But if she can only be a poor farmer’s wife, then she would prefer to stay where she is, with the life she has being Joe’s partner. All of this wells up in Jessica and leaves her confused — she has only questions and no answers.
Now, at eighteen, she tells herself she isn’t going to get a husband who will treat her half decent. Hester has told her that often enough for Jessica to believe her. So, she convinces herself, having babies doesn’t matter, you can’t have babies if you don’t have a husband.
Jessica is aware that most of the marriages in the district are shotgun weddings, but she won’t let that happen to her. Often at night, though, alone in bed, she wonders what it would be like to love a man and have him be inside her. Yet the thought that what she’s doing with her fingers, that what feels so good, is secretive and sinful disturbs her. She is not like that, she is not bad and has no other secrets but for this one, bad as it is.
Jessica longs to talk to someone about how she feels, to unburden herself, confess that she’s done wrong. But she can’t imagine anyone she knows who would listen to her without thinking she was a wicked girl who has sinned against God.
When Jessica left school at twelve to help Joe, she’d soon lost contact with girls her own age except to see them at the Narrandera Show or sometimes in church or a woolshed dance. Most are now married with a child at their side and another at the breast, or swelling in their stomach, the first the proverbial shotgun pregnancy and the second the result of their fecundity and a young husband exercising his conjugal rights. At eighteen their thighs are beginning to thicken, shoulders to droop, they have lost the brightness in their eyes, and their expressions are no longer curious. It’s this vacant look of the respectable country poor which Jessica dreads might some day be her own fate.
Jessica thought about talking to God, but from what she knows of Him, compliments of the Reverend Mathews, M.A. Oxon., He wouldn’t be exactly sympathetic. ‘Straight to Hell for you, my girl! No pleasuring of parts unseen before wedlock. Out of my sight!’ He’d be like Hester, only worse.
Standing naked in the tiny room, Jessica feels the first prickle of the day’s heat. Her right shoulder hurts and she recalls the shotgun blast and smiles to herself — the snakes are another secret, something else she must keep to herself. Though she doesn’t feel guilty about that one. What they don’t know can’t hurt them and she hasn’t done anything wrong. She prods at her right shoulder, it feels stiff and aches a bit. She tentatively winds her arm around a couple of times and winces. Not too bad, the bruise isn’t showing yet, no more than a bit of swelling, could be worse. She decides she can use the arm well enough — it will loosen up when she’s milking.
She takes up the washcloth again and rinses it, then wipes her sweat-covered body all over, not bothering to towel herself dry. The damp cloth feels cool against her skin, but she knows that in the few moments it will take to dry, the rising heat will make her face and neck break out in a thin coat of sweat again.
Jessica doesn’t spare a second thought for the weather outside — it’s wasted energy thinking about the heat. Like every other day, this one’s going to be a scorcher. It’s two months before the rains are due, if they come at all. She pours fresh water into a tin mug and scrubs her teeth with some bicarbonate of soda, spitting into the basin and then rinsing her mouth.
Considering the heat she has slept well enough, though she can remember dreaming of clouds. Blood red clouds. Probably from thinking of what Joe’s said about war coming.
The dogs have stopped barking as she pulls on a pair of old cotton bloomers with elastic at the waist and above her knees. Elastic is a new invention which Jessica thinks must surely be one of the best things ever made for women. She pulls on her moleskin trousers and a red flannel shirt, which she carelessly tucks into her waistband, and then buckles her broad leather belt. In her only concession to femininity Jessica reaches for her pinafore hanging from a nail on the wall, slips it around her neck and ties it about her waist. The pinny is a useful garment with its large front pocket, far more practical than the pockets in her moleskins, and so she sees no reason to discard it. She even enjoys the way a new stockman or shearer will look at the rosebud Meg or Hester always embroiders in the corner, not quite knowing what to think of her.
Finally she goes over to the side of her iron cot where she’d kicked off her working boots last night. Holding one boot pinned to the floor with her toes she works her small foot into its worn and scruffy leather upper, then sits herself down on the bed and pulls the second boot onto her left foot.
As part of the routine she uses to get into the day Jessica bends slightly forward and massages her sku
ll vigorously, then rakes the fingers of both hands impatiently through her short fair hair, patting it down. Hair, Jessica discovered as a child, keeps the fair sex in bondage, from which, at fourteen, she decided to make her escape.
