‘Yukio!’ she hollers. ‘Yukio!’
Her hands are cupped, holding something inside them.
‘I’ve got a gift for you,’ she says. She uncups her hands and a butterfly with flapping wings the colours of a tiger launches itself haphazardly into the sky.
‘Butterfly,’ Molly rejoices.
‘Butter . . . fly.’ Yukio smiles.
Greta walks on ahead by herself. Molly and Yukio watch the tiger butterfly disappear into the thick vine scrub lining the path.
‘I’ve been thinking about what you said last night,’ Molly says. ‘You said your wife didn’t just die.’ She stops and thinks harder on what she’s trying to say. ‘Well, ummm, she didn’t just go into the ground.’
Yukio turns to the girl, expressionless. Molly continues.
‘You said she turned into a butterfly,’ she says. ‘What a beautiful thing to turn into.’
Yukio nods, silently.
‘I lost my mum when I was seven years old,’ Molly says.
Yukio nods, silently. Molly tells Yukio Miki again about the curse of Longcoat Bob. She tells him about her home at Hollow Wood Cemetery. A place where she helped her father and her uncle bury people in dirt. She hoped for so long that there was more to death than dirt. ‘Then you come along and say there’s butterflies,’ she says.
They walk along silently for a stretch, passing a rocky vine thicket studded with pale grey trees with shiny dark green leaves and bright orange berries.
‘Them Japanese bombs blew Hollow Wood up,’ Molly says. ‘Them Japanese bombs blew my dad to bits.’
‘I sorry,’ Yukio says.
‘Nah, I know it wasn’t you, Yukio,’ Molly says. ‘I didn’t see no place for bombs on your little plane.’
She kicks a rock the size of a tennis ball with her right boot. It rolls along for ten feet or so and she kicks it off the path with another solid boot.
‘But maybe my mum and dad transformed, too?’ she says. ‘Maybe they’re butterflies now. Or maybe they’re the grass like Walt Whitman says, or maybe they’re the sky.’
Molly looks up to the blue sky. Thin day sky clouds like flour dusting a bread loaf. ‘The day sky and the night sky,’ Molly says.
‘Day sky.’ Yukio nods. ‘Night sky.’
‘Night skies tell no lies,’ Molly says.
‘Night skies tell no lies,’ Yukio repeats, smiling.
The three of them stop to drink from a thin freshwater creek. Molly shows Yukio her grandfather’s gold pan. She runs her fingers along the line on the flat underside.
‘This was the first gift from the sky,’ Molly says. ‘It’s leading us to Longcoat Bob.’
She looks to the blue sky again. It’s now filled with high puffs of small round clouds that look to Molly like the scales on a black bream. ‘Then I asked the sky to drop them bombs on Hollow Wood,’ Molly says. ‘But I didn’t want those bombs to blow my dad to bits.’ She puts the pan back in the duffel bag and they all walk on.
‘You were the next gift, Yukio,’ Molly says. ‘You fell from the sky. You came to help us.’ She looks further along the dirt track at Greta who is marching ahead through a mess of strangler figs inside another pocket of vine forest.
‘Or maybe you came to help Greta,’ Molly says.
‘Greta,’ Yukio repeats. He watches her walking when he says her name.
‘She’s sad, Yukio,’ Molly says. ‘There’s something inside her that makes her low. My friend, Sam, he’s a blackfeller who knows all there is to know about this deep country and he said the land gives you all you need if you know the right way to ask for it. I reckon the sky is like that, too. You saved us back there, Yukio. You fell from the sky because you knew you had to save us. You had to save me. And you had to save Greta. The sky knew she needed you.’
The vine forest clears and the thin track disappears into a giant sandstone rock formation shaped like an igloo, split by a thin crack down its middle with enough space for a body to walk through sideways. Greta turns to her side and puts her arms out as she squeezes through the narrow space, eyes raised to the line of sky running across the dome. Molly and Bert the shovel follow Greta and Yukio follows Molly.
Yukio’s eyes light up when he emerges from the crack to find he’s standing inside a kind of natural gallery space enclosed by high walls of sandstone and a wide rock overhang. On the other side of this space are three openings, like exits, one leading to the east, one to the north and one west. The floor of the space is dotted with smooth, eroded grinding holes. On the wall beside each opening is a vivid and ancient rock painting. The eastern wall features a painting in reds and browns and whites and yellows of three tall, thin figures wearing dresses, which seem to Molly to be women but are also strange-looking and not of this world. They have no eyes or noses or mouths but seem to be staring at her and she is unsettled by these stares. On their heads are what appear to be headdresses shaped like quartered lemon pieces. The figures seem important, like they have all the answers to all of Molly’s questions.
‘Where am I going?’ she asks them. ‘Why have I come this far?’ Then the whole truth of the gravedigger girl in a single conundrum: ‘Why did she go?’
On the northern wall is a painting of a white kangaroo standing tall on the tips of its back legs and looking down on something and on closer inspection that something is a tall ship at full sail. Yukio runs his fingers over the ship’s faint white sails and the ship seems like a ghost ship to
