> ‘Father, I don’t want to have my baby at home. I’ll come for Christmas dinner, but then, you’ve got to promise, you’ll bring me back here. Mother can come here if she wants, when it’s time, as long as you come too.’ Jessica waves her hand, indicating the tin hut. ‘She reckons this is good enough for me, putting me out here so I won’t embarrass her. Well, if it’s good enough for me, then it’s good enough for my baby. It won’t be the first or the last baby born in the bush. I’ll take me chances.’ Jessica is a bit shocked that she’s had the guts to talk to Joe in this manner, but she knows she’s not talking for herself, she’s talking for her child. She’d ten times rather trust her child to Mary Simpson than to Hester, even if Hester didn’t hate her. The fact that Joe says Hester won’t let her have a midwife shows her mother doesn’t give a bugger about Jessica’s child. Mary cares, Mary will always look after her.
Jessica knows she wouldn’t think like this without Mary Simpson being in her life. She’d be too terrified left alone to have her baby. But now she’s all right, she’s got a friend, someone who cares, who’ll take care of her when her time comes. Jessica doesn’t want to belong to her family any longer, even to Joe, whom she loves despite his betrayal. The new life breathing within her tells her she can’t depend on Joe any more, even if he’s holding her hand in childbirth. The little black lady with the shy smile, skinny legs and spreading hips who’s taught her to squat in preparation for childbirth is her true sister, better than her kith or kin.
‘Righto,’ Joe says, ‘come home for Christmas and I’ll talk to your mother about the other.’ ‘No, Father, talk to her first. I want your word on it.’ Joe sighs wearily. He is seated on a log outside the tin hut with his hands covering his face. Jessica looks down at him. He’s wearing the hat he had on the day she shot it off his head and it landed in the saltbush — he came and retrieved it later that day. It was once his best hat, but he’d been forced to wear it for every day because she gave his work hat to Billy Simple. But now it’s lost its shape a bit and is peppered with holes from the birdshot. Jessica reckons she’s done Joe a big favour and made his best hat into a work hat with just two blasts of the shotgun when it would’ve took him a year of sweat and mucking about to achieve the same result. That hat, she decides, always looked crook on Joe — too new, the nap brushed by Hester the moment they got home from somewhere then put away in a box from Heathwood’s Haberdashery. Now it looks perfectly natural, like it’s been around a fair while.
Joe draws his hands slowly down over his chin. ‘We done wrong by you, Jessie, I admit it. But it’s for your own good. You don’t understand yet, and I don’t blame yiz for going crook on us, but one day you’ll see the reason we done what we done. Your mother’s acted right and proper. I know you think it’s only for Meg, but that ain’t true, she’s done her best for you too.’
Jessica looks at her father scornfully. ‘Bullshit,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry, Father, but I don’t believe you.’
Joe looks despairingly up at his youngest daughter, chastened by what she’s said to him. ‘Honest, girlie, your mother’s only done what she thinks is right for us all.’ Then he shrugs his shoulders and gives a deep sigh, bringing his big hands to rest on his knees and looking down into the dirt just like Jack would do after his father had a go at him and he’d crept away to hide. Without looking up, Joe beseeches her, ‘How am I gunna make you believe that, eh?’
‘You can’t,’ Jessica says simply, ‘I don’t believe nothing she says any more.’
Jessica suddenly wants to cry, for she can see Joe honestly thinks that Hester is doing the right thing. Joe is going along with his wife because he reckons, in the end, it will be best for Jessica and her baby. Hester has defeated Joe so completely that he is no longer capable of standing up to her. Joe is finished. ‘Bergmans nil, Heathwoods ten!’ That’s how Jack would have said it.
He was always turning things into teams. ‘Heifers three, jackaroos one,’ he’d laugh after a mob of heifers got away from them in the scrub. ‘Ten nil to the Heathwoods, put down your glasses. It’s a walkover, a right thrashing!’ he’d have said, grinning.
