All Our Shimmering Skies

by Dalton, Trent

  And Molly moves on through the cemetery, corner to corner, grave to grave, returning the objects Aubrey and Horace robbed from the dead. A pink sapphire engagement ring replaced in the grave of Sarah Hill. ‘To undreamed shores,’ Sarah says on her headstone. Three turquoise balls like blue moons set into a gold ring go back into the grave of Julia Hancock. And Julia’s words on her headstone are Molly’s reward: ‘To live in the hearts of those we love is not to die.’ More life lessons. More messages from beyond.

  A silver enamel bird pendant for Geraldine Lamb: ‘Whither thou goest, I will go.’ A ruby and diamond ring for Eva Gordon: ‘We come whirling out of the nothingness, scattering stars like dust. The stars made a circle and in the middle we dance.’ Crystal pendant earrings for Agnes Herman: ‘Because I have loved life, I shall have no sorrow to die.’ A black opal ring for Marilyn Prince: ‘I know I am deathless. I know this orbit of mine.’ Just words on a red granite grave. Lessons.

  ‘“I know I am deathless,”’ Molly tells the night sky. ‘“I know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by the carpenter’s compass.”’

  ‘Marilyn Prince does not lie,’ the night sky says back to her.

  ‘Walt Whitman does not lie,’ Molly says. ‘Dad said my mum was always talking about that line on Marilyn Prince’s headstone and she asked anyone in town with half a brain what it meant. Someone in a mobile library told her it was by an American called Walt Whitman.’

  Molly flattens the dirt with Bert’s blade.

  ‘“My foothold is tenon’d and mortis’d in granite,”’ she says, reciting more Whitman. ‘“I laugh at what you call dissolution. And I know the amplitude of time.”’

  And a voice in darkness adds to those lines. But it’s not the night sky. The voice in the darkness is deep and muddled. Drunken.

  ‘“I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,”’ the voice says.

  And Molly turns to the voice, raising Bert the shovel to defend herself.

  ‘“If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles.”’ Aubrey Hook staggers into Molly’s lamplight. The girl draws a sharp, deep breath. Her uncle holds a single-shot .22-calibre rifle in his right hand, rests it on his right shoulder, wobbles it up there dangerously, like it could swing around to Molly any second now.

  ‘“You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,”’ Aubrey continues, still reciting Whitman. ‘“But I shall be good health to you . . . neverthe . . .”’ And he struggles to say the words with all the white spirit inside him. He’s all shadow. His black hat and his moustache the colour of the shadows passing across the lamplight. ‘“. . . nevertheless . . . and filter and fibre your blood.”’ And Aubrey looks to the night sky. Looks to the stars. He points his rifle upwards, closes one eye to take better aim, then staggers with the effort. ‘“Failing . . .”’ he says, reaching deep into his fogged memory. ‘“Failing to fetch me . . . at first” . . . “at first” . . . Oh, damn it.’ He turns to Molly. ‘Do tell me how it ends, Molly,’ he says, trying to be tender. ‘Your mother used to tell me how it ended. She knew that whole thing almost by heart and there were pages of it. Pages and pages, big words and more big words.’

  Molly is silent. Aubrey staggers forward, closer to Molly. He burps, spits, snorts the air. ‘Tell me how it ends,’ he barks, vicious and frothing, and his intensity makes Molly jump atop Marilyn Prince’s grave. She turns her eyes to the headstone then recites: ‘“Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged. Missing me one place search another. I stop somewhere waiting for you.”’

  Aubrey giggles at this and his giggles erupt into his deranged howl, that sick howl again, something to scare the fruit bats, a laugh so chilling it might bring the black rock frog rock to life, make it hop away south with everybody else who’s fleeing Darwin. ‘Do you think your mother’s somewhere waiting for you, Molly?’

  He howls again. ‘Maybe she’s in the grass,’ he says. He looks theatrically beneath his boots. ‘Maybe she’s under my bootsoles,’ he says, inspecting the ground. ‘Nope, not there I’m afraid.’

  Molly feels cold now, even on a Darwin summer night this still. ‘Where’s Dad?’ she asks.

  ‘Town,’ Aubrey says, groggy and brief, and Molly knows her uncle just spoke a lie because her uncle can’t lie like the day sky can lie.

