All Our Shimmering Skies

by Dalton, Trent

  ‘What if I told you the first person I will kill with this blade will be your betrayer, Rina?’ the White Tiger asked. ‘And what if I told you the second person I will kill with this blade will be your younger brother, Uno?’

  Asato was silent for a moment. ‘The sword is not for sale,’ he said.

  The White Tiger reached into a leather pouch slung to a belt around his waist. He raised a closed fist then opened it to reveal a pure white butterfly, which launched into flight from the assassin’s soft, open palm.

  ‘Have you heard the story of the gravedigger and the butterfly?’ the assassin asked.

  ‘I have not,’ said Asato.

  *

  And so now Oshiro Miki told his story of how the White Tiger told his story of Takahama, who was born into wealth and was highly educated but, despite his good fortune, chose, in the prime of his life, to spend the rest of his days alone, digging graves and tending the headstones of the dead, as caretaker for what was believed to be the most haunted cemetery in all of old Japan. So humble was the caretaker’s hut connected to the cemetery grounds that Takahama’s wealthy and influential family refused to visit for fear of embarrassment. Years later, when two neighbouring villagers stumbled upon an aged Takahama slowly dying alone on his bed, they called for the cemetery keeper’s remaining relatives to visit him at once.

  Takahama’s long-lost nephew, Hansuke, made it to the old man’s bed just in time to witness his final hours of life. As Takahama drew his last laboured breaths, a pure white butterfly flew in through his window and perched itself peacefully on the tip of his nose. The butterfly flapped its wings once, twice, three times. Hansuke shooed the butterfly away, and it flew off and returned and flew off and returned to the tip of the old man’s nose. Then Takahama’s eyes closed forever and the white butterfly seemed to know this and flew back out the window. Instinctively, Hansuke followed it deep into the haunted cemetery. He ran through grey and black gravestones covered in weed and moss, aisle upon aisle of the never-visited dead. The white butterfly flew left and flew right and then deep into a tunnel of elm trees that ended at a single tomb, where the butterfly rested itself on the only grave in the cemetery without a trace of moss or dirt upon it. Indeed, the grave was as pristine as if the headstone and tomb had been placed that very day. There was a name on the headstone: ‘Akiko’.

  Studying the gravestone epitaph, Hansuke began to piece together the story behind his late uncle’s decisions. Akiko and Takahama had been betrothed, but Akiko had died the day before their wedding. Since Takahama had already promised to look after his beloved Akiko, every hour of every day, he swore he would continue to do that, even if it meant caring only for her grave.

  As he stood pondering this, Hansuke noticed another small white butterfly emerge from the dense forest surrounding the cemetery and flutter towards the one he had followed to the grave, which was still hovering above the headstone. The two white butterflies circled each other for a long moment and then Hansuke edged closer to them, but his movement caused the butterflies to fly away from the headstone and they fluttered up into the sky and never came back down again. The nephew stared at that blue sky above, not with a sense of grief or confusion, but only wonder.

  Asato Miki stroked his chin inside his knife-making workshop, absorbing the assassin’s tale.

  ‘Well?’ the assassin asked.

  ‘Well what?’ Asato replied.

  ‘What did you learn from the story?’ the assassin asked.

  Asato stroked his chin some more, then gave his answer. ‘It is a simple tale you tell and there is only one lesson to be learned from it,’ he said. ‘Transformation. Sometimes they stay with us. And sometimes they wait for us. The lost are not lost. We can change into things. We can transform ourselves. Sometimes for the better . . .’

  ‘Sometimes for the worse,’ said the assassin, his eyes turning to the pure white butterfly that was now flapping above his right shoulder. He turned back to Asato. ‘I must take your life now,’ he said.

  ‘Why?’ Asato asked.

  ‘Because you will not share your artistry with me.’

  ‘You haven’t given me a chance,’ Asato said.

  The assassin paused. ‘Very well,’ he said. ‘Show me the full extent of your artistry.’

  ‘How would I do that?’ Asato replied.

  The assassin turned his eyes to the butterfly. ‘Take your sword and slice a wing off this flying white butterfly.’

  ‘That’s impossible,’ Asato said.

  ‘So is your blade,’ the assassin said.

