‘Have you noticed,’ said the voice, ‘how many significant biblical events take place on hilltops?’
Jack sat in one of his daughters’ desk chairs.
‘Let’s think about it,’ said the voice. ‘The ark came to rest on Ararat. Abraham sacrificed Isaac on Mount Moriah. The bush burned on Mount Horeb, and the Law came to Moses on Sinai. Elijah tested the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel, David built his palace on Zion. Jesus preached from a mountain, and he died on Golgotha hill. He wept for Jerusalem on the Mount of Olives, and from the Mount of Olives he ascended to Heaven.’
Jack thought he recognised some of these stories.
‘Listen, friend,’ said the voice, which lulled and throbbed. ‘God is in the high places.’
Jack thought about his property, which was flat to each horizon and lower than sea level. The whole plain on which his sheep had died and his wife had grown old had once been an inland sea. It had filled and sunk over millennia and was a long way from any mountain.
‘The Israelites knew it,’ said the voice, ‘and before they built their Temple on the Mount, they sought out the high places to make sacrifices to Yahweh. They sought out the high places to make and fulfill vows. They went to the high places, friends, to worship God.’
Jack turned off the radio and left the Girls’ Room. It angered him to think God listened harder to people standing on a hill; that those people might be given rain and healthy sons and living sheep. Even so, it seemed right that there might be particular places in which conversation with God would be more effective. He didn’t think his wife, with her bedtime prayers, had found such a place.
Jack thought he would see what it felt like under the red gum. He walked out into the heat, which pressed at him from all sides; he felt the sweat gather in the small of his back, and he felt the sun dry it. The closer he got to the red gum, the more his inner organs suffered a kind of squeeze. He stood beneath the stifling tree, and the brightness of the light from the white waterhole was like a wall of fire, but if the boy could sit out here for hours every week then so could Jack. It didn’t surprise him to learn that making requests of God might also involve suffering. He sat on the ground with his back against the trunk.
‘Almighty God,’ he said, ‘make it rain.’
And the seriousness of what he was asking, the great size of it, was brought home to him by the noise of the gum as it cracked and strained, the hot light of the sun through the branches, and the sound of the largest, oldest, most rotten limb as it felclass="underline" the airborne rush of leaves, the snap of smaller sections, and finally the clatter of wood hitting the ground. The fallen branch was itself the size of a substantial tree, and it lay so close to him he could stretch out his foot to touch it; if he’d been sitting just a little farther to the left he would have been partially or wholly crushed. But he was unharmed. Jack moaned as the boy had done at the passing of the cloud. He gathered dirt in his hands. Unlike his son, he didn’t rub the dirt in his hair. He only sat motionless beneath the tree, terrified by God.
* * *
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!’