‘Yes,’ his grandfather said. ‘But what if those three days sailing past that monster were the most terrifying and hellish three days any human could ever be subjected to? Looking into the eyes of those creatures was a hell beyond anything our books could conjure.’
‘I’d just close my eyes,’ Yukio said. ‘When I opened my eyes, I’d be alive and the three days would be over. If I didn’t open my eyes, I’d be dead and I wouldn’t have to open my eyes at all.’
His grandfather smiled. ‘Aaaah, dear grandson,’ he said. ‘You always seem to open my eyes a little wider every day.’
Yukio smiles now. He follows Molly to the western wall where Greta is captivated by the image of a creature that looks like a cross between a man and a bug and a fish. Thin human arms and legs spread wide, but the torso is made of what looks like a fish skeleton, with the tail placed where a man might normally find his backside. Molly sees that the painted creatureman has a head like a cartoon beetle’s head with big circles for eyes, no mouth or nose, and two upright antennae. From the sides of its head, what look like two bamboo sticks curve down to its feet. Two rods, thinks Molly.
‘The Lightning Man,’ she says. ‘Sam told me about the Lightning Man.’ She traces the rods running from his head. ‘Lightning shoots out from his ears and he bends it down to us, all of us down here on earth, because he wants to show us that everything we need in life is coming soon.’
Molly places a palm against the rock. ‘My grandfather was here,’ she says. She pulls the gold pan from her duffel bag. She runs her fingertip along a sentence etched into the pan.
‘“West where the yellow fork man leads”,’ Molly says. ‘My grandfather was poetic. He didn’t see the Lightning Man. He saw a yellow fork man.’ And Molly whispers now, ‘The Lightning is a Yellow Fork.’
‘Come again?’ Greta asks.
‘Emily Dickinson,’ Molly says. ‘She wrote about the sky. She must have seen the most incredible lightning in the sky. Forked lightning. She saw things in the sky like I see things. She looked up there and wondered where that gift of the lightning came from. She wondered who was up there dropping things from that house in the clouds.’
Molly slings the duffel bag back over her shoulder.
‘It’s coming,’ Molly says to Greta, eyes alight. ‘Let’s go. It’s coming.’
And Molly rushes through the western archway, which opens onto a thin brown dirt path bordered by tall trees.
‘What’s coming, Molly?’ Greta calls.
Molly turns and talks as she marches backwards.
‘Everything we need, Greta,’ she says. ‘Everything we need.’
THE TEN SECOND SKY
The red-haired boy, Shane, has knotted a lengthy rag around his head to staunch the blood that wants to spill from his severed left ear, and now he swigs from a bottle of moonshine, hoping all that hut-brewed white spirit will give him spirit enough to join his friends in the afterlife. He has dragged the bodies of his dead tin-mining colleagues together beside the campfire. He had thought that laying the men down in a uniformed row would give his dead friends the respect they deserve. There was something right about the effort it took to do that under God’s watchful eye. Fishing Hoss with the stab wound through his belly from a crimson-coloured corner of the creek. Dragging Kenny Spencer with his sliced throat back through the scrub to the mine site to lie beside McDougall, the man in the hunting jacket, also with a sliced throat. George Kane was the toughest to pull into the uniformed line, not just because of his dead weight, but because the one-eyed Kane was the man who raised the red-haired boy. Shane looked upon George as father and mother, two parents inside one giant man, making up for the mother and father who had left him on the doorstep of the Darwin police station fourteen years earlier.
Shane lined the bodies in a row, flat on their backs, their faces to the sky, then staggered back down the bush path leading to the stone, wood and tin hut where the workers had their swags. In the kitchen he cut himself a thick slice of cured kangaroo meat and wet his dry throat with a long guzzle of tank water. Then he went to George Kane’s raised stretcher bed and found the bottle of moonshine by a pair of old boots and then he reached under his pillow to find the loaded six-shot Enfield No. 2 revolver that he now picks up in two sweaty hands and holds between his knees as he sits on the thick log in front of the dying campfire. He takes a deep breath and he nods and walks to the four bodies lined up on the grass and he lies flat on his back beside George Kane with the caved-in skull and he looks up
