Jessica

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘How apt this is,’ he says smiling. ‘The Lord has taken away our brother, Joe Bergman, but he has, in return, given us a new life born on Christmas Day, the day the infant Jesus, our Saviour, was born to save the world from sin. A new life to replace the one He hath taken away.’ He pauses and looks about him. ‘You will, on this sad occasion, have missed the charming presence of Hester Bergman’s eldest daughter, Mrs Meg Thomas. This, I am pleased to announce, is because Meg has given birth, on Christmas Day, to a son for Jack and a grandchild for Joe, just hours after he departed so tragically from this mortal coil.’ Pleased with this opportune observation, the Reverend Mathews, M.A. Oxon., smiles beatifically. ‘The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away, blessed is the Lord,’ he intones.

  ‘No!’ Jessica screams. ‘No!’ She turns to Hester and starts to beat at her with her fists. ‘You can’t, you can’t take my baby!’

  Hester tries frantically to back away, but Jessica, still screaming, follows her and, swinging wildly, she knocks Hester’s hat off her head. Then she grabs her mother by the hair and scratches at her face and eyes. ‘I’ll kill you! I’ll kill you!’ she screams.

  Hester keeps moving backwards, her arms held across her face as she attempts to avoid Jessica’s blows. She stumbles, then trips and tumbles backwards onto the ground. Jessica, her teeth bared, hurls herself on top of Hester and continues to flail at her with her fists. ‘My baby! You’ve took my baby!’

  Suddenly male hands come from everywhere, pulling Jessica away from her mother, lifting her away. Jessica fights like a wildcat, kicking out and struggling frantically as they grapple to subdue her.

  ‘No! Noooooo! She’s stolen my baby! My baaaaby!’ she screams. Finally she is restrained, though it takes four men to hold onto her and then to carry her bodily off to the manse, still screaming hysterically.

  Hester is helped to her feet. Her face is scratched and a streak of grey hair, torn from one side of her bun, falls across her left eye. She covers her face with her hands and begins to sob as the vicar drops his prayer book and runs to comfort her, the skirts of his white cassock whipping about his ankles. Several of the women present gather around the distraught Hester, two of them trying to dust her skirt and shoulders while another picks up her hat. Two others hold her steady, tut-tutting and commiserating, the shock at what they’ve just witnessed clearly written over their concerned faces.

  Hester slowly brings her hands down from her anguished face and tears stream from her eyes. She looks directly at the vicar. ‘We thought she was better, that our darling Jessie had got better again,’ she sobs.

  BOOK THREE

  Park in Sydney.

  The records for the institution show a J. M. Bergman listed as an in-patient during this period. Although the patient’s gender is not initially given, it is evident from the Christmas manifest, which records that on three separate occasions, the Christmases of 1915, 1916 and 1917, the patient received a new green smock and a pair of black boots, the standard uniform for female inmates at Caltan Park.

  Several other events over this period can be determined from public and private records.

  Joseph Thomas, the first-born son of Meg and Jack Thomas of Riverview Station, was christened on Sunday, 9 February 1915 by the Reverend Mathews, M.A. axon., at St Stephen’s Church, Yanco.

  On the occasion of his christening Joseph was given a sterling silver christening cup, with a Hardy Brothers, Sydney, hallmark and inscribed ‘joseph Thomas — God’s precious gift to us — from his maternal grandmother, Mrs Hester Bergman, nee Heathwood’.

  On 5 April 1915, Meg Thomas and her mother Hester took up residence at Riverview homestead. They seem to have given almost immediate notice to the incumbent, George Thomas, to leave the large sheep station, though this may have been done on the instructions of Jack Thomas. There is a final withdrawal of funds in the name of G. A.

  Thomas for the amount of £15,000 shown on I May 1915, whereupon the account in the same name at the Narrandera branch of the Bank of New South Wales was closed. George The Riverview Station records show that ten days later, on 10 May 1915, two months before the commencement of the shearing season that year, Mr Mike Malloy was appointed as manager.

  The mortgage, owned by the Bank of New South Wales, covering Selection Nos. 41 & 42 (1280 acres) and Tubbo No. I (340 acres) in the Parish of Ourendumbee in the County of Boyd, registered in the name of the late Joseph Bergman, was paid off on 21 January 1918 by Mrs Meg Thomas, and the acreage transferred to Riverview Station.

