PETRINA SMITH
The angel thing arrived in a flash of light and a roar of thunder. My grandfather brought it late one night, very late, we were all in bed. A car on a country road at night sounds like the rushing of Jehovah’s winds, but I didn’t hear this one until it was upon us. The flare of headlights through the Venetian blinds threw barred shadows across my face. I was blinded like a rabbit pinned down by the spotlight. What could have been the clapping of wings was the clash of gears. They crunched into silence and I held my breath. Car doors slammed; there were men’s voices, but no words. And then another man’s voice, from the verandah, my father. ‘Evening,’ he was saying. He was opening the screen door and going out onto the verandah. I hadn’t heard him take the rifle from behind the door, hadn’t heard him break it and load it and snap it back together, that double click with a tiny echo ringing down the barrel. So it was all right, he knew who it was.
Mum came in with her brunch coat on over her summer nightie. ‘Dad says we’re not to go out. There are men here.’ It used to be that Mum and Dad were the grown-ups, and I was the child. Now I was like her, or she was like me. She seemed to think we both had something to he ashamed about. I’d started to bleed early and Mum said, ‘Now you’re a woman.’ She didn’t seem happy about it, but then she often wasted time being unhappy about things she could do nothing about. I was very fond of my mother, but I didn’t think she had much sense.
‘Shove over,’ said Mum. ‘Let me in.’
She wasn’t all that much older than me, my father kept saying we could be sisters and my mother kept saying, ‘But I’m not your daughter.’ But Dad treated us the same, sometimes he laughed at us and sometimes he shouted at us. I didn’t know why she let him. When I got older, I wasn’t going to let him.
‘Is Grandad here?’
‘Now how did you know your grandfather was here? You never cease to amaze me.’ I was keeping quiet, I didn’t want her to know I could feel my grandfather’s presence on her, feel her shrink inside herself.
‘Why is he here?’
‘Church business.’
We both knew what the other thought about Grandad and his church. Neither of them liked girls very much, even if Grandad did like kissing us, wet kisses on our lips that my mother and I wiped away as soon as we could. We lay in bed and pulled all the blankets over us, though it was too hot for them. I knew my mother felt safer that way as we listened to the men who weren’t meant to see us.
They were making loud footsteps and grunting, and there was a squeaky sound, like a rusty bicycle being wheeled across the dirt. Then more grunting and thumping at the verandah steps and the bicycle again, scraping across the boards on the side verandah, which was the other side of the house to our room. The noises stopped, but I thought I heard the door of the sleep-out slam.
Then there was the chink of cups on saucers in the kitchen and the men’s voices started up again in there - they sounded like the cattle calling far off. My mother was deceived, or maybe she was so tired she just went back to sleep. I wasn’t so tired that I couldn’t wonder what my grandfather was up to now.
If my grandfather didn’t like me, I didn’t like him any better. I couldn’t understand why everyone else we knew liked him a lot, liked him so much they usually did what he said. My mother didn’t like him either, though she did what he said too. She did what he said because she had to, and she didn’t like that either. He frightened her, but I wasn’t frightened of him, I just didn’t like him, that was all. My grandfather, I felt, needed keeping an eye on.
I didn’t put on my jiffies to keep my feet clean, but skated barefoot across the lino of the breezeway. The sliding door into the kitchen never closed properly. I could huddle up against the wall and look through the slit to a slice of the kitchen as narrow as the edge of a knife. All I could see was a sliver of my father, his feet thrust into work-boots without socks and his trousers on over his pyjamas. The one eye I could see was looking eager, but nervous, the way his dogs looked at him, so before he spoke I knew he was talking to my grandfather.
Still it wasn’t interesting. They were talking about what they always talked about - rain, even though we hadn’t had any for years and years. It was all anyone could ever talk about. I used to be interested because my father kept telling me about all the things I could have when it rained - dresses and a pony and trips to the city. He’d say it to me but he’d keep looking at my mother, so I knew he was really telling her. But my mother would walk away while he was still talking and it never rained and I never got these things and I was beginning to walk away when he talked like this too. But now my father seemed to think it would come soon. It was always coming soon.
