Jessica

by Bryce Courtenay

  Ada Thomas is President of the Women’s Committee at St Step hen’s and also of the Red Cross Society, formed in Narrandera after the Boer War. At church and charity she wields her power and uses her two daughters as her gossip and information gatherers.

  ‘The Three Must-interferes’ is what folks call them behind their backs. Their role, as they see it, is to flush out gossip or sniff out any misdemeanour in the parish and generally to pass judgement on anything or anyone. As a consequence, the sick, the lame and the downtrodden receive only that portion of charity which Ada Thomas decides they deserve, based on their past conduct, church attendance record and pecking order on the social ladder.

  The poorest usually get the least. This, in Ada Thomas’s eyes, is as it should be. After all, the workingclass poor set the lowest standards, have the least aspirations and, besides, are accustomed to doing without, so they should not be given false hopes of any large entitlement.

  If you’re a family in need of the church’s munificence you make damn sure you scrub the faces of your children and send them off to Sunday School in clean pinnies and patched knickerbockers. And if the brats don’t have boots you brush their hair and wash their feet and cut their toenails, because you can be sure that all will be noted by Winifred and Gwen and reported back to Ada.

  What’s more, if you know what’s good for you, you get your own bum into a pew quick smart of a Sunday morning and try to put a penny in the plate. This last observance is in the hands of Ada’s two daughters, who’ve replaced the anonymous black tithe bag with an open plate. They report with clerical accuracy every farthing given and by whom.

  Mrs Thomas has let it be known to one and all that she has no charity for godless blasphemers, shirkers and for most of the working-class poor.

  ‘God is not mocked,’ she will say after rejecting a name put forward on the church charity list on the basis of infrequent attendance at Sunday morning worship, combined with recent knowledge of a husband seen full as a boot outside the Royal Mail Hotel.

  The Thomases are the richest family in the district by far. That is to say, Ada Thomas is, because it was the fortune she brought to the marriage that made her husband George prosper despite his being an ex-riverboat captain without any previous experience on the land. He’s still the more unpopular of the two, but she holds the cheque book and that, people say, makes her an even bigger bitch than he is a bastard, though there’s little to choose between them.

  Even the vicar dares not stand up to Ada Thomas, possessing as he does a flock under his pastoral care with barely a penny between them. His is not a wealthy congregation and his living is a precarious one. Ada Thomas’s benevolence forms the major part of the parish income and so Reverend Samuel Mathews, M.A. Oxon., figuratively touches his forelock to the mistress of Riverview. His well-cultivated vowels are used too frequently in her praise when he ought to have been telling her to mind her own business.

  If it wasn’t for Ada Thomas, the Anglicans would not be any better off than the rest of God’s local affiliations. The Catholics look after their own and with the local Irish making up most of the congregation their resources are sorely stretched. The Lutherans are really missionaries who take care of the Aborigines and so are quite unacceptable. The Baptists and Presbyterians don’t have any money to speak of. In fact, Jesus is a pauper in all these denominations.

  The God-fearing Ada was not amused when, nearly a year after Billy Simon’s accident at Riverview Station, a mob of starving Aborigines, trying to escape the terrible drought further up north around the Darling River, turned up at Ada’s doorstep begging for sustenance. Ada immediately saw them as the property of the Lutherans and therefore a pestilence sent against the Anglicans by another, inferior denomination.

  Ada tried to send them away, but they were either too exhausted or too desperate to move and remained in the yard, pleading for food.

  ‘If we feed the brutes they’ll just stay,’ she told the cook. ‘You’re not to give them anything except water. They’re like animals — if you show them kindness, we’ll never get rid of them.’

  The dogs were out with the men on one of the runs and so she couldn’t set them onto the blacks camped in the yard. Ada called Billy in from the garden and demanded he fire a charge of birdshot into the air above their heads. This he refused to do, blubbering and clutching his hat over his head while she shouted furiously at him in vain. Then when he’d mumbled and stammered and finally run away to hide, she’d done it herself. But the blacks still wouldn’t move and she’d finally lost her temper and fired the small-bore shotgun at the legs of several of the adult men who stood to one side of their gins. The light birdshot peppered them, sending bright rivulets of blood down their dark, stick-thin legs, over their large, broken feet and the cracks in the soles and down into the dust.

