It’s as if he’s only just realised he hasn’t got his hat on. ‘You take a bath and wash your hair good, like I said, and I’ll bring you a hat. Orright?’
Billy nods, happy again. ‘Righto, Jessie.’ He leaves carrying the bar of soap in both hands as though it’s some precious object. Jessica watches him shambling towards the windlass and sees that he is limping, dragging his right foot along the ground. She remembers the billy and milking pail she’s left near where the dead dogs lie. She should fetch them back but right now she doesn’t have the courage to go back there.
Jessica feels herself go cold. She has been so calm until now — in shock — that she hasn’t thought that Billy might run away. If he does, she thinks, there isn’t much she could do except ride around to a few of the surrounding stations and farms and get what men she could find who aren’t too Sunday-drunk to saddle up and ride out to track him down.
But she feels sick at the thought of what these men might do if they came upon Billy alone in the bush. If a bunch of drunken larrikins should find him in some lonely gully they wouldn’t stop to ask any questions, they’d string Billy Simple up to the nearest branch or shoot him and leave him for the dingoes and the crows. Jessica quickly crosses the kitchen and walks into the tiny dark parlour where Joe keeps the small .22 lever action repeater. She takes the Winchester from the wall above the mantelpiece and goes over to the dresser and takes a packet of rim-fire cartridges from a shelf. Then she feeds eight copper-cased bullets, one by one, into the magazine. The feel of the metal bullets in her hand gives her a little more confidence, though she knows a .22 won’t stop Billy if he comes for her unless it’s a heart or brain shot. She pulls down the triggering arm and pushes the safety catch on. Jessica returns to the kitchen and puts the rifle into the wood box, covering it with several split logs.
The rifle now hidden, but easy to retrieve if need be, she runs to her bedroom and pours fresh water into the washbasin. Kicking her boots off, Jessica tears the clothes from her back and, standing naked at the basin, scrubs herself furiously. She rubs the sticky blood from her arm and scrubs between her legs and the inside of her thighs where she’s wet herself, then, rinsing the washcloth in the basin, she pulls a bucket from under the washstand and stuffs her discarded clothes into it, emptying the basin of soapy water over them. Jessica refills the basin from the jug and rinses the soap from her body. She washes her hair then dumps the soapy water again into the bucket and uses fresh water to rinse her hair. She reaches for a small, rough towel which hangs from the end of the washstand.
All this is done at a frantic pace, Jessica’s heart pounding all the while, fearful that Billy Simple might return and discover her naked. By the time she’s changed into fresh clothes and tied a new pinny about her waist, she is panting from the effort and the anxiety.
She moves to the back of the house, to Joe’s sleep-out.
She finds an old flannel shirt and a pair of work-stained moleskins, worn and patched but clean. She takes up Joe’s working hat, which has a hole in the crown. He’s gunna be real cranky about losing it, Jessica decides, for she knows it’s a toss-up whether a man likes a good worn pair of riding boots or his old, sweat-crusted hat best. She can’t remember a time when Joe didn’t have this battered and broken old headgear.
Jessica tucks the clothing and hat under her arm and is about to go to Joe’s medicine box when she notices a half-used packet of shag tobacco and cigarette papers on the apple box Joe uses for a bedside table. She drops the makings into her apron pocket together with a box of lucifers.
Now, from the small personal medicine box Joe keeps under his bed, she takes out a jar of his famous horse ointment. With Joe’s clothes and the yellow sulphur ointment, Jessica returns to the kitchen, placing the stuff on Hester’s working stool beside the table.
Since the killing of the dogs, Jessica hasn’t thought about Ada, Winifred and Gwen, the three dead Thomas women. She’s deliberately shunted them to the back of her mind, knowing that if she starts to brood, to stop and think what Billy has done, the horror of what has happened at Riverview will sap her will and she won’t have the strength to continue. Jack, where are you? she thinks, worrying about her friend and what’s going to happen when he gets home.
But Billy, for the moment, must be her only concern, all she can cope with.
Jessica still can’t get the dogs out of her mind, though. The terror she felt when Billy killed them so quickly and without a thought keeps returning. The sight of the two kelpies arcing in the air, the dull thud and cloud of black dust as Billy discarded the first, as though it were a bag of oats or a: slaughtered rabbit.
Joe says death is a part of living in the country and sometimes comes when you least expect it. She loved Red, who was a strong-eyed dog who ran wide. He was a dog, Joe said, that could only ever serve one master and he’d chosen a mistress who was bloody spoiling him rotten. ‘Shows what a smart bugger he is,’ Joe would sometimes joke when he was in a good mood and the dogs had worked well.
While the other two kelpies were Joe’s dogs, both were loose-eyed and not in Red’s class. Red was hers only and always a champ. When he nuzzled his wet nose into the palm of her hand she knew it was to tell her he loved her. She knows she’ll grieve bitterly for him later. She thinks of his torn and broken body lying in the sun near the pepper tree and her eyes fill with tears. She’ll bury him in some special place — it’s all she can do for him now.
Joe will be angry at the loss of the dogs. They were animals that grafted for their living and he depended on them to work the cattle and sheep. It will be a long, hard winter without the three of them in the paddocks.
