The High Places (27 page)

At midday the boy stopped to look at the sky. So Jack looked and saw, coming toward them, a long, light cloud, like a pillar laid sideways, like a plank of quality wood. The sky was otherwise empty. There was no rain in the cloud, Jack could tell, but it was moving so quickly and was such a strange colour, so golden-green, as if it were reflecting the steady burning of a diseased flame, that he became uneasy. The air was charged, the way it used to be before a storm. The boy dropped to his knees in a slack and yielding way. He took up fistfuls of dirt, which he rubbed in his hair.

‘Christ almighty,' said Jack, as he might have said another day, at some other peculiarity of his son's, but today the boy made a strangled yell as if to smother the words. The cloud rushed toward them. It reminded Jack of the surf he'd seen on a coastal holiday: a long green running line. And there was that same ominous, swimming feeling.

‘Cover your eyes!' called the boy, and pressed his face to the ground. The cloud was so close now that Jack thought he should be able to see through it to the sky beyond, but it was as if the sky behind the cloud were no longer there, and nothing had replaced it. He found himself hiding his face in terror as the cloud passed overhead. A brief, cold shadow crossed the ground. The boy sobbed and shook, lying there in the dirt, and Jack saw, to his surprise, that he, too, was crouched down and shaking. But the sky and the world were ordinary now, the smell of the dirt was ordinary, and there was no sign of the cloud. Jack wasn't afraid to look. He wondered why he'd been so frightened.

‘Come on now,' he said to his son. ‘Back at it.'

But the boy had lost his strength. He tried to stand and couldn't. His skin was an unusual shade of yellow-pink and a thick liquid ran from his nose. The joy of Monday and of work was lost for Jack, so he took the gear to the truck and stood over his son, nudged him in the back with a boot, and, when he didn't move, bent down and lifted him at the armpits. He dragged the boy to the truck and hoisted him in. A sixteen-year-old son is heavy. His feet are large and his limbs are long. Only closing the door of the truck very quickly could keep him from tumbling out of it.

Driving home, Jack said, ‘Fix yourself up' and ‘Jesus Christ,' and stopped the truck so the boy could lean out of the window to be sick. Afterward the boy slumped against the door, exhausted, but was able to manage the weight of his head.

They arrived at the house. ‘No need to say anything much to your mother,' said Jack.

They walked together up the steps to the veranda and into the front hall; the boy leaned on Jack as he went, with one hand held out in front of him as if afraid he might fall. Dirt flickered from his hair.

The girls swarmed out of their bedroom with wide eyes.

‘What's wrong with him?' said the oldest. ‘Is he sick?' The radio spoke behind them: ‘A verb,' it said, ‘is a doing word.'

Jack's wife came from the kitchen. She ran to the boy and touched his filthy hair.

‘Too much sun,' said Jack.

They were a solemn procession going down the hallway to the boy's bedroom: the boy leaning on his father, his mother behind them, the girls following until she shooed them.

‘Does he need a doctor?' she asked.

Jack shook his head. He pressed the boy down onto the bed.

‘Was there a voice?' asked the boy. ‘Did you hear it?'

‘Let him sleep it off,' said Jack.

‘The whirlwind,' said the boy.

Jack led his wife from the room.

‘What's this about a whirlwind?' she asked.

‘A lot of rot,' said Jack.

He left the house, climbed into the truck, and drove over to look at the last of his sheep. They trembled under the pepper trees. They were loaded with flies. Jack went carefully to his knees and prayed for rain.

*   *   *

The boy stayed in his bedroom for a few days. The girls lost interest in him. His mother brought him food and news of the unchanging weather. Jack went out to work on the fences. He prayed as he worked, and, having begun to pray, grew more impatient with the passivity of his wife's prayers. He disliked the helpless, quiet way she made her approach and her lack of any particular request. His own prayers were more specific.
Almighty God
, he said,
make it rain. Create a weather pattern that means rain. Raise the air, God, faster and faster, until a cloud forms. Load the cloud until it has to rain. Fill the waterhole and the creek and the dams. Make the grass grow. And while it does, lower the price of hay. Protect my land from the banks. May the banks shrivel up and die, like my grass. May they be killed and buried, like my sheep. Bring my sheep back from the dead, imperishable. And look after my son, Lord, if he's crazy. May he not be crazy. May he be content with life, and strong. Amen.

