All Our Shimmering Skies

by Dalton, Trent

  ‘Tom?’ Arthur gasped. It was New Year’s Eve. He and Bonnie were standing in a storeroom off the public bar in the Hotel Darwin.

  ‘Tom Berry?’ he gasped again. His best friend. The hapless, hopeless Tom Berry. Clumsy, awkward, bookish, meek, insecure, weak, poet Tom Berry. The friend who begged Arthur to let him accompany him on horseback as he rode into the deep country in search of a gold seam. That schoolteacher type. That literate scholar who possessed, at once, a gold sense as keen as a melon but a worrying gold lust like none Arthur had seen before. He’d nearly got himself killed only two months before, after blasting a hole with too much dynamite. And suddenly, on that New Year’s Eve, Arthur wished he had.

  ‘I can’t help how I feel, Arthur,’ Bonnie said.

  Arthur never believed a word of that sentence that fell so slowly from Bonnie’s mouth because he was a walking example of how a human can, in fact, help how they truly feel – because he truly felt, every second of every hour of every day after he heard those words, like crushing Tom Berry’s skull in two with a large piece of quartz, yet he resisted that profound feeling and just turned away from how he felt. So why couldn’t Bonnie Little help how she felt?

  From that day on, Arthur Hook could only hate Bonnie Little. And he hated her absolutely. But he hated Tom Berry twice as much as he hated Bonnie and his hate for Tom Berry bled into what later seemed to his fifteen-year-old son, Aubrey, to be a hatred for all of life. Arthur hated the leaves that dropped from trees and gathered on his porch. He hated horses and the sound their hooves made on concrete, and he hated the smell of their droppings as he meandered through hillside paths and range tracks that he took with his young sons, Aubrey and Horace, on gold-prospecting trips through Pine Creek country. He hated the woman he eventually married, June Buttigieg, the only daughter of Stanley Buttigieg, owner-operator of Darwin’s fledgling Hollow Wood Cemetery. Poor and sorry June, he told himself, with that lazy left eye that always sat like a fallen mango at the bottom of her eye socket whenever Arthur asked her questions about dinner or weather patterns or what it felt like to carry a child inside her belly. The gravedigger’s daughter with the dead left eye. Pull that eye out and bury it six feet deep, he told himself. He hated the way June howled during childbirth and he hated the smell of the black shit that burst from baby Aubrey’s backside and over his fatherly fingertips. He hated the tea leaves that built up in the bottom of his teacup and he hated the branches from the backyard oak tree that scratched against his tin roof and he hated the sun that kept on rising and telling him to go to work and he hated the sound of the fiddle players in the Hotel Darwin and he hated the beer that warmed too quickly in his hand and he hated anyone who wished good fortune on Tom Berry because he hated Tom Berry most of all.

  Arthur beat his sons. He beat the backs of their ducking heads with his closed fist and each beating made him hate Tom Berry even more because he blamed Tom Berry for stealing the only thing he ever loved and turning him into the kind of man who beats his sons. He beat his sons with rocks and whip handles and sticks and fists and then he watched his sons grow into muscular teenaged boys who beat each other.

  ‘Hate’s not such a bad thing,’ he told his boys once, swigging whisky under campfire light on a long Pine Creek gold search. ‘Never underestimate the power of hate. My hate for Tom Berry is what gets me up in the morning. I hate him so much that it gives me the energy I need to work those mines. I hate him so much I want to steal every piece of gold he’ll ever hope to get his hands on. And I will. I’ll do it. My hate for Tom Berry’s gonna make us rich.’ And Arthur Hook drank his whisky and his head turned to his sons, looking through the flames of the campfire. ‘What do you boys hate?’ he asked.

  And Aubrey and Horace turned to each other, both knowing the other’s answer but not giving it.

  Arthur Hook grew to hate the very gold he was seeking to find. He grew to hate the very mountains that hid the gold he despised. He hated the hills and valleys and ranges that kept their gold secrets from him. In the pubs of Darwin town he would hear whispers of Tom Berry’s successes in the goldfields and he would be enraged and he would curse the earth that chose to smile on such a deceitful man as Tom Berry and ignore a decent, hard-working miner such as Arthur.

