The High Places (12 page)

For a while after that the war passed over us. The year between the letter from Hélène and the arrival of the Americans moved quickly. Things always moved quickly in our house. Spiders ran up the walls and weevils hurried through the flour and settled into their crunchy camouflage before you could be sure you'd seen them. The final baby was born, white as a turnip. The Americans came, and the Japanese, crammed into the hills around our town, a small piece of the war delivered directly to us, and to Frank.

Before he married our mother, Frank was one of Edith's favourite subjects, because a city policeman moved to a country town like Merrigool was news. She didn't know he wasn't really city, but from the part of the city that's scratchy and open, half town and half bush, on the flat baking plain under the mountains where no one really from the city would ever think to go. Frank was large and ugly. There was something so definite about him. He had country arms, though he wasn't country, and hair the clingy colour of cicada shells. He had the use of a car that wasn't his, though we never found out to whom it actually belonged.

‘This car isn't mine,' he'd say, stern and formal, whenever we climbed into it, ‘so watch yourselves.'

For a year after his arrival in Merrigool he fought bushfires, came limping and roaring off the football field, calmed the drunken flurries of old men in the streets, and swam the flooding river to rescue a dog that bit his big arm. Then he met our mother. She had the best legs in – and out of – town and carried with her the self-sufficient weather of a widow. Their courtship was private: late nights, swimming, driving in the car that wasn't his, walking through long grass. Edith, who had always flapped to us with athletic stories of misdeeds and miracles, who always followed the scent of misfortune, of divorced women and almost-orphaned children, found one day the grassy, stubbly smell of Frank, massive on her chair in our kitchen, with his arms laid across the table. That afternoon, she addressed all her talk to Nora and me. Every time she visited us after that, she peered hesitantly into the kitchen before entering, unsure of what she might find. When Frank married our mother, she stopped coming. She didn't visit their unbaptised babies – one, two, three, eventually four – and rarely acknowledged Nora and me in the scripture classes she taught at our school. Edith continued to sidle reverently on the pond shore, singing with the Baptists, and I watched her from the house and surprised myself by missing her in our kitchen.

Of course Frank wasn't ugly, I now realise. But he had a mammoth face that loomed over us, and when he brought it to our level – shaded with new hair, blue at the roots – it looked as if parts of it had caved in. Nora tells me now that he was very attractive to women. ‘Jeanie,' she says, when I talk about him, when I tell our husbands how ugly he was, sculpting his lion's face with my hands, ‘Jeanie, you know, he was very attractive to women.'

One day he came home from work at dusk in that car he had the use of and found Nora cycling back and forth on the road by our drive, toward town and away from town, while I sat on the gatepost kicking my dirty feet. He stopped the car and unfolded himself from it. He watched Nora pedal away from him and began to jog after her, a jog that was long and slow and nevertheless covered the ground between them with unexpected speed. When Nora found him keeping pace with her, his knees lifting, his arms moving the air, she thought it was a game and threw her head back to laugh. But he reached out suddenly, took her under the arms, and lifted her from the bicycle, which wheeled along riderless, skidding and shaking. I watched Frank put Nora down and speak to her as he went for the bike. They walked back toward me, Nora nursing her arm. Often we rode the bike double, her feet moving in a swift blur, mine suspended over the dust-coloured road. Now we sat in that car with Frank, cruising slowly down the drive to the house, and Nora wouldn't turn from the front seat to look at me. He spoke to us quietly, his left hand lightly on the wheel, about the things girls could and could not do. He explained to us that when he came home from work he expected to see us waiting for him, clean and ready for dinner.

That was not long after they married. The bike came out later for his eldest boy, clattered over the veranda, and was pronounced too rusty to ride.

