by Trent Dalton
*
And here in this godforsaken and blood-strewn tin-mine campsite Aubrey Hook’s long story meanders haphazardly to a recollection the gravedigger has of the look upon Tom Berry’s face when he stood in the workshed at Hollow Wood Cemetery reciting from a notepad the words he would like chiselled into his gravestone. Less an epitaph than a warning. An act of anger. An act of love.
Tom Berry took Longcoat Bob’s gold by horseback deep into the deep country from whence it had come. Then he put that gold back in the hole in the earth he had left behind. But the fortunes of the Berry family were not miraculously reversed.
Tom Berry returned to Darwin from his fortnight-long journey to and from the deep country to find an inexplicable and unsettling melancholy spreading through his home. The hearts of the people he loved most, it seemed, were already turning cold in his presence, as if they were, indeed, already turning to stone. His wife seemed uninterested in his trip. In the ensuing months, she barely smiled at his humour, barely heard his comments on the weather and work and the welfare of his children. His son, Peter, had grown insular and detached and uncaring. His wife said early on that it was just the lingering sadness over the rash of impossible deaths that had struck the wider Berry family throughout the year. She wondered out loud one evening as she knitted a winter blanket if sadness was a contagion, as hazardous to heart and soul as smallpox was to mind and body.
But then Bonnie Berry revealed her deeper feelings in the fireside heat of a living room row between husband and wife. She said the truth was that she resented her husband for putting Longcoat Bob’s gold before their marriage. She hated him for his gold lust that had long ago overwhelmed his simple love of words and sentences. She resented him for being away so long in the deep country on that first fruitful and fateful trip. She said she had assumed he had died and she had steeled her heart for the worst kind of news and when she saw him alive she was dismayed to discover her heart did not soften back again.
‘I have no love for you, Tom,’ she bellowed across the living room. She held her chest and she spoke like a devotee of Dickinson. ‘There is nothing in here for you.’
And Tom Berry drove his fist through his living room window and a curving line of blood dripped down his forearm like the line he had etched on the back of his gold prospector’s pan, the secret map of the route to Longcoat Bob’s treasure, annotated with cryptic and clever words from a man who’d once prided himself on his way with them. That long walk through that strange and deep country recollected in a crooked line; the start and finish of all his failures.
Then he realised that map he’d etched on his prospecting pan was not just a reminder of how to find his lost gold, should he ever wish to return to it, but also a way to hunt down Longboat Bob. ‘I’ll kill that Longcoat Bob!’ Tom Berry screamed now, his own rage and regret and shame finally convincing him of the veracity of Longcoat Bob’s command over black magic. And no matter how many times Bonnie Berry told her husband that her once warm heart had grown cold towards him long before any suggestion of a black man’s curse upon their family, Tom Berry kept his shadow gaze on the sorcerer.
And when he was told by his daughter, Violet, that she had fallen in love with and was surely going to marry Horace Hook, youngest son of Arthur Hook, it was Longcoat Bob he saw through the red mist of rage. When an outraged and immovable Tom Berry instructed his daughter to end the union, Violet left the family home and vowed never to return until her father accepted her love for Horace.
Anyone but a Hook, Tom Berry pleaded to the night sky. Anyone but a son of Arthur Hook, his former best friend and goldmining partner who had long despised Tom and he had long despised in return – a man whose untimely death to cave-in he had toasted in a solitary moment with a raised glass of Irish whisky. When Tom Berry considered the implausibility of the union, the divine and impossible insult of it all – the union of all that he loved with all that he despised – he was convinced, in heart and soul and mind and body, that the curse of Longcoat Bob was real. And inside the cyclone’s eye of their endless and bitter arguments over the estrangement of their daughter, Tom and Bonnie Berry failed to see the heart of their beloved son, Peter, growing as cold and hard and incapable of feeling as the hearts they carried inside themselves. At 6.55 a.m. on New Year’s Day 1917, Bonnie Berry looked out her kitchen window to find her son hanging from a branch of the milkwood tree Peter and Violet would lie beneath as children, looking up at the sky.