  ‘I had to let myself into the house,’ Aubrey says. ‘Then I saw the strangest thing. Your father’s bedroom door was wide open and his drawers were pushed across the floor and damned if our treasured black tin box wasn’t missing.’

  Molly’s eyes fall on the box beside her lamp. Aubrey smiles.

  ‘I thought the house might have been robbed,’ Aubrey says. ‘Filthy . . .’ – searching for the word – ‘opportunists . . . Molly. Everybody’s evacuating their houses and all through town those evacuated houses are being looted by filthy opportunists making the most of this . . .’ – he takes a while longer to find this word – ‘precarious . . . situation . . . Darwin has . . . found itself in.’

  A wobble. A stagger.

  ‘Imagine that: robbing the homes of people running for their lives from the Japs.’

  ‘Next they’ll be robbing from the dead,’ Molly says.

  Aubrey smiles, waves a knowing forefinger at Molly. Then he relaxes his right arm, lets the rifle down, waves it about. ‘I thought I’d better grab Horace’s rifle and explore the extent of the burglary,’ he says. ‘Then, to my surprise, I saw a flicker of light from the kitchen window. Someone was walking through the cemetery. And now, who should I find burying . . . my . . . valuable . . .’ – another search for the right word, another stagger – ‘tr . . . tr . . . treasure.’

  ‘It doesn’t belong to—’

  ‘Be quiet now, child,’ Aubrey snaps. ‘You talk too much, child. Maybe that’s why you talk all that gibberish to the sky. There’s nobody left on earth who can stand listening to your drivel.’ He moves closer to Molly. He leans down and takes the lamp by its hooped wire handle. His eyes settle on the duffel bag hanging over Molly’s shoulder. ‘Hand me the bag,’ he says.

  Molly reluctantly slips the bag from her shoulders, hands it to her uncle who tips the contents onto the ground by his boots. Canned goods and utensils. Water. A thick black book with yellowed pages. Aubrey squats down to examine the book’s spine. ‘The Complete Works of William Shakespeare,’ he reads.

  He stands once more. ‘You going somewhere, Molly?’ he asks. ‘You disappearing into the bush again? You about to get yourself lost in the godless wild again?’

  ‘I’m going to find Longcoat Bob,’ Molly replies.

  Aubrey laughs, the lamp moving in his hand, sending light to new points of darkness.

  ‘And why . . .’ – Aubrey shakes his head, piecing his words together slowly – ‘would you . . . seek . . . to find . . . that sssssssnakey sssssssorcerer . . . Longcoat Bob?’

  ‘I’m going to ask him to lift the curse he put on our family,’ Molly says, flatly.

  Aubrey howls with laughter. ‘Of course, of course, the curse,’ he says. ‘You still believe in curses, Molly?’ He nods his head vigorously. He moves closer to her from the shadows. He hisses at her. ‘You still believe in sssssssorcery?’

  She doesn’t look at him. He’s Medusa from the shadows.

  ‘Even after everything I’ve told you about Tom Berry,’ he says.

  Closer still.

  ‘How many times do I have to tell you, child, that some children are born into this world destined to lead lives of pure and unavoidable misery?’ He extends a crooked right forefinger and he taps it hard three times on her chest as he says, ‘And you are . . .’ – tap – ‘quite simply . . .’ – tap – ‘. . . one of those children.’ Tap.

  Aubrey turns and tilts his head to the stars. ‘You can’t blame Longcoat Bob,’ he says, snidely, waving a finger at the sky. ‘Blame God. Blame your precious sky. Blame your shimmering stars.’ He turns to Molly. He snarls at her. The shadow snarl. ‘Blame your mother,’ he says. He laughs. Staggers on
his feet again.

  ‘I was there, Molly,’ he says, his drunk head bobbing on his shoulders.

  Molly can’t resist Medusa. ‘Where?’ she asks.

  ‘When your mother gave birth to you,’ he says. ‘I was there.’ His drunk legs move beneath him, but his head returns to the stars. ‘I saw the sadness of you arrive from nothingness. One minute your sadness was not in this universe, and the next minute it was.’ His hands make a mushroom cloud. ‘Pwoof. Like one of those stars arriving up there. You were suddenly . . . here. You arrived, Molly, in all your tragic . . . predestined . . . hardly immaculate . . .’ – he turns back to her – ‘misery.’

