The Memory Tree

by Tess Evans

  When Hal was in a depressive state, he would refuse to get up and had to be helped into his clothes, his uncooperative arms and legs manipulated by two nurses. He wasn’t able to shave himself and sat passively as the razor scraped across his cheeks and chin. He picked at his food and moped around the exercise yard, speaking to no-one. It was believed that this state was triggered by guilt and grief, and grief certainly played a part. The guilt, however, was more complex. The voices were pouring poison in his ear, a sticky, green poison, glowing like something radioactive. You know you want to join your wife and granddaughter. They despise your cowardice. Do it! Do it!

  Hal’s daily struggle with the voices wore him down. He had to stay in this world until the last brick was laid. That was his firm belief. But if Paulina and little Grace despised him, why bother? There were other voices, however—Wait, bright, blue angel voices said. You are needed. Your task is to finish the house. Torn between the two, struggling for air, Hal floundered in a gelatinous swamp, witch cackles and the cries of children exploding in his ears. Then, his medication adjusted, he’d return from the depths until the voices started again.

  Do it! Do it!

  Wait!

  While unable to control his depression, Hal was strategic about his delusions, wearing his pants tucked into his socks and dressing and undressing on his bed. That frustrated the adders, who were inclined to sulk. Later, he was glad to see them leave of their own accord. Even a little victory was welcome. The food was more tricky and he discussed this with Godown who visited at least once a month.

  ‘If I ask for a taster, they’ll say I’m a troublemaker.’

  ‘You sure they’re poisoning your food?’

  ‘Never been surer of anything.’

  Godown thought for a moment. ‘What if I bribe the cook? If he’s such a bad man, he’ll take a bribe for sure. All bad men take bribes.’

  ‘Ha! Hoist on their own petard!’ Hal rubbed his hands together gleefully. ‘Offer to pay him monthly in arrears so he won’t renege. Godown, you’re a genius.’

  It seems that over time you can get used to anything and Hal eventually fell in with the rhythm of life in J-Ward. He had no choice, of course, but cooperation was part of his plan to eventually engineer a move to Aradale. There was a large oak tree there, the bandido told him, and Hal focused on that tree. Shade in summer and the delightful crunching of leaves underfoot in autumn. As spring came he saw green appear on the tree over the wall and thought of his oak tree providing a home for nesting birds. His medication was more carefully calibrated and his depressions became less frequent and less intense. He was able to chat amiably with the nurses, particularly Steve the bandido, who recommended that he be assessed for transfer to Aradale.

  His psychiatrist agreed. Hal was still firmly delusional but certainly less depressed and no longer a high-level suicide risk. They would start him out in a locked ward and assess him further over time. The bandido escorted him as they drove through the iron gates that hung in the handsome red brick walls.

  Hal was settled into the new ward and shook the bandido’s hand. ‘You’re a good man for a bandit,’ he said.

  Bandit? ‘Thank you,’ the nurse replied. ‘And good luck.’

  A few months later, when Hal was deemed fit to leave the locked ward, he headed straight for the oak tree. It was solid and tall; its generous branches spread wide like a blessing. Hal felt a little flicker of contentment. You could rely on a tree like that.

  Autumn had begun in earnest and the tree was shedding its leaves. Fascinated, Hal watched them spiral gracefully to the ground. He shuffled his feet. The sound, the feel of the crunching leaves—magic!

  Seeing Hal shuffling in the leaves, the driver of a passing delivery van turned to his companion. ‘Poor bastard,’ he said with rough compassion. ‘A few sausages short of a barbeque that one.’

  The driver couldn’t have been more wrong. Among the leaves, my grandfather was free of his demons. His joy in the simple activity was a moment of sanity. He kicked and shuffled all morning, only stopping when the bell rang for lunch.

  4

  KATE’S MOTHER HAD REFUSED TO have anything more to do with her daughter’s husband or in-laws. Blame, and there must be blame, was theirs and theirs alone. Grandma Betty shed many bitter tears for Kate as well as for me.