*   *   *

Our father had sold the farm but the pond was still ours, half hidden among trees in the low folds of the beginnings of the hills. A waterhole, really, shaded by dry bush, sticky with duck mess, floating in the spring with the froth of the frogs that sang through the summer. The water was soft and brown and took the heat away, momentarily, until we resurfaced and it cupped over us again like a wet hand. The younger children, Frank's, were tied to the big dead gum tree to stop them from rolling down the yard in the way they tended to, irresistibly drawn to the pond, into which they blundered and bobbed like pumpkins. Tied up, they circled the tree, getting tangled and tired in the shade, while Nora and I waded, bug-bitten, waterlogged, and out of sight of our mother. We stepped with long feet over the sunny banks, warm with worms and mud. We lay on the grass and the earth felt dry and clean between our fingers, and the sun was big and good, the flies busy on our foreheads and above our lips, the places where the sweat gathered. We knew we would burn to a purply-brown, and when we did we would lie awake heating the air in our bedroom for hours and make midnight trips to the bathroom to dip towels in cold water. We'd lie under our towels in a humid cloud. And in the subsequent days we'd itch and itch until the skin came off in raspy, silky skeins.

That's how we all became so brown. Brown all year, brown feet, brown ears, brown in the parts of our hair. And stiff white hair, all of us, that later in our teens turned yellow and then unexpectedly dark. But when our hair was white, our mother cut it on the veranda every few weeks in the late afternoon. It grew quickly. Nora's especially, which left uncut shimmered down her back in a wet white coil that distracted farmhands and diverted the loyalties of dogs. The haircutting took place on the veranda so we could watch for signs of Frank returning. The land in front of the house was flat as far as the road, and in the dark of winter the lights of the car carried a long way across it. In winter, we knew for five minutes beforehand that Frank was about to arrive and could make ourselves quiet and good.

Summer was different. The sun stayed until eight, the light until nine. The birds stayed too, scratching in the grasses, screaming in the trees. By the time we heard the sound of him we only had a minute to prepare. We all liked to be busy, or hiding. Or we sat in a row on the veranda, knees pressed together, a towel on every knee shining with a lapful of stiff white hair, our mother poised above us with her scissors.

Frank always took time leaving the car. It wasn't large, but he was. The engine would stop its noise and he would sit in the car for a minute or more, collecting himself, I suppose. Nora and I – and probably our mother – had given up our attempts to predict what kind of mood he was in by watching his dark figure behind the windscreen. We all waited cautiously for his arrival in our evening lives, except for the baby, fat as a cabbage, who cooed from a cot and knew no fear. Sometimes the younger children would run down the steps to meet him as he rose from the car. They shuffled around him, offering their services for the carrying of hats and documents, and some days he accepted their offers, other days he swatted them away. On the best days, he swung one of them high into the air and onto his shoulders. The best days were usually ones on which he'd had some run-in with the Americans and come home ready to complain about them. Then he seemed to leap from the car, and the children laughed and flew, and when he stepped up onto the veranda even Nora looked happy to see him.

*   *   *

At first we only saw the Americans in town. They played darts in the pub. They crossed the street in their meticulous uniforms to talk to pretty girls. They held dances in their hangars, and if the wind blew in the right direction the music reached our bedroom on Friday nights. They played their brass instruments in the main street of town. An American flag appeared at our school, next to the Australian one, and always caught the wind first, the real wind that came from the distant sea.

I performed better at school after the handsome Americans came to teach us about their handsome country. We learned of river chasms miles across, and thick trees, and coyote dogs that prowled the uproarious night. Our own rocks and reefs and strange marsupials paled beside these natural wonders. Our men in the Papuan jungle and North African sand had left us in capable hands, and Merrigool felt a kind of blessing in this stylish American presence, a safety it loved and claimed to have prayed for, as though the Japanese soldiers were at that moment advancing across the wheat plains with maps of our muddy river.

But Frank didn't like the Americans. He said so in the evenings. They were bored, I suppose, and glossy and hilarious. Frank was never those things. They also didn't think much of the local police.

‘They think,' said Frank, ‘they're a law unto themselves.'

Their behaviour on the weekend streets of lean Merrigool did leave a little to be desired. Even Edith's faith must have wavered the Saturday night some descended on the town dressed as girls and painted black. I wish I'd seen them walking past the lit windows, revolving their droll hips. At first there were only these pranks, and flirtations, and lectures at the school. At first there was no bad luck. Then they began jumping from the sky.

