Jessica

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘Well, old Queen Victoria, who must have been near dead herself, knitted four of these scarves to be given to a colonial soldier for outstanding bravery. Bloody useful it must’ve been in the hot sun of Africa,’ Joe said. ‘You know, Jessica, I can’t see why we should give England the lives of our young blokes for a quarrel that’s got bugger-all to do with us here in Australia,’ he sighed. ‘But careful what you say — don’t tell anyone what I reckon. Could be dangerous. Remember, girlie, to some people around here I’m still a bloody foreigner — Danish is near enough to being German for some folk.’

  ‘What about you, Father? Would you fight?’ Jessica had asked.

  ‘You know me, Jessie — I’d fight for Australia, no questions asked, except I’m too old to join up. But loyalty to the Union Jack, or Denmark for that matter, means bugger-all to me. They done nothing for us, ‘cept grow rich. The bastards own the banks and most of the good land. Why should we help them, die for those bastards that hold our mortgages and sell our farms out from under us when we can’t pay? No bloody chance, eh girlie?’

  This is certainly not the feeling of the district, where they’re all true blue, sons of England, Rule Britannia marmalade and jam. The local-born are the worst of the lot, Joe reckons, their duty to King George and the British Empire never to be questioned. ‘Pax Britannica, there’s a laugh,’ Joe says, ‘buggers can’t get into the scrap with the Boche soon enough for their liking.

  ‘The young fellers’ll be pushing their ages forward and trying to grow a moustache and the old bastards’ll be pushing theirs back, buying every packet of those fancy new Gillette blades they can lay their hands on to shave real close so the recruiting sergeant can’t see the grey. They’ll be falling over each other to pack a rifle and volunteer to die for King and bloody Country.’ Joe pauses and rubs the stubble on his chin. ‘I saw it in the Boer War, bullshit baffles brains every time when it comes to joining up and wearing a uniform with brass buttons and a cockade of chook’s feathers in your flamin’ bush hat!’

  If Joe’s not joining up, Jessica can’t imagine war changing anything very much in her life. Joe staying here is all she cares about. The sun will still come up in the morning, the paddocks will still dry out by early summer, the rains will still be late or never come and the snakes will still dance down by the river.

  The dogs are now happily scoffing their feed. There’s still enough twilight left to put the hens and the rooster into the chicken run for the night, light the slush lamp, trim the warmer wick and turn the eggs in the hatchery. What’s more, there’s a good part of a cold leg of lamb and some roast taties Hester has left for her tea, so Jessica won’t have to cook for herself either. Things could be a whole lot worse.

  Then it suddenly strikes Jessica. Hits her like a smack in the mouth. Bloody hell! If there’s a war coming, like Joe says, Jack will join up to fight — he’s just the sort to volunteer. Where will that leave Hester and Meg and their precious marriage plans?

  CHAPTER THREE

  Jessica awakens to the barking of the dogs. The sky is just beginning to lighten and she judges it to be half an hour before sunrise. Perhaps a fox trying to get at the chickens — couldn’t be a snake, she thinks, dogs make a different sound around a snake. From their barking, though, they seem to be down near the top paddock, nothing much to worry about.

  Though she has lain on top of her narrow cot all night, Jessica’s body is wet with perspiration and her cotton nightdress clings to her small breasts and hips. She pours water from a jug into the washbasin and splashes her face and neck, then rinses a washcloth and wipes the night’s sleep from her eyes and cleans the inside of her ears. She washed before she slept but the grit IS always there, except for the brief periods when there’s been rain. She slips off the sweat-soaked garment and stands nude, completely unaware of her strong, shapely legs and flat, hard stomach. She runs her hand absently along her right thigh and her hand pauses briefly, then, as though it has a mind of its own, her fingers trail lightly through the soft hair between her legs.

