All Our Shimmering Skies

by Dalton, Trent

  ‘Yes,’ his grandfather said. ‘But what if those three days sailing past that monster were the most terrifying and hellish three days any human could ever be subjected to? Looking into the eyes of those creatures was a hell beyond anything our books could conjure.’

  ‘I’d just close my eyes,’ Yukio said. ‘When I opened my eyes, I’d be alive and the three days would be over. If I didn’t open my eyes, I’d be dead and I wouldn’t have to open my eyes at all.’

  His grandfather smiled. ‘Aaaah, dear grandson,’ he said. ‘You always seem to open my eyes a little wider every day.’

  Yukio smiles now. He follows Molly to the western wall where Greta is captivated by the image of a creature that looks like a cross between a man and a bug and a fish. Thin human arms and legs spread wide, but the torso is made of what looks like a fish skeleton, with the tail placed where a man might normally find his backside. Molly sees that the painted creatureman has a head like a cartoon beetle’s head with big circles for eyes, no mouth or nose, and two upright antennae. From the sides of its head, what look like two bamboo sticks curve down to its feet. Two rods, thinks Molly.

  ‘The Lightning Man,’ she says. ‘Sam told me about the Lightning Man.’ She traces the rods running from his head. ‘Lightning shoots out from his ears and he bends it down to us, all of us down here on earth, because he wants to show us that everything we need in life is coming soon.’

  Molly places a palm against the rock. ‘My grandfather was here,’ she says. She pulls the gold pan from her duffel bag. She runs her fingertip along a sentence etched into the pan.

  ‘“West where the yellow fork man leads”,’ Molly says. ‘My grandfather was poetic. He didn’t see the Lightning Man. He saw a yellow fork man.’ And Molly whispers now, ‘The Lightning is a Yellow Fork.’

  ‘Come again?’ Greta asks.

  ‘Emily Dickinson,’ Molly says. ‘She wrote about the sky. She must have seen the most incredible lightning in the sky. Forked lightning. She saw things in the sky like I see things. She looked up there and wondered where that gift of the lightning came from. She wondered who was up there dropping things from that house in the clouds.’

  Molly slings the duffel bag back over her shoulder.

  ‘It’s coming,’ Molly says to Greta, eyes alight. ‘Let’s go. It’s coming.’

  And Molly rushes through the western archway, which opens onto a thin brown dirt path bordered by tall trees.

  ‘What’s coming, Molly?’ Greta calls.

  Molly turns and talks as she marches backwards.

  ‘Everything we need, Greta,’ she says. ‘Everything we need.’

  THE TEN SECOND SKY

  The red-haired boy, Shane, has knotted a lengthy rag around his head to staunch the blood that wants to spill from his severed left ear, and now he swigs from a bottle of moonshine, hoping all that hut-brewed white spirit will give him spirit enough to join his friends in the afterlife. He has dragged the bodies of his dead tin-mining colleagues together beside the campfire. He had thought that laying the men down in a uniformed row would give his dead friends the respect they deserve. There was something right about the effort it took to do that under God’s watchful eye. Fishing Hoss with the stab wound through his belly from a crimson-coloured corner of the creek. Dragging Kenny Spencer with his sliced throat back through the scrub to the mine site to lie beside McDougall, the man in the hunting jacket, also with a sliced throat. George Kane was the toughest to pull into the uniformed line, not just because of his dead weight, but because the one-eyed Kane was the man who raised the red-haired boy. Shane looked upon George as father and mother, two parents inside one giant man, making up for the mother and father who had left him on the doorstep of the Darwin police station fourteen years earlier.

