by Trent Dalton
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, Molly. 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.
‘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.
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 that 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.
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.