All Our Shimmering Skies

by Dalton, Trent

  ‘What’s she carrying a rock for?’ Kane asks.

  Greta shakes her head, confused. ‘I don’t know,’ she says. ‘I’ve never seen that rock before.’

  Kane drops the rock and finds Molly’s paring knife. ‘The girl is not cursed,’ he says. ‘How could she be cursed when she has just lucked upon the new world.’

  The steel stamps thump into the ground. Kane leans over Greta’s face. His body so large. The smell of toil. Yellow pus inside the open lesions on his neck. He runs the point of the knife along the bruising on her eye.

  ‘Someone tried to disfigure you,’ he says. ‘Who did this to you?’

  Greta is silent.

  ‘Answer me,’ Kane says.

  ‘Just someone I knew back in Darwin,’ she says, quietly.

  ‘Someone you loved?’ Kane asks, softly.

  Greta nods. Kane turns to the red-haired boy. ‘Go to the house, Shane.’

  The boy stomps like a petulant child. ‘But you said I’d have my time.’

  ‘Your time will be with the girl,’ Kane says. ‘But all in good time, Shane.’

  Shane runs off along a path that fringes the mine entrance and disappears into the scrub.

  Greta reels in horror, bringing her knees to her chest. ‘Get away from me, you fucking animal,’ she screams. She pushes herself across the ground with the heels of her tied feet.

  ‘Sssshhh,’ Kane says. ‘Please understand that if you move again I will be forced to keep your head extremely still beneath those steel blocks. Please tell me you understand?’

  Thump. Thump. Thump.

  ‘It’s a new world, Greta,’ Kane says. ‘There are no rules in this new world of ours. There are no laws.’

  Greta shaking. She nods. She weeps.

  Kane’s thumb wipes away a tear. ‘He tried to make you ugly,’ he whispers. He runs his thumb now across her face. ‘He failed.’ He smiles. ‘Who would do this to something so beautiful?’

  Greta shivers.

  ‘I will never do this to you,’ Kane says. ‘We will treasure you. We will always know what you are.’

  Greta shivers, moves her head away from Kane’s fingers.

  ‘What am I?’

  ‘You are the beginning,’ Kane says. And his eyes move down her body to the hemline of her emerald dress and the skin of her thighs beneath it.

  ‘You are Eve,’ he says.

  *

  The man in the red shirt with the black stockman’s cap runs along the path to the creek to help his friend, Hoss, bring back the strange girl who could handle herself with a shovel. His name is Kenneth Spencer and he’s thirty-six years old. He has always believed in the things George Kane told him, but he believes them more than ever now. George told his men the old world was done for. He told them about the Kraut with the funny moustache who was putting an end to England. He told them about the Italians and the Japanese who would help destroy the old world. He promised his men there would be women for the new world when the old world ended, and Kenny Spencer knew every one of those words to be true the second he saw the gravedigger girl and the actress wander into their bustling tin-mine utopia.

  Kenny Spencer bounds through a thick wall of palms and ferns and finds himself at the flat rock by the mine’s well-frequented creek, where he sees the girl who steeled his beliefs. She’s sitting by the creek edge on her backside. He runs to her but then he stops. The girl hugs her knees to her chest looking into the water at something that has made her frightened. It’s a man floating face down. A tall bald man. It’s his friend, Hoss.

  The girl turns to Kenny Spencer. ‘Please don’t hurt me,’ she says.

  And Kenny Spencer realises there is more to this girl than George led him to believe, and if there’s more to the girl then there might be less to George, and that makes him uneasy about the new world. And this is the last thought he has, staring into the eyes of the girl by the creek, before a cold blade slices across his Adam’s apple.

  Molly watches the man in the red work shirt and braces collapse onto the rock floor, blood streaming from his neck like a burst water bag, leaving only the figure of Yukio Miki, of the day sky, standing, with his pilot boots two feet apart, braced for any further attack from beyond the forest walls.

  Molly nods her approval, then she stands and hurriedly dusts the dirt and rock debris from her hands. ‘Greta,’ she says, rushing past the man with the bloody sword.

  She leads the way back to the tin mine through the avenue of blue cycads the colour of the moon. The loud thumping of the rock-crushing stamps rumbles beneath their feet and Molly treads lightly as she approaches the mine entrance.

