The six dead snakes will be easy pickings for the crows and the kookaburras in the morning. In country where snake eats bird and bird eats snake, and snake eats snake and bird eats bird, nothing that hunts gets a free feed too often.
Jessica remembers how, when she was little and Joe killed a snake or a fox, or some other vermin, mostly rabbits, he’d call it a shotgun feed. ‘Everything lives off everything else, girlie. That’s the way of the world. It’s you or them. It’s damned hard work getting enough tucker to feed your family.’ He grinned and then continued, ‘So I give mother nature a bit of a helping hand, see, give ‘em a shotgun feed every once in a while and I reckon, in their own way, they’re grateful to me.’
‘Not if you’re the free feed!’ Jessica remembers replying, pleased that she’d made her father laugh.
Joe’s made regular attempts to tell Jessica about the dog-eat-dog world she lives in, to prepare her for a life which he describes as ‘a bloody nightmare most of the time’. She isn’t too worried, though, despite his dire warnings. Joe has trained her well, teaching her everything he knows. Isn’t that how things are measured? You can or you can’t. If you can’t you’re a useless bastard. If you can, you’ll just about do. That’s how men judge things. You have to be their equal. Men always look to see if you’re their equal. The only thing they fear is if you are better than they are. On the other hand, in her experience, nobody thinks you’re much chop if you’re the equal of any other woman.
But Jessica thinks she can see why life is tough for these men, for Joe. Her father is stubborn and set in his ways and she’s beginning to think the mighty Joe Bergman might not be a very good farmer. He is seldom willing to listen to advice and always knows better than the experts. Mind you, that goes for most of the blokes who farm land settlements in the Riverina. Men in the bush are so busy playing at being God, at having dominion over all they see and touch, that they never listen to the natural voice of the land. Or anyone else’s voice, fur that matter.
The government agricultural officer gives talks up at the experimental station about soil erosion and the need to keep hedges of box-leaf wattle or desert cassia as windbreaks on the margins of the paddocks and to leave some mulga scrub for the wildlife and to fertilise the soil. He talks about crop rotation and water conservation and other things Jessica thinks Joe ought to know about.
‘It’s cattle and sheep with us, girlie. Land was always here, always will be. Don’t need to bother yer head with them things,’ Joe says stubbornly.
Jessica goes with Jack Thomas and some of the young blokes with half a brain in their heads to listen to the lectures. Now she’s beginning to think there might be other, better ways of treating the land and using the river than just waging constant war against it, stripping it bare, ripping open its guts, hoping like hell the rains will come in time to save the winter wheat or the paddock of oats. But still Joe says those government bastards wouldn’t know how to grow a cabbage in a bucket full of wet cow shit.
Jack Thomas has talked to her about irrigation, about the big canal at Yanco they’ve built that’s going to change everything in the Riverina.
‘Imagine, Jessie,’ Jack says, his blue eyes lighting up his sun-hardened face, ‘you’re no longer dependent on the rain that never bloody comes. The soil’s good, we know that from the land below the river — give it water and the desert blooms.’
Jessica likes that, the idea of the desert blooming, the black soil plains green as far as the eye can see. If Meg manages to snare Jack Thomas she’ll have a good one, all right. Pity Jessica can’t warn him about her cow-faced sister.
Jessica turns to take a last look back towards the deserted river bank. A soft haze of grey river dust still hangs in the air where the snakes danced. The orchestra of fowl and insect is back, the birds squabbling away in the river gums, each one trying to have the last word, using up the last rays of the sun to drive home their noisy arguments before darkness comes.
Jessica swings the shotgun up, holding it halfway down the barrel so that the weight of the stock rests on her good shoulder, and continues her walk home in the approaching dark, happy because there’s no hurry tonight. No tea to endure with Hester and Meg looking on sour-faced and disapproving as she and Joe scoff down their dinner, too exhausted to talk. ‘Like pigs in a trough, those two!’ Her mother says it so often that Joe now faithfully responds, ‘Oink, oink!’
Hester’s Auntie Agnes died recently, and Joe has taken Hester and Meg into Whitton for the reading of her last will and testament. Jessica doesn’t expect them back for four days. Hester hopes to benefit in terms of two Irish linen tablecloths and a few pieces of silver, this booty comprising Auntie Agnes’s famous silver tea service which, Hester declares, will be the centrepiece of Meg’s glory box when she marries young Jack.
Jessica laughs to herself. She’s been mates with Jack for four years now, and all this time Hester and Meg have been plotting the marriage. She can’t really see that they’re any closer to it, though, tea set or no tea set.