  That was not the end of it, either. Calling for their horses to be saddled, Mrs Thomas and her two daughters drove the blacks off their land, beating them over the head and shoulders with their riding crops. Long lines of flies queued along the furrows of dried blood on their dust-encrusted legs. The men remained silent, unflinching at the blows from the riding crops, though the gins wailed their misery, carrying and dragging their starving kids with them.

  Ada Thomas was fined ten shillings by the police magistrate when he sat at Narrandera a month later. Her defence had been that they were trespassing on her land and were godless creatures and so didn’t rate her charity or the Lord’s compassion.

  ‘They should have gone to the Lutherans,’ she’d said with a toss of her head, followed by a sniff which clearly indicated her opinion of this denomination.

  ‘Be that as it may, Mrs Thomas, may I remind you that in things temporal we don’t go around shooting blacks,’ the magistrate replied.

  ‘Why not?’ Ada Thomas demanded. ‘Be that as it may, Mr Craddock, we’ve been doing it for the past hundred years and may I remind you, I only used birdshot!’

  There was much laughter at this and the magistrate was forced to clear the court, sending the crowd out into Larmer Street where they watched the proceedings through the open bay windows.

  The whole town had turned up for the hearing. When the magistrate pronounced the fine, Ada Thomas took a ten-shilling note out of her handbag and in an imperious voice demanded a receipt from the clerk of the court. When he’d written it out and handed it to her she’d looked the magistrate straight in the eye and said, ‘This could not have happened if Mr Donaldson had been here. He knew me for a good Christian lady.’ She paused before delivering her ultimate judgement of the magistrate. ‘God is not mocked, Mr Craddock!’

  The police magistrate did not bat an eyelid at the mention of his predecessor. ‘Maybe God is not mocked, but I am, Mrs Thomas. You have twice referred to me by name. You will kindly refer to the bench in this court as “Your Worship”!’

  Ada Thomas merely sniffed at this rebuke, to a ripple of sympathetic laughter from the open windows. The magistrate had finally had enough. ‘The defendant is fined another one pound ten shillings for contempt of this court!’ he bellowed. Later the crowd outside the window would quip that being rude to a magistrate was a threefold bigger crime than shooting an Abo.

  Jack Thomas had his brand new De Dion motor car waiting outside the courthouse, its engine cranked and ready for a quick getaway when his mother emerged. The large crowd greeted her with cheers, surrounding the handsome vehicle, many of them shouting, ‘Good on ya, Mrs Thomas! Australia for the white man!’

  Jessica remembers being told how Ada Thomas climbed up into the seat beside Jack and then started to smile and wave at the crowd like bloody Queen Mary at her own coronation, finally departing in a cloud of dust and smoke from young Jack’s motor.

  The cheering townsfolk, or the men anyway, repaired to the pub across the street to drink the health of a woman who was a fair dinkum hero, who’d done the right thing by decent society. Excep
t, they laughed, she should have used buckshot. If they had their way, Ada Thomas would be given a medal by the governor.

  Joe said that blacks were ‘useless bastards’, but then he’d tell Jessica how he’d worked with some up north, good blokes who’d been hard-working stockmen. ‘But that sort are few and far between,’ he reckoned. ‘They’re mostly dirty and drunk and you couldn’t trust one as far as you could throw him.’

  But when a small group of blacks, drifting down from the same drought along the, Darling River as Ada’s unfortunate lot, had come to their back door a couple of months after her court case, Joe hadn’t turned them away like she had.

  Jessica remembers what a pitiful sight they’d been, no more than skin and bone. Their arms and legs were covered in open sores where the flies clustered in swarms. The stomachs of the naked children were distended to the size of small watermelons and their dark eyes seemed too large in their woolly little heads. She could see the shape of their skulls under the tightly stretched skin covering their coal-black faces. Flies crawled at the corners of their eyes and up their nostrils and they seemed too tired to brush them aside. Their limbs were like twigs you could snap with a sharp twist of your thumb and forefinger, and lice swarmed over their heads.

