Jessica

by Bryce Courtenay

  Billy had become totally bewildered for weeks after this. Jack would come home at night and find him on his knees mumbling incoherently, stuttering and fumbling at his rosary beads in the tiny garden shed — the home he shared with the garden tools, though scarcely large enough to contain his huge frame.

  Since then the very sound of his mistress’s shrill voice causes poor Billy to go into a blind panic. Holding his hands over his ears he’ll squat on his haunches wherever he happens to be working and rock his body back and forth until she ceases her haranguing.

  Billy can manage words well enough if you give him time to get them out. All it takes is a little bit of patience and calmness. Billy responds to calmness and to folks who are gentle with him.

  ‘There’s no need to hound him, he works hard and keeps to himself. He loves the garden and has taken naturally to planting things,’ Jack has said to Jessica.

  ‘But why, if he’s doing a good job in the garden, does your mother give him a hard time?’ Jessica asked.

  ‘I reckon she’s never forgiven Billy for running away when she ordered him to fire the shotgun at the Aborigines,’ Jack replied. ‘I bet she thought that him firing at the blacks was a good way to kill two birds with one stone. She could have had Billy arrested for attempted manslaughter and put into the loony-bin on account of it and, at the same time, she’d be rid of the poor starving blacks. I wouldn’t put it past her.’ ‘Poor Billy, can’t we do something?’

  Jack shook his head. ‘Whenever she can, Mother blames Billy for involving her in a court case and for the fine she had to pay. She moans about him causing her to get a criminal record and says that’s why she wasn’t elected to the district council.’ ‘But she didn’t get enough votes!’

  ‘I know, but of course she doesn’t see it that way. She claims the other councillors spread it around that, with her criminal record, she wasn’t eligible and to save her the embarrassment, folk shouldn’t vote for her.’ Jack gave a bitter laugh. ‘It’s all Billy’s fault, you see.’

  Jack’s tried many times to intervene on Billy’s behalf, warning his sisters to stay away from him and begging his mother to leave him alone. But Jack is seldom at the homestead during the day, when all the teasing takes place. He tries to keep an eye on Billy, even thinking once to take him out on the land with him, but Billy became terrified around the horses.

  At Riverview, Billy has also suffered the wrath of George Thomas, which drove him into a fresh state of terror where for two days he lay too stupefied to get to his feet, shaking and whimpering, his hand in his mouth.

  Jack told Jessica how he found Billy and tried to get him to drink some water, afraid he might die of heat apoplexy. Eventually he had to kneel beside the pile of potato sacks on which Billy lay in his tiny shed, with his hat pulled down as far as it would go over his face, and haul him into a sitting position so he could get him to swallow a mug of water. Jack said how the fear in Billy had caused him to tremble so much that half the water spilled down his front.

  Jack spread his hands and shrugged. ‘What can I do, Jessie? He’s better off in the garden — at least he’s safe from being harmed.’

  On her visits to see Billy, Jessica keeps well clear of Ada Thomas and the two girls, afraid of what they might say to Hester and Meg.

  Jack respects Jessica for spending time with Billy and Jessica was surprised the first time he’d said so. ‘Jessie, he likes you. You and me are all he has. It’s sometimes nice to know there’s someone who has the time to sit with someone else,’ he’d remarked.

  Jessica knows he doesn’t only mean Billy Simple. She will sit quietly next to Jack when he’s gone bush after his old man has roused on him. Then, after a bit, she’ll try and cheer him up. Like she’ll say, ‘Don’t let the old man getcha, Jack. One day he’ll be that agitated his nose’ll blast right off his fat face and he’ll have his great hairy arm down yer throat tryin’ to fetch it back.’ She’ll try to make Jack laugh. ‘Then, when he can’t reach it, he’ll have you shitting in the porcelain potty next day looking for his flamin’ hooter!’

  Jack will sit there, looking down between his parted knees, a twig in his hand, drawing squiggles in the dirt at his feet and she’ll see him trying not to smile.

  ‘There it’ll be, your old man’s nose with the wart on the end, sticking out the top of the rest of what’s in the potty, trying its hardest not to sneeze!’