They’ll have to buy pups from a good pedigree litter and then go through the long hours, the weeks and months of training it takes to make a good sheep and cattle-dog. Joe doesn’t have that much patience any more and she doubts he’s up to the training it takes.
Jessica knows she isn’t as good as him with dogs and that they’ll never get another like Red. And it all takes time and money, Jessica sighs, money Joe doesn’t have. Jessica tries to think what Joe would do in her place. He’s killed a man before, and she wonders would he do the same to Billy Simple? Take the Winchester and go out and put a bullet through Billy’s head while he’s sitting in the tub happily soaping and scrubbing himself? Is that what she should do? Quick, simple, no questions asked. Bang! You’re dead, Billy. All the blood tidily caught in the tub water. God rest your immortal soul, Billy Simple. You ain’t gurina be missed by no one ?
??cept Jack and me. Jessica has a sudden alarming thought. If she shoots Billy then Meg would be certain to get Jack Thomas. It’d be damn near impossible for him not to marry into the family who avenged the death of his mother and sisters. Jessica realises Jack will spend the rest of his life carrying the guilt for what Billy has done. She knows him well enough to think he’ll blame himself for Billy’s actions. First the accident with the horse, then he brought the poor simpleton to work at Riverview. But he couldn’t save Billy from human cruelty, and now he’ll think it’s his fault that his mother and sisters are dead.
None of this, Jessica thinks, is a good enough reason for Jack to have to marry Meg, even though she knows, if she shoots Billy, Jack will see it as his duty. It would be something salvaged from the tragedy. The whole district would applaud such an ending, the triumph of good over evil. Pretty Meg and handsome, decent Jack united in holy matrimony.
She knows it’s crazy, but Jessica thinks suddenly that if she brought Meg and Jack together by killing Billy, then Hester would have to be grateful to her.
All she’d be doing, she tells herself, is what is already going to happen. Billy’s going to die at the end of a rope. Why shouldn’t she kill him now? It would be doing him a favour. It would also bring Meg and Jack together, but this time brought about by her own doing and not the grand plans and schemes of Hester and Meg. One simple little bullet in the back of his head and Hester will forgive her for everything.
For a brief moment Jessica sees herself as a true-blue heroine, applauded by everyone, for once the centre of attention. She can hear the things people would say. ‘Yeah, the plain one, she done it, Joe’s young ‘un. Showed a lot o’ guts if you ask me! Make someone a grand little missus that one would, not afraid to work neither.’
All she has to do is kill Billy Simple. Put a bullet in the soft spot where his spine connects with his skull.
In her mind Jessica rehearses the scene a second time. Billy will be sitting in the tin bathtub next to the windlass, scrubbing away, thinking himself a very good boy, trying his best to please her. She will move up quietly, the creaking of the windlass will cover her until she’s about twenty feet away. She’ll fire the bullet through the back of his head. If he turns and comes for her she’ll still have time with the Winchester to put a second shot right between his eyes.
Jessica tells herself again that Billy is going to die anyway, strung up at the end of the hangman’s rope. His poor, miserable, unhappy life is as good as over. Her shooting him would spare Billy the cruel treatment that must surely follow his arrest, or the terrible death he would suffer should the lynch mob catch up with him. Jessica goes to the soup pot and stirs it, then she tastes a small chunk of turnip from the tip of the wooden spoon. It’s not fully cooked but it’s soft enough for Billy not to know the difference, and the soup will do him good.
She takes a skillet pan from the hook above the stove and drops a generous dob of dripping into it. She puts the skillet on the back plate of the stove to heat up slowly. Then Jessica takes down the leg of bacon hanging in its muslin bag and places it on the butcher’s block where she slices an inch-thick slab from the side. She cuts it up into tiny squares so Billy can manage it with no teeth, and soon it’s bubbling and sizzling in the pan. It is more than she could eat in a month of Sundays, but she’s seen Joe tuck in after a day’s shearing, and she supposes Billy will be the same. God knows when he last ate. Then she takes six eggs and puts them into a bowl beside the stove and places a tin spoon and a bowl for the soup on the table, the familiar movements calming her. The bread is still hot to the touch, so using a cloth she lifts a loaf and places it on the window ledge to cool, covering it with cheesecloth to keep the flies away.
If she did shoot Billy, Jessica thinks, she could always claim she was protecting herself and no one would disagree. A young girl alone on a deserted farm with a madman who has killed three women on the loose. What’s more, when she tells the story of how Billy killed the dogs, most people would feel she’d had every right to shoot him. A good working dog is worth its weight in gold and people have said Red was good enough to compete at the Sydney Easter Show. He’d won at the Narrandera Show three times and once at Wagga Wagga. Everyone knows Joe Bergman has three dogs second to none in the district and Red the best of them all.
Jessica hears a yell from the yard, ‘Jessie, Jessie, Billy clean boy!’ and she puts all these thoughts to the back of her mind for now. She takes Joe’s moleskins and hat, leaving the faded flannel shirt on the stool together with the ointment, then she grabs a small towel from behind the stove and walks out into the yard and towards the windlass.
‘Billy, I’m coming!’ she calls. ‘Now you sit still, ya hear? In the tub. And turn yer back to me. Tell me when you’re ready!’