  ‘Poor bastards, all ribs and prick, like a drover’s dog,’

  Joe said.

  Jessica recalls how the adults smelled of rotting flesh. The torn, filthy rags they wore may have once been clothing but now concealed very little. They hung in bits and pieces over random parts of their skinny bodies, hardly hiding their private parts.

  Meg had come to the kitchen door first and ran screaming for Hester. Hester called to Jessica to bring the shotgun, but Joe came in and stopped his wife from driving them away.

  He’d given them a bag of flour for damper and let them have a wether, slaughtering the old sheep for them himself. He allowed them to stay in the bottom paddock which fronted the river and was well wooded and out of sight, warning them not to be seen or he’d have to send them away.

  He’d let Jessica use the shotgun to kill a roo for them every other day, or take the small-bore rifle, the .22, and shoot half a dozen rabbits. At this time of the year, though, there was hardly a bite of meat on a rabbit. ‘Vermin eating vermin,’ Joe would laugh, making a cheap joke out of his own charity. The roos she shot were full of worms but Joe said, ‘Blacks don’t care, don’t take any notice of things like that.’

  ‘You mean people who are starving don’t care!’ she’d protested.

  ‘Right,’ he said, seeing the look in her eyes and not wishing to take the matter any further.

  Jessica had gone into their camp every afternoon with strips of clean rags for bandages and a big jar of sulphur ointment Joe had produced for her. He said it was good for horses and he’d often enough used it on himself when he was a boundary rider and he’d come to no harm. She boiled water and cleaned the sores on the children’s little arms and legs with a strong permanganate of potash solution before applying Joe’s ointment. She tried not to retch at the suppurating flesh that came away on the dressings, often leaving only bone behind. The children hardly ever bawled when she dressed them and they loved the brightly coloured bandages and so were careful to keep them on afterwards.

  Joe told her she’d done good, but not to get too concerned, blacks were tough as old boots and had their own bush medicine. He said, ‘If they want to die they’ll just lay down and be dead on the spot, Jessie, wish themselves dead, and there’s nothing yiz can do about it.’ But Jessica didn’t see them gathering any of their own medicine and none of them seemed to want to lie down and die, so she kept on with the dressings.

  After a while one of the gins grew a bit friendly. She was younger than most of the women. Jessica thought she was sixteen, a year older than herself, though it was difficult to tell from her starving body. Her mission name was Mary Simpson and she spoke a little English, learned from the Lutheran Mission station up near the Lachlan Swamps.

  Mary was from the local Wiradjuri tribe, and had been taken as a bride by the Wongaibon tribe from the north who made up the rest of her small band. She first approached Jessica to say that some of the gins wanted to use Joe’s ointment on themselves as well as on the children. Soon Mary was helping her with the dressings and translating what Jessica told her into their own language. They were a sad little mob, but in a few days with a bit of tucker in them, they started to smile again. The children seemed to recover first and soon got strong enough to play in the river, which meant they didn’t smell quite as bad as before.

  One afternoon Mary came up to Jessica with all the kids in tow and they presented her with two yellowbelly and a redfin they’d caught.

  ‘For you,’ Mary said shyly. ‘They catch for you, Missus Jessie.’

  They were starving but still they gave her the three fish, which she knew she couldn’t refuse. She thanked them, tears in her eyes. Yellow-belly is a good eating fish and she’d taken them home and cooked them. Hester and Meg turned up their noses but Joe said, apart from tasting a bit muddy this time of year, they were real good.

  Hester commanded Jessica not to speak of Joe’s kindness. ‘You don’t breathe a word, you hear? Not to anyone. Folk are terrible tattle-tales — if people hear Joe Bergman is helping blacks it will do your father’s reputation no good.’ Hester knew well enough that any threat to Joe would keep her younger daughter’S trap firmly shut.