  Asato took a deep breath then exhaled slowly. He retrieved his impossible sword from a small locked room off the workshop’s furnace area and returned to stand before the butterfly and the assassin. He gripped the sword’s handle tight and raised the perfect blade high as the butterfly hovered, as if by will, as if by command, before his eyes. The betrayed sword-maker drew a short breath, tensed his shoulders, fixed his feet to the floor and began to swing his blade – but he immediately pulled out of the swing, and presented the sword to the assassin, handle end first. ‘I can’t,’ he said, shaking his head.

  The assassin raised his eyebrows.

  ‘The butterfly’s life is already too short,’ Asato said.

  The assassin lifted the sword to his eyes, laid his forefinger gently on the blade. He turned to face Asato and swung the blade three times. The sound of steel slicing through air was the only evidence of his actions, the blade moving too fast to be visible. Asato heaved a long sigh of relief on realising that he was still breathing.

  The White Tiger rested the sword in his open palms then handed it back to its creator. ‘You are right, knife-maker,’ he said, before turning and exiting the workshop through its rusty-hinged wooden front door.

  Asato stood in silence, then rushed to the door, just in time to see the assassin disappearing into the bustling port-village crowd, the pure white butterfly hovering peacefully above his right shoulder.

  *

  ‘Well?’ Yukio asked.

  ‘Well what?’ Oshiro replied.

  ‘What are you trying to tell me, father?’ Yukio asked.

  ‘The lost are not lost,’ Oshiro Miki said in the silence of the Sakai workshop.

  Yukio nodded his head in understanding. ‘There is something I must tell you about sad love stories, father,’ he said. ‘They are not as enjoyable when they are true.’

  Oshiro was silent. Then he nodded sincerely and said, ‘The lost are not lost. Sometimes they transform. Sometimes they stay with us.’

  And it was with two open palms that Oshiro Miki handed the old fire-forged shortsword to his first-born son, Yukio, before he set off to war.

  Yukio received the sword in silence. He walked to the front door of the workshop, then turned to speak to the father he loved.

  ‘And sometimes they wait for us,’ he said. Yukio left his father in the workshop and walked out the door in the direction of war.

  *

  Nara smiling at him now in a winged weapon. Now the deep-hell machinery sound of Yukio and his airborne brothers, who do and do not fear their death, spread across an attack wave of 183 battle planes in arrow formations: 89 Nakajima B5N bombers carrying 800-kilogram torpedoes and 250-kilogram bombs; 51 Aichi D3A dive bombers, each with a 250-kilogram bomb slung under its fuselage and two 30-kilogram bombs nestled on racks under its wings; and 43 agile Zero fighters flying above it all, closer to the blue sky ceiling, closer to heaven. 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. Red spots on battle wings. All those red rising suns in a morning sky formation.

  Yukio’s cockpit canopy has a 360-degree view of sky, water and land. A high green mountain range on Yukio’s right side, cloud on his left. It’s 7.48 a.m. and he’s been flying for one hour and forty minutes. The air fleet banks west and along a turquoise coastline and Yukio reaches quickly for his bi
noculars. Two glass lenses magnifying the beauty and terror of eight majestic battleships lining the port of Pearl Harbor, on the island of Oahu, Hawaii. There are smaller grey warships anchored around them like mice sleeping beside greyhounds.

  Yukio drops his binoculars and his naked eyes find the ‘black dragon’, an electrifying dark blue flare that’s now rising into the light blue sky. They don’t know we’re coming, Yukio tells himself. The fleet’s leader, Captain Mitsuo Fuchida, is speaking loudly and clearly to Yukio and his brothers with that dark blue flare. Speaking without speaking. He’s saying only one word. Screaming it through a burning and soaring dragon-flare streak. Demanding it. Just one word. Attack.

  Yukio’s left hand reaches for the gunsight fixed between his two 7.7-millimetre machine guns. His right hand reaches for the photograph fixed above his fuel gauge. He folds the top half of the photograph down over the bottom half. He doesn’t want her to see this. ‘I’m coming, Nara,’ he whispers, as his fighter swoops down towards a horizon lit by fire.

  THE WAYS IN AND OUT OF THE MAZE

  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 per
turbed 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.