Another lightning strike in the blackness far beyond the busy wharf.
‘I’m leavin’ here tomorrow, Molly,’ Sam says.
‘Where you goin’?’ Molly asks.
‘I’m going to the lightning, Molly.’
Molly releases her grip around Sam’s belly.
‘Me family,’ he says. ‘We’re going bush. We’re going deep, Mol’.’
‘Do you have to go?’ Molly asks.
‘Big gathering,’ Sam says. ‘A lot of talkin’ needs to be done with the elders about what’s comin’ with this war and where we all go from ’ere.’
‘Where are you all gathering?’ Molly asks.
‘I can’t tell you that, Mol’.’
Molly wraps her arms around Sam again.
‘Take me with you,’ she says. ‘I’ll go with you right now. You go ahead and give Danny a big kick in the belly and we can ride away, right now. Tonight. Just go deep into the bush. So deep we never come back.’
Sam turns his head to speak closer to Molly’s ears. ‘You’re not allowed to go where I’m going, Molly.’
Molly closes her eyes. Silent for a full minute. ‘Do you care for me, Sam?’
‘I care for you a lot, Mol’,’ Sam says. ‘But I’m sixteen and you’re twelve and—’
‘I’m almost thirteen,’ Molly says.
Sam nods, smiling. ‘And you’re almost thirteen,’ he says, breathing deep to finish what he has to say. ‘And I don’t think it’d be right for me to care for you the way you want me to.’
This heavy stone heart. Cry from it, Molly, cry, she tells herself. But she can’t cry, so she opens her eyes again and slides off the horse, walks to a large rock embedded in the sandy banks of the harbour and sits.
‘Will Longcoat Bob be there?’ she asks.
Sam slips off Danny, too, holds the horse’s reins as he talks to Molly’s back.
‘Nobody knows where he is,’ Sam says. ‘He’s been on a long walk. Longest he’s ever been on. Nobody’s seen him in almost two years.’
Molly drops her head, traces the circle of the night sky moon in the sand with her right big toe.
‘Sam?’
‘Yeah, Mol’.’
‘Remember I told you about the sky gift.’
‘Yeah, Mol’. I remember.’
Molly traces a twisting road running from the sand moon at her feet.
‘Remember them words my grandfather etched on the pan?’
‘Yeah, the poems,’ Sam says.
‘Directions,’ Molly says, correcting Sam. ‘They were directions. But he wrote them for the eyes of poets. Only people livin’ poetic lives could understand them. You have to be poetic, Sam. You have to be graceful.’
Sam ties Danny’s reins to the post of a rotting fence lining the beachfront.
‘Directions, huh,’ Sam says.
Molly nods.
‘I know where the silver road is,’ Molly says.
Sam says nothing.
‘It’s what you called the glass river,’ Molly says. ‘It’s the same thing. Way beyond the Clyde River. The road you used to walk as a kid.’
Molly looks up at the night sky moon. ‘I’m gonna leave this place, too,’ she says. ‘Everybody else goes away. Why can’t I? I’m gonna go find the silver road. And then I’m gonna find Longcoat Bob and then I’m gonna find my own treasure.’
‘What’s your treasure, Molly?’
‘Answers.’
‘Answers to what, Mol’?’
‘Why he did what he done to my family. How he’s gonna undo what he did.’
Sam finds a place on the beach rock beside Molly and he tells her, not for the first time, his deep-gutted full-flesh heart feeling about Longcoat Bob’s curse. ‘There is no curse, Molly,’ he says. ‘Longcoat Bob don’t work like that. He can’t work like that. He’s not able. There is only what the land and the sky deems right and wrong.’ Sam’s said this before, too.
‘It wasn’t Longcoat Bob who put the dark on your grandfather,’ he continues. ‘Only the earth can do that. Only that twinkling stuff up there can do that, Mol’. The land and the stars were watching. They both said your grandfather was wrong to do what he done. He took gold from the earth and the earth didn’t want that gold took. The earth rebelled, Molly. It turned on your grandfather. You start walking into places you don’t belong and it might just turn on you, too.’
Molly dwells on this for a long moment. Then she stands. ‘Did you like the film, Sam?’
Sam looks up at Molly. ‘Not really, if I’m bein’ honest,’ he says.
‘Why not?’
‘You weren’t watching it with me.’
Molly smiles. ‘Bye, Sam.’ She walks away.
‘Molly, wait,’ Sam calls. But she does not stop. He stands to watch her march into the night, patting Danny the colt’s head along the way.
‘Bye, Molly Hook,’ he whispers, only to himself.
*
Two shadows in the cramped kitchen of the caretaker’s house at Hollow Wood Cemetery. The Hook brothers, Horace and Aubrey. White long-sleeved work shirts buttoned to the neck. Black trousers. Both men too drunk to notice they’re still wearing their wide-brimmed black hats inside. Molly standing in the doorway to the kitchen. Horace can barely keep his eyes open. He sways in his chair, reaching once, twice, three times for a glass jar with a scratched ‘Queen’s Olives’ label on its side, which is half-filled with a clear spirit that smells to Molly like petrol mixed with a splash of tonic water. Aubrey stares at her through the dark slits of his dead black eyes, his right forefinger circling a small glass of the same spirit. Horace’s head finally stays still long enough to see his daughter standing expressionless and mute inside the kitchen. Then a thought reaches his clouded brain. Molly knows it’s a dark thought. Horace stands abruptly – too abruptly for his blood and his body and brain to catch up with his legs – and he stumbles to his right and trips on his feet and he falls hard to the ground, his eyebrow hitting the corner of the kitchen stove
