‘Why did you wanna do it in the first place?’
‘My friends have all gone,’ he says. ‘And the world has ended and all that, and what do I have to stick around for now?’
‘Who told you the world has ended?’
‘George,’ the boy says, nodding at Kane. ‘He said that Hitler feller’s runnin’ the north of the world now and the Japs are runnin’ the south and I knew that was true when I saw that Jap come out of the forest like that.’
The man nods, rubbing his moustache with his forefinger and thumb. He is silent for a long moment.
‘It is true, Shane,’ the man says. ‘Firestorms have engulfed every major city of the world. There are no vehicles moving through streets anymore because the streets are filled with skinless bodies. Gravediggers across the world are naming their price for their highly valued services. Ash rains across the east coast of Australia. The Thames runs red with blood. German soldiers march through Times Square.’
The boy shakes his head, dismayed. But confused, mostly. ‘George was going to start a new world here,’ he says.
Shane lies back down beside George and weeps.
The man looks to the sky and raises his bottle to it, like a toast. Then he swigs again and turns to the boy. ‘Would you like to know the truth, Shane?’
‘Yes,’ says the boy.
‘The truth is, Shane,’ the man says, ‘God is not watching you. God has never bothered Himself with the business of death. He only focusses on His successes and never bothers with His failures. He’s always too concerned with the wonder of birth and the business of life. He lets death unravel down here with all the purpose and predictability of a father of four children tripping down a lighthouse stairwell. He cares for death about as much as the bullets in your gun care for bone. He makes no analysis of it, Shane. He has no interest in the meaning of it, nor the making. God knows nothing about death.’
He drinks again and points the bottle at the boy. ‘But the gravedigger, Shane! The gravedigger knows everything there is to know about death.’
And Aubrey Hook whispers now. ‘Let me tell you the story of a man who once passed through this way,’ he says. ‘Let me tell you the story of Tom Berry. It’s a story about death.’
*
And here in this godforsaken and blood-strewn tin-mine campsite Aubrey Hook’s long story meanders haphazardly to a recollection the gravedigger has of the look upon Tom Berry’s face when he stood in the workshed at Hollow Wood Cemetery reciting from a notepad the words he would like chiselled into his gravestone. Less an epitaph than a warning. An act of anger. An act of love.
Tom Berry took Longcoat Bob’s gold by horseback deep into the deep country from whence it had come. Then he put that gold back in the hole in the earth he had left behind. But the fortunes of the Berry family were not miraculously reversed.
Tom Berry returned to Darwin from his fortnight-long journey to and from the deep country to find an inexplicable and unsettling melancholy spreading through his home. The hearts of the people he loved most, it seemed, were already turning cold in his presence, as if they were, indeed, already turning to stone. His wife seemed uninterested in his trip. In the ensuing months, she barely smiled at his humour, barely heard his comments on the weather and work and the welfare of his children. His son, Peter, had grown insular and detached and uncaring. His wife said early on that it was just the lingering sadness over the rash of impossible deaths that had struck the wider Berry family throughout the year. She wondered out loud one evening as she knitted a winter blanket if sadness was a contagion, as hazardous to heart and soul as smallpox was to mind and body.
But then Bonnie Berry revealed her deeper feelings in the fireside heat of a living room row between husband and wife. She said the truth was that she resented her husband for putting Longcoat Bob’s gold before their marriage. She hated him for his gold lust that had long ago overwhelmed his simple love of words and sentences. She resented him for being away so long in the deep country on that first fruitful and fateful trip. She said she had assumed he had died and she had steeled her heart for the worst kind of news and when she saw him alive she was dismayed to discover her heart did not soften back again.
‘I have no love for you, Tom,’ she bellowed across the living room. She held her chest and she spoke like a devotee of Dickinson. ‘There is nothing in here for you.’
And Tom Berry drove his fist through his living room window and a curving line of blood dripped down his forearm like the line he had etched on the back of his gold prospector’s pan, the secret map of the route to Longcoat Bob’s treasure, annotated with cryptic and clever words from a man who’d once prided himself on his way with them. That long walk through that strange and deep country recollected in a crooked line; the start and finish of all his failures.
Then he realised that map he’d etched on his prospecting pan was not just a reminder of how to find his lost gold, should he ever wish to return to it, but also a way to hunt down Longboat Bob. ‘I’ll kill that Longcoat Bob!’ Tom Berry screamed now, his own rage and regret and shame finally convincing him of the veracity of Longcoat Bob’s command over black magic. And no matter how many times Bonnie Berry told her husband that her once warm heart had grown cold towards him long before any suggestion of a black man’s curse upon their family, Tom
