Molly digs, her thin arms, only bone and muscle, filling a wooden bucket with grave dirt that her father and uncle pull to the surface after every eight shovel loads.
‘Dad.’
Horace takes a long drag on his smoke. Exhales.
‘Mmmm,’ he offers Molly. This is her permission to speak.
Molly digs hard as she talks, heartened by her father’s permission to do so. ‘I was just thinkin’ about how I’ve dug up six already this week and this will be my seventh and I’ve been working real hard with the customers as well and I was wondering if you would let me go to the Star with Sam on Saturday night?’
‘I can’t afford for you to go to no picture theatre, Molly,’ Horace says.
‘No, no, Sam said he’s gonna pay for me,’ Molly says.
‘Who’s Sam?’
‘Sam Greenway.’
‘The coon boy?’
Just Sam and nothing else, Molly thinks. Her best friend who’s not a shovel or a sky.
‘Sam’s good stock, Dad. He works hard and he’s real smart and he’s been telling me all there is to know about what it’s like growing up out there in the bush, in the real deep country past the Clyde River.’
‘And what does Sam tell you about what it’s like out there in the deep country?’
Molly stops digging. She turns to her father, up there on the surface, sun shining over his shoulders and onto her face. She puts a palm over her eyes.
‘He says it’s magical,’ Molly says. ‘He says there’s crocodiles in the creeks as old as dinosaurs and the crocodiles talk to him and he says there’s plants out there so big that their vines can suffocate you in your sleep and there’s trees with bark so soft you can roll it up and sleep on it under the stars, and the trees talk to you, too. Then there’s Ol’ Man Rock and he’s just a big rock, but he knows the answer to any question you could possibly think to ask him.’
Horace Hook scrapes a cake of mud from the sole of his left boot with a stick. ‘I hope he told you, too, about all the criminals who live in shacks and caves out there,’ he says. ‘Did he tell you about that, Mol’? Murderers on the run from the law, hiding themselves in scrub so thick and dangerous the cops would never dare go after ’em. Thieves and rapists livin’ on river rats and peanut bushes. Men sick with pox, women gone brain-mad with syphilis. Kidnappers who’d swap a twelve-year-old girl’s virginity for a can of oil. Lunatic child killers who’d cut a girl’s heart out and trade it for a fresh orange.’
Molly is silent. Her eyelids blinking.
‘No,’ she says. ‘Sam said nuthin’ about that.’
‘You go walkin’ too far into that deep country, you might never come back,’ Horace says. ‘So no more bloody walkabouts, Molly, ya hear me?’
‘I hear you.’
‘Dig, Molly, dig.’
Molly digs. Horace smokes his strong tobacco and enjoys the quiet for a moment. Then Molly breaks the silence. Molly always breaks the silence.
‘Sam told me how to eat an echidna, even though I thought it would be impossible to eat an echidna,’ she says, dropping another dirt load in the wooden bucket. ‘Do ya wanna know how to eat an echidna, Dad?’
Horace sighs, drags on his smoke. ‘How do you eat an echidna, Molly?’
‘The trick of it is all those spines on top, of course,’ she says. ‘But Sam says you just cover the spines with a thick layer of clay – you know, like that red ferrosol stuff you told me about – then you whack the echidna on the fire and when it’s all cooked you take it out and let it sit, and then you peel back that layer of clay on top and all the spines come off with it and it’s like you’re peeling back the lid on a can of sardines, except what you have underneath those spines is tastier and oilier than any duck you’d find on a plate in Paris.’
Molly digs, transfers the dirt, counts off the eighth shovel load and lets her uncle heave the wooden bucket to the surface.
‘The Star’s playin’ The Cowboy and the Lady, with Gary Cooper,’ Molly says. ‘You’d like Gary Cooper, Dad. He doesn’t talk much in the pictures. He’s all quiet and serious, like how you and Uncle Aubrey are.’
Molly looks at her father and, as he always does, her father looks at his older brother, Aubrey. And Uncle Aubrey briefly shakes his head from side to side.
‘But I haven’t been—’
‘Quiet now, Molly,’ Aubrey says, his lips unseen beneath his black moustache.
‘But—’
‘Dig, child, dig,’ Aubrey grunts.
Molly digs. One, two, three shovel loads. Four, five, six shovel loads. Bert the shovel clangs against a large rock buried in the grave soil. Molly reaches for a forged steel spud bar leaning against the right-side grave wall. With both hands she drives the spud bar, wedged at the business end, clean into the rock three times and the rock breaks into three smaller pieces that she hacks out with a smaller pickaxe.
More shovelling. Seven shovel loads. Eight shovel loads. Total silence. Horace hauls the bucket up the side of the hole. Molly watches a long black earthworm wriggle along the north wall of the grave. Up, up, up towards the surface. Her eyes go up with the worm and a little further up to settle on a view of Lisbeth Fleming’s headstone.
‘Who was she?’ Molly asks.
‘Who was who?’ Horace replies.
‘Lisbeth Fleming.’
‘She wasn’t anyone.’
‘Everybody’s someone,’ Molly says. ‘Ya reckon she’s still got family in town?’
The men say nothing. Aubrey pats the deep lines in his forehead with his handkerchief.
‘“Matthew, Iris and George”,’ Molly says, reading the headstone epitaph. Molly’s right boot kicks hard at Bert’s blade and the bucket is back to receive another shovel load. She pauses to read more from Lisbeth Fleming’s headstone. ‘Matthew, Iris and George were