‘The angel of the Lord,’ he was saying. ‘That’ll bring it.’ But he was grinning, not reverent the way he should be when he talked of the Lord and his angels. I waited for my grandfather to remind him, but there was no reminder. My father kept talking. ‘That’ll bring them, bring the prayers and bring the rain. The angel of the Lord,’ he said again, repeating himself as though he’d had a beer or two, though I knew he never had a beer when my grandfather was around. ‘The angel of the Lord.’
We heard about angels all the time in church. Our lives were crowded with angels. My favourite was the guardian angels, but there were lots of others - attendant angels, avenging angels, recording angels, angels of mercy, angels of death. I was getting bored, angels were old news. I started to shiver, the days were getting hot but it was still chilly just before dawn. He kept talking and my grandfather didn’t say anything, so I slid back to my bed where my mother was a nice soft bundle to warm me into sleep. When the car started again it was present in my dreams as thunder or the whoosh of wings departing.
I was dreaming of rain. I’d been quite young the last time I’d heard it, but I remembered what it sounded like, the sound that dots make. In my dream it rained and it rained and it rained until the land was covered with water and the house floated away. There was a big rope leading up into the sky that was tethered to the house. I looked up and there was an angel at the other end of the rope, towing us away.
When I woke up the next day, Mum was already up. I could hear her arguing with Dad in the kitchen. It was still cool, my feet were bare on the lino floor and goose bumps prickled up my calves.
Dad told me, ‘We have a guest.’
‘Don’t stare,’ said my mother edgily.
The bicycle noises had been made by a wheelchair, now pulled up to the kitchen table. Our guest was slumped in the wheelchair, its legs covered by a cloth. I was careful not to stare at them. Instead, I stared at the face. It didn’t seem to be looking back.
‘It’s a friend of your grandfather’s,’ my father told me, ‘who needed a place to stay.’
‘And your father in his kindness has offered,’ my mother said.
‘Dad asked me. What did you want me to say?’
I realised instantly that this was the angel of the Lord that my father had been referring to, although it wasn’t the same as the one in my dream. It had done something with its wings.
I looked behind it, looking for where its wings should be, but it was pushed up against the back of the chair and I couldn’t see. Half of the face was hidden by hair as fine as feathers, a yellow so pale it was almost white. But the half I could see was skin tightened over the skull. Eyelids drooped over eyes that were blue with only a dot of black at the centre. I got up close and peered into those eyes. It was like looking into a cloudless sky, no sign of rain. Dad and Grandad and everyone else except my mother always frowned at skies like that. ‘Always the city girl’, my father would say disapprovingly. My mother didn’t take skies seriously enough.
Instead, she would name the blue for me: cobalt, indigo, ultramarine. I could see those colours in the angel’s eyes. I got up so close I could feel the cold coming off its skin, like it had just come out of the refrigerator.
‘What are you doing? Leave it alone!’ It was one of his roars - not as good as Grandad’s, but still frightening. It always made both of us jump and fall back with a jelly feeling in our stomachs.
‘She’s only curious,’ said my mother. ‘Maybe that’s good. I’ll need her to help me look after it.’
‘There’s not much to look after, Mum,’ he said.
‘I’m not your mother,’ said my mother. ‘I’m not its mother.’
Our kitchen table is laminex, green laminex, like a green plain with a pattern of white rivers. I can trace out a landscape on that tabletop, flat as the country that surrounds us. Facing the wall, I’ve mapped the territory all around my place at the table while my parents sit at either end and argue from edge to edge. I take a journey now by boat, maybe a raft, poling along the white rivers while far away on another waterless plain my mother and father argue.
‘It doesn’t eat,’ said Dad. ‘There’s stuff you give it, in injections, I’ve got them, I’m sure you can take care of it.’
‘And washing it? And sitting it on a potty and cleaning it afterwards? Am I to take care of that, too?’
‘You don’t need to. It’s not human like us, it doesn’t need that, it’s just a thing. The injections are sort of like watering it, like a plant. And there’s other stuff in the injections to keep it quiet. We can leave it in the sleep-out for the time being.’
‘For the time being? How long are we meant to have it for?’
‘They just need a place to put it aside for a while.’
‘Put it aside? Why?’
