The High Places Read online

  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.

  ‘Here,’ said our mother, ‘is your father. Who has been worried sick and is very disappointed in you.’

  I imagined our father slumped in the corner, his fishy feet worn out from pacing to and fro with worry. Then she left and we heard her moving about the kitchen, calm now, with no responsibility. She clucked at the baby in the way she liked to. There would have been a time when she clucked at us.

  Frank did not look disappointed in us. He sat in the best red chair, which smelt of dogs and used towels, and eyed us thoughtfully, his bare policeman’s feet planted square on the yellow rug. In that undersized chair, his vast and neutral face was almost at our level. His knees rose higher than his belly. He wore a vest and his trousers and, keeping up his trousers, a belt. When I touched it much later, after Frank was dead, the belt was old and supple with use. That belt felt soft as a calf the day it’s born.

  ‘My children,’ said Frank, ‘never miss dinner.’

  He ordered us to turn around, and he stood up. I remember his shadow on the wall. It was strangely diminished by the low-hanging light fitting, which swallowed his legs; I saw his arm, though, as it rose and fell, and the belt flying at the end of it. I remember being grateful that he did me first, and I wondered if the Americans might even then be flying overhead, dangling on their strings, and knew they weren’t, because of the smoke in the hills. I think I cried, but Nora didn’t.

  That night, the American flag at school stirred at half-mast in the meagre wind. The interned Japanese – doctors and painters and wives and plumbers – wrote letters of panic to the mayor and the police, to the Americans, to the Baptist minister and the Anglican, declaring their innocence in the matter of the crash. I wanted, more than anything, to throw myself into the pond, to touch the surface lightly once, twice, three times, like a skimming stone, and stay there underwater until the sun rose again and Frank was gone.

  * * *

  Because they hadn’t been buried, the souls of the eight dead airmen began to cause trouble in the area. They played with ladies’ stockings, tearing tiny holes in them that ran and ran. They bit apples on the trees and left them swaying and rotting, with tooth marks. They sent bugs scurrying through oats, and they spooked cows so no bulls could rut. We saw their shadows at times, swimming in the pond among the knees of the Baptists, delaying the return of Jesus because their bodies hadn’t yet been put back together. That, we discovered, was Frank’s job, with the help of the airbase surgeon.

  We imagined the airmen gruesomely neat, each a jigsaw of distinct pieces: arms, legs, torso. We rarely thought of the heads. We learned the names of the Americans: James Milner. Curtis McAvoy. Kevin Roberts. Roy Brand. We repeated them over and over, skipping them into our games, clapping out the rhythm. Leroy Bump, of North Carolina. Poor Bump had a nasty bump, we joked. Clarence Sullivan. Eugene Jackson. David Young, who died once and always young. We talked of Frank’s methods, the eight tables accumulating parts and the fitting together of a Sullivan arm with a Sullivan shoulder. We thought of mothers fixing dolls, and of the detachable tails of bloodless lizards.

  As Frank’s task wore on and those stubborn pieces would not fit back into eight bodies, we were impressed by his silence, the way he simply sat at dinner with us, chewing and drinking. At night, in bed, I discussed with Nora his nerve and his courage, his secretive profession, and his strict rules about a subject’s suitability for children. No war, no details of other people’s marriages, no religion, no airmen in a scrambled heap. He was unfazed by his difficult and gory work, even when the town, plagued by the dead Americans, became impatient with the time he was taking.

  We noticed one difference in him: he became more tender with his children, if not with Nora and me, and seemed to understand the cries of the baby in a way that not even our mother could, walking it on his huge hip and feeding it raisins he had chewed and softened in his own mouth. He read to his children until he became frustrated with them for wanting the same stories over and over again. He taught his boys to play football. Nora and I watched from the veranda as they stumbled and fell on their fat legs, bewildered and violent, knocking each other to the ground.

  * * *

  After nearly two weeks of concern among the Merrigool citizens, uneasy in the presence of the Americans, alive and dead, and the interned Japanese, with Frank politely accused of incompetence in every kitchen, word came that Curtis McAvoy of Iowa City had never been on the plane at all. He had abandoned the plane and the base on the morning of the crash and found a truck on its way to Sydney – just as our father once had – where he lived it up in the bars and in the soft tanned arms of the Woolloomooloo whores and watched for Japanese submarines sneaking into the harbour. The eight airmen, it turned out, were seven, which explained Frank’s difficulty with their jigsaw bodies.

  Our mother cut our hair that day. We sat on the veranda, watchful, quiet, while the lorikeets picked at the afternoon grass. Because the cut was unscheduled and it was a washday, all the towels were wet, so our collars filled up with white hair that clung to our necks and worried us all evening, itchy but elusive. Eventually our mother took Nora inside to help prepare the meal. The rest of us stayed on the veranda listening for any sound through the dusk. The dogs barked at nothing. They barked at birds and each other. Finally they barked because he came.

