Jessica (10 page)

If Joe ever thought about love, then he supposes he loves Jessica. Whatever it is he feels for his youngest daughter he has no such emotion for Meg. He admires Hester for creating in her a young woman such as he could never have aspired to know in his own humble youth. Meg is a definite step up and away from the life of respectable poverty they know with him, while Jessica, despite her cleverness, is more of the same common stock to which Joe knows himself to belong.

Hester is a Heathwood, and they're a family of shopkeepers, indoors people with scrubbed white hands and clean nails. Joe has always accepted that his wife is well bred, from people above his own station in life. Hester has never really taken to the battler's life on the land and he knows well enough that he's not the sort of bloke she would have fancied before her dashing young subaltern went off with the New South Wales Lancers to fight for Mother England in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan and got himself killed.

Joe wasn't to know that all subalterns are dashing once they are dead. That Auntie Agnes thought Hester's intended was a thorough bounder and up to no good, just the sort of person the Heathwoods should avoid at all costs. Privately she felt his untimely demise had probably saved the family.

Joe had waited until he had something he could call his own before he went looking for a wife. At thirty-five he'd given up his life as a boundary rider and taken up a government allotment along the Murrumbidgee. It had taken him nearly fifteen years to clear the scrub and stock it, build a home and, in a good year, profitably run a small holding. His land had been hard-won through two droughts, two locust plagues, a mouse plague, a flood and a bushfire, which destroyed his home and the outbuildings and burned his stock alive. Joe Bergman was fifty years old when at last he felt he had enough behind him to take a bride.

After her soldier had died, Hester had got herself stuck behind the counter of her father Henry's haberdashery shop in Narrandera. At thirty-five years old, when she met Joe, she was well past the marriageable age, with slim prospects of finding a man with a decent spread. All the same, Joe didn't need to be told he was no great catch. When he'd asked her to be his bride, she'd refused at first, then finally accepted, but only after a great deal of persistence on his part and some unexpected involvement by her Auntie Agnes.

Hester's father, a widower, had been reluctant to let her go and insisted she was needed in .the shop and at home to cook and clean. But his sister Agnes, who lived in Whitton, folk said to be away from her brother, and was herself a widow and the mother of two sons who'd both turned out like their father, wastrels and drunkards, had come to Joe's rescue.

Agnes had insisted that her niece still had a few good years left in which to have a family. ‘A woman,' she'd said, ‘can breed until she's in her mid-forties, there's time for half a dozen if you're quick at it!' She'd pointed out that Joe, even though a foreigner and of a lower class, was a big, strapping man with fair hair and blue eyes, just the sort of new blood the Heathwoods needed. He was known never to touch a drop, and though a bachelor for so long, could never be accused of having hot britches for the women. ‘Hester, my dear, Joe Bergman is a good man, rough but decent.' She'd wagged a bony finger at her niece. ‘A hard-working and sober husband of humble origins is better than a drunken lord in a grand palace,' she'd proclaimed. When Hester had tried to use her father's welfare as an excuse, Auntie Agnes had countered, saying, ‘I'll send your father down to Sydney, to the Easter Show, to find himself a grateful widow who can clean house and work in the shop. They're two a penny in the big smoke.'

When Hester finally accepted Joe's hand in marriage, he was aware she did so without much enthusiasm. For his part, Joe has never complained about her lack of affection. She's been a dutiful wife beyond his expectations, she cooks well and runs a neat home. She is a good little woman in lots of ways. If he has a wound she dresses and binds it for him, and if, as sometimes happens, he gets a bad chest, she prepares a mustard poultice or doses him with a tablespoon of sugar soaked in eucalyptus oil. Though these days it's Jessica who cares for him. Hester washes and mends his clothes and she keeps herself neat and, with it all, gives him a sense of being the head of the family. And she doesn't complain any more than Ian be expected from someone who has been forced to come down a notch or two in life.

It seems only fair to Joe that Hester should devote most of her time and love to Meg, that she should want a life for her eldest daughter which she must once have imagined for herself. He knows he isn't much chop but he's done the best he can and there's always been food on the table, Hester makes their clothes from good material and they have boots on their feet. It may not be much but it's a damn sight better than most. Hester occasionally even has a little extra to spend on pretty ribbons and a bit of lace for Meg.

