Aubrey Hook takes a long swig from a rusting silver hip flask, directs a sharp and perturbed look towards his younger brother across the grave.
‘Quiet now, Molly,’ Horace says.
Molly digs and Bert’s blade tip thumps against wood. Molly bangs the blade twice more. Thump, thump.
Aubrey shifts his smoke to the left side of his lips and leans down slowly, bones aching, to grip the mattock resting by the piles of dirt. ‘Out,’ he says through his near-closed lips.
Molly turns and scrambles up a small wooden ladder resting against the south wall of Lisbeth Fleming’s grave. Her father hands her a brown leather water bag. She unscrews the cap and guzzles down the liquid, letting it splash across the soil covering her face and neck.
Aubrey doesn’t use the ladder, simply slides down into the grave, his black boots landing heavily on Lisbeth Fleming’s rotting wooden casket. His right boot scrapes away the dirt on the casket top, searching for an entry point. He stomps his boots three times, testing the thickness of the wood. On the third stomp he finds a softer, rotted section. He raises his mattock high with a two-handed grip and drives the mattock down on the casket like he is staking a claim in the earth. Old wood cracking, splintering. Aubrey raises the mattock at the same point, drives it down again.
The shiver along his worn spine is the same shiver of expectation he used to feel in the gold-digging years, a gold shiver. It was the thrill of mining a hole where you could smell the gold and that smell turned into a taste and that taste was blood and metal on a tongue tip. The gold in all those deep rocks was all buried treasure. He and Horace and Violet’s father, Tom Berry, and all those Chinamen who followed them down into those holes were all pirates, except they had no treasure maps to work from, only their instinct, only the shivers that ran along their worn spines. That shiver meant success.
Aubrey wedges the mattock between the casket top and its side and pushes hard. Molly, from above ground, watches the casket lid flip up from the dirt like the lid of a jewellery box. But there is no jewel sparkle to be seen inside Lisbeth Fleming’s coffin, only bones. The casket’s bottom has largely disintegrated. A skull with a mouth full of dirt. Dirt in the eye holes. Dirt in a cracked cheekbone. I will never be afraid, Molly tells herself. I will feel no pain.
Arm bones and hand bones resting upon each other, meeting at the waist of a torso that time and slow earth movement have torn away from Lisbeth’s leg bones. There is a book by her waist that Aubrey digs from the earth, prises open with two hands. Pages fused together by decades of damp. ‘Bible,’ he says, tossing the book to the side of the grave. There is a round tobacco case by Lisbeth’s right elbow. Aubrey bangs the case against the mattock, caked dirt falling over his long fingers. He pulls a small pocket knife from his back pants pocket and runs the knife blade along the lid rim. He bangs the case again on the mattock and blows dirt from it that clouds above Lisbeth’s skull face. Gripping the lid firmly, he twists it off, drops it in the dirt and tips the case’s contents into his left hand. He holds an amethyst and crystal bead necklace to the sun for less than ten seconds then tosses the necklace over his shoulder towards his younger brother, who catches it and lifts it up to the light.
Aubrey kneels down over Lisbeth’s waist and lifts her hands up as nonchalantly as he might lift a pile of kindling sticks. There’s a pure gold band on Lisbeth’s left-hand ring finger. He tries to slip it off, but it’s set in place by gathered dirt. Molly watches her Uncle Aubrey wrench the ring finger bone back and forth and back and forth then rip the finger from its socket. He blows on the finger, spits on the finger, makes a cloth of his shirt and rubs the finger like he’s polishing his boots. Then Molly watches her Uncle stick the long-dead corpse finger in his mouth, grip the gold band in his teeth like an animal and pull it off. He drops the finger in the dirt and he spits the gold band into his palm. Then he spits on the ring again and polishes it in his shirt before holding it up to the sun.
Even from above ground, Molly and Horace can clearly see the unearthed treasure because there are no earths and no sins and no deaths that can keep the edge of a pure gold band from glowing in the lemon light. Molly observes the way her uncle smiles at it now. His secret smile. The silent affair he has maintained with the glowing. She’s studied this bond for some time now.
The gravedigger girl has been reading the poetry books on the shelf by the front door of the cemetery house as her mum told her to do. She’s been trying to find bits of her mum inside them, the bits of those books she connected to. All those hardback and dusty books of poems by all those graceful poets like John Keats and Walt Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe and William Butler Yeats and Emily Dickinson, who is Molly’s favourite because although she doesn’t seem as graceful as the rest, she seems more honest, and not afraid to show when she’s mad in the heart and in the head. All that those poets seemed to do all day was study people like her Uncle Aubrey. All those poets seemed to write about were the things you can’t see on the outside of people like Uncle Aubrey. They
