‘But we’ll be disgraced if we’re found out,’ Meg protests.
‘We are already disgraced — your sister has seen to that,’ Hester snaps. Then, to Meg’s surprise, she adds calmly, ‘I have some plain white wool from your Aunt Dolly. You’re to be seen knitting for your baby whenever there are folk gathered about.’
At the mention of Jessica and the disgrace she has caused them, Joe is once more consumed with guilt. He has conspired to make Jack marry Meg when he’s in love with Jessica. Jack will go to war knowing that if he returns he will be trapped into a marriage he doesn’t want with a woman he doesn’t love. Joe is sensitive enough to know that a young man going to war should carry the memory of his sweetheart to comfort and sustain him. He tries, though with little success, to assuage his own guilt by telling himself that should Jack know that Jessica carries Billy Simple’s child he would think quite differently about her. He even imagines Jack might willingly settle for Meg in such circumstances and all would be well in the end.
Joe does not blame Jack for succumbing to Meg’s seduction. He can well see attractive Meg offering herself to a young buck naked in the soft moonlight, without demanding a commitment. A scheming whore whose price is his future. She has fooled him by relying on his innate sense of decency, and his company commanding officer, Colonel Cunningham-Thomas, is right to have drawn up the contract. The guilt and frustration grow within him and he feels more and more that he is on Jack’s side, on Jessica’s as well. But Hester has committed him, implicated him completely in her plot to snare the young owner of Riverview Station for their eldest daughter.
Joe knows he’s stuck. But if he simply draws the line and tells Hester they’ll take their chances and announce that Meg isn’t pregnant, there is the letter from old Doc Merrick to explain and their plan to trap Jack Thomas, all this followed by admitting to Jessica’s pregnancy, with the whole bloody countryside taking one simple guess as to who the daddy is and getting it right in one. If Jack returns from the war, Meg will be trapped with a husband who dislikes her and, if he doesn’t, she’ll have wasted her youth on the duration of the war only to end up a penniless widow. Two daughters, both of whom have destroyed their lives and who, with the money he owes to the bank, soon won’t even have a home to go to.
Slowly Hester’s idea of faking a miscarriage gains momentum in Joe’s mind. After all, if Jack is killed, the chances are that bastard George Thomas will get Riverview Station or, just as bad, some obscure Thomas relations, perhaps even his uncle, the colonel. Didn’t he say he was gunna keep a copy of the contract? Besides, Joe thinks, Jack has admitted he loves Jessica. Why shouldn’t Jessica, who’s always loved Jack selflessly and been his best mate, get something? Christ knows, she’s gunna need it with a monster’s small child in her arms. Joe is growing increasingly morbid about his health. With Meg and Hester at Riverview homestead with good irrigation land, and Jessica with her own allotment, they’d be well took care of if he should die. Joe sighs. They’ve come too far to turn back now. His wife’s fierce ambition for Meg has, in the end, proved too strong for him. He’s beat, and he must go along with her until the end, whatever it may be. He, who knows nothing of irony, thinks now how Hester’s need for respectability for herself and their oldest daughter has caused all of them, except Jessica, to sink lower than a snake’s belly.
Joe is disgusted with himself for his weakness and his silence, his attempts to remain uninvolved. He tells himself that he should use his fists on Hester for destroying his pride as a man. On every important occasion she has trapped him, committed him, made him do things which serve her ambition for Meg. Now, by making him aware that not just Meg but his youngest daughter will also be saved if Jack Thomas is killed in action, she has shown him up for the useless bastard he really is. Their future depends on a faked miscarriage and a fine young bloke being killed. Christ, life is a bloody nightmare, a man ought to put a bullet to his own head.
Joe is feeling increasingly weary. His back aches constantly and the dull pains in his chest and left arm come more often now and seem to last longer each day. He knows that keeping the selection for his youngest daughter seems more than he dare ask. It
’s all too much — the sudden frailty of his body, the never-ending drought and the banks, who would rob him of all he has worked his guts out for.
Always before, Joe’s seen hard work as his salvation. Even in the worst times he’s managed to scrape through by working in a shearing shed, as a drover, fencing, or as a bush carpenter, even walking behind a stump-jump plough. His powerful body has been there to support him, to work harder than other blokes, if only to pull and push, lift and carry. There has always been someone who will hire Joe Bergman for his strength and the value he puts into a day’s hard yakka.