  He drove his pickaxe into those hills and every wild swing was an act of vengeance. Fellow prospectors often questioned his reckless approach. He cut great trenches into the earth but he never took the time to repair the holes he dug, leaving the mountain wounded. Older goldminers would pass his digs and shake their heads. ‘That mountain’s gonna turn on him one day,’ they said, because the older goldminers knew what the blacks knew about the mountain, about the Northern Territory earth. It felt things. Mysterious things. And it rewarded the prospector who felt those things, too, and it punished, they said in campfire whispers, the prospector who ignored those mysteries.

  Hate drove Arthur Hook to ride horseback with his sons deep into the scrub beyond Marrakai Crossing, east of fruitful Mount Bundey and the nearby Rustler’s Roost goldmine, seeking the long-lost and near-mythical Black Leg Mine. It was named after its owner, Percy ‘Black Leg’ Gould, a seasoned prospector whose left leg had become wedged under a fallen rock in a trench when he was twenty-two. By the time Percy was found, his leg had turned gangrenous and black, and it had to be cut off and replaced with a wooden peg that he walked on for four more decades before disappearing somewhere in the hills between the Rustler’s Roost mine and Mount Ringwood, along the Margaret River. The Black Leg Mine was said to contain great riches just waiting for anyone brave or foolish enough to try to hack through its unstable and unpredictable rocks.

  Arthur Hook found what he thought was the Black Leg Mine after he and his sons rode along a precarious cliff-edge track that skirted Dead Bullock Needle, a natural obelisk pointing 150 feet into the sky that wandering and lost cows and sheep have tried and failed to skirt around for centuries, their bones left to rot beside the trunks of tall native trees some hundred yards beneath the cliff-edged needle base. Beyond the needle, along a winding track through thick brush, wide enough for only one horse, Arthur Hook reached the entrance to the mine, a hole in the ground in which stood a long ladder with forty or so rungs. He climbed down with a lamp then followed a tunnel to a rock face crossed by a rich vein of white quartz, and that quartz sent a shiver down Arthur Hook’s spine. And he knew that shiver for what it meant. Gold.

  He explained to his sons how millions of years ago pockets of liquid had turned solid inside rocks, trapping free-flowing grains and nuggets of gold, and how these gold-bearing quartz veins had waited ever since for the Hook boys to find them and dig them out and make their fortune. ‘It’s like big ol’ bank vaults that are locked up down there,’ Arthur Hook said, and he raised his pickaxe, ‘and we got the key to the lock.’

  And Arthur Hook swung his axe at that underground rock face as if it were the face of Tom Berry himself. He hacked at it, slashed it and smashed it. And for three straight weeks he and his sons worked on that face, Aubrey and Horace lugging buckets of mined ore up the ladder and over to a nearby creek, where they sorted through rocks and panned the most promising dirt, letting lighter materials wash away down the creek and waiting, hoping, for the heavy gold to sparkle at the dirty bottoms of their pans. But the gold never showed itself and a rage grew inside Arthur Hook. ‘Where are you?’ he screamed. ‘Where are you?’ And his axe swung and the muscles in his wire skeleton and no-meat body tore and he coughed and spluttered on all the rock dust he was sucking into his lungs.

  It was Aubrey who told his father he was working too hard on the rock face, too fast, who told him he wasn’t respecting the mountain as he should. That he was too reckless. Too hungry. Too vengeful. That they were moving too fast through the tunnel and they were not propping up the roof of their dig hole with sufficient wooden frames. But his father did not listen, could not listen, because his father was someone else. He was now a man with a yellow light in his eyes, a fire in his eyes, go
ld in his eyes. He was overcome by the lust for gold. The hatred for gold. The absolutes of it all.

  And it was Aubrey who was at the rock face with the ore bucket, standing six safe feet behind his father’s flailing rock hammer, when twenty feet of unsupported rock ceiling caved in on father and son. Aubrey saw the tunnel ceiling fall in on his father first and had time enough to turn and kneel down on the ground with his head towards his crotch and his arms over his skull, and brace for the cave-in. Two large boulders wedged a pocket of air around his face, which was pushed hard against the ground, and grey rock dust and debris pressed on his back and for three full minutes he breathed the shortest of breaths while waiting for the oxygen in that small pocket of air to be used up, and in his final moments beneath that terrifying rubble blanket he discovered the only thing in life he cared about.

