All Our Shimmering Skies

by Dalton, Trent

  ‘Dad!’ Molly says, kneeling down, hands out to help her father regain his equilibrium. But he doesn’t lean on those hands, he only grabs them and reefs them towards his head before scrambling to his feet and reaching for the razor strop that hangs from a nail by the stove. He pushes Molly against the kitchen table and forces her head down hard, knocking his drinking jar off the table and smashing it on the floor. And Aubrey Hook sits perfectly still with his right hand gripped around his glass as he stares into the eyes of his niece while her father flogs her backside and her rear thighs with the razor strop. Up and down and up and down. The movement of the thick leather strop and the pulsing of the kitchen light bulb. Welts upon welts upon welts, blood upon blood. Ten lashes, twelve, fifteen; eighteen in total. And Molly Hook is so truly grateful in this moment for the curse of Longcoat Bob because her stone heart is surely the only thing that is keeping her from crying in front of her dumb-faced, dark-shadow uncle, whose black eyes she refuses to turn away from, no matter how loud that strop whacks, no matter how deep it stings and cuts. Do not look away, Molly. Dig, Molly, dig. Whack and whack and whack and whack. Dig and dig and dig and dig. And Aubrey Hook’s lips smile beneath his thick black moustache and he raises a moonshine toast to the gravedigger girl and then he howls with deranged laughter, rejoicing in the music he hears in his head, the music made by leather meeting skin.

  GRAVES AT HER COMMAND

  Sleep, Molly, sleep. Keep the bedroom door shut. Stay right here until they are gone or until they are dead. Her bed is a single mattress on a wooden floor by a duchesse with a small square mirror. Rising damp in the wood walls. It’s morning, well past dawn, and Horace and Aubrey Hook still scream and laugh and bellow beyond her bedroom door. She has her mother’s copy of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, taken from the living room bookshelf and shaken furiously from the landing to expunge the silverfish wiggling through its fertile pages. A black hardback cover, pages yellowing and brittle. She reads with her belly pressed against the mattress to ease the pressure on her throbbing arse and the whip-welted backs of her thighs, her head leaning over the end of the mattress, her elbows and the open Shakespeare flat on the floor.

  The gravedigger girl reads The Tempest. It’s about the wind and the rain, about the kinds of storms that strike Darwin in the stifling summer when men like Aubrey and Horace Hook turn strange and vengeful like Prospero the sorcerer, who can wield the wind and the rain and who can raise the dead from grim and sorry graveyards. ‘“Graves at my command have waked their sleepers,”’ the girl reads. Sleep, Molly, sleep. The Tempest feels like a dream to Molly. One great fevered sea dream. Sleep, Molly, sleep. ‘“And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind,”’ the girl reads. ‘“We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”’ And she sleeps.

  She sleeps for eight hours and her empty stomach wakes her in darkness. She can hear her father and uncle outside now. They are in the front yard working the engine of Aubrey’s red utility truck. The motor won’t start and the men bark at the car, curse it for not acknowledging their murderous threats. Molly wants to stand, but standing is no longer so easy with the swelling. She pushes herself up with her arms first then bends her knees and that motion puts pressure on her backside and pain shoots through her lower back and into her brain. She opens her bedroom door carefully, slips into the living room on the tips of her toes, the hollers of her long-drunk and stupefied father and uncle still safely at a distance in the yard. She scurries down the house’s rear steps to the under-house toilet. Agony now just to pass a small stool. She drops a scoop of sawdust down the long drop.

  Back upstairs now and into the kitchen where she opens the icebox and pushes aside a bowl of fried sheep’s brains and tomato sauce and fills her hands with three old pork sausages and a block of mould-covered cheese. She opens a small standalone pantry cupboard to find small stacks of mixed canned goods: Spam luncheon meat, Edgell tinned peas and, the only dinner Horace Hook seems to eat these days, Campbell’s Condensed Oxtail Soup. Molly takes a can of Spam and a can of peas. She finds a can opener in the cutlery drawer. She fills two empty glass pint milk bottles with water and scurries back to her bedroom, closing the door behind her. Molly drops her food on the mattress and places the bottles on the floor then drags her mirrored duchesse across the room and pushes it against the back of her bedroom door. She lies back down on the mattress on her belly, bites an end off a pork sausage.