  Sergeant Jack Thomas was killed in the Battle of Magdhaba fought on 23 December 1916 in the Northern Sinai Desert near the Mediterranean coastal town of El Arish. The attack on the Turks by elements of the 1st Light Horse was led by Major-General Harry Chauvel. The attack commenced at daybreak after No. I Squadron of the Australian Flying Corps, flying low over the village of Magdhaba (which was being used by the enemy as a base), established the Turkish dispositions. What followed was a hard-fought battle resulting in a significant victory against a stubborn and courageous enemy. Three hundred Turks were killed with only twenty-two dead on the British side, Sergeant Jack Thomas among them. Jack died of his wounds in a military hospital at El Arish in the early hours of Christmas Eve.

  Jack Thomas’s entire estate (with the exception of a gold hunter watch, misplaced after his death) passed into the hands of his son, Joseph ‘Joey’ Thomas, to be held in trust Thomas, until he reached the age of twenty-one. The mention of the gold hunter watch seems a curious notation in an estate valued at £280,000. It is assumed to have been a family heirloom taken from Jack’s bedside after he died.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Jessica sits outside her tin hut just before sundown, before the mosquitoes come, and thinks about the morning. Rusty, her new kelpie, lies at her feet, his tongue lolling in the heat even though he’s just been sent into the creek to cool down. She can smell his wetness, his doggy smell. Any moment now the rabbits will come to the creek to drink, crushing together and jostling each other, fifty of them all trying to get to the water in one spot though there’s the whole creek bank to choose from. Jessica thinks that the rabbits can’t be all that high up on the animal intelligence scale. She loads the twelve bore shotgun — she can, if she’s careful, get ten of the buggers, maybe a few more to make up the hundred pelts she needs to fill her quota for the hat factory in Sydney. She’ll just have enough time before nightfall to skin them and stretch the pelts over wire V-frames.

  The turkeys are making their usual racket in the run out back — they must know they’re getting a feed of corn tonight. If they weren’t turkeys and so dumb, they’d sense this wasn’t good news for the lot that’s been separated to go to the rail siding tomorrow at dawn. Joe always said there’s nothing more stupid than a chook unless it’s a turkey. He used to say ‘gobblegobble’ was the exact right sound for them, grub pecked up into their flamin’ beaks and squirted out their bums without a single thought in between, that’s your basic turkey. Chooks, Joe’d say, seem to have a bit of nous — not much, mind, but a bit. Hens have something going for them. They’ll scratch and when they’ve laid an egg, they’ll cackle proud as all get-out, tell the world what they’ve just gone and done. Then they’ll get broody and mind their eggs. They take real good care of their chicks when they hatch, and hide them under their wings if there’s a goshawk about, and make a terrible racket if a snake comes into the coop. What’s more, cocks crow and strut and fight each other and sometimes even mind their hens, herding them together when there’s danger about.

  But turkeys are a different kettle of fish altogether. They’re bloody useless buggers — they lose their chicks, or stand on them, or peck them in the head till they die. They’ll let a hawk take as many chicks as it likes, or they’ll walk right up to a fox and look him in the eye, usually for the last time before they kiss their life goodbye. They’ll even die of thirst when there’s water twenty feet away, but most
ly they’ll panic. They panic over the slightest thing, gobble-gobbling hysterically and scattering to the four winds. ‘You can’t teach a turkey nothing it don’t already know and that’s bugger-all anyway,’ Joe would say to Jessica when she was a little kid. ‘There’s nothing about a turkey you can like until it’s been plucked and the stuffing’s steaming in its bum.’

  It’s a full moon tonight and, as usual, not a cloud in the sky. Jessica will be up at four o’clock and on the road to Yanco Siding to arrive with her turkeys not long after sun-up. She rubs the sole of her scuffed boot behind Rusty’s ear. ‘Not much of a job for a sheep-dog, is it mate?’ she says fondly to him. She wonders whether Rusty senses that he was bred for better things — whether he knows that herding Solly Goldberg’s fattened Christmas turkeys to the railway siding is a bit of an insult.

