Fiona McFarlane: The High Places: Stories

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.