Jack didn't tell his wife he had begun to pray, because he didn't want to go to church with her. He also thought it would be unjust if she took any credit for his prayerfulness, which had more to do with the absence of the sky behind the cloud than her own scheduled devotion. The Sunday following his son's ‘turn', Jack stayed in bed until long after he heard the truck driving away from the house. It had been easy to avoid his son while the boy slept and shuffled in his room, but the boy was up early that Sunday, calling his sisters out of bed, clattering up and down the hallway, telling his mother in a loud voice that he would drive. Jack couldn't stand to look at his rejuvenated son. He lay in bed until midday, which he hadn't done in decades, until he felt a sweat descend on him, and a buzzing in his legs. The sweat and buzzing got him out of bed.

There had been a time, when the children were small, when Jack wouldn't let his wife go to church because he didn't think small children should travel four hours in the old truck. He liked to see his wife on Sunday mornings too; to keep her in bed. When she protested, he reminded her that she knew what she was getting into, marrying onto a sheep station in the middle of nowhere. But he'd bought the radio. It wasn't entirely a luxury, since they'd need one eventually for the children's education, but his wife thought of it that way. When it arrived and she saw the size of it, she held his hand. She listened to the city news and pretty songs and foreign languages, and on Sundays she tuned in to religious programmes. She sat in the Girls' Room, still a nursery, still not entirely filled with girls, and he heard her singing along with the hymns in a thin, fine voice, which seemed to lift up of its own accord and float above the house. He remembered hoping that the vastness of the sky over their property would not entirely dissolve the song. He'd been fanciful like that, in those days.

On the Sunday after the cloud, Jack went into the Girls' Room. The midday sun struck at the beds through the window. Each single bed was spread with a yellow coverlet; each little desk was clear of possessions. It was a room, Jack saw, to which no one was tied, and that no one would be sorry to leave. Against the far wall stood the high-frequency two-way radio transceiver through which his children learned, with growing confidence, of the existence of an outside world made up of things like tall buildings, speedboats, elephants, and rain.

Jack tuned the radio in and out of pop songs and newsy chat until he found a promising voice: a deep, certain voice of painful energy and, behind it, the low hum of organ music.

‘Have you noticed,' said the voice, ‘how many significant biblical events take place on hilltops?'

Jack sat in one of his daughters' desk chairs.

‘Let's think about it,' said the voice. ‘The ark came to rest on Ararat. Abraham sacrificed Isaac on Mount Moriah. The bush burned on Mount Horeb, and the Law came to Moses on Sinai. Elijah tested the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel, David built his palace on Zion. Jesus preached from a mountain, and he died on Golgotha hill. He wept for Jerusalem on the Mount of Olives, and from the Mount of Olives he ascended to Heaven.'

Jack thought he recognised some of these stories.

‘Listen, friend,' said the voice, which lulled and throbbed. ‘God is in the high places.'

Jack thought about his property, which was flat to each horizon and lower than sea level. The whole plain on which his sheep had died and his wife had grown old had once been an inland sea. It had filled and sunk over millennia and was a long way from any mountain.

‘The Israelites knew it,' said the voice, ‘and before they built their Temple on the Mount, they sought out the high places to make sacrifices to Yahweh. They sought out the high places to make and fulfill vows. They went to the high places, friends, to worship God.'

Jack turned off the radio and left the Girls' Room. It angered him to think God listened harder to people standing on a hill; that those people might be given rain and healthy sons and living sheep. Even so, it seemed right that there might be particular places in which conversation with God would be more effective. He didn't think his wife, with her bedtime prayers, had found such a place.

