Jessica

by Bryce Courtenay

  He has seen it before — a single cart piled high with a few pitiful sticks of furniture pulled by an old horse the bank couldn’t hope to sell. The family walking behind, kids with bare feet and runny noses, husband and wife with their heads bowed, too ashamed to acknowledge his greeting. He’s even seen the kids pulling a cart, the bank sometimes not even allowing them a horse to take with them. These are the dispossessed, men robbed of their land, the work of the greedy mongrels in their city clothes and brown derby hats who come in their fancy traps with leather-bound ledgers under their arms. ‘Mr Bergman, may I come in? A small matter of the mortgage payments.’ A small matter that will destroy his confidence and cause him to whimper and bite his knuckles in his sleep.

  Joe knows he could not bear such a humiliation. He thinks bitterly that his only hope lies in the prospect of one of the sows getting the attentions of the ageing boar. He is back in Hester’s clutches and she has trapped him once again. These are his thoughts as he approaches the homestead across the flat, dry, dusty saltbush plain.

  Jessica has seen them coming ever since the sulky appeared out of the dark line of river gums to regain its outline in the late afternoon sunshine. She’s prepared a pot of lamb stew, which has been bubbling away on the stove for three days. Not knowing when they would arrive back, Jessica’s had it for her own tea each night, and then topped it up in the morning with vegetables and the last of the lamb Joe slaughtered before he left, which she’s par-boiled to make it last longer so they might have a stew with a bit of meat to it.

  Jessica well knows how tired they will be after the long trip from Narrandera, though she knows nothing of the wearisome overnight train journey. There is no time to bake bread, and so she quickly mixes flour and water for damper and, at the same time, prepares a batch of scones, before putting the kettle on for tea. They have almost reached the homestead by the time she has adjusted the flue and popped the scones into the oven. She finds her heart beating harder as she watches the sulky coming towards the homestead. She’s determined she will not cry for fear of what her family have done or may yet do to her. She will weep for Jack when they cannot hear her, but they must never be allowed to know her sadness.

  Jessica’s baby is kicking in her stomach and, with the sense of the life growing inside her, she’s resolved that it won’t suffer from any loss of her normally robust health. She knows little about having a child but she has heard the old adage that she must eat for them both. That a healthy baby comes from a well-fed mother and that sadness in pregnancy will make a sad child. She must, Jessica tells herself, follow both these rules with all her strength. The life within her has become everything to her and she has come to believe that she must protect it against the dark forces ranged against her, forces which she sees clearly enough in the form of Hester and Meg. But even Joe has changed and is showing an increasing indifference to her.

  Jessica knows that she will have to put up with Hester’s unremitting attention to Meg’s pregnancy. That she must willingly suffer her mother’s scorn and anger at the prospect of the child she carries in her own stomach — the child they think of as her great mortal sin, while regarding Meg’s baby as a triumph.

  She knows, too, that Joe is no longer on her side. He has given up, suddenly grown old and tired. Her mother has finally beaten Joe, and Jessica can no longer depend on him to help her, or feel his big heavy hand on her shoulder to comfort her.

  Joe’s silences have become morbid, no longer are they just the silences of a naturally shy man who has spent a near lifetime on his own in the bush. Nor is the darkness which has befallen him the same as the silent thinking that he believes is hard-won from nature, when stillness and observation will slowly evolve to become wisdom. Joe’s new silence is born of sadness and desperation and Jessica doesn’t know how to comfort him, thinking all the while that she is the major cause of his misery.

