Jessica

by Bryce Courtenay

  After Mary has departed Jessica starts on the clearing. The sun won’t be long in coming but she thinks the shade of the river gum will protect her from the worst of it for a while. She finds that she’s panting after the least effort. But almost two hours later, with the sun well up, the heat haze shimmering in the north paddock so that the old man saltbush is a green glassy smudge, she has all but completed the task. There remains just one large boulder, large only because of her present state and Jessica knows better than to try to lift it. Joe can do it when he comes tomorrow, she thinks. Then she changes her mind — she wouldn’t have left it for him before, so why now? She won’t leave a job half done. She decides to cut a stout sapling and use it as a crowbar to move the rock so she doesn’t have to use much of her own strength.

  Jessica cuts an ironbark pole about four inches in diameter and six feet long and sharpens one end to a wedge shape so it will slip easily under the rock. Her efforts prove successful enough and she tumbles the rock towards the edge of the clearing, using the leverage of the pole. She needs only to move it another couple of feet when it lands after a roll in a small hollow. It’s jammed and she has difficulty slipping the wedged tip of the pole in under it. After a bit of a struggle she gets the wedge halfway in — enough, she hopes, to allow her to move the rock out of the indentation and onwards. Jessica pushes her end of the pole downwards, but it isn’t secured well enough under the rock and springs loose. She stumbles and pitches forward onto the hard ground, breaking her fall with her hands and rolling on her side.

  Jessica lies perfectly still, panting, not wanting to move, her heart beating furiously, waiting to see where she hurts. But after a few moments she realises she hasn’t hurt herself or her baby and slowly struggles to bring herself up onto her hands and knees. The pole lies within reach and she grabs it up and pushes it into the ground in front of her and, with both hands grasping the stake, pulls herself up. Jessica is almost standing when she feels a terrible cramping pain in her back.

  Jessica is panting hard and she puts her hand on her stomach. Maybe it was simply a pain from doing too much, she tells herself. But now another comes. Mary has told her to expect labour pains — ‘They come slow and you think it’s nothing much, just the baby kicking or something like that. But you got to listen, wait for them. After a few hours they keeps comin’ faster, time’s getting near, you got to get ready ‘cause that baby wanting to break out of jail.’

  Jessica comforts herself that the pains will keep coming for some hours, that Mary will be back to look after her by the time they come closer together. She decides to go into the hut and rest and try to get everything ready. She’s got an enamel basin and there’s a fire laid with the kettle filled, so all Mary’s got to do is boil the water. She’s got an old sheet and three old towels: one for the birth mat, one for cleaning the baby and one for swaddling it. There’s a sharp knife for cutting the umbilical cord and a bit of cat gut to tie it. There’s also plenty of swabs made by the two of them from one of her dresses, boiled clean and dried in the sun on a hot stone and then stacked up tidy on the tiny table. The hurricane lamp is filled with kerosene with its wick trimmed in case they have to work at night. Jessica can’t teach Mary how to stitch her if she needs it, so she hasn’t asked Joe for his horsehair and needle, though he’s brought a jar of Condy’s crystals, petroleum jelly and a tin of boracic powder.

  Jessica barely makes it to the hut before another contraction comes, but it’s not too bad, she thinks to herself again — it must have taken about five minutes to get to the door from the clearing. But she just makes it to the bed before she has another. She manages to kick off her boots and even to remove her bloomers. The labour pains are now no more than two minutes apart, though she has no way of timing them as she doesn’t have a clock. She is already wet with perspiration and her dress is soaked and clinging to her body. The hut is a veritable furnace, with the noon sun beating down on the tin roof.

  ‘Oh, Gawd, let me last until Mary comes,’ Jessica prays. She manages to get herself onto Joe’s rough wooden bed and she feels woozy, but thinks it must be from the heat. She’s put a mug of water on the table and now she reaches for it and brings it to her mouth, spilling half of it down her dress.