  But, Jessica thinks, the kelpie does it willingly enough. When you come to think of it, sheep aren’t exactly the most intelligent animals anyway and this dog’s never been trained to work sheep, never been introduced to a sheep. Turkeys are all he knows — they’re his sheep — so perhaps Rusty takes pride in being the best turkey-dog in the Riverina, maybe in the whole world. It’s a compliment really, as sheep are positively docile compared to turkeys. A turkey panic needs great skill to bring it to order and Rusty is just the dog to do it. It may be an undignified way for a sheep-dog to make a living but nobody’s told him so, and he’s got his work cut out to keep a flock in line. Not too many sheep-dogs could do what he does. What’s more, if ever he meets another sheep-dog Rusty doesn’t back down — no, he’s got a ton of courage, so he’s still got all his pride going for him.

  Rusty seems happy enough, Jessica thinks. She’s a pretty good mistress who loves him, he has plenty of rabbit meat to eat and a big flock of turkeys to mind.

  Kelpies like to keep busy and this one’s on the go most of the day, watching that the silly buggers don’t get lost in the saltbush or the mulga scrub and keeping an eye out for the odd fox lurking about or the sparrow-hawks and kites ready to have a go at the chicks.

  Jessica doesn’t keep her turkeys in the run all the time but lets them out during the day to run free over the ten acres she owns. So even Rusty loses a few during the course of a year but it’s worth it — Jessica’s turkeys have a flavour to the meat that has made her famous in one small part of the world, in Goldberg’s Kosher Butchery in Hall Street, Bondi Beach, in Sydney. Mr Solly Goldberg orders fifteen turkeys a week, year in year out, and fifty at a time for Hanukkah, which he once explained to her was, ‘Like Jewish Christmas without no Jesus or Christmas trees, my dear.’

  This solid business contact with Solly Goldberg all began in Callan Park, where his son Moishe, a Sydney lawyer, was sent because of his dark moods and after he’d made several incompetent attempts to top himself. Dark moods were something Jessica understood very well, having spent a lifetime with Joe, and she soon made friends with the strange, shy, pencil-thin Jewish boy whose trousers always looked about to fall down. Jessica would sit with Moishe, talking quietly to him during his dark times until his confidence slowly returned. In return Moishe Goldberg would read to her. He had a lovely, gentle voice and a great passion for literature.

  Jessica didn’t pretend to understand everything he read to her. In fact, for the first year of their acquaintance she understood very little. But Moishe, when he wasn’t in one of his dark moods, was an excellent teacher and he would explain to her that writers weren’t only involved with telling stories but were also interested in ideas. ‘We humans have become a superior species because we have been given the gift of speech and with it the gift of imagination. We have the ability to think,’ he once told her.

  It had never occurred to Jessica that the major purpose of thinking was to arrive at a better solution than the one which already existed. If she’d ever thought about it, which she hadn’t, she felt that, like most people, the knowledge she needed already existed and that it was her own ignorance that prevented her from finding the proper solution.

  Everything, Jessica assumed, was already known and decided upon and if she came up with a viewpoint which contradicted the one held by conventional wisdom, then she must be wrong and ignorant.

  But Moishe didn’t see things in quite the same way. He held that most of what we believed in was wrong. That the world could be a better place without so many fixed ideas, that humans were like sheep allowing themselves to be led by the dog who barks the loudest and bites the hardest. He told Jessica that all this was about to end, that a couple of really big-time thinkers called Marx and Engels had finally found the answer to the misery and oppression of the working classes.

  Moishe would excitedly read to her from the works of these men, outlining the doctrine called Communism — the first political movement, he explained, ever to represent the common people. The workers of the world, ‘the proletariat’, as they seemed to be called, were about to unite to overthrow the capitalist system and bring justice to society.

  ‘People just like you and me, Jessie,’ Moishe would say. ‘It’s a system of government that delivers the common people from the clutches of the greedy capitalists and the privileged classes. Imagine, no more wars, no more killing — man’s inhumanity to his fellow man will stop, Jessie.’ Grabbing her impatiently by the shoulder as though he wished to shake the sense of it into her, he’d continue, ‘Greed and disregard for the welfare of the worker is what drives the capitalist world. Generosity and goodwill towards people like you and me is the Communist manifesto! Jessie, we can’t have another war like this one again. There must be a revolution in Australia, just like the one that’s coming in Russia.’