  Shane lined the bodies in a row, flat on their backs, their faces to the sky, then staggered back down the bush path leading to the stone, wood and tin hut where the workers had their swags. In the kitchen he cut himself a thick slice of cured kangaroo meat and wet his dry throat with a long guzzle of tank water. Then he went to George Kane’s raised stretcher bed and found the bottle of moonshine by a pair of old boots and then he reached under his pillow to find the loaded six-shot Enfield No. 2 revolver that he now picks up in two sweaty hands and holds between his knees as he sits on the thick log in front of the dying campfire. He takes a deep breath and he nods and walks to the four bodies lined up on the grass and he lies flat on his back beside George Kane with the caved-in skull and he looks up to the blue sky. There are two clouds up there, one fat and shaped like a wagon and the other thin and stretched like a crocodile.

  The red-haired boy with half a left ear cocks the hammer on the revolver and breathes deep as he brings the barrel to his temple. He closes his eyes and his right forefinger slips cautiously over the trigger. He weeps, and the tears squeeze through his closed eyelids. His mouth is closed and he screams through gritted teeth. A guttural howl, a lunatic wail, death-frenzied, life-crazed. But confused, mostly.

  The finger on the trigger. Pull it, he tells himself. Be brave like George, he tells himself. He breathes deep again but he can’t pull the trigger and he opens his eyes and is met by the face of a man looking down at him.

  ‘Almost there,’ the man says.

  The boy screams in fear and raises the gun. ‘Get away,’ he spits. ‘I’ll do you in, I will. I’ll shoot your face right in.’

  The man nods casually and steps away and the boy watches him move to the campfire as he aims at his back.

  ‘I mean you no harm,’ the man says.

  The man is tall and lean. A bushy black moustache over his lips. A white shirt covered in dirt and blood. Black pants and boots and a large black hat with a wide brim that shadows his face.

  ‘Who are you?’ Shane spits.

  ‘I’m the gravedigger,’ the man says, smelling the tea inside a cup he’s found by the campfire logs. He slurps that tea down like it was made for him.

  ‘Have you come to bury the bodies?’ the boy asks, because his mind moves slow, and the man with the tea knows this already.

  ‘No, I’m not here for these bodies,’ he says, now sipping the tea. ‘But bodies are what I’m looking for.’

  ‘Are you one of them?’ the boy asks.

  ‘Who’s them?’

  ‘Them what done all this?’ the boy replies, casting his eyes over his dead friends in the human line. The man turns his eyes to the bodies.

  ‘What happened here, boy?’

  The boy speaks through tears. ‘There was two girls, one younger and one older,’ he says. ‘I saw them by the creek and I ran back here and told my boss, George, about them and then they came on through and we gave ’em some tea and . . . and . . .’

  The boy weeps.

  ‘And?’ the man prompts, running his fingers across his left shoulder where a bloodstain has seeped through his shirt.

  ‘And the boys were gonna have their way with the blonde woman, and my boss, George, he sent me down to the hut but I didn’t go all the way down. I hid behind them shrubs because I wanted to see them have their way and . . . and . . . then he came out of the forest.’

  ‘Who came out of the forest, boy?’

  ‘The ghost,’ the boy says. ‘He moved like a ghost and crept up behind McDougall and cut his throat open before I had a chance to say a word of warnin’ and I froze a bit but my pecker didn’t because it pissed in my pants and I looked down and saw my wet pants and when I looked up again that ghost had stuck a sword inside George.’

  ‘A sword?’ echoes the man, intrigued.

  The boy cries hard now, the events rising together in a great wave of chilling reality.

  ‘What did this ghost man look like?’

  ‘He was a Japanese,’ the boy says.

  The man with the moustache shakes his head. ‘Extraordinary,’ he says.

  He nods at the boy’s left ear, where blood is pooling in the worn rag dressing.

  ‘What happened to your ear
?’

  ‘The younger girl was carrying a shovel and she swung it at me and cut my ear fair in half,’ the boy says.

  The man smiles beneath his moustache. ‘And why would she do a thing like that?’

  The boy shakes his head. ‘I was trying to grab hold of her.’

  ‘Why were you grabbing hold of her?’

  ‘We were gonna keep her here,’ the boy says.

