All Our Shimmering Skies

Here lies Lisbeth Fleming. Dead at seventy-three, influenza. Buried 1884. Here stands Molly Hook, aged twelve years and nine months, four feet deep in Lisbeth’s grave, Bert’s blade biting through old dirt that’s meeting the sun for the first time in fifty-seven years.

‘Water?’ Molly asks.

‘Break at five feet,’ says her father, Horace. ‘These old gravediggers always took shortcuts. They usually called it quits at five and a half.’

A gravestone. A hole in the ground. The girl in the hole, and her father and her uncle, Aubrey, leaning on their shovels above ground, each taking a side of the grave. Around the grave are mountains of dirt and a single pile of rocks beside the rusting mattock that was used to dig them all up.

Molly digs. Molly digs. Molly digs. She wears old brown leather boots, her dig boots, and a pair of brown pants made for boys that Horace found in a Tennant Creek thrift store.

Molly digs, her thin arms, only bone and muscle, filling a wooden bucket with grave dirt that her father and uncle pull to the surface after every eight shovel loads.

‘Dad.’

Horace takes a long drag on his smoke. Exhales.

‘Mmmm,’ he offers Molly. This is her permission to speak.

Molly digs hard as she talks, heartened by her father’s permission to do so. ‘I was just thinkin’ about how I’ve dug up six already this week and this will be my seventh and I’ve been working real hard with the customers as well and I was wondering if you would let me go to the Star with Sam on Saturday night?’

‘I can’t afford for you to go to no picture theatre, Molly,’ Horace says.

‘No, no, Sam said he’s gonna pay for me,’ Molly says.

‘Who’s Sam?’

‘Sam Greenway.’

‘The coon boy?’

Just Sam and nothing else, Molly thinks. Her best friend who’s not a shovel or a sky.

‘Sam’s good stock, Dad. He works hard and he’s real smart and he’s been telling me all there is to know about what it’s like growing up out there in the bush, in the real deep country past the Clyde River.’

‘And what does Sam tell you about what it’s like out there in the deep country?’

Molly stops digging. She turns to her father, up there on the surface, sun shining over his shoulders and onto her face. She puts a palm over her eyes.

‘He says it’s magical,’ Molly says. ‘He says there’s crocodiles in the creeks as old as dinosaurs and the crocodiles talk to him and he says there’s plants out there so big that their vines can suffocate you in your sleep and there’s trees with bark so soft you can roll it up and sleep on it under the stars, and the trees talk to you, too. Then there’s Ol’ Man Rock and he’s just a big rock, but he knows the answer to any question you could possibly think to ask him.’

Horace Hook scrapes a cake of mud from the sole of his left boot with a stick. ‘I hope he told you, too, about all the criminals who live in shacks and caves out there,’ he says. ‘Did he tell you about that, Mol’? Murderers on the run from the law, hiding themselves in scrub so thick and dangerous the cops would never dare go after ’em. Thieves and rapists livin’ on river rats and peanut bushes. Men sick with pox, women gone brain-mad with syphilis. Kidnappers who’d swap a twelve-year-old girl’s virginity for a can of oil. Lunatic child killers who’d cut a girl’s heart out and trade it for a fresh orange.’

Molly is silent. Her eyelids blinking.

‘No,’ she says. ‘Sam said nuthin’ about that.’

‘You go walkin’ too far into that deep country, you might never come back,’ Horace says. ‘So no more bloody walkabouts, Molly, ya hear me?’

‘I hear you.’

‘Dig, Molly, dig.’

Molly digs. Horace smokes his strong tobacco and enjoys the quiet for a moment. Then Molly breaks the silence. Molly always breaks the silence.

‘Sam told me how to eat an echidna, even though I thought it would be impossible to eat an echidna,’ she says, dropping another dirt load in the wooden bucket. ‘Do ya wanna know how to eat an echidna, Dad?’

Horace sighs, drags on his smoke. ‘How do you eat an echidna, Molly?’

‘The trick of it is all those spines on top, of course,’ she says. ‘But Sam says you just cover the spines with a thick layer of clay – you know, like that red ferrosol stuff you told me about – then you whack the echidna on the fire and when it’s all cooked you take it out and let it sit, and then you peel back that layer of clay on top and all the spines come off with it and it’s like you’re peeling back the lid on a can of sardines, except what you have underneath those spines is tastier and oilier than any duck you’d find on a plate in Paris.’