  For two whole days, barricaded safely behind that bedroom door, she waits out the tempest. And three words keep rattling through her mind like a mantra. Like an enchantment. Like a spell. Like a curse.

  Dig, Molly, dig.

  *

  Dusk. Molly hears the utility truck pulling out of the driveway. Her bedroom door creaks open and the noise of it makes her pause. She waits for signs of life through the house. Nothing. She scans the house, assesses the silent fallout of her father’s and uncle’s deep dive into white spirit. Lamps on their side on the floor. Chairs on their side. Broken glass in the hallway. She’ll be expected to clean this up. She will not clean this up.

  She pads into the kitchen. Empty bottles and shattered glasses. A patch of human hair on the floor. Streaks of blood across the walls. Blood and bile vomit in the sink.

  Molly fills a cup of water, glugs it down. She sits for a moment at the kitchen table. A beer-stained newspaper on the table covered in bush tobacco and ash. Northern Standard. Days old, weeks maybe. It’s open at a public notice, an order. Molly dusts off the tobacco, holds the paper up to her eyes.

  COMMONWEALTH OF AUSTRALIA

  NORTHERN TERRITORY ADMINISTRATION

  PROCLAMATION

  EVACUATION ORDER

  CITIZENS OF DARWIN

  The Federal War Cabinet has decided that women and children must be compulsorily evacuated from Darwin as soon as possible, except women required for essential services. Arrangements have been completed and the first party will leave within the next 48 hours. This party will include sick in hospital, expectant mothers, aged and infirm and women with young children. You have all been issued with printed notices advising you what may be taken and this must be strictly adhered to. Personal effects must not exceed 35 lbs. The staff dealing with evacuation is at the Native Affairs Branch in Mitchell Street and will be on duty day and night continuously. The personnel who will make up the first party will be advised during the next few hours and it will be the duty of all citizens to comply at once with the instructions given by responsible authorities.

  Remember what your Prime Minister, Mr Curtin, said recently. ‘The time has gone by for argument. The instructions of the Federal Government must be carried out.’ The Federal Government has made all arrangements for the comfort and welfare of your families in the South. Darwin citizens will greatly assist the war effort by cheerfully carrying out all requests. There will be hardship and sacrifice, but the war situation demands these and I am sure Darwin will set the rest of Australia a magnificent example to follow.

  (Sgd.) C.L.A. ABBOTT,

  Administrator of the Northern Territory.

  Molly places the paper back on the table. She pads to her bedroom and slips on her dig boots. Dig, Molly, dig. Dig for your courage. Dig for your soul. Dig for your rage.

  Bert the shovel leans against her bedroom wall by a window. Bert’s been waiting for this moment and Molly knows it. Molly and Bert walk to Horace Hook’s bedroom at the end of the long hallway. His door is locked as always because Molly and Bert are never to enter Horace’s bedroom. Molly raises the shovel in two hands the way she might point a spear at a lion and she drives the shovel blade hard and fast into the wood where the lock meets the door. The blade digs in, the old wood splitting and splintering. Molly pulls Bert back and drives him in again and again. Finally he digs in hard and Molly puts all her weight on the end of the shovel and the door cracks and flies open.

  Her father’s room is dark and smells of sweat and sick a
nd spirits – the liquor kind and maybe the ghost kind too. She slides under her father’s bed, grips a large canvas drawstring duffel bag filled with tools, drags it out and dumps its contents on the floor: blunt pickaxes and files, hammers and spades. She takes the duffel bag into the kitchen, fills it with every canned food she can find in the pantry. Canned corned beef, canned corn. One can of Nestlé Sunshine powdered milk.

  Molly hurries back to her bedroom, finds her leather water bag in the corner of her room beside a wide-brimmed yard hat which she stuffs in the duffel bag. Back into the kitchen to fill the water bag then back to her father’s bedroom where she digs her shoulder into the side of a chest of drawers. She pushes hard with her legs, her boots slipping on the floorboards but sticking enough to slide the chest of drawers a few feet across the room. Three wooden panels in the newly exposed floor are shorter than those flanking them. Molly kneels down and finds a crack wide enough for her to slip in her right forefinger and pull one panel up. Her left hand removes the other two panels then her right hand reaches into the space not more than one foot deep between the bedroom floorboards and the under-house ceiling. She knows what she’s looking for. A black metal box, lidded and locked, not much bigger than the square shortbread biscuit tins lining the shelves at A.E. Jolly’s store in town. She does not replace the panels or slide the chest of drawers back where it was. There is no time for that now.

