All Our Shimmering Skies

by Trent Dalton

  ‘I blacked out in the kitchen today,’ Molly says. ‘I don’t even remember how I got into town. I feel like I just woke up outside Ward’s Boutique.’

  Danny clops along the beachfront. The gravedigger girl holds Sam tighter.

  Danny stops. Sam looks out beyond the wharf. On the horizon, three jagged lines of lightning split the sky, turning it violet.

  ‘The Lightning Man’s comin’,’ Sam says.

  Molly knows about the Lightning Man. Sam’s grandfather was the one who first told him about the Lightning Man, the spirit god who rides high in the sky on a high-speed vehicle made out of storm clouds. ‘Wish I had me one of those to get around on, eh Mol’,’ Sam said. He told Molly the Lightning Man has powerful ears that know things, that know the weather, and from these ears the Lightning Man shoots rods of electricity down through his storm cloud to the ground. ‘But you don’t run from the lightning,’ Sam said. ‘You go to it. Because that Lightning Man’s trying to tell you where to find what you need. The Lightning Man comes and then all the good water and food comes with him.’

  Another lightning strike in the blackness far beyond the busy wharf.

  ‘I’m leavin’ here tomorrow, Molly,’ Sam says.

  ‘Where you goin’?’ Molly asks.

  ‘I’m going to the lightning, Molly.’

  Molly releases her grip around Sam’s belly.

  ‘Me family,’ he says. ‘We’re going bush. We’re going deep, Mol’.’

  ‘Do you have to go?’ Molly asks.

  ‘Big gathering,’ Sam says. ‘A lot of talkin’ needs to be done with the elders about what’s comin’ with this war and where we all go from ’ere.’

  ‘Where are you all gathering?’ Molly asks.

  ‘I can’t tell you that, Mol’.’

  Molly wraps her arms around Sam again.

  ‘Take me with you,’ she says. ‘I’ll go with you right now. You go ahead and give Danny a big kick in the belly and we can ride away, right now. Tonight. Just go deep into the bush. So deep we never come back.’

  Sam turns his head to speak closer to Molly’s ears. ‘You’re not allowed to go where I’m going, Molly.’

  Molly closes her eyes. Silent for a full minute. ‘Do you care for me, Sam?’

  ‘I care for you a lot, Mol’,’ Sam says. ‘But I’m sixteen and you’re twelve and—’

  ‘I’m almost thirteen,’ Molly says.

  Sam nods, smiling. ‘And you’re almost thirteen,’ he says, breathing deep to finish what he has to say. ‘And I don’t think it’d be right for me to care for you the way you want me to.’

  This heavy stone heart. Cry from it, Molly, cry, she tells herself. But she can’t cry, so she opens her eyes again and slides off the horse, walks to a large rock embedded in the sandy banks of the harbour and sits.

  ‘Will Longcoat Bob be there?’ she asks.

  Sam slips off Danny, too, holds the horse’s reins as he talks to Molly’s back.

  ‘Nobody knows where he is,’ Sam says. ‘He’s been on a long walk. Longest he’s ever been on. Nobody’s seen him in almost two years.’

  Molly drops her head, traces the circle of the night sky moon in the sand with her right big toe.

  ‘Sam?’

  ‘Yeah, Mol’.’

  ‘Remember I told you about the sky gift.’

  ‘Yeah, Mol’. I remember.’

  Molly traces a twisting road running from the sand moon at her feet.

  ‘Remember them words my grandfather etched on the pan?’

  ‘Yeah, the poems,’ Sam says.

  ‘Directions,’ Molly says, correcting Sam. ‘They were directions. But he wrote them for the eyes of poets. Only people livin’ poetic lives could understand them. You have to be poetic, Sam. You have to be graceful.’

  Sam ties Danny’s reins to the post of a rotting fence lining the beachfront.

  ‘Directions, huh,’ Sam says.

  Molly nods.

  ‘I know where the silver road is,’ Molly says.

  Sam says nothing.

  ‘It’s what you called the glass river,’ Molly says. ‘It’s the same thing. Way beyond the Clyde River. The road you used to walk as a kid.’

  Molly looks up at the night sky moon. ‘I’m gonna leave this place, too,’ she says. ‘Everybody else goes away. Why can’t I? I’m gonna go find the silver road. And then I’m gonna find Longcoat Bob and then I’m gonna find my own treasure.’