Molly digs, transfers the dirt, counts off the eighth shovel load and lets her uncle heave the wooden bucket to the surface.

‘The Star’s playin’ The Cowboy and the Lady, with Gary Cooper,’ Molly says. ‘You’d like Gary Cooper, Dad. He doesn’t talk much in the pictures. He’s all quiet and serious, like how you and Uncle Aubrey are.’

Molly looks at her father and, as he always does, her father looks at his older brother, Aubrey. And Uncle Aubrey briefly shakes his head from side to side.

‘But I haven’t been—’

‘Quiet now, Molly,’ Aubrey says, his lips unseen beneath his black moustache.

‘But—’

‘Dig, child, dig,’ Aubrey grunts.

Molly digs. One, two, three shovel loads. Four, five, six shovel loads. Bert the shovel clangs against a large rock buried in the grave soil. Molly reaches for a forged steel spud bar leaning against the right-side grave wall. With both hands she drives the spud bar, wedged at the business end, clean into the rock three times and the rock breaks into three smaller pieces that she hacks out with a smaller pickaxe.

More shovelling. Seven shovel loads. Eight shovel loads. Total silence. Horace hauls the bucket up the side of the hole. Molly watches a long black earthworm wriggle along the north wall of the grave. Up, up, up towards the surface. Her eyes go up with the worm and a little further up to settle on a view of Lisbeth Fleming’s headstone.

‘Who was she?’ Molly asks.

‘Who was who?’ Horace replies.

‘Lisbeth Fleming.’

‘She wasn’t anyone.’

‘Everybody’s someone,’ Molly says. ‘Ya reckon she’s still got family in town?’

The men say nothing. Aubrey pats the deep lines in his forehead with his handkerchief.

‘“Matthew, Iris and George”,’ Molly says, reading the headstone epitaph. Molly’s right boot kicks hard at Bert’s blade and the bucket is back to receive another shovel load. She pauses to read more from Lisbeth Fleming’s headstone. ‘Matthew, Iris and George were her kids,’ Molly says. ‘I wonder if Iris is Iris Brentnall who worked behind the counter in the saddlery in town.’

Aubrey Hook takes a long swig from a rusting silver hip flask, directs a sharp and perturbed look towards his younger brother across the grave.

‘Quiet now, Molly,’ Horace says.

Molly digs and Bert’s blade tip thumps against wood. Molly bangs the blade twice more. Thump, thump.

Aubrey shifts his smoke to the left side of his lips and leans down slowly, bones aching, to grip the mattock resting by the piles of dirt. ‘Out,’ he says through his near-closed lips.

Molly turns and scrambles up a small wooden ladder resting against the south wall of Lisbeth Fleming’s grave. Her father hands her a brown leather water bag. She unscrews the cap and guzzles down the liquid, letting it splash across the soil covering her face and neck.

Aubrey doesn’t use the ladder, simply slides down into the grave, his black boots landing heavily on Lisbeth Fleming’s rotting wooden casket. His right boot scrapes away the dirt on the casket top, searching for an entry point. He stomps his boots three times, testing the thickness of the wood. On the third stomp he finds a softer, rotted section. He raises his mattock high with a two-handed grip and drives the mattock down on the casket like he is staking a claim in the earth. Old wood cracking, splintering. Aubrey raises the mattock at the same point, drives it down again.

The shiver along his worn spine is the same shiver of expectation he used to feel in the gold-digging years, a gold shiver. It was the thrill of mining a hole where you could smell the gold and that smell turned into a taste and that taste was blood and metal on a tongue tip. The gold in all those deep rocks was all buried treasure. He and Horace and Violet’s father, Tom Berry, and all those Chinamen who followed them down into those holes were all pirates, except they had no treasure maps to work from, only their instinct, only the shivers that ran along their worn spines. That shiver meant success.

Aubrey wedges the mattock between the casket top and its side and pushes hard. Molly, from above ground, watches the casket lid flip up from the dirt like the lid of a jewellery box. But there is no jewel sparkle to be seen inside Lisbeth Fleming’s coffin, only bones. The casket’s bottom has largely disintegrated. A skull with a mouth full of dirt. Dirt in the eye holes. Dirt in a cracked cheekbone. I will never be afraid, Molly tells herself. I will feel no pain.

