Almost a year ago, Molly Hook started scribbling poems of her own with chalky rocks on the backs of random headstones throughout Hollow Wood. She recently wrote a poem with no title about the bond her uncle shares with the glowing. She etched the poem into the back of a nameless gravestone deep in the south-western corner of Hollow Wood. She used all the creatures she sees in the cemetery to represent things inside her uncle that can’t be seen from outside. She wrote it out of anger, like all her best poems.
The bird said he dug for the bread
The scorpion said he dug for treasure
The worm said he dug for the dead
The snake said he dug for pleasure
It was a poem about how Molly believed it wasn’t the precious metal that her uncle was hoping to find in all these graves, it was the glowing – the brief flash of new light the dug-up gold brought into his world. There was a kind of love in it, she thought. A romance, maybe. Lust, surely. Not the picture-theatre kind, but a darker kind that dwells in shadows and never sleeps. The Edgar Allan Poe kind.
And she has come to believe, lately, that her uncle would do anything for the glowing because the glowing is breathing and eating and drinking and sleeping and fighting and digging. The glowing is all of life and he lives only in the briefest moments when the glowing bounces back into his shadowy eyes. It’s a private affair, a solitary lust. She’s not supposed to know about it.
He whips his head to the side and catches Molly staring at him. ‘Make yourself scarce,’ he growls.
*
The gravedigger girl and Bert the shovel standing alone and silent before Tom Berry’s grave, with the sun in the middle of the sky. Molly reads her grandfather’s epitaph. Her eyes are drawn to the same sentence they’re always drawn to.
LONGCOAT BOB TURNED OUR
TRUE HEARTS TO STONE.
Molly places her right hand against her chest. Molly tries to feel her heartbeat because a heart can’t beat inside stone. And she can feel the weight of her heart inside her chest, and she could swear her heart grows heavier every year.
Molly has a book of poetry in her left hand. It’s the Dickinson book with the hard and faded blank olive-green cover. She has the book open at a poem she likes. It’s a poem about the sky and the things that take place above it.
Molly looks up to a clear blue sky today. ‘I worked it out,’ she says.
And the day sky responds to Molly Hook because it’s the graceful thing to do. ‘You did?’
‘“The longer I stand, the shorter I grow,”’ Molly recites.
‘You worked it out, Molly?’
‘It’s a candle,’ Molly says.
‘A candle!’ the day sky says. ‘Of course! The longer I stand, the shorter I grow.’
‘He’s talking about candlelight,’ Molly says. ‘Tom Berry started out from Candlelight Creek.’
‘Candlelight Creek!’ the day sky says. ‘Of course! So what are you going to do now, Molly?’
Molly says nothing.
‘Mmmmm,’ says the knowing day sky. ‘You gonna go walkabout again?’
Molly says nothing.
Her father would kill her. No more walkabouts. When she was nine years and three months of age, Molly walked deep into the scrub beyond the edge of Hollow Wood Cemetery. She walked off with no water, no food, no shoes. She can’t even remember now exactly why she walked off like that, so deep into the wild where the grass was so hard it felt like broken glass beneath her feet. She just kept on walking and she can’t recall if the deep country out there was pulling her further in or if this dark and damned cemetery was pushing her further out. Soon she was lost in a pathless mess of towering cypress pines. Horace and Aubrey found her almost two days later, asleep and breathing slowly beneath the shade of a sand palm. Her uncle said she should have been flogged for walking off like that, but her father did not belt her that day because he was so relieved to find his daughter still alive. He thought he’d lost her and he held her to his chest as they padded back out of the deep scrub. He held her tighter that day than he’d ever held her, and Molly remembered there was as much daylight in her father then as there was night-time.
When Molly was eleven years and three months of age, her father woke before dawn one morning by the edge of the Adelaide River, south of Darwin and north of Katherine, to find the camping swag beside his – Molly’s swag – empty. He found her deep in the bush beyond the river four hours later, sleeping and breathing slowly in the centre of a low-lying flat cluster of more than a hundred termite mounds, some of them twelve feet tall. Violet Hook had once told Molly that termite mounds like that were meridional and miraculous, built instinctively by the white-bodied debris-feeding termites that manage to magnetically align each tall mound in a north–south direction so that the eastern face of each mound is warmed rapidly by the morning sun and the hottest midday sun hits only the thinnest profile of the termite’s strange architecture. Molly saw the mounds as perfectly aligned gravestones. Same chalky grey colours. Same colour of stone. The cluster was a cemetery, but a cemetery filled with microcosmic life. Molly saw it as Hollow Wood Cemetery; she saw it as home.
Horace belted Molly that day. There and then, he hit her arse so many times and so hard with his open palm that she could not sit back down in the spot where he’d found her. He did not carry her out of the scrub, but left her to walk
