That was how Clem saw himself: the centre of Thornfield’s story. Which was why, June reminded herself, he’d done what he’d done: left the farm with Agnes after he’d overheard June telling her she’d decided not to bequeath Thornfield to him. In essence, her own son had heard his mother tell the girl he loved that she deemed him undeserving.
June reached for her flask and took a long swig. And another. And another. Her head stopped pounding.
Looking at Agnes’s face carved by her son’s hand, June was loath to admit how much Alice was like her. The same big eyes and bright smile. The same light step. The same big heart. Giving Alice something of her mother was the least June could do. She lifted the brass hook from the latch and opened the lid. Memories flooded her senses before she could stop them. The honeyed scent of winters by the river. The bitterness of secrets.
June was eighteen years old when she stood beside her mother to scatter her father’s ashes around the wattle tree. Afterwards, when the town gathered in their house to share tales of the babies her father delivered and the lives he saved, June fled to the river. She hadn’t run the chalky path much, not since she was a child when she began to learn stories about the bad fortune doing so brought to the women in her family. June craved an order to things and it frightened her that love could be so wild and unfair; she hated the sight of the gum tree her mother and grandmother had carved their names into, bearing the blessing and curse love had dealt each of them. That day, however, her body parched by grief, June was drawn through the bush by the thought of the water.
When she reached the river, her face tear-streaked and her black stockings full of holes, she found a young man swimming naked in the tea-green water, staring up at the sky.
June quickly wiped her cheeks, and drew herself together. This is private property, she announced in her haughtiest tone.
His calm expression was disarming. As if he was expecting her. He had dark hair and pale eyes. Stubble covered his chin.
Get in, he said. His eyes rested on her black clothes. Nothing hurts in here.
She tried to ignore him. But watching him watch her, heat started to rise to her skin; the relief of feeling something other than death and grief was sweeter than the honey from her father’s beehives.
June started unbuttoning her dress; slowly at first, then in a frenzy until she’d shed her dark mourning clothes and thrown her pale body into the water. She sank to the bottom, blowing the air in her lungs up to the surface. Sand and grit rubbed between her toes. River water filled her ears and nose and eyes.
He was right. Nothing hurt in there.
When the pressure in her lungs pinched she sprang to the surface, hungry for breath. He stayed his distance, looking across the green water at her. Before she understood fully what she was doing, June swam straight to him.
Later that afternoon, with a small fire crackling in a sandy pit on the riverbank, they lay curled into each other. Her body stung from pain and pleasure. She’d fumbled around with boys in the bushes at high school but it was the first time she’d wholly shared herself with a man. She traced her fingertips over a mottled red scar on his chest. There was another at the same point on his back. June kissed each, on either side of his body, tasting the sweet river water on his skin.
Where do you live? she asked.
He disentangled himself from her limbs.
Everywhere, he replied, pulling his boots on. She watched him, realisation sinking through her like a stone. He meant to leave.
She gathered her clothes to her body. Will I see you again?
Every winter, he replied. When the wattle blooms.
June fell into love like it was the river: steady, constant and true. She told herself this was nothing like her grandmother Ruth’s ill-fated love affair with the River King, nor the safety of her mother and father’s union. The way June saw it, she was in control; she would not lose her heart to a man and have to engrave her name in a tree to bear witness to her pain. Her love wouldn’t be an unfinished story. He would be back. When the wattle bloomed. And the wattle always came into bloom.
The months following her father’s death were slow, dusty, and arduous. Wattle Hart wouldn’t get out of bed. The house smelled of rotting flowers. June turned to the farm, spending long days tending the flower fields and running deliveries to the surrounding towns. At night, after she’d cooked a meal that Wattle barely picked at, June tucked herself into the workshop, where she taught herself to press flowers into jewellers’ resin. She stayed there until her eyes started to blur. Sometimes she slept at her desk, waking with a crick in her neck and flower petals stuck to her cheek. She avoided her mother’s pain wherever and however she could; she couldn’t bear to witness the wreckage love left behind.
The following May, June kept a close watch; at the first sign of wattle blossom buds in bloom, she ran to the river. She held her breath as she ran. I’ll breathe when I see him. I’ll breathe when I see him.
She went back day after day. The end of winter drew near. Wattle blossoms began to drop. June’s clothes hung from her hips and collarbone. Purple half-moons appeared under her eyes. While her skin became feverish and her fingers were stained with dirt, the flower fields thrived. One afternoon at the end of August, when she walked through the clearing to the river bank, a small fire was burning, with a billy of tea boiling above it. He looked at her, the gaze of his pale eyes piercing her centre.
Where have you been? she asked.
He glanced away. I’m here now, he said. A new scar, blue and jagged, under his right eye.
June fell to him, gathering his arms around her, feeling his heartbeat through his flannel shirt pressed against her own.
She didn’t go back to the house for three days.
They camped by the river, eating tinned pea and ham stew with damper, making love by the fire and daisy chains in the sun. He didn’t tell her where he’d been. She didn’t tell him how much she needed him to stay.
A few months later, articles about a series of bank robberies far away in the city appeared in the papers. They alleged the thieves were veterans, returned from war. They warned rural towns to be on vigilant watch. These criminals will be armed, dangerous and looking for somewhere to hide.
Through the spring, summer and autumn, Thornfield yielded a blaze of blooms, the result of June’s relentless work. She was so absorbed, turning her torment into flowers, that she didn’t notice how frail her mother was until Wattle was a mere wisp of the woman she’d once been.
Pay attention now, Junie, Wattle used her last words to warn her daughter. These are Ruth’s gifts. These are the ways we’ve survived.
While June wasn’t paying any attention, disease had eaten what was left of her mother’s heart. For the funeral, June cut down all the flowering wattle at Thornfield.
Their third winter together by the river was nearly wordless. He didn’t ask her why she cried. She didn’t ask him where the scars on his knuckles came from. Just like him, she didn’t want to hear the answers.
By the time spring came, June knew she was pregnant. She gave birth alone on a windblown autumn day and named her son Clematis, a bright and ever-climbing star. When the wattle was next in bloom, June knew before she reached the clearing by the river with the swaddled baby in her arms that he would not be there. Nor would he ever come again.