Here lies Thelma Leonard, 1813–1867: ‘Deep peace of the quiet earth to you.’ Molly drives Bert into the soil in front of Thelma’s stone, her right boot stomping hard on the blade edge. Four quick shovelfuls, not enough time to go deeper. Inside the black box she sifts through the pieces. She remembers Thelma’s ring – she remembers them all – a small sapphire in a crystal setting the same square shape as Thelma’s gravestone. Molly drops the ring into the hole and fills it in, flattening the dirt with four hard whacks with the back of Bert’s blade.
On the eastern edge of Hollow Wood, amid a cluster of flat, square tablet headstones, Molly stops at the grave of Phyllis Quinn, 1865–1914: ‘There shall be no darkness. There shall be light and music.’ When she reads the epitaphs, Molly hears human voices, as if the grave’s owner is talking to her, and maybe that was the intention. Phyllis Quinn’s voice is eloquent, a touch of Irish in it. Musical. Phyllis played piano. Phyllis sang Irish lullabies to her children. And there was no darkness in the sunroom of her two-storey Darwin home. There was only light and music. Molly digs her hole, drops the flower brooch inside it, returning it to its rightful owner, the single pearl bud inside the flower buried with a single shovel load. ‘I’m sorry, Phyllis,’ Molly whispers.
And Molly moves on through the cemetery, corner to corner, grave to grave, returning the objects Aubrey and Horace robbed from the dead. A pink sapphire engagement ring replaced in the grave of Sarah Hill. ‘To undreamed shores,’ Sarah says on her headstone. Three turquoise balls like blue moons set into a gold ring go back into the grave of Julia Hancock. And Julia’s words on her headstone are Molly’s reward: ‘To live in the hearts of those we love is not to die.’ More life lessons. More messages from beyond.
A silver enamel bird pendant for Geraldine Lamb: ‘Whither thou goest, I will go.’ A ruby and diamond ring for Eva Gordon: ‘We come whirling out of the nothingness, scattering stars like dust. The stars made a circle and in the middle we dance.’ Crystal pendant earrings for Agnes Herman: ‘Because I have loved life, I shall have no sorrow to die.’ A black opal ring for Marilyn Prince: ‘I know I am deathless. I know this orbit of mine.’ Just words on a red granite grave. Lessons.
‘“I know I am deathless,”’ Molly tells the night sky. ‘“I know this orbit of mine cannot be swept by the carpenter’s compass.”’
‘Marilyn Prince does not lie,’ the night sky says back to her.
‘Walt Whitman does not lie,’ Molly says. ‘Dad said my mum was always talking about that line on Marilyn Prince’s headstone and she asked anyone in town with half a brain what it meant. Someone in a mobile library told her it was by an American called Walt Whitman.’
Molly flattens the dirt with Bert’s blade.
‘“My foothold is tenon’d and mortis’d in granite,”’ she says, reciting more Whitman. ‘“I laugh at what you call dissolution. And I know the amplitude of time.”’
And a voice in darkness adds to those lines. But it’s not the night sky. The voice in the darkness is deep and muddled. Drunken.
‘“I bequeath myself to the dirt to grow from the grass I love,”’ the voice says.
And Molly turns to the voice, raising Bert the shovel to defend herself.
‘“If you want me again look for me under your bootsoles.”’ Aubrey Hook staggers into Molly’s lamplight. The girl draws a sharp, deep breath. Her uncle holds a single-shot .22-calibre rifle in his right hand, rests it on his right shoulder, wobbles it up there dangerously, like it could swing around to Molly any second now.
‘“You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,”’ Aubrey continues, still reciting Whitman. ‘“But I shall be good health to you . . . neverthe . . .”’ And he struggles to say the words with all the white spirit inside him. He’s all shadow. His black hat and his moustache the colour of the shadows passing across the lamplight. ‘“. . . nevertheless . . . and filter and fibre your blood.”’ And Aubrey looks to the night sky. Looks to the stars. He points his rifle upwards, closes one eye to take better aim, then staggers with the effort. ‘“Failing . . .”’ he says, reaching deep into his fogged memory. ‘“Failing to fetch me . . . at first” . . . “at first” . . . Oh, damn it.’ He turns to Molly. ‘Do tell me how it ends, Molly,’ he says, trying to be tender. ‘Your mother used to tell me how it ended. She knew that whole thing almost by heart and there were pages of it. Pages and pages, big words and more big words.’
Molly is silent. Aubrey staggers forward, closer to Molly. He burps, spits, snorts the air. ‘Tell me how it ends,’ he barks, vicious and frothing, and his intensity makes Molly jump atop Marilyn Prince’s grave. She turns her eyes to the headstone then recites: ‘“Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged. Missing me one place search another. I stop somewhere waiting for you.”’
Aubrey giggles at this and his giggles erupt into his deranged howl, that sick howl again, something to scare the fruit bats, a laugh so chilling it might bring the black rock frog rock to life, make it hop away south with everybody else who’s fleeing Darwin. ‘Do you think your mother’s somewhere waiting for you, Molly?’
He howls again. ‘Maybe she’s in the grass,’ he says. He looks theatrically beneath his boots. ‘Maybe she’s under my bootsoles,’ he says, inspecting the ground. ‘Nope, not there I’m afraid.’
Molly feels cold now, even on a Darwin summer night this still. ‘Where’s Dad?’ she asks.
‘Town,’ Aubrey says, groggy and brief, and Molly knows her uncle just spoke a lie because her uncle can’t lie like the day sky can lie.
‘I had to
