Pearl in a Cage by Joy Dettman

relied on to strike more or less regularly. Crops were lost beneath its floodwaters, stock drowned, families washed from their homes, but that forest drank her fill and gave birth to saplings.
    Gertrude was eyeing a healthy clump of the things growing beside her boundary gate as she dragged it shut, looped a circle of rusting wire around a leaning gatepost — and for the umpteenth time promised her gate a new gatepost — and the gatepost a new gate. She’d been making similar promises for a year or two now, but hadn’t got around to keeping them. She promised that clump of saplings an axe — and that was a promise she’d need to keep before the things started pushing over what was left of her fence. Everywhere she looked this morning she saw something that needed doing.
    Her father had wrestled these fifteen acres from the forest, fenced them, then spent the remainder of his life fighting an ongoing war against red gum saplings hell bent on reclaiming his land. Had he followed his father’s wishes and wed a neighbour’s daughter, he might have ended up with more. An independent man, Gertrude’s father, he’d learned to live without money — as had his daughter. In this old world, some are written down to do it easy but most are born to do it hard.
    Amber had chosen a harder row to hoe when she’d wed Norman Morrison. She’d had a few nice boys come calling, then ended up with the worst of the lot — which Gertrude blamed on the last flood. The Morrisons had offered Amber a bed for the duration, and after three weeks in that railway house then coming home to floors covered in mud and green slime . . .
    They’d been shovelling side by side for an hour or more, scraping up that stinking mud and pitching it out the door, Gertrude pleased to be home, pleased she’d had no floor coverings to lose, when Amber had let out a howl of the damned, pitched her shovel out the door, then followed it.
    â€˜To hell with it,’ she’d said. ‘I’m marrying him.’
    â€˜Who?’
    â€˜Who do you think!’
    â€˜Wally Dobson?’
    â€˜Norman!’
    â€˜Norman Morrison! You don’t suddenly decide to marry someone like Norman Morrison just because you’re sick of shovelling mud. Now pick that shovel up and get me some water. We’ll sweep the rest of it out.’
    â€˜I deserve something better than this.’
    â€˜Then you don’t marry a man like Norman Morrison, you fool of a girl. You don’t love him.’
    â€˜Who are you to give advice on love? You left my father before I even knew him.’
    â€˜He went missing.’
    â€˜So you say.’
    â€˜I wasn’t much older than you are now, I had you in my belly, I was stuck in India and he was gone, and if I’d stayed there I would have starved. And he didn’t worry too much about you starving either, my girl. Now get me a couple of buckets of water and the old straw broom.’
    â€˜People don’t live like this.’
    â€˜No. There’s a lot who live worse.’
    â€˜And plenty who live better.’
    â€˜Yes, well, I can tell you now, you’d be a damn sight more comfortable riding a wet log downstream with a chookperched on one end and a goat on the other than in tying yourself up with those Morrisons. I didn’t raise you to be a fool, so don’t you go acting like a fool and ruining your life.’
    Should have kept her mouth shut. Amber had wed him anyway.
    Not that there was a lot wrong with Norman — or maybe there was nothing in the man to be wrong with him. He was lacking — lacking in self, or he’d had it drained out of him by his battleaxe of a mother. At times Gertrude made the effort to attempt some sort of communication with him, but it was like talking to a trained cockatoo — one trained by a parson. He could parrot plenty of big words, but when he’d finished what it was he had to