  Moishe’s enthusiasm for Communism knew no bounds and his greatest disappointment occurred when he finally realised that Jessica failed to share his vision or even to understand it.

  Jessica kept reminding herself that Moishe was mad — otherwise why was he at Callan Park? While she didn’t believe for one moment that she was crazy, she wasn’t silly enough to assume that everyone in the place was similarly wronged. Quite clearly the place was full of loonies, and Moishe, when his dark moods descended upon him, was one of them. Jessica was a country girl with no real experience of being exploited by the ruling classes beyond the greed of George Thomas, who’d never been thought of as a member of the ruling classes so much as a mongrel in his very own right.

  Jessica had been brought up by Joe to believe that life was meant to be a huge bloody struggle. And, except for the bank, which he never thought of in human terms anyway, it wasn’t man’s inhumanity to man that made life miserable. It was nature that supplied most of the toil, disadvantage and heartbreak.

  Therefore she was pretty lukewarm over Moishe’s enthusiasm for Communism, a doctrine she believed had no chance of working, out in the bush. Especially when Moishe spoke to her about the concept of the collective farm, where everyone worked the land for the mutual benefit of all of the people.

  ‘This bloke Karl Marx, does he come from the bush?’ she once asked Moishe.

  ‘No, he was born in Trier and educated in Bonn and Berlin,’ Moishe replied, showing off the depth of his knowledge.

  ‘That the big smoke?’

  ‘What, Berlin? It’s the capital of Germany.’

  ‘Yeah, thought so,’ Jessica sniffed.

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’ Moishe asked.

  ‘Well, this Marx bloke, he ain’t never put his theory to country folk, that’s for sure.’ ‘Why ever not?’

  ‘Well, mate, you can’t get two blokes to agree on bloody nothing in the bush, except maybe that the government don’t know its arse from its elbow. They’d think this bloke Marx was talkin’ out the back of his head.’

  But Moishe, a lad from the city, didn’t care to have a country bumpkin like Jessica contradicting him. ‘It is precisely by harnessing the vast discontent felt by the Russian workers towards the Tsar that Communism will s
ucceed,’ he protested. ‘It is the same here — a movement that will be led by the masses, by the proletariat, the people on the land and in the factories. We must begin with the overthrow of the landed gentry and the capitalists, and often enough they’re the same people,’ Moishe explained patiently, though Jessica could sense his frustration with her.

  The only landed gentry Jessica could think of was Jack Thomas, the man she loved, and George Thomas, whom everyone agreed to hate. But the idea of overthrowing Riverview Station and turning it into a collective sheep station was just plain silly. ‘Bullshit, Moishe,’ Jessica said.

  The idea of rising up against George Thomas or any of the other squattocracy simply didn’t make sense. George was a liar and a cheat but you already knew that, so you made a deal and you kept to it. It was never totally fair or unfair neither, just George Thomas wanting to show you who was the boss. But once you shook hands, the both of you made it work. It was all part of what happened in the bush, Jessica thought, and by no means the worst part.

  On two occasions, however, she and Joe had attended a hastily convened meeting behind the shearing shed at Riverview. The stop-work had been called by Joe Blundell, the shop steward for the Shearers’

  Union. The first time had been to have a bit of a whinge about the time allowed for a smoko. Another time he went on about whether, when the wool was damp, they should reduce the number of sheep shorn to qualify for the higher pay rate.

  But on the way home after both meetings, Joe said it wasn’t to be took too serious. The idea of a strike over working conditions never occurred to them on Riverview Station. There were sheds that were worse and some better but that was life. There was talk that in some stations the Shearers’ Union got a bit cranky and threatened the boss. But in Joe’s book you worked hard, you got paid and you kept your trap shut. Joe was right, nothing ever came of those Shearers’ Union meetings. George Thomas just told Joe Blundell to get stuffed, and that as far as he was concerned they could collect their pay-packet and piss off the lot of them, because there was enough local labour around to fill the shearing shed twice over. As Joe said, a good union man becomes scab labour as soon as the brats start to starve. Everyone knew this was true, so they shut their gobs and took home a wage that was half decent by local standards.