‘Listen,’ said my father earnestly, ‘we’re hiding it, all right? They’re playing God out there, they’re trying to make people like machines and this is one of their failures. The church rescued it. They’ve asked me to deal with it.’
‘Did you ask me if I wanted to deal with this failure?’
‘It’s just a thing. It’s a thing they had made up - like an experiment - but it didn’t work out.’
‘Made up? Made up out of what? For what? Who’re these people who’ve asked you to deal with it?’
‘Important people,’ said my father, trying to sound important himself.
‘You mean your father?’
‘He’s important to us, too right! This place is still in his name. If you want to get rid of it, tell him to come and get it.’
And my father escaped outside where my mother’s voice would be muffled by the sky.
My mother sat staring at the angel thing, left behind with us. It sat like it had been thrown into its chair, slumped like a doll. I tried to pull it upright, but it was quite heavy for something so fragile-looking. It felt as dry as paper, as though its skin would tear if I handled it too roughly. I rearranged its arms instead.
‘What are you doing?’ asked my mother.
I jumped and bit my tongue, but my mother couldn’t frighten me like my father or grandfather.
‘Looking for its wings,’ I said.
‘What do you mean, its wings?’
‘Angels have wings,’ I explained.
It made sense to me. We were beset by angels, according to the church, but most populous were the angels that had fallen. It was not so surprising that one had fallen into our lives.
But my mother was not so keen on angels, she was not so keen on the church, come to that. I didn’t expect her to be pleased, and she wasn’t.
‘I’m going to ring your grandfather,’ she said. ‘I’m going to tell him he can keep his angels and his crazy ideas, and stop passing them on to my daughter.’
My mother was about to get herself into trouble with my grandfather. Like I said, she had no sense. ‘He didn’t pass them on, I thought of it all by myself, I saw the angel in my dream ...’
But my half-lies only made it worse.
‘You’ve been cooped up inside for too long,’ she said, and threatened to send me outside for a walk. It was a terrible thing for her to say; I knew she felt that outside could make you feel more cooped up than inside. So I was quiet while she rang my grandfather, so quiet I could hear the phone ringing in his kitchen and the voice that said hello. It wasn’t him, it was one of the many women that always seemed to be in his kitchen, cooking his meals, cleaning his house. His wives, my father called them, but never when he could hear.
The wife who answered was reverential about his time, didn’t think he could come to the phone, but my mother insisted. My grandfather had a voice that could be as soft as rain and as loud as thunder. Now it belled out as I heard him say, ‘Daughter.’
My mother’s hand clenched on the receiver but her voice was calm. ‘Good morning, father. How are you keeping?’
They talked no-talk for a while, they both knew the questions and the answers, about how he was - good - and how my mother was -good - and how my father was - good - until finally they got to how I was and then my mother broke the pattern.
‘She’s not so good.’ I was proud of my mother, even if she didn’t have any sense, she was so brave to be saying what she was saying to my grandfather. ‘This - this thing you’ve left with us, father, we’ve got a child in the house and I think she’s a bit young for an influence like this, she’s a high-strung child, she doesn’t understand properly, she’s getting it fixed in her head that this - this thing you’ve left is some kind of angel.’ My mother gulped. ‘She’s got such an imagination, I don’t think it’s good for her.’
Neither of us could believe that she was saying what she was saying. She was whispering at the end of it, I was surprised my grandfather could hear her at all. He had dropped his voice in response, soft as rain, I couldn’t hear his words, going on and on, but I saw them on my mother’s face. ‘No, father, no, that won’t be necessary. Yes, I can deal with it, with her and the - the angel thing. No, I won’t tell anybody. Yes, I’m sure it’s a good idea.’
The day had hotted up but she looked cold and pinched as she hung up. ‘He reminded me,’ she said, ‘he reminded me that he’d offered to send you to school in the city, a good church school where you’d get proper instruction.’
‘He said a lot more than that,’ I said. Sometimes you had to be firm with my mother, it was the only way.
But all she said was, ‘He repeats himself a lot,’ and I knew there was something she wasn’t telling me. And then to herself, ‘He’s going mad.’
It was all very worrying. That was the only way my grandfather could frighten me, by frightening my mother. I listened very carefully for everything she said about the angel to my father, and then she repeated that his father was beginning to think he was God, not just his servant.
