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.