  ‘Leave him,’ she said, even while Zav was still flying out with the medevac team. ‘Leave him,’ she said, while Zav drank himself to oblivion with the padre. ‘Leave him,’ she said again, while Zav slept fitfully in the hollowed out body of the Hercules. When he came home, she quickly intuited his baffling remoteness and urged her daughter over and over. ‘There’s bad blood in that family. Leave him. You owe him nothing.’

  But my mother wanted, more than anything, to lay her grief on her young husband’s broad shoulders. To share the emotion that only parents can feel at the loss of a child. To find comfort in loving arms. It will be okay, she told herself and her mother with ever-diminishing conviction.

  Needing to talk, she ignored her mother and confided in Sealie. To speak to Zav’s sister seemed less like a betrayal. ‘Talk to him, Sealie. Please. I can’t get through to him anymore.’

  Though reluctant, Sealie bided her time and when Zav seemed in a more receptive mood, she suggested they go for a walk. ‘It’ll be dark soon. I’d rather have you come along,’ she said.

  Zav sighed and folded his newspaper. ‘Okay. I can’t be too long, though.’

  ‘Why,’ she said when they were out on the street. ‘Why can’t you be too long?’ She pressed him, knowing that he did very little all day. The army had extended his compassionate leave and he was soon to be discharged. Most days he just sat.

  Zav ignored her question so she pressed on clumsily. ‘Kate’s worried about you.’

  ‘Not much point in that.’

  ‘She loves you. And she needs you.’

  ‘She needs Grace and there’s nothing I can do about that.’

  Shocked, Sealie persisted. ‘Maybe you should go away for a while. Just the two of you. To the beach, maybe. A bit of fresh air . . .’

  ‘Fresh air? Christ almighty!’

  ‘Zav. What’s got into you?’

  ‘You have to ask?’

  They walked the rest of the way in silence.

  At night, my parents made love in the dark, each unwilling to see the other’s face. It was a desperate attempt to connect, but desperation and love inhabit different landscapes and they were stranded on the wrong side of that gulf.

  Kate felt more alone with Zav’s apparent indifference than she did waiting for his return from Vietnam. ‘I haven’t even seen you cry,’ she screamed at him at last. ‘What sort of man are you?’

  Zav looked at her sadly. ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I just don’t know anymore.’

  They were gentle with each other then, but separation was inevitable.

  Six months and seventeen days after the funeral, Kate packed a case and caught the train to Sydney to share a flat with her sister.

  ‘The removal man will come for the boxes and furniture on Tuesday,’ she told Zav. ‘You’ll need to be home between eight and ten. After that, I won’t need anything more from you.’

  ‘I’ll drive you to the station.’ Zav’s voice was flat.

  ‘Thank you. I need to leave by six thirty.’

  So polite, my parents.

  My mother is climbing onto the train, my father trailing behind with her case. He stows it in the rack and kisses her on the cheek.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Kate.’

  ‘Yes.’

  He leaves the station without waiting for the train to depart. My mother, childlike and vulnerable with her cropped hair, effaces herself in the corner furthest from the corridor. Her skin is translucent. You can see the shape of her skull. Her hands lie idle and her eyes are cavernous. She’s wearing a long green skirt with a loose T-shirt and jerkin, her natural elegance obvious, even though she dressed with little care that morning.
She stares from the window with unseeing eyes.

  The train pulls out. This is the last we will see of my mother. The rest of her life is a mystery to me. Sometimes I like to think of her happily married with another child to love. Mostly though, I selfishly hope she still mourns for me, her firstborn.

  It’s not fair. Why can’t I follow her life—the life of my blameless young mother? Why must I be bound to the family so deeply implicated in my tragedy? I can only hope there’s a good reason.

  Zav returned to an empty flat. Kate had left it clean and unusually tidy, but there was very little evidence of feminine occupation. Even the silk scatter cushions, those last vestiges of Kate’s homemaking, looked forlorn. He made himself a coffee and drank it standing. Wandering into the bedroom to get his book, he looked at the neatly made bed with the psychedelic bedspread, a wedding present from one of his university friends. It was unrelentingly horrible and, in dividing their possessions, both he and Kate had been more than keen to be generous with it. He lost, and there it was. The swirling patterns and acid colours made him nauseous.