Arm bones and hand bones resting upon each other, meeting at the waist of a torso that time and slow earth movement have torn away from Lisbeth’s leg bones. There is a book by her waist that Aubrey digs from the earth, prises open with two hands. Pages fused together by decades of damp. ‘Bible,’ he says, tossing the book to the side of the grave. There is a round tobacco case by Lisbeth’s right elbow. Aubrey bangs the case against the mattock, caked dirt falling over his long fingers. He pulls a small pocket knife from his back pants pocket and runs the knife blade along the lid rim. He bangs the case again on the mattock and blows dirt from it that clouds above Lisbeth’s skull face. Gripping the lid firmly, he twists it off, drops it in the dirt and tips the case’s contents into his left hand. He holds an amethyst and crystal bead necklace to the sun for less than ten seconds then tosses the necklace over his shoulder towards his younger brother, who catches it and lifts it up to the light.

Aubrey kneels down over Lisbeth’s waist and lifts her hands up as nonchalantly as he might lift a pile of kindling sticks. There’s a pure gold band on Lisbeth’s left-hand ring finger. He tries to slip it off, but it’s set in place by gathered dirt. Molly watches her Uncle Aubrey wrench the ring finger bone back and forth and back and forth then rip the finger from its socket. He blows on the finger, spits on the finger, makes a cloth of his shirt and rubs the finger like he’s polishing his boots. Then Molly watches her Uncle stick the long-dead corpse finger in his mouth, grip the gold band in his teeth like an animal and pull it off. He drops the finger in the dirt and he spits the gold band into his palm. Then he spits on the ring again and polishes it in his shirt before holding it up to the sun.

Even from above ground, Molly and Horace can clearly see the unearthed treasure because there are no earths and no sins and no deaths that can keep the edge of a pure gold band from glowing in the lemon light. Molly observes the way her uncle smiles at it now. His secret smile. The silent affair he has maintained with the glowing. She’s studied this bond for some time now.

The gravedigger girl has been reading the poetry books on the shelf by the front door of the cemetery house as her mum told her to do. She’s been trying to find bits of her mum inside them, the bits of those books she connected to. All those hardback and dusty books of poems by all those graceful poets like John Keats and Walt Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe and William Butler Yeats and Emily Dickinson, who is Molly’s favourite because although she doesn’t seem as graceful as the rest, she seems more honest, and not afraid to show when she’s mad in the heart and in the head. All that those poets seemed to do all day was study people like her Uncle Aubrey. All those poets seemed to write about were the things you can’t see on the outside of people like Uncle Aubrey. They were always writing about emotions like love and hate and envy and regret and rage and they were always using real-life creatures like nightingales and crows and horses to represent those emotions.

Almost a year ago, Molly Hook started scribbling poems of her own with chalky rocks on the backs of random headstones throughout Hollow Wood. She recently wrote a poem with no title about the bond her uncle shares with the glowing. She etched the poem into the back of a nameless gravestone deep in the south-western corner of Hollow Wood. She used all the creatures she sees in the cemetery to represent things inside her uncle that can’t be seen from outside. She wrote it out of anger, like all her best poems.

The bird said he dug for the bread

The scorpion said he dug for treasure

The worm said he dug for the dead

The snake said he dug for pleasure

It was a poem about how Molly believed it wasn’t the precious metal that her uncle was hoping to find in all these graves, it was the glowing – the brief flash of new light the dug-up gold brought into his world. There was a kind of love in it, she thought. A romance, maybe. Lust, surely. Not the picture-theatre kind, but a darker kind that dwells in shadows and never sleeps. The Edgar Allan Poe kind.

And she has come to believe, lately, that her uncle would do anything for the glowing because the glowing is breathing and eating and drinking and sleeping and fighting and digging. The glowing is all of life and he lives only in the briefest moments when the glowing bounces back into his shadowy eyes. It’s a private affair, a solitary lust. She’s not supposed to know about it.

He whips his head to the side and catches Molly staring at him. ‘Make yourself scarce,’ he growls.

*

The gravedigger girl and Bert the shovel standing alone and silent before Tom Berry’s grave, with the sun in the middle of the sky. Molly reads her grandfather’s epitaph. Her eyes are drawn to the same sentence they’re always drawn to.

LONGCOAT BOB TURNED OUR

TRUE HEARTS TO STONE.

Molly places her right hand against her chest. Molly tries to feel her heartbeat because a heart can’t beat inside stone. And she can feel the weight of her heart inside her chest, and she could swear her heart grows heavier every year.

Molly has a book of poetry in her left hand. It’s the Dickinson book with the hard and faded blank olive-green cover. She has the book open at a poem she likes. It’s a poem about the sky and the things that take place above it.