‘You are the curse!’ Bonnie screamed at her husband as she collapsed on the grass beneath the milkwood tree, a stretch of cut rope by her side and her son in her arms. ‘You are the curse, Tom Berry.’
*
A large green caterpillar with red spots across its back walks in a body-looping fashion across Aubrey Hook’s black right boot. He puts his arm down and allows the creature to roll its belly on to his hand and looper-walk along his knuckles.
The red-haired boy, Shane, looks up at the blue sky that is turning, turning, turning with shifting cloud.
‘Was he really cursed?’ the boy asks.
‘That depends what you mean by the word, Shane.’
‘What happened to his wife?’
‘He found her six months later hanging from that same milkwood tree,’ Aubrey says. ‘Violet had her buried in Hollow Wood Cemetery alongside one whole sorry row of Berrys. My brother and I buried her.’
‘What happened to Tom?’
‘He became a recluse when his wife went,’ Aubrey Hook says, assessing how much drink is left inside the bottle. ‘He quarantined himself in his house. He didn’t want to get close to anyone in case Longcoat Bob’s curse rubbed off on them. He’d chase people from the front gate, screaming like a madman, “Don’t come any closer! Don’t come any closer! Don’t you know this place is damned!”’
The red-haired boy shakes his head in disbelief.
Months before he died, Tom Berry knocked on the front door of the cemetery keeper’s house at Hollow Wood. He told his long-estranged daughter, Violet, that he was dying. His lungs were shot from breathing in all that rock dust in his dig days. It was with great reluctance that Tom Berry asked the sons of Arthur Hook to give him a proper burial beside the grave of his wife, but he endured the conversation as a means to an eternal end beside the only woman he had ever truly loved.
‘And what would you like as your epitaph?’ Aubrey Hook asked Tom Berry in the Hollow Wood Cemetery workshed, the men seated by a standing stack of grey headstones.
‘No epitaph,’ Tom Berry said. ‘Just a message.’
*
‘How could one man be so unlucky?’ asks the red-haired boy.
‘That’s not the question you need to ask yourself, Shane,’ Aubrey Hook says. ‘The question is how could God allow such misery to fall on one man?’
Aubrey Hook caps the moonshine bottle and places it by his feet. He turns to the boy.
‘I know why you struggled to pull the trigger, Shane,’ he says. ‘It is a question not of God in the sky, but of value in your heart. No matter how miserable your life is, Shane, even to the point at which you have a loaded revolver placed against your temple, you have still found, deep within your heart, some inexplicable value in your existence. Usually, of course, the rippled complexity of your particular choice of ending is compounded by the phenomenon that there are others in this world who have also placed inexplicable value upon your life: parents, siblings, lovers. But in your case, boy, it appears the only people who placed any value whatsoever on your life are now lying in the dirt beside you. So, in turn, one can safely say that you are, to every living creature on this planet outside of yourself, completely and profoundly worthless. Therefore, I say to you, boy, if you have a lingering attachment to the earth and its people that is prohibiting you from pulling that trigger, you would be well advised to discard it. Which then leaves you to challenge only one remaining notion: that you inexplicably consider yourself, deep down in your heart, to be of some value.’
Aubrey holds the caterpillar on his hand out to the boy whose wide eyes study the looping caterpillar searching for a safe exit off the human platform.
‘Do you think God placed any more value upon you, Shane, than He did upon this caterpillar?’
The red-haired boy rubs his eyes, ponders a response.
‘This caterpillar will transform soon into a glorious butterfly that will float high over rivers and flower beds, and if you saw it in flight you might say to yourself that it was the prettiest sight your sore eyes had ever seen,’ Aubrey says. ‘But does that mean the caterpillar’s life has more value than yours, Shane?’
Shane shakes his head slowly.
‘No, it does not, because we know, deep down in our hearts, that all of God’s creatures – you, me and my furry friend here – are of perfectly equal value. And by that I mean, Shane, we are all perfectly and profoundly worthless.’
The boy watches the caterpillar and then he watches Aubrey casually lob it into the campfire, the creature roasting to a black ball within seconds.
‘Would you like me to help you?’ Aubrey asks, soft and tender.
