The High Places: Stories

Those Americans Falling from the Sky

When I tell our husbands the story of the bad-luck Americans, I begin with Edith because when the Americans came, moving into the airstrip out of town, expanding it with new buildings and sheds and hangars, bringing with them a brass band that practised in the streets of a Saturday, I thought of the planes that hummed over our newly crowded sky as tiny Ediths with their parrot faces pointed toward the sun. Edith was a short woman, short enough maybe to count as a dwarf, and from the back she looked like our kid brothers. From the front she was about sixty, and looked like a parrot. Her lips were pale and hard and fused. Her eyes were small and dark. They rotated backward, first one way, then the other, whenever the kitchen in which she was talking was invaded by a man.

Edith called us Eleanora and Jean Louise when Nora and Jeanie did at home and everywhere else. She was one of those people who act out every story they tell, waving her arms, reproducing facial expressions, running around our kitchen like an unfamiliar cat. She acted out the air raids on London — a miniature plane tilting at our table, dropping erratic bombs that rattled the teacups. These gymnastics tired our mother. When the Baptists came every few Sundays, leasing our pond to wash their sins away, Edith was always among them, hopping side to side with her parrot step. Our mother would pull the shutters to shut out the hymns and say, ‘Don’t let them come in, not today, and not that Edith. If she comes up inside I’ll die of tiredness. I know I’ll die. She just tires me and tires me out.’

When we saw her in town she was brisk and chatty. It was Edith, for example, who explained to us, one Saturday morning on Merrigool’s main street, about the internment camp.

‘They’re bringing in Chinamen, by the truckload,’ she said.

‘They’re not from China,’ said our mother. ‘They’re from Japan.’

‘Well,’ said Edith. ‘They’re all Orientals, aren’t they.’

I thought of a missionary talk she had taken us to about the work of God in China, the blessed and dangerous work of God among the delicate foods and feet of China, with a woman in Chinese dress telling us not to be confused between the Taiwanese and the Chinese, and especially not the Japanese, and certainly not the Malays.

‘God bless the Americans,’ cried Edith, raising her bird hands to Heaven right there on the street, ‘and our boys.’

Despite this blessing, the Americans brought nothing but bad luck — for us, but mostly for themselves. They blustered through town and held dances and attended church, or so we heard, dressed in uniforms so stiff they could hardly expand their lungs to sing. They were shiny and good-looking. After the war plenty of girls packed their suitcases and, clutching letters and photographs, departed for promised love in exotic places like Texas and Montana. With their easy walk and their well-combed hair, the Americans seemed brave and fortunate. But as it turned out, they had a strange aptitude for dying on the outside of the war.

Our father, on the other hand, Nora’s and mine, died on the very inside of the war. He always succumbed to things quickly. When we were younger, before the war, he panicked at the thought of financial difficulty. Word of crashing markets and worthless bank accounts reached Merrigool by train and newspaper, and our father leased out our fields amid speculation about the future of beef and milk. A little later he sold the farm off, piece by piece, until we were left with the house, the yard, the pond, the gully and the creek. Also, the drive reaching out to the Merrigool road, and the yardy, pondy, bushy strip leading from the house back to the hills. Then he left on a truck for Sydney, looking for work, and never came back. At some point he and our mother were no longer married. Frank arrived and became our stepfather, and then there were more children, and the war. Our father sent us a letter to say he had enlisted, and in the envelope, a photograph of him at a wedding, standing by a woman in white we’d never heard of.

He died in Egypt, in a yellow-walled hospital, in the midst of befriending the nurses, taking sips of smuggled whiskey from strangers, cradling a crushed arm. He sent us letters, childlike and left-handed, or dictated to someone who added comments in French that we couldn’t understand. One day we received a letter from a woman named Hélène, also from Egypt, accompanied by a rainbow school of foil fish, all neatly cut from sweet wrappers by our father’s careful, concentrating left hand. There were over two hundred of them. We played with them for a week before abandoning them in a silver-backed pile. For many years afterward we found stray fish around the house, blue and gold minnows beneath loose tiles, brilliant green sardines swimming in the dust behind chests of drawers. Hélène sent the fish and her sympathy and her admiration for our father. His love for his daughters provided solace to the end. In the valley of death he had heard the Word of God, and was comforted.

This letter reached us before the one from our grandmother in distant Melbourne telling Nora and me that he was dead. Our mother wasn’t included in either letter, and we felt adult and private as we showed them to her. Nora was sadder than I was, so I learned from her how to be sad. She refused to believe the letters and persisted in a private conviction that someone else had been mistaken for our father, who had lost his memory, been rescued by the Americans, and now lived in New York City. He would find his way back to us, someday. I was three when he left. Back then, he would pick me up and pretend to throw me off the veranda, over and over, and I would laugh with terror, again and again.

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.

‘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 reassembled 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.’

She spoke with kindness and authority, as if she had never stepped out of our kitchen and left us alone with Frank. We followed her, and no one saw us go.

* * *

The pond was gold in the late light, the colour of good wheat. Edith took us there, I suppose, because she was used to praying at the pond, a place of wet and joyous rebirth. Her footing over the sloping banks was uneasy but she maintained her constant bird chatter to God on the subjects of rescue and redemption. She held her tiny arms out like airplane wings to steady herself over the mossy rocks. And in her effort, praying and balancing, she didn’t notice what we did.

The American floated above the pond, his feet partially submerged, greenish with weed and his parachute. I don’t know how he got there, or how they had missed him. The trees had caught him and hung him by his strings on the edge of the bush and the war. He had a scratched face and only one arm, whiskey breath, and the fish that swam at his booted feet were silver as tinfoil. Seeing his face was the very worst of our luck, Nora’s and mine. But as I tell our husbands, it didn’t last. We grew up, didn’t we. We left Merrigool, Nora first, me later, and found our husbands. We instructed our half-siblings on methods of escape and eventually they did, to lives that rarely involved us. We made telephone calls to our mother, and when Frank answered he never spoke to us for long.

Our mother died, and then Frank, and we returned to the house to clear it out. We walked to the pond, dry in the drought and empty of ducks. Once again, we heard Edith praying with her face to the late sky. We heard Frank calling our names, his voice soft as leather, only this time we didn’t go to him. And the American still floated above the water, turning in the wind, and the wind smelled of dinner.