Jessica (2 page)

Right from the word go, Jessica never seemed to get the hang of being anybody but herself. Like Joe, Jessica makes her mind known the moment she opens her mouth, not much of an asset if you're going to be a lady. But Jessica watches her own language around Joe she'd never call him ‘Joe' to his face! — and if she says even one of Joe's bad words half under her breath he's got hearing like a bloody fox and she'll cop an earful to keep her quiet for the rest of the day.

Now Jessica rests the stock of the shotgun on the ground between her feet, gripping either side of the worn butt with the insteps of her boots. Then, bending down so that the twin barrels rest against her right shoulder, she uses both thumbs to force the first of the firing hammers back and then the second.

All this is done by feel — not once does she look down at the shotgun. Instead, her wide green eyes never leave the reptiles less than fifteen feet away. Jessica knows she isn't being cocky like Joe often said she was when she was a brat. She remembers how he'd hit her once for this and she's never forgotten the lesson.

When Jessica was eleven a school inspector had come all the way up from Sydney to visit their little school. In her excitement, she'd foolishly boasted to the inspector that her father wasn't scared of snakes. That when Joe saw a snake he'd bend down and grab it behind the head, his thumb and finger pressing behind the jaws so they'd be open wide showing the terrible poisonous fangs. Then he'd hold it up and kiss it on the head, with the tip of its tail hanging free off the ground, squiggling and squirming. Meg, sly and superior even then, gleefully carried this exaggeration home and Jessica had gotten into terrible trouble with her old man at tea that night.

All of them were sitting at the table, she and Joe glaring at each other, Meg proud as punch at having just spilled the beans, Hester looking on, her nerves on edge.

‘But I seen it!' young Jessica protests, turning to Joe for confirmation. ‘You done it! I seen it, remember?'

‘Bullshit. That were a bloody carpet snake and you know it,' Joe replies. ‘Big harmless buggers.'

‘Well how was I supposed to know it was harmless?'

Jessica shouts at her sister. ‘He picked it up, didn't he?

He kissed it! That's all I said to the government man!' ‘Who's “he”, the cat's father?' Hester chides in her tired and exasperated voice.

‘Father!' Jessica points to Joe at the head of the table.

‘I seen Father do it!'

Joe's voice cuts in quietly. ‘You
did
know it was harmless, girlie. ‘Cause I told both of yiz meself.' He turns to Meg. ‘What's a carpet snake look like, Meg?' Meg smiles. ‘Black and brown mottled patches against a sort of creamy background, Father. They can get to be nine feet long,' she adds gratuitously.

‘Good.' Joe faces Jessica again. ‘You bragging to that bloke from the government has made a bloody fool outa me, girlie,' he says.

Jessica flushes deeply, biting her bottom lip, looking down into her lap. Meg is a real bitch. But worse, she, Jessica, has made Joe look stupid and that is more than she can bear to think about.

‘Country folk don't get cocky with snakes, ya hear?

They fear ‘em something terrible,' Joe continues, still in a low voice. ‘City folk think snakes are evil, it's something that they've taken out of the Bible.' He pauses, then adds, ‘But we know different, don't we? Snakes is just another sort of vermin. Crows, rats, mice and feral cats, dingoes and foxes, they're vermin too, all of them meateaters. They'll have a go at chooks and take a newborn lamb once in a while, but they won't go humans, they don't kill people. Snakes do. Snakes kill. Nobody fools around with Joe Blakes, girlie. Bloke who fools around with snakes is a flamin' idiot.'

Suddenly he swings his arm across the table and backhands Jessica hard across the cheek, his knuckles making her skull ring and the teeth rattle in her head. ‘You
knew
it were a carpet. Don't ever brag about me to no bastard, you hear? I don't want no flamin' school inspector from Sydney thinking your old man's a bloody fool! Some sort of Injun snake charmer!'

