All Our Shimmering Skies

by Dalton, Trent

  A spring-fed forest of monsoon palms thins out briefly to reveal a wide bed of sandstone rising to a wave-shaped overhang that is blocking the wind and prompts Greta to stop and suggest they sleep before they set off on a day of sunlit wandering. She sits down between a large boulder and the overhang, drops her head to her knees. But Molly still stands because she is struck by the outline of an unusual rock formation on top of the overhang: a red sandstone block that has been weathered into the rough and jagged shape of a human face, albeit one with square-shaped eyebrows and a diamond-shaped nose and a dusty crease for a half-smile. A face, the hard face of a man, worked by water and wind and ancient friction and the rising and falling of seas and the landmass that holds Australia’s greatest mystery – the time trapped inside all that is moving and all that is still. And this face is alive to Molly in the moonglow, as if it might turn and look down at her and tell her that it is bad manners to stare so hard at your elders.

  ‘I’ll be back soon,’ Molly says. She rushes around the base of the rock.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Greta shouts after her, confused.

  Molly doesn’t even hear the question because she’s focussing on her footing in the dark as she clambers over boulders and scree and lifts herself up onto shelves and ledges.

  Greta stands, concerned now, and tries to follow Molly’s footsteps with her eyes, but the girl has disappeared into the dark, scampering quickly around the corner of a sloping stone shoulder that rises to the top of the wave-shaped overhang that supports the formation that contains the face of a man.

  ‘Molly!’ Greta calls. But the gravedigger girl is too quick. And now the gravedigger girl is gone.

  *

  Small scree rocks sliding beneath her boots. At this hour, so close to dawn, everything is a shimmering blue in Molly’s eyes. She approaches the overhang from a sharp rubble slope that runs down its back like a spine. It’s so sheer that she has to fall to her hands and knees and crawl up it, her fingers tingling with flurries of fright whenever she loses her grip on the shifting stones.

  The flat top of the overhang is small in comparison to the plateaus she’s seen so far today in the deep country, but it’s still big enough to drop a small house on or Dottie Drake’s hair salon or Bert Green’s lolly shop. The lolly shop. What she wouldn’t give for a tall glass of sarsaparilla. What she wouldn’t give for a green and red apple-flavoured all-day sucker.

  She approaches the strange rock formation from behind and then she shivers in the blue moonlight when she realises the carved face is performing a miraculous balancing act, somehow leaning forward with all its weight on a single, small slab of ancient rock. A full human face of rock resting on only one-third of a neck. The formation should, by the natural rules of gravity, have plummeted off the overhang a thousand years ago, but it stays in place, leaning forward to say to Molly that it’s trying to look at something, that it’s trying so hard to see something, but sandstone eyes can’t see, so the face will stay right here in this precarious place until those eyes turn to the colour of the sky and they can see for miles like Molly Hook.

  She runs her hand over the diamond-shaped nose and the remarkable crease that looks like the valley where an upper and bottom lip meet, and she runs her hands over the eyes that cannot see and she sees someone she knows, someone she longs to see.

  ‘Dad,’ she whispers. And Walt Whitman reminds her of the deathless death. ‘“I know I am deathless.”’

  ‘“Missing me one place, search another,”’ she says. ‘“I stop somewhere waiting for you.”’

  And she sees her father’s deep eyes. The overhang of his sorrow. The rubble of his past. The jagged edges of his weaknesses. The dusty lips of his regret. Her father sits with Ol’ Man Rock now, she tells herself. Horace Hook and the maker of mountains, she tells herself, trying to make sense of what happened here on earth. Trying to understand the making of men like Aubrey Hook.

  Sam says he can ask Ol’ Man Rock anything and he always receives a correct answer.

  ‘Where is the silver road?’ Molly whispers.

  And she finds her answer in those deep sandstone eyes. She follows the gaze of the rock face and she walks to the edge of the overhang, so close that she could fall to her death with a careless misstep. And she leans her head down like the rock face does and she can see what the rock face cannot see. A still freshwater lake lit by the moon, and from the edge of this lake runs a twisting path that shimmers like it’s made of stardust. A crystal glass snake winding through darkened monsoon forest. And as she stands there, the sun wakes up and the first rising slice of its light meets the glowing of the moon and the silver road sparkles like a luminous diamond necklace, unfastened and endless, dropped in the deep country, bending and curving and cutting through the forest. A magic road for those with the kind of eyes that can see it, twisting and turning towards the silver horizon, towards the gold, towards the treasure, towards Longcoat Bob.