Molly looks up to a clear blue sky today. ‘I worked it out,’ she says.

And the day sky responds to Molly Hook because it’s the graceful thing to do. ‘You did?’

‘“The longer I stand, the shorter I grow,”’ Molly recites.

‘You worked it out, Molly?’

‘It’s a candle,’ Molly says.

‘A candle!’ the day sky says. ‘Of course! The longer I stand, the shorter I grow.’

‘He’s talking about candlelight,’ Molly says. ‘Tom Berry started out from Candlelight Creek.’

‘Candlelight Creek!’ the day sky says. ‘Of course! So what are you going to do now, Molly?’

Molly says nothing.

‘Mmmmm,’ says the knowing day sky. ‘You gonna go walkabout again?’

Molly says nothing.

Her father would kill her. No more walkabouts. When she was nine years and three months of age, Molly walked deep into the scrub beyond the edge of Hollow Wood Cemetery. She walked off with no water, no food, no shoes. She can’t even remember now exactly why she walked off like that, so deep into the wild where the grass was so hard it felt like broken glass beneath her feet. She just kept on walking and she can’t recall if the deep country out there was pulling her further in or if this dark and damned cemetery was pushing her further out. Soon she was lost in a pathless mess of towering cypress pines. Horace and Aubrey found her almost two days later, asleep and breathing slowly beneath the shade of a sand palm. Her uncle said she should have been flogged for walking off like that, but her father did not belt her that day because he was so relieved to find his daughter still alive. He thought he’d lost her and he held her to his chest as they padded back out of the deep scrub. He held her tighter that day than he’d ever held her, and Molly remembered there was as much daylight in her father then as there was night-time.

When Molly was eleven years and three months of age, her father woke before dawn one morning by the edge of the Adelaide River, south of Darwin and north of Katherine, to find the camping swag beside his – Molly’s swag – empty. He found her deep in the bush beyond the river four hours later, sleeping and breathing slowly in the centre of a low-lying flat cluster of more than a hundred termite mounds, some of them twelve feet tall. Violet Hook had once told Molly that termite mounds like that were meridional and miraculous, built instinctively by the white-bodied debris-feeding termites that manage to magnetically align each tall mound in a north–south direction so that the eastern face of each mound is warmed rapidly by the morning sun and the hottest midday sun hits only the thinnest profile of the termite’s strange architecture. Molly saw the mounds as perfectly aligned gravestones. Same chalky grey colours. Same colour of stone. The cluster was a cemetery, but a cemetery filled with microcosmic life. Molly saw it as Hollow Wood Cemetery; she saw it as home.

Horace belted Molly that day. There and then, he hit her arse so many times and so hard with his open palm that she could not sit back down in the spot where he’d found her. He did not carry her out of the scrub, but left her to walk back to their campsite alone. ‘No more fuckin’ walkabouts,’ he said, before disappearing back into the thick bush.

No more fuckin’ walkabouts.

‘Dig, Molly, dig,’ the day sky says.

‘Why do you say that? Dad always says that. Uncle Aubrey always says that. “Dig, Molly, dig.” That’s all I ever hear.’

‘Dig, Molly, dig,’ the day sky says.

‘Dig for what?’

‘Dig for the answers.’

‘But I don’t even know the questions.’

‘Of course you know the questions, Molly.’

Molly turns her head back to her grandfather’s gravestone. She reads more of Tom Berry’s last words to the world.

I TOOK RAW GOLD FROM LAND BELONGING TO THE BLACK NAMED LONGCOAT BOB AND I SWEAR, UNDER GOD, HE PUT A CURSE ON ME AND MY KIN FOR THE SIN OF MY GREED.

Molly turns her eyes back up to the sky. ‘Why did she leave me down here?’

The day sky says nothing.

‘How could she leave me like that? How could she leave me here with them?’

The day sky says nothing. But Molly waits for an answer.

‘These are questions for the night sky, Molly.’

Molly shakes her head in disappointment.

‘I know why she left. It was Longcoat Bob. It was the curse. Kin means daughters. Kin means granddaughters. Kin means mothers. Kin means fathers. She said I was blessed because she wanted to make me feel better. How could I possibly be blessed, stuck down here with them?’ Molly nods her head, sure of her words. ‘I know a curse when I see one. I see one every day. A mum would have to be cursed to do what she did.’

‘Dig, Molly, dig,’ the day sky says.

