And when he was told by his daughter, Violet, that she had fallen in love with and was surely going to marry Horace Hook, youngest son of Arthur Hook, it was Longcoat Bob he saw through the red mist of rage. When an outraged and immovable Tom Berry instructed his daughter to end the union, Violet left the family home and vowed never to return until her father accepted her love for Horace.
Anyone but a Hook, Tom Berry pleaded to the night sky. Anyone but a son of Arthur Hook, his former best friend and goldmining partner who had long despised Tom and he had long despised in return – a man whose untimely death to cave-in he had toasted in a solitary moment with a raised glass of Irish whisky. When Tom Berry considered the implausibility of the union, the divine and impossible insult of it all – the union of all that he loved with all that he despised – he was convinced, in heart and soul and mind and body, that the curse of Longcoat Bob was real. And inside the cyclone’s eye of their endless and bitter arguments over the estrangement of their daughter, Tom and Bonnie Berry failed to see the heart of their beloved son, Peter, growing as cold and hard and incapable of feeling as the hearts they carried inside themselves. At 6.55 a.m. on New Year’s Day 1917, Bonnie Berry looked out her kitchen window to find her son hanging from a branch of the milkwood tree Peter and Violet would lie beneath as children, looking up at the sky.
‘You are the curse!’ Bonnie screamed at her husband as she collapsed on the grass beneath the milkwood tree, a stretch of cut rope by her side and her son in her arms. ‘You are the curse, Tom Berry.’
*
A large green caterpillar with red spots across its back walks in a body-looping fashion across Aubrey Hook’s black right boot. He puts his arm down and allows the creature to roll its belly on to his hand and looper-walk along his knuckles.
The red-haired boy, Shane, looks up at the blue sky that is turning, turning, turning with shifting cloud.
‘Was he really cursed?’ the boy asks.
‘That depends what you mean by the word, Shane.’
‘What happened to his wife?’
‘He found her six months later hanging from that same milkwood tree,’ Aubrey says. ‘Violet had her buried in Hollow Wood Cemetery alongside one whole sorry row of Berrys. My brother and I buried her.’
‘What happened to Tom?’
‘He became a recluse when his wife went,’ Aubrey Hook says, assessing how much drink is left inside the bottle. ‘He quarantined himself in his house. He didn’t want to get close to anyone in case Longcoat Bob’s curse rubbed off on them. He’d chase people from the front gate, screaming like a madman, “Don’t come any closer! Don’t come any closer! Don’t you know this place is damned!”’
The red-haired boy shakes his head in disbelief.
Months before he died, Tom Berry knocked on the front door of the cemetery keeper’s house at Hollow Wood. He told his long-estranged daughter, Violet, that he was dying. His lungs were shot from breathing in all that rock dust in his dig days. It was with great reluctance that Tom Berry asked the sons of Arthur Hook to give him a proper burial beside the grave of his wife, but he endured the conversation as a means to an eternal end beside the only woman he had ever truly loved.
‘And what would you like as your epitaph?’ Aubrey Hook asked Tom Berry in the Hollow Wood Cemetery workshed, the men seated by a standing stack of grey headstones.
‘No epitaph,’ Tom Berry said. ‘Just a message.’
*
‘How could one man be so unlucky?’ asks the red-haired boy.
‘That’s not the question you need to ask yourself, Shane,’ Aubrey Hook says. ‘The question is how could God allow such misery to fall on one man?’
Aubrey Hook caps the moonshine bottle and places it by his feet. He turns to the boy.
‘I know why you struggled to pull the trigger, Shane,’ he says. ‘It is a question not of God in the sky, but of value in your heart. No matter how miserable your life is, Shane, even to the point at which you have a loaded revolver placed against your temple, you have still found, deep within your heart, some inexplicable value in your existence. Usually, of course, the rippled complexity of your particular choice of ending is compounded by the phenomenon that there are others in this world who have also placed inexplicable value upon your life: parents, siblings, lovers. But in your case, boy, it appears the only people who placed any value whatsoever on your life are now lying in the dirt beside you. So, in turn, one can safely say that you are, to every living creature on this planet outside of yourself, completely and profoundly worthless. Therefore, I say to you, boy, if you have a lingering attachment to the earth and its people that is prohibiting you from pulling that trigger, you would be well advised to discard it. Which then leaves you to challenge only one remaining notion: that you inexplicably consider yourself, deep down in your heart, to be of some value.’
Aubrey holds the caterpillar on his hand out to the boy whose wide eyes study the looping caterpillar searching for a safe exit off the human platform.
‘Do you think God placed any more value upon you, Shane, than He did upon this caterpillar?’
The red-haired boy rubs his eyes, ponders a response.
‘This caterpillar will transform soon into a glorious butterfly that will float high over rivers and flower beds, and if you saw it in flight you might say to yourself that it was the prettiest sight your sore eyes had ever seen,’ Aubrey says. ‘But does that mean the caterpillar’s life has more value than yours, Shane?’
Shane shakes his head slowly.
‘No, it does