  The man nods. Then his eyes turn to the log by the campfire and find the bottle of moonshine the boy was just swigging from. The man’s eyes light up as he throws his teacup in the fire. He picks up the bottle of moonshine and the very touch of it makes him exhale with relief. The bottle has humbled him somehow.

  The boy watches the man sit on the large fireside log closest to him and remove his hat with what looks like exaltation.

  The man smiles and holds the bottle up to the boy. ‘You mind if I have a splash?’

  ‘Go ahead, mister.’

  The boy could only sip that moonshine because it burned like liquid fire inside him, but the man puts that bottle to his dry and blistered lips and glugs down half of it in a single blast, his cheeks puffing like a bullfrog, his throat working hard like he’s sucking on a water hose after a day’s work in a wheat field.

  The man brings the bottle down and closes his eyes, breathing slow and deep. ‘What’s your name, boy?’

  ‘Shane.’

  He opens his eyes again, turns to the boy. ‘What were you gonna do to the girl, Shane?’

  The boy shakes his head. ‘No, no, I’m not gonna tell you that.’

  ‘You can tell me,’ the man says. ‘Go ahead, Shane. I promise you no analysis and I promise you no harm.’

  ‘Anala . . . what?’

  ‘Analysis, Shane,’ the man says. ‘Thinking on an event then considering the meaning and the making of it.’

  The boy thinks on this for a moment. He turns to George beside him. Then he speaks softly. ‘George said she was gonna be my first.’

  The man nods. ‘You were gonna have your way with the girl?’

  The boy drops his eyes, nodding.

  The man swigs from the bottle again. ‘Tell me, Shane, what stopped you from pulling the trigger just now when you had that gun at the side of your head?’

  Shane rests the gun in his lap now, sits up with his legs crossed.

  ‘I couldn’t do it,’ he says. ‘I kept thinkin’ God was up there in the sky looking down on me and he was gonna send me to hell for doin’ it.’

  ‘Why did you wanna do it in the first place?’

  ‘My friends have all gone,’ he says. ‘And the world has ended and all that, and what do I have to stick around for now?’

  ‘Who told you the world has ended?’

  ‘George,’ the boy says, nodding at Kane. ‘He said that Hitler feller’s runnin’ the north of the world now and the Japs are runnin’ the south and I knew that was true when I saw that Jap come out of the forest like that.’

  The man nods, rubbing his moustache with his forefinger and thumb. He is silent for a long moment.

  ‘It is true, Shane,’ the man says. ‘Firestorms have engulfed every major city of the world. There are no vehicles moving through streets anymore because the streets are filled with skinless bodies. Gravediggers across the world are naming their price for their highly valued services. Ash rains across the east coast of Australia. The Thames runs red with blood. German soldiers march through Times Square.’

  The boy shakes his head, dismayed. But confused, mostly. ‘George was going to start a new world here,’ he says.

  Shane lies back down beside George and weeps.

  The man looks to the sky and raises his bottle to it, like a toast. Then he swigs again and turns to the boy. ‘Would you like to know the truth, Shane?’

  ‘Yes,’ says the boy.

  ‘The truth is, Shane,’ the man says, ‘God is not watching you. God has never bothered Himself with the business of death. He only focusses on His successes and never bothers with His failures. He’s always too concerned with the wonder of birth and the business of life. He lets death unravel down here with all the purpose and predictability of a father of four children tripping down a lighthouse stairwell. He cares for death about as much as the bullets in your gun care for bone. He makes no analysis of it, Shane. He has no interest in the meaning of it, nor the making. God knows nothing about death.’

  He drinks again and points the bottle at the boy. ‘But the gravedigger, Shane! The gravedigger knows everything there is to know about death.’

  And Aubrey Hook whispers now. ‘Let me tell you the story of a man who once passed through this way,’ he says. ‘Let me tell you the story of Tom Berry. It’s a story about death.’

  *

  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.’