  He walks over to her and smiles. He grips her chin, lifts her face to the lamplight.

  ‘It was remarkable how quickly it all unfolded,’ Aubrey says. ‘The single worst thing that ever happened to us.’

  He studies her eyes. ‘I do wonder, young Molly,’ he says. He laughs to himself and shakes his head. ‘If you are so evidently capable of believing in the notion of sorcerers and curses, I do wonder if you are also capable of believing in the notion that the lives of your mother and your father and, indeed, your uncle, only descended into misery the moment you were born. I wonder if you have ever considered the possibility, Molly Hook, that there was a curse given to this family – and that curse was you.’

  He keeps hold of her face, stares deep into her eyes. Molly gives nothing away. Her uncle smiles. ‘But, alas, still no tears,’ he says.

  Aubrey staggers backwards four paces then drops himself down on his backside on the hard dirt and grass, rolls himself a smoke.

  Molly watches him lick his tobacco papers. I will never be afraid, she tells herself. I will feel no pain. Rock is hard. Can’t be broken. ‘You ought to believe in Longcoat Bob’s curse,’ she says. ‘Because it has passed to you, Uncle Aubrey. I know this now.’

  He does not look up. ‘What makes you so sure?’

  ‘Only a cursed man would say those things to a child,’ Molly says. ‘That curse has got into your heart and turned you black. You’re only shadow now, Uncle Aubrey.’

  He lights his smoke with a match. ‘I won’t argue with that,’ he murmurs. Then he sucks on his smoke and exhales slowly, the grey smoke floating across the nearby gravestones like the souls of their occupants escaping. ‘Now, tell me Molly,’ Aubrey asks, waving the smoke away. ‘How do you intend to find the elusive Longcoat Bob in all that deep country?’

  Molly rests her backside on the soil, tired. ‘The sky gift,’ she says.

  Aubrey smiles. ‘Aaaah, but of course, Molly Hook’s magical gift that fell from the sky on the day her mother abandoned her like a lame fawn.’

  Molly shakes her head in disgust. I will never be afraid. I will feel no pain. ‘It was a map leading right to Longcoat Bob’s gold and you took it from me and you threw it away because you were so angry and so stupid,’ Molly says.

  Aubrey stands, moves back closer to his niece.

  Molly stares him in the eyes. ‘You couldn’t see a thing because you were just a shadow,’ she says.

  Aubrey’s menace as he moves. Aubrey’s curiosity.

  ‘You couldn’t see that you held all the gold you could ever want in your hands,’ Molly says. ‘He scratched a map on that pan and he wrote directions on it.’

  Aubrey nods and he kneels to stare deep into her eyes. ‘The man was a lunatic, child.’

  Molly shakes her head. She will tell him now. She will show him. She remembers what she read on the bottom of the pan. She remembers the dark place. The banks of Blackbird Creek. ‘“The longer I stand, the shorter I grow,”’ she recites, chin up, knowing and defiant. ‘“And—’

  ‘“And the water runs to the silver road,”’ her uncle says, finishing her sentence.

  Molly is stunned, gut-punched by her uncle’s knowledge of those words.

  Aubrey laughs, shaking his head. ‘By the end, Molly, your grandfather was scratching his loopy ramblings on anything he could put a pocket knife to. The scribbles of a broken prospector who had spilled his marbles long ago.’

  Molly shakes her head slowly while her uncle nods his.

  ‘The man was brain-sick,’ Aubrey says. ‘He lost his mind just like his daughter lost hers two decades later and just like his granddaughter is losing hers before my very eyes.’

  ‘But he didn’t write them directions for you,’ Molly says, forcefully. ‘He wrote them for someone who was graceful. Someone who was poetic. That silver road is out past Clyde River and I know how to find it. You’ll never know because you’re not poetic and you’re sure as shit not graceful.’

  Molly closes her eyes and braces for the palm across her face. But it does not come. She opens her eyes again. A puff of Aubrey’s smoke. A long pause. Another exhalation into the night air. The thin eyes now of Aubrey Hook. The shadow forming around him. The blackness.

  ‘And how exactly will you find it, Molly?’ he asks.

  Molly shakes her head. She spits her words more than she speaks them. ‘I’ll never tell you.’