  She turns back to Yukio and puts a finger to her mouth. ‘Sssshhh.’

  *

  The metal arms and jaws and legs of the crushing plant. Cranks turning, shafts spinning. The steel block stamps, still thumping into the earth. The loudness of it all. The machinery of it. The man in the hunting jacket standing at a distance from the drop of the crusher stamps. He watches his boss, George Kane, who has his back turned to him, leaning over the actress, cutting the last threads of rope that bind her ankles. The colour and shape of the actress’s legs have excited the man in the hunting jacket and he thinks about running his hands over those legs and spreading those legs apart and he thinks about pounding the actress’s insides with the force of the crushing stamps that pound so loudly behind her and this thought is the last he has before a cold, sharp sword blade runs silently across his throat. The man in the hunting jacket falls to the ground, but Kane does not hear his friend’s death unfolding over the sound of the turning and thumping machinery.

  Yukio Miki now silently approaches George Kane’s turned back. The heavyset miner cuts the last link in Greta’s ankle ropes and gently shifts her legs apart. Yukio raises his sword, two hands on the hilt held high, the blade pointing downwards like a fighter plane set to fly into the target of the stranger’s large back. He says a word in Japanese: ‘Yamero.’ But he’s not heard in the sound of the machinery. Thump. Thump. Thump.

  He says it louder: ‘Yamero!’ And Kane turns and his face turns white when he sees the vision of a Japanese soldier with the sun behind his back, body glowing, light shimmering off the blade of a raised sword.

  Yukio’s eyes fix on the stranger’s blood-red eye and then fix on the paring knife he holds in his right hand, and the pilot hacks instantly at Kane’s right wrist, but the hallowed Miki blade severs limbs in a single swing only in the family stories that Miki men have passed down through generations. Yukio hacks again at the wrist and Kane is left stunned by the sight of his right hand hanging loosely by a thin bridge of flesh.

  Eventually he gathers his thoughts and, in turn, finds his rage and he charges at the Japanese sword carrier, who changes the thrust of his elbows and instantly braces himself to drive the blade deep into the giant one-eyed man’s round belly. But the rage-filled miner keeps moving forward along the blade until the hilt guard is pressing against his skin and the blade tip has pushed through to his spine.

  Kane’s big left hand reaches for and grips Yukio’s throat, and the bloody nub of his severed right wrist pushes deep into the underside flesh of the pilot’s jaw. Kane drives with his legs and Yukio, two hands still grasping the sword hilt, is lifted up and carried for several yards before Kane drives the pilot’s back hard into the ground as he falls forward on top of him. Then the giant with the sword through his gut presses all of his weight on Yukio and invests every last ounce of his strength into choking the Japanese pilot to death.

  Five seconds. Eight seconds. Yukio gasping for air. Up this close to Kane, Yukio Miki wonders for a moment in this brief hell if he has found himself before an oni, one of the supernatural demons his grandfather Saburo told him about as a boy, those giant disfigured monsters who passed across the demon gate from the world of darkness. They had a third eye mashed into their foreheads and they had extra fingers and toes and strength enough to walk with blades pierced through their stomachs.

&nb
sp; Ten seconds. Twelve seconds. Yukio out of breath, feeling like he’s swallowing his own Adam’s apple. The hand and the nub of a monster. I’m coming Nara, he tells her. I don’t know how it came to end like this, dear Nara, but I am coming.

  Then a large red rock shaped like a heart smashes into Kane’s right temple. Then it smashes again and again and Greta Maze howls with fury as the blood-red rock that Molly took from inside the bone pillow of her mother’s chest meets the bones of George Kane’s face. Still the monster squeezes the pilot’s throat and still the actress smashes the rock against the side of Kane’s face.

  ‘Animals!’ she screams, and she is rage and blood and fear and she is past and she is present and when she screams that word again – ‘Animals!’ – she is including herself in the gallery of monsters in her mind.

  The falling steel stamps of the crushing plant. Thump, thump, thump. The rock hitting the side of the giant’s head, his blood splattering onto the face of the Japanese pilot, until, at last, George Kane slumps still and dead on top of Yukio Miki. Greta pushes hard at Kane’s side and Molly is there now to help her, and the actress and the gravedigger girl heave the miner off Yukio and onto his back with the hilt of the blade still lodged in his belly.