  ‘“While we have time”,’ she says to herself, ‘“let us do good.”’

  The Japs are coming. Time is running out. There is only time enough to be good.

  *

  Darkness now in Hollow Wood Cemetery. Molly carries a kerosene lamp but she could find her way through this cemetery without a light. She could close her eyes and make it through this death hall, just by running her hands over the shapes of the cemetery headstones.

  Martha Sorenson, 1842–1908. Granite stone work. Ridgetop contouring. ‘In loving memory of dear mother.’ Someone might be alive today who misses Martha Sorenson the way Molly misses her mother.

  Teddy Byrne, 1854–1904. Limestone in a bevelled block. ‘Sure is dark down here,’ Teddy offers on his headstone. Teddy reminds Molly to laugh.

  Edwin Harper, 1803–1887, reminds Molly to carry on. ‘Edwin Harper. Robbed, stabbed twice in neck, 22 years. Survived sinking of Fortuna, 33 years. Met June Mooney, 35 years. Farewelled June, 83 years. Died, 84 years.’

  Norman Ballard, 1877–1926. Blue-pearl granite. Gothic top contouring. ‘The end and reward of toil is rest.’ Molly cannot rest. Not yet. Not until she has opened the black metal box tucked under her left arm.

  Bonnie Russell, 1865–1923. Grey limestone. Apex top contouring. An epitaph line that Molly hopes every night in her sleep will turn out to be true: ‘Death is only a wall between two gardens.’ Molly standing in one garden on one side of that wall, here in the Northern Territory, her garden filled with ironwood trees and fern-leaved grevilleas with orange flowers the colour of fire; her mother, Violet, on the other side of that wall, standing among roses, red and pink roses and nothing else. She’s smiling. She’s waiting.

  So much love inside a cemetery. So much loss, but so much love. It’s the one thing Violet appreciated about gravedigging. She called it ‘the romance of the cemetery’, though Horace never understood what she meant. ‘Ain’t nuthin’ romantic about it,’ he said. ‘Just holes for dust an’ bones.’ But Violet saw the poetry in the place. She saw those lines on Cherie Lawrence’s grave. 1854–1917. India red granite. A serpentine contour on top:

  EVERY DAY AT HALF PAST THREE

  A WHISPERED NAME, CHERIE

  AND YOU SAIL BACK TO ME

  ACROSS THE ETERNAL SEA

  A simple line of love for Henry Prendergast, 1866–1909: ‘I miss your hand in mine.’ The simple reflection on the life of Hazel Collins, 1854–1926: ‘Died grateful. Died loved.’

  The harrowing epitaphs to children. Violet Hook told Molly that these reminded her to be grateful. ‘Love lies below. Hope flies above’; ‘We held you for a day. We hold your heart forever.’ They reminded Violet of all she stood to lose.

  Molly’s yellow lamp lights up the darkened cemetery lanes. Her duffel bag hangs on her back with the strap stretching from her left shoulder to her right hip. Bert the shovel rests like a sheathed sword between her shoulder blade and the bag strap. All these gravestones she knows so well. All these life lessons from people in the beyond. Marion Curtis, 1854–1908: ‘Loved in life, lamented in death.’ Lucille Clifford, 1823–1874: ‘While we have time, let us do good.’ Molly was raised on these lessons, these headstone messages to God. All that trust in faith.

  ‘Blessed are the pure in heart.’

  ‘Eternity, be thou my refuge.’

  ‘I know that my redeemer liveth.’

  ‘A lonely scene shall thee restore.’

  Last words left behind by the dead. Concluding truths after lifetimes endured.

  But can she believe them? Can she believe the words of Eunice Milton, 1875–1934: ‘Don’t grieve, for what we lose comes around in another form’? Because Molly likes that one. She wants to believe in Eunice Milton. She won’t grieve the loss of her mother because Violet Hook is still here, in another form. Molly just hasn’t found her yet. But she’s here. She’s come around again.

  Now the night sky speaks to her.

  ‘What makes you so sure, Molly?’ the night sky asks.

  ‘I can feel her,’ she says, because to respond to the night sky like this is to be graceful and poetic.

  ‘Where can you feel her?’