  Her teasing will usually get him back to his old laughing self again. Funny that, she wouldn’t do the same for any other bloke except perhaps for Joe. Though she couldn’t imagine ever teasing her father.

  Jessica knows that Joe’s relationship with George Thomas hasn’t improved at all. George Thomas likes to humiliate a man and make him sing for his supper. She’s seen it herself often enough in the four years she’s worked on and off at Riverview Station.

  ‘That’s the problem with being a poor feller,’ Joe once confided to her. ‘You can never sort things out man-to-man with a rich bastard like George Thomas. Not the way it ought to be possible between two blokes. Even if he has it coming to him, and you’ve got every bloody right and a charter from the flamin’ King of England. You can’t have a go at him, can’t square with him, or punch him, can’t expect justice when he’s done the wrong thing by you, because, as sure as God made little green apples, you’re gunna have to go cap in hand to him one of these flamin’ days.’ He’d paused and watched a couple of bush doves fly overhead, their wings fluting the air. ‘Being poor is like the drought: when the rains come and the paddocks are up to a sheep’s belly in green grass, remember that the mud is only wet dust waiting to dry out.’ That was Joe, ever the gloomy one.

  Sooner or later George Thomas has a go at everyone who works for him at Riverview. Although he didn’t fire her after Billy’s accident. Jessica had been too upset at the time to care whether he did or not, but after a week Mike Malloy had told Joe to fetch her back to the shearing shed. Since then she’s stayed out of the owner’s way, though she expects that one of these days her turn will come.

  She likes to imagine she’ll give him some of his own back, stand toe-to-toe and trade abuse. Show him a real woman doesn’t have to take that from any man! Tell him to his face that he may be able to get away with it when it’s his son, because the lowest thing a boy can do is hit his father, but she won’t put up with his abuse when she’s done nothing wrong. She’ll go on to say he can yell at the poor stockmen or shearers all he likes — they have to take it on the chin, because they need the money to feed their scrawny kids. But she won’t put up with him, he can go to Hell.

  Yet she knows, if push came to shove, she probably doesn’t have the courage to trade insults with Jack’s father. George Thomas is an ex-riverboat captain (Jack says it. must have been a slave ship) and he has more blow-hard than a sperm whale and most of it ugly enough to fry the hair off your head.

  Folk say he made his fortune carrying stuff up the river when the water was low and the other boats couldn’t navigate the shallows. He’d sunk and capsized his boat dozens of times until, shortly after the railway was put through, he’d sunk it one final time, claiming he’d struck a fallen tree and split the bow in two. The boat had conveniently gone down in one of the deep holes in the river so his claim could never be substantiated. He’d collected the insurance from North British & Mercantile, bought himself a fancy horse and rig and walked out a while with Ada Murphy, the only daughter of Jack Murphy of Bindaloo Station. He’d married her for her money and Riverview Station, the property she’d inherited from her grandfather.

  Jessica sighs to herself. Now she thinks about it, there isn’t much she can do if George Thomas has a go at her. Joe doesn’t pay her wages, she eats at his table and shares the good seasons with the bad, the plenty with the nothing. It doesn’t occur to either of them there may be any other way. So working on the Thomas property is the main source of Jessica’s income. Apart from musterin
g cattle, the shearing shed goes eight weeks and while most of what she earns there goes to Joe he gives her threepence in the florin, which makes up the bulk of her income. That and a bit of work she can sometimes get from one of the smaller stations that may be shorthanded.

  Jessica depends on the few shillings she earns to pay for her moleskins, flannel shirts and boots, all of which, with the exception of her hat, Hester refuses on principle to supply now that she’s a grown woman.

  ‘You want to look like a man, you pay for it!’ her mother insists.

  Hester reluctantly accepts, however, that a bonnet isn’t practical for the sort of work her youngest daughter does around the farm. She also makes her pinafores, which Jessica wants plain without any flounces, like a carpenter’s apron. Meg, thinking she’s being funny, always embroiders a pink half-opened rosebud with stem and leaves on the pocket of the apron, no doubt hoping her sister will object. But Jessica wouldn’t give her the satisfaction — in fact, she rather likes the little decoration.