  ‘What’s your treasure, Molly?’

  ‘Answers.’

  ‘Answers to what, Mol’?’

  ‘Why he did what he done to my family. How he’s gonna undo what he did.’

  Sam finds a place on the beach rock beside Molly and he tells her, not for the first time, his deep-gutted full-flesh heart feeling about Longcoat Bob’s curse. ‘There is no curse, Molly,’ he says. ‘Longcoat Bob don’t work like that. He can’t work like that. He’s not able. There is only what the land and the sky deems right and wrong.’ Sam’s said this before, too.

  ‘It wasn’t Longcoat Bob who put the dark on your grandfather,’ he continues. ‘Only the earth can do that. Only that twinkling stuff up there can do that, Mol’. The land and the stars were watching. They both said your grandfather was wrong to do what he done. He took gold from the earth and the earth didn’t want that gold took. The earth rebelled, Molly. It turned on your grandfather. You start walking into places you don’t belong and it might just turn on you, too.’

  Molly dwells on this for a long moment. Then she stands. ‘Did you like the film, Sam?’

  Sam looks up at Molly. ‘Not really, if I’m bein’ honest,’ he says.

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You weren’t watching it with me.’

  Molly smiles. ‘Bye, Sam.’ She walks away.

  ‘Molly, wait,’ Sam calls. But she does not stop. He stands to watch her march into the night, patting Danny the colt’s head along the way.

  ‘Bye, Molly Hook,’ he whispers, only to himself.

  *

  Two shadows in the cramped kitchen of the caretaker’s house at Hollow Wood Cemetery. The Hook brothers, Horace and Aubrey. White long-sleeved work shirts buttoned to the neck. Black trousers. Both men too drunk to notice they’re still wearing their wide-brimmed black hats inside. Molly standing in the doorway to the kitchen. Horace can barely keep his eyes open. He sways in his chair, reaching once, twice, three times for a glass jar with a scratched ‘Queen’s Olives’ label on its side, which is half-filled with a clear spirit that smells to Molly like petrol mixed with a splash of tonic water. Aubrey stares at her through the dark slits of his dead black eyes, his right forefinger circling a small glass of the same spirit. Horace’s head finally stays still long enough to see his daughter standing expressionless and mute inside the kitchen. Then a thought reaches his clouded brain. Molly knows it’s a dark thought. Horace stands abruptly – too abruptly for his blood and his body and brain to catch up with his legs – and he stumbles to his right and trips on his feet and he falls hard to the ground, his eyebrow hitting the corner of the kitchen stove on the way down. Blood spills immediately from his forehead and he tries to wipe it away but he merely wipes it across his forehead so that he looks to Molly like a war-painted Indian in a Gary Cooper western.

  ‘Dad!’ Molly says, kneeling down, hands out to help her father regain his equilibrium. But he doesn’t lean on those hands, he only grabs them and reefs them towards his head before scrambling to his feet and reaching for the razor strop that hangs from a nail by the stove. He pushes Molly against the kitchen table and forces her head down hard, knocking his drinking jar off the table and smashing it on the floor. And Aubrey Hook sits perfectly still with his right hand gripped around his glass as he stares into the eyes of his niece while her father flogs her backside and her rear thighs with the razor strop. Up and down and up and down. The movement of the thick leather strop and the pulsing of the kitchen light bulb. Welts upon welts upon welts, blood upon blood. Ten lashes, twelve,
fifteen; eighteen in total. And Molly Hook is so truly grateful in this moment for the curse of Longcoat Bob because her stone heart is surely the only thing that is keeping her from crying in front of her dumb-faced, dark-shadow uncle, whose black eyes she refuses to turn away from, no matter how loud that strop whacks, no matter how deep it stings and cuts. Do not look away, Molly. Dig, Molly, dig. Whack and whack and whack and whack. Dig and dig and dig and dig. And Aubrey Hook’s lips smile beneath his thick black moustache and he raises a moonshine toast to the gravedigger girl and then he howls with deranged laughter, rejoicing in the music he hears in his head, the music made by leather meeting skin.

