‘Yeah, everyone,’ Molly says.
‘I trust your father then told that shocked limestone salesman how those nights I take my clothes off might represent my finest role of all.’
‘He didn’t say anything about any role you were playing.’
‘Of course it’s a role I’m playing,’ Greta says. ‘I’m playing Greta Maze, a thirty-three-year-old actress with too much talent and not enough opportunity who stayed in the arse end of the earth because she thought she loved an older man.’
Greta closes the script, tucks it under her arm and swings her legs over the side of the truck tray, the rubber soles of her laced saddle shoes leaving imprints in the dirt driveway where she lands.
‘And what role are you playing today, Molly?’ Greta asks. ‘Or are you still working on that twelve-year-old gravedigger girl who has convinced herself she’s not being raised by monsters?’
RED TIN THIMBLE
Tapping metal typewriter keys echoing through a house of timber and tin and old wooden stumps. Peeled paint on the walls inside. A hole in the living room wall above a broken and dusty pneumatic pianola, where Molly once watched her Uncle Aubrey drive his younger brother’s bloodied head during a mindless and lengthy drinking binge that ended with the brothers shooting nips of paint thinner.
‘And have you thought about the inscription on the headstone?’ Molly Hook asks across an old wooden table, her busy twelve-year-old fingers already wiggling above the keys, ‘R’, ‘I’ and ‘P’.
Mouldy air and sunlight pushing through a faded curtain in the living room where the business is conducted. The Hook family business of burying the dead.
When Horace Hook’s in a light mood, Molly sometimes suggests to her father that this cemetery keeper’s house feels like a kind of tomb in itself, as dark and dead as the 894 (and always counting) tombs that surround it. She suggests more windows. She suggests more cleaning. She suggests more food to eat. Fewer maggots in the sink. Fewer bloodstains on the kitchen walls. Fewer unwashed forks and dinner plates caked in old gravy. Fewer weevils in the oats in the pantry. Fewer silverfish crawling through Emily Dickinson and William Butler Yeats and Walt Whitman on Violet’s bookshelf by the front door. Fewer empty whisky bottles filling the space beneath the kitchen sink. Fewer strips of flypaper hanging from the ceiling, turned black with the stuck dead wings, heads and legs of house flies.
In the two chairs across from Molly’s typewriter sit two grieving customers, sixty-eight-year-old Mildred Holland and her twenty-seven-year-old son, Clem Holland. Mildred wears a black cardigan and tightly grips a purse with both hands on her thighs. Her wide-eyed and round-faced son wears white overalls covered in flour. He’s come straight from work, the same bakery on Herbert Street where his father, Lloyd Holland, died instantly of heart failure at dawn four days ago. Clem found his father lying amid twelve freshly baked loaves of bread that were sold for half price that same afternoon.
Mildred places her reading glasses on her nose, pulls a rolled piece of paper from her purse, unrolls it and reads from it. ‘We wish to have the following words written on the gravestone,’ she says. She studies the paper and reads the words out slowly. ‘“Rest . . . in . . . peace . . . Lloyd”.’
Molly taps these words out on the typewriter. ‘Good, and what should we write next?’ she then asks.
Mildred is puzzled. ‘That’s all we could think of to say,’ she says.
Clem shrugs his shoulders. ‘Pretty well says it all, don’t ya think?’
Molly nods. ‘Would you consider a couple more lines, perhaps, that say something more about the full life he enjoyed before he passed away?’ Molly suggests.
‘He didn’t really enjoy much at all,’ Clem says.
‘Something about how he cherished his family and friends, perhaps, and how he was cherished in return?’ Molly tries again.
Mildred looks at her son, grimly. Looks back at Molly.
‘He was mean and sour most of the time,’ Mildred says.
Clem turns to his mother. ‘When I told people the news, everybody seemed to have the same look on their face.’
‘What look was that?’ asks Mildred.
‘Relief,’ Clem says.
‘I see,’ Molly nods, understandingly. ‘If Lloyd had one belief, Mrs Holland, one value that he really lived by, what would you say it was?’
Mildred shrugs. ‘He believed in bread,’ she says. ‘He believed there was something beautiful in creating something that tasted so good out of just, you know, flour and . . . you know . . .’ Mildred looks to her son.
Clem nods knowingly. ‘Water,’ he adds. ‘Just flour and water.’
‘Flour and water,’ Mildred repeats, nodding.
‘I see,’ Molly says.
Mildred looks around the house. She looks at the closed bedroom doors beyond the hall off the living room. ‘Where did you say your father was, again?’ Mildred asks.
‘He’s fallen ill,’ Molly says.
Clem smiles. ‘Got the brown-bottle flu, has he?’
Molly gives a half-smile. ‘Mrs Holland, if you had any thoughts about anything that interested him, then I could perhaps help you craft something that might be a more fitting tribute to your late husband.’
Molly turns to Clem. ‘Something his children’s children might appreciate half a century from now.’
Molly looks back at Mildred. ‘I know I’m only young, but I’ve helped many people find the words that are just right for their departed loved one.’
‘How old are you, anyway?’ Mildred asks.
‘I’m thirteen in a month.’
Mildred studies Molly’s face, dismayed by the idea of having to think more deeply about her husband. She ponders. She looks at her son, pats a cloud of flour from his shoulder. She shakes her head. ‘I guess the only thing that made him happy was a loaf of well-baked bread in the morning.’
Molly nods, swinging the typewriter’s carriage-return lever over to start a new line of text. She looks out the only window in the living room, where a slice of blue sky fills half the frame.
‘What about this?’ she asks. And she speaks the words as she types them. ‘Like . . . a . . . falling . . . sun,’ she types, ‘you . . . closed . . .
