The Weight of Water

1The drought had been with them so long that Ellie had stopped noticing its shape, and the farm itself seemed moribund. It was in the cracked earth of the dam, which had shrunk to a brown eye staring at the sky; in the sheep that gathered at the troughs each morning, patient and thin; in the way her father now walked the fence lines, slowly, as if the ground might give way beneath him.

2Nobody spoke about it at dinner. They spoke instead about school, about the price of feed, about the neighbours who had sold up and moved to the coast. Her mother cut the meat into smaller pieces than she used to and said nothing about that either. Ellie had learned to read the silences the way her father read the sky: carefully, for signs.

3It was her little brother, Sam, who finally said it. He was seven and had not yet learned which things were not to be spoken. “Are we going to have to move?” he asked, his fork halfway to his mouth.

4Her father set down his knife. For a moment, the only sound was the ticking of the kitchen clock, which Ellie had never noticed before and now could not stop hearing.

5“Maybe,” her father said. It was the first time Ellie had heard him say anything other than “We’ll be right.” The word sat on the table between them, heavier than anything on their plates.

6Later that night, she found him on the veranda, looking out at the paddocks silvered by the moon. She sat beside him without speaking, as she had done when she was small, and after a while he put his arm around her shoulders.

7“Your great-grandmother came out here with nothing,” he said eventually. “Lived through the worst drought this district has ever seen. Used to say the land doesn’t owe us anything. We just have to be worth staying for.”

8Ellie did not fully understand what that meant, and she suspected her father did not either. But she understood the way he said it: not as an answer, but as something to hold on to.

9Three weeks later, she woke to a sound she almost did not recognise, a soft, uneven drumming on the iron roof. She lay still, afraid that moving might stop it. Then she heard the back door open, and her father’s voice, rough and astonished, calling her mother’s name into the dark.

10It was not enough rain to fill the dam. It would not save the season. But in the morning, the whole family stood in the yard in their pyjamas, faces turned upward, and nobody said a word, because for once the silence did not need explaining.