  Aubrey grips his rifle, moves closer to Molly. ‘Poor Molly Hook,’ he says. ‘Mad little gravedigger girl. You think if you find that silver road, then you’ll find Longcoat Bob. And what do you think Longcoat Bob’s going to tell our little gravedigger girl? Do you think Longcoat Bob’s gonna tell the gravedigger girl what happened to her mother to make her so sad? Do you think Longcoat Bob has all the answers? Do you think he’ll tell you why she left you behind?’

  He holds the lamp to her eyes, so close that the heat of the lamp flame warms the invisible hairs on her cheek. He whispers. ‘Is it her you’re always talking to up there in the sky?’

  His breath smells like turpentine. His lip spit lands on her cheek and chin.

  ‘“Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,”’ he recites. ‘“Missing me one place, search another. I stop somewhere waiting for you.” Do you think she’s waiting for you, Molly? Do you think Longcoat Bob’s gonna tell you where she is?’

  Aubrey steps back, looks across a lane of headstones. Then he points the rifle at Molly’s heart. ‘Let me show you exactly where she is.’

  *

  ‘Run, Molly, run,’ whispers the night sky because the night sky always fears the worst.

  Since she was seven years old, she has not spent so long in this corner of the cemetery. She has not spent so long beneath the milkwood tree. She has not been so close to the black rock frog rock.

  Aubrey Hook sits on the black rock frog rock. The lamp rests beside his black left boot. He rolls a smoke, his lips still wet from the hip flask nestled in his crotch. The rifle leans on his bent right leg. Molly Hook stands inside a hole in the earth, only one foot deep so far, Bert’s blade in the process of going deeper. The gravedigger girl does not respond to the sky.

  ‘Your grandfather was not brain-sick, Molly,’ says the night sky, because the night sky never lies. ‘You are not losing your mind, Molly. It is, in fact, your uncle who is losing his mind.’

  Molly digs, blade into dirt, boot onto blade.

  ‘He’s going to leave you here, Molly. He’s going to bury you with your mother. Do you hear me, Molly? Do you understand? You are digging your own grave.’

  Molly pauses, looks up from the hole at her uncle. The lamp lights only one side of his face. The rest is shadow. A black moustache wet from spirit, strands of brown bush tobacco caught in the nest of hair above his invisible top lip. Molly leans down once more, takes Bert’s tall wooden handle. She turns around in the hole so her back is facing her uncle. She digs.

  ‘Why’s he doing this?’ Molly whispers into the dirt.

  ‘You know exactly why he’s doing it.’

  ‘Longcoat Bob’s curse,’ Molly murmurs, shovelling another load to the surface.

  ‘That sounds like one of those gentle lies the day sky would tell you.’

  Molly digs, heaves to the surface a heaped blade of soil the colour of chocolate cake.

  ‘But I know you, Moll
y. And I know when you know the truth but are too afraid to tell it.’

  Molly digs Bert hard into the dirt, rests her aching right arm on the handle for a moment, stares up at the stars sprinkled across the black sky.

  ‘He wants me gone,’ Molly says.

  ‘Why?’ asks the night sky.

  ‘I make the shadow.’

  ‘Why?’ asks the night sky.

  ‘I remind him of her.’

  ‘Who?’ asks the night sky.

  ‘Her,’ Molly says. ‘Mum. I saw the way he looked at her. I saw the things he wanted to do to her. I saw his envy. I saw his lust. The poets all write about it. I saw it in his eyes. I saw it in his shadow.’

  Molly returns to her digging. Stop talking to the sky, ignore the night sky, she tells herself. But the sky keeps talking to her.

  ‘You saw a question, Molly?’

  ‘I don’t want to ask it,’ she says.

  ‘You will feel no pain, Molly. You will never be afraid.’

  ‘I know what the question is.’

  ‘You have always known the question.’

  Molly stabs Bert into the dirt and looks up at the night sky.

  ‘What did he do to her?’

  The night sky says nothing and that’s how Molly knows she asked the right question.

  ‘You can save me,’ Molly says.

  ‘How can I possibly save you from up here?’ asks the night sky.

  ‘A sky gift,’ Molly says.

  The night sky says nothing and that’s how Molly knows the night sky is thinking.