All Our Shimmering Skies

by Dalton, Trent

  Molly’s head down, staring at the dirt. Staring at a platoon of ants marching towards her grandfather’s grave.

  ‘Will I still be able to talk to you?’

  ‘We can talk any time you want to talk,’ Violet says. ‘All you have to do is look up.’

  ‘But how will I hear you?’ the girl asks.

  ‘All you have to do is listen.’

  Molly’s head stays down.

  ‘No, you can’t be doing that,’ Violet says. ‘You can’t be keeping your head down like that, Molly. You must look up. You must always look up.’

  Molly looks up. Violet nods, half-smiles.

  ‘Is there anything else you want to ask me?’

  Molly scratches her face, twists her left foot in the dirt, something on her mind.

  ‘What is it, Molly?’

  Molly’s screwed-up face.

  ‘You’re gonna miss my birthday,’ Molly says.

  ‘I’m gonna miss all of your birthdays, Molly.’

  Molly drops her head.

  ‘I won’t get any more gifts from anyone,’ Molly says.

  ‘You’ll still get gifts from me.’

  ‘I will?’

  ‘Of course you will.’

  Molly points to the sky.

  ‘But you’ll be up there.’

  Violet smiles.

  ‘That’s where the best gifts come from.’

  Violet looks at the sky again.

  ‘The rain, Molly,’ Violet says. ‘The rainbows. The dolphin clouds. Elephant clouds. Unicorn clouds. The great big bolts of lightning. The sky gifts, Molly. I’ll send them all down for you.’

  ‘The sky gifts,’ Molly says. She likes those words. ‘Just for me?’

  ‘Just for you, Molly. But you have to keep your eyes on the sky. You have to keep looking up.’ Violet points at the sky. ‘There’s one falling now.’

  ‘Where?’ Molly gasps, scanning the blue sky.

  Violet points to the sky again.

  ‘There,’ she says. And Molly squints her eyes and shades her face with her hands to block the glare.

  ‘It’s a gift from your grandfather, Molly. It’s something he wants you to have.’

  Molly bouncing on the spot now. ‘What is it? What is it?’

  ‘It’s how your grandfather found his treasure,’ Violet says, staring at the sky.

  ‘Treasure!’ Molly says.

  ‘We all have our own treasure to find, Molly. He wants you to find yours.’

  Molly stares harder into the sky, but she can’t see the falling sky gift.

  ‘Keep looking up, Molly,’ Violet says. ‘Just keep your eyes on the sky, Molly. Don’t look away or you’ll miss it falling.’

  Molly stares harder into the sky but she can’t see the falling sky gift.

  ‘Keep looking up, Molly,’ Violet says. ‘Just keep your eyes on the sky, Molly. Don’t look away or you’ll miss it falling.’

  Molly feels her mother move closer to her. Molly feels her mother’s arms wrap around her shoulders. She feels her mother’s lips against her temple.

  ‘I’m going now, Molly,’ Violet says. ‘But you must not watch me go. You must keep looking up. You must keep your eyes on the sky.’

  And Molly looks at the sky and looks and looks and she wants to turn her eyes away but she listens to her mum, she believes in her mum, she believes her, and she never takes her eyes off that high blue roof and she feels her mum move away from her, hears her mum’s sandals crushing leaves and grass shoots behind her, and she wants to look away from the sky and turn her eyes towards those sounds but she listens to her mum because her mum is always right, always true, always graceful.

  ‘You can write your own epitaph now, Molly.’ Further away.

  ‘It won’t be written for you. You can write it yourself. Just keep your eyes on the sky, Molly.’ Further away.

  ‘Keep your eyes on the sky, Molly.’ Further away.

  ‘Keep your eyes on the sky, Molly.’ Too far away.

  Molly keeps her eyes on the sky and she stares up at that sky for so long she tells herself she will only stare at that sky for sixty more seconds and she counts sixty seconds in her head and when she has only five more seconds to count she vows to count another sixty seconds and she does. Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one.

  She still can’t see the sky gift, so she turns her eyes away from the blue and she sighs, her belly still turning inside, and she whips her head round to where the last sounds of footsteps came from. She looks for her mother. But there are only trees and graves and weeds and mounds of pebbled clay covering the dead, nothing else. And she stares into that still cemetery space waiting for her mother to walk back into it. But she does not.

