All Our Shimmering Skies

by Dalton, Trent

  ‘Do you remember what I told you?’

  ‘Keep your eyes on the sky,’ Molly says.

  ‘Keep your eyes on the sky, Molly Hook.’

  *

  The night animals of Hollow Wood can see all of this curious scene: the man on the rock and the girl in the hole and the dim lamplight. The fruit bats in the trees. A black-headed python on a cool-air night hunt slipping behind the black rock frog rock, unseen. Two possums bouncing across to a high branch in the milkwood tree, which are startled by the lamplight. A saggy-bottomed wombat lumbering towards the hole suddenly frozen stiff by the sound of Molly’s voice.

  ‘Drink break?’ she asks, turning to face her uncle.

  Aubrey’s head is down. He spits a strand of tobacco from his bottom lip.

  ‘No breaks,’ he says. ‘Dig, Molly, dig.’

  Molly digs.

  WOMEN AND CHILDREN FIRST

  Evacuations. Daytime preparations. Night-time blackouts. Young men painting Darwin’s street lights with dark blue paint. Orderlies from the Cullen Bay civil hospital carrying elderly patients to the waterfront. Women and children first. Nurses to stay and care for the wounded.

  Some 530 evacuees squeeze onto the troopship Zealandia bound for southern Australia. The ship hasn’t been cleaned for months. Minimal toilet and washing facilities. Anyone carrying a suitcase of belongings weighing more than thirty-five pounds – and there are many – has to watch that suitcase being thrown into the sea by guards and their keepsakes, photographs, money, savings, winnings and heirlooms sinking to the sand where the stingrays hide. White Australian families share cabins built for four with as many as twelve. Chinese families are not allowed in cabins at all, but are forced by the guards to spend the long journey south on the open deck.

  On shore, a wealthy cattleman in a black suit slams a handful of notes down on the front desk of the office of the State Shipping Company.

  ‘Sorry, Sir, women and children first,’ says a flustered young office clerk.

  More notes on the counter. ‘Just git me on that fuckin’ boat.’ Some 187 evacuees sail south from Darwin Harbour on the passenger ship Montoro. Some 173 aboard the Koolama. A final shipload of seventy-seven women and children on the Koolinda. Dazed children on the decks; toddlers confused and frightened by the suffocating rush, gripping doll heads and the sweaty palms of mothers whose husbands remain in town digging sheltering trenches the same way Molly Hook digs graves: blade into soil, boot onto blade, soil into cart.

  Two men in singlets smoking by a sandbag filling station. One bloke says to the other bloke that he heard about a bloke who knows a bloke who’s handing out cyanide pills. ‘If the Japs wanna set up shop ’ere,’ he says, ‘I’ll be stickin’ one of those in me pie, thank you very much.’

  Dusty and frantic families carrying calico bags full of clothing and food on the long road south. Families near flattened by fast-moving military convoys barrelling north to RAAF airfields, hangars, fuel dump zones, workshops and ammunition stores. Australian Kittyhawk fighters zipping through the sky on test flights. An evacuating mother of three waiting for transport on the side of the Stuart Highway. Her youngest son, eight years of age, holds a suitcase in his right hand. With his left forearm he hugs to his chest a small and plucky Australian terrier with dark brown eyes. In her dress pocket, his mother clutches a National Emergency Services leaflet she found in her letterbox.

  Each and every Evacuee will be entitled to take the following articles, as personal belongings:

  (a)One small calico bag containing hair and tooth brushes, toilet soap, towel, etc (personal only).

  (b)One suitcase or bag containing clothing, and such shall not exceed 35 lbs gross weight.

  (c)A maximum of two blankets per person.

  (d)Eating and drinking utensils.

  (e)One 2 gal. water bag filled for each family.

  (f)No Evacuee shall take, or attempt to take, with him or her, any domestic pet, either animal or bird, and any such pets owned by the Evacuees should be destroyed prior to the Evacuation.

  The mother gives the boy a look he knew was coming. Grim wartime pragmatism. He hands her the dog and she walks it into the scrub lining the Stuart Highway.

