Jessica (54 page)

Jessica screams and, dropping the candles, she runs from the room, stumbling through the house in the dark until she reaches the kitchen and then staggers, sobbing, into the yard where she falls to her knees, her hands covering her face in despair.

When she eventually looks up the house is already ablaze, the flames sucking greedily at the dry timber. Jessica rushes into the kitchen, which is rapidly filling with smoke, rescues her saddle and then returns for her saddlebags, the two billy cans and her shotgun, barely escaping a wall of flame that rushes down the narrow corridor towards her.

Once outside Jessica struggles to get her things far enough away from the house so that they are safe from the flames. Then she sits, shocked and distraught, on her saddle in the dirt, and watches the homestead burn. The roof is the first thing to collapse, the corrugated iron twisting and buckling in the heat before glowing red-hot and falling down into the innards of the house in a shower of fiery sparks. Soon the clapboard walls fall one by one, collapsing inwards, so that the flames appear to cease for a moment before the inferno gains momentum and roars on.

In less than an hour all that remains is a heap of charred and smouldering timber with small fires still licking independently in half a dozen places. Only Hester's bed remains upright, standing defiant in the smoking ruins. The bed from which Joe was banished to the sleep-out after his children were born, where Meg seduced Jack and where, unbeknownst to Jessica, old Mrs Baker was murdered, now stands like Hester herself — hard, unforgiving, unrepentant and determined to survive.

A near-full moon has risen in the east across the saltbush plains and it is light enough to see the lazy curls of acrid smoke rising upwards from the charred remains of the homestead. Jessica thinks of the words in Jack's last letter when he described the full moon in the desert.

Can you remember? The moon is sometimes bright like it is on a summer night at home. ‘You can read a newspaper by its light,' folk would always say, though I never saw anyone who did.

Jessica thinks also of Joe's funeral and the ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust' words intoned over his grave by the Reverend Mathews, M.A. Oxon. And then Joe's own prophetic interpretation of the Biblical sentiment, ‘That's the whole flamin' story o' the plains, everything turns to dust or bloody ashes.'

Jessica opens her bed-roll and wraps herself in a blanket and, with her head resting against the saddle, she prepares to go to sleep. Tomorrow she'll move down to the tin hut and start her new life as a supplier of plump turkeys to Solly Goldberg, Kosher Butchery, Hall Street, Bondi Beach.
‘Chickens
—
second to none! Turkeys
—
the very best!'

Jessica is almost asleep when she has a sudden impulse. She decides that, in the morning, even before she goes to the boundary rider's hut, she'll ride to Yanco Siding and hire a man with a cart to bring Billy Simple's gravestone back to Warralang, the ten acres she owns beside the creek. Though it's black soil country, Jessica has now named the place ‘Redlands' after Red, her beloved kelpie who was shot by Billy Simple when he tried to defend her.

On the afternoon following the fire, Jessica returns to the burnt-down homestead from Yanco Siding, where she's arranged for Solly Goldberg's beautiful gift to be brought to Redlands. Finding a slightly cracked glass preserving jar near the windlass, she washes it clean and then walks among the still-warm ashes until she locates what remains of her cot. Jessica tells herself she has come to rid herself of the terrible curse her mother had placed on her by arranging Billy Simple's bloody garments on her bed. Jessica is certain now her mother was mad, for she must have kept Billy Simple's garments after finding them in the tub beside the windlass after Hester, Joe and Meg had returned from the reading of Agnes's will in Whitton — the incident of the famous silver tea service.

Using a twig to poke among the debris, Jessica collects almost half a jarful of tiny burnt scraps that were Billy Simple's shirt and moleskins. She thinks to herself that some of the now invisible blood soaked into the material is Billy's own and he has paid the ultimate price for his sins. It is time to bury them together with his virtues.

And so she'd buried the preserving jar with the tiny scraps of burnt cotton under the gravestone.
In
her mind, she restored Billy Simple from being a nonperson buried in quicklime to the real person who had once been her and Jack's good mate.

From that day on, Jessica truly believed in her heart that there was more of the true spirit of Billy Simple lying under the beautiful old river gum, with the quiet stream flowing by, than ever there could be in the chalky remains beneath the hard, anonymous flagstones of Long Bay Prison.

Now almost five years have passed since the Bergman homestead burnt down and tomorrow, before she and Rusty drive the turkeys to the railway, Jessica must put flowers on Billy's grave. It will be 6 August 1923, nine years since the day war was declared in Europe and since Billy's short life ended at dawn. The first of the wattle is already out and in the morning before they leave she'll pick a bunch of the brilliant yellow blossom for Billy's grave.

Jessica watches as the rabbits come down to drink, bunching together and pushing each other as though the only spot along the broad creek bank is the yard of pebbles selected by those who have arrived first. She feeds a single cartridge into the right-hand barrel of the twelve-bore and pulls back the hammer. Rusty now stands beside her, his tongue lolling, his ears pricked up, waiting expectantly for the sound of the shotgun blast.

When it comes, he rushes forward, barking and splashing through the shallows to stand on the furthermost bank even before the echo of the shotgun has fully died down. He sniffs at the dead rabbits, pushing at four or five with his nose as though to make sure they're dead, barking his head off all the while. One of the rabbits tries to crawl away and Rusty quickly snaps it up and crosses over the stream to where Jessica sits. He drops it at her feet, and Jessica reaches down for the rabbit and snaps its neck, putting it out of its misery. Rusty then returns across the creek until eventually nine dead rabbits lie at her feet. Jessica pats him on the head. ‘For a sheep-dog who herds turkeys yiz a bloody good retriever, Rusty dog,' she laughs.