  An image enters the gravedigger girl’s mind. A bull ant crawling across a curse. A single word carved in stone. Bad magic for someone who might deserve it. She turns to read her grandfather’s epitaph and resting upon the slab of stone by her twig-thin shinbones is a flat, square cardboard gift box. It’s wrapped in a ribbon tied in a bow. The colour of the ribbon is the colour of the sky.

  Molly leaps on the sky gift and shakes it in her hands. She rips at the ribbon and her belly isn’t turning anymore. Her dirt and sweat fingers claw at the sides of the box. At last, an opening, and her fingers rip the thin, cheap cardboard roughly across the bottom edge and something metal – something hard – slides out of the box and into her hands.

  She holds it up to the sky. A round metal dish. Solid copper. Old and caked in dirt. She thinks it’s a dinner plate at first. Maybe a serving dish for sandwiches. But the dish has raised, sloping sides and a flat base, and it’s not much smaller than a car’s steering wheel. And Molly’s seen one of these before. In the back tray of her Uncle Aubrey’s red utility truck, in the old metal box where he keeps his fossicking tools. It’s not a plate, she tells herself. It’s a pan. A pan for finding gold. A pan for finding treasure. And Molly Hook, aged seven, knows not what to say back to the sky for such generosity, so she looks up to it and says what she can only hope is graceful. ‘Thank you.’ And in the silence of the cemetery the gravedigger girl waits patiently for the sky to say something back.

  BLACK ROCK FROG ROCK

  The gravedigger girl by the water, four days later. Molly Hook kneeling on the muddy bank of Blackbird Creek, which runs along the eastern edge of Hollow Wood Cemetery. She holds the sky gift. Earth, dirt and silt have turned the copper pan to a dark mud-brown colour. She fills the pan with dry creekbed gravel and duck-waddles without standing into the shallow creek water. With two steady hands, she submerges the pan and the cleaner parts of its edge bounce sunlight off copper and Molly mistakes these magic tricks of the light for early and miraculous strikes of gold.

  Gold, Mum, gold. And she turns her head to the sky. Is this you, Mum? Are you doing this? Can you hear me, Mum?

  And it makes sense to Molly in this moment when she is so close to her eighth birthday that the god of minerals, that miserable and selfish spirit god of gold, that son of Zeus, Khrysos – whose grave her father and her uncle say they’re always pissing on when they’re liquored – would grant her a gold strike on this day. This strange day of all strange days, this dark mood of a day when her father, Horace, and her uncle, Aubrey, are over there by the black rock frog rock beneath the sprawling milkwood tree digging a deep dirt hole to rest another human body in for eternity.

  She watches them digging. Aubrey Hook is two years older than Horace Hook and half a foot taller. The brothers are aged in their mid-thirties but too much toil and too much Darwin sun have dragged them prematurely into their forties. Both brothers wear wide-brimmed black hats that shadow their hands as they break to open their rectangular and rusting Havelock tobacco tins and roll their smokes, silent as always. The men wear white cotton shirts and black trousers and black work boots covered in dirt. Their spines bend sharply at the top, as if their shoulder blades are pushing their heads over, like they were born disfigured, but it’s all because
of the shovel work. Digging graves for the dead and all those years they spent digging eventual graves for themselves in the sorry rear end of the Northern Territory gold rush. It takes decades for a spine to assume the dig position, but it catches on eventually, starts curling into a comfortable place, the way Horace and Aubrey will one day curl gratefully into a mud-cake brown-dirt hole just like the one they’re digging beside the black rock frog rock.