Joe sometimes wonders if things would have been different if they'd had a big family like other folk. But they'd started out too late for that. The doctor said it was probably him getting the mumps when he was fifty five that put a stop to her pregnancies. He would have liked a boy, but there you go, can't have everything. Now he wouldn't change Jessica for a football team of lads built like bullocks. So Hester can enjoy Meg.

Hester constantly refers to Meg's hair as her crowning glory and at night delights in releasing the thick plaits Meg wears coiled about her head, letting them fall to her waist. She takes care to brush it a hundred strokes with an expensive English hairbrush ordered up from Anthony Hordern's in Sydney. Joe hears the two of them still chatting away like a couple of budgerigars long after Jessica has taken to her narrow iron cot and him to the bed out the back. Hester has made it very clear to Joe that she has no further interest in marital relations, as she calls it.

Hester firmly believes that the coming together of a married couple has the singular purpose of bringing forth issue. Having done what was required of her and given her husband two daughters, she doesn't see that she has any further duties to perform in the marital bed, and Joe's shooting blanks has been a stroke of luck for her.

For his part, Joe has spent too many years alone in his life not to know how to seek his own relief and so he lets her be, though he knows other blokes in the same circumstances would think they'd been shafted.

Most of the men in the district would climb into the saddle regardless. It would never occur to them to ask permission, or that a wife has a say in the first place.

For most it was a man's flamin' right, that's all there was to it. ‘A skinful on a Saturdee night, mount the miss us and there she goes! Conjugal rights, mate! It's written in the Bible when yiz gets hitched.' Joe has heard it often enough in the shearing sheds and elsewhere. But he leaves Hester alone as part of the price he feels he has to pay for not being her equal. In his seventies, his urges have become a lot easier than perhaps they used to be.

Joe sometimes wakes up to go for a piss in the yard only to find his wife and eldest daughter in the kitchen still chewing the fat as late as ten o'clock at night. It amazes him that after being together from morning till dusk they still find something to talk about. He and Jessica are often together for hours without a word passing between them. Yet Joe knows that Jessie can talk the hind leg off a donkey if she's in the mood or is excited by something new she's seen or learned. He remembers how as a child she never stopped asking questions, wanting to know everything, couldn't be put off. Why, why, why? Until he was nearly out of his mind. So very different the two girls, chalk and cheese.

When the two of them are together, strangers hardly ever know that they're sisters. Although if they were to stop and examine them closely, they would see both have a fullness around the mouth and an identical shape to their lips. This sweetly shaped mouth makes Meg seem a bit exotic, as if she might be foreign, an Italian contessa or a Spanish dancer or something splendid like that.

Jessica is aware that she and Meg share the same shaped mouth. And while Jessica agrees it looks very pretty on Meg, she is not at all sure that it isn't the shape of her own mouth that creates most of her problems. She secretly bemoans the fact that it cannot be used like a proper mouth, like a mouth that doesn't say things to men before it's opened. No matter what she does with it, it always ends up looking like Meg's mouth. That is to say, it ends up looking pretty and feminine and promising something unspoken when no such promise exists in Jessica's mind.

Meg's mouth goes with her lovely figure. Meg has all the right curves to suit the fashion of the day and they can easily enough be imagined under her tight-waisted dress. Her lips, which she has the habit of keeping just a fraction apart so that she looks slightly breathless, are calculated, along with everything else about her, to drive a young bloke round the twist. On the other hand, Jessica feels her own mouth is just stupid and looks out of place with the rest of her body, which is flat as a pancake all the way down the front.

Hester has long since given up trying to influence Jessica's appearance. Despite the dress she is required to wear to church of a Sunday, which Hester has sewn and embroidered around the collar as prettily as may be, Jessica remains as plain-looking as mustard pickles in a Jar.

Hester no longer feels guilty about Jessica and has convinced herself that it's only natural that her duty is to concentrate on Meg, who has all the looks she needs to get the kind of husband she herself missed out on. But she's well aware that any mother who has an eligible boy with a decent inheritance coming to him goes to market knowing prettiness alone is not enough to qualify for her son's hand in matrimony.

