Jessica

by Bryce Courtenay

  All this is done by feel — not once does she look down at the shotgun. Instead, her wide green eyes never leave the reptiles less than fifteen feet away. Jessica knows she isn’t being cocky like Joe often said she was when she was a brat. She remembers how he’d hit her once for this and she’s never forgotten the lesson.

  When Jessica was eleven a school inspector had come all the way up from Sydney to visit their little school. In her excitement, she’d foolishly boasted to the inspector that her father wasn’t scared of snakes. That when Joe saw a snake he’d bend down and grab it behind the head, his thumb and finger pressing behind the jaws so they’d be open wide showing the terrible poisonous fangs. Then he’d hold it up and kiss it on the head, with the tip of its tail hanging free off the ground, squiggling and squirming. Meg, sly and superior even then, gleefully carried this exaggeration home and Jessica had gotten into terrible trouble with her old man at tea that night.

  All of them were sitting at the table, she and Joe glaring at each other, Meg proud as punch at having just spilled the beans, Hester looking on, her nerves on edge.

  ‘But I seen it!’ young Jessica protests, turning to Joe for confirmation. ‘You done it! I seen it, remember?’

  ‘Bullshit. That were a bloody carpet snake and you know it,’ Joe replies. ‘Big harmless buggers.’

  ‘Well how was I supposed to know it was harmless?’

  Jessica shouts at her sister. ‘He picked it up, didn’t he?

  He kissed it! That’s all I said to the government man!’ ‘Who’s “he”, the cat’s father?’ Hester chides in her tired and exasperated voice.

  ‘Father!’ Jessica points to Joe at the head of the table.

  ‘I seen Father do it!’

  Joe’s voice cuts in quietly. ‘You did know it was harmless, girlie. ‘Cause I told both of yiz meself.’ He turns to Meg. ‘What’s a carpet snake look like, Meg?’ Meg smiles. ‘Black and brown mottled patches against a sort of creamy background, Father. They can get to be nine feet long,’ she adds gratuitously.

  ‘Good.’ Joe faces Jessica again. ‘You bragging to that bloke from the government has made a bloody fool outa me, girlie,’ he says.

  Jessica flushes deeply, biting her bottom lip, looking down into her lap. Meg is a real bitch. But worse, she, Jessica, has made Joe look stupid and that is more than she can bear to think about.

  ‘Country folk don’t get cocky with snakes, ya hear?

  They fear ‘em something terrible,’ Joe continues, still in a low voice. ‘City folk think snakes are evil, it’s something that they’ve taken out of the Bible.’ He pauses, then adds, ‘But we know different, don’t we? Snakes is just another sort of vermin. Crows, rats, mice and feral cats, dingoes and foxes, they’re vermin too, all of them meateaters. They’ll have a go at chooks and take a newborn lamb once in a while, but they won’t go humans, they don’t kill people. Snakes do. Snakes kill. Nobody fools around with Joe Blakes, girlie. Bloke who fools around with snakes is a flamin’ idiot.’

  Suddenly he swings his arm across the table and backhands Jessica hard across the cheek, his knuckles making her skull ring and the teeth rattle in her head. ‘You knew it were a carpet. Don’t ever brag about me to no bastard, you hear? I don’t want no flamin’ school inspector from Sydney thinking your old man’s a bloody fool! Some sort of Injun snake charmer!’

  It feels as though she’s been hit by a rock. Jessica gasps, shocked by the unexpected attack and the sudden, fearful pain. The blow almost knocks her from her stool and she has to grab hold of the table’s edge in order to retain her balance. Joe never hits her indoors, the house is Hester’s territory and her head is ringing as she looks to her mother for help.

  Hester jumps up from the table, her chair skidding backwards in her haste. Jessica thinks she is going to have a go at her father for hitting her, but Hester only looks down at her, wiping her mouth with the back of her puffy hand. Jessica can see from her mother’s expression that she isn’t going to come to her rescue. Hester, she realises, wants no part of what’s going on between her and Joe. All this has happened in a few moments — it is as if the blow to her head has given Jessica a sudden clarity of vision, an insight into her mother’s heart where there is no longer any room for her younger daughter. Jessica knows her mother thinks she’s becoming a handful, too headstrong. ‘Can’t tell you anything you don’t already know and you’ve got no manners, just like your father.’ She says it often enough and there it is again in her eyes as she turns and leaves the table. Jessica knows her mother has finally given up on her. From now on Jessica must stick with Joe, and Hester gives all her affection to Meg.