It feels as though she's been hit by a rock. Jessica gasps, shocked by the unexpected attack and the sudden, fearful pain. The blow almost knocks her from her stool and she has to grab hold of the table's edge in order to retain her balance. Joe never hits her indoors, the house is Hester's territory and her head is ringing as she looks to her mother for help.

Hester jumps up from the table, her chair skidding backwards in her haste. Jessica thinks she is going to have a go at her father for hitting her, but Hester only looks down at her, wiping her mouth with the back of her puffy hand. Jessica can see from her mother's expression that she isn't going to come to her rescue. Hester, she realises, wants no part of what's going on between her and Joe. All this has happened in a few moments — it is as if the blow to her head has given Jessica a sudden clarity of vision, an insight into her mother's heart where there is no longer any room for her younger daughter. Jessica knows her mother thinks she's becoming a handful, too headstrong. ‘Can't tell you anything you don't already know and you've got no manners, just like your father.' She says it often enough and there it is again in her eyes as she turns and leaves the table. Jessica knows her mother has finally given up on her. From now on Jessica must stick with Joe, and Hester gives all her affection to Meg.

Jessica recalls how Meg rose from her stool to follow Hester into the kitchen.

‘Stay! You bloody started this,' Joe commands. Meg lowers herself slowly back on her stool, not looking at her father.

Jessica, not daring to touch her face, turns and nods dumbly to Joe, accepting her punishment. Then she looks down into her lap, fighting back her tears, determined not to show Meg how she feels.

The room is silent. She can hear her mother in the kitchen, angrily scraping the bottom of the meat pan with the metal gravy spoon. Then the clank of Joe's knife and fork on his tin plate as he resumes eating his tea. Joe won't eat his tucker off proper plates, he says tin makes food seem hard-earned by decent folk.

Jessica waits until she can be certain her voice has recovered enough before turning to her sister. ‘Fuck you,' she whispers from the side of her mouth.

‘Jessie just swore at me, Father! She used a terrible word, too!' Meg howls.

Joe looks up from his dinner plate at Meg. His mind is already elsewhere, his temper cooled down. In his opinion the matter is settled, Jessica has took her punishment fair and square. He plants both elbows on the table, still chewing. His massive sun-bronzed arms give the appearance of two hocks of well-cooked meat with a knife protruding from the end of one and a fork from the end of the other. Swallowing, he' asks mildly, ‘What'd she say?'

‘I can't say it!' Meg looks directly down into her plate as though she's addressing the potatoes.

Joe picks at a tooth with his pinkie nail and turns to Jessica. ‘What'd you say to your sister, girlie?'

Jessica, even more furious at Meg, no longer cares if she ends up copping another backhander from her father. She grips the sides of the .table with both hands and glares defiantly at Meg, angry tears welling. ‘I said, Fuck
you!'

She shouts out the words in such a bold manner that Joe is left in no doubt that they are now meant to include him as well.

Jessica closes her eyes and pulls her head back so that her neck is held rigid, her jaw exposed to take the clout she expects from her father. Her cheek still burns and the left side other mouth is numb from his previous blow. She can feel her eye starting to close.

Joe smiles to himself. He likes the courage he's seen in the eyes of his youngest daughter. She's game, all right, he thinks. He turns his gaze on Meg who sits with downcast eyes, straight-backed, chin tucked in, her hands folded in her lap. A man would need a bloody pickaxe to crack open that one's heart, he thinks to himself. Pity the poor bastard who gets her.

How could two girls be so different? Meg, cunning as a shithouse rat, the perfect little lady, at fourteen already a woman with all the looks and tricks that turn men's eyes soft with longing. But what's between her legs you can be sure she'll keep locked up tight until the exact right moment. That one's got her mind firmly set on a better life than most of the men in the district could offer a lass. Good on her, he doesn't mind that, she's got bugger-all inheritance coming from him. The property's mortgaged to the hilt and the bank'll get the bloody lot when he's gone, unless Jessica can keep it going. Meg'll marry the Thomas boy and have babies dressed in ribbons and booties — it's written all over her sulky little face.