  ‘Greta!’ Molly shouts, and the name echoes across the deep country.

  THE ADMIRAL’S FROCK

  An olive-coloured Model A Ford pulls over to the side of a thin red dirt road lined with orange-flowered honeysuckle trees. Aubrey Hook yanks hard on the Ford’s handbrake and the action makes the wound in his left shoulder howl with blinding pain. He slowly unbuttons his work shirt. The dried yellow-white pus of the bite wound has stuck hard to the fabric of his shirt. He pulls on his sleeve, tearing away the pus-rimmed scabbing that has built up around the edge. Only hate could have caused such a wound, he tells himself. Only hate could turn a man into a dingo like that, turn his younger brother, Horace, into a wild dog who could bite the flesh from his own brother’s shoulder.

  He gets out of the car and assesses the damage to his shoulder in the car’s side mirror. An infected mess of pus and blood – his brother’s teeth were rotting like his own. There are white-bellied mangrove snakes sliding along the mudlined creeks beyond those honeysuckle trees and they spend their days eating dead mud crabs and poison-bellied toads and they still have fangs less infectious than Horace Hook’s pearly blacks. He looks at the wound and all he sees in the side mirror is the gravedigger girl and her miserable story and the series of miserable events that placed his brother beneath that Japanese bomb that removed his body so inconveniently from his left leg. Not a Hook at all, he tells himself. The girl is a Berry through and through.

  He buttons his shirt and walks along the dirt road. On the right side of the road he drops his head to follow two parallel wheel tracks that run down an incline to his own red utility truck, which sits abandoned with its front bonnet crumpled hard against a cluster of stringybark trees. The truck’s windows are wide open and, on the driver’s side, it appears that something smashed into the vehicle. Aubrey retraces his steps and paces back along the road, past his parked automobile, to a series of skid marks bending and curving across the damp dirt road. Then, back further along the road, a series of animal footprints running from one side of the road to the other. He turns to the roadside trees and scrublands that wall a fertile woodland stretching to the sea in the far distance. Not the prints of horses. These hoofprints are too widely spaced for cows. These animals had agility. Buffalo, he tells himself. And he ponders the grave misfortune of the actress and the gravedigger girl. Imagine living with that kind of luck, he tells himself. To be cursed with such black fortune that your vehicle is run off the road by a panicked herd of Northern Territory water buffalo. That’s a Tom Berry kind of luck, he thinks. That’s a Berry family kind of misfortune.

  *

  ‘What are the chances?’ Tom Berry rejoiced, spilling his beer on the unvarnished wooden floors of the Hotel Darwin’s public bar. ‘There I was, thinking I was the unluckiest son-of-a-bitch to ever hold a pickaxe, and then I look up and see this barefoot blackfeller dressed like feckin’ Napoleon!’

  Aubrey restarts the Ford on the side of the dirt road and motors on at a pace not much quicker than he could walk if his body wasn’t so broken. He re
members the smile on Tom’s face. The sheer wonder of it all. The sheer good fortune.

  There must have been twenty or so local goldminers in the bar that afternoon and Aubrey Hook was one of the youngest. The men were celebrating the miraculous return of Tom Berry, who had gone missing three months earlier while prospecting alone in the rocky tablelands far beyond the Clyde River. Tom bought three rounds of whisky for every man present and then, to a chorus of rowdy hoots and hollers, he told the extraordinary and seemingly implausible story of the three months he was missing in the deep country.

  For several days, he recounted, he’d made progress on a quartzite seam, in a location he was careful not to disclose. There he lived on beans and whisky, and he spoke of the seam’s potential only to his packhorse of twelve long years, Samson. Tom told his horse how he would be returning home a rich man and that his beloved wife, Bonnie Berry, and his beloved children, then-teenaged Violet and Peter Berry, would be waiting for him and he would tell them to pack up their things quick smart because they were moving to Sydney because Tom was getting out of the gold-digging business and getting into the caviar-scooping business because their ship had just come in on waves of raw gold. He told Samson how he would then march on down to Smith Street, Darwin, and find every last smug goldminer in every last dark corner of every last pub in town; every last man who had ever laughed about his gold-digging abilities; every man who’d ever said he had more book sense than gold sense; every man who’d ever said there was more twinkle in Tom Berry’s eyes than there ever was in his pan. And he would gather these men together and he would glow like gold itself when he told them of his riches.

