All Our Shimmering Skies

by Dalton, Trent

  Longcoat Bob enjoyed sitting by the fire at night telling the wayward traveller stories of how the land around him came to be, and in thanks for those stories Tom Berry recited descriptions of landscapes penned by famous English poets. Then Tom Berry told Longcoat Bob the story of his life. He told him of his love of the written word, from which he had been distracted by the glowing of gold. He spoke of how hard he had toiled for nothing, and the terrible cost of that fruitless toil to his wife and children, and how every gold-empty rock and cave and dugout he ever climbed down into was another reason to feel bitter and angry at the spinning earth. But, alas, he had felt like a changed man sitting by the fire with Longcoat Bob. He’d come to the deep country to dig up a gold lease, he said, but he’d dug up a new lease on his own life. Were he to strike a gold run of any significance now, he told Longcoat Bob, he would return the grace shown to him by God and Longcoat Bob in those recent days by creating a school where Darwin’s children of all colours and creeds and religions could study both the wonders of the written word and the wonders of Longcoat Bob’s creation stories. And Longcoat Bob stared at the goldminer across the fire and he stood and he moved closer to Tom Berry and he reached a long arm out and pointed at Tom’s chest. ‘Good heart, Tom Berry,’ he said, tapping Tom’s chest twice. ‘Good heart.’ Then Longcoat Bob turned towards the forest. ‘I must talk to the stars for a moment,’ he said. And he disappeared into the night.

  The next evening, before sunset, Longcoat Bob met Tom at his hut. ‘Sunrise tomorrow, Tom Berry and Bob go for a long walk,’ Longcoat Bob said.

  ‘And that surely was a long walk, my friends,’ Tom Berry said to his audience. ‘We walked for six days. The land was Longcoat Bob’s kitchen. He turned grubs into fire-cooked delicacies. He reached his hands into rivers and long-necked turtles seemed to come to him willingly. And that land he showed me, my friends, was like no land I had ever seen. He led me through the most treacherous and deep country. He took me through ancient galleries and across crocodile-infested waterholes and through cave systems that felt like portals into different dimensions in time and space. I saw things in that country, gentlemen, that I’d never dreamed existed. There were tests, I tell you. I had to show my courage. I had to show my faith in Longcoat Bob, and faith in things beyond my understanding, and I believe he was testing me. The more worth I showed, the closer he took me to his secret place.’

  ‘And where exactly was this secret place?’ shouted Albert Strudwick.

  ‘Well, I’m sure you’d like to know, Albert,’ Tom said. ‘But Longcoat Bob’s secrets will remain safe with me. Though, make no mistake, dear friends, I am, at heart, a scholar, and a good scholar always takes notes.’

  Tom Berry laughed and tapped his temple and he did not speak then of how the closest thing he’d had to a pencil on the long walk was a pocket knife and the closest thing he’d had to notepaper was the back of a goldminer’s pan. But then he did speak of how Longcoat Bob’s long walk ended at a miracle. A place of pure impossibility.

  ‘It was a vault,’ Tom Berry said. ‘A vault of gold in the heart of the deep country. A vault built by the earth. A safe room beyond my wildest imagination, housing more raw gold than I could have carried home on the backs of ten horses.’

  ‘Step inside,’ Longcoat Bob said at the entrance. And Tom Berry stepped cautiously into the vault and his dark brown eyes were lit up by a blaze of raw gold. Too many fat and raw gold nuggets to count. Gold nuggets the size of apples. Finds the size of oranges. Nuggets shaped like tree stumps as long as Tom’s hand. Triangular nuggets. One nugget as big as an eggplant and so heavy that Tom needed two hands to hold it.

  ‘These are all yours?’ Tom asked Longcoat Bob.

  Longcoat Bob shook his head. ‘Not mine,’ he said. He told Tom the gold belonged to the land. He said his people had been finding gold nuggets like the ones in that vault for centuries. But in all his years, he said, he was yet to come across a single gold nugget that brought any real happiness to the person who held it. Longcoat Bob said his family had found one large nugget long ago – centuries back – that resembled a human hand and it became so coveted by members of his family that it caused fights between brother and sister, sister and mother, father and son. During one dispute, an old woman struck her nephew over the head with the gold hand. The nephew was struck dumb and his mental capacity was like a waterhole that could never be more than half full after that, and the old woman was so ashamed by her actions that she begged Longcoat Bob’s grandfather, the oldest living member of the family, to hide the gold away in a place where no one else could find it. And any other gold nuggets that were found from that moment on, Longcoat Bob’s grandfather reasoned, were best hidden away with it too.