Jessica first became friends with Jack Thomas at the age of fourteen, when Joe took her to Riverview Station at the start of the shearing season in early July of 1910.
Most of the small settlers who can manage the work head for the shearing shed at Riverview during the season. George Thomas’s big sheep station carries eleven thousand merinos not counting the two thousand lambs towards the end of the season and the burly squatter takes on fourteen shearers to do the job. He’ll give every local man who applies an hour without pay on the shearing board, each going full swing, to see if he’s up to the tally the foreman’s set for the season.
George Thomas doesn’t believe in charity and if a local man can’t reach a daily tally expected from a top contract shearer he’s weeded out and sent packing. It’s a popular laugh that by the end of the local trials Thomas has a couple of days’ worth of free shearing to his credit. George Thomas has never been known to do anything where there wasn’t a solid quid in it for him. Joe’s taken young Jessica along with him to the cut, hoping that Mike Malloy the foreman will accept her to be trained as a rouseabout. If she gets the work, it’s another income they’ll be able to rely upon for eight weeks every year.
The start of the shearing season is always an anxious time for the small farmers who depend on those two months in the big shed to get them through. If George Thomas throws one of them out it’ll mean a lean year for the family. Joe’s never missed the cut, even though he is a good bit older than most of the local men. Now he’s depending on his past record to persuade Mike Malloy to take Jessica on as a tar boy and sweeper, the first job a boy learns coming into a big shed.
Even though it was four years ago, Jessica can still recall almost everything about that first day. Big, tough old Joe, trying to look at ease, his taut muscles and awkward stance giving away how tense he was, how much he wanted her to succeed, but without him having to beg to get her the job. Standing in front of them was the foreman, a hard-looking man, though a little soft in the stomach and with a complexion scarred from childhood smallpox. His cheeks look purple and pink and raw and sore as he frowns slightly, listening to what Joe has to say. Then his first words: ‘Joe, I dunno, mate, it’s pretty unusual.’ Rubbing the side of his nose with his forefinger, ‘Shearin’ shed ain’t no place for a young girl, the men swearing an’ all.’
Joe gives a little nervous laugh, at the same time wiping the palms of his sweaty hands down the side of his moleskins. ‘Won’t be nothing she ain’t heard from her old man.’
The foreman scratches his forehead just under the rim of his hat. ‘It ain’t just her, the men ain’t gunna feel, y’know, free to express themselves. Jeez mate, I dun no,’ he repeats and then glances down at Jessica. ‘She ain’t too big neither.’
Joe pushes Jessica forward. ‘She’s just a brat yet. She can start as a tar boy, learn the trade. Don’t need size for that, do you? She don’t look no different to a boy and I’ll wager she’ll work harder than all of them little buggers.’
‘Yeah, but—’
‘Mr Malloy, what with the Wolseley engine and the wool press, there’s such a racket going o
n she won’t hear a flaming word unless they cup their hands and shout it down her earhole. It’s just noise in there. If she does a good job they’ll soon enough forget she’s a girl and if she don’t measure up she’ll get the flick same as anyone else.’ Jessica can sense Joe trying to keep calm, trying not to plead with the foreman. ‘Just give the girlie a chance to prove herself, Mr Malloy.’Mike Malloy looks at Joe. ‘Mate, I’d like to, we’ve worked together a long time, but I don’t think it’s within me authority t’hire a sheila. I’ll need to ask Mr Thomas.’ He frowns, thinking of something else. ‘What about when she’s taking her dinner with the men?’
‘She’ll manage, Mr Malloy, she’ll be sitting right next to her daddy.’
The foreman laughs — it’s a fair enough answer. Joe Bergman is still a big man and has earned a lot of respect with his fists in the past. There’s not too many in the shed will truck with him even now he’s getting to be an old bastard. Mike Malloy sighs. ‘I’ll speak to the owner, Joe. That’s all I can promise. Fair enough?’
Joe nods, though he’s not too happy. Jessica knows that he didn’t want to involve George Thomas.
They are kept waiting outside the tally clerk’s office for two hours before the owner finally appears, Mike Malloy beside him. George Thomas is a smallish barrel of a man with a big gut and a very red face, and even with him wearing a hat you know he must be bald on top. He’s dressed up to the nines, wearing riding boots, jodhpurs, a tweed jacket and tie. Jessica wonders if he’s off to a meeting or the races or something until Joe tells her later that’s how owners dress in the shearing season. ‘This your girl, Joe?’ he asks, pointing a stubby finger at Jessica.