  Greta stands over the Japanese swordsman. Her hands and body are covered in blood. Yukio sucks air back into his lungs as he watches the actress go and wipe her hands on the pants of the dead miner and then he watches her walk back to him and stand over him once more, breathing, breathing, breathing and studying his face, staring into his eyes, examining the splatters of blood across his skin. And then she extends her right arm. She offers the pilot her hand, her shaking right hand. And he raises his right hand up to hers and the two hands meet in the middle of the silent space between them.

  Greta Maze pulls Yukio Miki to his feet.

  DELIRIUM TREMENS

  The questing shadow man. He does not stop to vomit. He spews three mouthfuls of blood and bile as he walks, and the vile stomach slurry showers the spear grass of the floodplain far beyond Candlelight Creek. The sun is high and hot but his body is cold and shaking. He drinks from floodplain waterholes but what his body needs more than water is gin, vodka, whisky. Turpentine. His hands shaking, his knees shaking, but he walks on because the hate inside him is the only thing he has to keep him warm and moving. Only animal now. Only hate.

  Head aching. Clammy skin. The bite wound in his shoulder blade still weeping and full of vivid yellow pus. Dizzy. He passes purple and pink flowers and he turns back to these knee-high flowers on occasion because he could swear the flowers have eyes for petals and these eyes are following him, but every time he turns back to catch them staring they look away. Weak muscles moving so slow but a heart beating so fast. He walks through a small city of meridional termite mounds and he believes for a moment he is walking back into Hollow Wood.

  In one straight row of termite mounds he sees the names of Tom Berry’s kin because all he sees is hate. He sees their names on their gravestones and he sees their reasons for being buried in the ground. The most profound and rotten season of bad luck to ever befall a single family in all of Darwin history. Some four members of Tom Berry’s kin, all of whom perished within three months of the night the black sorcerer named Longcoat Bob pointed his finger at Tom Berry from the doorway of the Darwin town hall.

  Aubrey looks deep into the face of a large termite mound. He sees a name in bold letters written across a gravestone. ‘Theodore Berry, 1866–1916’. Tom Berry received the news in a telegram only five days after Longcoat Bob made his announcement in the town hall. His brother, Theo, the eldest of the three Berry brothers, had been working alone as he often did during the slower seasons on his wheat farm in Clermont, central Queensland. When production was halted by a blockage in his grain silo, he tied a safety rope to his waist, as he had done numerous times, and lowered himself into the silo to unclog it. When the safety rope snapped, Theo found himself immersed to his shoulders at the centre of a cone-shaped depression of wheat grains. When he tried to dig himself out, the mounded grains began to slowly slide down the cone-shaped slopes and engulf him. He called to his wife, Marg, who could not hear his desperate pleas for help because she was weeding the front garden of the couple’s farm cottage, some sixty yards from the grain silo. Remaining perfectly still, Theo Berry managed to slow the gradual slide of the suffocating grains, which was pressing down hard on his chest and eventually his throat, long enough for Marg to realise her husband wasn’t coming to the house for his usual afternoon tea. Theo heard Marg’s calls beyond the silo walls just as his mouth and nostrils were filling with seed.

  ‘Theo!’ Marg called. ‘Theo!’

  Theo used his last gasp of air to holler, ‘I love ya Marg and I always will’. Then his head was drowned by the grains.

  Aubrey chuckles. Then his eyes find another epitaph in the termite mound city. ‘Esme Berry, 1843–1916’. Tom Berry’s aunt died three weeks after Theo from a gastrointestinal infection.

  ‘Clara Berry, 1845–1916’. Tom Berry’s beloved mother, Clara. A month after her sister-in-law died, Clara’s right leg fell clean through a rotting wooden board on the thin rear deck of her small home in Batchelor, south of Darwin. Her leg was gouged sickeningly through the rear calf when it landed on the large rusted tooth of an old manual crop cultivator which was being stored in the space beneath the deck. The tooth went so deep that the town surgeon said the leg would have to be amputated above the knee, but the surgery was poorly carried out, the leg became infected, gangrene set in and Clara Berry died a painful death some two months after the death of her sister-in-law.