  Jessica recalls how Meg rose from her stool to follow Hester into the kitchen.

  ‘Stay! You bloody started this,’ Joe commands. Meg lowers herself slowly back on her stool, not looking at her father.

  Jessica, not daring to touch her face, turns and nods dumbly to Joe, accepting her punishment. Then she looks down into her lap, fighting back her tears, determined not to show Meg how she feels.

  The room is silent. She can hear her mother in the kitchen, angrily scraping the bottom of the meat pan with the metal gravy spoon. Then the clank of Joe’s knife and fork on his tin plate as he resumes eating his tea. Joe won’t eat his tucker off proper plates, he says tin makes food seem hard-earned by decent folk.

  Jessica waits until she can be certain her voice has recovered enough before turning to her sister. ‘Fuck you,’ she whispers from the side of her mouth.

  ‘Jessie just swore at me, Father! She used a terrible word, too!’ Meg howls.

  Joe looks up from his dinner plate at Meg. His mind is already elsewhere, his temper cooled down. In his opinion the matter is settled, Jessica has took her punishment fair and square. He plants both elbows on the table, still chewing. His massive sun-bronzed arms give the appearance of two hocks of well-cooked meat with a knife protruding from the end of one and a fork from the end of the other. Swallowing, he’ asks mildly, ‘What’d she say?’

  ‘I can’t say it!’ Meg looks directly down into her plate as though she’s addressing the potatoes.

  Joe picks at a tooth with his pinkie nail and turns to Jessica. ‘What’d you say to your sister, girlie?’

  Jessica, even more furious at Meg, no longer cares if she ends up copping another backhander from her father. She grips the sides of the .table with both hands and glares defiantly at Meg, angry tears welling. ‘I said, Fuck you!’

  She shouts out the words in such a bold manner that Joe is left in no doubt that they are now meant to include him as well.

  Jessica closes her eyes and pulls her head back so that her neck is held rigid, her jaw exposed to take the clout she expects from her father. Her cheek still burns and the left side other mouth is numb from his previous blow. She can feel her eye starting to close.

  Joe smiles to himself. He likes the courage he’s seen in the eyes of his youngest daughter. She’s game, all right, he thinks. He turns his gaze on Meg who sits with downcast eyes, straight-backed, chin tucked in, her hands folded in her lap. A man would need a bloody pickaxe to crack open that one’s heart, he thinks to himself. Pity the poor bastard who gets her.

  How could two girls be so different? Meg, cunning as a shithouse rat, the perfect little lady, at fourteen already a woman with all the looks and tricks that turn men’s eyes soft with longing. But what’s between her legs you can be sure she’ll keep locked up tight until the exact right moment. That one’s got her mind firmly set on a better life than most of the men in the district could offer a lass. Good on her, he doesn’t mind that, she’s got bugger-all inheritance coming from him. The property’s mortgaged to the hilt and the bank’ll get the bloody lot when he’s gone, unless Jessica can keep it going. Meg’ll marry the Thomas boy and have babies dressed in ribbons and booties — it’s written all over her sulky little face.

  Joe th
inks of young Jack Thomas, just two years older than his daughter with five thousand acres coming to him when George Thomas finally carks it. A thousand already under the plough and most of that fronting the river. Meg is putting in a lot of groundwork with the two Thomas girls these days. She’s gone over to the Anglicans and got Hester to do the same. It’s good tactics — the Thomases wouldn’t marry a Lutheran or a Catholic for that matter, strictly C of E that lot. If Meg wins over Ada Thomas and the two girls, you can put down your glasses, George Thomas and his boy Jack don’t stand a chance. Joe can see it all, the future rolling out like a Sunday church carpet, the same red carpet they use for weddings at St Stephen’s: his eldest daughter emerging from the church, Mrs Meg Thomas of Riverview homestead, soon to take to squatters’ ways as though she’s bloody born to them. Hester will die happy as a pig in mud, she’s put that much into the girl.

