The Cedar Tree

by Nicole Alexander

  Cook, cleaner, carer. Ann was right. The extent of Stella’s duties was more than she’d anticipated.

  ‘Is that all right?’ asked Ann.

  ‘I wasn’t expecting—’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ Ann drew up the sheet, fiddling with the top hem. ‘Country homes. There’s always so much to do.’

  Although Stella hadn’t considered her role beyond that of tending to Ann’s needs, she realised that it was impractical of her to have believed that her tasks would have been limited to that of carer, and yet it irked her that Joe’s family assumed that she’d be happy to do whatever was asked of her.

  ‘You can put your bird on the rear veranda if you like.’

  ‘Thank you, Ann, for having me here,’ Stella said cordially.

  ‘Keeping busy. That’s the thing, Stella, during difficult times. It’s always helped me. And I’m sorry – about what happened.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Now, you might empty my pot for me. The bathroom is just down the hall.’

  Stella walked around the bed and, uncovering the chair, carried the pot out of the room, the flies trailing her. Harry had been remarkably plain in his speech across the telephone line when he’d told Stella of Ann’s accident and offered her a bed in exchange for help in caring for his wife.

  Perhaps she’d been a little too quick to accept.

  Chapter 2

  The knock at the door startled Stella. She’d been lying on the bed, staring out the window at a dusky sky. A dim light hung low through the trees. The angle suggested it wasn’t a star, but something else. A vehicle perhaps, or torchlight. And that smell. The air was sweet. It was a scent at odds with what she was used to. Usually the night air carried with it the smells of the sheep yards, of urine and manure, a tangy sharpness that seeped into clothes and hair and wafted about her husband like unwanted cologne. At the sound of a man’s voice Stella rubbed her eyes and sat upright. The light disappeared.

  ‘Joe?’ she called. He’d always been late. Always driving around at night, checking on something. Nature has its own rhythm, he’d tell her, it doesn’t work nine to five. And neither did he. Joe had had no sense of time. To him, the demarcation between night and day was, if anything, an annoyance to be tolerated. Her husband was always prepared, ready for anything. If there was a weed, he’d take to the hoe until he’d chipped the life from it. If one of his beloved sheep contracted a disease, then there was a chemical to eradicate the liver fluke or tapeworm, or one of the many other issues that might affect his livestock. When the blowflies attacked them, he would painstakingly clip away the sopping wool to reach the flesh-feeding maggots. There was a dreadful necessity to his persistence at times – he couldn’t let go, even for a moment. He was addicted. Obsessed. Joe was a proud landowner and he wasn’t letting nature or anything else ruin his domination.

  The voices were clearer now. It was a man and a woman. She listened to their muffled conversation. She’d already hung her clothes in a large cedar wardrobe and slid underwear into a drawer that held a porcelain doll. The clothes on the toy were age-worn, the face, with its eyelids that flicked open and shut, crazed by heat. This wasn’t her home. It was another family’s life, not hers. And as of today, she was staff.

  From outside on the veranda came Watson’s familiar cry. ‘Hello,’ he called. ‘Coming back, coming back. When. When.’

  The knock sounded again and the door to the room opened. A man appeared. He flicked on the overhead light and Stella scowled at the sudden brightness.

  ‘Stella. Hello. Ann fell over. She couldn’t see where she was going in the dark. You’re here to help and she can’t be left alone. I told you that on the phone. She said she called out for you.’

  Her brother-in-law’s voice was deeper in person. It was seven years since their last meeting, at her wedding.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘It was a long drive.’

  Harry’s shoulders were squared as if expecting an argument, perhaps even seeking one. She knew the stance – it appeared to be genetic – but at least here was a man who spoke his mind, and immediately Stella respected him for this simplest of attributes.

  ‘If you don’t think you can help out like we discussed you better let me know,’ said Harry.

  ‘I’ve just arrived,’ she reminded him, squeezing back tears that had little to do with Harry’s presence. She was thinking of Joe, of what she’d once hoped for and what she now faced in his absence. ‘We’re doing each other a favour, Harry.’

