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.