  Aubrey’s eyes move to another mound. ‘Charles Berry, 1909–1916’. It was at Clara Berry’s wake that Esme Berry’s seven-year-old grandson, Charles, was challenged by two older boys to eat a peculiar slug they had found crawling in the backyard tool shed of the man who was hosting the wake, Darwin councilman Henry Pegg.

  That afternoon in Pegg’s living room, with his fingers sticky from the scone he was eating with jam and cream, Charles Berry fell to the floor and began frothing at the mouth and shaking with convulsions. He died on the right shoulder of Henry Pegg, who was then running towards the Darwin emergency hospital.

  And Aubrey Hook smiles. He laughs at the wild misfortune of it all. Then he howls, his deranged and deep guffaws echoing across the still floodplain.

  It was after the death of young Charles Berry that the Darwin Examiner made the first public press reference to a rumour that had been swirling across town: Longcoat Bob had put a curse on Tom Berry for the sin of his greed, and the curse was proving to be real. The newspaper ran a quote from an anonymous source who claimed to have been in the Darwin town hall the night Longcoat Bob placed his so-called curse on Tom Berry. ‘The sorcerer had a bone in his hand,’ the anonymous witness said. ‘He pointed it at Mr Berry and he said in a loud and commanding voice, “I curse you and your kin, Tom Berry. Your hearts will turn to stone.” That’s what he said. And look at all the bad fortune that’s come over that family. That blackfeller was talking black magic and the rest of us was lucky he didn’t decide to talk to us.’

  Tom Berry tossed the newspaper into his living room fire when he read it. ‘There’s a difference between a curse and piss-poor luck,’ he screamed, so loud it made his wife, Bonnie, jump in her armchair beside his. ‘Did any one of those people die of a stone heart?’ Tom Berry barked, uncapping a bottle of whisky and reaching for a glass. ‘Has my heart turned to stone! Has your heart turned to stone, Bonnie? Have mercy!’

  Bonnie Berry sat in silence, looking into the warm fire and wondering if her husband’s statements were entirely true. She’d seen something change inside her husband since his return from his strange and fruitful odyssey through the deep country, and despite his newfound wealth, a cloud seemed to follow him wherever he went. He was irritable and, although now more generous, less kind. And how was Bonnie to explain the heaviness of her own heart, were it not itself undergoing some
slow transformation? How was she to explain how low she had felt in recent months? She had tried to express to friends the feeling of unwillingness she had carried for so long, a dread of living that made her belly sick. Unwilling to rise in the morning. Unwilling to cook. Unwilling to clean. Unwilling to love. Anyone and anything. She read so many poetry books that sang of the workings of the human heart, its mystic machinery, of the fountain inside of us all that gives and receives love in the endless and glorious thud of a chest beat. She placed her palm on her chest by the fire and she could feel the beat of her heart, but she could not feel the love she had once kept inside it for her husband. A heart that can no longer love, she told herself, might as well be made of stone.

  ‘Tom,’ Bonnie said by the fire.

  ‘Yes, my love.’

  ‘I think you should put the gold back where you found it.’

  *

  Aubrey Hook stares into the floodplain sun and his fever vision splits the sun into two, like a double-yolk egg frying on a skillet. He dumps his head into a waterhole, slaps his face hard. Then he marches on across the floodplain, his hatred giving him pace.

  His mouth is dry and desperate for spirits. He wonders about explorers who came through here on horseback and on foot. He wonders if they ever tossed their whisky bottles from their horses. Buried them in dirt to save for return journeys. Buried spirit treasure. He curses the blacks who walked these isolated lands for millennia and never once took the time to construct a saloon among the forests and plains, a glowing two-storey pub with piano music and song echoing through its windows, high up on the range he can see in the distance.

  He walks along a woodland avenue of fern-leafed grevilleas and milky plum trees with yellow fruits that he rips from the branches in desperate grabs and shovels into his mouth like they were pub bar peanuts. ‘The damned,’ he tells himself, his mouth full of fruit, juice streams spilling down his chin. ‘The daaaammned!’ he laughs. He knows whose footsteps he’s following. The footsteps of damned Tom Berry, the accursed goldminer who made his intentions clear for all to read when he placed an announcement in the Darwin Examiner.