  She was careful to emphasise his name. There had been two rules that her mother had enforced from an early age: one, don’t let yourself be yelled at and two, don’t be taken for granted. That last rule had not been so easy to achieve – at least, not where her husband was concerned.

  Harry stood in the doorway, much like a shag on the edge of a drying dam, trying to decide whether to take a step closer or not. He’d grown older. They all had. But the sixteen-year age gap between Harry and Joe seemed more pronounced now. She counted the years. Joe died at forty-two, which meant Harry was in his fifty-eighth year. He had the same freckled skin as her husband. The same full face and rounded jaw. The same thin-lipped tightness that suggested a temper, except that in Joe’s case he’d seldom let anything out. That was the problem. It was hard to build a life with a man who rarely spoke, except for the basics of sun and sheep and the price of wool.

  ‘Reckon you’d have an attitude, being Italian,’ said Harry.

  It was the second time that day that her ethnicity had been raised. Stella bit away the retort forming in her mind.

  ‘I’d appreciate a meal. I’m burning one of the fields tonight. If you leave it in the warming oven, I can eat it later when I come in.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Stella, but her reply was wasted. He’d already departed.

  When a door slammed somewhere in the house she walked across the hall to Ann’s room and apologised.

  ‘It’s okay. I get impatient and Harry doesn’t mean to be so abrupt.’ Ann tipped out a pill from a medicine bottle and swallowed it with a sip of water. ‘He feels guilty about the accident. I’d been asking him for the last three months to clean the gutters.’

  ‘I always cleaned ours,’ said Stella, trying to find solidarity with the woman, and failing miserably.

  Ann regarded her steadily before screwing the top back on the medicine bottle. ‘We both know this is an awkward situation. Harry and Joe never did understand each other.’

  ‘Why is that?’ asked Stella.

  ‘Myriad reasons,’ Ann said flatly.

  Stella waited for her sister-in-law to elaborate, however Ann was reading the label on the bottle.

  ‘Can I get you anything?’ Stella picked up the dried sandwiches sitting on the table.

  ‘Some scrambled eggs would be great. Can I ask about your own family? We thought you would have gone straight home to them until you got yourself sorted. I mean, it’s not like I don’t appreciate your coming to help us . . .’

  Stella wasn’t sure if she’d ever be able to satisfy Ann’s curiosity. Their lives were as distant in experience as the miles that had been between them. ‘Harry was worried about you. He said that you needed help,’ was all Stella said.

  Ann nodded at this, accepting the answer. But her face betrayed the slightest trace of disbelief, as Stella excused herself from the room.

  Chapter 3

  Stella had met Joe seven years earlier at Woodburn, a sleepy town further along the Richmond River that was only a short drive to the south-east of Harry’s cane farm. She’d travelled there from Sydney with her parents and younger cousins, Angelina and Carmela, to visit New Italy, the settlement her grandparents had arrived at in 1882, having survived the Marquis de Rays expedition. The mad Frenchman had promised a group of Italian colonists from Veneto some land at Port Breton in New Ireland in the South Pacific. Stella’s grandparents had paid the idiot 1800 francs in gold for a new beginning. In the end, the passage returned only starvation and deat
h for many, before eventual salvation for the luckier ones in New South Wales.

  The visit to New Italy was the idea of Stella’s mother, Dona, who wished to visit her father’s resting place, but the daytrip to Woodburn was unplanned. Joe had been carting sheep and was parked nearby when Stella and her cousins, ice creams in hand, decided to stretch their legs. She still wondered at their meeting. Had it been mere coincidence or fate?

  She and her cousins took one side street and then another until they reached the edge of town, where sheep were being unloaded into a small set of yards. Specifically, one large woolly sheep with twirling horns. A man was standing in the rear of a truck trying to push the animal from the crate off the back, down a makeshift ramp and into a timber pen. Stella and her cousins stood watching, tongues stuck to their ice creams. The man braced his legs and leant down so that his head nearly contacted the sheep’s rear end. He groaned under the effort and gave an almighty push. And another. And another.