Not a day has passed when she hasn’t thought of Jack and longed to hear word from him. Her first question every time Joe comes to the hut is, ‘Have you heard from Jack?’ Joe always says no, though she senses this is because Hester’s told him to. Joe is not a good liar and he hesitates too long before he answers her. Once he’d said that Jack’s regiment hadn’t gone to Britain but to Egypt to guard the Suez Canal, but then hurriedly added that he’d read this in the newspaper.
Jessica tries to imagine Jack in Egypt, a place she’d learned about in Bible lessons at Sunday School. Him sitting on his horse near the pyramids with date palms, and camels passing by, Arabs in their long, white robes seated astride them like the three wise men on Christmas cards. The sand looking like a yellow sea with waves, only not moving, carved by the desert wind and stretching to the other side of sunset.
She wonders if Jack will wear a burnous, so the sand don’t get into his eyes and up his nose. She’d seen a postcard once of just such a scene, but without the Suez Canal, which she thinks of as like the Yanco irrigation channel, but dug in the desert and a bit bigger of course, so as to accommodate giant ships. Pity it can’t be fresh water, she thinks, then Jack would see the desert bloom, like he’s always said will happen in the Riverina.
Jessica feels in her heart that Jack has written to her and that Hester’s kept his letter, or letters, back from her. It’s just another reason why she doesn’t want her family any longer. She’ll wait for Jack and even if she can’t have him, there’ll never be anyone else, Tea Leaf will always love him.
‘Jessica, how am I gunna convince you that your mother will let you come back here after Christmas dinner?’ Joe now asks.
Jessica sees her father’s problem immediately — nothing Hester can say or do will make her trust her mother. Jessica has a sudden idea, and grins. ‘We could have it here,’ she says. ‘A picnic on Christmas Day, Christmas dinner beside the stream,’ she points towards the place, ‘under that big river gum. I’ll clear a space.’
Joe looks doubtful. ‘She’ll want the turkey hot, like always, she won’t want to serve dinner on a cold plate.’ Jessica laughs harshly. ‘It’s always what she wants, ain’t it, never what anyone else wants? If she wants to help with the birth, she’s gunna have to come here anyway. May as well kill two birds with one stone.’
Joe rises wearily to his feet. ‘I’ll tell her you’re not comin’ home, not comin’ for Christmas dinner neither, but you’ll have a picnic here, that’s all.’ He looks at Jessica. ‘Best I can do, girlie. I can’t tell your mother nothing no more,’ Joe confesses.
On the morning of Christmas Eve, Jessica decides she’ll spend the day clearing around the big red river gum in preparation for the next day. Joe has brought back the news that Hester has agreed to come over and bring Christmas dinner — cold turkey and her special pudding. Jessica feels both triumphant and frightened. She hasn’t seen her mother and sister for five months and she doesn’t know how she’ll react when they arrive.
Meg’s baby, she thinks, will be nearly as big as her own by now. Jack’s child in her sister’s stomach — she doesn’t know if she’ll be able to contain her tears, or even her anger. The child Jack didn’t want to have, in case he was killed, is sitting snug as a bug in a rug inside Meg’s tummy. In the stomach of Mrs Jack Thomas. Jessica thinks bitterly to herself that her beloved Jack has ended up with the child he doesn’t want, inside the wife he doesn’t want, and all because of her mother and sister wanting to get their greedy hands on his fortune.
Jessica decides she must make a large clearing in case of snakes. They’ll need to be able to spread the rug Hester brings so that there’s lots of cleared ground around it. Snakes don’t see or hear too well and with so many about, one could quite easily drop in on them. She’ll keep the shotgun and the axe
nearby and Joe carries the Winchester in the sulky at all times.
Jessica plans to start early, before sun-up so as to beat the worst of the heat. But as she comes out of her hut not long after first light, she finds Mary waiting for her. ‘Good morning, Mary, you’ve come early,’ Jessica greets her.