  But what of young Jessie here, waiting, expecting him to clout her again? He sighs and shakes his head sadly as he thinks of what lies ahead for Jessica. The bush ain’t the kind of place where defiance gets anyone very far, least-ways a woman without a dowry looking for a husband. And Jessie’s having real trouble knowing she’s a girl.

  Maybe he should put her back in her mother’s charge. Maybe she’ll grow out of it, he thinks. After all, she’s only eleven years old. Though Joe knows his youngest daughter pretty well by now and he doesn’t much like her chances of losing that stubborn streak. But most of all Joe knows he can’t manage without Jessica, he needs her around the place. He decides this time he’ll let it pass, leave her be. She’s copped enough for one day. He forgets how little she is — the blow he give her, meant to be no more than a reminder not to be cheeky, bloody near knocked her head off. She hasn’t blubbed, though. You’ve got to admire the little bugger for that. She took her medicine like a man. That’s the whole trouble, though, if she’d been a real girl she’d be holding her cheek and bawling her eyes out, sniffing and howling and burying her face in her mother’s apron.

  Joe sighs again and looks directly at Meg. ‘What Jessie just said, that’s not swearin’. Swearin’s only when you don’t mean it.’

  Jessica grins to herself as she recalls this incident. She remembers how Meg burst into tears at Joe’s clever remark and fled howling from the table. The backhander from her father and the black eye that followed were worth it just to see the look on her sister’s face. Maybe Joe can’t say it out aloud, but she knew then, at that moment, that he loved her.

  Now, as she watches the dancing serpents, Jessica wonders why the different kinds of snakes don’t seem to need to dance separately, each species in some sort of poison pecking order. They all look to mix happily enough on the river bank, mulga, Eastern brown and gwardar. Even the harmless carpet snakes play with their deadly neighbours, the whole tangle of them moving like they are listening to some kind of secret bush orchestra that humans can’t hear. Then she remembers snakes are deaf — it must be the vibrations they make among themselves, she reckons.

  Some snakes sway and arch in lazy loops, some spiral in a ribbon of silver light, while others rise to balance momentarily on the tips of their tails and then whip downwards, striking the earth with a thud to send a small explosion of ochre dust into the air.

  The thumping and writhing of the reptiles soon causes the dust, lit from behind by the setting sun, to form a translucent curtain in the surrounding air. The snakes now seem to be shadows moving in rippling patterns across a screen of light.

  Jessica squints and judges the distance at roughly fifteen feet then waits, holding the gun in both hands below her waist, ready for the pattern she thinks she needs.

  ‘Those two on the right first,’ she murmurs. ‘The mulgas.’ Joe says they’re to be called mulgas, though most people round here call them king browns. Joe likes to be right about things, even though king brown sounds better, more deadly. Jessica must wait until the two snakes are at the highest point of their dance when their heads are thrown back, flicking tongues testing the air. That’s when they show the soft underside of the jaw where the scales are the colour of putty.

  She must make head shots all, her first shot a deadly conclusion of blood, mashed vertebrae, scales and fang. Snakes have their brains encased in hard bone, so she’s got to smash the jaws when she fires, make them harmless. She sees them dead already, mangled heads and necks thickened with black flies.

  To bag her haul, she must kill four more with her second shot. It’s tricky stuff, she must judge it finely, so that when she fires the first shot at the two mulgas, the four snakes three feet to the left must already be in the process of rising. The blast from the second barrel must reach them at the height of their dance with their underjaws exposed to the birdshot.

  Jessica knows she will have to shoot fast, empty the two barrels almost as if a single explosion. Six snakes must be left writhing in the grey river dust, too stupid to know they are already dead, taken care of in the name of the black hen and her stolen chicks.

  She now sees the pattern she needs, sees it forming, the two large mulgas swaying high, then four more snakes to her left beginning to rise. Two Eastern browns and another mulga and a carpet snake, all of them hopefully contained within the sweep of a double-barrel shot.

