Joe, standing beside the sulky with the two old cardboard and twine-bound suitcases at his feet, witnesses it all. He clutches. suddenly at his chest and sinks to his knees and then pitches forward into the dirt.
Joe’s ‘fit of melancholy’, as he calls it, lasts two days, after which he rises from his bed in the sleep-out. Though Hester has fussed somewhat over him, he hasn’t allowed either of his daughters to see him. On the morning of the third day he emerges silently and seats himself at the kitchen table for breakfast.
Jessica, returning from milking the cows and feeding the pigs, enters the kitchen. ‘Oh, Father!’ she cries out in delight and rushes towards Joe tearfully. But he puts up his hands to fend her off.
‘Don’t fuss, girl,’ Hester admonishes, though she has earlier allowed Meg to embrace him, much to Joe’s consternation. ‘Your father is well. It was some trick of the sun, a fever perhaps.’
Jessica pulls up short, tears now in her eyes. Joe looks well enough, though his hands shake as he dips a spoon into his porridge. Jessica seats herself quietly at the table and Hester places a plate of oatmeal porridge in front of her.
‘Jessie, I want you to separate the three sows without piglets and let the boar at them,’ Joe says suddenly.
Jessica looks at Joe in surprise. ‘But Father, two are too young and could abort or the piglets could die in the cold. Besides, the old sow is well past it — her piglets usually die soon after they’re born.’
Joe looks down into his plate of porridge. ‘Do as I say, girlie.’
Jessica bows her head. ‘Yes, Father.’
Since Joe’s collapse, when they helped her to carry him to his bed, Hester and Meg have hardly spoken to Jessica. The incident with Joe which Hester now calls a trick of the sun has postponed Jessica’s shock at the news of Meg’s wedding, which has not been mentioned since by anyone. Now, sure that Joe will live at least for the moment, Jessica takes herself down to the river to weep for Jack.
Meg’s marriage to Jack isn’t entirely unexpected. Jessica reckons she’d be pretty stupid if she thought that Meg’s going off pregnant to Sydney with Hester to confront Jack would not have resulted in Hester extracting some promise from him. It’s only that she loves Jack so very much, that she is quite unable to comprehend how he could agree to marry Meg for the sake of her child. He could have given Meg money, she tells herself, or offered to care for her child and asked her to wait until he returns. He’d said himself that he didn’t want to go to war with the responsibility of a wife or a family.
In her emotional confusion Jessica cannot see that Jack’s decency has forced him to legitimise Meg’s child, but only that Jack has deserted her. That he has allowed Meg to seduce him and that Meg and Hester have once again cheated her of what she wanted most in all the world — besides the child in her womb. Jack has been taken from her and Joe could soon enough be taken as well, for she had seen him clutch at his heart and she’s not fooled by Hester’s sun and fever story. Jessica, who has often enough been lonely, suddenly knows herself now to be utterly alone in the world. It is not the same thing as loneliness and it’s a feeling she has never experienced before.
After breakfast she goes down to the pig pen and separates the two young sows and old Maude, the ageing sow. The old girl has in her time produced numerous piglets but now seldom becomes a farrowing sow. When she does, the piglets usually die or are crushed by her rolling on them. Jessica calls to the sows, who follow her, grunting loudly, smelling the cabbage leaves in her hand. She leads them into a small holding pen they use for breeding when the weather is warmer.
The boar is a cranky old bastard, usually handled by Joe, and Jessica approaches him with some trepidation.
But he’s sighted the three sows and the cabbage leaves she’s placed in their pen. When released from his enclosure he makes straight for them, although, once in, he seems more interested in feeding his face than in servicing his womenfolk.
With winter well advanced, Jessica can’t imagine why Joe wants the sows to breed. It isn’t good farming practice — the freezing cold, or a sudden frost in the early mornings, will often enough kill off a litter and, besides, the sows require extra rations to keep up their milk supply.
The household settles down to some semblance of normalcy. In the weeks that follow Joe still works apart from Jessica, and it is obvious from the things that are left undone about the place that he is slowing down considerably.