  At least it gave some life to the room. Without Kate, it was so impersonal. The floor was usually littered with underwear, tights, scarves and other items of clothing, dropped in the spot where she took them off. All that remained on the dressing table was his hairbrush. The little pots and tubes of this and that, the bottles of perfume, the multitude of beads hanging from the mirror were all gone. He found his book on the bedside table along with a small brass frame displaying a photo of a baby with fairy wings. Kate had taken all the other photos with her. Zav picked it up and looked at the little figure, propped awkwardly against the cushions, its gaze wide-eyed and solemn. I’m sorry I didn’t know you, my father told me, unaware of how much his own expression mirrored mine.

  Zav lasted three days before packing his bag and taking a taxi to his childhood home. Sealie had deferred her nurse training and was still in her dressing-gown when her brother appeared at the door, wild-eyed and dishevelled.

  ‘I’ve come home,’ he said.

  ‘Where’s Kate?’ Sealie peered past him.

  ‘Gone. She won’t be back.’

  ‘Oh, Zav!’

  Zav shrugged off her attempted embrace. ‘Does Godown still live here?’

  ‘Of course. Why?’

  ‘Get rid of him. All that religious shit—it’s his fault.’

  ‘Where can he go? He has no other home.’

  ‘I don’t care. Just get rid of him. I’ll live here till he goes.’ And to Sealie’s dismay, he marched over to the cupboard under the stairs and threw in his bag, closing the door behind him.

  Godown still worked for Bob and when he came home, Sealie met him at the door. She put a finger to her lips and stepped out onto the porch. ‘Can you come for a walk? It’s Zav.’ Godown started to speak but she hurried him down the path. She had spent the day fretting over what she might say. Godown had been shattered by events but had staunchly supported her efforts with Hal.

  Sealie walked fast. The sight of the big man’s concerned face left her tongue-tied. She started to speak and coughed instead. What on earth had she planned to say? She felt a surge of anger. It was a large house. Zav was being unreasonable.

  Godown started for her. ‘You said something about Zav. We have to watch out for him. I’ve been to war too and with the other thing . . .’

  ‘Kate’s left him,’ Sealie said flatly. ‘He’s come home to live.’

  ‘Probably better,’ Godown mused. ‘That way we can take care of him.’

  Oh God! They turned the corner into the park, where a father and son kicked a football. To be normal like that. To come home and walk the dog, kick a footy . . . It was little enough to ask.

  ‘What’s on your mind?’

  Sealie looked as wretched as she felt. ‘Zav is being . . . difficult. He wants just him and me without—’

  ‘You want me to go? Is that what you’re saying?’

  Sealie stopped and stepped off the path. ‘It’s not what I want at all. Zav seems to blame you for, for . . .’ She began to cry and Godown pulled her to his chest.

  ‘Not your fault, little girl,’ he said, stroking her hair. ‘None of this is your fault. Now. Let’s walk a while longer. We don’t want that brother of yours to see you in this state.’

  They continued to walk in silence, Godown holding her hand as if she were still his little Miss Twinkle-toes.

  ‘I’ll need to leave most of my stuff until I find another place,’ he said. ‘But I’ll go tonight. I reckon Bob’ll put me up for a day or two.’

  ‘You don’t have to go right away.’

  ‘I do. If that’s what Zav wants, I do.’

  Zav emerged from the cupboard when he heard the door close behind Godown’s retreating figure. ‘What took him so long?’

  Sealie had had enough. ‘It took him thirty minutes. Surely he’s entitled to collect his things?’

  ‘In this house, he’s entitled to nothing.’

  ‘For God’s sake! It’s been his home for over ten years.’

  ‘I can’t live here if he does. It’s my call. Dad—’ He corrected himself. ‘Hal owes me that much.’

  ‘Okay,’ she said quietly. ‘Unpack your stuff and I’ll get you some sheets.’

  Zav’s room was as he had left it on that day the sun shone on his bride. If they hadn’t married so soon . . . If Kate hadn’t been pregnant . . . If he’d gone to Vietnam first . . . If. My father lay on the bed and stared at the ceiling. When Sealie came to call him to dinner he was sound asleep.

