‘Dad!’ Molly says, kneeling down, hands out to help her father regain his equilibrium. But he doesn’t lean on those hands, he only grabs them and reefs them towards his head before scrambling to his feet and reaching for the razor strop that hangs from a nail by the stove. He pushes Molly against the kitchen table and forces her head down hard, knocking his drinking jar off the table and smashing it on the floor. And Aubrey Hook sits perfectly still with his right hand gripped around his glass as he stares into the eyes of his niece while her father flogs her backside and her rear thighs with the razor strop. Up and down and up and down. The movement of the thick leather strop and the pulsing of the kitchen light bulb. Welts upon welts upon welts, blood upon blood. Ten lashes, twelve, fifteen; eighteen in total. And Molly Hook is so truly grateful in this moment for the curse of Longcoat Bob because her stone heart is surely the only thing that is keeping her from crying in front of her dumb-faced, dark-shadow uncle, whose black eyes she refuses to turn away from, no matter how loud that strop whacks, no matter how deep it stings and cuts. Do not look away, Molly. Dig, Molly, dig. Whack and whack and whack and whack. Dig and dig and dig and dig. And Aubrey Hook’s lips smile beneath his thick black moustache and he raises a moonshine toast to the gravedigger girl and then he howls with deranged laughter, rejoicing in the music he hears in his head, the music made by leather meeting skin.
GRAVES AT HER COMMAND
Sleep, Molly, sleep. Keep the bedroom door shut. Stay right here until they are gone or until they are dead. Her bed is a single mattress on a wooden floor by a duchesse with a small square mirror. Rising damp in the wood walls. It’s morning, well past dawn, and Horace and Aubrey Hook still scream and laugh and bellow beyond her bedroom door. She has her mother’s copy of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, taken from the living room bookshelf and shaken furiously from the landing to expunge the silverfish wiggling through its fertile pages. A black hardback cover, pages yellowing and brittle. She reads with her belly pressed against the mattress to ease the pressure on her throbbing arse and the whip-welted backs of her thighs, her head leaning over the end of the mattress, her elbows and the open Shakespeare flat on the floor.
The gravedigger girl reads The Tempest. It’s about the wind and the rain, about the kinds of storms that strike Darwin in the stifling summer when men like Aubrey and Horace Hook turn strange and vengeful like Prospero the sorcerer, who can wield the wind and the rain and who can raise the dead from grim and sorry graveyards. ‘“Graves at my command have waked their sleepers,”’ the girl reads. Sleep, Molly, sleep. The Tempest feels like a dream to Molly. One great fevered sea dream. Sleep, Molly, sleep. ‘“And, like this insubstantial pageant faded, leave not a rack behind,”’ the girl reads. ‘“We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”’ And she sleeps.
She sleeps for eight hours and her empty stomach wakes her in darkness. She can hear her father and uncle outside now. They are in the front yard working the engine of Aubrey’s red utility truck. The motor won’t start and the men bark at the car, curse it for not acknowledging their murderous threats. Molly wants to stand, but standing is no longer so easy with the swelling. She pushes herself up with her arms first then bends her knees and that motion puts pressure on her backside and pain shoots through her lower back and into her brain. She opens her bedroom door carefully, slips into the living room on the tips of her toes, the hollers of her long-drunk and stupefied father and uncle still safely at a distance in the yard. She scurries down the house’s rear steps to the under-house toilet. Agony now just to pass a small stool. She drops a scoop of sawdust down the long drop.
Back upstairs now and into the kitchen where she opens the icebox and pushes aside a bowl of fried sheep’s brains and tomato sauce and fills her hands with three old pork sausages and a block of mould-covered cheese. She opens a small standalone pantry cupboard to find small stacks of mixed canned goods: Spam luncheon meat, Edgell tinned peas and, the only dinner Horace Hook seems to eat these days, Campbell’s Condensed Oxtail Soup. Molly takes a can of Spam and a can of peas. She finds a can opener in the cutlery drawer. She fills two empty glass pint milk bottles with water and scurries back to her bedroom, closing the door behind her. Molly drops her food on the mattress and places the bottles on the floor then drags her mirrored duchesse across the room and pushes it against the back of her bedroom door. She lies back down on the mattress on her belly, bites an end off a pork sausage.
For two whole days, barricaded safely behind that bedroom door, she waits out the tempest. And three words keep rattling through her mind like a mantra. Like an enchantment. Like a spell. Like a curse.
Dig, Molly, dig.
*
Dusk. Molly hears the utility truck pulling out of the driveway. Her bedroom door creaks open and the noise of it makes her pause. She waits for signs of life through the house. Nothing. She scans the house, assesses the silent fallout of her father’s and uncle’s
