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.