  The pains are coming more frequently now, every minute or so, and Jessica knows her baby is very near. She feels she will faint from the suffocating heat and some deep instinct tells her she must get out of the hut, go to the creek under the trees and get her legs into the water. The creek still runs quite quickly and there is a shallow pool under the river gum where Mary has set a fish trap. Jessica knows it comes up no further than her knees. She remembers that Mary has told her how the women of some Aboriginal tribes give birth in a creek, which keeps the child safe ‘cause it doesn’t come out the womb breathing proper. She can hear Mary’s voice in her head, ‘They pull it out the water and give it a whack on the bum to make it cry, fill its lungs with air. Some of the aunties say it’s the best way, but the Wiradjuri, we don’t do it.’

  Jessica struggles from the bed, the pain now gripping her like a vice so that she howls out, but she makes it to the door where she’s left the pole. Using it to support her, she moves towards the creek, screaming and howling. She can feel the baby coming, pushing down, the contractions increasing and becoming so powerful that she knows she’s got to squat soon. She reaches the side of the creek and starts to squat, pulling her skirt up above her waist. The part of the embankment where she squats gives way suddenly and the sand bank crumbles into the water. Jessica cannot maintain her balance and she tumbles headlong into the stream.

  Jessica thinks her whole body will split apart from the pain she feels, but she struggles to regain her feet, splashing furiously in the water, gasping and thrashing about. She feels the sandy bottom under the soles of her feet and this gives her a little security, though she is still too panic-stricken to know that the water has cooled her and given her a buoyancy she desperately needs. She reaches for the creek bank and knows at once that she hasn’t the strength to pull herself up.

  Jessica feels as though something has exploded within her as her waters break and flow away into the stream. She’s utterly helpless and all she can do is squat down in the water, bear down and let the pain come. She feels her vagina stretching, the contractions coming faster, and her body seems to be tearing open as her baby’s head starts to come through and they increase in power again. Her heart beats even faster and she screams suddenly so that a flock of galahs in the paddock across the creek rise in fright, their high-pitched splintered screeching chirrachirra filling the air. There is nothing Jessica can do to stop the baby coming now. ‘Push down, push, yiz gotta push hard,’ Mary’s voice says in her head. ‘I can’t!’ she cries aloud, as though Mary is present. ‘Oh Mary, help meeee!’ she screams as the terrible pain overcomes her.

  The water around Jessica is bloody, but it clears quickly with the flow of the stream and then is almost immediately bloody again. She looks down and sees that her baby is halfway out of her body. Instinctively she reaches down and takes it by the shoulders and pulls. Just at the very moment she’s quite sure she must die from the pain, suddenly she is holding her little baby. It is out and she lifts it out of the water with the umbilical cord still attached. The water has washed some of the blood from the tiny body. Jessica holds it in one hand and spanks its bottom. The baby gives a tiny sneeze then screws up its eyes and yowls, taking in its first lungful of glorious air.

  Sitting back in the stream, Jessica rests her baby on her stomach with its head against her heart, and laughs and weeps and laughs again, and sniffs and sobs and laughs in what becomes an ecstatic giggle. One hand trails in the cool water that reaches up to her thighs. She takes her hand from the stream and moves the baby slightly to one side. She has given birth to a boy. The boy Joe always wanted — a boy she will call Joey, after him. After a while Jessica gathers enough strength to cup her hands into the water and wash her
baby, splashing its head and tiny body until it is clean all over, the almost brick-red colour of the newly born.

  Jessica stays in the stream, too weak to move. She’s lucky that she is shaded by the leaves of the big river gum overhead. She knows she’s got to cut the umbilical cord quickly and get rid of the placenta, as Mary told her it can create infection. She has no knife and worries that she might have to bite it through. But then she searches the bottom of the creek around where she is sitting and, after pulling out several small stones, finds one with a sharp edge. She’s already asked Mary if cutting the cord would hurt her baby or herself. ‘That cord it dead when the baby come out, it don’t work no more, it don’t hurt to cut,’ Mary replied. ‘What about the blood?’ Jessica remembers asking. ‘No blood, Jessie, blood don’t come no more in that string.’

