All Our Shimmering Skies

by Trent Dalton

‘The sky wanted us to meet him,’ Molly says.

  ‘Is that right?’ Greta replies. She stops and turns to Molly, agitated, tired. ‘And I guess the sky wanted your father blown to bits?’

  Molly stops now, too. She wonders who, indeed, wanted that to happen to her father. Her father, Horace, the good and the bad one, blown across the yard and lodged in the fork of a tree. Blood dripping from his thigh where the rest of his leg used to be. Who did ask for that? She’d asked for another gift from the sky. Then the sky had rained Japanese bombs. Who did ask for that?

  *

  They beat a loose path through a fringe of red ash trees that meets a rocky incline where a solitary pandanus tree stands, its wedge-shaped, bright-red fruits looking like the kinds of jewels Aubrey and Horace Hook would rob from Hollow Wood’s dead. When their improvised course takes them higher across sandstone ranges and rises, the moon throws enough light down for the actress and the gravedigger girl to see the land that unfolds before them. Then they follow a clearer path through the trees and the sandstone gullies and outcrops. Sam Greenway might have walked this way once, Molly tells herself. His people have walked this path for millennia and so have the short-eared rock wallabies and the black-footed tree rats and the short-beaked echidnas and the golden bandicoots. And now the gravedigger girl and the actress.

  The moon is silver and the stars surrounding it dutifully assemble into shapes for Molly. An arrow. An elephant. A warrior’s shield. A gravestone.

  Her mother, Violet, made her promise she would make her life beautiful and grand and poetic and she promised her mother that she would write her own epitaph, that she would live a life that could be written about with ease on an upright slab of limestone.

  Now the night sky whispers to her, ‘What would it say, Molly? And be honest. I’m not like that fool the day sky. I will know if you are lying.’

  ‘I know exactly what it will say,’ Molly whispers.

  HERE LIES BRAVE ORPHAN MOLLY HOOK WHO LOST HER MOTHER AND FATHER BEFORE THE AGE OF 13 AND SET OFF INTO THE NORTHERN AUSTRALIAN WILDERNESS IN SEARCH OF A SORCERER NAMED LONGCOAT BOB BUT WHAT SHE WAS REALLY SEARCHING FOR WERE ANSWERS TO QUESTIONS SHE COULD NOT BRING HERSELF TO ASK. IN A PITIFUL ACT OF BLIND VENGEANCE, MOLLY BLUDGEONED LONGCOAT BOB TO DEATH WITH A BLOOD-COLOURED ROCK SHE BELIEVED WAS HER MOTHER’S TRUE HEART TURNED TO STONE. MOLLY DIED MANY YEARS LATER, RIDING HER BICYCLE OFF A KATHERINE GORGE CLIFF FACE, AGED 122. SHE IS SURVIVED BY HER HUSBAND, SAM, AND THEIR HANDSOME AND RICH TWIN SONS, TYRONE AND GARY.

  Molly stops and reaches into her duffel bag to check the blood-coloured stone is still inside, but really she doesn’t need to check because she knows she carries her mother’s heart inside her duffel bag as much as she carries it inside her chest. Greta moves on ahead in the dark.

  ‘Is that really your plan, Molly?’ asks the night sky.

  ‘Maybe,’ Molly says. ‘If he doesn’t cooperate.’

  Molly closes the bag and walks on again.

  ‘You’re going to crack that rock over Longcoat Bob’s skull?’

  ‘Yep,’ Molly says. ‘If I have to.’

  ‘You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do, Molly.’

  ‘Really?’ she says. ‘Really? You could have fooled me. My whole life I’ve been doing things I don’t want to do.’

  Greta emerges from the darkness.

  ‘Who you talkin’ to?’ she asks.

  ‘I’m talking to the sky,’ Molly says.

  ‘Oh, good,’ Greta says, straight-faced. ‘I thought you’d lost your marbles for a second there, but you were only talking to the sky.’

  *

  They negotiate a series of sandstone outcrops and step slowly through a blind natural alley between two rock walls. They come to a clearing of quartzite the size of half a football field and the silver moon reflects in pools of water collected in eroded holes the size of wagon wheels. The clearing blends into a scree slope that runs down to a thick patch of floppy billygoat plum trees and little gooseberry trees, through which they have to battle hard, with Bert in full swing.

  Brute wandering. Always Molly breaking the silences. High on another outcrop, she sees a dark, black-brown bird in the sky. ‘Wedge-tailed eagle!’ Molly rejoices.

  The glorious bird circling in the thermal updraughts of its own shimmering sky. That heavenly wingspan looks as wide to Molly as some cars. It’s not even flapping its wings, Molly tells herself. It’s floating. It’s levitating. The bird is magic up there in its sky territory, where it circles now beneath a cloud shaped like a domed castle, and there it is home and there it is queen.

  ‘She’s the queen,’ Molly says. ‘Her majesty!’ she calls to the sky, waving in the same way she might wave at a royal from the mother country. She breathes deep and beams.

  ‘She’s just like us, Greta,’ Molly says. ‘She’s free.’ Molly nods. ‘Yep, this is full life livin’, Greta. This is how we’re supposed to be livin’.’

  ‘I can think of several other ways I’d prefer to be livin’,’ Greta says. ‘And I’m holding a glass in every one of ’em.’

  ‘I mean this is what we’re supposed to be doing with our lives, isn’t it?’ Molly replies. ‘We’re supposed to find ourselves things to etch on our gravestones. And now we’re writing our own epitaphs, Greta. You’re writin’ yours. I’m writin’ mine.’

  Greta can see her grave now. ‘“She was the next Greta Garbo,”’ she says, ‘“but she died prematurely from prolonged exposure to the sun and girls who talk to the sky. The Palmerston Players closed their theatre two days later out of respect, and also due to the fact that its troupe numbers were cut by a third upon Miss Maze’s untimely demise.”’

  ‘I’ll always remember this long walk with you, Greta,’ Molly says.

  ‘That’s good, Molly,’ Greta says. ‘Because if we don’t find your grandfather’s silver road this may be the last walk you’ll have to remember.’

  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 fl
at 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.

  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 remembers 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.