  More and more Jessica feels drawn to enter her womanhood, to rub it with the soft pads of her fingers. At eleven she had quite accidentally discovered this way of pleasuring herself, and the urge has increased as she’s grown older. She now submits to it most nights, her fingers at first absently stroking, and then more urgently rubbing and sliding until she feels a sweet ache and a rising of her blood, followed by a few moments of pleasure which take her breath away. Then comes a wonderful sense of release, a lightness as if she’s floating. For a brief moment in time she is complete. Sleep follows almost immediately, as though the two actions have become dependent upon each other.

  At first Jessica wondered if what she’d discovered was wicked, and in the months that followed her guilt increased. She knew enough from the schoolyard to know that it is dirty ‘down there’. She made an early resolve not to take any chances by mentioning it to her sister Meg, not that they ever talked to each other anyway, although she’s often wondered if Meg does it too. Then one morning, just over a year after she first started exploring, disaster struck. Her monthly bleeding came for the first time. Never having been told about menstruation, Jessica was terrified, thinking the blood was caused by her nightly rubbing, that her finger had worn away something vital inside her and that she must surely bleed to death.

  She knew there was no way out and she wouldn’t be missed anyhow, so she lay down on her narrow iron cot to die, hoping death would come quickly and painlessly. She did think it rather stupid of herself to cause her own demise just when she’d finished her schooling and was about to become grown up. It was then that she remembered Hester’s warning to her when she was little.

  Hester made Jessica wear black flannel knickers down to her knees right up until she was twelve. This hideous garment contained a drawstring at the end of each leg and another around her waist, and seemed to possess her body and restrict it from moving freely. When Jessica was still too small to manage them herself Rester would pull the tapes so tightly that they almost stopped the circulation above her knees, and the drawstring around her waist cut deeply into her flesh and was most uncomfortable in the heat, leaving a deep red welt when it was removed at night.

  When Jessica had complained to Hester about the tightness of the cords her mother sniffed dismissively. ‘It’s to keep your little hands away from sin and temptation!’ Hester held the young Jessica by the shoulders, and looking directly into her eyes she said sternly, ‘The wages of sin is death!’

  No more was said about it, but Jessica gathered from the tone of her mother’s voice that her hands, against her own wishes, could be quite capable of doing something truly wicked from which Hester was safeguarding her with the dreaded drawstrings.

  When, at eleven, Jessica discovered the joy her fingers could give her she did not for one moment associate them with the same hands that would one day lead her to sin and temptation and onwards from there to an untimely death. There was a simple enough explanation for this. Her hands only found their way down there at night when she was wearing a nightgown and when her knickers were neatly folded beside her dress on the stool beside her bed. Plainly, knickers were for use in the daytime, when sin and temptation obviously struck. With a child’s logic, Jessica had reasoned she need only be on the alert for these calamities during daylight hours, when she was safely under the protection of Hester’s drawstring knickers.

  Now, as she lay bleeding to death, her mother’s words finally made sense to her. The drawstrings were to stop her hands yielding to temptation and going down there to sin. Hester had obviously known all along that the wages of sin was death by bleeding.

  And so, on her deathbed, Jessica had yet another reason for resenting her mother. Why couldn’t she have just come out and told her properly, just said it plainly like Joe would have done: ‘Jessica, don’t rub down there or you’ll bleed to death!’ She would have understood an instruction like t
hat.

  Jessica must have fallen asleep in the process of dying, for Hester entered the room and saw her blood-stained nightdress. Next thing Jessica knew she was briefly back in her mother’s affections, held tightly clasped to her ample bosom.

  ‘My little girl has begun her journey to womanhood,’ Hester said.

  ‘You mean I’m not gunna die, Mama?’ Jessica asked, pushing away in confusion from her mother’s large breasts.

  ‘No, Jessica, you’re going to grow up to be a fine young lady.’

  Jessica had never seen Hester so loving, and she promised God, then and there, never to touch herself again. She told herself she would henceforth imagine invisible drawstrings around her waist and above her knees when she went to bed. She managed to keep her promise to God for an entire week after her first bleeding ended and then her resolve crumbled and the temptations of the flesh became too much to overcome and back came the delicious sin of her fingers.