  The umbilical cord, once her baby’s life line, floats in the clear water at her waist, the knotted blue and red veins and arteries showing clearly through the almost translucent tube. Using the sharp stone, Jessica takes a deep breath and saws at the thick cord as near to her baby’s navel as she dares to go and after some time it is cut through and, together with the placenta, floats off downstream for the yellow-bellies and yabbies to feed on. Everything has to find a way to live, she thinks, watching it go.

  Though they’re still in the shade of the giant river gum, Jessica grows concerned about her baby’s head in this heat. She tears off the short sleeve of her summer dress and, with it, fashions a little cap for the tiny infant’s crown.

  After crying for a few minutes her baby sleeps, his thumb stuck in his mouth. Jessica is too frightened to remove his hand, though she’s worried that it might stop him breathing. But her child seems perfectly content, his breathing even, his little chest rising and falling against her breasts, which have ached for two months as they prepared to produce the milk her child will need.

  The sun beats down and Jessica remains in the creek, bathing and cooling her infant from time to time, splashing water over his body and head. Jessica tries to stand, but she is still too weak. She prays that Mary will come before sundown, before the mosquitoes begin to swarm, as she and her baby will be helpless against them. Just after sundown, in the gathering dusk, the swarm gathers above the creek, blackening the warm, thick air, their whine enough to pierce the eardrums. If they come for her they will easily kill her newborn infant in a matter of hours. They will sting it until it dies of the trauma, its tiny body blackened by thousands and thousands of mosquitoes until it appears to be covered by a dark, softly vibrating fur. She knows if Mary doesn’t come very soon she must somehow get into the hut and under the mosquito net.

  At five o’clock, an hour before sundown and seven hours after Jessica’s child is born, Mary arrives at the hut. Jessica, still seated in the water, holds up her baby. ‘See, Mary, see what Santy CIa us sent me,’ she shouts, and then begins to bawl her heart out.

  Mary works all night, going back to the Aboriginal camp and returning with bush medicine for Jessica. She has tied the umbilical cord and generally tidied her up. At Jessica’s insistence she bathes the baby in a light solution of permanganate of potash. After this, she powders Jessica in her most tender places with boracic powder. But for the deeper, internal birth injuries she applies her own bush medicine.

  ‘Jessie, you had a good one that birth. When I tell the aunties they gunna say whitefella woman she done good going in the water. Where you learn that?’ Jessica looks astonished. ‘You told me, Mary.’

  Mary is surprised, not remembering the conversation. ‘Me? I never did!’ she exclaims, ‘I only heard it once before, not from the Wiradjuri. Some tribe I heard up north, they done that.’

  Mary stays with Jessica all night, giving the baby boiled cool water into which she has’ mixed a little sugar, feeding it into his rose-petal lips by wetting her finger and pushing it into the infant’s Mouth so he won’t dehydrate in the heat. Then she puts him to suck on Jessica’s breast for her colostrum. She will have to wait two days for her milk to come and the baby will be sustained by the thick, creamy substance that exudes from her nipples. ‘Them little buggers know it’s there somewheres,’ Mary laughs. ‘If they keep sucking the milk’s gunna come, but that stuff you got, that real good tucker for him. It’s good you let him suck, learn the ways,’ Mary explains, then shows Jessica how to gently stroke her baby’s cheek to turn its head in towards her so that, with a touch of the nipples to its pursed lips, her child will begin to suck. She is almost as happy about Jessica’s’ baby as its mother is.

  The little Aboriginal woman watches over Jessica while she sleeps and at one stage warms up a lamb stew and wakes Jessica and makes her eat. Later she gives her a mug of milk and another of water. Then she eats some of the stew herself.

  Towards morning, sitting on the floor beside Jessica’s crude timber bed, Mary falls asleep and it is well into the morning, an hour after sunrise, when they both wake up to the baby’s mewling.

  Mary puts it back onto Jessica’s breast. Having slept a few hours, Jessica feels the first tremendous joy of motherhood, the sense of having something in her life which is entirely her own. As the tiny infant sucks at her sticky paps she has never felt more complete and thinks she must burst with happiness. Her child is well formed — ten fingers and ten toes, and everything where God intended to put it. Jessica has a perfect baby with a tuft of reddish-blond hair fine as spun silk.

