Jessica (64 page)

‘Do we honestly believe that we can afford the process of selecting these children by giving their mothers and fathers — that is, if the father may even be found — the benefit of the doubt? What shall we do — examine the parents and if they obtain a pass-mark allow them to keep their children? It is far better to spread a wide net and to gather in a few innocents while bagging a majority of the guilty. The law is not infallible, it will make mistakes, but are they not affordable in the light of the splendid consequences planned for the mixed-blood children of this land?'

Codlington turns to Justice Blackall. ‘Your Honour, I rest my case and put my trust in the laws of this land. They have made the British people the greatest on earth and it is a marvel that we are prepared to share the bounty of our civilisation with people of a lesser one so that their children might benefit.'

Codlington seems well pleased with himself. Runche has not interrupted with a host of pernicious objections so that the flow of his oratory and, he tells himself, his damned fine common sense have been allowed to prevail. The day in court, which on several occasions looked blighted and where he has been wrong-footed by a man whose reputation as a drunk is only slightly less notorious than his reputation for incompetence, has been rescued by his own acuity. Codlington believes that, by relying on the solid foundations of the law and his belief and trust in the system, he has once again got himself out of the deep water into the murmuring shallows.

Justice Blackall gives notice that he will give his verdict at half past four and retires to his chambers.

Jessica is a bundle of nerves and Mary remains silent. There is too much resting on the outcome for her even to hope and she sits on the park bench outside the courthouse in a state of numbness.

Moishe wonders if they have got it all wrong. Maybe they should have fought the case along similar lines to the magistrate's hearing at Narrandera, he worries. The logic he had used there was irrefutable and he had felt at the time that had the magistrate possessed the power to release Mary's children he would have done so. Codlington's stonewalling had been impressive and Moishe knows that it was an accurate summation of the prevailing opinion of white Australians. Had they taken a wrong turn in trying to prove that the government institution, with the power of the law behind it, was abusing its power? Governments are not prone to censure their own instrumentalities, he knows only too well, and especially if the work of those instrumentalities is approved by a majority of the people.

Runche for his part feels weary and he would sell his soul for a bottle of claret. He has been preoccupied with the case for nearly two years and he has lost the vanity that makes a barrister believe he can win against the odds. It has only been Jessica's burning desire for justice that has kept him going. He's always known that they'd only get one chance, that they would make history or disappear entirely. Runche now tells himself that David very seldom triumphs against Goliath and that they've probably used the wrong tactic — that they should have brought the case of Millie Carter to trial and by winning it perhaps exposed the Aborigines' Protection Board more effectively and thereafter petitioned for a change in the law. How tired he is, how weary of it all — his bones ache, his mind is empty and he thinks only of the oblivion promised in a bottle of cheap claret.

The court is reconvened at half past four to hear Justice Blackall read his verdict. He is careful to sum up both cases and it is clear to Moishe and Runche that the judge has clearly seen what it is they have attempted to do. Jessica and Mary are lost in the tedium of his words until finally he brings down his gavel.

‘I have made my decision in favour of the plaintiff, Mrs Mary Simpson. I instruct that her two children, Polly and Sarah, at present under the jurisdiction of the Aborigines' Protection Board and in the care of the Cootamundra Domestic Training Home for Aboriginal Girls, be returned to their mother. I am quite sure in my mind that Mrs Simpson's two girls stand a better chance of living fulfilled and useful lives without the State controlling their destinies. I direct that the whereabouts of Mrs Simpson's two youngest daughters be made known to her and that she be allowed to make the decision as to whether they will be returned to her or will remain with their foster parents.' Justice Blackall pauses. ‘We are responsible for the administration of the laws of the land, but we seldom question whether the laws of the land are responsible. It is not sufficient that we accept every law without equivocation simply because we are its custodians. We of the law are accustomed to arguing the smallest points of jurisprudence while often neglecting to see its glaring deficiencies. The law must be based on the charitable behaviour of people rather than making people behave according to the law. Laws should be based on natural justice and not on punitive reaction, on enlightenment and not on our fear. As a judge I am charged to uphold it. As a human being I have only this last to say.' Justice Blackall looks about him. ‘As long as history shall prevail, the love of a mother for her child cannot be replaced by an institution which will give the child a full belly and an empty heart.' Justice Blackall brings down his gavel. ‘This court is now in recess.'