‘Dad’s smarter than that, hon,’ said my father.
‘What’s this about making rain, then? Angels who can bring rain. You don’t really believe that, do you?’
‘Course I don’t. But there are a lot who will, a lot who will believe it if my father says he does. We may not bring them rain, love, but we’ll deliver faith. And hope. What’s wrong with giving people hope?’
‘Everything, if that’s all you can give them.’
My father just laughed and said, ‘Think of the congregation this will get us!’
My mother said, ‘At least some can harvest a good crop in this drought.’ My father laughed again but told her not to repeat this to my grandfather and went back to the paddocks.
After that my mother ignored the angel as much as possible. She ignored it so successfully she forgot some of its injections. I didn’t dare remind her, but when I saw the angel’s lips move, working against each other, I thought I knew and ran for a straw and a glass of water. I had to work the straw between its teeth, which were shut tight. Its lips felt like iceblocks, but I had guessed right. The movements were suction and it drained the glass. I kept up the refills until the angel was blowing bubbles.
I didn’t tell my mother, not even when the angel wet itself, and the chair, and the floor. I mopped up the floor and left the angel to dry. This was quick at midday, but the heat had another side-effect.
My mother said to my father, ‘That thing has started to smell.’
‘Leave it, love,’ said my father uneasily. ‘It isn’t like it matters. And they’ll be back for it soon.’
‘How soon?’ my mother wanted to know, but my father was already gone. ‘How soon?’ my mother demanded of the angel. ‘How long am I going to have this stinking thing in my kitchen?’ She and the angel looked back at each other for a while, and it was my mother’s eyes that fell. When she raised her eyes back to its face, she spoke to it as she might have spoken to me, stating a fact. ‘We do have to do something about that smell, you know.’
‘It must need a bath,’ I said.
‘We don’t have the water for that.’ We were sharing the same bathwater as it was, a few inches in the tub, and some nights we only had what my mother called a duck bath, a basin of water and a washer. My mother seemed to like the angel more now that she had yelled at it, but still not enough to share its bathwater. Definitely not enough to give it a wash. I wanted her to go on liking the angel more.
‘We could take it to the baths.’ I knew this was the right thing to say, my mother loved the baths. Every country town had a pool - virulent green lawns bordering an acid blue rectangle of water, as precious as the most beautiful water gardens during the drought. Our pool was known for the hot springs that stank so they had to be good for you. A lot of people came from down south just to use the springs, so the angel wouldn’t stand out so much as being different. She could swim in her underwear, a lot of people did, and maybe it would warm her up.
‘Dunk her like a biscuit?’ said my mother. ‘At least it’ll get us out of the house.’ I realised I’d made a mistake. My father doesn’t like my mother taking off just like that. He says his mother had one day every week for going into town, and so everyone knew where they were, and he could place his orders and so forth. My mother tried to restrain herself, but sometimes, like now, she just wanted to get into the jeep and go. So we did.
We bumped over the dry creek bed at our boundary like a roller-coaster; dry because it had been dammed higher up. But even the dam was dry now. We did a figure eight there and back, hollering with the thrill as the jeep bounced and veered and threw up dust. We could have been the only thing moving under the afternoon sun, and we could see from edge to edge, not a hill, barely a tree. We were a long way from town, but the road was almost straight except for one right-angled turn around the boundaries of a property so big its owner could insist that public roads respect his private property. It was out of sight of our place, which was a good thing because my mother took that corner without slowing down. Dad had said she was ruining the vehicles, the speed she drove, and why was she in such a hurry to get to town anyway? My mother said then that that bend in the road was the only one she had in her life, and she’d get all the excitement out of it she could. Dad had asked, ‘What about the kid?’
But I always felt quite safe when my mother drove.
The back tyres slid and squealed, red dust smoked from under them and plumed out after us. The dust cloud blanked out the rear window. We could have come from anywhere. I strained my seatbelt to hang over the back seat and watch. My mother and I squealed along with the wheels.
‘Look,’ said my mother. ‘The first lamb. Poor little thing.’