Hester knows well enough that there's nothing quite like childbirth to take the bloom off a woman's good looks. Meg must also be seen to look as though she will turn matronly in an appropriate manner after having given birth to the mandatory six or more children, hopefully including a brace of sons thrown in for good measure.

Finally, and almost as important as her capacity to bear healthy children in large numbers, her eldest daughter has all the domestic qualifications needed for a good homemaker. Meg is an excellent cook and her preserves and needlework are always among the best at the Narrandera Agricultural Show and she has twice won a blue ribbon there for the best starched and pressed tablecloth.

All in all, Hester quietly congratulates herself that all of this adds up to a set of marriage qualifications which any future mother-in-law would be anxious to secure for her son.

Using the same rules, she has come to accept that it would be difficult for any potential mother-in-law to imagine how Jessica's narrow-hipped, lean little body could possibly endure a pregnancy without complications. Or that the young lads who might gladly call on Meg would be likely to entertain the idea of walking out with the family leftover. In her mind Hester has consigned Jessica to a spinsterhood she herself has only managed to avoid by the skin of her teeth.

It is one sentiment Joe is forced to share with his wife. He once sadly remarked, ‘Meg is prime stock for the marriage market, but Jessie is gunna be left alone in the sale-yards long after every young bloke's climbed back on his horse and gone home.'

It is hardly surprising that Jessica's family haven't noticed that, though still flat in front at eighteen years old, Jessica has a neatly rounded little backside which fits snugly into a pair of moleskins and sits well enough in the saddle for many a young stockman to happily let her take the lead when riding single file.

Nor are they aware that Jack Thomas will most often choose to be Jessica's partner on a cattle drive or when they're branding the ewes from the wethers, castrating or crutching sheep. This fact entirely escapes Joe's notice -like his wife, he's so resigned to the notion that Meg must win young Jack that he could not even conceive of Jessica having a place, no matter how platonic, in the young man's affections. Hester and Meg are none the wiser, as both are unaware of the Thomas boy's peripheral presence in Jessica's life.

Jessica lacks the personal vanity to suppose for one moment that Jack might think of her as anything but a good working partner or even a mate when they attend lectures at the government experimental farm. Her self-esteem requires no more bolstering than this from her future brother-in-law. She continues to enjoy working with Jack, being his firm friend. They both seem to anticipate each other's movements on a horse and together they can drive a large herd through the scrub better than most.

Jessica now hears the currawongs in the river gums — they're always the first to greet the sunrise — and she goes out to the woodpile and gathers an armful of firewood. She returns to the kitchen, builds a fire in the cast-iron stove and sets the kettle to boil. While she waits she chops a turnip, a parsnip, two carrots and several potatoes into the soup pot and adds what's left of last night's lamb bone. Then she empties half a jug of water into it and adds a handful of gelatine crystals to compensate for giving the dogs a generous splash of soup over their feed of bones last night.

Joe would be annoyed that she'd added the gravy to their tucker, but he'll never know, she smiles to herself. Hester, or perhaps Meg, has set four bread pans of dough to rise overnight on the scrubbed pine kitchen table, covering them with cheesecloth. Jessica removes the cloth and sprinkles a little milk over the top of the risen dough, spreading it evenly over the top of the loaves with the tips of her fingers so the crusts will brown in the baking. Then she returns to the stove and adjusts the flue to heat the oven. In about half an hour it will be hot enough to bake and by the time she gets back from milking the cow the bread will be ready to be taken out of the oven and cooled on the window ledge. Hester knows that Jessica would rather eat the last of the loaves when it is three days old than go to the trouble of mixing and kneading a batch of dough and baking fresh bread herself. Despite her coldness to her youngest daughter, Hester is a dutiful mother. There's the stockpot bubbling away on the back of the stove, a side of bacon in the cool house and another leg of lamb cooked and ready to eat cold, tea, bread, eggs, milk and yesterday's churned butter — Jessica will want for nothing while they're away.