Richard Runche turns to Jessica, takes her hand and, squeezing it, he says, ‘Jessica Bergman, my dear, you have made history.'

Jessica turns tearfully and hugs Mary, though inwardly she mourns for her own lost child, for her precious Joey. ‘We've done it, Mary, we've done it!' she sobs.

T
he year is 1929 and the New York Stock Exchange has collapsed and plunged the world into the beginning of the Great Depression.

It is also the year that Richard Runche KC doesn't wake up one cloudless morning in mid-March. The old man is usually up at dawn for a wash by the side of the creek, whereupon it is his habit to light the fire outside the hut and put the billy on to boil. He'd make a mug of strong, dark tea sweetened with honey, just the way Jessica likes it, and then he'd wake her up.

Jessica wakes this bright day to find the light too sharp for the hour she usually rises. The hut is stifling with the sun baking down onto the tin roof. She lies for a moment feeling confused, curious that Runche hasn't woken her with her usual cup of tea. She dresses hurriedly and comes outside to find the lanky Englishman lying in his bed under the lean-to on his back with his hands folded across his chest and his legs stuck straight out. He looks for all the world like an ageing knight laid out in a great medieval cathedral. Jessica reaches down and touches his calm face and knows the instant she does that he is dead.

Mary arrives later in the morning and, taking turns to dig the grave, Jessica and Mary bury Richard Runche next to Billy Simple's gravestone and not far from one of Runche's beloved beehives.

The barrister born into the English nobility, whose ancestors, since the time of the crusades, have lain in the same quiet churchyard in the village of Cerne Abbas in Dorset, now lies forever beside a quiet stream under the shade of a giant river gum. Here is no green and pleasant ancestral grave, no murmuring brook or dark shade of oak. This is a landscape beautiful only to those who know that beauty must be hard-won in the mind and the eye as well as in the heart. It is a harsh, new beauty with very little antecedent poetry to till and seed the white man's imagination. A landscape that must be viewed with an Aboriginal eye to see its colours and patterns and cunning shifts in perspective. The whitefella eye is still a long, long way from seeing this land's dreaming and the whitefella's heart is not yet fully opened to the high and ancient antipodean sky.

Jessica and Mary stand over the Englishman's grave and say the Lord's Prayer. Both cry a little, but not for long — they loved the old man too much for a bout of rag-sodden weeping. ‘Don't cry for me when I'm gone, my dears, I should hate that,' he once said as they sat around the fire one night.

‘Don't worry, we won't,' Jessica had replied cheekily.

‘I'll be cranky as hell—who's gunna bring me tea in the mornin'?'

Mary had laughed. ‘First thing that's gunna happen, we're gettin' rid o' them flamin' beehives of yours. I been stung that often I couldn't count that high, even with all the education you give me.'

Now as they sit at the rough wooden table, weary from digging Runche's grave and saying their farewells, Jessica sips a cup of tea. ‘Well, I know he died happy.

He told me once that getting me outa the loony-bin, and getting back Polly and Sarah from Cootamundra, and fighting for Millie Carter and seeing the matron sent to prison for murdering her were the only good things he reckoned he'd ever done.'

‘He didn't take no credit for it neither,' Mary says.

‘He always said it was you give him the chance to be decent for once in his life.'

‘He was always decent, there wasn't a bad bone in his body. He was born decent and he died decent,' Jessica murmurs sadly.

Mary laughs. ‘And givin' up the grog — that was another good thing he did.'

Jessica smiles, remembering. ‘Not that we gave the old bugger a chance to get back onto the sauce again. Even Rusty would have stopped him going into a pub if he'd tried.'

‘I never seen that done before. I never seen a drunk that's as far gone as him, that's got them DTs, who give up drinkin'. When we brought him back from Wagga, I truly thought you was mad. I was sure we was bringing back a dead whitefella we'd only have to take the trouble to bury.' Mary seems to be thinking. ‘And he was right about Dulcie and Katie.'

Jessica looks up, surprised. ‘I've never heard you say that before.'

