Jessica takes everything she can from the sulky in order to lighten it — the tucker basket, axe, water bag, blankets, billy, skillet, tin plates and mugs, the bag of oats she’s brought for the pony and finally the Winchester. She tries again, but no luck. Finally she chops down a cypress pine and lops the branches along the trunk some three or four inches from where they abut so that each short spike will dig into the river bank and act as resistance when the sulky wheels run backwards against the spiked log.
The cypress trunk is heavy and she is already exhausted, but with each small gain up the embankment Jessica somehow manages to keep sliding it under the sulky wheels. In this manner, almost inch by inch, they make it to the top. It is an hour before they’ve conquered the slope and the pony is almost spent and will need another spell before they can move on. Jessica is anxious and impatient, but knows they have no choice while Billy, seated in the sulky, is soon enough asleep.
It’s well after two in the afternoon when she has reloaded the sulky and they finally get away again. What Jessica had hoped would take them no more than three hours including the river crossing has taken them two hours more. They have at least another ten hours to go before they reach Narrandera and Jessica now knows they won’t make it in one haul.
She decides they’ll go as far as they can before stopping for the night. When the sun sets there’ll be enough moonlight to guide them along the rutted road. But the pony, even with frequent spells, has no more than six hours left in him and will be unable to work any longer without a good night’s rest. At the latest, by nine o’clock they’ll have to stop and camp for the night.
If the men on horseback get across the river by sundown, they’ll catch them anyway and Billy won’t see another dawn. But if they do stay the night on the far shore and cross at daylight, then, with a fair amount of luck, she and Billy should be no more than four hours away from Narrandera and the mob won’t catch her. It’s a lot to ask of Napoleon, but he’s a stock pony in his prime, bred tough, and unless he goes lame she knows he’ll give her all he’s got.
By sundown they are twenty miles from the river crossing and Jessica knows the next two hours will tell if their pursuers have managed to cross the river. Going any further, she tells herself, isn’t going to make any difference. She decides to take a spell and boil the billy.
Billy is in a lot of pain as she helps him down from the sulky and allows him to use her shoulder to steady himself as he hops on one leg off the track. She helps him lower himself to the ground with his back resting against the trunk of a boree tree. Jessica makes a fire of dry scrub and boils the billy. Making two strong mugs of sweet black tea, she hands one to him. She adds more twigs and a few dry branches from the boree and allows them to burn down, then puts the skillet on the hot ashes and cooks a thick slice of bacon, which she cuts into tiny squares so Billy can swallow them easily. She hollows out the centre of half a loaf and packs in the bacon pieces and then replaces the bread. It’s the only way she can think to prepare a quick meal for this poor creature who has no teeth.
Jessica tries to sound cheerful as she hands the bread and bacon to him. ‘There you go, Billy, eat it all up now. I doubt there’ll be much more coming your way till mornin’, mate. When we make camp tonight, I won’t have the strength to cook and you’ll have to settle for dry rations, a bit o’ bread maybe, eh?’
Billy snatches at the bread and bacon, grunting as he tears at it with his fingers, cramming pieces into his mouth as fast as he can manage, softening the bread with gulps of tea. Then Jessica sits on her haunches and eats a little of the bread and drinks her tea and wonders if this is the last supper for poor Billy Simple.
She is dog-tired and the thought that the mob may have made it across the river makes her want to cry. She tells herself that Billy is her charge and she must deliver him to the police magistrate. She cannot bear the thought of failing, of seeing him gunned down short.
Joe wouldn’t say anything and he’d be happy she was alive, but she knows that deep down he would think she’d failed, that she didn’t correctly calculate the risks. ‘Girlie, they killed him, didn’t they? And he could’ve killed ya, eh, eh? A waste o’ time and effort and now them what did the killing’ll think things about you and him. Bad things.’ Jessica can hear him clear as a bell, even though she reckons he’d never say such a thing to her face.
She thinks about Jack. What will he say about all this? Earlier she felt he would agree she’d done right taking Billy to the police magistrate at Narrandera. But now she’s not so sure. If he’s among the men when they come, will he be the one to pull the trigger? The mob would expect it. Will Jack put Billy up against a tree and blast what few brains he has left out of his ugly head? Jack’s own self-respect may demand that Billy die by his hand.
But how would Jessica react then? Would she try to defend Billy Simple against the mob, against Jack? If she did, she knows it’d be taken real bad by all who heard of it, not just the drunken mob on horseback, but by folk everywhere. Jessica can hear the gossip in her head:
‘A woman who defends a murderer must have a reason, don’t ya reckon? She’s ugly and can’t get a man what’s normal. Hey, wait a minute, maybe them two . .. ? What’s he say all the time about what Jesus give him? Maybe she’s been helping herself on the side? Joe’s youngest, she ain’t like her older sister. Never did like her much. A proper tomboy, and ya can’t trust a woman what dresses like a man, can ya? Dirty little bugger!’
Jessica can see their looks, hear the sniggers from the women at St Stephen’s or at the agricultural show. Hester and Meg could never again hold their heads up in polite society.
Again she thinks about killing Billy. She could claim he tried to rape her when she was asleep. She could say she was trying to bring him to justice and also to save him from what the men would do to him — that was true enough. Then he’d attacked her, a madman coming at her in the night.