The boy holds the gun in his hands. He considers the offer for a long moment. He hands the pistol to the man.
‘Thank you,’ the boy says. He lies back down beside the man he loved most in this turning world, the one-eyed giant named George Kane.
‘You just look on up to the sky, young Shane,’ Aubrey says. ‘I will count backwards from ten and if you want me to stop at any time, you just go ahead and sit up.’
The boy settles into place and nods his head, arms straight and flat by his side.
‘Ten … nine … eight … seven,’ Aubrey says, his right arm out and the pistol pointed at the boy’s head. ‘Six … five … four.’
The boy closing his eyes.
‘Three.’
The gun’s barrel the length of a hand away from the boy’s temple.
‘Two.’
The boy opening his eyes again to the blue sky.
‘One.’
‘Wait,’ says the boy.
And the gunshot echoes across the deep country.
Prove it, Nara, Yukio Miki says silently to the sky. Prove to me that this is not your Plain of High Heaven that I have parachuted into. For all I see is your paradise. There are things in this world down here so beautiful that they must have been made by you.
The pilot runs his hand through a bed of vivid purple flowers and then to a thick grey eucalypt covered in so many hanging red and green figs they could form a dress for the tree. Or a silk kimono. There are birds in the trees with orange breasts that glow like the setting sun and azure shoulders that shine like a blue moon. There are birds on the ground making homes for their lovers and the homes are made only of curved twigs but the homes have great archways and the birds gather bright-coloured shells and flakes and stones and they lay them at the entry to their houses in the hope that a lover might care to drop by.
He finds a climbing vine with soft, round green leaves covered in fur and from these leaves sprout lilac and white sepals, and from the purple base of those sepals rises a fountain of green and yellow petals and from those petals emerges the fine and fragile shape of a woman dancing – the flower’s style and stigma and anther. The woman’s leg is raised and her elbows are high and her head is tilted, lost in the music that makes her move. And Yukio can see Nara in this high heaven flower. Prove it to me, Nara, Yukio Miki asks the sky. Prove it.
‘Looks like a music box ballerina,’ Greta says, appearing at Yukio’s side. ‘It’s beautiful.’
Yukio nods. He looks into Greta’s eyes and nothing he sees in her emerald iris galaxies serves to weaken his theory that he may have fallen into his own Takamanohara. ‘Beautiful,’ he says.
And Greta feels something strange and unsettling and tender passing from the pilot’s eyes in that moment, so she turns away and they walk together down a thin path that leads through tall trees and past thick walls of scrub.
Molly walks three paces behind them, thinking about a story Yukio told her over breakfast. He spoke of it in broken English but his flailing arms and finger gestures were enough to communicate its essentials to a girl so ready to hear it. The story of the assassin known as the White Tiger, who came to Yukio’s village all those years ago to meet the maker of a blade designed to cut the beating heart out of the very man who forged it. He spoke of the cemetery keeper who spent his life polishing the grave of his one true love. Molly wasn’t sure if she got the story right, but she thinks the old man died and when he died he turned into a white butterfly and flew on up to heaven to be with his one true love who was now the most beautiful butterfly in a sky full of butterflies. Molly knew that when he told this story Yukio was thinking of his wife, Nara. That’s why people tell stories, she thinks. They remind us why we love things. They remind us why we love other people.
Molly is struck by a notion she wants to share with Yukio, so she rushes forward and wedges herself between her travelling companions.
‘I reckon that old man did turn into a butterfly, Yukio,’ Molly says.
Yukio nods. He chuckles to himself. ‘Butterfly … in … sky,’ he says.
‘It was like magic,’ Molly says. ‘And I was thinkin’, Yukio, that what Longcoat Bob did to my grandfather was a kind of magic, too. But it was bad magic. And if there’s bad magic then there’s gotta be good magic, too.’
‘Good … magic,’ Yukio nods. He likes the thought of it.
‘Good magic like turning the people we care about into butterflies when they die,’ Molly says. ‘But there’s somethin’ I don’t understand about the story, Yukio?’