  ‘Come on,’ he said loudly, his body nearly parallel to the ground.

  With no warning the sheep moved. Not slowly and deliberately but with the quickness of an animal intent on escape. It jumped from the vehicle and ran down the ramp into the pen. The man fell, disappearing from view.

  Stella, Angelina and Carmela glanced at each other and burst out laughing.

  ‘Go on, then.’ Carmela elbowed Stella. ‘He looks like your type, and you aren’t getting any younger.’

  ‘Who said I had a type?’ Stella replied.

  ‘What are you waiting for?’ said Angelina. ‘You’ve been complaining for the last three years—’

  ‘—ever since war broke out,’ continued Carmela, ‘that you’ll die an old maid if something isn’t done about Hitler very soon. And now you’re presented with a living, breathing, un-uniformed species of the male variety and you stand there like—’

  A hand appeared on the crate and the man pulled himself up. He swore at the ram and began brushing his clothes.

  ‘All right.’ Stella licked the ice cream that had dripped onto her hand.

  At the spinsterly age of thirty, marriage was becoming an issue for more than just her parents. But it wasn’t that she was fussy, simply that she had a certain kind of husband in mind. One who didn’t come attached to a grocery store, milk bar or used car dealership.

  ‘We’ve got ten minutes before we have to meet your parents, Stella,’ Angelina reminded her.

  ‘Clock’s ticking,’ said Carmela.

  The man jumped from the rear of the truck. Noticing the three girls watching, he gave them a nod.

  ‘Are you all right?’ called Stella, walking towards the truck, her cousins following. Gooey clumps of manure stuck to the soles of her shoes as she moved to within a couple of feet of the yards. The sheep bashed against the railings of the enclosure.

  ‘Don’t get too close, he can get a bit obstreperous if you do.’

  Stella took a step back from the sheep pen and the man came to her side. He was moon-faced, copper-haired and tall. Taller than anyone in her family, who were prone to being on the plusher side and barely able to make five foot five inches according to the aged scribblings on the kitchen doorway of her childhood home.

  ‘Obstreperous,’ she repeated. Angelina and Carmela giggled.

  ‘It means—’ said the man.

  ‘I know what it means,’ said Stella.

  ‘He doesn’t like being trucked,’ the man continued. ‘He should be back home in the paddock.’

  ‘Then why isn’t he?’ asked Stella.

  ‘Because I can’t use another ram. By rights he should be winning prizes at the regional shows but the war’s stopped all that. I have to sell him. Don’t you think he’s a fine animal? Look at his conformation; the body. His strong head, the horn placement.’ He deftly hurdled the railing.

  ‘Well, go on,’ whispered Carmela. ‘Look interested.’

  Stella threw the ice cream over her shoulder, and moved closer to the pen.

  The man walked up to the ram and carefully spread the fleece on the side of the animal’s body until bright white wool showed. ‘Twenty micron. Soft and white.’

  ‘How amazing,’ said Carmela, stringing the word out so that by the time she’d finished, it meant the opposite. She hooked an arm through her sister’s and dragged her away.

  ‘Sorry, they’re not really sheep girls,’ Stella apologised.

  ‘No worries.’ He rubbed the animal’s back, closing the wool he’d displayed.

  ‘You like sheep,’ Stella commented.

  ‘I like anything of beauty.’ He jumped the railing and held out his hand. ‘Joe O’Riain. You’re not from around here, are you? Otherwise I’d offer to buy you a drink.’

  ‘Stella Moretti, and I’m with my family.’ She gestured to where her cousins were now waiting at the end of the street. She was pleased by his interest, however also a little wary of his forthright nature. ‘We’re visiting New Italy.’

  ‘Have you got family there?’

  ‘Used to,’ Stella told him.

  ‘Where are you from?’ he asked.

  ‘Sydney.’

  ‘I go there a bit.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Sure.’ He smiled.

  Stella allowed herself to enjoy the harmless flirtation. It wasn’t hard. Joe’s pleasant nature showed itself in the laconic way he leant on the railing.