  ‘Everywhere,’ Molly says. ‘In trees, in flowers, in the rocks, in the dirt.’

  Molly rushes on with her lamp. ‘Did she come back around in another form?’ Molly asks the night sky.

  ‘You’ve been talking to the day sky again, haven’t you?’

  ‘A little bit,’ Molly says.

  ‘It’s a lie, Molly.’

  ‘What is?’

  ‘The day sky. Be wary of the things it tells you. The day sky is an illusion. It’s a trick. You believe it’s so blue and so real you can touch it, but the truth is, Molly, the day sky is just more of me. More black. And the black goes on forever.’

  ‘A boundless sea?’

  ‘A black sea with no shore,’ the night sky says. ‘Never ending or beginning. Never to be trusted.’

  In the south-western corner of the cemetery she stops at a gravestone. Molly has found the grave she’s been looking for. Thelma Leonard. Upright limestone. Oval top contouring. She places her lamp beside the headstone. She slips off her duffel bag and holds the black tin box in two hands. She runs her fingers over her target connection point, a small hanging padlock at the centre of the tin box. Then, with a fierce swing of her gravedigger girl arms, she smashes the tin box against Thelma Leonard’s headstone.

  But the box does not break open. There are items in the box, hard and small, and they rattle and bang against the insides as though Molly’s holding a box of lit Chinatown firecrackers. Molly tries again, with another rabid, wild gravedigger girl swing that dents the box but does not break it open.

  ‘What are you doing, Molly?’ the night sky asks.

  ‘I’m putting it all back,’ she says.

  ‘You don’t have time for this, Molly,’ the night sky says. ‘The pubs are closing in town. They’ll be home soon.’

  ‘What makes you so sure?’

  ‘Night skies tell no lies, Molly.’

  Molly looks up to the black sky blanket beyond the hanging leaves of the milkwood tree. She looks back down at the black rock frog rock.

  ‘“While we have time, let us do good,”’ she says. ‘The Japs are comin’. Everybody’s gettin’ out. Stuart Highway’s gonna be full of buses and cars and army troop lorries. They’ll be stuck in town for hours.’

  ‘What if they’re not in town?’ the night sky asks. ‘What if they’re just at Aubrey’s house, sipping moonshine in the old shed?’

  The thought of Aubrey fills Molly�
��s arms with warm blood and she tenses her muscles and she bashes the tin against the rock so hard her gritted front teeth feel set to crack. This time the box lid bursts open and flashes of gold and silver spread across the dirt. Jewellery. Necklaces, bracelets, rings. Wedding bands. Engagement rings. Victorian engagement rings. Edwardian engagement rings. Molly takes the lamp and runs it over the ground, her fingers scrabbling for the scattered jewellery and carefully placing it back in the box. More than twenty pieces in total. Diamond. Amethyst. Opal. Pearl. Gold and gold and more of other people’s gold, all stolen by her father and uncle and stockpiled in the black tin box until they were ready to take the train to Sydney, where no Darwin loved ones would spot the sacred items in the shop window of a King’s Cross pawnbroker.

  Here lies Thelma Leonard, 1813–1867: ‘Deep peace of the quiet earth to you.’ Molly drives Bert into the soil in front of Thelma’s stone, her right boot stomping hard on the blade edge. Four quick shovelfuls, not enough time to go deeper. Inside the black box she sifts through the pieces. She remembers Thelma’s ring – she remembers them all – a small sapphire in a crystal setting the same square shape as Thelma’s gravestone. Molly drops the ring into the hole and fills it in, flattening the dirt with four hard whacks with the back of Bert’s blade.

  On the eastern edge of Hollow Wood, amid a cluster of flat, square tablet headstones, Molly stops at the grave of Phyllis Quinn, 1865–1914: ‘There shall be no darkness. There shall be light and music.’ When she reads the epitaphs, Molly hears human voices, as if the grave’s owner is talking to her, and maybe that was the intention. Phyllis Quinn’s voice is eloquent, a touch of Irish in it. Musical. Phyllis played piano. Phyllis sang Irish lullabies to her children. And there was no darkness in the sunroom of her two-storey Darwin home. There was only light and music. Molly digs her hole, drops the flower brooch inside it, returning it to its rightful owner, the single pearl bud inside the flower buried with a single shovel load. ‘I’m sorry, Phyllis,’ Molly whispers.