The Anvil Cloud, by Irena Marchuk

An original novel extract set in the twentieth century.

By four o’clock the sky to the west had turned the colour of a bruise, and Marta had stopped pretending to do the ironing.

She stood on the porch with the baby on her hip and watched it come. The wheat ran away from the house in every direction, flat and gold, nearly ready, the best crop in three years, the crop that was going to pay the bank and buy Pavel a new boot to replace the one he had mended with wire. Above it the cloud was building itself, slowly and deliberately, into a great anvil, a tower, a cathedral of dark.

There was no wind yet. That was the worst of it. The air lay on the land like a hand pressing down, thick and hot and silent, and even the chickens had gone quiet under the granary, and the dog lay flat with its chin on its paws, watching her, as if she might know what to do.

She did not know what to do. Pavel had taken the wagon to Elmvale for flour and would not be back till dark, and there was nothing to be done with a storm in any case. You could not tie down a field. You could not pull a sheet over three hundred acres. She thought of hail. She had seen it once, the summer they arrived, stones like hen’s eggs, and afterwards the Dahl place across the road had looked as though someone had taken a scythe to it in a temper.

Please, she said, not aloud. She did not know whom she was asking. Please, not this year.

The first gust came across the wheat like a hand smoothing a cat the wrong way, and the whole field shivered silver. The baby laughed. Marta held her tighter. A spatter of fat drops struck the porch roof, one, two, then a dozen, loud as gravel.

She listened. She listened with her whole body, the way she had listened at night when the baby was ill, for the change in the sound, the hard white rattle that would mean the end of everything. Rain drummed. Thunder rolled round the edge of the sky like furniture being moved in an empty house.

It was rain. Only rain. She let out a breath she had been holding, it seemed, since four o’clock, and found that she was crying, and that the baby was patting her wet cheek with a small, interested hand.

How does the writer show Marta’s thoughts and feelings as the storm approaches the farm?

You should consider:

• what the writer says about Marta
• the writer’s use of language to show her thoughts and feelings

You must refer to the text to support your answer, using relevant subject terminology where appropriate.