The dusty ewes lay like cushions strewn on the bleached grass, panting in the heat. Everything was the colour of the dirt, except that little speck of new-washed, newborn white. ‘Poor little thing,’ said my mother again. ‘No feed for it or its mum.’
‘They’ll turn the lambing ewes into the crop,’ I said practically. My mother knows nothing about farming, although she’s lived in the country for longer than I have. ‘See, the wheat’s dying off already.’
In the next paddock, the little green stalks of new wheat were already turning yellow. Daubed in on the soil they looked like writing looked to me before I learned to read, telling some story I was unable to understand. But I could read these signs - even my mother was literate to this extent.
‘Another year of drought,’ she said drearily. ‘Another little sacrificial lamb.’
We had forgotten the angel thing, bundled into the back seat, but the turn must have pushed it upright against the door behind me. Its head was bumping against the glass, the yellow-white hair falling over its face. I swivelled round to prop its head up. Its skin felt warmer, just chilly, not ice-cold. Maybe it was the wind rushing over its face that had pulled its lips back, maybe it was smiling. ‘Look, Mum, look!’ My mother adjusted the rear-view mirror and inspected the angel. ‘Maybe it thought it was flying again,’ I suggested.
‘Maybe,’ said my mother, and slowed down.
The smell of the pool reached out into the street like a fog. I pushed the angel thing through the special doors they had for wheelchairs while my mother paid for us all at the turnstile. Together we edged the chair over the plastic matting down the corridor to the women’s pool. It was a tight fit in the changing cubicle, but we could do it if I stood on the bench.
When my mother took the cover off the angel’s legs, they were skinny but didn’t look so different to anyone else’s. I wondered why they had to be hidden.
‘Get into your cossie,’ said my mother brightly. ‘And don’t stare.’
I wriggled into my swimsuit while my mother worked the cotton dress up and over the angel’s body, but I could still look. So I could see why my mother gasped and pulled the dress down again, quickly. The angel wasn’t wearing underwear. ‘She’s like me,’ I said. ‘She hasn’t grown hair yet.’
‘She can wear my slip into the pool,’ said my mother. ‘You get behind and help me to pull it over her head, all right?’
I knew my mother didn’t want me to see the angel thing without underwear, but what I saw was even worse. When my mother pulled her forward she looked hump-backed, as if she had her wings curled up in there. But when her dress was pulled up there were no wings; you could see it was muscles, really big muscles that twitched and jumped as if they were feeling something that wasn’t there. Or maybe they were trying to shrug off the big scars that ran down over her shoulderblades.
‘That’s what happened to her wings,’ I said. ‘See? You can see where they’ve been cut off.’ My mother didn’t say anything. She looked at the scars and didn’t say anything.
The angel was very light to lift down the steps that led into the water. I helped with her legs and they weighed almost nothing at all. ‘She weighs no more than a bird,’ said my mother as the hot water lapped us up.
‘Did you know,’ I said instructively, ‘that birds have hollow bones? That’s why people can’t fly. Even if they had wings sewn onto their shoulders, they’d be too heavy.’
We put the angel down on the seat built underwater, but then we had to hold her there so she wouldn’t float off.
‘Look, she’s flying,’ I said. ‘She’s really flying now, isn’t she, Mum?’
‘Yes,’ said my mother. ‘Really flying.’
The angel was definitely smiling now, it wasn’t me imagining it. Her pupils were growing. It looked like they were getting closer. ‘The angel is getting nearer to us.’
‘Coming in to land,’ said my mother. ‘Are you reading me yet?’ she said to the angel. She said it as if she were joking, but neither of us laughed. If I’d thought of the angel as having a voice, I would have said it would rumble like thunder in the distance. Instead it mewled, a piping noise like a small bird very close.
‘Hurt,’ I thought it said. ‘Hurt.’
It was like a table talking, or one of the cattle, it was like a person bursting out of a thing. My mother shied away from it, flailing at the water. I stayed close to the angel, staring into its eyes like they were the sky and I was reading it, frowning the way Dad and Grandad frowned at a cloudless sky, making it tell them things. I wanted the angel to tell me things.
