Fiona McFarlane - The High Places - Stories

* * *

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.

‘We have to be willing to give everything to God,’ said the oldest girl in her proud and piping voice. Her sisters looked at her in awe. ‘He demands it of us.’

‘Oh, but we demand it of ourselves,’ said her mother with a sigh, as if the effort of this demand were unbearably sweet.

The boy laughed again. ‘Your descendants will be strangers in a country not their own,’ he said. ‘And we will all be changed.’

‘You watch yourself,’ said Jack, still light, but in a lower tone, with his face only partially turned toward his son. The girls shrank a little in their chairs. Their mother wore a plaintive face, her own burnt offering.

‘I’m not afraid of you,’ said the boy. He dropped the chop onto his plate, wiped his hands on the tablecloth, and said to his sisters, ‘I’ll tell you a great mystery. This man died today. He was crushed by a tree, but God raised him.’

Jack brought his fist down on the table and the plates and glasses jumped.

‘He was raised, and he was changed. I’m not afraid of him.’

Jack leaned over and struck the back of his son’s head. The boy cried out. Then he ducked his head and laughed.

‘A burnt offering!’ he said. His nose bubbled with snot. His sisters were silent; his mother lowered her face. Jack lifted his hand again. ‘Fire from below,’ said the boy, almost singing, ‘and water from above.’ He cringed as Jack’s hand flew. ‘That’s what the voice said from the whirlwind. He heard it! This man!’

Jack’s mouth was filled with a bitter fluid. He swallowed it down. He said, ‘You make me sick.’ Then he walked out of the house and climbed into the back seat of the truck. There was a blanket in there and he pulled it over him. He would spend the night in the truck, away from his family. He would stay out of the house so the roof couldn’t fall on him. He pulled the blanket over his head so no part of the sky was visible. That way he might be hidden from God.

* * *

His sheep rose in the night. Jack felt them nudging at the truck, which rocked so that it seemed to him, lying in the back seat, as if he were in a boat. There was a sea sound too — but it turned out to be the soft murmur of the sheep as they brushed against each other. They had risen from the dead, whole flocks of them, a wealth of sheep, imperishable after all: they were plump and perfectly shorn, not a nick on their bodies, not a curl of wool anywhere but on their heads, except they had the tails they were born with. Jack could see the sheep around the truck although he was still beneath the blanket. He was comforted by their perfection, their great number, their eternal life. He closed his eyes and slept.

When he woke, the truck was moving at some speed. He threw the blanket off and sat up. It was day and his son was driving. There were sheep — five or six dirty ewes in the bed of the truck. Jack’s head thundered, and his throat was so dry he only wheezed when he opened his mouth to speak.

‘Morning, Dad,’ said the boy. ‘Might want to wear your seat belt.’

The truck flew over a ditch. Jack jumped in his seat and the sheep tumbled behind him.

‘Slow down,’ said Jack. His voice almost sounded like itself.

‘Sorry,’ said the boy.

Jack climbed between the seats into the front of the truck. The clock on the dashboard read 10:02, but they were already hours from the house and driving west: away from water, away from the last of the grass, and into that arid plain out of which the cloud had risen a week ago.

‘You turn this truck around,’ said Jack, without conviction.

His son grinned at him from behind the wheel. ‘Nup,’ he said.

‘Where are we going?’

‘Dunno,’ the boy said.

‘And the sheep?’

The boy laughed, but not the way he had the night before. This was a brief, ordinary Monday laugh. It took in his father and the truck and the sheep and the sun as it rose over them, and it laughed at each of them in turn, and then at itself. It wasn’t serious. ‘Burnt offering,’ he said.

Jack was in a state of steady calm. He felt as he once had when he sat down to a test at school and knew the answers.

‘Then we go somewhere high,’ he said. ‘We find a hill.’