  A town of men now. Men who spend their days as clerks and shoe salesmen and taxation officers are rushing through the streets carting the sand that fills the sandbags that will cushion the impact of dreadful things the Japanese plan to drop from the sky. Men who are trawlermen and house painters and fencers and farmers by day are being taught by shipped-in Australian army recruits how to feed ammunition to a Lewis gun, while more seasoned soldiers oil anti-aircraft guns on the oval in the centre of town and another on high ground at Fannie Bay, north of town. Men are loading twenty-eight-pound shells that can soar six-and-a-half miles into the sky. Blazing heat. Soldiers in singlets and shorts, socks and boots. Weary gangs of longshoremen working round the clock, splitting shifts among their full complement of 252 wharfies, unloading shipped armaments – depth charges, TNT and other explosives – from the hulking 6000-ton, 393-foot-long cargo vessel Neptuna, moored off Stokes Hill Wharf.

  Across town, some families refuse to leave the homes they’ve worked for because they lack trust. They don’t trust the Northern Territory administrators giving the evacuation orders, they don’t trust their neighbours, they don’t trust the police, and they don’t even trust the Japanese to make it all the way down to Darwin.

  But dawn comes as it always does and the sky is the colour of 19 February 1942, as it can only be once. In the Tiwi Islands settlement of Nguiu on Bathurst Island, fifty miles north across the sea from Darwin, Father John McGrath carries out his morning duties as head of the Mission of the Sacred Heart. A dry, hot day. Father McGrath says his morning prayers, has his breakfast, moves through the island mission where some three hundred Tiwi Islanders are working in the fields, tending to gardens, and younger missionaries are making their way to the island school. He laughs with the islanders. He believes in humour and the words of Matthew: ‘Whatsoever you do to the least of my brethren you do to me.’ He has lived with the Tiwi Islanders here since 1927. He speaks their language. Some call him ‘The Apostle of the Tiwis’. Others call him John. He will one day be called ‘grandfather’ by these people and, many years from now, they will bury him in the red earth of this paradise island, with the sons of the island’s oldest women taking turns to gently shovel the dug soil back over his resting corpse. ‘Nampungi,’ they will whisper. Goodbye.

  The sound reaches the island first. The vicious snarl of that sound, the growl of it. The wasp of it. The tiger of it. A violent symphony of three-blade propellers slicing air and overworked engines spitting smoke. The Tiwi farmers lower their tools and turn their heads to the blue Pacific sky. Father John McGrath raises his head with them. He believes in things that take place beyond that sky, but he can’t quite believe this sight he now sees beneath it.

  A great and terrifying swarm of grey and green and silver aircraft in arrow-shaped attack formation, red rising sun circles painted on the undersides of their wings, heading south-east to Australia, but also somewhere more specific and the name of that evolutionary wonder enters the mind of the priest. Darwin, he tells himself. And he runs across the mission yards to an administration room, where he sits himself down at a radio transceiver, call sign Eight SE, linked to a series of communication and navigation aeradio stations scattered across mainland Australia in a network called AWA, Amalgamated Wireless of Australia. He speaks urgently into the transceiver’s mouthpiece, sends a message to the AWA Darwin Coastal Station, call sign VID. ‘Eight SE to VID,’ he says. ‘Big flight of planes passed over going south. Very high. Over.’

  And a scratchy radio reply is returned from a duty officer in the Darwin Coastal Station. ‘Eight SE from VID. Message received. Stand by.’

  But Father John McGrath cannot stand by because his heart and his legs are telling him to run, telling him there is already something raining from the high blue sky t
hat is tearing up the red soil of Nguiu settlement, something splitting through timber rooftops and stabbing through walls. Many years from now, around Father John McGrath’s grave, the oldest Tiwi women will speak of the priest’s bravery and goodness on that morning of 19 February 1942: how he cared for them and led them to shelter, shielding them with his own God-given life. Some will refer to that fire and metal rain as machine-gun fire. Others will simply remember it as war. A whole world war that fell from the sky.

  NIGHT SKIES TELL NO LIES

  Her mouth is dry and she longs for the mattress in her bedroom and she longs for the road out of Darwin or the train to Alice Springs or the saddle on Danny the colt who runs like the wind blows. Molly digs slowly. She digs for so long that the sun comes up over Hollow Wood Cemetery and the cemetery stones surrounding Molly and the hole dampen with dew. Soon the hole is deeper than Molly is tall. Aubrey stands at the foot of the grave watching her dig. His flask is empty but what he’s drunk in the past twenty-four hours will keep him staggering for a while longer.

  During her fifth hour of digging, Bert’s blade strikes something hard that Molly mistakes for rock. She drives harder with the shovel and feels an object beneath the dirt break into pieces. Her right hand reaches deep into the soil and emerges into the morning light again carrying a handful of brown dirt and fragments of her mother Violet’s shattered shinbone.