‘Who hurt you?’ I asked, and I was saying it in the voice my father used to order me around, the voice my grandfather used on him. Because I was part of them as well as myself, I knew the answer to my question even as I asked. ‘It was them, wasn’t it?’ Maybe not my grandfather in person, definitely not my father because he wouldn’t, but men like them. We weren’t looking after the angel, we were keeping it prisoner. I turned to my mother and told her, in case she hadn’t heard, ‘It was them. It was the church.’
The angel was still making little noises, there may have been words. ‘Did it say lamb?’ I asked my mother. ‘I thought it said lamb, but why would it?’
My mother drew breath so sharply it seemed to cut her throat, she made a sound as strange as any of the angel’s. ‘It couldn’t be that,’ she said. ‘Oh no, oh no. There’s been a mistake, can’t you see? There’s been a mistake, but I’ll tell your father about it and he’ll fix it up.’
I don’t know why I still have faith in my mother after all these years when I also know that she has no sense at all when it comes to my father. My mother has known my father for longer than I have, but she still has faith in him. And he has faith in my grandfather, and my grandfather has faith in God, and so there was nothing to be done to fix it up because they all - we all - had faith in someone who didn’t deserve it.
My grandfather’s Landrover was parked in the carport when we got home and my father was standing in front of it, like he was barring our way. He was holding a gun. Not the rifle, the .22, that was for rabbits and crows and warning shots, but the .303, the shotgun for slaughtering steers. My mother would never let me watch when my father used that gun. She hated guns.
‘Dad’s not feeling too good about you taking this thing out in public, like,’ said my father unhappily. My grandfather was not a big man, but his presence spread like oil. When we looked up at the house, we already knew he was there, standing in the shadows of the verandah. On the whole, I thought the gun was less of a worry.
‘We reckon it isn’t safe, having it around. I said so to Dad and he said that maybe I was right, maybe I should do something about it.’
My mother hated that, hated it when my father spoke for his father as though they’d decided something together when everyone knew my grandfather could work him like a sheep dog. She pushed past my father, pushing aside the shotgun like a turnstile, crossing the line from the glare in the yard to the darkness under the verandah to confront my grandfather. Left in the jeep, I could only squint across the blaze of light to their dim figures, my mother’s arms flailing as if she were still swimming, my grandfather standing still in the gloom. My mother’s voice carried, high-pitched with tears.
‘Its wings,’ said my mother, and I could hear the angel’s piping in her voice. ‘Why’d they have to cut off its wings?’
‘It had to be done,’ said my grandfather. He was using his preacher’s voice; the words rolled out to me in the jeep.
‘It was uncontrollable, hon,’ my father called to her from his post by the gate. The gun was still pointed towards us in the jeep, swinging from his hand, but all his attention was focused on his own house. ‘It would’ve tried to escape ...’
My mother ran back to the edge of the verandah where the light met the shade. Her eyes were masked. All I could see was her mouth stretched by the amount of grief it encompassed.
‘You did it,’ said my mother. ‘Oh my god, you did it.’
‘It’s just a thing, honey, just an animal, made to look like a person.’
‘It spoke,’ cried my mother. ‘It spoke to me and I looked into its eyes and I saw it had a soul.’
‘Honey - ‘ said my father helplessly, looking back to where my grandfather was standing.
‘It’s just a thing, a thing that was made to deceive, and I didn’t think you’d fall for it,’ said my grandfather to her back. ‘Didn’t think you’d fall for it, a smart city girl like you.’ My mother ignored him.
‘And how many people here d’you think are going to fall for this lamb of your father’s?’ said my mother. ‘This sacrificial lamb? Is it the blood of this lamb that will bring the rain?’
My grandfather walked past her out into the light. He didn’t push past her, but she made way for him, cringing back. He didn’t look at her, but went to my father’s side before he turned to face her. He isn’t a big man, my grandfather; his son my father towers over him, twice as broad, but the evening sun threw a shadow that covered him. ‘Jesus gave his life to save us,’ said my grandfather softly. However softly he spoke, he could always be heard. ‘Compared to that, what’s the life of something that was never really alive worth?’
‘It’s as alive as I am,’ said my mother. ‘It’s a person like I am. I’m going to tell everyone that. I’m going to tell everyone what you’re doing.’
