Suddenly she hears Joe’s words loud and clear in her head while the sound of the second shot echoes across the creek to the paddock beyond. ‘A big brown’ll hunt you down, stalk you all the way home. If it’s cranky there’ll be no stopping it. If you’ve shot one of the mongrels always keep a fresh shot up the spout for its mate, girlie.’
The second snake strikes high, catching her in the neck. She never even saw it, the mate, its deadly partner which has come after her.
Jessica makes it back to the hut and thinks about saddling the horse and trying to get to Riverview Station, which is an hour’s ride away. The bite is just under her jaw and there is no way she can hope to put a tourniquet on it. She is already feeling dizzy and nauseous.
Now she’s having trouble with her eyes, starting to see double. She knows she has no chance — she’s got half an hour at the most — and she won’t be able to stay in the saddle if she tries to ride to Meg and Hester and her beloved Joey.
Jessica pulls the little brass key from around her neck and removes a small box from the shelf above her bed and unlocks it. Inside is a gold hunter watch and a bundle of letters neatly tied. Even with her vision becoming steadily more blurry, Jessica seems to know precisely which letter she wants.
She places the letter and the watch on the table, drags off her boots and strips off her moleskins and flannel shirt and steps out of her bloomers. Naked, she leaves the hut, staggers over to the creek and wades into the water up to her waist and stands beside the same submerged rock she’d pushed against when she’d given birth to Joey fifteen years ago. Jessica washes herself carefully, conserving her strength, her every movement slow and deliberate. She can hear the water running over the rock and a group of rose-breasted galahs quarrelling in the paddock and the cicadas in the gum trees stinging the air with the pitch of their noise. Somehow she makes her way back into the hut. Her body is still hard and young and she still doesn’t know how attractive it is. There hasn’t been anyone around to tell her that at thirty-three years of age she has become a very beautiful woman.
Jessica dries herself slowly and then puts on one of Auntie Dolly’s pretty dresses, the ones she’d been given after she’d left the loony-bin. She feels very dizzy as she attempts to button up her good shoes but manages to complete the task. Then she unfolds a clean pinny — it’s one she has kept all these years with Meg’s rosebud embroidered in the corner of the pocket. She slips it over her head and ties it behind her back. Her movements are growing slower and her arms are heavy with fatigue as she picks up the watch and letter and puts them in her pocket. Jessica then walks shakily into the blinding sun, though she feels cold and seems to walk as if in a dream.
She reaches the outside table where Rusty lies and slips her arms under his body. His dead weight is almost too much for her but she summons the last of her strength and, lifting him, she places him down in front of Billy’s gravestone.
Rusty’s head is on his paws as though he is asleep in the shade of the old river gum. Jessica sits down slowly with her back against the rear of the gravestone, against the lettering which says in Yiddish, Compliments Mrs Goldberg. She discovered two years ago that there had never been a Mrs Goldberg — that in fact Sally did all the baking, as Moishe’s mother had died in childbirth. She gives a weak smile at this thought.
Jessica has only enough strength to reach into her pinny and to open the back of the gold hunter Jack had left her as he lay dying.
Then she takes the letter from her pocket and unfolds it, placing it on her lap with the beautiful old antique watch on top of it so the letter won’t blow away. Her eyelids feel leaden and she closes her eyes. ‘I loved you, Jack,’ she whispers. ‘I always did and I always will.’
Mary finds Jessica with her back resting against Billy Simple’s gravestone. From a distance Jessica looks as though she is asleep, so Mary does not shout out to her.
It’s only when she draws closer that she sees Jessica is dead with Rusty lying beside her, resting together as Mary had seen the two of them so often. ‘Good mates, them two,’ she murmurs, tears springing to her eyes.
She kneels beside her friend and takes the watch from her lap. Pasted against the open lid is a small curl of blonde hair, which seems to be stuck against the lid with a tiny lump of tar. Scratched into the gold above it in crude letters, as though etched with the blade of a penknife, are the words I love you, Tea Leaf.
Mary picks up the letter and sees that it is in Jessica’s handwriting. She begins to read.
6 August 1914
My darling Jack,
Today the war clouds over Europe finally broke and they have taken you from me to fight in the war. I know that you will be brave but my heart breaks for fear that I may never see you again. I am writing this letter to you, though I shall never send it. If you come back to me I shall kiss your sweet lips and feel your strong body against mine and tell you what it says. If you do not return, you will never know that I carry your child.
My strongest wish is that I may give you a son as handsome and as brave as his father. A boy who you may teach to be a man as loving and gentle as you are.
I shall never love again, for I shall never again feel as I did when you loved me in Narrandera. When you carried me in your arms and stayed by my bed for two days while they made me stay in hospital. I will never forget how on the third night you came to the window. There was a moon, I remember, not quite full, and you came to the window and threw a pebble onto my bed to wake me. ‘Come, Jessie,’ you said. ‘Come and walk in the moonlight with me.’
And then later we made love under a big old gum, with the wind in the high leaves sounding like the waves against the shore I’ve only dreamt of, those leaves rustling in the w
ind high up in the gum tree. Your body was so beautiful and when you were inside me, the pleasure was almost unbearable and I thought I must surely die. Oh Jack, I loved you so very much.
I can feel our child, it kicks inside me. I know it will be a boy for already the kicks are rough and wild. With every kick I think of you, my dear, sweet, beautiful Jack.
Stay safe, dear Jack. Stay brave and true. You are forgiven for Meg, for she has nothing of you and I have everything. I have your child.
I love you, Jack. I always did and I always will.
Tea Leaf.
Mary looks up from her letter at the sound of wailing. Then she sees them, the black people. They are wading through the creek. The aunties and the old men and the gins with babies on their breasts. They’re splashing through the shallows and beginning to wail, to cry in the way that women cry when the greatest has gone away from them.
At first there are only a few, but as the hours pass more and more come. By evening there are hundreds, more black people than Mary knew there could possibly be in the district. They come continuously for two days from Lachlan River, Nyngan, Wagga Wagga, Wilcannia and all the camps and settlements across the black soil plains and further still. West and north, east and south from the Victorian border, they come, and they don’t know why. And then they know, they’ve come to take Jessica into her dreaming.