  Jessica is also aware that she must somehow keep to herself the terrible anger she feels against Meg and Hester, who are trying to steal Jack from her. They know only one Jack, the rich Jack Thomas of Riverview Station. But they do not know the Jack with the smiling blue eyes she has known since she was a brat. The Jack who once snipped a lock of her tar-covered hair so that the men in the shearing shed would not see her fourteen-year-old shame. The Jack who would sit and talk to Billy Simple and make him feel as though he was a man again. The silent Jack, seated in the bush with the shame of his father’s humiliation bearing down on him. The Jack of the sly smile when she went to comfort him with a rude joke so that in the end they could laugh about George Thomas and his big brandy nose. The earnest Jack of pipes and canals, donkey engines and irrigation. Jack in his motor car, all clank and roar and backfire and boyish grin. But most of all, the Jack Thomas on horseback kicking up clods of earth, daring her to ride beside him, driving and turning a beast, whooping through the saltbush and mulga scrub, jumping from his horse to pull down a calf and laughing when he missed and went rolling in the black dust. The Jack Thomas who has always accepted her as an equal, as a mate — yet loved her as a woman, too shy to show the tenderness she could see in his eyes when he looked at her. That is the Jack, the Jack who called her Tea Leaf, whom they could never take away from her. This is the Jack she would wait for until the end of her life.

  She tells herself that no good will come from the hate she feels for her mother and sister, but she also knows that there is a part of her that will not forgive them. Jessica is no Christian soul, nor is she taken in by the pious sermons of the Reverend Mathews, M.A. Oxon., and his exhortations to love all creatures great and small. For it’s Jessica’s observation that it’s the small, helpless creatures who always cop the shit.

  She comforts herself with the knowledge that now all that matters is her baby, and her need to nourish the fierce and wonderful love for the child that breathes within her. Jessica will make no plans until she can carry this precious and unexpected gift in her arms and suckle it at her small breasts. She will simply do as she is told and stay out of trouble. Gentle Jessica meek and mild, look upon your little child, she laughs to herself.

  Stubborn Jessica, with her flat chest, blunt, broken nails, carelessly cropped hair, sweat-stained cotton shirt, dirty moleskins and scuffed boots, will stay out of harm’s way. She wants nothing more than to be the mother of her own child, to love and cherish it with every beat of her heart. She will do nothing to endanger its birth. Jessica feels the womanliness in her come to life like a great, surging force, a power she has never felt in herself before, and she knows she will not be broken.

  Jessica now goes out to meet them. Joe’s face is grey with weariness, Hester ignores her and turns away at her greeting, and in Meg’s prim little face her eyes are ringed red from weeping.

  ‘Go in, Father,’ Jessica says to Joe, ‘leave the pony to me.’

  Joe casts her a grateful glance. ‘Nice to see yiz, girlie.’ ‘There’s tea made in the pot and the scones will be ready soon,’ Jessica says, trying to sound cheerful. ‘I’ve made a stew for tea t’night, not much lamb left in it, though.’ Climbing into the sulky, Jessica watches as Joe takes down the two battered suitcases. ‘Leave ‘em, I’ll bring them in,’ she says.

  Joe glances up at her. For a moment she sees his old scornful look and then his expression crumbles. ‘Much obliged, Jessie,’ he says softly. ‘It’s me arm, I’ve got a crook left arm.’ He tries to grin but it comes out more as a grimace and Jessica can feel his pain.

  Hester and Meg have gone ahead meanwhile, walking towards the kitchen door. At the door Hester pauses and looks back over her shoulder. ‘You’ll need to congratulate your sister, girl,’ she says loudly. Then, as Jessica turns at the sound of her voice, Hester lifts her eyebrows and tilts her head slightly so that she appears to be looking down her nose. It’s an expression Jessica saw often enough on the face of Ada Thomas. ‘Meg is now Mrs Jack Thomas of Riverview homestead!’ Hester calls.

  Jessica
turns away from her mother. Her heart is a rush of terrible sadness and anger, an emotional turmoil within her so overwhelming that she is dose to fainting. She grips the rail on the sulky to steady herself, feeling the sun-baked metal burn into her palms. Then she grabs the reins and sends the tired pony forward, her back rigid and her head, as her mother must observe it from the back, held high. Hester cannot see that her daughter is biting her bottom lip so hard a trickle of blood now runs down her chin, or that her eyes are so tight-closed that it takes several moments before the first tears squeeze through her soft lashes.

  Joe, standing beside the sulky with the two old cardboard and twine-bound suitcases at his feet, witnesses it all. He clutches. suddenly at his chest and sinks to his knees and then pitches forward into the dirt.