  ‘And you wouldn’t believe what he said then,’ Tom Berry whispered to his enraptured audience. ‘He said he and his family saw no value whatsoever in all that gold. He said real treasure was a freshwater spring. He said the real jewels of the earth were gooseberries that grow on trees. He said a good dig in his world is when you stick your fist down a bubble in the mud and find a long-necked turtle to grab hold of. He said true wealth isn’t havin’ your pockets filled with coin but your belly filled with white turtle flesh cooked in its juices, shell down, on a bed of coals. He said the only use for gold was to glitter, and he said the glitter of gold was like the glittering smiles of us white men he’d seen in town dressed in expensive clothes. He said that gold can’t be trusted. He said we all got the gold disease and it rots our hearts. It poisons us. He said it changes who we are, how we behave.’

  ‘Too right it does!’ said a liquored prospector also from Halls Creek, raising his beer glass. And the other gold diggers raised their glasses in agreement.

  ‘He said the long-necked turtle didn’t do that,’ Tom Berry said. ‘He said the turtle was a gift from the earth that kept on giving. He said he rubbed turtle fat on the chests of sick infants to make them strong again. He said the oil and meat from a single turtle could keep a dying elder alive to see an extra month of sunrises. And then he asked me if I thought a month of sunrises was worth more or less than the box of gold that rested in the hole below us. I said it depended on how you spent the gold and how you spent the month of sunrises.

  ‘And Longcoat Bob smiled at that and he pointed again at Tom Berry’s chest and said, ‘Good heart, Tom Berry. You speak of good things that can come from gold.’

  Then he gestured towards the gold vault. ‘You may take what you can carry in your hands, Tom Berry,’ he said.

  And in the public bar of the Hotel Darwin, young Aubrey Hook felt as envious as he did sceptical as he watched Tom Berry finish his tall tale of gold lust and gold rewards.

  ‘But then Longcoat Bob placed a hand on my arm,’ Tom Berry said. ‘And he told me something I will never forget for all my years because it sent a shiver down my weary spine. He said, “Carry all you own, Tom Berry. But own all you carry.”’

  And the men across the public bar sipped their drinks in silence and confusion.

  *

  On the red dirt track far south of Darwin, Aubrey Hook brings the Model A to a stop once more. By the side of the road he can see two sets of shoe prints. One set bigger than the other. Further on he can see the snaking track left by something that was dragged carelessly behind the smaller set of footprints. A large stick, perhaps. Or a tool of some kind, he considers. A shovel.

  He kneels down by the shoeprints. He traces his forefinger along the shovel’s line. The gravedigger girl, he tells himself. The miserable legacy of Tom Berry’s long walk into the wilderness.

  He remembers the looks on the faces of every man in that bar that day when Tom Berry told his fabulous story of Longcoat Bob and the mystical vault of gold. Disbelief. Disregard. And just the slightest glow of gold envy.

  ‘So how much did you take?’ asked Albert Strudwick, eyes alight.

  ‘I’m not gonna tell you lot,’ he said. ‘But rest assured it’s enough to buy you all another round.’ And he
raised his whisky and triumphantly downed another shot.

  ‘Go on Berry,’ Strudwick urged with a treacherous gleam in his eye. ‘Tell us how much you took!’ The greatest supply in the prospector’s kit is reliable information and Albert Strudwick wanted more of it. ‘We know you want to tell us, Berry!’ Strudwick urged. ‘Go on. Tell us how rich the most hapless prospector in Australia has become!’

  Tom had promised himself he would not reveal the weight of what he’d carried from that natural vault that day, but he felt the pride of his glittering achievement welling up inside him, and he was going to burst if he held it inside any longer, the molten-lava eruption of his good fortune. There was something that always trumped wisdom in any conversation among gold prospectors and that was luck. The brightest, shrewdest prospectors – and Albert Strudwick was one of them – knew well that all the planning and information and hard graft in the world were nothing against the all-conquering force of a stroke of good luck.

