‘Where?’ Molly gasps, scanning the blue sky.
Violet points to the sky again.
‘There,’ she says. And Molly squints her eyes and shades her face with her hands to block the glare.
‘It’s a gift from your grandfather, Molly. It’s something he wants you to have.’
Molly bouncing on the spot now. ‘What is it? What is it?’
‘It’s how your grandfather found his treasure,’ Violet says, staring at the sky.
‘Treasure!’ Molly says.
‘We all have our own treasure to find, Molly. He wants you to find yours.’
Molly stares harder into the sky, but she can’t see the falling sky gift.
‘Keep looking up, Molly,’ Violet says. ‘Just keep your eyes on the sky, Molly. Don’t look away or you’ll miss it falling.’
Molly stares harder into the sky but she can’t see the falling sky gift.
‘Keep looking up, Molly,’ Violet says. ‘Just keep your eyes on the sky, Molly. Don’t look away or you’ll miss it falling.’
Molly feels her mother move closer to her. Molly feels her mother’s arms wrap around her shoulders. She feels her mother’s lips against her temple.
‘I’m going now, Molly,’ Violet says. ‘But you must not watch me go. You must keep looking up. You must keep your eyes on the sky.’
And Molly looks at the sky and looks and looks and she wants to turn her eyes away but she listens to her mum, she believes in her mum, she believes her, and she never takes her eyes off that high blue roof and she feels her mum move away from her, hears her mum’s sandals crushing leaves and grass shoots behind her, and she wants to look away from the sky and turn her eyes towards those sounds but she listens to her mum because her mum is always right, always true, always graceful.
‘You can write your own epitaph now, Molly.’ Further away.
‘It won’t be written for you. You can write it yourself. Just keep your eyes on the sky, Molly.’ Further away.
‘Keep your eyes on the sky, Molly.’ Further away.
‘Keep your eyes on the sky, Molly.’ Too far away.
Molly keeps her eyes on the sky and she stares up at that sky for so long she tells herself she will only stare at that sky for sixty more seconds and she counts sixty seconds in her head and when she has only five more seconds to count she vows to count another sixty seconds and she does. Ten, nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one.
She still can’t see the sky gift, so she turns her eyes away from the blue and she sighs, her belly still turning inside, and she whips her head round to where the last sounds of footsteps came from. She looks for her mother. But there are only trees and graves and weeds and mounds of pebbled clay covering the dead, nothing else. And she stares into that still cemetery space waiting for her mother to walk back into it. But she does not.
An image enters the gravedigger girl’s mind. A bull ant crawling across a curse. A single word carved in stone. Bad magic for someone who might deserve it. She turns to read her grandfather’s epitaph and resting upon the slab of stone by her twig-thin shinbones is a flat, square cardboard gift box. It’s wrapped in a ribbon tied in a bow. The colour of the ribbon is the colour of the sky.
Molly leaps on the sky gift and shakes it in her hands. She rips at the ribbon and her belly isn’t turning anymore. Her dirt and sweat fingers claw at the sides of the box. At last, an opening, and her fingers rip the thin, cheap cardboard roughly across the bottom edge and something metal – something hard – slides out of the box and into her hands.
She holds it up to the sky. A round metal dish. Solid copper. Old and caked in dirt. She thinks it’s a dinner plate at first. Maybe a serving dish for sandwiches. But the dish has raised, sloping sides and a flat base, and it’s not much smaller than a car’s steering wheel. And Molly’s seen one of these before. In the back tray of her Uncle Aubrey’s red utility truck, in the old metal box where he keeps his fossicking tools. It’s not a plate, she tells herself. It’s a pan. A pan for finding gold. A pan for finding treasure. And Molly Hook, aged seven, knows not what to say back to the sky for such generosity, so she looks up to it and says what she can only hope is graceful. ‘Thank you.’ And in the silence of the cemetery the gravedigger girl waits patiently for the sky to say something back.
BLACK ROCK FROG ROCK
The gravedigger girl by the water, four days later. Molly Hook kneeling on the muddy bank of Blackbird Creek, which runs along the eastern edge of Hollow Wood Cemetery. She holds the sky gift. Earth, dirt and silt have turned the copper pan to a dark mud-brown colour. She fills the pan with dry creekbed gravel and duck-waddles without standing into the shallow creek water. With two steady hands, she submerges the pan and the cleaner parts of its edge bounce sunlight off copper and Molly mistakes these magic tricks of the light for early and miraculous strikes of gold.
Gold, Mum, gold. And she turns her head to the sky. Is this you, Mum? Are you doing this? Can you hear me, Mum?
And it makes sense to Molly in this moment when she is so close to her eighth birthday that the god of minerals, that miserable and selfish spirit god of gold, that son of Zeus, Khrysos – whose grave her father and her uncle say they’re always pissing on when they’re liquored – would grant her a gold strike on this day. This strange day of all strange days, this dark mood of a day when her father, Horace, and her uncle, Aubrey, are over there by the
