And Molly Hook holds the heart in her hands. And she is certain in this moment that it is not rain that floods across her face.
And she realises that if there is treasure to be found anywhere under the shimmering skies, if there is true value beneath the high plain of heaven, then it will be the lips of lovers that will one day fire her soul and the fear that will always make her fight and the friends who will take her fears away and the children she will call her own and the wonders she will see on the trees and leaves and mountains and in the stone and iron and glass buildings that will touch the day and night skies across her world. It will be in the joy and sadness that will gather in the corners of her eyes, all that salty treasure leaking from all the life she will bury inside herself, from the glowing inside her. An epitaph with no end, leaking out of the gravedigger girl, precious drop after precious drop after precious drop.
MOLLY AND THE EPITAPH
Sam Greenway the buffalo hunter knows the short way back home to Darwin, but Molly keeps insisting on going the long way. Sam makes the mistake of telling Molly about how good a mud whelk tastes cooked on a bed of hot coals. They are a delicacy, he says. They’re known as ‘long bums’ in his family. He says it’s a kind of snail that can grow as long as Molly’s middle finger and when he says it possesses the strangest blue colouring, like a bright blue sea, Molly begs him to take a detour off their path to a faraway mangrove forest where Sam knows the long bums will be clustering together in shells shaped like ice-cream cones.
Sam walks in front and Molly walks in the middle and Greta Maze walks behind. Three travellers again in the deep country. Sam holds only his spear but Molly and Greta carry grass shoulder bags filled with fresh berries and bush tomatoes and snake meat wrapped in mulberry leaves and water, all given to them by Sam’s aunties. Molly doesn’t want this walk home to end because there is no fear now in the journey. She feels like she’s walking inside the very moment in a Gary Cooper picture when the bad guys have gone away or been buried in the dirt and the sun is taking its time to set and everything seems to glow with hope and security. It’s always been her favourite part of any picture. She always wanted to stay in the warmth of that balanced moment, dive into it, but then the canvas picture screen at the Star would turn to black and the picture credits would roll and people in the audience would clap their hands with joy, but Molly Hook would sit in silence because those picture credits rolling meant she had to go home. And that’s what Darwin is to her now. Darwin is the black screen. Darwin is the credits rolling. Darwin is real life.
*
They pass two cascading waterfalls along the way to the mangrove forest. They see a tree that Sam smiles at and he tells them it has red-black staining berries and corky-textured branches that he uses to make his spear shafts. ‘Good wood for music, too,’ he says.
They see a cluster of bright pink ground-cover flowers that Sam eats raw and calls ‘pigface’. They come to a clump of vivid blue weed that Sam picks for Molly and Greta and says they should store in their grass bags because it will be good for relieving any colds they get.
Passing a sprawling milkwood tree, Molly thinks of her mother and her mother’s old house. She turns to Greta behind her. ‘Do you think it’s still there?’ she asks.
‘What?’ Greta asks.
‘Darwin,’ Molly says.
Greta thinks on this for a moment. ‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘That town ain’t goin’ anywhere.’
Greta ducks under the low-hanging branch of a litsea tree, from which Sam pulls bunches of leaves that he tells Molly and Greta to keep in their shoulder bags because the leaves will soothe the sore muscles they’ll have after their long walk.
They light a fire and form a bed of cooking coals in a flat space inside the mangrove forest Sam promised to show Molly. They feast on the mud whelks, which Sam cooks straight on the coals before removing the snail meat from the hard, burnt conical shells by cracking them with a creek rock.
Molly swallows five snails and wonders about the Star Theatre.
‘You reckon the Star is still standin’, Sam?’ Molly asks.
‘Better be,’ Sam says, working the coals around with his spear. ‘I still ain’t seen High Sierra.’
*
The next morning, Sam leads Molly and Greta through a vine forest thicket buzzing with mosquitoes. Sam lights a handful of bark he strips from a bush plum tree and the smoke seems to drive the insects away. Through a dark tunnel of climbing plants the trio walk another mile or so before the thicket opens onto a narrow red dirt road bordered by more vine forest.
Sam stops and looks left along the straight road. He turns to Molly. ‘I gotta get back, Mol’,’ he says, softly.
‘I thought you were coming all the way with us?’
‘I was,’ he says. ‘But them tasty long bums ate up all me time. I gotta be back before tomorrow mornin’. Uncle Bob’s takin’ me for a walk.’ His eyes light up with pride and Molly knows why. Sam’s been chosen. Longcoat Bob wants him to learn things about the deep country that others will never be allowed to know.
‘That’s great, Sam,’ Molly says. ‘That’s real great.’
Sam turns to Greta, who stands a few yards away, giving the gravedigger girl and the buffalo hunter some space to say meaningful things to each other should they manage to dig them up from the places where they have buried them.
‘Walk up ’ere for four
