At midday the boy stopped to look at the sky. So Jack looked and saw, coming toward them, a long, light cloud, like a pillar laid sideways, like a plank of quality wood. The sky was otherwise empty. There was no rain in the cloud, Jack could tell, but it was moving so quickly and was such a strange colour, so golden-green, as if it were reflecting the steady burning of a diseased flame, that he became uneasy. The air was charged, the way it used to be before a storm. The boy dropped to his knees in a slack and yielding way. He took up fistfuls of dirt, which he rubbed in his hair.
‘Christ almighty,’ said Jack, as he might have said another day, at some other peculiarity of his son’s, but today the boy made a strangled yell as if to smother the words. The cloud rushed toward them. It reminded Jack of the surf he’d seen on a coastal holiday: a long green running line. And there was that same ominous, swimming feeling.
‘Cover your eyes!’ called the boy, and pressed his face to the ground. The cloud was so close now that Jack thought he should be able to see through it to the sky beyond, but it was as if the sky behind the cloud were no longer there, and nothing had replaced it. He found himself hiding his face in terror as the cloud passed overhead. A brief, cold shadow crossed the ground. The boy sobbed and shook, lying there in the dirt, and Jack saw, to his surprise, that he, too, was crouched down and shaking. But the sky and the world were ordinary now, the smell of the dirt was ordinary, and there was no sign of the cloud. Jack wasn’t afraid to look. He wondered why he’d been so frightened.
‘Come on now,’ he said to his son. ‘Back at it.’
But the boy had lost his strength. He tried to stand and couldn’t. His skin was an unusual shade of yellow-pink and a thick liquid ran from his nose. The joy of Monday and of work was lost for Jack, so he took the gear to the truck and stood over his son, nudged him in the back with a boot, and, when he didn’t move, bent down and lifted him at the armpits. He dragged the boy to the truck and hoisted him in. A sixteen-year-old son is heavy. His feet are large and his limbs are long. Only closing the door of the truck very quickly could keep him from tumbling out of it.
Driving home, Jack said, ‘Fix yourself up’ and ‘Jesus Christ,’ and stopped the truck so the boy could lean out of the window to be sick. Afterward the boy slumped against the door, exhausted, but was able to manage the weight of his head.
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.