  Joe’s ‘fit of melancholy’, as he calls it, lasts two days, after which he rises from his bed in the sleep-out. Though Hester has fussed somewhat over him, he hasn’t allowed either of his daughters to see him. On the morning of the third day he emerges silently and seats himself at the kitchen table for breakfast.

  Jessica, returning from milking the cows and feeding the pigs, enters the kitchen. ‘Oh, Father!’ she cries out in delight and rushes towards Joe tearfully. But he puts up his hands to fend her off.

  ‘Don’t fuss, girl,’ Hester admonishes, though she has earlier allowed Meg to embrace him, much to Joe’s consternation. ‘Your father is well. It was some trick of the sun, a fever perhaps.’

  Jessica pulls up short, tears now in her eyes. Joe looks well enough, though his hands shake as he dips a spoon into his porridge. Jessica seats herself quietly at the table and Hester places a plate of oatmeal porridge in front of her.

  ‘Jessie, I want you to separate the three sows without piglets and let the boar at them,’ Joe says suddenly.

  Jessica looks at Joe in surprise. ‘But Father, two are too young and could abort or the piglets could die in the cold. Besides, the old sow is well past it — her piglets usually die soon after they’re born.’

  Joe looks down into his plate of porridge. ‘Do as I say, girlie.’

  Jessica bows her head. ‘Yes, Father.’

  Since Joe’s collapse, when they helped her to carry him to his bed, Hester and Meg have hardly spoken to Jessica. The incident with Joe which Hester now calls a trick of the sun has postponed Jessica’s shock at the news of Meg’s wedding, which has not been mentioned since by anyone. Now, sure that Joe will live at least for the moment, Jessica takes herself down to the river to weep for Jack.

  Meg’s marriage to Jack isn’t entirely unexpected. Jessica reckons she’d be pretty stupid if she thought that Meg’s going off pregnant to Sydney with Hester to confront Jack would not have resulted in Hester extracting some promise from him. It’s only that she loves Jack so very much, that she is quite unable to comprehend how he could agree to marry Meg for the sake of her child. He could have given Meg money, she tells herself, or offered to care for her child and asked her to wait until he returns. He’d said himself that he didn’t want to go to war with the responsibility of a wife or a family.

  In her emotional confusion Jessica cannot see that Jack’s decency has forced him to legitimise Meg’s child, but only that Jack has deserted her. That he has allowed Meg to seduce him and that Meg and Hester have once again cheated her of what she wanted most in all the world — besides the child in her womb. Jack has been taken from her and Joe could soon enough be taken as well, for she had seen him clutch at his heart and she’s not fooled by Hester’s sun and fever story. Jessica, who has often enough been lonely, suddenly knows herself now to be utterly alone in the world. It is not the same thing as loneliness and it’s a feeling she has never experienced before.

  After breakfast she goes down to the pig pen and separates the two young sows and old Maude, the ageing sow. The old girl has in her time produced numerous piglets but now seldom becomes a farrowing sow. When she does, the piglets usually die or are crushed by her rolling on them. Jessica calls to the sows, who follow her, grunting loudly, smelling the cabbage leaves in her hand. She leads them into a small holding pen they use for breeding when the weather is warmer.

  The boar is a cranky old bastard, usually handled by Joe, and Jessica approaches him with some trepidation.

  But he’s sighted the three sows and the cabbage leaves she’s placed in their pen. When released from his enclosure he makes straight for them, although, once in, he seems more interested in feeding his face than in servicing his womenfolk.

  With winter well advanced, Jessica can’t imagine why Joe wants the sows to breed. It isn’t good farming practice — the freezing cold, or a sudden frost in the early mornings, will often enough kill off a litter and, besides, the sows require extra rations to keep up their milk supply.

  The household settles down to some semblance of normalcy. In the weeks that follow Joe still works apart from Jessica, and it is obvious from the things that are left undone about the place that he is slowing down considerably.