  Mary leaves after she’s cooked porridge for Jessica and made tea. She wants to stay, but is afraid that if she remains much longer Joe might arrive at the hut. Or, worse, Hester and Meg may decide to make a day of it and come early.

  ‘This the best Christmas present you can get, Jessie,’ Mary says, handing Jessica her baby when she’s eaten some breakfast. ‘I come back tonight, your old people be gone back home.’

  ‘No, wait,’ Jessica cries, ‘we’ve got to dress him. You’ve got to tell the aunties what he looks like in his dress.’

  Together they dress little Joey in his Chinese dress. ‘He gunna poop on it, spoil it,’ Mary laughs.

  ‘I just want you to see it before you go. I’ll take it off and put it back on just before they come.’

  ‘He looks beautiful, eh?’ Mary says. ‘Pity he’s a boy, he make a nice girl in that pretty dress.’

  Mary takes her leave and walks towards the creek, watched by Jessica holding her baby. She turns just before she enters the shallow water to wade to the far side. ‘Jessie, don’t let them mongrels take your baby!’ she shouts. Then she swings around and splashes through the shallow water and up a slight embankment to disappear into the dark green mulga and bush on the other bank.

  ‘Mary, I love you!’ Jessica calls after her, surprised at the strange look on the Aborigine’s face as she shouted her warning. Why would Mary look at her like that? The black people know things, but Joe has given his word her baby will be safe and she knows he won’t go back on it, no matter what Hester wants.

  Joe arrives in the sulky with Hester and Meg just after midday. Jessica is seated in the shade with her back against the big river gum and hears them coming some way off. Earlier she made a brush broom and swept the clearing again. The offending rock still lies at its edge, though she wonders why she’d bothered with it at all — there’s plenty of room for a picnic blanket and clear ground beyond in case of snakes.

  She places her baby, dressed in his little Chinese outfit, snugly in a pillowcase. Now he lies in a carefully made towelling nest between two above-ground roots of the big gum tree. Jessica’s cut some of the mosquito net and fashioned a little tent over him to keep the black flies away. Little Joey sleeps to the sound of the creek water gurgling over rock.

  At the approach of her family Jessica takes the still sleeping baby from the pillowcase and lifts him into her arms, clutching him against her breast. Then she stands in the centre of the clearing and waits for them to arrive.

  She’s washed
her face and brushed her hair and put on a clean cotton dress and her best Sunday boots. And she’s wearing one of the special pinnies Hester made for her with Meg’s rosebud embroidered on the large front pocket. Mary’s bush medicine has helped her no end, and while she is still pretty tender, she feels strong and well rested. Jessica knows she will make a very good mother for young Joey Bergman who, unconcerned about being moved, sleeps contentedly in her arms with his thumb in his mouth.

  Joe pulls the sulky to a halt outside the hut, not seeing her at first. Hester and Meg are both carrying parasols and are dolled up to the nines in their Sunday best, though Jessica can’t imagine why when it’s so bloody hot. As Meg steps down from the sulky, Jessica sees immediately that her stomach has grown, though she expected it to be a lot bigger. They now all stand in the bright sunlight and are temporarily blinded, not able to see her in the shade of the big river gum until she calls out.

  ‘Oh, there you are,’ Hester says, turning in the direction of Jessica’s voice. ‘Merry Christmas, my dear.’ Hester’s voice has already taken on a more imperious tone and Jessica realises she’s getting ready to be the second mistress of Riverview homestead. Poor bloody Jack — not only Meg but also Hester to contend with. Joe unharnesses Napoleon and leads the pony to the creek to drink while Hester and Meg walk towards Jessica with their parasols held high, picking their way daintily along the creek bank. Neither of them is looking over to where she stands. Jessica wonders briefly if they feel any guilt for leaving her to fend for herself in the tin hut. Indeed, how would her precious sister feel if it were done to her? But she refuses to be angry, to spoil her news and her special Christmas present to Joe. The baby suddenly cries out and it is Meg who looks up first, for she and her mother have reached the clearing and are now only a few feet from where Jessica stands.