  Then, hacking away at the quartzite seam, Tom noticed a rash across the underside of his left forearm and that rash began to spread across his whole left side. He worked on with his axe and rock hammer, but soon he began to cough uncontrollably and his chest began to wheeze and he could not suck enough air into his lungs. In a fevered sweat, he wisely chose to pack his tools and provisions, and he climbed onto Samson and steered the faithful horse towards Darwin, where Tom Berry would see a doctor for what he was convinced was a deadly case of influenza.

  But soon his limbs grew so weak he could not stay upright on his horse and he rode for three miles on his belly with his dead arms hugging Samson’s side. With little instruction, the horse walked aimlessly through the deep-country scrub, then took a path high into the plateau lands. It chewed on grasses by the sides of paths and when it came to a choice of routes it simply based its choice on the quality of grass each one had to offer.

  The horse clopped along for ten miles through treacherous mountain country until it came to a wild, fast-flowing river that led to a thunderous waterfall down below that Tom was only just lucid enough to register in his ears.

  Samson stopped at a bridge crossing the rapids. ‘But it was no bridge made of nail and hardwood,’ Tom Berry whispered to his transfixed audience in the public bar. ‘It was a bridge made by the blackfellers, ya see, a few thin logs that felt like twigs to a packhorse. Samson refused to go any further.’

  Tom Berry slid from the horse and landed in a mess of arms and legs on the dirt and stone edge of the rapids. He could no longer walk, as his legs were paralysed. Half his face was paralysed, too – the whole left side was numb and sagging so much that he felt it was going to drop clean off his head. With his face pressed against the earth and his dry tongue licking dust, he tried to drag himself towards the bridge and he moved a couple of yards, but he was spent altogether when he got within an arm’s reach of the bridge.

  He closed his eyes and he slowed his breathing and he regretted the fact he lacked the strength to throw himself into the rapids, where he could die quickly, smashing his head against a rock or being sucked down into the waterfall and sprayed off a clifftop and then drowned soon enough in pounding whitewash. Instead he would die slowly of thirst in the dirt beneath the baking northern Australian sun. He thought in that moment of how there was a time in his life when he’d intended to put his brain to better use than swinging a sharp axe at rock faces he was always too proud to admit were barren. He had planned to be a schoolteacher. A local priest, Duncan Hall, in Palmerston had been starting up a small Catholic school, largely for the children of mining families, and he’d asked Tom if he would teach the kids grammar and rhetoric, given he was such a keen and well-spoken advocate for the wonders of literature. But Tom had turned the priest down because he carried a weakness inside him and that weakness glowed between cracks of grey rock like a fire and that fire lit his soul. He then thought of his wife, Bonnie, and his son, Peter, who was a quiet and good boy, and his daughter, Violet, and how it made sense that such a fine woman as Bonnie would raise such a fine young woman as Violet. A voracious reader of books like her father. She’d been eating up his poetry books. She’d recite lines to her father over breakfast and her oats would go cold because she was so lost in the worlds of Byron and Wordsworth and Whitman. But the glow of the gold blinded him to all that. The glow saw him work too much on rock faces, and then it saw him drink too much because the drink kept lethargy away from the rock face, kept him working too much.

  Now the miner turned over and stared into a different golden glow, and that was the full sun, and he willed it to set him alight, to burn his gold-lusting soul to ash.

  ‘But then I heard Samson holler out with a neigh like he was startled by somethin’,’ Tom Berry told the wide-mouthed whisky drinkers at the bar. ‘And I felt footsteps coming towards me in the dirt and I could not even move my head, gentlemen, because I was so weak. But I could move my eyes and I turned my eyes to the footsteps in the dirt and then a figure stood over me.’ Tom Berry paused for effect in the telling of his great tale and he lowered his voice. ‘The figure of a man, and this man blocked out the sun and all I could see was his coat. His long . . . black . . . feckin’ coat! A French admiral’s frock coat.’