  That was 1970. The year Godown turned fifty. How many changes had he witnessed in those fifty years? In his short lifetime—the Great Depression, a world war, a cold war, Vietnam —then what? He had mourned the death of Martin Luther King and the Kennedy brothers. So much wasted hope.

  As he continued his inventory, Godown became increasingly depressed. But he had seen the miracle of penicillin, a vaccine for polio, and blacks and whites walking together in the great freedom marches. Most wonderfully, he’d seen, in flickering black and white, a man walking on the moon.

  His own life had taken strange turns, he thought, as he sat in the neat little flat he had just bought with the money he’d saved over the years. His parents had never owned more than their furniture, and here he was, a home owner. He felt a flicker of pride but even though the walls were nicely painted, the stove clean and modern and his bed soft and comfortable, he was reminded also of what Hal had taken him from. The surroundings were different, but today there was the same hollowness, the same sense of isolation, that he experienced in the shabby room behind the shop. Worse, he no longer had his vision to sustain him. The Divine Conflagration was completely extinguished.

  Where did he belong on this planet that Neil Armstrong had seen from space? He yearned for the old neighbourhood of his youth despite knowing that his parents were dead and his siblings long moved on. If he returned, would he find one person he knew, one building unchanged?

  He opened a small photograph album. His parents stared at him sternly from a formal portrait. The children were corralled into their best clothes; his older brothers Aaron and Jude, almost visibly squirming in collar and tie, and his little sister, Mamie, with black pigtails and dancing eyes, sitting on his father’s knee. Only he and Mamie left now. They wrote, but she never really forgave him for not coming home. ‘You broke Momma’s heart’, she had written all those years ago. The next few pages of the album displayed child photos of Sealie and Zav: Sealie posing and smiling in her ballet dress, Zav scowling uncomfortably with a football under his arm. Here was a picture of his congregation at Fellowship in the days when he believed he was doing God’s work. Brushing his eyes with the back of his hand, he sniffled a little before turning to the wedding photos. He and Mrs Mac had been so proud to be included in the family group. There they were. Smiling fit to kill. The last pages were photos of me. Godown had invested in a camera and had a good collection of baby photos. He’d
been going to offer most of them to Zav, but couldn’t see how that was possible now. The final photo looked like one of grandparents and grandchild. It was Godown, me and Mrs Mac, taken in the park.

  Godown looked again at the wedding group wondering about the fate that had tied him to these people. Fate. The word had never had a place in his lexicon. Fate, God’s will, free will, randomness and chaos—a universe that had been so ordered, so utterly explicable had become a strange and lonely place.

  He glanced at the clock and jumped up. Eileen and Alice were preparing a little birthday party for him. It was time he started to get ready. Before he stepped into the shower, he looked down at his fifty-year-old body, pinching the flab that had accumulated on his once muscular torso. He looked in the mirror. Greying hair, sagging jaw. The strong, handsome young man who had so entranced women, who had lived for the pleasure of their bodies—where had he gone? That part of his life was all too short. He had scourged his flesh by denying his needs and now he was left with nothing. In the normal scheme of things, he thought, he’d have a wife and children, maybe grandchildren, but he’d lived his life for God.

  No, he suddenly realised. I’ve lived my life for Hal.

  Godown Moses stood under the hot water pondering this revelation.

  Where would he have been if he hadn’t met Hal? Would he still have been working at The Perfumed Garden? Would he have returned to the United States, perhaps to marry and have those children? Maybe he’d have been a famous preacher, saving the unjust from the fires of Hell. He’d never know now. It was a combination of Hal’s generosity and transparent need that led him down the path he now trod. He had made his choice. And he had to admit not all his reasons were altruistic. When he chose to accept Hal’s impulsive offer, he was effectively homeless. Of course, he had also wanted to help Hal, but had no way of knowing how their lives would stay entwined. Over time, Hal had become a friend, and despite his best intentions, he, Godown, had failed in that friendship. He turned off the shower. No way to celebrate a birthday. There were others relying on him now.