  It was a girl. The image of her entered his mind. She was spinning in a white dress at the school dance that past summer. Violet Berry, the teenaged daughter of Tom and Bonnie Berry. Violet Berry, with the curly brown hair and blue eyes and deep red lipstick. Violet Berry, who he was not supposed to talk to under any circumstances, and that had suited him fine because he always knew she would blind him, make him deaf and dumb, were he to stand too close to those eyes. An angel too precious to say hello to, much less ask to square dance. But now he was so close to death that he had the courage to make a pact with himself. If I survive this cave-in, he thought, I will ask Violet Berry to go riding one Sunday afternoon.

  And then he felt a shovel scraping at the rubble mound above him. He felt a boulder give way and the weight of the cave-in release its suffocating pressure on his chest. Then another boulder was removed, and a shovel was frantically digging into the mound, scraping, hauling, shifting the pressure away from Aubrey’s body. Soon the dirt around him was loose enough that he could push his right-hand fingers up through it and those fingers found other fingers. His brother’s hand. And Horace pulled with all his strength, pulled so hard on his older brother’s right arm that Aubrey thought it might come clean away from his shoulder.

  Horace pulled and pulled and soon he could see his brother’s hair buried in the dirt, coloured grey by the rock dust. Then he saw his face, so grey that it looked like Aubrey had turned to stone beneath that rubble. Finally his brother emerged with the air-sucking gasp of a vampire that had been trapped in a coffin for five hundred years. And Horace fell on his backside beside his coughing and spluttering older brother and the two boys looked at the impenetrable rubble wall before them knowing they both now had to dig for their father, who was lying somewhere beyond it.

  But something mysterious kept them from reaching for their shovels and pickaxes. It was a strange and powerful force running through them both, something they knew never to underestimate. It was hate.

  *

  On the army transport, flat on his back between the human rubble of bloodied bodies, Aubrey Hook wakes with a deep and loud suck on Darwin air. His chest rises then falls back hard on the transport tray. He’s punch-drunk and dazed. He looks around him. Men and women. Soldiers mostly. Some have died during the trip. Their eyelids and their mouths still open. Hands on their hearts.

  The truck bounces along the uneven streets, motoring fast. Then it brakes and skids to a halt outside Cullen Bay civil hospital. Two shirtless soldiers pull the truck’s rear tray guard down and begin hauling the bodies onto hospital stretchers. More soldiers come, reach for the hands and feet of the dead and wounded. Aubrey stands. His head spins but, to his surprise, he can actually walk now and so he staggers to the side of the tray and slides off the back.

  ‘You need to lie back down, mister,’ says a young soldier, hauling the dead body of an elderly woman out of the truck.

  Aubrey says nothing. He coughs up a mouthful of blood and spits it onto the brown dirt by his boots, then looks down at his soiled shirt, blood-spattered and bomb-torn. He shuffles away from the army transport, his head turned to the hospital entrance where nurses and police officers and soldiers carry too many bodies into the casualty ward. Movement all around him and he moves so slow. One foot after the other. Finding his balance. In his clouded mind, he tries to find purpose. What just happened? Where was he going? What does he need to do now? And he fixes on an image in his head. Molly Hook and Greta Maze standing over him. The brown-haired gravedigger girl and the blonde-haired actress.

  There is a temporary medical station under a tarpaulin outside the hospital. A nurse is handing out canvas water bags to soldiers. ‘I need two,’ Aubrey says softly, his body aching with the effort of speaking. A wooden bucket filled with fruit stands beside the nurse’s table. Aubrey reaches for a banana and two large orange and red mangoes. He sits in the gutter of the footpath outside the hospital and glugs down the water, sinks his teeth into the skin of a mango and drives his face hard into its juicy flesh like a rabid dog. Only animal now. Primal. A beast with no past. A beast with only one goal. To find the gravedigger girl and the actress.