‘Sorry, Jessie, but I can’t come this afternoon. They’s having a Christmas party for the blackfellas’ kids up the Lutheran Mission and me two young ’uns wants to go and some of the others from the mob also. I’m the Mission girlie, see, so I gotta take ‘em.’
‘Can you stay for a cuppa?’ Jessica asks.
‘No, ta Jessie, I got to go.’ Mary tilts her head to one side and examines Jessica. ‘It’s getting pretty close, that baby,’ she laughs, and puts her small black hand on Jessica’s stomach. Then she bends and puts her ear to the side of her tummy, still keeping her hand on it. ‘Strewth, could be your Christmas present from Santy Claus.’ She laughs again, then she straightens up and wishes Jessica a merry Christmas, putting her hand into the pocket of her pinny and taking out a brown paper packet. ‘For your baby, Jessie.’ She smiles shyly, then says, ‘The mob got a bit o’ money together. They not forget you, Jessie. Us aunties, we gone into Narrandera and bought it in the Chink shop,’ Mary explains proudly.
Jessica opens the packet and pulls out a tiny baby’s dress in oyster-coloured Chinese silk with cherry blossoms embroidered on the front. ‘It’s for a girl,’ Mary announces. ‘Boys go bad, you’re gunna have a girl, Jessie.’ ‘Oh Mary, it’s lovely,’ Jessica exclaims, holding the tiny dress up. She kisses Mary. ‘Thank you, thank you,’ she cries and bursts into tears. ‘Mary, you are so kind to me,’ Jessica sobs. Mary embraces her and takes her into her arms, though she can hardly manage to do so for the size of Jessica’s baby sticking out in front. ‘That baby coming soon — crying, that’s always the sign,’ the little Aboriginal woman declares, then adds, ‘You do them squatting, you hear, Jessie? Much as you can. I come back tonight after Santy Cia us seen the kids at the Mission.’
After Mary has departed Jessica starts on the clearing. The sun won’t be long in coming but she thinks the shade of the river gum will protect her from the worst of it for a while. She finds that she’s panting after the least effort. But almost two hours later, with the sun well up, the heat haze shimmering in the north paddock so that the old man saltbush is a green glassy smudge, she has all but completed the task. There remains just one large boulder, large only because of her present state and Jessica knows better than to try to lift it. Joe can do it when he comes tomorrow, she thinks. Then she changes her mind — she wouldn’t have left it for him before, so why now? She won’t leave a job half done. She decides to cut a stout sapling and use it as a crowbar to move the rock so she doesn’t have to use much of her own strength.
Jessica cuts an ironbark pole about four inches in diameter and six feet long and sharpens one end to a wedge shape so it will slip easily under the rock. Her efforts prove successful enough and she tumbles the rock towards the edge of the clearing, using the leverage of the pole. She needs only to move it another couple of feet when it lands after a roll in a small hollow. It’s jammed and she has difficulty slipping the wedged tip of the pole in under it. After a bit of a struggle she gets the wedge halfway in — enough, she hopes, to allow her to move the rock out of the indentation and onwards. Jessica pushes her end of the pole downwards, but it isn’t secured well enough under the rock and springs loose. She stumbles and pitches forward onto the hard ground, breaking her fall with her hands and rolling on her side.
Jessica lies perfectly still, panting, not wanting to move, her heart beating furiously, waiting to see where she hurts. But after a few moments she realises she hasn’t hurt herself or her baby and slowly struggles to bring herself up onto her hands and knees. The pole lies within reach and she grabs it up and pushes it into the ground in front of her and, with both hands grasping the stake, pulls herself up. Jessica is almost standing when she feels a terrible cramping pain in her back.
Jessica is panting hard and she puts her hand on her stomach. Maybe it was simply a pain from doing too much, she tells herself. But now another comes. Mary has told her to expect labour pains — ‘They come slow and you think it’s nothing much, just the baby kicking or something like that. But you got to listen, wait for them. After a few hours they keeps comin’ faster, time’s getting near, you got to get ready ‘cause that baby wanting to break out of jail.’