  But Jessica, even then, knew what her mother really meant. On the basis of the popularity she’d gained over the shooing of the Aborigines off Riverview Station, Ada Thomas was thinking of standing for the position of councillor in the Shire elections, the first woman in the Riverina ever to contemplate such an action. If Joe’s kindness to the Aborigines was known then the Bergmans could be seen as nigger lovers, which would do Meg’s chances any amount of harm. But, despite all Hester’s fears, Ada Thomas lost the election anyway. People may have thought she was a hero but she was still a bossy boots and no one wanted to give her any more power than she already had.

  As Jessica arrives at the homestead, she can hear that the dogs have worked themselves up into a howling frenzy. She’s locked the three kelpies in the shed so they wouldn’t follow her down to the river and get themselves bit to death. Red is gunna be real cranky, Jessica thinks to herself. Red is her dog, the oldest of the three, and he likes to be around her, always on the lookout in case she comes to harm. Red sees Jessica as his responsibility and he doesn’t like to be insulted by being shut away when there’s something going on.

  By way of making up to them, Red in particular, Jessica decides they’ll get a bit extra in their bucket of bones and boiled hogget scraps. Maybe she’ll toss in a ladle or two of Hester’s soup gravy — that, she decides, should cheer ‘em up a treat. She can just hear Joe’s voice now, scolding her: ‘They’re working dogs, girlie.

  Spoil a dog and it’ll never come good again. Sit on its bum under a tree all flaming day!’

  But it would just be another of Joe’s gloomy predictions. Any deviation from the normal makes Joe uncomfortable and brings out his sense of impending disaster, what Jessica has come to think of as his ‘never come trues’. Red and the two other kelpies love to work and if one of them were to lay down on the job you could be damned sure something was seriously wrong with it — distemper, maybe, or a tick or a bite from a snake.

  Jessica grins because she’s long since called her father’s bluff — she knows he’s not the cranky old bugger he pretends to be. He’s kind enough for anyone’s liking, but he just doesn’t want to be caught at it.

  The Aborigines aren’t the only instance where Jessica’s caught Joe not practising his dog-eat-dog theory. He’ll slaughter a two-tooth and leave the dressed carcass at the back door of someone’s ‘place, or do the same with a side of bacon. He’ll hear a farmer is taken ill, and he’ll turn up to put in a couple of days’ ploughing, shearing,
harvesting or whatever needs doing.

  It’s just that you never know what Joe is up to when he is doing good because he never speaks of it. If you catch him at it he’ll get stroppy and deny any dogooding. He’ll claim he’s sold the two-tooth for good money, or obtained a more than fair price for the bacon, or been paid wages for his labour. Meanwhile, it’s as plain as the nose on your face that the people who’ve received his kindness can no more afford a side of bacon than pay cash for the crown jewels. Yes, Jessica knows her old man, all right. He can be a real stubborn bugger with a bad temper, but as for dog-eat-dog, Joe never ate another dog in his life.

  Jessica thinks over something wise Joe said recently. ‘There’s talk of war coming,’ he told her over smoko one day, ‘there’s war clouds gathering over Europe. The young fellers will have to head over there if it does come.’ Jessica imagines the dark gunpowder-black clouds over the cities and villages, with frightened people in coats and boots and scarves wrapped half around their faces looking up at them as more and more of them gather, until they fill every patch of blue sky. The wind howling and snow beginning to fall, with a terrible kind of darkness beginning to descend.

  ‘When will we know?’ asked Jessica, wide-eyed.

  ‘Reckon I’ll know more when we get back from town and I’ve seen the Sydney papers. I reckon Australia will be in it, boots and all. Young bucks being blooded, lots of bullshit flying around about duty to King and Country. Boer War veterans waving the flag and beating the drum, wearing their medals in the pub and telling how they knew A. H. Dufrayer, the hero from Morundah who was awarded the Queen’s Scarf — before he got killed, that is,’ Joe finished with a laconic twist.

  ‘What’s the Queen’s Scarf?’ she’d wanted to know.