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.
Jessica’s first concern is for her beloved Rusty. She puts the shotgun down and bends her knees to lift him and then cradles him in her arms and starts to carry him towards the hut. The kelpie is heavy and she can feel his heart racing against the inside of her arm. Her hands are sticky against his soft, warm fur and as she holds him, Jessica knows only one snake can have this effect on a dog. She is positive Rusty’s been bitten by a king brown. His entire body is now vibrating with the effects of the deadly venom. In her mind Jessica hears Joe’s words all those years back when she was just a brat. ‘A dog’s got maybe ten minutes, a big man maybe an hour.’ She remembers how he’d looked at her, measuring her weight in his head, and said, ‘Half an hour, you wouldn’t go beyond that, a mulga’s a real bastard.’ Joe liked to get things right — he always called a king brown a mulga, though it didn’t sound nearly as dangerous.
Now Jessica puts Rusty down on the table near Billy Simple’s gravestone. She knows there is nothing she can do to save him, so she runs to the hut and fetches a blanket to cover him. Then she washes her hands quickly and comes to sit beside him, stroking the kelpie’s head and holding his soft ear in her hand, crying and waiting for her best mate to die.
‘You were the only turkey-dog in the world, Rusty, and the best friend a whitefella ever had. I love you and I’m gunna miss you somethin’ terrible,’ she says, then Jessica feels his brave heart stop. With one last convulsive jerk, his legs stiffen and he dies.
Rusty, who had come to her as a puppy, a little squirming bundle of red colour and curiosity. When she’d come back from the loony-bin he’d been her best mate from the very first. He’d never whined and every morning of his life he’d be waiting faithfully for her outside the hut just to tell her that she was the best missus a dog could have. Rusty, the champion turkey-dog of the whole world, was dead, bitten by a fucking king brown when he was trying to save some stupid turkey hen. Jessica pulls the blanket over his head. ‘There’s too many people I love buried around here,’ she sobs. Then her breast is suddenly filled with rage. Not
hing is allowed to live in this godforsaken land, and nothing ever dies naturally. The land, the dust and heat and floods and drought, everything living off everything else, death and destruction everywhere. Nothing is safe from this monstrous land. For the first time in her life Jessica knows what Joe meant all those years ago, feels the bitterness he felt, shares his hatred and the bittersweet love for this miserable strip of earth.
Jessica rises, fuming, and in her mind she’s marked the spot where Rusty emerged from the bush. Snakes don’t move around much in the heat and the king brown always marks its territory. She walks over to the shotgun lying on the ground — the barrel is already too hot to touch from lying in the fierce heat. She pulls back the hammers and then approaches the thicket of saltbush and wattle. Now she sees why there’d be a snake in there. A small clump of rock is hidden by the bushes — it’s an ideal place for rodents, and a bloody snake would know that.
Jessica pushes the branches aside, stepping very carefully through the bush. Snakes are almost blind and deaf but if there’s one there it will feel her vibrations as she approaches. A king brown, knowing it has a safe place like an outcrop of rock, will stay put and lie in wait rather than risk coming out into open ground.
Jessica stands still, waiting until her eyes have grown used to the deep shade under the saltbush, not moving the shotgun held at her waist. She can fire from the hip if she has to — it will throw her back but at least she wouldn’t miss the bastard. Then she sees it — it’s a king brown all right, a real big bastard. It lies curled with its ugly head raised, forked tongue testing the air, knowing she is there and measuring the distance between them. She is close enough to see its obsidian eyes, dark as sudden death.
Jessica doesn’t panic as she slowly raises the shotgun to her shoulder, pushing the branches aside with the barrel so that she has a clear shot at the serpent’s head. She feels her hand pull back the trigger, then the rending of the air from the explosion and then the snake lashing at the branches as its head explodes when the birdshot smashes it to a pulp. ‘You bastard! You bastard, I’ve got you!’ Jessica screams, then in her fury she lets the second barrel go, the birdshot at close range ripping the already dead snake apart.