‘Billy, I know it’s going to hurt a lot getting you onto the pony’s back, but you gotta try for me.’
Jessica brings the pony around to stand beside Billy. Then she helps him onto his good foot, but he starts to blubber. ‘C’mon, Billy,’ she says, ‘jump up, you gotta try, please!’
Billy makes several attempts and fails. Napoleon shifts his rump around, disturbed by all the movement, and Jessica tries to keep him still long enough to let Billy get on him. Each attempt causes him great pain so that he is now bawling like a child. ‘Can’t, Jessie, can’t!’ he sobs. ‘Damn you, Billy,’ Jessica screams at him, losing her patience in her anxiety. Then she takes a deep breath and tries to calm herself. ‘Billy, please try, try for me, your friend Jessie. You must try, we have to get going.’ Billy makes one final attempt and this time manages to hang on long enough for Jessica to get her body under him and hold him up so he can get his good foot over the pony’s back, pulling himself more or less up by the mane. Jessica thinks her back’ll break but she grabs Billy’s infected leg and pushes for all she’s worth. Billy screams in agony but holds on and finally sits unsteadily astride the horse, weeping and whimpering, great tears splashing down his dirty cheeks.
Jessica collapses at the side of the track, panting. Then she throws up her breakfast. ‘Good boy, Billy,’ she finally pants, spitting in the dirt, all but spent from the effort. ‘Now you hang on. Don’t let go, no matter what. Don’t let go, Billy!’ She is bent over with her hands on her knees, gasping as she tries to regain her breath.
Billy looks down blearily and starts to hiccup, then suddenly he vomits over the pony’s flank. His whimpering grows even louder. ‘Hang on, Billy!’ Jessica yells. ‘Never mind that, just bloody hang on, will ya!’
She shortens the reins and, with the Winchester slung over her shoulder, Jessica sets off down the track, leading Billy on the pony. They have about ten miles to go and, by her calculations, two and a half hours to get to Narrandera before they’re overtaken.
The black flies swarm around the vomit on the pony’s flank and cover half Billy Simple’s face where he’s dribbled down his chin. Jessica sees none of this. She has set her mind on getting to Narrandera and no bastard is going to stop her now. They’ll have to shoot her to make her stop. Joe always said she was too. bloody stubborn for her own good.
For years folk would tell how at ten o’clock on the last Monday morning in April 1914 Joe Bergman’s girl Jessica came into town leading a stock pony with a half-dead man on its back. Him lying with his arms slung around the horse’s neck and his head lolling to one side with a cloud of black flies about it, like the Devil’s halo.
They recalled how this slip of a girl, wearing a man’s flannel shirt, moleskins and stockman’s boots, walked down the centre of the dusty main street in Narrandera, staring ahead of her, ignoring the folk who’d come out into the street. Twice she’d stumbled onto her knees from exhaustion, but she just picked herself up and kept going. There was blood on her arm and face where she’d fallen somewhere out on the track.
They told how she was no more than two hundred yards from the courthouse when a mob of horsemen came galloping into town behind her. Must have been twenty or more, with rifles slung. She’d stopped and turned to face them and unslung her rifle to fire two shots over their heads, bringing them to a halt in a cloud of dust. Then she’d turned, calm as you like, and, taking up the reins, went on her way up the street, looking neither left nor right.
One of the horsemen broke from the pack and came trotting up towards her and she’d turned again with the rifle aimed straight up at him. She’d have fair dinkum shot him right out of the saddle if he’d come any further. The young bloke pulled his horse up and raised his hands in the air. ‘Jessie! Jessie, it’s me, Jack. Jack Thomas. Don’t shoot!’ he called down at her. The girl stood and stared at the young horseman, the rifle still pointed at his chest, then, without a word, she lowered the rifle and slung it, then turned back to the pony and continued leading it towards the courthouse.
The young bloke turned his horse in and rode behind the pony with his hand held up, keeping the mob of horsemen behind him at bay.
It was a sight the townsfolk would take to their graves. A lone girl with blood on her arms and face, no more to her than a hundred or so pounds, leading a stock pony with no saddle carrying a huge, lifeless-looking fellow spread across its back, his cut and bloodied arms locked about the horse’s neck.