My grandfather looked at her, but spoke to my father. ‘Your wife told me it was a bad influence on your little girl. I didn’t know it was a bad influence on her as well. She asked me to do something about it. I think we should.’
I knew what my father was going to do with the gun by the way he handled it; lifting it, but not aiming. ‘Get it out of the jeep,’ he said to me. ‘I don’t want the upholstery spoilt.’
I’d watched my father fire guns before, heaps of times. It was like thunder and lightning, the crack sounded in one place, the flash struck in another, and the flash was death. A crop-nibbling rabbit, a little lamb that was crying because it had no eyes, or the crow that had picked them out; there had always been a reason. This was the first time I thought the death unreasonable.
‘You can’t do that, Dad,’ I said, astounded that he’d even think it. ‘You can’t do that.’
‘No,’ agreed my mother quite calmly, ‘you can’t do that. I’m taking it away.’ And she started walking towards the jeep, putting herself between the angel and the gun. My father started to scream after her to come back, to come back right now. My grandfather’s voice cut through his yelling as if it weren’t there.
‘You won’t get far,’ said my grandfather. ‘We’ll have all righteous people looking out for it ... and you and the jeep. How far do you think you’ll get?’ And he took the gun from my father.
My mother turned at the jeep door to face him and the gun. ‘Reckon I have to find out,’ she said.
As she turned back to get into the jeep, my father lunged at her from behind, the way he tackled other men when he played football on the weekends. He pulled her away from the door and threw her on the ground, and then reached across the steering wheel to grab me and haul me out of the jeep. I yelled and clamped onto the wheel.
I didn’t see the angel move, I only felt its impact as it pushed me, the feather-light hair brushing my bare arms as I hit my father’s chest. I was winded and my father was thrown back a couple of feet, as if he’d been thrown from a horse. As he hit the ground, the gun in my grandfather’s hands went off so loudly I thought I had been hit in the head, but it was only the noise deafening me. In the awful silence, there was another explosion like an echo of the gun. Thunder.
Dark clouds boiled up in the sky as if they were hurrying to make up lost time. The rain fell so quickly my mother was drenched before she got into the jeep, as if a bucket of water had been emptied over her. The rain fell so hard my father and grandfather were beaten back. My grandfather roared over the roaring of the water, ‘You won’t get far.’
‘Reckon I have to find out,’ said my mother to herself. Then she put her foot down on the accelerator, and she wasn’t to lift it till we’d outrun the rain.
As we skidded out the gate, I turned and watched through the rear window. My father was trying to run after us, falling and sprawling in the mud. My grandfather was headed back into the house. ‘He’ll phone,’ I yelped. ‘He’s going to phone.’
Lightning struck the phone lines just after we’d passed under them. A pole, felled like a tree, brought the cable down for a hundred yards on either side. We almost lost traction in the mud, but I barely noticed. My grandfather ran out of the house and fought his way through the rain to his Landcruiser. The bigger vehicle kept the road better. He was gaining on us as we reached the creek bed, already filling. My mother didn’t slow down, but churned right through it at her usual speed, raising sprays of water where earlier that day we had raised sprays of dust. The sprays hid the tidal wave bearing down on us from the broken dam. The surge of water hit us side on. It was almost as high as the windows, almost capsized us. We slewed around to face it and surfed backwards towards the opposite bank, reaching it just before it, too, was engulfed. The wheels spun, gripped and shot us forward in a spurt of mud. I caught it right across my face as I leaned out the window to watch the flood lift my grandfather’s Landcruiser and bear it away.
The rain soon washed the mud from my face, though it was slackening off. It was a nice steady downfall as we went through the town. I don’t think anyone noticed us and the angel particularly, though everyone was out on the streets. Some people were jumping around, others were just standing there, eyes shut, as if they were praying.
We were on the other side of town before I thought to ask my mother where we were going. ‘The city, I suppose,’ she said. ‘In the city they’ll know what to do with the angel. How to help it.’
I wasn’t so sure the angel needed help. It had brought rain when we needed help, but what could we do for it? There was no point trying to tell my mother this. I dozed off in the passenger seat. My head was tossed from side to side as we slid around the road, but I always felt safe when my mother drove.
First published 1995.