  With the money she earns from working at Riverview, Jessica is also saving up for a new saddle, which she reckons is going to take her as long as it will take the rosebud on her apron to grow into a rose bush.

  While Joe needs the money she earns, Jessica secretly welcomes the opportunity to work at Riverview Station. Often lonely for company of her own age, she looks forward to Jack Thomas being on the horse beside her on a muster. They’ll grin at each other every time they ride up close to turn a beast in the right direction, shouting instructions through a haze of grey dust. Then they’ll gallop off furiously, hooves kicking up clods of earth behind them, laughing and skylarking all the day long. The fear of George Thomas turning on her may never be far from her mind, but Jessica reckons it’s worth it to work with Jack and do what she loves best. And deep down, she feels pretty sure that if George Thomas really lost his rag with her for no good reason, her father would have a piece of him, no matter how poor they happened to be at the time. Maybe Mr Thomas knows that Joe Bergman has a reputation for being a hard man.

  Joe had once shot a man and got off scot-free when the judge in Sydney said it was self-defence. Jessica didn’t know the exact details, he’d never told her about it himself, but she thought it had something to do with his settlement. This was Crown land, which had been appropriated by the Great Peter’s Run, a vast station belonging to John Peter, and which was said to stretch all the way to the Victorian border.

  Joe’s government settlement interrupted John Peter’s run and so his foreman had taken to knocking down Joe’s fences as soon as they were erected. Joe had re-erected the fences twenty times or more before he’d finally had enough. One bitter winter’s morning he’d gone to see John Peter’s foreman, a notorious bully named Dutch Miller. As Joe approached the foreman’s camp on horseback he’d been challenged and then threatened. The foreman had drawn a gun and claimed he’d kill Joe unless he moved off what he claimed was rightfully John Peter’s land. Joe had refused, waving the land certificate which entitled him to two lots of 640 acres in the parish of Ourendumbee.

  ‘I don’t give a damn what the paper says, Joe Bergman, that land belongs to John Peter by right of use and we’re taking it back,’ Dutch Miller shouted. Then he’d fired at Joe, the bullet from his revolver chipping the bottom of Joe’s collarbone and travelling to the side of his chest, coming out directly under his left arm. Then Joe finally lost his patience and he calmly raised his Winchester and shot the man, his aim not nearly as careless as the foreman’s, the bullet making a neat hole in the centre of his forehead. Or so the story went, anyway. The wound Joe had received left a lovely scar for the judge in Sydney to see, and a hole in Joe’s best and only overcoat front and back.

  The oven is now ready and Jessica places the four bread tins in it and unhooks the milk pail, ready to milk the cow. She fills a billy with what was left of the water in the kettle to wash the cow’s udder and teats and then, carrying the milk pail in one hand and the billy in the other, she steps out into the yard.

  She’s only gone a few yards from the homestead when the dogs start up again. Jessica stops in her tracks. She is certain now that they are onto something, that the kelpies have disturbed some sort of intruder, a dingo or a fox maybe, probably have it bailed up. She returns to the kitchen, puts the milk pail and the billy on the table and picks up the shotgun. Then, carrying both cans in her right hand to save her sore shoulder, she slings the shotgun over her left shoulder. Jessica leaves again through the kitchen door, heading for the small paddock where they keep the jersey cow and her calf.

  When she draws close enough she whistles for the dogs. They stop barking for a moment and then continue. The kelpies are trained to the whistle and when she doesn’t see them coming Jessica places the pail and the billy at her feet and works the hammers back on the shotgun. Then she retrieves the cans and walks towards the barking dogs, carrying the shotgun in her right hand so if she needs to move fast she can drop the cans and quickly bring the gun up to her shoulder. She realises that she’s forgotten to fit the shoulder pad and hopes it’s all a false alarm.

