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brother had told Griffin, just before the wedding, that he was part of the family now.
    A short time after they married, Marie heard her father was getting close to returning to the earth. As the eldest daughter, she would be the one to look after him while he died. Griffin would not deny her that. They moved to Hune Hill. Griffin’s car wasn’t the prized possession it had once been, with scratches and dents on the side. He had stopped playing cricket, and, not long after the conception of their first child, enlisted in the war.
    ~
    Over the next months, as she looked ready, Pearl became increasingly agitated. She lay in the bath, the only place she felt some relief.
    ‘I can’t do this anymore,’ she said to her sister.
    ‘We can handle it,’ Marie said.
    Marie took care of her sister, responding to any requests. Her darling Irma was her little helper, assisting her with the meals and the garden while Griffin worked long hours at the butcher shop.
    Pearl said sometimes she thought the baby would kill her. She had gotten so ill-proportionally big that she could no longer use the front or back door of the house. She got in and out for an occasional smoke, or for a wander into the bush, through the kitchen window. Marie had given up wondering why this was easier for her. She watched Pearl put her bottom down on the ledge, tilt her hips, and push her feet forward. Perhaps the doorways didn’t invite her path. Her body was moving to the ironbarks – called by a mysterious pre-natal rhythm. Marie made sure the windowsill was clear of clutter: kitchen utensils, matches and children’s teeth. She kept the window open.
    Every day Marie felt distressed that she lacked the knowledge to help her sister. She tried to remember how the old women had helped to deliver her own children. But all of her children had come early, quickly, and much of it was a blur. It was clear this baby of Pearl’s was late. When she felt the baby it had turned, ready for delivery. She thought it could be dead until it moved unexpectedly under her fingers. Without acting on the old people knowledge, or white medicine, she was helpless. They had tried everything. Marie had walked with Pearl for hours at a time each afternoon, tracing their tracks through the dry, dull earth, and maintained morning massages and cups of herbal tea.
    Leaving Pearl in the bath, Marie and Irma went for a visit to the cemetery. The girl was like her; the toxins in the house weren’t doing her good. She hinged on emotion. They walked through the scrub up the hill. They said this place was a lightning point because of the history here. She made out the small white sticks in the ground. The Kresinger circle. Here was where her unborn and stillborn babies also lay, with their ancestors’ bones.
    There was a bench under an ironbark tree. She sat Irma on her lap, pressed the warm back of her head against her breast. She could see the whole valley from here. She spoke low, the words that she knew rumbling through, the wind making a part. Irma was serious in concentration with her, in connection.
    She didn’t feel lighter as she usually did talking with the old people. There was no sudden clarity. She saw Irma’s fist around something.
    ‘What have you got, my baby?’
    Irma opened her hand to a small finger lime. ‘Can we go home now?’ she whispered.
    ‘Yes, we can,’ Marie said.
    On the way down from the hill she saw finger limes everywhere. She picked them up and carried them in her skirt. She had seven. Irma skipped ahead of her, the backs of her feet peppered black.
    Marie put down the handful of fruit on the kitchen bench. She thumbed her way through an old baking book. Pineapples and other fruit can induce labour, she had read once, and here she read it again. On the next page was a baked key lime tart recipe. Cooking was a calm in chaos – passed on by the women who had shaped her – Marie had learnt to solve problems with method. By the next morning she had