  ‘We’re about the same build, Albert,’ Tom Berry said. Both men were short and thin. ‘How much can you lift in pounds?’

  ‘I once carried two seventy-pound bags of flour in my arms,’ he said. ‘Reckon I could carry more on me shoulders.’

  Tom nodded, sipped a newly arrived whisky shot. ‘Reckon you could carry a couple pounds more, too, if you knew you was carrying pay dirt.’

  The men in the bar were silent then. Some scratched their heads. Some slapped their knees in awe, some shook their heads in disbelief. Aubrey Hook was only young, but his father, the late Arthur Hook, had taught him how to find a hole in any surface. And he knew the surface of that grand and miraculous story of Tom Berry’s was like the surface of any gold country – full of holes.

  *

  On the dirt track, Aubrey Hook follows the two sets of footprints and he eventually comes to a short bridge crossing Candlelight Creek. He and Horace walked up Candlelight Creek when they were boys. Horace was so scared by the darkness that they were forced to turn back after half an hour of walking inside its twisting tunnel foliage. Darkness and light, Aubrey tells himself. There are some who can walk further into the darkness and there are some who always run back to the light. A world of absolutes. Rich and poor. Cursed and blessed. Good and bad. Truth and lies.

  ‘But I am a man of my word,’ Tom Berry announced in the public bar on that revelatory afternoon. ‘I told Longcoat Bob I would do good with that gold and I fully intend to do just that.’

  At the same time as the newly wealthy Tom Berry was building his wife, Bonnie, and his children, Violet and Peter, a new and grand house on the Darwin waterfront that overlooked the Timor Sea, he set about drafting plans for a new school, one street back from the waterfront at Mindil Beach. Aubrey and Horace Hook attended the very town hall meeting at which Tom Berry stood on stage in a new black suit and vest and tie and proclaimed proudly to the gathered residents of Darwin that Mindil Beach Primary School would be a place of learning for children of all colours and creeds, all races and religions. ‘From the grandsons of our Afghani cameleers to the descendants of our Aboriginal elders who are the children of what they call “the Dreaming”,’ he read from a page of inspired pencil notes. ‘The Mindil Beach Primary School will open its doors to all who are willing to learn. And what learning they will enjoy, from the poems of Edgar Allan Poe to the theories of Pythagoras and, yes, to the traditional campfire histories of this very rich and promising shared territory passed down by its original inhabitants over the course of millennia.’

  But then the doors of the town hall swung open loudly and some four hundred seated attendees turned their heads to the voice of an Aboriginal woman standing at the entrance of the town hall, calling, ‘Thief!’

  It was Little Des and she had come from the deep country to tell the residents of Darwin that Tom Berry’s tale of good fortune and long walk redemption was a charade, an elaborate work of fiction masking the fact he had stolen from Little Des’s family.

  ‘We took care of you,’ Little Des shouted boldly across the town hall as the heads of suited guests reeled in shock and dismay, ‘and you stole that gold right out from under us.’

  Tom Berry snapped back at Little Des from the stage. ‘Longcoat Bob told me it didn’t belong to your family,’ he shouted. ‘He told me it belonged to no one. I had every right to take it.’

  Then a tall figure in a long black coat emerged behind Little Des. Some of the town hall guests questioned their eyesight because they struggled to comprehend the vision before them: an ageing Aboriginal man, thin and lanky but taller than any man in the room, walking silently down the central aisle of the hall, dressed improbably in an old black and gold French admiral’s frock coat. The Aboriginal man raised his right hand and exactly what he carried in this hand would be debated for all the years that followed in the pubs and general stores and hair salons of Darwin. Some said it was a stick shaped like a knitting needle with brown emu hairs tied to the end of it. Some said it was just the man’s extended forefinger but the finger was so long it looked like a sorcerer’s wand. Some said it was the bone of a sinful human covered in ochre and resin and maybe even the sinner’s blood. The man pointed at the newly rich prospector on stage. ‘Tom Berry,’ the old Aboriginal man said loudly. ‘A heart of stone.’ And that was all Longcoat Bob had to say.

  *

  At the side of the bridge crossing Candlelight Creek, Aubrey Hook kneels down and stares up the black tunnel of foliage that encloses the thin freshwater creek he walked up as a boy.

