrified of going near her in case she didn't know what she was doing. I started to shake. I was afraid she would kill me if I went too close.

I found Edward on the top step watching. We knew we had to get her inside. We called out to her.

‘Mum . . .' I tried first.

‘Go away!' She punched at my plea with an angry grunt.

We took a step back.

‘Come on in, Mum . . .' Edward tried next, sounding as normal as he could.

In the following silence we heard the axe drop. We could just make out her figure staggering into the strip of light my window cast on the back yard. Then we saw there was a shadow by her side. It was Vonnie hovering over her, a great guardian angel. She was steering Mum away from the tree, towards the house. She led her up the back stairs and past us into the kitchen. At the same time Uncle Jack pushed open the front door.

‘Just cut the stupid thing down!' Edward yelled. He'd taken enough of her madness, he was finally blowing. ‘I'm going to, if you don't.' He stormed out of the kitchen and made for the back door.

‘No!' my mother screamed after him.

Uncle Jack went straight to Edward directing him back to the kitchen.

‘It's been a long day, troops.' He held Edward by the shoulders and spoke softly to his dark hair. ‘I suggest we all hit the sack and reconvene for a debrief at 11.00 hours.'

No one had any better suggestions so we nodded and drifted our separate ways. Vonnie stayed on though. I could hear her talking to my mother in her small intense voice under the interrogating fluorescence of the kitchen light.

Jack went back up north that week. He swore he would come again soon, but it had been five years since we'd seen him before that, not counting Dad's funeral, so I figured it would be five years till we saw him again. As he carried his bag out to the waiting taxi we followed in a solemn file.

‘Look after your Mum,' he said over his shoulder to Edward, trailing just behind him. ‘Don't you give her any trouble, you two.' He turned to James and me.

‘And you, little fella.' He picked up Gerard and patted his tiny broken wing folded into his chest. ‘No more tree climbing.' Gerard slid down Uncle Jack's side and dropped back to the grass on the footpath.

Jack wrapped his giant paw around Mum's back.

‘See ya, Dawn,' he said.

Mum replied caustically, trying to hide how abandoned she felt by his departure.

‘Yeah.' She said it to the grass at her feet.

‘Remember we have a deal,' Jack reminded her.

Jack had found a phone number of a tree surgeon the previous evening, he had made the initial call and organized for the man to ring my mother and agree a date.

‘I've told him to come within the week,' said Jack.

‘This week?' Mum protested. Then she nodded. ‘Yeah, all right,' she added, trying to convince us all that she was ready now.

‘What will it take?' Jack yelled at her. ‘He's lucky to be alive.' I knew he meant Gerard.

Mum inspected the footpath as Jack told her off. He reduced her to age twelve.

‘All right,' she agreed, ‘I'll do it.'

‘Dawn!' He looked into her eyes.

‘I hear you.' She said it quietly, but there was meaning in the words.

‘I'll call the cops if I hear you haven't cut it down.' They were Uncle Jack's final words.

He said it in front of us, so we heard it too. I knew it was his crude way of letting us know that he didn't want us to feel like we were being deserted, which is exactly how we felt.

‘I can't do all of it, Dawn. If I cut it down, you'll punish me for ever,' he said.

That was true enough. My mother could be bitter and irrational and Jack wasn't interested in the role of scapegoat. He was big enough to occupy the role, but he wasn't going to, even when our lives depended on it.

‘You have to take the last step, at least, Dawn,' he said.

It was a long way down for Jack to stoop from the footpath to the cab. He threw his bag into the back and plunged down into the front seat next to the driver. Then he hauled the door closed. I thought he was looking at me as the taxi took off up the street, but I knew he had eyes like the Sacred Heart, they looked at everyone at the same time and followed you wherever you moved. We raced the taxi up the hill, but by the time we got to the hibiscus trees it was pulling away from us. I stopped because I knew there was no point chasing it. I would never get Uncle Jack back now.

We drifted back to the house all feeling lost. Mum was sinking her fury into the saucepan cupboard. She was crashing around like a Sherpa warding off the mountain spirits. An air of destitution sunk over the dinner table that night, apart from Mum dropping plates on the table and Gerard asking for Uncle Jack, we sat in silence.

All the responsibility was with my mother again and she exploded in the end.

‘He's got a family, all right. He's someone else's father.'

We knew he had a family that needed him, but we felt we needed him more.

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.