  Molly reels back against the southern wall of the grave, her eyes now finding a ball of white bone in the dirt, like a wildly struck golf ball just landed a foot from her boots. It’s Violet Hook’s right kneecap. She turns her head away and her stomach turns with it and she vomits in her mouth but there’s no breakfast or lunch in it, only fluid. She spits and she closes her eyes, face tucked in the corner of the hole.

  ‘Please, don’t make me do this,’ Molly screams.

  ‘Dig, Molly, dig,’ says Aubrey Hook, leaning into the grave.

  Molly shakes her head. Molly grits her teeth.

  ‘It’s you who’s mad, Uncle Aubrey,’ she says. ‘It’s you who’s lost his mind.’

  ‘Dig, Molly, dig,’ Aubrey repeats.

  ‘I know why you’re doing this,’ she says, not turning to look at her uncle. She breathes hard. Sweat across her forehead, sweat in her eyes. Dirt across her arms and legs. Dirt beneath her fingernails. That circle of bone in the dirt. ‘You want to see her again,’ she says. ‘I want to see her again, too. But not like this. It’s not her, Uncle Aubrey.’

  The shadow across Aubrey’s face. Black as the hat on his head. He closes his eyes and breathes deep. He opens his eyes and raises his rifle to his shoulder, aims the muzzle at Molly’s chest. ‘Dig, Molly,’ he commands.

  And then a sound, a wailing sound reaching all the way from Darwin’s town centre and through the trees of Hollow Wood Cemetery, between the stone epitaphs of the dead, to the ears of Molly Hook standing deep inside her mother’s grave.

  An air raid siren ringing out across Darwin. Aubrey looks back over his shoulder, finds the direction of the sound. Molly keeps her eyes on the sky. No more dawn pinks and reds. All blue now.

  Aubrey returns his gun barrel to Molly’s chest.

  ‘Dig, child, or I’ll leave you face down beside her.’

  Molly breathes, grips Bert’s handle. The air raid siren rings again. Bert’s blade is gentle now, more the tool of an archaeologist. No stomping on the blade shaft, just a series of scrapes and gentle digs. She’s Howard Carter from the papers and her mother’s body is an Egyptian pharaoh sleeping in the dirt. Precious and fragile. But her churning stomach means this is not science. This is not archaeology. This is family. One shovel load, two shovel loads, three shovel loads.

  ‘Deeper,’ Aubrey barks.

  I will feel no pain, she tells herself. I will feel no pain. I will feel no pain. Dig for your courage, Molly. Dig for your soul.

  The day sky says nothing. The gravedigger girl will uncover the bones of her mother alone.

  ‘Deeper,’ Aubrey hollers, leaning in to the grave more with each macabre sighting of bone. More leg bones. Arm bones across a waist.

  It’s not her, she tells herself. It’s not her. It’s not her. She’s not down here. She’s not down here. She went up there. She went up there.

  The last thin fibres of a dress, earth-eaten and browned by soil, covering a ribcage with three missing ribs. Objects surrounding the skeleton, dirt-caked and heavy. A jewellery box. A pair of dancing shoes. Books. So many books around the skeleton.

  ‘Keep digging, Molly,’ Aubrey says.

  The shovel goes deeper. More objects. More of Violet Hook’s belongings. A porcelain figurine. A teacup. Then Molly’s eyes catch the edge of a copper circle. Bert’s blade digs around the copper – scrape, scrape, dig, dig – then Molly does the rest by hand, fingers frantically searching for a hold on the copper sky gift she thought was lost, disposed of in a bag of rubbish with a pig’s head and a dozen eggshells. She pulls her grandfather’s copper pan from the earth, runs her fingers over it, inspects its underside, scratches the dirt off it with her fingernails.

  The words are still there. The directions.

  I will never be afraid. Rock is hard. Can’t be broken. ‘Liar,’ she screams. ‘You . . . fuckin’ . . . animal . . . liar.’

  ‘Give me that pan,’ Aubrey says from the grave edge.

  Molly hugs it close to her chest. ‘It’s mine,’ she says. ‘The sky gave it to me.’

  Aubrey points the gun barrel at Molly’s face. ‘And now you’re gonna give it to me.’

  Molly stays put.

  Aubrey cocks the rifle’s hammer. ‘I won’t ask again, Molly.’