When she’d got the job at the shearing shed and had suggested to her mother that she’d like her hair cut short Hester had become hysterical. ‘You’ll look like a boy!’ she’d shouted at her daughter. ‘I forbid you! A woman’s hair is a gift from the Lord God Himself! What could you be thinking of, Jessica?’
But this argument didn’t impress Jessica, who’d never really found God to be on her side anyway. Rejecting His gift to womankind she took to her long blonde hair with a pair of scissors, cropping her head like a man’s. She’d cut Joe’s often enough to know her way around a head of hair and when her snipping was complete she was confident she’d made a passable job of it: Knowing that no matter what happened next it couldn’t be put back again, Jessica resolved to take whatever punishment she had coming from her mother. Looking defiant, she’d walked into the kitchen where Hester and Meg were baking oat biscuits.
Meg had been the first to look up as she entered. Bringing her flour-whitened hands to her cheeks, she’d let out a piercing scream. Hester looked up in alarm and then promptly burst into tears.
‘Oh my God!’ she wailed. ‘We’ve lost her! Lost her for good to the Devil!’
Jessica felt a bit better. Her mother being busy with blubbing meant that she wouldn’t think of a particularly nasty punishment on the spot. ‘I’m not dead, Mother!’ she’d protested.
‘Might as well be,’ Hester wept. ‘You’re no daughter of mine any more!’
Meg, recovered from her initial shock, then had a go at Jessica. ‘You’re a foolish girl and a disgrace to your kind. How dare you do this to us! To me!’ She shook a floury finger at her sister. ‘Just you wait until Father sees what you’ve done!’
Jessica was saved. By referring her hair to Joe, her sister made it impossible for Hester to interfere and impose her own punishment. Jessica often feels that Meg is more the cranky mother than Hester, and certainly they have no sisterly relationship. Only three years separate them, but it might as well be a whole generation.
At tea that night Joe barely glanced at his youngest daughter and despite Hester and Meg trying to prod him into punishing her, he simply looked up at Jessica and said, ‘I reckon it’s damned practical for the work she does, that’s all. Leave her alone.’
‘But it will destroy us, Father,’ Meg had howled.
‘The only thing that’ll destroy us is if the bank doesn’t give me an extension on our loan until the heifer sales,’ Joe growled in reply. ‘I’m telling ya, leave the girlie alone.’
Jessica recalls how she wasn’t too upset at Hester’s threat that she was ‘no daughter of mine’. Since the time when Joe clouted her at the table over the snake incident and her mother abandoned her for the meat dish, there have been a dozen or more such declarations, all followed by a promise of permanent banishment from Hester’s affections.
The most recent incident was when she’d come second in her age group at the Narrandera Agricultural Show, working Red, the oldest kelpie, to herd and pen thirty sheep.
‘Listen to me, my girl, men don’t like a woman who shows them up! A working dog is men’s work,’ Hester scolded her. ‘I give up on you!’
In a strange way, these constant threats have made Jessica realise that in her mother’s eyes, she might still hold some hope. One day she might have a long enough run of good behaviour to get back into Hester’s good books. Although, until Meg gets hitched to Jack Thomas or, if she fails to hook him, some other eligible young bloke, Jessica isn’t sweating on a change of heart from her mother.
If Jessica has never wished to be a boy, she’s never really been allowed to be a girl either. She only wants to be accepted as being as capable as those who work with her. It is her misfortune that what she does well is generally seen as a man’s work. But she doesn’t ask any favours because she’s a girl. If she’s up to the job, then she wants to be treated as an equal. If she fails, then she’s prepared to cop whatever’s coming to her and learn from the experience. In her naturally stubborn mind it is a simple enough request. She doesn’t want to play at being the modest little woman always putting herself down in front of males. She -can do the job well enough. It is what Joe expects from her, and she doesn’t know how it could be otherwise if she is to be his partner on the land. But with her green eyes, blonde hair and full sweet mouth, there’s not much chance of Jessica pulling off any such grand ambition. The young blokes won’t have it — she can’t be one of them even if she works as hard and is as good as they are. She’s still a girl and therefore she must publicly cop their scorn and privately feed their fantasies.