  Joe seems to be working most days down by the creek where the old boundary rider’s hut is situated and he mentions that he’s decided to try breeding turkeys. This statement is made without explanation when Jessica ventures to ask him what he’s doing in a part of the selection where there is normally little work to do. She is surprised at her father’s response, for poultry breeding had been one of Jack’s so-called harebrained ideas. With the telegraph and the train line coming through in a year or two, the Sydney and Melbourne market will open up, he claimed, and poultry might be the go for smaller properties where labour is the sole responsibility of the family on the land. At one of their Sunday dinners he’d told them all that with irrigation the grain and the green needed for turkeys could be grown, that live poultry in special trucks could easily enough be sent off, bred for the Christmas market when the lambing and calving season was well over. Jessica can’t recall that Joe had shown any enthusiasm for Jack’s idea at the time and so she is surprised and at the same time hurt that he hasn’t invited her to see what he is doing or to share in the task. But she knows well enough to stay away from the section where he works, trying for her part to keep the remainder of the paddocks going as best she can.

  A month after she’d let the old boar in with the sows Jessica comes back in from the cow paddock for breakfast one Saturday morning to see Joe emerge from the pig pen with his hands and arms covered in blood up to the elbow and carrying a zinc bucket covered with a piece of hessian.

  He stops only long enough to say, ‘I’ll need yer help after breakfast, girlie.’

  ‘What for, Father? Have you slaughtered old Maude?’

  ‘Nah, the two young ‘uns. You’ll help me to dress them and make bacon. Scrub out a pickling barrel, will ya?’ He continues on his way over to the well to wash, taking the bucket with him.

  Jessica is alarmed and confused. The two sows were a pedigree cross, Berkshire and Saddleback, which Joe had selected for his breeding stock after a great deal of care. They’d cost a fair whack, more than Joe could rightly afford, and he’d been that proud of them. She’s surprised that he’d let them breed so young and now, for no good reason, he’s slaughtered them. It doesn’t make sense, Jessica thinks — both were in prime health.

  He couldn’t want them for ham, as they were not yet old enough to make a good-sized hindquarter.

  She goes into breakfast puzzled, but no further explanation is forthcoming from her father. Jessica spends the better part of the day with him and by its end her hands are red and puffed from the near-boiling water used to scrape the hair from the skin, and they hurt from the exposure to the brine and spices in the bacon trough and pickling barrel. Throughout it all Joe remains grimly silent.

  After the evening meal Hester and Meg talk about inviting Mrs Baker to Sunday dinner after church the following morning. Jessica is surprised — while Hester sometimes visits the old girl, she’s not, by her own a
dmission, all that fond of her. Even by Hester and Meg’s standards, Mrs Baker is sanctimonious and, as well, a terrible old whinger and gossip.

  ‘A nice feed of pork chops and a bit of crackling will do the old dear a power of good,’ Hester asserts to no one in particular. ‘She’s poor as a church mouse and eats like a bird. I’m sure that’s what mostly ails her.’ Then she turns to Joe. ‘Will that be all right, Joe?’ She doesn’t wait for his answer before she concludes, ‘Good then, we’ll bring her home with us after morning service.’ Hester now turns to Jessica. ‘You’ll need to stay out of the way, Jessica. I don’t want Mrs Baker seeing you in your condition. She’s a fearful old gossip and the whole world will know in a day. You’ll be in your room when we return from St Stephen’s and I’ll thank you to stay there until your father takes her home later on in the afternoon.’

  They are the most words Hester has spoken to her in a week. The previous time her mother had addressed her was to point out that Meg was beginning to show, making her eldest daughter stand up and spread her hands tightly across either side of her stomach so that Jessica might see the slight bulge under the brown bombazine of her sister’s dress. ‘Such a pretty little bulge,’ Hester said, smiling benignly up at Meg.

  Jessica does not reply to her mother, but rises slowly, almost painfully, from the table to go to her room. It has been a tiring day. Slaughtering and dressing pork is hard work and Joe seems less able to do his usual share. With all the bending, lifting and carrying, scalding and scraping the bristles from the skin and cutting up the carcasses, Jessica’s back also aches something terrible. Besides, her baby has been unusually active and she is sore all over and exhausted. She washes-herself carefully and retires gratefully to her cot, glad to spend the afternoon of the following day alone in her own room.

  Jessica spends the next morning doing her usual Sunday chores until shortly past noon, when she sees the sulky approaching across the saltbush plain leading from the river, whereupon she dutifully retires to her bedroom.