‘Well I should have told him so,' Mary says regretfully. Jessica thinks back to the time after the court case when they'd won, and the judge had ordered the Aborigines' Protection Board to return Mary's children. It had taken another year before the Board finally gave them the name of the foster parents with whom the baby Katie and little Dulcie had been placed. She remembers how they'd arrived at a nice house in Gosford belonging to Kevin and Doreen Blake, a childless couple who'd fostered Mary's two youngest children. What they'd found were two happy, healthy children clinging to the skirts of a pretty white lady who was very close to tears. Dulcie and Katie were dressed in charming little white dresses with yellow socks pulled up to their chubby knees and little patent leather shoes and they both wore a bright yellow ribbon in their hair.

Jessica recalls how Mary rushed up to them and how the two children had backed away from her, their eyes fearful, for of course neither of them recognised the strange dark woman coming at them with her arms wide open. What a crying match that had been. The two girls were howling and clinging to their white foster mother, who was also howling and clasping them tightly. Then Mary had started bawling, not knowing what to do, and even Kevin Blake sniffed into his handkerchief, about as useful as tits on a bull.

Richard Runche, who'd brought the papers with him to reclaim Mary's children, sat them all down and talked things out quietly with them. It was obvious that the Blakes loved Dulcie and Katie as if they were their own and that they were truly broken-hearted at the prospect of losing them. The barrister had finally taken Mary outside into the garden, where they remained talking for nearly an hour while the sobbing continued inside the house. When they returned, a still-sobbing Mary agreed that Kevin and Doreen Blake could keep her two youngest and that they had her permission to formally adopt them. Mary had never yet confided in Jessica what Richard Runche had said to her to make her change her mind.

‘Mary, it ain't none of my business, but what did the old bloke say to you, you know, about Dulcie and Katie, when he took you into the garden that time?'

Mary looks up from her mug of tea. ‘That a tough day, Jessie. We talked a lot there in that lovely garden and then the old bloke said something that I couldn't find no answer to. He said, “Mary, you can't give more love than they've already got.'” Sudden tears well in Mary's eyes as she remembers. ‘He was right, Jessie. Whitefella love is the same as blackfella love. Me kids were loved, that's all a mother can ask for.'

At first, after the death of Richard Runche, Jessica finds it difficult to settle down. The old bloke had become part of her life and he'd always been cheerful and busy enough with his beloved bees. The honey from his eight hives is now a Solly Goldberg delicacy and Jessica would send it out in a ten-gallon milk can along with her turkeys and Solly would bottle and label it.

REDLANDS RIVER GUM HONEY

‘By gum, it's good!'

After his death Jessica gives the hives to Mary, who now has a small income from the turkeys and bees, even though the Great Depression is beginning to bite savagely and times are hard with thousands of Australian families thrown out of work. There are men on the roads again, carrying their swags and looking for a day's or a week's work in return for their tucker and a little tobacco.

And even Solly has had to reduce his weekly order for turkeys. ‘Never mind my dear, we manage. A kosher turkey is blessed by God.' Jessica has very few personal needs and her greatest use for money is saving up to put young Polly Simpson through teachers' training college at Wagga Wagga when she's old enough.

Young Joey has been sent to the King's School in Parramatta and Jessica feels fortunate if she can just catch a glimpse of him on horseback during the school holidays. He has grown into a tall fourteen-year-old and takes after his grandfather in looks. He is a bigboned boy, a little clumsy-looking, with a mop of blond hair and ice-blue eyes.

The future owner of Riverview Station has for the past four years competed with boys of his own age at the Narrandera Show, and Jessica leaves Mary to tend the turkeys and stays with Auntie Dolly so that she might attend every event he competes in. Hester and Meg no longer accept Jessica as family — her friendship with Mary has seen to that — so that they look through her as though she no longer exists.

Joey is too heavy in the saddle and lacks the natural balance needed to be a good horseman, and he always finishes well down in the field. Jessica is finally forced to admit he is a bad loser, for he seems to sulk if he doesn't win. He'll hand his horse to a stable boy and stomp away to be comforted by Meg and Hester, who make no end of a fuss of him.