Now these tasks are simply beyond him. Though the heat is less at this time of the year, he tires after the least exertion and often finds himself stooped, gasping, with his hands clasped to his knees. It’s for this reason he has made Jessica work away from him — so that she won’t try to compensate and do too much in her condition. Joe is sad and confused but he doesn’t want Jessica to lose her child. He has seen the fierce, protective look in her eyes. Jessica’s child means everything to her and he is determined that, in this one thing, he won’t let her down. Jessica, he realises, will soon be severely slowed down, too heavy with child to help him to keep the rabbit fences up. With no dogs to help her, she’ll be unable to bend low enough to crutch and worm the few sheep that remain, or move the cattle to pasture to fatten them in time for the spring sales. That is, always supposing the rains come this season to bring the bitter dust to life. Joe lies in his cot at night in dread of first light and what the new day may bring. He worries that when the summer heat is upon them again he’ll be too exhausted to struggle through the day. He is already six months in arrears with the bank payments and he knows of two small selections like his own that have been repossessed by the bank. Both owned by good blokes, who don’t drink that much, work their land well and take pride in their capacity to feed their large families.
He has seen it before — a single cart piled high with a few pitiful sticks of furniture pulled by an old horse the bank couldn’t hope to sell. The family walking behind, kids with bare feet and runny noses, husband and wife with their heads bowed, too ashamed to acknowledge his greeting. He’s even seen the kids pulling a cart, the bank sometimes not even allowing them a horse to take with them. These are the dispossessed, men robbed of their land, the work of the greedy mongrels in their city clothes and brown derby hats who come in their fancy traps with leather-bound ledgers under their arms. ‘Mr Bergman, may I come in? A small matter of the mortgage payments.’ A small matter that will destroy his confidence and cause him to whimper and bite his knuckles in his sleep.
Joe knows he could not bear such a humiliation. He thinks bitterly that his only hope lies in the prospect of one of the sows getting the attentions of the ageing boar. He is back in Hester’s clutches and she has trapped him once again. These are his thoughts as he approaches the homestead across the flat, dry, dusty saltbush plain.
Jessica has seen them coming ever since the sulky appeared out of the dark line of river gums to regain its outline in the late afternoon sunshine. She’s prepared a pot of lamb stew, which has been bubbling away on the stove for three days. Not knowing when they would arrive back, Jessica’s had it for her own tea each night, and then topped it up in the morning with vegetables and the last of the lamb Joe slaughtered before he left, which she’s par-boiled to make it last longer so they might have a stew with a bit of meat to it.
Jessica well knows how tired they will be after the long trip from Narrandera, though she knows nothing of the wearisome overnight train journey. There is no time to bake bread, and so she quickly mixes flour and water for damper and, at the same time, prepares a batch of scones, before putting the kettle on for tea. They have almost reached the homestead by the time she has adjusted the flue and popped the scones into the oven. She finds her heart beating harder as she watches the sulky coming towards the homestead. She’s determined she will not cry for fear of what her family have done or may yet do to her. She will weep for Jack when they cannot hear her, but they must never be allowed to know her sadness.
Jessica’s baby is kicking in her stomach and, with the sense of the life growing inside her, she’s resolved that it won’t suffer from any loss of her normally robust health. She knows little about having a child but she has heard the old adage that she must eat for them both. That a healthy baby comes from a well-fed mother and that sadness in pregnancy will make a sad child. She must, Jessica tells herself, follow both these rules with all her strength. The life within her has become everything to her and she has come to believe that she must protect it against the dark forces ranged against her, forces which she sees clearly enough in the form of Hester and Meg. But even Joe has changed and is showing an increasing indifference to her.
Jessica knows that she will have to put up with Hester’s unremitting attention to Meg’s pregnancy. That she must willingly suffer her mother’s scorn and anger at the prospect of the child she carries in her own stomach — the child they think of as her great mortal sin, while regarding Meg’s baby as a triumph.
She knows, too, that Joe is no longer on her side. He has given up, suddenly grown old and tired. Her mother has finally beaten Joe, and Jessica can no longer depend on him to help her, or feel his big heavy hand on her shoulder to comfort her.
Joe’s silences have become morbid, no longer are they just the silences of a naturally shy man who has spent a near lifetime on his own in the bush. Nor is the darkness which has befallen him the same as the silent thinking that he believes is hard-won from nature, when stillness and observation will slowly evolve to become wisdom. Joe’s new silence is born of sadness and desperation and Jessica doesn’t know how to comfort him, thinking all the while that she is the major cause of his misery.