  With the knowledge that she was now a woman and could have children, which is what Hester told her, Jessica knows what she is doing must be wrong and that ‘it’, for that’s what she’s called the end result of her exploring hands, might stop her having babies one day. Jessica’s guilt as a child has grown into shame as a young woman. But with it, her desire seems to have increased. When she’s lonely or sad, her fingers give her comfort. When Joe is in one of his moods and doesn’t talk to her for several days, it’s some solace. When she sees Meg dressed up for church, pretty as a picture, and herself, in Hester’s borrowed dress, flat in front and ugly, or so she thinks, when she hears some of the women at the church say, ‘What a pretty dress, Jessica,’ and then turn to Meg and say, ‘Don’t you look pretty today,’ she will secretly dream of being pretty herself and those are nights she does it.

  Jessica can feel how the other young women envy her sister, with her thick chestnut hair, her alabaster skin and delicate curves. Jessica doesn’t envy Meg’s looks, but she sometimes weeps secretly in her bed at night because Meg and Hester seem to know exactly what they’re doing, where they’re going, what it means to be a woman, and all she has is Joe, who keeps doggedly pressing on, expecting nothing good, as if life is a punishment he must endure, just letting everything happen to him, expecting her to be the same.

  When Jessica thinks about all these things she sometimes feels resentful and even a bit sorry for herself. She’s the ugly duckling who must try to look as if she doesn’t care. Her flannel shirt, moleskins and scuffed and broken boots are the symbols of her defiance. But Jessica has never wanted to be a man — she just doesn’t want to have to act stupid, to be less than she is. She has observed the ways of the men, the smallholders in the district, how they own the women they marry and treat them badly and beat them when they’re drunk.

  Meg will marry a rich man and she will be spared the life of a poor farmer’s wife but she, Jessica, won’t. She’ll be expected to become one of those dull-eyed, exhausted women whom men call ‘a good little breeder’ and have ten or more children and wear herself out caring for them while, at the same time, being a slave to her husband. She will be pregnant or nursing a baby for most of the first twenty years of her married life, or, as happens often enough, she will die in childbirth or simply from being worn out.

  But if she can only be a poor farmer’s wife, then she would prefer to stay where she is, with the life she has being Joe’s partner. All of this wells up in Jessica and leaves her confused — she has only questions and no answers.

  Now, at eighteen, she tells herself she isn’t going to get a husband who will treat her half decent. Hester has told her that often enough for Jessica to believe her. So, she convinces herself, having babies doesn’t matter, you can’t have babies if you don’t have a husband.

  Jessica is aware that most of the marriages in the district are shotgun weddings, but she won’t let that happen to her. Often at night, though, alone in bed, she wonders what it would be like to love a man and have him be inside her. Yet the thought that what she’s doing with her fingers, that what feels so good, is secretive and sinful disturbs her. She is not like that, she is not bad and has no other secrets but for this one, bad as it is.

  Jessica longs to talk to someone about how she feels, to unburden herself, confess that she’s done wrong. But she can’t imagine anyone she knows who would listen to her without thinking she was a wicked girl who has sinned against God.

  When Jessica left school at twelve to help Joe, she’d soon lost contact with girls her own age except to see them at the Narrandera Show or sometimes in church or a woolshed dance. Most are now married with a child at their side and another at the breast, or swelling in their stomach, the first the proverbial shotgun pregnancy and the second the result of their fecundity and a young husband exercising his conjugal rights. At eighteen their thighs are beginning to thicken, shoulders to droop, they have lost the brightness in their eyes, and their expressions are no longer curious. It’s this vacant look of the respectable country poor which Jessica dreads might some day be her own fate.

  Jessica thought about talking to God, but from what she knows of Him, compliments of the Reverend Mathews, M.A. Oxon., He wouldn’t be exactly sympathetic. ‘Straight to Hell for you, my girl! No pleasuring of parts unseen before wedlock. Out of my sight!’ He’d be like Hester, only worse.