Jack thought he would see what it felt like under the red gum. He walked out into the heat, which pressed at him from all sides; he felt the sweat gather in the small of his back, and he felt the sun dry it. The closer he got to the red gum, the more his inner organs suffered a kind of squeeze. He stood beneath the stifling tree, and the brightness of the light from the white waterhole was like a wall of fire, but if the boy could sit out here for hours every week then so could Jack. It didn't surprise him to learn that making requests of God might also involve suffering. He sat on the ground with his back against the trunk.

‘Almighty God,' he said, ‘make it rain.'

And the seriousness of what he was asking, the great size of it, was brought home to him by the noise of the gum as it cracked and strained, the hot light of the sun through the branches, and the sound of the largest, oldest, most rotten limb as it fell: the airborne rush of leaves, the snap of smaller sections, and finally the clatter of wood hitting the ground. The fallen branch was itself the size of a substantial tree, and it lay so close to him he could stretch out his foot to touch it; if he'd been sitting just a little farther to the left he would have been partially or wholly crushed. But he was unharmed. Jack moaned as the boy had done at the passing of the cloud. He gathered dirt in his hands. Unlike his son, he didn't rub the dirt in his hair. He only sat motionless beneath the tree, terrified by God.

*   *   *

When he heard the truck approaching the house, Jack found he was able to sit up and dust himself off. He watched the truck stop and the girls traipse inside. He watched their mother follow them with her handbag swinging, calling his name, and when he didn't answer, the girls began to call for him as well. The boy turned away from the truck with his Bible in his hand, heading for the tree. Jack stood. He felt composed enough to place one foot on the topmost part of the fallen branch, with his knee bent, as if he had planted a flag there and claimed it for his own.

The boy ran to him. ‘It must be four metres long,' he said.

Jack kicked at the branch. ‘What did I tell you? Widow- makers.'

His son looked up into the tree, lifting his Bible to shield his eyes from the glare.

‘Was it a wind?' the boy asked. ‘Was it the cloud again?'

The girls and their mother came running from the house.

‘Dad! Dad!' cried the girls, delighted by the catastrophe of the fallen branch. They inspected everything. Their mother stopped farther away. She wanted, Jack knew, to order them all out from under the tree. She wanted to gather and scold them, but had lost that habit.

Jack didn't tell them he'd been sitting under the tree when the limb fell. He said he'd heard it from the house. The boy stood with his Bible shading his eyes, looking at the dirt on his father's back and under his fingernails.

*   *   *

Jack spent the afternoon cutting the branch into firewood. The boy paced on the veranda, where his sisters sat crowded over a borrowed magazine. The girls read with a solemnity unusual to them on a Sunday and kept looking up from the pages as if fascinated by their father's labour. Their mother stood at the kitchen window, peeling vegetables in slow, even strokes. Jack felt them all keeping him in their sights. He felt it in his spine and his gut; it was a pleasant constriction. The girls talked in thrilled whispers about how lucky it was their brother hadn't been under the tree when the branch fell. There was a conspiracy among them, of longing and possibility and dread, and this glamorised their brother, so they endured his pacing and the strange way he cleared his throat at the sky.

The boy didn't bring his Bible to dinner. He didn't speak as he had the previous week. He only stabbed a lamb chop with his fork and held it over his plate. The girls were more expectant than usual, bright around the eyes.

‘Well, dig in,' said Jack, and the girls began to eat, their faces turned to their food. But they snuck looks at their brother, who finally lifted the chop with his fingers the way their father did and tore into it with his teeth.

Jack was revolted by the sound of the boy's teeth in the fibres of the lamb and the creaking of the bone as he dug out the marrow with his long finger. He couldn't eat with all this noise, and pushed away his plate. That was enough to stop his daughters, who held their knives and forks in the air. But the boy reached for another lamb chop with a slippery hand.

‘The sermon was excellent this morning,' said his mother.

‘Oh?' said Jack, careful to keep a casual, disdainful note in his voice.

‘We learned about sacrifice,' she said. She laid her cutlery down on the table. ‘We learned about making burnt offerings of our lives.'

‘Burnt offerings!' scoffed her son, waving the lamb chop above his plate.

‘Sounds uncomfortable,' said Jack. Still with that light tone in his voice, the one his daughters knew to be wary of.