Jessica remembers what a pitiful sight they’d been, no more than skin and bone. Their arms and legs were covered in open sores where the flies clustered in swarms. The stomachs of the naked children were distended to the size of small watermelons and their dark eyes seemed too large in their woolly little heads. She could see the shape of their skulls under the tightly stretched skin covering their coal-black faces. Flies crawled at the corners of their eyes and up their nostrils and they seemed too tired to brush them aside. Their limbs were like twigs you could snap with a sharp twist of your thumb and forefinger, and lice swarmed over their heads.
‘Poor bastards, all ribs and prick, like a drover’s dog,’
Joe said.
Jessica recalls how the adults smelled of rotting flesh. The torn, filthy rags they wore may have once been clothing but now concealed very little. They hung in bits and pieces over random parts of their skinny bodies, hardly hiding their private parts.
Meg had come to the kitchen door first and ran screaming for Hester. Hester called to Jessica to bring the shotgun, but Joe came in and stopped his wife from driving them away.
He’d given them a bag of flour for damper and let them have a wether, slaughtering the old sheep for them himself. He allowed them to stay in the bottom paddock which fronted the river and was well wooded and out of sight, warning them not to be seen or he’d have to send them away.
He’d let Jessica use the shotgun to kill a roo for them every other day, or take the small-bore rifle, the .22, and shoot half a dozen rabbits. At this time of the year, though, there was hardly a bite of meat on a rabbit. ‘Vermin eating vermin,’ Joe would laugh, making a cheap joke out of his own charity. The roos she shot were full of worms but Joe said, ‘Blacks don’t care, don’t take any notice of things like that.’
‘You mean people who are starving don’t care!’ she’d protested.
‘Right,’ he said, seeing the look in her eyes and not wishing to take the matter any further.
Jessica had gone into their camp every afternoon with strips of clean rags for bandages and a big jar of sulphur ointment Joe had produced for her. He said it was good for horses and he’d often enough used it on himself when he was a boundary rider and he’d come to no harm. She boiled water and cleaned the sores on the children’s little arms and legs with a strong permanganate of potash solution before applying Joe’s ointment. She tried not to retch at the suppurating flesh that came away on the dressings, often leaving only bone behind. The children hardly ever bawled when she dressed them and they loved the brightly coloured bandages and so were careful to keep them on afterwards.
Joe told her she’d done good, but not to get too concerned, blacks were tough as old boots and had their own bush medicine. He said, ‘If they want to die they’ll just lay down and be dead on the spot, Jessie, wish themselves dead, and there’s nothing yiz can do about it.’ But Jessica didn’t see them gathering any of their own medicine and none of them seemed to want to lie down and die, so she kept on with the dressings.
After a while one of the gins grew a bit friendly. She was younger than most of the women. Jessica thought she was sixteen, a year older than herself, though it was difficult to tell from her starving body. Her mission name was Mary Simpson and she spoke a little English, learned from the Lutheran Mission station up near the Lachlan Swamps.
Mary was from the local Wiradjuri tribe, and had been taken as a bride by the Wongaibon tribe from the north who made up the rest of her small band. She first approached Jessica to say that some of the gins wanted to use Joe’s ointment on themselves as well as on the children. Soon Mary was helping her with the dressings and translating what Jessica told her into their own language. They were a sad little mob, but in a few days with a bit of tucker in them, they started to smile again. The children seemed to recover first and soon got strong enough to play in the river, which meant they didn’t smell quite as bad as before.
One afternoon Mary came up to Jessica with all the kids in tow and they presented her with two yellowbelly and a redfin they’d caught.
‘For you,’ Mary said shyly. ‘They catch for you, Missus Jessie.’
They were starving but still they gave her the three fish, which she knew she couldn’t refuse. She thanked them, tears in her eyes. Yellow-belly is a good eating fish and she’d taken them home and cooked them. Hester and Meg turned up their noses but Joe said, apart from tasting a bit muddy this time of year, they were real good.
Hester commanded Jessica not to speak of Joe’s kindness. ‘You don’t breathe a word, you hear? Not to anyone. Folk are terrible tattle-tales — if people hear Joe Bergman is helping blacks it will do your father’s reputation no good.’ Hester knew well enough that any threat to Joe would keep her younger daughter’S trap firmly shut.