  In the one sure movement she swings the heavy shotgun up to her shoulder and fires, the second blast following almost instantly. The kick from the double explosion knocks her backwards into a large clump of scrub.

  ‘Bloody hell!’ she yells, still holding onto the shotgun with its barrel now pointed into the heavens above. The galahs and cockatoos take to the air in a raucous pink and white mass. The cicadas go silent, their collective hum cut as though sliced cleanly with a sharp knife. The twin echoes of the shotgun blasts race across the river and over the flat country beyond to disappear over the horizon, sucked up into the dark maw of the approaching twilight.

  Jessica reaches frantically into the pocket of her pinny for the spare cartridge. She grabs at it and grips it between her teeth, at the same time scrambling from the bush into clear ground, though she’s still up to her knees in scrub. Panting with fear, she breaks the shotgun and expels the casings. A curl of gun smoke still issues from the hot breech. She drops the spent cartridges into her pocket, then takes the live cartridge from between her teeth and pushes it home, snapping the breech shut. Trying to stay calm she positions the butt of the shotgun between her feet and with both thumbs again pulls the hammer back. Her heart beats furiously, she can barely hear for the drumming sound it makes in her chest.

  She knows what she’s doing is almost useless. If she’s killed the partner of one of the mulgas or Eastern browns now fleeing from the vibrations of the blast, it will come back for her. Or if she’s in the way of a fleeing snake she’ll be long bitten before she’s got the bloody shotgun in place. She can hear Joe’s words in her head: ‘A brown will hunt you down, stalk you all the way home. If it’s cranky there’ll be no stopping it. If you’ve shot one of them mongrels, always keep a fresh shot up the spout for its mate, girlie.’

  Jessica forces back her fear and makes herself face the river bank, knowing there must be snakes all about her, expecting one to rear up at any moment. An Eastern brown strikes high in an S shape, and could come up out of the scrub to her left or right any second. She waits a few seconds longer, holding the shotgun at the ready, then she runs for the path up from the river. Reaching the path she begins the half-mile walk back to the homestead, trying to keep a steady pace, looking back over her shoulder every few moments. It is only when she is well away from the river and clear of the scrub, with open country about her, that Jessica slows down and she releases the hammer from the firing position so that it seats back into safety. Then she carefully lowers the shotgun, and brings her hand up to rub her painful right shoulder.

  Jessica knows only too well what the kick from a twelve-bore feels like. She’s padded her right shoulder with a cunningly fashion
ed pin-cushion contraption which has a looped tape sewn to one end and two tapes to the corners of the other. The loop fits around her neck with the two further tapes, one pulled under her armpit and tied to the other at the top of her shoulder. Tied in this manner the cushion fits snugly into the curve of her shoulder to protect her right breast and collarbone.

  The kick from the first barrel must have pushed the padding up above her collarbone and she’s received the second blast fair and square in her chest. In a week’s time a purple patch of broken blood vessels the size of a man’s hand will have spread across her right shoulder and breast.

  ‘Milking’s gunna be a bugger,’ she sighs ruefully, gingerly rubbing her damaged shoulder with the tips of her fingers. It could be worse, though, she could’ve broken her collarbone. If she had, Joe would call her a useless bludger trying to get out of her fair share. He’d want to know what she was doing with the shotgun. She couldn’t lie to him. Couldn’t lie anyway. Then he’d go mad about her going down to the river at sunset. ‘Revenge? What for? Six flamin’ new-hatched chicks? Jesus Christ, girlie, you got pig shit for brains, eh?’ He doesn’t hit her now she’s grown up, but Jessica knows he’d be well within his rights to do so if she told him about hunting the snakes with both barrels.

  Anyway, Jessica’s done what she said she would. For the moment she doesn’t care what Joe thinks, or even about her bruised shoulder. ‘Gotcha, you slimy bastards!’ she yells back in the direction of the river bank, where, in her mind’s eye, the serpents lie twisting and writhing in their last dance by the river.

  CHAPTER TWO

  The six dead snakes will be easy pickings for the crows and the kookaburras in the morning. In country where snake eats bird and bird eats snake, and snake eats snake and bird eats bird, nothing that hunts gets a free feed too often.