  It took him some time to get out of the car. We all stood when he did, and our mother came to the door. Nora watched from the window through the batter of moths. We realised then how dark it was. He climbed the steps purposefully, looking everything in the eye, and then put his hand on top of my head.

  ‘We’re all hungry, aren’t we,’ he said, moving his fingers in my hair. ‘We’re a family of good eaters, and we like to sit around a table for our tea.’

  We filed in, our bare feet soft on the floor, treading our hair into and around the house. Frank’s belly growled all through dinner, loud and complaining, and he turned this into a joke, holding it in both hands and soothing it like his baby. We laughed at it and fed the dogs with furtive scraps of meat.

  * * *

  With the seven Americans reassemble
d at last, Frank took a week off work, and this free week coincided with our school holidays. His presence made the days tricky and unpredictable. He worked all morning beneath sinks, along the fences, hidden in the roof. He chopped down a huge dead tree so that it lay across the yard like a giant squid, pale and horizontal, its enormous sideways branches cut back to stumps. But in the afternoons he lurked in chairs and on steps and by the pond, lazy and hazardous, and we played around him, alert, never nearing the bush or water.

  He remained in a good mood, against our expectations, and one day set up an obstacle course of tin cans on boulders and fences. Then he got Nora and me and the boys into the car and told us we’d take turns leaning from the front passenger window to grab as many cans as we could.

  ‘Someone will get hurt,’ observed our mother, but she did nothing to stop it. She sat with the baby on a rug in the yard, shelling peas, her long fingers working quickly in the shade. It was hot, and hotter in the car. Hotter even when there was a breeze, because the breeze came from the desert and blackened our necks and snot. The car bucked over the uneven ground and we barrelled from side to side in it, collecting tin cans, missing tin cans, awaiting our turn to lean out over the burning metal and squint into the moving, rolling sun. Nora at first refused to try, sitting behind the driver’s seat with the window down, leaving the wind to mess her hair, keeping her eyes on the horizon. Eventually Frank persuaded her, and of course she was the best of us, hanging from the car with one brown outstretched arm and her bum filling the window. Then the youngest boy vomited over the back seat. Frank stopped the car and we all ran and lay on the grass beside the pond, panting and burning. Except Nora, who walked back in the direction of the house. She moved as if she were underwater, lifting each leg higher than necessary, letting her arms trail behind her and turning her head slowly from side to side. Then she stopped and pointed at the sky.

  ‘Look,’ she said, and we looked. Beside the sinking sun, men were falling. They rocked in the dusty wind, their parachutes opening and catching, and the birds flew away from them and into the trees. We knew where they came down – out on the fields, past the bush by the creek, where the cows had chewed the last of the grass and the ground was powdery ash. Each of us imagined feeling the earth shake, almost imperceptibly, as one by one the men landed, gathering their nets around them and feeling again the weight of the sky. We hadn’t seen them jumping since the plane crashed.

  Frank was watching transfixed. He’d never been home when they jumped, and it seemed he’d never watched them from the windows of the station, or his car, or the houses he drove to daily, where thefts and suspicious fires occurred.

  ‘How high up are they?’ he said, and we looked at each other and then back at where he stood, one hand shading his narrowed eyes. With relief, we realised he didn’t expect us to answer.

  ‘Maggie!’ he called to our mother. ‘Have you seen this? Would you look at this?’

  And our mother didn’t say, Tell me when the soup boils over, tell me when the pond dries up, tell me when the minister arrives naked, but don’t tell me those Americans are falling from the sky again, again, again. She smiled and looked up toward the airborne Americans and said, ‘Just as long as they don’t land in my henhouse.’

  ‘They’re half a mile up,’ said Frank. I knew that to be the distance of our house from the Merrigool road, so I tilted that length into the sky and mentally ran along it, tiring quickly, as the Americans followed it down. ‘Half a mile up or more.’

  Our mother sat the baby on her knee and let him throw his hands in and out of the peas. The frogs were beginning to sing, their bellies full of hard, cross music that sounded at the bottoms of our ears. That’s how we knew the day was ending. Now we would start to wait for Frank to come home. But here he was.

  ‘And how do they get home again? Do they walk?’ asked Frank.

  We knew the answer to this. The youngest boy, smelling of pond weed and still a little of vomit, said, ‘The truck comes.’

  ‘The truck, eh?’ said Frank, and he turned to me.

  ‘Yeah, Dad,’ I said, surprised that he had looked at me, and proud. ‘They send a truck to pick them up and take them all back to base.’

  The sky was empty now, and the truck was crossing over the hills, over the fields, filling up with Americans who laughed about holding their breath as they jumped.

  ‘All right,’ said our mother. ‘Who’ll help cook peas? Who’ll help cook the sweetcorn?’ It was a special dinner, and there was a job for everyone – everyone except Frank. We followed our mother into the house and moved among the different foods while Frank stayed outside, scanning the sky for a tiny plane half a mile up or more.