Joe thinks of young Jack Thomas, just two years older than his daughter with five thousand acres coming to him when George Thomas finally carks it. A thousand already under the plough and most of that fronting the river. Meg is putting in a lot of groundwork with the two Thomas girls these days. She's gone over to the Anglicans and got Hester to do the same. It's good tactics — the Thomases wouldn't marry a Lutheran or a Catholic for that matter, strictly C of E that lot. If Meg wins over Ada Thomas and the two girls, you can put down your glasses, George Thomas and his boy Jack don't stand a chance. Joe can see it all, the future rolling out like a Sunday church carpet, the same red carpet they use for weddings at St Stephen's: his eldest daughter emerging from the church, Mrs Meg Thomas of Riverview homestead, soon to take to squatters' ways as though she's bloody born to them. Hester will die happy as a pig in mud, she's put that much into the girl.

But what of young Jessie here, waiting, expecting him to clout her again? He sighs and shakes his head sadly as he thinks of what lies ahead for Jessica. The bush ain't the kind of place where defiance gets anyone
very
far, least-ways a woman without a dowry looking for a husband. And Jessie's having real trouble knowing she's a girl.

Maybe he should put her back in her mother's charge. Maybe she'll grow out of it, he thinks. After all, she's only eleven years old. Though Joe knows his youngest daughter pretty well by now and he doesn't much like her chances of losing that stubborn streak. But most of all Joe knows he can't manage without Jessica, he needs her around the place. He decides this time he'll let it pass, leave her be. She's copped enough for one day. He forgets how little she is — the blow he give her, meant to be no more than a reminder not to be cheeky, bloody near knocked her head off. She hasn't blubbed, though. You've got to admire the little bugger for that. She took her medicine like a man. That's the whole trouble, though, if she'd been a real girl she'd be holding her cheek and bawling her eyes out, sniffing and howling and burying her face in her mother's apron.

Joe sighs again and looks directly at Meg. ‘What Jessie just said, that's not swearin'. Swearin's only when you
don't
mean it.'

Jessica grins to herself as she recalls this incident. She remembers how Meg burst into tears at Joe's clever remark and fled howling from the table. The backhander from her father and the black eye that followed were worth it just to see the look on her sister's face. Maybe Joe can't say it out aloud, but she knew then, at that moment, that he loved her.

Now, as she watches the dancing serpents, Jessica wonders why the different kinds of snakes don't seem to need to dance separately, each species in some sort of poison pecking order. They all look to mix happily enough on the river bank, mulga, Eastern brown and gwardar. Even the harmless carpet snakes play with their deadly neighbours, the whole tangle of them moving like they are listening to some kind of secret bush orchestra that humans can't hear. Then she remembers snakes are deaf — it must be the vibrations they make among themselves, she reckons.

Some snakes sway and arch in lazy loops, some spiral in a ribbon of silver light, while others rise to balance momentarily on the tips of their tails and then whip downwards, striking the earth with a thud to send a small explosion of ochre dust into the air.

The thumping and writhing of the reptiles soon causes the dust, lit from behind by the setting sun, to form a translucent curtain in the surrounding air. The snakes now seem to be shadows moving in rippling patterns across a screen of light.

Jessica squints and judges the distance at roughly fifteen feet then waits, holding the gun in both hands below her waist, ready for the pattern she thinks she needs.

‘Those two on the right first,' she murmurs. ‘The mulgas.' Joe says they're to be called mulgas, though most people round here call them king browns. Joe likes to be right about things, even though king brown sounds better, more deadly. Jessica must wait until the two snakes are at the highest point of their dance when their heads are thrown back, flicking tongues testing the air. That's when they show the soft underside of the jaw where the scales are the colour of putty.

She must make head shots all, her first shot a deadly conclusion of blood, mashed vertebrae, scales and fang. Snakes have their brains encased in hard bone, so she's got to smash the jaws when she fires, make them harmless. She sees them dead already, mangled heads and necks thickened with black flies.