  Two eyes to two eyes. Blue to black. Light to shadow. Molly tosses the pan to the surface. Aubrey picks up the pan.

  ‘There’s no such thing as curses, Molly,’ he says, inspecting the words on the back of the pan. ‘There’s no such thing as sky gifts either.’

  He wipes more dirt off the pan, uncovering the third and last set of words Tom Berry engraved. Molly sees a strange light – a brief glowing – shift across her uncle’s eyes and she can’t tell if it’s a reflection from the copper pan or the light of inspiration on his face.

  ‘But make no mistake, Molly, there is such a thing as gold.’ Aubrey drops the pan by his boots. ‘Keep diggin’,’ he says.

  Molly grips Bert’s handle once more. She digs.

  ‘You don’t need nuthin’ from Longcoat Bob, Molly,’ Aubrey says. ‘You don’t need to find some ol’ black witch doctor to give you your answers.’

  The shovel blade scraping away more dirt.

  ‘You see this gun, Molly,’ Aubrey says. Molly turns her eyes to the gun barrel. ‘Here’s your answers right here. She took this gun and she got herself lost, too, out there in that deep country. Maybe she went looking for Longcoat Bob, too. We found her four days later. She was lying flat on a rock by Strike-a-Light Creek.’

  The shovel blade scraping away dirt.

  ‘I’ll never forget her face,’ Aubrey says.

  Molly turns to her uncle. He’s lost in his mind, distant.

  ‘Your mother had a nice face,’ he whispers.

  He snaps back to the moment. ‘Show me her face,’ he says, pointing the gun at Molly.

  And the gravedigger girl’s boots stumble on the uneven soil and she kneels beside the bone frame of her mother, not entirely because she’s being ordered to at the end of a gun barrel. There is a space inside the gravedigger girl’s mind that wants to see her mother’s face. She wants to see the shape of her cheekbones, her jawline. She wants to touch that face. Her soil-covered fingers brush dirt off her mother’s skull. Her right thumb strokes a cheekbone. She’s dreaming this, she tells herself. She’s been dreaming since she was standing outside Ward’s Boutique staring at that sky-blue dancing dress. She can do things like this in her dreams, kneel beside her mum like this, touch her bones. She can find beauty in the act. She can make it tender.

  Two nasal cavities. She loved this woman, so she ca
n love this bone face. The smooth bone bowl that once carried her left eye now carrying a collection of soil that Molly dusts away as carefully as she dusts off Bert’s blade at the end of a long day’s digging. The gentle curve of the left-side temporal bone, like an empty rock pool at Butterfly Gorge when there’s been no rain.

  Dirt falling off that face. But her left hand explores too far – some pieces of archaeology should never be uncovered. Dirt falls away on the upper right side of the skull, from Violet Hook’s frontal bone, her high vertical plate, and there is a hole where the right side of her skull should be. There is no smooth bone bowl around her right eye. There is only dirt.

  ‘How do you do that?’ Aubrey asks.

  ‘I have a heart of stone,’ Molly asks. ‘I will never be afraid. I will feel no pain.’

  ‘There’s something wrong with you, child,’ Aubrey says.

  ‘I know,’ Molly replies.

  Molly runs her eyes over her mother’s skeleton. It’s not her, she tells herself. It’s not her. It’s not her. She lingers on the chest bones. But it is her. She is here. She is down here, too. There is a thin sheet of worn dress material stuck to her upper chest bones. Her mother’s heart once beat beneath that fabric. Molly’s hands reach for the material. She will peel it away and she will know the truth. The night sky truth, not the day sky truth. Night skies tell no lies.

  But then a voice from the surface. ‘Get away from her, Molly.’

  Molly swings her head back over her shoulder. Her father, Horace, stands beside his brother at the edge of the grave, five feet above her. He holds a long pickaxe in his right hand. The sight of her father makes Molly snap out of her dream, snap out of her deep-grave fever. She reels back.

  ‘He was gonna shoot me, Dad,’ Molly says.

  Aubrey howls. A frenzied guffaw. He slaps his knees grandly. He adopts the voice of a twelve-year-old girl. ‘“He was gonna shoot me, Dad!”’ he howls. He staggers to his left, finds his footing at the edge of the grave. Then his face goes dark in an instant. ‘Have you seen what your child has done?’ he asks, two hands on the rifle handle, balls of saliva gathering on his moustache.