  It was a special dinner because Frank was returning to work the next day. Our mother had killed two chickens and baked five different kinds of vegetables. The meal took a long time to cook and very little time to eat. There was fruit salad for dessert – oranges and apples. Frank told us stories about fruit picking in Queensland.

  ‘The queen of fruit,’ said Frank, ‘is the mango.’

  He told us the mango tasted like sugar and cream and peach and banana all at once. He told us the sap could burn your skin like a hot stove. He told us about German men wrapped in shirts – one for the body, one for each arm and leg – who could pick a hundred mangoes in ten minutes. The possibilities of Frank’s previous lives occurred to me suddenly, and they tasted of oranges and apples.

  Frank leaned back in his chair, looking at the ceiling as if he might see the Americans dangling there. ‘Tomorrow,’ he said, ‘I’ll cook us sausages for tea, burned on the skins the way we like ’em. Eh?’

  ‘You’re working tomorrow,’ said our mother.

  ‘Saturday then,’ said Frank, still inspecting the ceiling. Only he said it ‘Satd’y’, the way fathers do, the way their sons do: Tuesd’y, Thursd’y, Satd’y, familiar and friendly with the long days of the never-ending weeks.

  That night I dreamed of rain. It started with clouds so low I could touch them if I stood on a chair. They were dense and solid; I could break pieces off and even taste them. They tasted of burnt sugar. I held one out to Nora and said, ‘Try some mango.’ When the clouds burst into rain, the noise on our iron roof was terrible. Nora was trying to sing, but no one could hear her. There was nobody else in sight – no American airmen, no Baptists, no brothers or mothers or Frank. Just me, and Nora, and rain and more rain, which looked like white hair. I stirred at some point, very early, and heard unfamiliar voices in the hallway, then swam back into my noisy dream of rain.

  Later, Nora woke me to say that an American was missing and they were searching for him on our farm. My heart slowed. I thought of my fear, a secret until now, even to myself, that Frank had taken Curtis McAvoy, limb by extraneous limb, and buried him by the creek. But this was another American, Nora said, who’d jumped from the plane yesterday and never come back. We had watched him fall, shading our eyes and wondering if he was watching us: children lying on the grass by a pond, a mother on a rug with a baby, a father’s face lifted to the sky, looking like a family.

  ‘But the truck?’ I said, remembering what I’d told Frank, with such confidence, calling him ‘Dad’, and I thought of being wrong. I wondered if I would be punished.

  Nora took me outside. Planes flew low overhead. We saw men we recognised and men we didn’t climb out of the creek gullies to be served cold drinks by our mother. Frank led the search. We spent the day watching him, proud of his authority, proud that he was stern and unforgiving, and pleased to see lesser men try to satisfy him. We stayed far from him, and kept quiet, and managed through a combination of helpfulness and invisibility not to be sent away somewhere less exciting.

  We heard the sound of dogs at the creek and drew our feet in beneath us, squatting on the veranda. Other women came and we listened as they speculated that the American had copied Curtis McAvoy: shaken off his parachute, walked up the weary roads, found a travelling truck, and disappeared. We heard these
things could be contagious. An old man stood with his foot on the veranda rail and said, ‘What we need is a tracker.’ Everyone laughed and then nodded, as if to say, Yes, we need a tracker. But there was no prison in Merrigool anymore, no mission, and only a small police station. Frank didn’t have a tracker working for him the way he might have years before. There were no black men in Merrigool.

  In the late afternoon we helped our mother peel potatoes. We knew by the density of the air around the house that the American had not yet been found.

  ‘Where is he?’ I asked Nora, my hands brown with sticky dirt.

  ‘Maybe in Heaven,’ she said.

  I thought of all the things I had done since watching the parachutes fall the night before. I had boiled peas and eaten my part of two chickens. I had learned about mangoes, and German men in shirts, and dreamed of rain. I had helped my mother bake scones and carried them to the gathered men and waiting women, fully conscious of the importance of my task. I had served drinks and peeled potatoes. The American had been lost this whole time.

  I realised suddenly that any of the men we had helped untangle, who had fed us army-issue chocolate and showed us photographs of their sweethearts, could have been on the plane that crashed in the hills, could be this American who might never come back, and even if he was found, or that plane had never fallen, they would all be sent, anyway, to the war that had killed my father. I felt the way I did when I ran under the chute silk into a green world without sky or air.

  And there in that world was Edith. She had arrived at our house with the sixth sense of lonely and loving and meddling people who fancy a crowd and an emergency.

  ‘Jean Louise,’ she said, in the old way, the way she used to before I was just another girl in one of her scripture classes. ‘Follow me. And you too, Eleanora. Follow me. And we’ll pray together for the return of the American.’