‘It’s the murderer!’ one of the horsemen shouts to the crowd. ‘Him on the pony. The Thomas women from Riverview Station, all murdered!’
The young lass has brought the murderer in all by herself. And behind the pony, young Jack Thomas, the son and brother of the murdered women, on a horse keeping back the lynch mob.
And then old man Thomas shouting and cursing his son, coming up to him on his horse. The horse pulling its head back and prancing sideways. The father red as a cockscomb, eyes almost popping out in anger.
Then the young bloke pushing the barrel of his Winchester into his father’s fat gut, warning him not to interfere or he’d shoot his balls off. The rest of the mob on horseback armed to the teeth and angry as sin, wanting to get at the murderer and finish him off, do for him right then and there in the main street of Narrandera. Do what they’d come to do.
And Joe Bergman’s little girlie walking on, leading the pony, not looking back, not hearing nothing, taking no notice.
By the time Jessica reaches the courthouse a fair-sized crowd has gathered. Somebody must have alerted the police magistrate, Patrick Brown, because he now stands on the courthouse steps beside a fat constable with shiny buttons on his dirty tunic, the last three undone to let his gut breathe out.
Jessica leads the pony right up to the steps, its withers a
lather of sweat, nostrils blowing hard. The poor beast is about done in, its nose almost touching the ground, when she relaxes the reins. Jessica looks up at the police magistrate and wearily extends the reins to him. The surprised official takes hold of them, not quite sure what’s expected of him next.
‘Your Honour, I’ve brought Billy Simple. He’s done a murder and he’s hurt bad and needs a doctor.’ Jessica collapses at the astonished official’s feet, the Winchester clattering to the ground beside her. Jack Thomas jumps down from his horse and rushes over to Jessica, kneeling beside her. Then he picks her up in his arms and brushes straight past the magistrate and the constable, carrying her up the steps and into the safety of the courthouse. ‘Jessie, Jessie, Jessie,’ he keeps saying.
BOOK TWO
CHAPTER SIX
The news of the murders is brought into Whitton by young Sam Cully, who has inherited the role of stock and station agent from his father Henry. Sam called in at Riverview on the Sunday evening, planning to spend the night in the shearers’ quarters. On the Monday morning he hoped to interest George Thomas in a Shorthorn stud bull from Groongal Station, bought three years back by Mr Ralph Falkiner from a famous stud in Scotland. Sam’s heard the rumour around the district that George’s present bull, Trump Card, has turned out to be a bit of a joker and is firing blanks.
What Sam found at Riverview was the cook alone, returned from her visit to North Yanco and in a fearful state. Her eyes were red from weeping and upon seeing him she became quite hysterical.
She had returned to find the three Thomas women wrapped in bed linen and hanging in the meat cooler, with a note from Mr Thomas explaining what had happened and instructing her to contact Reverend Mathews at St Stephen’s to prepare for their burials. Also, he had asked for someone to go to Darlington Point first thing on Monday to fetch Coffin Nail, the Italian carpenter.
All this the cook told Sam Cully in sobs and sniffs, and Sam obligingly offered to go, eager to spread the news at Whitton on the way.
Coffin Nail, a master cabinet-maker by trade, was originally brought out from Italy to do the interior panelling, fittings and staircase at the McCaughey homestead at North Yanco Station. His real name was Copernicus Di Nallo, but this proved too much of a mouthful for the locals and after he started making coffins in his spare time he quickly became known as Coffin Nail.
After he’d finished the job at North Yanco Station, Coffin Nail decided that he liked the black soil country so much, though Gawd knows why, that he took up a settler’s selection, which he named Santa Sophia, after the name of his village in northern Italy. He was never short of work, and developed a nice sideline in fancy carved coffins for the squattocracy and, as Joe puts it, ‘for folk what’s foolish or wicked enough to take death so seriously they want to invest money in it’. Unwittingly, many a rich Protestant squatter has gone to his eternal rest with the coat of arms of the tiny Catholic village of Santa Sophia carved on the lid of his fancy Tasmanian blackwood coffin.