  Sleep, Molly, sleep. Keep the bedroom door shut. Stay right here until they are gone or until they are dead. Her bed is a single mattress on a wooden floor by a duchesse with a small square mirror. Rising damp in the wood walls. It’s morning, well past dawn, and Horace and Aubrey Hook still scream and laugh and bellow beyond her bedroom door. She has her mother’s copy of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, taken from the living room bookshelf and shaken furiously from the landing to expunge the silverfish wiggling through its fertile pages. A black hardback cover, pages yellowing and brittle. She reads with her belly pressed against the mattress to ease the pressure on her throbbing arse and the whip-welted backs of her thighs, her head leaning over the end of the mattress, her elbows and the open Shakespeare flat on the floor.

  The gravedigger girl reads The Tempest. It’s about the wind and the rain, about the kinds of storms that strike Darwin in the stifling summer when men like Aubrey and Horace Hook turn strange and vengeful like Prospero the sorcerer, who can wield the wind and the rain and who can raise the dead from grim and sorry graveyards. ‘“Graves at my command have waked their sleepers,”’ the girl reads. Sleep, Molly, sleep. The Tempest feels like a dream to Molly. One great fevered sea dream. Sleep, Molly, sleep. ‘“And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind,”’ the girl reads. ‘“We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”’ And she sleeps.

  She sleeps for eight hours and her empty stomach wakes her in darkness. She can hear her father and uncle outside now. They are in the front yard working the engine of Aubrey’s red utility truck. The motor won’t start and the men bark at the car, curse it for not acknowledging their murderous threats. Molly wants to stand, but standing is no longer so easy with the swelling. She pushes herself up with her arms first then bends her knees and that motion puts pressure on her backside and pain shoots through her lower back and into her brain. She opens her bedroom door carefully, slips into the living room on the tips of her toes, the hollers of her long-drunk and stupefied father and uncle still safely at a distance in the yard. She scurries down the house’s rear steps to the under-house toilet. Agony now just to pass a small stool. She drops a scoop of sawdust down the long drop.

  Back upstairs now and into the kitchen where she opens the icebox and pushes aside a bowl of fried sheep’s brains and tomato sauce and fills her hands with three old pork sausages and a block of mould-covered cheese. She opens a small standalone pantry cupboard to find small stacks of mixed canned goods: Spam luncheon meat, Edgell tinned peas and, the only dinner Horace Hook seems to eat these days, Campbell’s Condensed Oxtail Soup. Molly takes a can of Spam and a can of peas. She finds a can opener in the cutlery drawer. She fills two empty glass pint milk bottles with water and scurries back to her bedroom, closing the door behind her. Molly drops her food on the mattress and places the bottles on the floor then drags her mirrored duchesse across the room and pushes it against the back of her bedroom door. She lies back down on the mattress on her belly, bites an end off a pork sausage.

  For two whole days, barricaded safely behind that bedroom door, she waits out the tempest. And three words keep rattling through her mind like a mantra. Like an enchantment. Like a spell. Like a curse.

  Dig, Molly, dig.

  *

  Dusk. Molly hears the utility truck pulling out of the driveway. Her bedroom door creaks open and the noise of it makes her pause. She waits for signs of life through the house. Nothing. She scans the house, assesses the silent fallout of her father’s and uncle’s deep dive into white spirit. Lamps on their side on the floor. Chairs on their side. Broken glass in the hallway. She’ll be expected to clean this up. She will not clean this up.

  She pads into the kitchen. Empty bottles and shattered glasses. A patch of human hair on the floor. Streaks of blood across the walls. Blood and bile vomit in the sink.

  Molly fills a cup of water, glugs it down. She sits for a moment at the kitchen table. A beer-stained newspaper on the table covered in bush tobacco and ash. Northern Standard. Days old, weeks maybe. It’s open at a public notice, an order. Molly dusts off the tobacco, holds the paper up to her eyes.

  COMMONWEALTH OF AUSTRALIA

  NORTHERN TERRITORY ADMINISTRATION

  PROCLAMATION

  EVACUATION ORDER

  CITIZENS OF DARWIN

  The Federal War Cabinet has decided that women and children must be compulsorily evacuated from Darwin as soon as possible, except women required for essential services. Arrangements have been completed and the first party will leave within the next 48 hours. This party will include sick in hospital, expectant mothers, aged and infirm and women with young children. You have all been issued with printed notices advising you what may be taken and this must be strictly adhered to. Personal effects must not exceed 35 lbs. The staff dealing with evacuation is at the Native Affairs Branch in Mitchell Street and will be on duty day and night continuously. The personnel who will make up the first party will be advised during the next few hours and it will be the duty of all citizens to comply at once with the instructions given by responsible authorities.

