The shadow across Aubrey’s face. Black as the hat on his head. He closes his eyes and breathes deep. He opens his eyes and raises his rifle to his shoulder, aims the muzzle at Molly’s chest. ‘Dig, Molly,’ he commands.
And then a sound, a wailing sound reaching all the way from Darwin’s town centre and through the trees of Hollow Wood Cemetery, between the stone epitaphs of the dead, to the ears of Molly Hook standing deep inside her mother’s grave.
An air raid siren ringing out across Darwin. Aubrey looks back over his shoulder, finds the direction of the sound. Molly keeps her eyes on the sky. No more dawn pinks and reds. All blue now.
Aubrey returns his gun barrel to Molly’s chest.
‘Dig, child, or I’ll leave you face down beside her.’
Molly breathes, grips Bert’s handle. The air raid siren rings again. Bert’s blade is gentle now, more the tool of an archaeologist. No stomping on the blade shaft, just a series of scrapes and gentle digs. She’s Howard Carter from the papers and her mother’s body is an Egyptian pharaoh sleeping in the dirt. Precious and fragile. But her churning stomach means this is not science. This is not archaeology. This is family. One shovel load, two shovel loads, three shovel loads.
‘Deeper,’ Aubrey barks.
I will feel no pain, she tells herself. I will feel no pain. I will feel no pain. Dig for your courage, Molly. Dig for your soul.
The day sky says nothing. The gravedigger girl will uncover the bones of her mother alone.
‘Deeper,’ Aubrey hollers, leaning in to the grave more with each macabre sighting of bone. More leg bones. Arm bones across a waist.
It’s not her, she tells herself. It’s not her. It’s not her. She’s not down here. She’s not down here. She went up there. She went up there.
The last thin fibres of a dress, earth-eaten and browned by soil, covering a ribcage with three missing ribs. Objects surrounding the skeleton, dirt-caked and heavy. A jewellery box. A pair of dancing shoes. Books. So many books around the skeleton.
‘Keep digging, Molly,’ Aubrey says.
The shovel goes deeper. More objects. More of Violet Hook’s belongings. A porcelain figurine. A teacup. Then Molly’s eyes catch the edge of a copper circle. Bert’s blade digs around the copper – scrape, scrape, dig, dig – then Molly does the rest by hand, fingers frantically searching for a hold on the copper sky gift she thought was lost, disposed of in a bag of rubbish with a pig’s head and a dozen eggshells. She pulls her grandfather’s copper pan from the earth, runs her fingers over it, inspects its underside, scratches the dirt off it with her fingernails.
The words are still there. The directions.
I will never be afraid. Rock is hard. Can’t be broken. ‘Liar,’ she screams. ‘You . . . fuckin’ . . . animal . . . liar.’
‘Give me that pan,’ Aubrey says from the grave edge.
Molly hugs it close to her chest. ‘It’s mine,’ she says. ‘The sky gave it to me.’
Aubrey points the gun barrel at Molly’s face. ‘And now you’re gonna give it to me.’
Molly stays put.
Aubrey cocks the rifle’s hammer. ‘I won’t ask again, Molly.’
Two eyes to two eyes. Blue to black. Light to shadow. Molly tosses the pan to the surface. Aubrey picks up the pan.
‘There’s no such thing as curses, Molly,’ he says, inspecting the words on the back of the pan. ‘There’s no such thing as sky gifts either.’
He wipes more dirt off the pan, uncovering the third and last set of words Tom Berry engraved. Molly sees a strange light – a brief glowing – shift across her uncle’s eyes and she can’t tell if it’s a reflection from the copper pan or the light of inspiration on his face.
‘But make no mistake, Molly, there is such a thing as gold.’ Aubrey drops the pan by his boots. ‘Keep diggin’,’ he says.
Molly grips Bert’s handle once more. She digs.
‘You don’t need nuthin’ from Longcoat Bob, Molly,’ Aubrey says. ‘You don’t need to find some ol’ black witch doctor to give you your answers.’
The shovel blade scraping away more dirt.
‘You see this gun, Molly,’ Aubrey says. Molly turns her eyes to the gun barrel. ‘Here’s your answers right here. She took this gun and she got herself lost, too, out there in that deep country. Maybe she went looking for Longcoat Bob, too. We found her four days later. She was lying flat on a rock by Strike-a-Light Creek.’
The shovel blade scraping away dirt.
‘I’ll never forget her face,’ Aubrey says.
Molly turns to her uncle. He’s lost in his mind, distant.
‘Your mother had a nice face,’ he whispers.
He snaps back to the moment. ‘Show me her face,’ he says, pointing the gun at Molly.
And the gravedigger girl’s boots stumble on the uneven soil and she kneels beside the bone frame of her mother, not entirely because she’s being ordered to at the end of a gun barrel. There is a space inside the gravedigger girl’s mind that wants to see her mother’s face. She wants to see the shape of her cheekbones, her jawline. She wants to touch that face. Her soil-covered fingers brush dirt off her mother’s skull. Her right thumb strokes a cheekbone. She’s dreaming this, she tells herself. She’s been dreaming since she was standing outside Ward’s Boutique staring at that sky-blue dancing dress. She can do things like this in her dreams, kneel beside her mum like this, touch her bones. She can find beauty in the act. She can make it tender.
Two nasal cavities. She loved this woman, so she can love this bone face. The smooth bone bowl that once carried her left eye now carrying a collection of soil that Molly dusts away as carefully as she dusts off Bert’s blade at the end of a long day’s digging. The gentle curve of the left-side temporal