  ‘Are you going to enlist?’ She already knew of young men who’d done so voluntarily, although there was talk that by the middle of the year conscription would be introduced. She reminded herself that there was every likelihood this man would soon be lacing up soldier’s boots and joining the Citizen Military Forces.

  ‘Not if I can help it. Someone’s gotta keep the country running,’ said Joe.

  ‘I suppose. How many sheep do you have? Thousands, I imagine.’

  He pursed his lips. ‘Twenty,’ he admitted, a self-conscious blush rising on his neck. ‘Twenty head. I’m off a cane farm a bit further north.’

  ‘So, this is like a hobby?’

  ‘At the moment. But not forever,’ he added.

  Stella knew nothing about cane or farming and even less about sheep. If there’d been more time, she might have liked to learn, if only because the teacher was very easy on the eye.

  ‘Stella, we have to go!’ yelled Carmela.

  She looked over at her cousins. ‘I have to go.’

  ‘Can I call you when I’m next in Sydney?’

  ‘I suppose.’

  He opened the door of the truck and rummaged on the dashboard. ‘I’ve got a pencil somewhere here.’

  ‘Stella, come on!’ Carmela yelled again.

  ‘I’m coming!’

  ‘Here it is,’ Joe said, handing her a notebook and pencil. ‘Can I have your telephone number, please?’ he asked.

  She wrote down her name and number, and then added her address.

  ‘I’ll see you later, then,’ he replied.

  ‘Sure.’ She smiled goodbye, then turned and walked off to meet her cousins, not even bothering to take a final glance over her shoulder at the man she’d so freely given her contact details to.

  Stella never expected to hear from him again. Certainly she never dreamt that Joe O’Riain would be knocking at her door only three weeks later.

  Chapter 4

  It was evening by the time Stella carried the washing outdoors, ducking from the mass of insects flocking around the light above the screen door. She switched the station wagon’s headlights on and, with the line illuminated, hung Ann’s clothes out to dry. Back inside the house, she poured a glass of the wine she’d brought in from the station wagon, cut a wedge from some cheese she’d found in the fridge and walked back into the cool of the night. Turning the headlights off, she sat on the bonnet of the car. The patient was asleep and Harry’s dinner in the warming oven, as requested. Only a few hours had passed since her arrival and it already felt like a month. On the horizon, a flare of red and yellow rippled acr
oss the night sky. The scent of the blaze was strong. It hung in the air, replacing the familiar dryness of her old home with the tang of smouldering paper.

  She watched the fire until the redness diminished in size and was finally extinguished. It was as if the black of the atmosphere had suffocated the flames, smothering the unruly beast until all air was gone from its body. It was many years since she’d been surrounded by so much colour and it stung her to think of what she’d endured, of the things an individual could become accustomed to, and of what a person could be driven to do. Stella drank the wine and then angrily threw the glass to the ground, where it smashed into pieces.

  Some time later, vehicle headlights appeared on the road leading to the house. They bounced around, following the uneven surface as the car approached. Stella slid from the bonnet and gathered up the shards of glass as the truck swung sideways, spotlighting first the clothesline and then her before stopping. Harry stepped into the halo of the porch light.

  ‘How did it go?’ asked Stella tentatively.

  He paused, as if not expecting her to speak, let alone comment on the day’s work. ‘Good. It was a good burn. At one stage I thought it might have got away from me. There were a couple of floaters that caught fire to the western edge, but the wind dropped and I had the water cart nearby so I got a handle on it pretty quick.’

  She followed him indoors, placing the glass in the rubbish bin, and waited as he washed his hands at the kitchen sink. ‘Do you have a drink before dinner, Harry?’

  He dried his hands on a towel. ‘A beer.’

  Stella fetched a longneck bottle from the fridge and a glass from the cupboard and set them on the table where Harry was now sitting. His clothes were flecked with ash and he smelt strongly of smoke.

  ‘You don’t need to wait on me,’ he told her, taking the top off the bottle and pouring the beer.