Joe seems to be working most days down by the creek where the old boundary rider’s hut is situated and he mentions that he’s decided to try breeding turkeys. This statement is made without explanation when Jessica ventures to ask him what he’s doing in a part of the selection where there is normally little work to do. She is surprised at her father’s response, for poultry breeding had been one of Jack’s so-called harebrained ideas. With the telegraph and the train line coming through in a year or two, the Sydney and Melbourne market will open up, he claimed, and poultry might be the go for smaller properties where labour is the sole responsibility of the family on the land. At one of their Sunday dinners he’d told them all that with irrigation the grain and the green needed for turkeys could be grown, that live poultry in special trucks could easily enough be sent off, bred for the Christmas market when the lambing and calving season was well over. Jessica can’t recall that Joe had shown any enthusiasm for Jack’s idea at the time and so she is surprised and at the same time hurt that he hasn’t invited her to see what he is doing or to share in the task. But she knows well enough to stay away from the section where he works, trying for her part to keep the remainder of the paddocks going as best she can.
A month after she’d let the old boar in with the sows Jessica comes back in from the cow paddock for breakfast one Saturday morning to see Joe emerge from the pig pen with his hands and arms covered in blood up to the elbow and carrying a zinc bucket covered with a piece of hessian.
He stops only long enough to say, ‘I’ll need yer help after breakfast, girlie.’
‘What for, Father? Have you slaughtered old Maude?’
‘Nah, the two young ‘uns. You’ll help me to dress them and make bacon. Scrub out a pickling barrel, will ya?’ He continues on his way over to the well to wash, taking the bucket with him.
Jessica is alarmed and confused. The two sows were a pedigree cross, Berkshire and Saddleback, which Joe had selected for his breeding stock after a great deal of care. They’d cost a fair whack, more than Joe could rightly afford, and he’d been that proud of them. She’s surprised that he’d let them breed so young and now, for no good reason, he’s slaughtered them. It doesn’t make sense, Jessica thinks — both were in prime health.
He couldn’t want them for ham, as they were not yet old enough to make a good-sized hindquarter.
She goes into breakfast puzzled, but no further explanation is forthcoming from her father. Jessica spends the better part of the day with him and by its end her hands are red and puffed from the near-boiling water used to scrape the hair from the skin, and they hurt from the exposure to the brine and spices in the bacon trough and pickling barrel. Throughout it all Joe remains grimly silent.
After the evening meal Hester and Meg talk about inviting Mrs Baker to Sunday dinner after church the following morning. Jessica is surprised — while Hester sometimes visits the old girl, she’s not, by her own a
dmission, all that fond of her. Even by Hester and Meg’s standards, Mrs Baker is sanctimonious and, as well, a terrible old whinger and gossip.
‘A nice feed of pork chops and a bit of crackling will do the old dear a power of good,’ Hester asserts to no one in particular. ‘She’s poor as a church mouse and eats like a bird. I’m sure that’s what mostly ails her.’ Then she turns to Joe. ‘Will that be all right, Joe?’ She doesn’t wait for his answer before she concludes, ‘Good then, we’ll bring her home with us after morning service.’ Hester now turns to Jessica. ‘You’ll need to stay out of the way, Jessica. I don’t want Mrs Baker seeing you in your condition. She’s a fearful old gossip and the whole world will know in a day. You’ll be in your room when we return from St Stephen’s and I’ll thank you to stay there until your father takes her home later on in the afternoon.’
They are the most words Hester has spoken to her in a week. The previous time her mother had addressed her was to point out that Meg was beginning to show, making her eldest daughter stand up and spread her hands tightly across either side of her stomach so that Jessica might see the slight bulge under the brown bombazine of her sister’s dress. ‘Such a pretty little bulge,’ Hester said, smiling benignly up at Meg.
Jessica does not reply to her mother, but rises slowly, almost painfully, from the table to go to her room. It has been a tiring day. Slaughtering and dressing pork is hard work and Joe seems less able to do his usual share. With all the bending, lifting and carrying, scalding and scraping the bristles from the skin and cutting up the carcasses, Jessica’s back also aches something terrible. Besides, her baby has been unusually active and she is sore all over and exhausted. She washes-herself carefully and retires gratefully to her cot, glad to spend the afternoon of the following day alone in her own room.