‘Have you seen what they’ve been doing?’

‘Dig, Molly, dig,’ the day sky says.

‘Robbing dead folks of their most precious belongings.’

‘Dig, Molly, dig.’

‘She had to be cursed to do what she did and they must be cursed to do what they do. Cursed, just like this whole place. Cursed and damned and dead.’

‘Dig, Molly, dig.’

‘Dig for what?’

‘The book, Molly, the book.’

Molly raises the Dickinson in her hand. She opens the book at the page of the poem she likes about the sky.

‘It’s called “The Lightning is a Yellow Fork”,’ she says. ‘It’s about all the things that are happening up in the sky. She says there’s a great big mansion up there and there’s a great big dining table inside the mansion and there’s all these extraordinary people, all these special people, all sitting around that table and one of those people drops a yellow fork from the table and that yellow fork drops through the sky as lightning.’

Molly stares up at the sky and three blowflies buzz around her face but she doesn’t blink an eye.

‘A yellow fork, Molly,’ the day sky says.

Molly nods. ‘Yes, I remember seeing those words on Grandpa’s pan, but I can’t remember what else it said.’

‘Where’s the pan, Molly?’

‘Uncle Aubrey threw it away,’ Molly says.

‘It wasn’t his to throw away.’

‘He said he wrapped it in a rubbish bag with a pig’s head and a dozen eggshells.’

‘That pan was a gift for you, Molly.’

‘A sky gift,’ Molly says.

‘Sky gifts for the gravedigger girl.’

‘Do you have any more?’

‘More what?’

‘Sky gifts.’

‘Always, Molly.’

‘How will I find them?’

‘Just look up.’

*

Molly lies flat on her back in the dirt clearing beside her grandfather’s grave. She stares for ten straight minutes up at the sky, her arms fanned out from her sides. She remembers lying like this with her mother. Mother and daughter, flat on their backs, hand in hand. Molly remembers her mother telling her there was a huge milkwood tree in the backyard of the house she grew up in, a sprawling two-storey cyclone-proof family home for four on the Darwin waterfront. She said that tree had branches like a tarantula raising its front legs, and she and her younger brother, Peter, who was a thoughtful and deep boy just like Molly, would stretch their arms out beneath the shade of the tarantula’s legs and look up through those leg cracks to the sky, and they’d pretend the world was upside down and they were actually floating above the milkwood tree and the tree was sprouting from a ground made of blue sky.

‘It always amazes me how little time people spend looking up at that sky,’ Violet said.

Molly nodded.

‘Maybe it’s too beautiful,’ Violet continued, ‘maybe nobody looks up at it anymore because they know they’d want to spend the rest of the day looking at it. I guess we’d never get anything done if we spent all day looking up at the sky.’

‘Can something be too beautiful, Mum?’

‘Some things, Mol’. Not you. You’re just the right amount of it.’

Then Violet gripped her daughter’s hand. ‘Let’s float, Molly,’ she said. ‘Let’s float.’ And she smiled and breathed deeply.

‘Can you feel it, Molly?’ she asked.

‘What is it, Mum?’

‘The world is turning upside down. Can you feel it?’

And Molly saw clouds shifting across the sky. She saw leaves blowing. She saw movement. ‘I can, Mum. I can feel it.’

‘We’re on top now, Molly! Can you feel it? We’re floating. We’re on top!’

Molly remembers all of that now and she smiles. She stands and picks up Bert, who’s been leaning against her grandfather’s headstone. She pads between the rows of the long dead, through avenues of limestone and dirt, back to the cemetery caretaker’s house.

The back door to the cemetery house is painted dark green and Molly turns a loose, rusted bronze door knob to enter the downstairs laundry space, where she stops immediately before a curled western brown snake, cooling itself on the laundry’s concrete floor. Her friend from town, Sam Greenway, and his family have a word for the western brown snake that Molly can’t pronounce correctly, but it’s a catch-all word meaning, ‘If you come across this deadly snake you would be well advised to change your course and go the long way around.’ Molly likes the way Sam’s family can say so many things in a single word.

Molly doesn’t change course. She wants to drink from the laundry sink tap, and brown snakes can’t be gathering beneath the house, so she fixes her eyes on the snake’s black head that’s resting on the third ring of its own curled brown skin and drops Bert’s cutting blade down on the snake’s exposed neck so hard and fast that a brief spark flies from the concrete floor as the severed snake head is propelled towards the downstairs toilet running off the laundry.