  The longer I stand, the shorter I grow, he tells himself. He remembers the gravedigger girl writing those words in the scrub. She would write them everywhere. On the back of the Hollow Wood water tank, on the side of the thunderbox. She carved those words on trees, she wrote those words with letters made of broken twigs. The ramblings of a grandfather who ran into madness to escape the shame of his lies. To escape the curse of his past.

  Resting beside Aubrey Hook’s left boot on the side of the bridge is a find that he might have once linked to luck back when he was foolish enough to believe in it. An empty round fruit can, its tin lid peeled back so coarsely that he wonders if its owner cut herself when she opened it, leaving drops of blood on her fingers and clothes, stains she would struggle to wash away.

  THE DEVIL’S HEARTBEAT

  The silver road glitters brighter than gold in the daytime. For almost two hours Molly’s been walking along the winding track that shimmers with silver light and still she stops to look at what presents to her eyes as flakes of clear cut-crystal glass beneath her dig boots. Each flake bouncing light and turning that light, up close, to flashes of pink and purple and aqua. Millions of clear flakes piled upon each other over time, which, seen as a whole, form a gleaming road of silver that Molly feels like she could mould together to form the shining armour of a Camelot knight. Or she could turn all the flakes into building bricks and she could make a glass castle that she and Greta could escape to after all this searching and questing is over.

  She sweeps her hands over the silver road flakes and she cups them in her palm and they feel like fish scales but their colour is more magnificent, like they are the scales of silver mermaids from deep down in the kinds of seas sailed by Odysseus.

  ‘It’s ground mica,’ Molly says. ‘Rock crumbs left behind by time.’

  Flakes as thin as the film stock they load into the projectors at the Star, but clear enough and twinkling enough to form the fake night sky that hangs above the picture house marquee. In some places the clear mica sheets have joined together in layers to create silver book-like structures that Molly can grip between her fingers and whose pages Molly can count, with one eye closed for clarity.

  ‘Isn’t it beautiful,’ Molly says. ‘Sam told me about the silver road. He called it the glass river. He reckoned a Dreamtime serpent snaked through this whole deep forest here and that serpent was made of stars and it was slithering through here for so long it kept shedding its skin. The serpent meant to leave the star
skin behind because it knew the silver road would help people find their way through the forest at night.’

  The silver road winds through a valley of cycads lining a narrow creek where Molly and Greta stop to rest and eat. They share a can of tinned corn from Molly’s duffel bag and Greta asks the gravedigger girl for an update on their food stocks. Six cans left in the bag, half a tube of condensed milk. Two cans of baked beans, one of oxtail soup, one of ham, one of corned beef and a can of peaches, which Molly keeps resisting the urge to open.

  ‘What else you got in that bag?’ Greta asks. ‘Looks like more than six tins of food in there.’

  Molly’s fingers run over the blood-red rock she took from her mother’s chest.

  Then she pulls out a book.

  ‘The Complete Works of William Shakespeare,’ she says. ‘Well, if we have to lie down and die somewhere out here,’ Greta says, ‘at least we’ll have the Bard to send us off to sleep.’

  Greta rests by the creek, Yukio’s pistol in her hands. She thinks of the curious soldier who fell from the sky. She pictures him dead by a bedrock, a full day’s walk behind them. In her mind he’s long lost and given up, slumped over in a successful act of ritual self-sacrifice, the ornamental sword he seemed to cherish so much having disembowelled his flat stomach.

  ‘You ever fired one of those?’ Molly asks.

  ‘A couple of wood ones on stage,’ Greta replies.

  ‘Maybe you should get some practice,’ Molly says.

  ‘I don’t need any practice,’ Greta says. She stares down the length of the gun barrel with one eye closed. ‘Not much to it. Point and shoot and phone a lawyer.’

  Molly pours the last mouthfuls of corn down her wide-open throat and rushes to a large black rock leaning over the creek like a warthog bending down for a drink. ‘You don’t necessarily have to shoot someone,’ she says. ‘You just have to be able to show them you could shoot them if you wanted to. That’s how Gary Cooper does it. He’ll shoot a can three times and make it bounce in the air so all them bad guys soil their pants and drop their guns.’