  Aubrey has a moustache but Horace does not. Red kerchiefs round their necks for sweat, white handkerchiefs in their trouser pockets to wipe dirt off their foreheads. Men of bone and skin and work and broken sleep and worry. Men who Molly believes might have been born in dirt. Men who did not come from the place she came from. Men who emerged from the earth they’re always digging up. The girl knows if she drove Bert into her father’s belly and stomped on the blade shaft with her right boot, she’d find the same red, yellow and brown earths she keeps finding beneath all these old black cemetery gravestones lining Blackbird Creek. She’d find the Darwin kandosols her dad has told her about, those hard Top End soils that hold little water, the sandy and loamy surface soils, inside her own father. Then she’d dig deeper and she’d find no innards in the man, no gut tubes, no organs, no heart, just the vertosols, the same cracking clays and black soils found beneath the Top End’s vast floodplains. She can’t picture Uncle Aubrey’s insides, thinks he’s hollow like the dead, termite-ravaged trees that gave this cemetery its name. All he has inside is shadow.

  ‘Black rock frog rock,’ Molly mumbles to herself as she pans.

  The black rock frog rock beneath the milkwood tree looks to Molly like the black rock frogs she always sees hopping through Hollow Wood. The frogs remind her of burnt damper. Hopping lumps of burnt bread.

  She likes those words. ‘Black rock frog rock.’ She sounds like a croaking creek frog when she says those words fast. ‘Black rock frog rock. Black rock frog rock.’ And she laughs.

  Molly shakes the pan from side to side, vigorously enough to turn the gravel, gently enough to keep the gravel in the pan. She takes the larger gravel rocks from the pan, washes them clean in the water, discards them. Circular pan movements now, revolutions of gravel and water as dirt and clay dissolve. The gravedigger girl’s fingers working lumps of dirt and clay, working smaller rocks to the surface, letting the heavier minerals – the gold, Mum, the gold – settle at the bottom of the pan. The pan goes up and the pan goes down and the dirt spins like the earth spins beneath Molly Hook’s dirt-brown bare feet. And she searches for those flashes of gold for forty-five minutes and she never finds them.

  But after all the searching, all the sifting, she finds that the sky-gifted pan has been washed clean on both sides. The wet copper shimmers in the Darwin sun and she turns the pan in her hands and she guides a reflecting beam of the sun onto her left palm and she wonders if the beauty of that light on her skin is prettier than any large nugget of gold she could ever find, anyway. Maybe this was the kind of treasure her grandfather hunted across every corner of this land. The treasure of pure golden light.

  She’s tired now and she lies back on the dry creek bed to rest and she looks up to the wide blue sky and she talks to it. She asks a question of it: ‘Why did you give me this?’ And the sun blasts whiteness in her eyes and she shields the sun with the perfect circle of the copper pan and she wonders if that’s why she received this gift, so she could look up and see only sky. But what she sees when she looks up is cursive. Words. A series of sentences roughly engraved on the underside of the prospector’s pan. She reads the words with the same interest with which she reads the epitaphs on the crumbling gravestones of Hollow Wood Cemetery, all those final deep-grief stories yielding clues to the lives of the departed souls, while the mud beneath her right forefinger nail underlines each strange word.

  The longer I stand, the shorter I grow,

  And the water runs to the silver road

  She repeats those words to herself. Repeats them over and over. ‘“The longer I stand, the shorter I grow, and the water runs to the silver road” . . . “The longer I stand, the shorter I grow, and the water runs to the silver road.”’

  From the words runs the etched line of what could only be called a map, but it’s like no map that Molly Hook has ever seen. She has seen maps of her country. She has seen the dot of Darwin resting like a jewel in a princess’s tiara on the left-hand corner of the top of Australia. She has seen the rectangle of the Northern Territory wedged in straight lines between a mapped out and vast Western Australia to its left and the eastern bulge of Queensland to its right. She has stared at all the wondrous names of places she hopes to visit across her Northern Territory when she’s done with digging holes for the dead and for her dad. Auld’s Ponds. Teatree Well. Eva Downs Station. Waterloo Wells. Each place conjures a vision in her head. Blue ponds where long-legged white storks stand on lily pads the size of Roman shields that float across the noses of sleeping crocodiles. A deep well full of English tea, where fancy men and fancy women in fancy hats fill bone-china cups as they watch lawn games unfold to the sounds of dappled-sunshine violin players. A woman named Eva Downs who looks like that actress Katharine Hepburn and who runs a thriving cattle property with a shotgun in one hand and a martini in the other. That place in the central Australian desert where Napoleon fell back down to earth.