But Jessica, even then, knew what her mother really meant. On the basis of the popularity she’d gained over the shooing of the Aborigines off Riverview Station, Ada Thomas was thinking of standing for the position of councillor in the Shire elections, the first woman in the Riverina ever to contemplate such an action. If Joe’s kindness to the Aborigines was known then the Bergmans could be seen as nigger lovers, which would do Meg’s chances any amount of harm. But, despite all Hester’s fears, Ada Thomas lost the election anyway. People may have thought she was a hero but she was still a bossy boots and no one wanted to give her any more power than she already had.
As Jessica arrives at the homestead, she can hear that the dogs have worked themselves up into a howling frenzy. She’s locked the three kelpies in the shed so they wouldn’t follow her down to the river and get themselves bit to death. Red is gunna be real cranky, Jessica thinks to herself. Red is her dog, the oldest of the three, and he likes to be around her, always on the lookout in case she comes to harm. Red sees Jessica as his responsibility and he doesn’t like to be insulted by being shut away when there’s something going on.
By way of making up to them, Red in particular, Jessica decides they’ll get a bit extra in their bucket of bones and boiled hogget scraps. Maybe she’ll toss in a ladle or two of Hester’s soup gravy — that, she decides, should cheer ‘em up a treat. She can just hear Joe’s voice now, scolding her: ‘They’re working dogs, girlie.
Spoil a dog and it’ll never come good again. Sit on its bum under a tree all flaming day!’
But it would just be another of Joe’s gloomy predictions. Any deviation from the normal makes Joe uncomfortable and brings out his sense of impending disaster, what Jessica has come to think of as his ‘never come trues’. Red and the two other kelpies love to work and if one of them were to lay down on the job you could be damned sure something was seriously wrong with it — distemper, maybe, or a tick or a bite from a snake.
Jessica grins because she’s long since called her father’s bluff — she knows he’s not the cranky old bugger he pretends to be. He’s kind enough for anyone’s liking, but he just doesn’t want to be caught at it.
The Aborigines aren’t the only instance where Jessica’s caught Joe not practising his dog-eat-dog theory. He’ll slaughter a two-tooth and leave the dressed carcass at the back door of someone’s ‘place, or do the same with a side of bacon. He’ll hear a farmer is taken ill, and he’ll turn up to put in a couple of days’ ploughing, shearing,
harvesting or whatever needs doing.
It’s just that you never know what Joe is up to when he is doing good because he never speaks of it. If you catch him at it he’ll get stroppy and deny any dogooding. He’ll claim he’s sold the two-tooth for good money, or obtained a more than fair price for the bacon, or been paid wages for his labour. Meanwhile, it’s as plain as the nose on your face that the people who’ve received his kindness can no more afford a side of bacon than pay cash for the crown jewels. Yes, Jessica knows her old man, all right. He can be a real stubborn bugger with a bad temper, but as for dog-eat-dog, Joe never ate another dog in his life.
Jessica thinks over something wise Joe said recently. ‘There’s talk of war coming,’ he told her over smoko one day, ‘there’s war clouds gathering over Europe. The young fellers will have to head over there if it does come.’ Jessica imagines the dark gunpowder-black clouds over the cities and villages, with frightened people in coats and boots and scarves wrapped half around their faces looking up at them as more and more of them gather, until they fill every patch of blue sky. The wind howling and snow beginning to fall, with a terrible kind of darkness beginning to descend.
‘When will we know?’ asked Jessica, wide-eyed.
‘Reckon I’ll know more when we get back from town and I’ve seen the Sydney papers. I reckon Australia will be in it, boots and all. Young bucks being blooded, lots of bullshit flying around about duty to King and Country. Boer War veterans waving the flag and beating the drum, wearing their medals in the pub and telling how they knew A. H. Dufrayer, the hero from Morundah who was awarded the Queen’s Scarf — before he got killed, that is,’ Joe finished with a laconic twist.
‘What’s the Queen’s Scarf?’ she’d wanted to know.