Back home Jessica tends to bore Mary endlessly with all the details. ‘The boy's mollycoddled because Jack's not there to see he grows up proper. He's soft, you can see it — soft in the saddle, lazy, and he doesn't respect the horse. Sniffy too, he don't talk to the other lads much and I ain't seen him rub down his mount once. It's Meg and Hester, them two's made a sissy outa him. Jack would never have stood it. He'd soon have knocked that sort o' nonsense outa him, his grandpa woulda too. Joe wouldn't let him get away with that sort of rot. One day he's got to run Riverview and he's gotta start earnin' his respect now. Country folk've got long memories and Meg and Hester ought to be ashamed of what they're doing to my boy.'

Mary knows this kind of talk will be on for a week after Jessica's return from Narrandera and she has learned to make all the right women's noises without taking too much notice. She knows Jessica hopes that her boy will grow up to be like Jack or if he can't be like Jack, at least like Joe — both hard men. Jessica often wonders aloud to Mary what Joey would be like in a fight. ‘Too soft and slow and he'd go bawlin' to Meg or his granny,' she reckons.

It's early October and there have been good rains, though with the Depression the bottom has fallen out of wool prices. Jessica can almost hear Joe looking down from heaven and saying, ‘That's right, good rains for the first time in ten years and we have to shoot the lambs and it ain't worth clippin' and balin' the flamin' wool. God hates this bloody country!, The rains and the early summer heat have brought out the snakes. Snakes seem to know when there's a good season about to come, with plenty of rodents for their young. Jessica is losing more than half a dozen turkey chicks a day and she is forced to keep them inside the. run. She's also losing several hens who are too stupid to look where they scratch in the saltbush, and with so many snakes about, Rusty shows her several dead birds each day. The only good thing that can be said is that the wattle and red gum blossom are in profusion and Mary's hives are brimming with the best honey the women can remember getting.

‘Good thing Solly's order is down. At this rate I reckon it's gunna be hard to give him the birds he wants, come Hanukkah.'

‘What's Hanukkah?' Mary asks.

‘It's Jewish Christmas, well sort of, without Jesus,' Jessica says.

‘And they eat turkey like us?' Mary laughs. ‘Until I know you, Jessie, I never tasted turkey in my whole life. At the Mission all they give us Christmas mornin' was cold mutton with maggots.'

‘Nah,' Jessica explains. ‘They don't eat turkey at Hanukkah, well not especially anyway. Moishe tells me Solly has a notice in his shop for the Mrs Turkey Shoppers.
To try a little turkey for Hanukkah don't make you Christian. It delicious, it kosher, so why not? God bless!
But Moishe reckons that Solly goes gentile at Christmas and he's got a nice little arrangement with Hannan's Butcher Shop in Rose Bay to sell the turkeys to the rich Eastern Suburbs matrons.'

Jessica sighs and says, ‘But this year I don't suppose there's going to be a whole lot of turkey on the table for most folk, what with the snakes and the Depression. I might as well shut the hatchery down and save the kerosene and grain.'

These are the things which occupy Jessica's mind into late October and the coming of summer. It is a really hot morning, the first of the summer blinders. Jessica has let everything except the turkey chicks out of the run and Rusty is busy seeing they stay bunched up in the nearest paddock. Mary has gone up to Wagga to see Polly and Sarah and Jessica is smoking a hive to fill Solly's weekly order for honey. The order for turkeys is still way down but Solly can't get enough Redlands ‘By gum, it's good!' honey.

Jessica hears Rusty growl and then give a short, sharp bark. She is holding a full honeycomb, which she's just removed from the frame. ‘Oh shit,' she says in alarm and drops the frame and runs to the hut for the shotgun.

Her hands are sticky with honey as she breaks the twin barrels and feeds two birdshot cartridges into them. Rusty is still whining and barking as she comes out of the hut and Jessica is cursing her sticky hands. She runs over to the nearest paddock just in time to see the kelpie emerging from under an old man saltbush.

‘Rusty, come here boy,' she calls and the dog turns and comes towards her. At ten feet she can see the two scarlet cuts on his nose. ‘Oh Jesus, no!' Jessica screams, frozen to the spot, and the kelpie goes down on his front legs. Rusty gets up and tries to reach her but falls again. His eyes are still bright but he seems to have lost his sense of direction. He gets up and walks sideways, but falls over and tries once more to stand up. Jessica sees with horror the thin line of white foam around his mouth. Rusty makes one last desperate effort to reach his mistress, and gives a pathetic little whine as though he is trying to apologise to her for being so stupid. Then he collapses at her feet.