Aubrey chuckles. Then his eyes find another epitaph in the termite mound city. ‘Esme Berry, 1843–1916’. Tom Berry’s aunt died three weeks after Theo from a gastrointestinal infection.
‘Clara Berry, 1845–1916’. Tom Berry’s beloved mother, Clara. A month after her sister-in-law died, Clara’s right leg fell clean through a rotting wooden board on the thin rear deck of her small home in Batchelor, south of Darwin. Her leg was gouged sickeningly through the rear calf when it landed on the large rusted tooth of an old manual crop cultivator which was being stored in the space beneath the deck. The tooth went so deep that the town surgeon said the leg would have to be amputated above the knee, but the surgery was poorly carried out, the leg became infected, gangrene set in and Clara Berry died a painful death some two months after the death of her sister-in-law.
Aubrey’s eyes move to another mound. ‘Charles Berry, 1909–1916’. It was at Clara Berry’s wake that Esme Berry’s seven-year-old grandson, Charles, was challenged by two older boys to eat a peculiar slug they had found crawling in the backyard tool shed of the man who was hosting the wake, Darwin councilman Henry Pegg.
That afternoon in Pegg’s living room, with his fingers sticky from the scone he was eating with jam and cream, Charles Berry fell to the floor and began frothing at the mouth and shaking with convulsions. He died on the right shoulder of Henry Pegg, who was then running towards the Darwin emergency hospital.
And Aubrey Hook smiles. He laughs at the wild misfortune of it all. Then he howls, his deranged and deep guffaws echoing across the still floodplain.
It was after the death of young Charles Berry that the Darwin Examiner made the first public press reference to a rumour that had been swirling across town: Longcoat Bob had put a curse on Tom Berry for the sin of his greed, and the curse was proving to be real. The newspaper ran a quote from an anonymous source who claimed to have been in the Darwin town hall the night Longcoat Bob placed his so-called curse on Tom Berry. ‘The sorcerer had a bone in his hand,’ the anonymous witness said. ‘He pointed it at Mr Berry and he said in a loud and commanding voice, “I curse you and your kin, Tom Berry. Your hearts will turn to stone.” That’s what he said. And look at all the bad fortune that’s come over that family. That blackfeller was talking black magic and the rest of us was lucky he didn’t decide to talk to us.’
Tom Berry tossed the newspaper into his living room fire when he read it. ‘There’s a difference between a curse and piss-poor luck,’ he screamed, so loud it made his wife, Bonnie, jump in her armchair beside his. ‘Did any one of those people die of a stone heart?’ Tom Berry barked, uncapping a bottle of whisky and reaching for a glass. ‘Has my heart turned to stone! Has your heart turned to stone, Bonnie? Have mercy!’
Bonnie Berry sat in silence, looking into the warm fire and wondering if her husband’s statements were entirely true. She’d seen something change inside her husband since his return from his strange and fruitful odyssey through the deep country, and despite his newfound wealth, a cloud seemed to follow him wherever he went. He was irritable and, although now more generous, less kind. And how was Bonnie to explain the heaviness of her own heart, were it not itself undergoing some slow transformation? How was she to explain how low she had felt in recent months? She had tried to express to friends the feeling of unwillingness she had carried for so long, a dread of living that made her belly sick. Unwilling to rise in the morning. Unwilling to cook. Unwilling to clean. Unwilling to love. Anyone and anything. She read so many poetry books that sang of the workings of the human heart, its mystic machinery, of the fountain inside of us all that gives and receives love in the endless and glorious thud of a chest beat. She placed her palm on her chest by the fire and she could feel the beat of her heart, but she could not feel the love she had once kept inside it for her husband. A heart that can no longer love, she told herself, might as well be made of stone.
‘Tom,’ Bonnie said by the fire.
‘Yes, my love.’
‘I think you should put the gold back where you found it.’
*
Aubrey Hook stares into the floodplain sun and his fever vision splits the sun into two, like a double-yolk egg frying on a skillet. He dumps his head into a waterhole, slaps his face hard. Then he marches on across the floodplain, his hatred giving him pace.
His mouth is dry and desperate for spirits. He wonders about explorers who came through here on horseback and on foot. He wonders if they ever tossed their whisky bottles from their horses. Buried them in dirt to save for return journeys. Buried spirit treasure. He curses the blacks who walked these isolated lands for millennia and never once took the time to construct a saloon among the forests and plains, a glowing two-storey pub with piano music and song echoing through its windows, high up on the range he can see in the distance.
He walks along a woodland avenue of fern-leafed grevilleas and milky plum trees with yellow fruits that he rips from the branches in desperate grabs and shovels into his mouth like they were pub bar peanuts. ‘The damned,’ he tells himself, his mouth full of fruit, juice streams spilling down his chin. ‘The daaaammned!’ he laughs. He knows whose footsteps he’s following. The footsteps of damned Tom Berry, the accursed goldminer who made his intentions clear for all to read when he placed