Yukio slows. He turns his head down to Molly. ‘Molly … no … understand?’
‘Yeah,’ Molly says. ‘I don’t understand why he turned into a butterfly. Why turn him into something that’s only going to die a few days later?’
Yukio stops on the spot and the travelling party stops with him. He kneels down before Molly. ‘Nooooooo, Molly Hook,’ he says with a knowingly theatrical hint of the mystic. ‘Butterfly … short life. But butterfly … see … all world. Butterfly … love … all world. Butterfly … short time … no lose time.’
He raises his arms to the trees around him and the insects in those trees and the sun over their heads. He beams as he turns his head across all of the life he sees before him. ‘Butterfly knows way,’ he says. ‘Butterfly see everything. Tree. Sky.’
He points at the sun. ‘San,’ he says in his native tongue. He points at a log by the side of the path. ‘Uddo,’ he says.
Greta watches him closely. She sees the way he speaks, like every thought was formed in his soul and every word was ink-pressed in blood from his heart.
He points at two birds circling each other in the sky. ‘Bird,’ he says. ‘Water. Air. Light.’ He points at Molly. ‘Butterfly see you, Molly Hook.’ Molly smiles. ‘Butterfly short life,’ Yukio says. ‘But butterfly live forever …’ – he raises a single forefinger – ‘in one day.’
Molly nods appreciatively, eyes wide and awed. The trio press on.
Silence for two full minutes. Then Molly breaks the silence. Molly always breaks the silence.
‘That’s like you and Nara,’ she says, looking straight ahead, speaking words as they come to her. ‘You only had a short time. But she could give you everything …’ – she knows now that the words she is saying are for herself – ‘in one day.’ This is why people tell stories, she thinks.
Yukio nods. His head turns to the ground and Greta can see the pain inside him and she wants to move three steps to the side and wrap her arms around that strange pilot’s shoulders, but that’s a move for different worlds, softer worlds than this one.
‘Molly Hook understand,’ Yukio says, softly.
*
Hot air and humidity. Greta rubs the sweat from the back of her neck and uses it to wash dirt from her hands and face. Molly is still pressing on quick and hard, walking alone some thirty yards ahead
of them. Yukio quickens his walking pace to catch up to Greta’s left shoulder.
‘Bob,’ Yukio says.
‘Yeah,’ Greta says, shaking her head as she plods along. ‘Longcoat Bob, the magic man.’
‘Magic,’ Yukio says. ‘You … be … ahhh … believe?’
Greta gives a half-smile, shrugs her shoulders. ‘Not really,’ she says.
‘Why you come?’ Yukio asks. ‘Why … come … far?’
‘I don’t really know,’ Greta says. She nods at Molly, ahead of them, just at the moment she mistimes her step over a fallen branch. She trips, but plants a steadying foot to stop herself from falling flat on her face. ‘Someone had to keep her out of trouble.’
‘You … want … gold?’ Yukio ponders.
‘Well, I wouldn’t say no to it.’
They walk in silence.
‘Aisuru,’ Yukio says.
‘Huh?’
‘Aisuru,’ Yukio repeats. He nods at Molly. ‘You … Molly.’ And he puts his hand on his heart and pats it four times like it’s beating. ‘Aisuru.’
‘Love?’ Greta suggests.
The first word of English his father did not learn. ‘Love,’ he smiles. ‘You … love … Molly.’
Greta smiles. Considers that notion.
‘Like … child,’ Yukio adds.
Greta is taken aback by the comment, but she shrugs it off with a nervous chuckle. Her eyes return to Molly ahead, off the path now, inspecting something she’s seen beneath a broadleaved paperbark tree.
‘Well, yeah, I care about the kid, but I’m not about to stick her photograph in my purse,’ Greta says.
‘Girl … want … mother,’ Yukio says. ‘Girl … love … Greta.’
Greta speaks more sharply this time. ‘I don’t think for a second she’s my child, if that’s what you’re saying,’ she says. ‘The girl’s got a mother. It’s just a shame she’s six foot under.’
Yukio is bright enough to tune to the frequency of anger in her voice, despite his inability to understand all of her words.