Divine Terroir

The scene; a baptism. 'Jacinta knew that Treadway did not look at the Croydon Harbour Eagle the way she did. He saw other things in it, things that had to with his travels over the land, things that he and other men of the cove, and many of the women, recognised as their own spirit, made of the energy that came off the land. There was an energy in the English eagle and another energy altogether in the Labrador eagle. They were so different that everyone knew-Treadway knew and Jacinta knew in a different way-that the pine eagle did not belong in church at all. But it was there and so were the spruce-wood pews, and the plain windows, and the wooden nave, and the ordinary house carpet, and the glass jugs of flowers picked from patches of ground descended from the tender but incongruous gardens planted by Moravian missionaries along this coast in the early nineteen hundreds. There were pansies poppies and English daisies, flowers that the cliffs and seas and raging skies dwarfed but the hearts of the first German and Scottish women settlers had needed to not break upon Labrador stones. This whole religion Jacinta thought-and Treadway knew without thought-depended on people more than people depended on it. You didn't need it unless you died not have the land in your heart; the land was it's own God.

A paragraph from 'Annabel' by Kathleen Winter, published in 2011 and shortlisted for the Orange prize for Fiction in that year.