  Remember what your Prime Minister, Mr Curtin, said recently. ‘The time has gone by for argument. The instructions of the Federal Government must be carried out.’ The Federal Government has made all arrangements for the comfort and welfare of your families in the South. Darwin citizens will greatly assist the war effort by cheerfully carrying out all requests. There will be hardship and sacrifice, but the war situation demands these and I am sure Darwin will set the rest of Australia a magnificent example to follow.

  (Sgd.) C.L.A. ABBOTT,

  Administrator of the Northern Territory.

  Molly places the paper back on the table. She pads to her bedroom and slips on her dig boots. Dig, Molly, dig. Dig for your courage. Dig for your soul. Dig for your rage.

  Bert the shovel leans against her bedroom wall by a window. Bert’s been waiting for this moment and Molly knows it. Molly and Bert walk to Horace Hook’s bedroom at the end of the long hallway. His door is locked as always because Molly and Bert are never to enter Horace’s bedroom. Molly raises the shovel in two hands the way she might point a spear at a lion and she drives the shovel blade hard and fast into the wood where the lock meets the door. The blade digs in, the old wood splitting and splintering. Molly pulls Bert back and drives him in again and again. Finally he digs in hard and Molly puts all her weight on the end of the shovel and the door cracks and flies open.

  Her father’s room is dark and smells of sweat and sick and spirits – the liquor kind and maybe the ghost kind too. She slides under her father’s bed, grips a large canvas drawstring duffel bag filled with tools, drags it out and dumps its contents on the floor: blunt pickaxes and files, hammers and spades. She takes the duffel bag into the kitchen, fills it with every canned food she can find in the pantry. Canned corned beef, canned corn. One can of Nestlé Sunshine powdered milk.

  Molly hurries back to her bedroom, finds her leather water bag in the corner of her room beside a wide-brimmed yard hat which she stuffs in the duffel bag. Back into the kitchen to fill the water bag then back to her father’s bedroom where she digs her shoulder into the side of a chest of drawers. She pushes hard with her legs, her boots slipping on the floorboards but sticking enough to slide the chest
of drawers a few feet across the room. Three wooden panels in the newly exposed floor are shorter than those flanking them. Molly kneels down and finds a crack wide enough for her to slip in her right forefinger and pull one panel up. Her left hand removes the other two panels then her right hand reaches into the space not more than one foot deep between the bedroom floorboards and the under-house ceiling. She knows what she’s looking for. A black metal box, lidded and locked, not much bigger than the square shortbread biscuit tins lining the shelves at A.E. Jolly’s store in town. She does not replace the panels or slide the chest of drawers back where it was. There is no time for that now.

  ‘“While we have time”,’ she says to herself, ‘“let us do good.”’

  The Japs are coming. Time is running out. There is only time enough to be good.

  *

  Darkness now in Hollow Wood Cemetery. Molly carries a kerosene lamp but she could find her way through this cemetery without a light. She could close her eyes and make it through this death hall, just by running her hands over the shapes of the cemetery headstones.

  Martha Sorenson, 1842–1908. Granite stone work. Ridgetop contouring. ‘In loving memory of dear mother.’ Someone might be alive today who misses Martha Sorenson the way Molly misses her mother.

  Teddy Byrne, 1854–1904. Limestone in a bevelled block. ‘Sure is dark down here,’ Teddy offers on his headstone. Teddy reminds Molly to laugh.

  Edwin Harper, 1803–1887, reminds Molly to carry on. ‘Edwin Harper. Robbed, stabbed twice in neck, 22 years. Survived sinking of Fortuna, 33 years. Met June Mooney, 35 years. Farewelled June, 83 years. Died, 84 years.’

  Norman Ballard, 1877–1926. Blue-pearl granite. Gothic top contouring. ‘The end and reward of toil is rest.’ Molly cannot rest. Not yet. Not until she has opened the black metal box tucked under her left arm.

  Bonnie Russell, 1865–1923. Grey limestone. Apex top contouring. An epitaph line that Molly hopes every night in her sleep will turn out to be true: ‘Death is only a wall between two gardens.’ Molly standing in one garden on one side of that wall, here in the Northern Territory, her garden filled with ironwood trees and fern-leaved grevilleas with orange flowers the colour of fire; her mother, Violet, on the other side of that wall, standing among roses, red and pink roses and nothing else. She’s smiling. She’s waiting.