  Calls of ‘balderdash’ and ‘bunkum’ and ‘bullshit’ echoed across the beer-stained pub floor, but Tom Berry stood adamantly by his story. Longcoat Bob was old and tall. He was shirtless under the coat, but his long thin legs wore brown riding pants. There was scarring across his chest like the staff lines on the piano music sheets Bonnie Berry played from after dinner. He had a mess of curled silver hair and he had creases so deep in his long, thin face that the creases looked like battle scars. He wore the French admiral’s frock coat as naturally as a white man wears a vest. It was made of military-grade navy blue wool, with gold buttons and elaborate gold embroidery on the lapels and cuffs. The collar was so high and stiff it brushed against Bob’s earlobes. But the coat was no museum piece; it looked like the old man had worn it for decades, as it was torn at the elbows and covered in dust.

  ‘It was the real thing, too,’ Tom said, and men laughed and spat beer from their lips as they slapped their thighs.

  ‘I speak the truth,’ Tom gasped. ‘That coat had made its way from them Napoleonic Wars all the way to that bloke Bob up in those mountains.’

  Tom’s audience was sceptical. ‘You went mad up there in those mountains, Berry,’ called Albert Strudwick, a seasoned digger from South Australia. ‘Tell me how a blackfeller all the way out there comes by a coat sewn by the French Empire?’

  Tom knocked back a small glass of whisky and followed it with a swig of beer.

  ‘Well, there’s something you need to know about this feller Longcoat Bob,’ Tom said. ‘He’s not like other blackfellers.’

  Tom then recounted how he dropped out of consciousness at Longcoat Bob’s feet because the vision of the strange Aboriginal had felt like a dream and there was little else he could do with his life at that point except slip away into that dream. He woke two days later inside a small hut with supports made of tree branches and walls made of rusting corrugated iron. The hut smelled of eucalyptus oil. His neck was throbbing, but he was no longer suffering the flu symptoms that had left him near dead by the rapids crossing. He ran his fingers across the back of his neck an
d felt a hole in the soft flesh behind his right ear. The hole was filled with a paste that smelled like piss and old grass.

  Then an Aboriginal woman entered the hut. She said her name was Little Des, daughter of an older woman named Big Desree, and she wore an old grey linen shirt and she spoke in her people’s native tongue as well as English and told the lost goldminer just how fortunate he was to have been found by the extraordinary man they called Longcoat Bob, who had brought Tom Berry back to his camp and identified the paralysis tick the size of a pepper corn that had burrowed into the back of his skull and was digging a tunnel out of feasted human flesh that was about to break through the soft and juicy wall of his brain. At the same time as it was gorging itself on his insides, the tick was filling Tom Berry’s head with poison. Longcoat Bob had drowned the tick in wet tobacco ashes then dug it out with a burnt knife tip. He’d filled the hole it had left with a healing paste he made out of emu bush, tea tree oil, mashed moth larvae and one more secret ingredient that Little Des said he refused to disclose to tribe members, in order to maintain his superior air of medicinal mystery.

  ‘What are you doin’ wanderin’ about out here?’ Little Des asked. And Tom told Little Des about his shameful lust for gold and how he had found a promising quartzite seam maybe twenty miles from Longcoat Bob’s camp and he had hoped he would return to Darwin a wealthy man who could provide for his beloved family.

  Stepping out of the hut later, Tom smiled wide at what was a small tribal camp of huts and firepits spread across a clearing fringed by stringybark trees and lush cycad bushes with ten-foot-tall stems. A trio of shy young women approached him with paperbark plates filled with boiled goose eggs and freshly cooked fish and freshwater eel. He found Samson in a shaded corner of the camp, joyfully slurping from a bucket of water next to a mountain of collected grass and bush apples.

  Longcoat Bob subsequently ordered Tom to eat fourteen billygoat plums each day for a week to fight off infection. And soon Tom’s strength was restored, but he did not rush to climb onto Samson and clip-clop his long way back to Darwin. He had developed a fondness for Longcoat Bob’s people and they had developed a fondness for him.