Molly rests her backside on the soil, tired. ‘The sky gift,’ she says.
Aubrey smiles. ‘Aaaah, but of course, Molly Hook’s magical gift that fell from the sky on the day her mother abandoned her like a lame fawn.’
Molly shakes her head in disgust. I will never be afraid. I will feel no pain. ‘It was a map leading right to Longcoat Bob’s gold and you took it from me and you threw it away because you were so angry and so stupid,’ Molly says.
Aubrey stands, moves back closer to his niece.
Molly stares him in the eyes. ‘You couldn’t see a thing because you were just a shadow,’ she says.
Aubrey’s menace as he moves. Aubrey’s curiosity.
‘You couldn’t see that you held all the gold you could ever want in your hands,’ Molly says. ‘He scratched a map on that pan and he wrote directions on it.’
Aubrey nods and he kneels to stare deep into her eyes. ‘The man was a lunatic, child.’
Molly shakes her head. She will tell him now. She will show him. She remembers what she read on the bottom of the pan. She remembers the dark place. The banks of Blackbird Creek. ‘“The longer I stand, the shorter I grow,”’ she recites, chin up, knowing and defiant. ‘“And—’
‘“And the water runs to the silver road,”’ her uncle says, finishing her sentence.
Molly is stunned, gut-punched by her uncle’s knowledge of those words.
Aubrey laughs, shaking his head. ‘By the end, Molly, your grandfather was scratching his loopy ramblings on anything he could put a pocket knife to. The scribbles of a broken prospector who had spilled his marbles long ago.’
Molly shakes her head slowly while her uncle nods his.
‘The man was brain-sick,’ Aubrey says. ‘He lost his mind just like his daughter lost hers two decades later and just like his granddaughter is losing hers before my very eyes.’
‘But he didn’t write them directions for you,’ Molly says, forcefully. ‘He wrote them for someone who was graceful. Someone who was poetic. That silver road is out past Clyde River and I know how to find it. You’ll never know because you’re not poetic and you’re sure as shit not graceful.’
Molly closes her eyes and braces for the palm across her face. But it does not come. She opens her eyes again. A puff of Aubrey’s smoke. A long pause. Another exhalation into the night air. The thin eyes now of Aubrey Hook. The shadow forming around him. The blackness.
‘And how exactly will you find it, Molly?’ he asks.
Molly shakes her head. She spits her words more than she speaks them. ‘I’ll never tell you.’
Aubrey grips his rifle, moves closer to Molly. ‘Poor Molly Hook,’ he says. ‘Mad little gravedigger girl. You think if you find that silver road, then you’ll find Longcoat Bob. And what do you think Longcoat Bob’s going to tell our little gravedigger girl? Do you think Longcoat Bob’s gonna tell the gravedigger girl what happened to her mother to make her so sad? Do you think Longcoat Bob has all the answers? Do you think he’ll tell you why she left you behind?’
He holds the lamp to her eyes, so close that the heat of the lamp flame warms the invisible hairs on her cheek. He whispers. ‘Is it her you’re always talking to up there in the sky?’
His breath smells like turpentine. His lip spit lands on her cheek and chin.
‘“Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,”’ he recites. ‘“Missing me one place, search another. I stop somewhere waiting for you.” Do you think she’s waiting for you, Molly? Do you think Longcoat Bob’s gonna tell you where she is?’
Aubrey steps back, looks across a lane of headstones. Then he points the rifle at Molly’s heart. ‘Let me show you exactly where she is.’
*
‘Run, Molly, run,’ whispers the night sky because the night sky always fears the worst.
Since she was seven years old, she has not spent so long in this corner of the cemetery. She has not spent so long beneath the milkwood tree. She has not been so close to the black rock frog rock.
Aubrey Hook sits on the black rock frog rock. The lamp rests beside his black left boot. He rolls a smoke, his lips still wet from the hip flask nestled in his crotch. The rifle leans on his bent right leg. Molly Hook stands inside a hole in the earth, only one foot deep so far, Bert’s blade in the process of going deeper. The gravedigger girl does not respond to the sky.
‘Your grandfather was not brain-sick, Molly,’ says the night sky, because the night sky never lies. ‘You are not losing your mind, Molly. It is, in fact, your uncle who is losing his mind.’
Molly digs, blade into dirt, boot onto blade.
‘He’s going to leave you here, Molly. He’s going to bury you with your mother. Do you hear me, Molly? Do you understand? You are digging your own grave.’
Molly pauses, looks up from the hole at her uncle. The lamp lights only one side of his face. The rest is shadow. A black moustache wet from spirit, strands of brown bush tobacco caught in the nest of hair above his invisible top lip. Molly leans down once more, takes Bert’s tall wooden handle. She turns around in the hole so her back is facing her uncle. She digs.
‘Why’s he doing this?’ Molly whispers into the dirt.
‘You know exactly why he’s doing it.’
‘Longcoat Bob’s curse,’ Molly murmurs, shovelling another load to the surface.
‘That sounds like one of those gentle lies the day sky would tell you.’
Molly digs, heaves to the surface a heaped blade of soil the colour of chocolate cake.
‘But I know you, Molly. And I know when you know the truth but are too afraid to tell it.’
Molly digs Bert hard into the dirt, rests her aching right arm on the handle for a moment, stares up at the stars sprinkled across the black sky.
‘He