  Then she sees the dogs near the cow paddock, standing around the base of a pepper tree, barking up into the branches. Can’t be a snake, she thinks. Dogs use a peculiar bark when they’re around a snake, a small whine and then a sharp bark and then a whine again and a growl—but the kelpies aren’t barking like that now. Jessica whistles to them again and this time they leave the tree and turn, Red leading them, reluctantly padding towards her but turning around every few steps to bark back up at the tree. Jessica puts the pail and the billy down and starts to move forward slowly. Sensing her caution, the dogs turn and rush back to the tree, jumping, their paws scrabbling against its trunk. Jessica whistles again and the dogs stop barking and immediately go down on all fours, whining and growling their excitement. Then she sees a boot and part of a man’s leg hanging from a branch. She’s almost reached the tree but stands in open ground — if whoever is up the tree has a rifle she is dead meat. But then, if he is armed, she tries to reason in her growing panic, he could long since have shot the dogs and made his escape. ‘Come down!’ she calls, ‘or I’ll bloody fire!’

  ‘Dogs!’ she hears a man’s terrified voice call from the pepper tree. ‘Dogs! Dogs!’

  Jessica moves closer with the shotgun now held against her shoulder and pointed up into the pepper tree. ‘Get down, they won’t hurt you. Get down, or I’ll fire!’ she commands, her voice sounding braver than she feels.

  Then the voice in the tree begins to howl like a small child.

  ‘Billy?’ Jessica calls out in surprise. ‘Is that you?’

  The voice howls even louder and the dogs grow overexcited and start barking again. Jessica whistles them to silence. By this time she stands among them, looking up into the tree where Billy Simple sits howling fit to burst.

  Coming out of the bright early morning sunlight into the dark shade under the tree, Jessica can only just make out Billy’s huge shape clinging for dear life to a branch with both hands, his cheek against another branch as he wails. It is only after her eyes have adjusted that she sees he is covered in dried blood — it’s all over his face and hands and the front of his flannel shirt and all the way down his moleskins.

  ‘Billy, what happened?’ Jessica screams. ‘Are you hurt? Who hurt you, Billy? Tell me who hurt you!’

  Billy stops howling. ‘Hail Mary, Mother of God .. .’ he begins.

  ‘Billy, Amen, stop that! Tell me what happened!’ Billy tries to smile at her through his tears, a pitiful attempt, his mouth working for words. ‘Jessie my friend, eh?’

  ‘Yes Billy, I’m your friend. Now you come down and I’ll give you some tea and tucker.’

  ‘No, no, shoot! You shoot Billy, Jessie. Billy bad boy!’

  ‘Billy, stop that nonsense. I can’t come up and fetch you, so you come down at once, you hear me, Billy!’ To Jessica’s relief Bi
lly Simple starts to untangle himself from the branches of the tree and after a few moments he lets himself drop to the ground, falling to his knees and then rolling in the dust towards her.

  The dogs go for him, thinking he is about to attack Jessica. Billy screams and covers his face with his arms and pulls his knees up into his chest to protect himself from the kelpies.

  ‘Stay!’ Jessica commands the dogs and lets out a piercing whistle. The dogs draw back. ‘Down!’ The kelpies lie panting, their pink tongues lolling wetly.

  Billy slowly uncurls himself and gets to his feet. It is then that Jessica sees the full extent of the blood on him. It seems to be everywhere, as if he’s somehow fallen into a slaughter trough at the abattoir in Hay. His face, neck and arms, as well as his clothing, are dark and stiff with dried blood, yet she can see no cuts or the wetness of a seeping wound anywhere on his body.

  ‘Jesus, Billy, what have you done to yourself?’ Jessica asks again.

  Billy is now standing in front of Jessica with his head bowed, hands clasped below his waist, shaking like a leaf.

  ‘Billy, it’s me, Jessica. Don’t be afraid, mate. I won’t hurt you. Jessica likes you, Billy, I’m your friend. Remember?’

  Billy looks up and then shakes his huge, ugly head several times.

  ‘No more! Jessie don’t like Billy no more.’ He lowers his head to his chest again and begins to blub, snot bubbles blowing from his flattened nose.

  ‘Billy, that’s not true. I’m your friend. Jack and me, we’re your best mates. Tell me, Billy, what happened?’ He stops bawling as suddenly a” he’d started and looks up, grinning at Jessica. ‘Hail Mary -’

  ‘No, Billy, you can say that later. Now tell me why you’re covered in blood. Have you killed a beast?’ It’s now clear to Jessica that, despite the blood, Billy doesn’t seem to be hurt.