  Standing naked in the tiny room, Jessica feels the first prickle of the day’s heat. Her right shoulder hurts and she recalls the shotgun blast and smiles to herself — the snakes are another secret, something else she must keep to herself. Though she doesn’t feel guilty about that one. What they don’t know can’t hurt them and she hasn’t done anything wrong. She prods at her right shoulder, it feels stiff and aches a bit. She tentatively winds her arm around a couple of times and winces. Not too bad, the bruise isn’t showing yet, no more than a bit of swelling, could be worse. She decides she can use the arm well enough — it will loosen up when she’s milking.

  She takes up the washcloth again and rinses it, then wipes her sweat-covered body all over, not bothering to towel herself dry. The damp cloth feels cool against her skin, but she knows that in the few moments it will take to dry, the rising heat will make her face and neck break out in a thin coat of sweat again.

  Jessica doesn’t spare a second thought for the weather outside — it’s wasted energy thinking about the heat. Like every other day, this one’s going to be a scorcher. It’s two months before the rains are due, if they come at all. She pours fresh water into a tin mug and scrubs her teeth with some bicarbonate of soda, spitting into the basin and then rinsing her mouth.

  Considering the heat she has slept well enough, though she can remember dreaming of clouds. Blood red clouds. Probably from thinking of what Joe’s said about war coming.

  The dogs have stopped barking as she pulls on a pair of old cotton bloomers with elastic at the waist and above her knees. Elastic is a new invention which Jessica thinks must surely be one of the best things ever made for women. She pulls on her moleskin trousers and a red flannel shirt, which she carelessly tucks into her waistband, and then buckles her broad leather belt. In her only concession to femininity Jessica reaches for her pinafore hanging from a nail on the wall, slips it around her neck and ties it about her waist. The pinny is a useful garment with its large front pocket, far more practical than the pockets in her moleskins, and so she sees no reason to discard it. She even enjoys the way a new stockman or shearer will look at the rosebud Meg or Hester always embroiders in the corner, not quite knowing what to think of her.

  Finally she goes over to the side of her iron cot where she’d kicked off her working boots last night. Holding one boot pinned to the floor with her toes she works her small foot into its worn and scruffy leather upper, then sits herself down on the bed and pulls the second boot onto her left foot.

  As part of the routine she uses to get into the day Jessica bends slightly forward and massages her sku
ll vigorously, then rakes the fingers of both hands impatiently through her short fair hair, patting it down. Hair, Jessica discovered as a child, keeps the fair sex in bondage, from which, at fourteen, she decided to make her escape.

  When she’d got the job at the shearing shed and had suggested to her mother that she’d like her hair cut short Hester had become hysterical. ‘You’ll look like a boy!’ she’d shouted at her daughter. ‘I forbid you! A woman’s hair is a gift from the Lord God Himself! What could you be thinking of, Jessica?’

  But this argument didn’t impress Jessica, who’d never really found God to be on her side anyway. Rejecting His gift to womankind she took to her long blonde hair with a pair of scissors, cropping her head like a man’s. She’d cut Joe’s often enough to know her way around a head of hair and when her snipping was complete she was confident she’d made a passable job of it: Knowing that no matter what happened next it couldn’t be put back again, Jessica resolved to take whatever punishment she had coming from her mother. Looking defiant, she’d walked into the kitchen where Hester and Meg were baking oat biscuits.

  Meg had been the first to look up as she entered. Bringing her flour-whitened hands to her cheeks, she’d let out a piercing scream. Hester looked up in alarm and then promptly burst into tears.

  ‘Oh my God!’ she wailed. ‘We’ve lost her! Lost her for good to the Devil!’

  Jessica felt a bit better. Her mother being busy with blubbing meant that she wouldn’t think of a particularly nasty punishment on the spot. ‘I’m not dead, Mother!’ she’d protested.

  ‘Might as well be,’ Hester wept. ‘You’re no daughter of mine any more!’

  Meg, recovered from her initial shock, then had a go at Jessica. ‘You’re a foolish girl and a disgrace to your kind. How dare you do this to us! To me!’ She shook a floury finger at her sister. ‘Just you wait until Father sees what you’ve done!’