Jessica reaches over for her hunting knife and, picking up a plump rabbit, she cuts around the fur at the extremity of the back and front legs then draws the knife up the inside of the back legs, making an incision to the top of the inside haunch. Then she pulls the pelt over the remainder of the body up to the rabbit's head, and quickly cuts around the neck and pulls the entire pelt over the head, clean as a whistle. The whole process takes her less than a minute and she lays the pelt aside and gives the rabbit to Rusty, who trots off happily to take his dinner under a nearby saltbush.

In less than ten minutes Jessica has skinned all the rabbits and stretched each of the pelts across a wire U-frame. Then she takes them to the turkey run behind the hut, where she hangs them high up on the chicken wire to dry out.

Jessica returns to the hut and cuts up three of the rabbits for the stew pot. It is nearly spring and the late winter rain has put a good topping of grass on the plains, so that the rabbits are nice and plump. She puts another aside for Rusty's dinner the following day. The remaining rabbits she prepares to throw into the creek where the crayfish, redfin and yellow-belly will clean them up a treat or, if any should wash onto the bank further down, a fox or a crow will make a welcome meal of it. It is her contribution to Joe's world of ‘everything lives off something else' — a free feed for which some creature, fish, fowl or four-legged animal, won't have to work too hard.

Usually Jessica waits an hour or so before disposing of the surplus rabbit meat. Often enough, one or two of the aunties from the nearby Aboriginal camp — some of Mary Simpson's mob — will hear the shotgun blast at sunset and come on over and get the rabbits Jessica doesn't need.

Jessica wakes at dawn to the sound of roosters crowing and makes a fire outside the hut. While the billy boils she washes at the creek and then, with Rusty by her side, she walks over to a wattle tree near the bank and cuts a large sprig of the brilliant yellow blossom. She returns with it and puts it down for later, when she will go to Billy's grave. Now she pours boiling water from the billy into a pot and stirs in three or four handfuls of oats and puts the pot back on the embers. With the remaining water in the billy she makes tea. Jessica watches the oats impatiently, stirring the pot frequently as she sips at the mug of sweet, dark tea. When the oatmeal is set she eats quickly, straight from the pot, blowing frequently at the hot porridge on her spoon. After only a few spoonfuls she puts the remaining porridge into Rusty's dish and mixes a little of last night's cold rabbit stew in with it. Rusty is smart enough to know that it's too hot to eat and he settles down beside his dish, whining with impatience. ‘Be careful, ya'll burn yer tongue,' Jessica says absently as she fills a jam jar with water for the wattle blossom.

The birds are already calling out in the river gums, their morning song well under way, and Jessica stops and watches briefly as a grey heron glides down to land on a rock near the far bank of the creek. This morning the kookaburras are winning the contest, which they usually do. The turkeys, of course, are having their say, gobbling away nineteen to the dozen, expecting to be let out of the run, but the river birds are more than a match for them. Carrying the jar of wattle blossom and a damp cloth, Jessica walks the short distance to Billy Simple's grave. She has ‘buried' him between the smooth white folds of two large surface roots belonging to the giant river gum, placing the cross exactly where she'd once put her baby on Christmas morning 1914, when her family had arrived to find she'd given birth to Joey.

For Jessica this is a sacred spot. Not only is it the site of Billy Simple's gravestone, but for her it has come to symbolise Jack's death as well. At the end of the day she often comes to sit under the tree beside the gravestone to think of Jack and to read his faded letters.

Jessica places the jar to one side and begins to wipe the face of the cross with the damp cloth. On every occasion she does this she thinks of Solly Goldberg who, so many years ago now, out of the goodness of his heart, commissioned the fine cross of polished grey granite just to please her.

How wonderful he has been to her over the years, taking her turkeys and even giving them a name, so that a ‘Redlands Turkey' is known amongst the Jewish community in Sydney as the very best there is. It is a turkey with a unique flavour that, curiously, needs no salt. Jessica once explained to Solly in a letter that this came about because the birds constantly pecked at saltbush.

In
his very next letter to her Solly wrote, ‘So let me tell you the wonderful news, my dear. Now I am selling turkeys “salted by Mother Nature”. You like it? For this, Mrs Turkey Shopper must pay one shilling more!'

Jessica wipes the side and the back of the granite cross and then places the jar of wattle down in front of it. She pulls back slightly to admire her handiwork and then, with her finger, she traces the inscription across the arms and down the centre to its base while quietly reciting the Lord's Prayer.

William D'arcy Simon

‘Billy Simple'

A great

mate

to

Jack

and

Jessica

R.I.P.

* 1892-1914 *

Finally she reaches to the back of the cross, to the plinth where her finger finds the small inscription written in Yiddish:
Mit'n Best'n Vinchen By Mrs Goldberg,
which she knows in English means ‘Compliments Mrs Goldberg'.

It takes a good part of the day to herd the turkeys to the siding and get them into their wire packing cages and to feed, water and settle them down. Jessica collects her library book sent up the line by Miss French and leaves the one she must return and then she goes to visit Joe's grave at St Stephen's. By two o'clock she must be outside the schoolyard in the hope that she might catch a glimpse of young Joey, who has grown into a robust and noisy eight-year-old. The child has blue eyes and fair hair and it's not too hard to see he's a Bergman.

On the days she sees him, Jessica nearly chokes with her love for her son as she watches him get onto his pony and start out for home with two other boys. Sometimes he'll look at her and once he'd ridden up and squinted up at her. ‘Why are you dressed like a man, missus?' he'd asked.