  An olive-coloured Model A Ford pulls in to the hospital driveway. The driver rushes around to the rear-left passenger door, grabs the hands of a wounded man in a suit, and drags him cumbersomely out of the seat. Aubrey recognises the driver as Frank Roach, one of the business managers at the Bank of New South Wales on Smith Street. Frank Roach pants and strains as he drags the body of his friend along the ground, his arms hooked under the man’s armpits.

  Roach spots Aubrey watching him from the gutter. ‘Well, don’t just sit there,’ he barks. ‘Help me, dammit.’

  Aubrey shuffles over wearily, lifts the man’s legs and helps place him on a stretcher at the hospital entrance.

  ‘Thank you,’ a breathless Roach says to Aubrey, who nods silently. Roach follows two soldiers as they drag the stretchered man into the casualty ward.

  Aubrey turns away from the hospital and returns to the fruit and water bags he has left by the gutter. Then he walks casually to the driver’s side of Frank Roach’s Model A Ford. He starts the car and coughs up another mouthful of blood that he spits out the window. Only animal now. He slams his foot on the accelerator and the wind through the car window refreshes him. But there is something more mysterious than wind keeping him upright, keeping him breathing in one last buried pocket of air. Something dangerous and energising that is fuelling him from the inside. And as the Ford speeds south out of Darwin he knows this mystery force for what it is. He learned long ago not to underestimate its power.

  Only animal now. Only hate.

  NINE NORTHERN DINGOES

  Her face is stained with the stomach blood of the wallaby she ate yesterday. She doesn’t bark, she moans, and the sound of that moan tells the younger ones in the pack that she is second in charge behind her partner, the dominant male who walks ahead. Her coat is fire-coloured but the fur on her feet is the colour of snow. She knows a ripple of disharmony has spread through the pack. The dry season was lean and she was forced to kill the newly born pups of another pack mother, as much to maintain her own authority as to allow the spoils of pack kills to spread further. She’s been walking through the boggy wetlands for most of the day and she is hungry and tired and wants to go home.

  But, ahead, her partner stops behind the screen of a purple turkey bush, so she snorts twice and the rest of the pack instantly freeze behind her. She lightens her step and moves to her partner, stopping when her nose reaches his right hindleg. She is old, but she is younger than him and has better vision and she sees immediately the subject of his gaze. A field of bush apple trees in the distance, the likes of which neither of them has ever seen. The trees are so plentiful and so closely bunched together that the apples on their branches have formed a vast red apple roof that is now sheltering a small herd of wild water buffalo at rest.

  She purrs softly to her partner, informing him that she, too, can see the buffalo calf drinking from a small water build-up some distance away from the rest of the herd.

  She can twist her neck to face almost directly behind her, and her
feet do not even move when she turns to signal to the rest of the pack that it’s time to hunt.

  TEAR DRIVEN

  Momentum. No going back, Molly, she tells herself. For the first time in your life you are only moving forward. You might have a copper pan scrawled with directions, but there is only one way to go now. Here to there. Molly to Bob. No going back.

  An avenue of creamy pink Northern Territory salmon gums and a red utility truck running between them on a narrow and damp red-dirt road filled with dry holes and full puddles. Beyond the scrub to Molly’s left is the rail line running south to Alice Springs. Momentum. Destiny. She feels this. Every moment in her life unfolding precisely as it needed to in order to place the gravedigger girl right here in a fast car beside the actress.

  ‘Faster,’ Molly says.

  ‘You wanna drive?’ Greta responds, weaving the vehicle through deep potholes in the road. She brakes at a flooded road crossing.

  ‘We can make it across,’ Molly says.

  ‘What makes you so sure?’ Greta asks.

  ‘Because we’re meant to make it across,’ she says. ‘We’ve only just begun. There’s no way they’d make us stop so soon when we’ve only just begun.’

  ‘Who’s “they”?’

  ‘Everybody,’ Molly says. ‘Everything.’

  Greta hits the accelerator and the truck powers into a stretch of floodwater that rises above its old worn rubber tyres and halfway up the front grille. More gas and Greta keeps the steering straight and Molly gives her driver an encouraging pat on the shoulder. ‘Almost there,’ she says. ‘Keep going.’