Jessica isn’t even too sure what rape is, or how it is done. It is a word she’d first read in the newspapers when she was ten and. when she’d asked Hester her mother had said it wasn’t something a little girl should know about. When she’d persisted Hester sighed and replied that rape was when a man made a baby with a woman he didn’t know from Adam.
The young Jessica simply couldn’t imagine why a man would want to do that. Almost all the people she knew had too many children as it was. It was hard enough trying to feed the brats they had with their own wives, let alone the kids of someone they didn’t know. But when she’d asked Hester why a man would do that, Hester had gotten real cranky and said that all Jessica needed to know about men was not to let one touch her until she was married and never to talk to a foreigner in a railway station.
As Je
ssica had never been in a railway station and couldn’t remember if she’d ever met a foreigner she’d felt pretty safe from this particular version of rape. When she told Joe what Hester had said and asked him was it true, he’d grunted, plainly embarrassed, then, after a while he’d cleared his throat and replied, ‘Yer mother’s right, girlie, most men are animals, not just foreigners.’ She supposed Joe had to say that because he’d once been a foreigner himself.
Now, at the age of eighteen, Jessica hasn’t acquired a lot more knowledge about rape. If men are animals, like Joe says, then they must do it like animals. This thought has preoccupied her greatly. She wonders how a man could rape her if she refuses to go down on all fours in front of him? He’d have to threaten to kill her and she’d have to do it to save her own life. That’s what she’ll say Billy did, threatened to kill her. He’d be dead and with him being mad and a murderer, there’d be nobody wouldn’t take her word for it.
Still and all, she’s read about a woman in Sydney who’d been surprised in her bed by a man who’d come through her window one night. She’d kept a knife under her pillow and she’d stabbed him to death in the act of raping her. Jessica has often puzzled about how the woman could stab him with her being on all fours with him behind her and her with her back to him and her hands and knees planted on the mattress. She’s concluded that the woman must have done it afterwards. The paper didn’t say, just said she’d stabbed him with a kitchen knife.
Jessica now realises that she can’t say Billy threatened to rape her. Because it will mean Billy has made her go down on all fours and done it to her before she killed him, like the woman in Sydney must have done. Otherwise how can she prove he tried to rape her?
The judge let the woman in Sydney off, but the newspaper didn’t say if she’d had the dead man’s baby. Jessica doesn’t want people thinking she is going to have Billy Simple’s baby. That Billy actually did it to her. It would shame Joe something terrible and Hester and Meg could never live such a thing down. Even when she doesn’t have the child because nothing happened, people will always say that she could have, that he’d done it to her rape or not. They’ll point to her and whisper to each other that she’d been raped by a madman and they’ll giggle and repeat the thing Billy always said about his gift from Jesus. They’ll think, she’s had his big thing inside of her. The shame of it might even prevent Meg marrying Jack Thomas, which will cause Hester to banish Jessica to purgatory for a lifetime or even longer. Jessica decides then and there that she definitely can’t make rape her reason for killing Billy.
In fact, Jessica knows now that she can’t kill Billy Simple in cold blood, come what may. She looks over to where he sits with his back against the boree tree. He’s finished his tucker and now holds the empty mug on his lap, as he lies fast asleep with his chin tucked into his shoulder.
He’d never even know if I put a bullet between his eyes, she thinks for the last time. Jessica grins sadly to herself. He is so bloody ugly, but she knows instinctively that he won’t harm her, and that he’s her responsibility. The poor bugger must have copped so much from those Thomas women over the years to do what he’s done.
Jessica has no doubt that Billy will be hanged for what he’s done. But it must be done by the law, done fairly and respectable and not by a drunken lynch mob. The least Billy has coming to him after his miserable life is a fair trial. There is terror enough in that, but it isn’t as bad as being strung up out here in the bush. Someone ought to speak up on his behalf, say what the Thomas women did to him. It won’t help, but at least people will know the murders weren’t done in cold blood. They’d know he was provoked real bad. Jessica remembers how fair Billy had been when he dealt with the tar boys the day all this started, four years ago. It’s only right that he’s treated with some kindness in return, though she knows that before the night is out she may still witness him hanging from the branch of a gum tree or see his big, clumsy body riddled with bullets. Jessica feels the tears starting to well up.
She’d once heard tell of how Ben Hall was gunned down, bullets smashing into him. A terrible picture passes through her mind, it is of Billy lying helpless on the ground looking up at her., his eyes confused. Then of men rushing over to fire point-blank into him, the way they did with Ben Hall, emptying their magazines into him, so they could later claim they’d personally shot him.
Poor bastard can’t even make a run for it with that leg of his, she thinks, he’d just stand there facing them. He’d be whimpering, confused, not knowing what was going on, looking over at her, thinking she’d let him down, then looking at them, until the first volley of bullets knocked him down, his chest pumping blood into the warm dust.
The sun goes down quickly out here in the southwest, sinking below the flat horizon like a coin slotting into a money box. Nor does it take the moon long to rise in the eastern sky. By the time they have to move on, a moon two days short of being full is up and the track’s easy enough to follow in the moonlight. There’s been no sign of the mob, no sound of hooves, and Jessica lets herself hope that they haven’t crossed the river tonight. She can barely think straight, she’s so bone-tired. Billy is drifting off to sleep beside her, moaning every once in a while. His injured leg stretched out in front of him is clearly giving him pain.