Coffee with Augustine

The road got steadily worse as Andrew approached the end of the ridge. Asphalt gave way to graded gravel which progressively narrowed, deteriorating into patches of smooth dirt between collections of potholes and suspension-shaking corrugations. Just before the track ended at the concrete-bedded steel feet of a towering electricity stanchion, he turned, drove through the orchard gate and passed the two beds—about half a hectare each—of young peach trees he’d pruned last month. An early-fruiting variety, the buds were already swelling pink in anticipation of the spring. He drove slowly over the orchard’s rough dirt track, trying to avoid the jutting rocks and the soft wet holes that made the ancient tractor grunt in summer as it pulled the trailer loads of red-skinned, white-fleshed fruit. On the seat beside him, in his haversack, Augustine’s Confessions was bookended between his thermos and his cheese sandwiches.

He parked beside a block of mature peach trees at the back of the orchard where his boss’s land bordered the national park. He got out of the car and rubbed his hands together. The morning was clear and bright, but cold. Patches of frost lay white on the lower limbs of the trees and on the dead grass—sprayed with weedicide a month ago—beneath the trees. He took his loosely-fitting quilted jacket from the car and put it on, along with a woollen beanie that he pulled low over his ears and forehead. In the car window he saw his wind-burned face framed by the immature beard he’d been growing for a month but which, although he was twenty-three, would not thicken.

Andrew walked through the orchard to the tree he’d left unfinished last evening. The pruned limbs were neatly patterned with the short twigs showing their creamy-white freshly-cut ends, while the unpruned limbs retained the confusion of growth: strong canes dominated and if left uncut would shade, in summer, the smaller, more productive shoots. A few yellow leaves, shot through with brown holes, hung like pennants at the top of the tall canes, waiting for the next strong wind to send them scurrying across the cold ground.

Each year had added another metre or more to the height of the trees and now most of the pruning had to be done from a ladder. Andrew climbed the metal rungs, trying not to touch the cold, damp tubular steel with his hands. He took the secateurs from his pocket and cut the top branches back hard so they wouldn’t get any taller. Then he cut the slim twigs on each limb back to about the length of a finger, the cuttings pattering softly on the frosted grass.

When he finished the tree, he stayed perched on the ladder, looking back over the trees he’d pruned yesterday. In a few weeks, flowers would burst from the shoots he was pruning now. Then fruit, larger and more numerous because of the work he’d done in the winter, would cause the limbs to hang down with their weight. Pruning was strange: it shouldn’t be possible to work predictably with nature if chance was in charge of everything. But the silent trees, evenly spaced in rows, didn’t question either their essence or their existence.

Andrew finished eight more trees—each took about twenty minutes—before stopping for morning tea. He got his haversack from his car, and headed for a rounded boulder that had been nicely shaped by the rain and wind into a suitable place to sit. The boulder sat at a point of the ridge that overlooked the national park. A valley of bush twisted among sharp ridges and on each ridge—more or less evenly spaced—electricity stanchions held aloft their wires which drooped over the ravines between each ridge. The harsh drone of a distant jet attracted his attention. The jet was a mere silver speck at the front of an advancing white spear of condensation.

From his haversack Andrew took out his thermos and poured its coffee into a plastic cup. He placed the cup on the shoulder of the boulder and opened Augustine’s Confessions. He was halfway through the book. He found his place, read a paragraph to remind himself of the context, then placed the book on his lap while he sipped his coffee and looked out over the valley. Mist rose in patches and swirled slowly into invisibility. The carolling of currawongs turned the valley into a huge, airy cathedral. Spider webs hung everywhere on the small coarse shrubs that covered the uncultivated ground between the orchard and the bush. Dew clung to the sagging, concentric webs, making the area look like a showcase of God’s transient but still valuable jewellery.

He put his coffee down and continued with Augustine’s account of his life in Milan. A slight breeze teased the wisps of hair that his beanie didn’t cover. The leaves of the nearby young gums rattled. Andrew could hear a gusting wind and the distant groans of large trees. He stood and gazed across the valley to the opposite ridge. There the trees were being thrashed by a storm of wind. Where he stood the trees were still or shivered only slightly. He watched the trees farther along the ridge twitch in prescience, then bend and swoon as their leaves were gathered and thrown as far as the limbs would allow. He heard the crack and fall of old branches as the wind swept along the ridge towards him. Now the trees that had been stirred first were swaying more sedately, but the scrub around him had grown agitated. He watched the progress of the wind towards him and felt an exhilarating moment of fear as the first gust hit him hard and cold across the face and chest. Now it seemed as if the bushes beside him were running past and throwing clumps of leaves high over his head to land among the peach trees. His ears were full of the sound of the wind moving irresistibly across the falling, fluid, tumbling landscape. He was pushed back and his big jacket ballooned around him and he felt as if just the slightest strengthening of the wind would lift him above the neat rows of trees and the brown grass but already the wind was past him, making the stanchions’ slender wires sway and hum.

Turning to put his haversack back in his car, Andrew wondered if Augustine had felt the same breeze tousle his hair and stir the leaves above him as he sat in the garden of his friend’s house in Milan. Credo ut intelligam. Andrew had difficulty only with the Latin.