No more fuckin’ walkabouts.
‘Dig, Molly, dig,’ the day sky says.
‘Why do you say that? Dad always says that. Uncle Aubrey always says that. “Dig, Molly, dig.” That’s all I ever hear.’
‘Dig, Molly, dig,’ the day sky says.
‘Dig for what?’
‘Dig for the answers.’
‘But I don’t even know the questions.’
‘Of course you know the questions, Molly.’
Molly turns her head back to her grandfather’s gravestone. She reads more of Tom Berry’s last words to the world.
I TOOK RAW GOLD FROM LAND BELONGING
TO THE BLACK NAMED LONGCOAT BOB AND
I SWEAR, UNDER GOD, HE PUT A CURSE ON
ME AND MY KIN FOR THE SIN OF MY GREED.
Molly turns her eyes back up to the sky. ‘Why did she leave me down here?’
The day sky says nothing.
‘How could she leave me like that? How could she leave me here with them?’
The day sky says nothing. But Molly waits for an answer.
‘These are questions for the night sky, Molly.’
Molly shakes her head in disappointment.
‘I know why she left. It was Longcoat Bob. It was the curse. Kin means daughters. Kin means granddaughters. Kin means mothers. Kin means fathers. She said I was blessed because she wanted to make me feel better. How could I possibly be blessed, stuck down here with them?’ Molly nods her head, sure of her words. ‘I know a curse when I see one. I see one every day. A mum would have to be cursed to do what she did.’
‘Dig, Molly, dig,’ the day sky says.
‘Have you seen what they’ve been doing?’
‘Dig, Molly, dig,’ the day sky says.
‘Robbing dead folks of their most precious belongings.’
‘Dig, Molly, dig.’
‘She had to be cursed to do what she did and they must be cursed to do what they do. Cursed, just like this whole place. Cursed and damned and dead.’
‘Dig, Molly, dig.’
‘Dig for what?’
‘The book, Molly, the book.’
Molly raises the Dickinson in her hand. She opens the book at the page of the poem she likes about the sky.
‘It’s called “The Lightning is a Yellow Fork”,’ she says. ‘It’s about all the things that are happening up in the sky. She says there’s a great big mansion up there and there’s a great big dining table inside the mansion and there’s all these extraordinary people, all these special people, all sitting around that table and one of those people drops a yellow fork from the table and that yellow fork drops through the sky as lightning.’
Molly stares up at the sky and three blowflies buzz around her face but she doesn’t blink an eye.
‘A yellow fork, Molly,’ the day sky says.
Molly nods. ‘Yes, I remember seeing those words on Grandpa’s pan, but I can’t remember what else it said.’
‘Where’s the pan, Molly?’
‘Uncle Aubrey threw it away,’ Molly says.
‘It wasn’t his to throw away.’
‘He said he wrapped it in a rubbish bag with a pig’s head and a dozen eggshells.’
‘That pan was a gift for you, Molly.’
‘A sky gift,’ Molly says.
‘Sky gifts for the gravedigger girl.’
‘Do you have any more?’
‘More what?’
‘Sky gifts.’
‘Always, Molly.’
‘How will I find them?’
‘Just look up.’
*
Molly lies flat on her back in the dirt clearing beside her grandfather’s grave. She stares for ten straight minutes up at the sky, her arms fanned out from her sides. She remembers lying like this with her mother. Mother and daughter, flat on their backs, hand in hand. Molly remembers her mother telling her there was a huge milkwood tree in the backyard of the house she grew up in, a sprawling two-storey cyclone-proof family home for four on the Darwin waterfront. She said that tree had branches like a tarantula raising its front legs, and she and her younger brother, Peter, who was a thoughtful and deep boy just like Molly, would stretch their arms out beneath the shade of the tarantula’s legs and look up through those leg cracks to the sky, and they’d pretend the world was upside down and they were actually floating above the milkwood tree and the tree was sprouting from a ground made of blue sky.
‘It always amazes me how little time people spend looking up at that sky,’ Violet said.
Molly nodded.
‘Maybe it’s too beautiful,’ Violet continued, ‘maybe nobody looks up at it anymore because they know they’d want to spend the rest of the day looking at it. I guess we’d never get anything done if we spent all day looking up at the sky.’
‘Can something be too beautiful, Mum?’
‘Some things, Mol’. Not you. You’re just the right amount of it.’
Then Violet gripped her daughter’s hand. ‘Let’s float, Molly,’ she said. ‘Let’s float.’ And she smiled and breathed deeply.
‘Can you feel it, Molly?’ she asked.
‘What is it, Mum?’
‘The world is turning upside down. Can you feel it?’
And Molly saw clouds shifting across the sky. She saw leaves blowing. She saw movement. ‘I can, Mum. I can feel it.’
‘We’re on top now, Molly! Can you feel it? We’re floating. We’re on top!’
Molly remembers all of that now and she smiles. She stands and picks up Bert, who’s been leaning against her grandfather’s headstone. She pads between the rows of the long dead, through avenues of limestone and dirt, back to the cemetery caretaker’s house.
The back door to the cemetery house is painted dark green and Molly turns a loose, rusted bronze door knob to enter the downstairs laundry space, where she stops immediately before a curled western brown snake, cooling itself on the laundry’s concrete floor. Her friend from town, Sam Greenway, and his family have a word for the western brown snake that Molly can’t pronounce correctly, but it’s a catch-all word meaning, ‘If you come across this deadly snake you would be well advised to change your course and go the long way around.’ Molly likes the way Sam’s family can say so many things in a single word.
Molly doesn’t change course. She wants to drink from the laundry sink tap, and brown snakes can’t be gathering beneath the