  Her father has a prospector’s map of Australia from 1914. He keeps it in his work room off the main bedroom that Molly’s never supposed to enter. The prospector’s map doesn’t even have Darwin marked on it. It doesn’t even show the whole of the Northern Territory. That map is pink and everywhere outside of what is mapped out as the states of Western Australia, South Australia, Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria is marked simply with the word ‘Aborigines’. Depending on the wilting spirit or rabid desperation of the goldminer, these areas marked ‘Aborigines’ were seen by Horace and Aubrey and their old goldminer friends as either dangerous no-man’s-lands or untouched gold-rich money fields ripe for a sharpened pickaxe. But this etched map in her hands is like no map Molly has seen. This is a map from a storybook. This is a map not of towns and cities, rivers and roads. This is a map of wonder and mystery, fortune and glory. And treasure. She remembers what her mother said: ‘We all have our own treasure to find.’

  A treasure map, Molly tells herself, as her fingernail traces the single etched map line down to a second set of words.

  West where the yellow fork man leads

  East in the dark when the wood bleeds

  She doesn’t repeat these words because she can see more words below them and she’s too desperate to follow the etched line that travels from north-west to south-east now down the back of the copper pan in a shaky course to another set of words, and a thousand blue butterflies are set free inside her stomach as she runs her short forefinger beneath them.

  City of stone ’tween heaven and earth

  The place beyond your place of birth

  The map line runs on and there are more words to be read on the pan but they are covered in silt. She rushes into the creek water once more and uses her yard dress to wipe the back of the pan completely clean, and she must remember to breathe when she raises her grandfather’s sky-gifted treasure map to the blue sky and reads the last collection of words etched into the pan.

  Own all you carry, carry all you own

  Step inside your—

  ‘Moll-yyyyyy!’

  Uncle Aubrey is shouting at her from beneath the milkwood tree.

  ‘Get outta that feckin’ creek, child!’

  The gravedigger girl rushes and splashes out of the water and crawls up the creek edge, grasping at clumps of tall grass to haul herself up and onto the cemetery grounds. Molly can see her uncle standing over the grave he’s just dug, leaning on the long shovel he used to dig it. Her father stands next to him, his head down and his black hat in his hands.

  ‘Get over here, child,’ Aubrey commands. His long thin arms and his long thin finger bones are waving
her towards him, but she doesn’t want to go there.

  ‘May I please stay here, Uncle Aubrey?’ Molly calls.

  ‘No,’ her uncle says. ‘Come here now.’

  ‘I don’t want to go over there,’ she says.

  ‘Get over here now, child,’ Aubrey Hook barks. He’s so tall and thin, and his wide-brimmed work hat is black like his eyes and his eyebrows and his gaze. And Molly wants to cry now to show her uncle that she’s frightened. Cry, she tells herself. Cry, Molly, cry. Cry and he will understand you. Cry and he will care for you. But she cannot cry in this moment, no matter how hard she forces herself to.

  ‘Dad,’ Molly calls.

  But her father says nothing. And she knows her father is weaker than her uncle.

  ‘Dad!’ Molly calls again.

  But her father has gone away in his mind. Gone away, she tells herself, gone away like Horace and Aubrey said her mum had gone away. They said she wandered off into the bush. They said she was lost in the wild and deep country and she couldn’t find her way back again. Back to Hollow Wood. Back to Molly.

  Horace is frozen in this moment, head down, his hat in his hands.

  ‘You will come here now, child, and you will say goodbye to your mother,’ Aubrey demands from the edge of the grave.

  Molly grips the sky gift copper pan and hugs it to her chest. I will never be afraid, she tells herself. I will feel no pain. Rock is hard. Can’t be broken. She shakes her head. No. ‘She’s not in there,’ Molly calls.

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘She’s not in that hole,’ Molly says. She points to the sky. ‘She’s up there.’

  Aubrey is momentarily stunned by his niece’s words. He looks at her closely to see where they might have come from, which part of the girl’s bent mind. He tilts his head and squints his eyes. Poor little gravedigger girl, he tells himself. Mad little gravedigger girl, he tells himself. Mad like her grandfather, mad like her mother.