They fell on our farm when the wind blew east. From a distance it looked soft – the billowing descent, the padded green, all the silk folding onto the warm yellow grass, like our mother pouring thick cake batter into a tin. Sometimes we were closer, watching the fields from the bush, and saw the Americans' light-limbed run across the paddocks, the wind catching in their parachutes while the cows looked on, sleepy. We watched the morning jumps from our cloudy kitchen windows until our eyes tired from the light and we dragged through our chores. Our mother was never interested. Men fell in the yard and tangled in our washing. They scared her hens. One skimmed our roof and floated away down the gusty drive, his slim legs dancing. Our mother never cared one way or the other.

‘Tell me when it's raining,' she said. ‘Tell me when the Baptists are at the door to pay for the pond. Tell me when there's cows in the yard and the barn's on fire. That's worth telling. Not those Americans.'

The Americans drifted back and forth, even in the night. They carried lights and radios. They carried ration packs they didn't need. If we located them in the long grass, dizzy with gravity and knotted ropes, we helped them find the right way up and they gave us dried apples and chewing gum and smoked beef. They let us flap the green silk into the sky and run underneath it. We loved the terror of feeling trapped, the increased sound of our own breath. We stumbled and rolled and found each other, clutching at arms and shoulders, nostrils flaring, scrambling for a way out. We helped fold the chute, surprised at the size of it spread out like water and the size of it folded to nothing. The men who had fallen from the sky, in the way the men routinely did, shouldered their packs with their great green nets inside them. They left in the truck that came for them, always, riding with radios out of the hills.

With the sky full of Americans, I didn't fear war. I didn't fear the Germans or the Japanese. I didn't fear the return of Jesus, though the Baptists prayed for it, wading in the pond, and I didn't fear my father's ghost staggering in the hallways with his ruined arm and scratched face, followed by tinfoil fish. I was also less afraid of Frank. I was silent around him, and watchful. For long stretches at a time, I was able to pretend he wasn't with us at all.

Then, one Monday afternoon in the hot late March of that year, a plane crashed in the hills and all eight airmen died. An ordinary training flight, readying for tropical bombing over the green Pacific. They had been in our sky, looking down over our yellow town with its yellow river and fields and hills beyond it. All they had seen, before they fell, was the expansive sea and palmy islands and the paths of bombs across them.

We didn't see the plane go down, though we all claimed we had, somehow skidding across our schoolroom windows and over the rooftops of the town. We did see the smoke: a plume of black that split the sky in two and resisted the half-hearted rain of the late afternoon. Nora and I hurried home that day. As soon as we arrived, we threw our school cases onto our beds and ran across the yard, down into and out of the gully and through the patchy bush that separated us from the hills. We wanted to run into the hills and find the plane. We wanted to follow the smoke for days if necessary, to see the collapsed airmen, none of them dead but piously calling for our help.

By the time we cleared the trees, however, it had begun to grow dark. The hills rose above us. We knew Frank would be driving the car that wasn't his down the Merrigool road. Nora and I looked up at the hills and the smoke that was blurring into scrappy clouds and twilight. We turned around and made our way home.

There was no sign of the rain in the roots of the bush. The creek hadn't risen, hadn't budged from its course. In the dark, among the trees, we thought we could hear the Americans calling for help that wouldn't come. Back in our yard, we paused to look up at the lit house. Dinner was over. Behind us the plane and the airmen smoked.

‘God help us,' said our mother. ‘Here you are. Here they are. Where have you been? Wait, don't tell me, I'm not interested. You disappear like rabbits, not a word, you don't come home for tea. For all I know you've been bitten by a snake, both of you, lying in the bush bitten by snakes. That's the last thing we need. Nora, what do you say? You're fifteen years old, for god's sake, Nora.'

Nora said nothing. Our mother pushed us through the kitchen and into the front room that we used only for winters and punishments, both unexpected. She straightened our clothes and neatened our damp hair and brushed leaves from our legs, as if preparing us to enter a church.