Jessica is also aware that she must somehow keep to herself the terrible anger she feels against Meg and Hester, who are trying to steal Jack from her. They know only one Jack, the rich Jack Thomas of Riverview Station. But they do not know the Jack with the smiling blue eyes she has known since she was a brat. The Jack who once snipped a lock of her tar-covered hair so that the men in the shearing shed would not see her fourteen-year-old shame. The Jack who would sit and talk to Billy Simple and make him feel as though he was a man again. The silent Jack, seated in the bush with the shame of his father’s humiliation bearing down on him. The Jack of the sly smile when she went to comfort him with a rude joke so that in the end they could laugh about George Thomas and his big brandy nose. The earnest Jack of pipes and canals, donkey engines and irrigation. Jack in his motor car, all clank and roar and backfire and boyish grin. But most of all, the Jack Thomas on horseback kicking up clods of earth, daring her to ride beside him, driving and turning a beast, whooping through the saltbush and mulga scrub, jumping from his horse to pull down a calf and laughing when he missed and went rolling in the black dust. The Jack Thomas who has always accepted her as an equal, as a mate — yet loved her as a woman, too shy to show the tenderness she could see in his eyes when he looked at her. That is the Jack, the Jack who called her Tea Leaf, whom they could never take away from her. This is the Jack she would wait for until the end of her life.
She tells herself that no good will come from the hate she feels for her mother and sister, but she also knows that there is a part of her that will not forgive them. Jessica is no Christian soul, nor is she taken in by the pious sermons of the Reverend Mathews, M.A. Oxon., and his exhortations to love all creatures great and small. For it’s Jessica’s observation that it’s the small, helpless creatures who always cop the shit.
She comforts herself with the knowledge that now all that matters is her baby, and her need to nourish the fierce and wonderful love for the child that breathes within her. Jessica will make no plans until she can carry this precious and unexpected gift in her arms and suckle it at her small breasts. She will simply do as she is told and stay out of trouble. Gentle Jessica meek and mild, look upon your little child, she laughs to herself.
Stubborn Jessica, with her flat chest, blunt, broken nails, carelessly cropped hair, sweat-stained cotton shirt, dirty moleskins and scuffed boots, will stay out of harm’s way. She wants nothing more than to be the mother of her own child, to love and cherish it with every beat of her heart. She will do nothing to endanger its birth. Jessica feels the womanliness in her come to life like a great, surging force, a power she has never felt in herself before, and she knows she will not be broken.
Jessica now goes out to meet them. Joe’s face is grey with weariness, Hester ignores her and turns away at her greeting, and in Meg’s prim little face her eyes are ringed red from weeping.
‘Go in, Father,’ Jessica says to Joe, ‘leave the pony to me.’
Joe casts her a grateful glance. ‘Nice to see yiz, girlie.’ ‘There’s tea made in the pot and the scones will be ready soon,’ Jessica says, trying to sound cheerful. ‘I’ve made a stew for tea t’night, not much lamb left in it, though.’ Climbing into the sulky, Jessica watches as Joe takes down the two battered suitcases. ‘Leave ‘em, I’ll bring them in,’ she says.
Joe glances up at her. For a moment she sees his old scornful look and then his expression crumbles. ‘Much obliged, Jessie,’ he says softly. ‘It’s me arm, I’ve got a crook left arm.’ He tries to grin but it comes out more as a grimace and Jessica can feel his pain.
Hester and Meg have gone ahead meanwhile, walking towards the kitchen door. At the door Hester pauses and looks back over her shoulder. ‘You’ll need to congratulate your sister, girl,’ she says loudly. Then, as Jessica turns at the sound of her voice, Hester lifts her eyebrows and tilts her head slightly so that she appears to be looking down her nose. It’s an expression Jessica saw often enough on the face of Ada Thomas. ‘Meg is now Mrs Jack Thomas of Riverview homestead!’ Hester calls.
Jessica
turns away from her mother. Her heart is a rush of terrible sadness and anger, an emotional turmoil within her so overwhelming that she is dose to fainting. She grips the rail on the sulky to steady herself, feeling the sun-baked metal burn into her palms. Then she grabs the reins and sends the tired pony forward, her back rigid and her head, as her mother must observe it from the back, held high. Hester cannot see that her daughter is biting her bottom lip so hard a trickle of blood now runs down her chin, or that her eyes are so tight-closed that it takes several moments before the first tears squeeze through her soft lashes.