After three days of shopping, Jessica’s ready to leave. She leaves Narrandera just after dawn on the fourth morning. Dolly has crammed one of her saddlebags with food and the other contains the bare essentials Jessica will need when she arrives back at the Bergman homestea
d. Matches, candles, shotgun cartridges, a five pound sack of flour, a quarter-side of bacon, plate, knife, fork, spoon and mug. She has two billies hanging from the straps as well. It’s all she’ll need until the pony and cart arrive with her other supplies.
Jessica arrives back home just before sunset. The horse she bought has made light work of the journey, despite the extra burden he carries, and she’s pleased she can still pick a good working horse when she sees one. She thinks how Jack would have approved.
She dismounts wearily and ties the reins to the hitching post, outside the kitchen door. Every bone in her body aches from the ride, after not having been in the saddle for so long. But she’s happy to be home and not to have to go bush for the night.
Jessica recalls that the last time she spent the night in the bush was with poor Billy Simple nearly five years back. Then, in a curious twist of memory, she remembers that the pony she’d used to get Billy Simple to Narrandera was named Napoleon. Considering her aching bones, she decides on the spot to call her new horse Bonaparte. She grins to herself at the little joke she’s made, knowing Richard Runche KC would think it was clever, while Solly Goldberg would be likely to clap his large hands together and exclaim, ‘Exact, my dear!’ Moishe would smile quietly and be glad that she was learning things from the books he’d brought for her.
The house appears deserted in the fading light, which is hardly surprising. And it looks miserable, old and deserted and unloved, and Jessica can’t believe how small it seems. The windlass, though, is still turning and there’s plenty of water. To her surprise a lone tomato vine grows up the side of the water tank and sports a display of ripe, red fruit. Other than this single splash of scarlet, everything seems to be grey, the colour of dry dust. The yard around the house is baked iron-hard in the sun and Hester’s rose garden is dead, dry thorny branches protruding from the dun-coloured earth. Apart from the rabbit fencing, there is no sign of where the vegetable garden once stood. Jessica walks stiffly, trying to ease the pain in her muscles. The chicken run is empty but still carries the unmistakable whiff of chicken shit. There are feathers gathered up in the corners where the wind has piled up the dust, and tiny white leg-feathers cling stubbornly to the chicken wire. The pig pen leans to one side — several of its planks have fallen to the ground, and its corrugated-iron roof has collapsed on one side.
Jessica begins to cry softly, the memories flooding back. She is afraid to go into the homestead, not sure what she’ll find and knowing that if it’s empty and cleaned out it will be even worse.
‘There’s no time to blub, girl,’ she tells herself sternly, knuckling the tears from her eyes. The sun is setting and she has to water and stable the horse and have a wash at the well herself. She’ll chop wood in the morning as she’s too tired and sore to boil the billy right now anyway.
Jessica unstraps the saddlebags and unsaddles Bonaparte and leaves the gear outside the kitchen door together with the shotgun and bed-roll. Then she takes the horse to the windlass and picks three ripe tomatoes there. At the well, she rinses the dust off the smooth red, polished skins and then eats them while she allows Bonaparte to drink his fill. The fleshy fruit is sharp and tart and then sweet at the centre and Jessica relishes the clean taste. She draws a bucket and washes her face and arms, leaving the rest of her toilette until the morning. Then she leads Bonaparte to the stable, hangs up the harness and gives him his feed of oats.
As Jessica walks up to the homestead she can hear the cacophony of the birds settling in, deciding their nightly pecking order on the eucalypt branches down at the river bank. Tonight it’s the currawongs that seem to be getting the better of the nocturnal bickering and she wonders how bad the snakes have been this year.
Jessica realises how, of all the sounds of the bush, it is the bird life at sunset that she has missed the most, this squawking and carry-on to announce the end of the hot day and the beginning of the night. More than anything, it is the sound of coming home, of a hard day’s work completed with weary legs and arms. Joe riding at her side, the soft plurrrrr of their horses and the clink of harness buckles, the dark stains on their shirts and the smell of sweat, the anticipation of a wash at the well, yellow lantern light in the kitchen window, cooking smells and the soft look of the bush in the gathering dusk.
Jessica enters the homestead through the kitchen door. The sun has almost set and the room is already in deep, dark shadow. She sees that the kitchen table remains, and the old iron stove. To her surprise the cast-iron kettle rests in its usual place on the rear hob.
Otherwise the room is empty. The kitchen smells slightly rancid, as though the grease of a thousand meals has been allowed to leak back out of the woodwork to permeate the neglect. Every surface is covered in dust and there are bird droppings on the table — most likely an owl, Jessica thinks, come in after mice. She looks up to see the kitchen window is half open, hanging on one hinge, the glass darkened with wind-battered dirt.
Jessica begins to explore the empty house and sees that the parlour has been stripped and only the worn linoleum remains on the floor. In the sleep-out Joe’s long wooden cot remains, though the mattress has been removed. Meg’s room is empty, the floorboards creak and the candles cast long shadows to make the space around it seem hollow. In Hester’s room the cast-iron bed remains, a thing of broken springs and black arms and legs, a dark spider’s skeleton in a dead room. Jessica leaves her own bedroom until last, not wishing to feel the same terrible sense of emptiness, the loneliness of things lost forever, of lives disappeared. Her family, with its laughter and quarrels, secret smiles, despair and sometimes even hope, all turned into this emptiness, into nothing.
Finally she turns the knob of her door and opens it inwards. The candles flicker in the draught caused by the door opening, then flare again to light the interior. Jessica gasps. Her room is intact, completely untouched. Though covered in dust, nothing seems to have been removed. It is, as much as the candlelight can show, just as she remembers it when she left.
Jessica steps into the room and goes straight to the bed and lifts the mattress, disturbing a small cloud of dust in the process. Jack’s two letters taken from Joe’s medicine box after his death are missing from where she’d left them under the mattress. She lets the mattress fall back and it is only then that she sees what lies on the bed. Laid out carefully the length and breadth of the small cot are Billy Simple’s blood-stained clothes, the stains now brown patches in the fabric of his torn shirt and moleskins.
Jessica screams and, dropping the candles, she runs from the room, stumbling through the house in the dark until she reaches the kitchen and then staggers, sobbing, into the yard where she falls to her knees, her hands covering her face in despair.
When she eventually looks up the house is already ablaze, the flames sucking greedily at the dry timber. Jessica rushes into the kitchen, which is rapidly filling with smoke, rescues her saddle and then returns for her saddlebags, the two billy cans and her shotgun, barely escaping a wall of flame that rushes down the narrow corridor towards her.
Once outside Jessica struggles to get her things far enough away from the house so that they are safe from the flames. Then she sits, shocked and distraught, on her saddle in the dirt, and watches the homestead burn. The roof is the first thing to collapse, the corrugated iron twisting and buckling in the heat before glowing red-hot and falling down into the innards of the house in a shower of fiery sparks. Soon the clapboard walls fall one by one, collapsing inwards, so that the flames appear to cease for a moment before the inferno gains momentum and roars on.
In less than an hour all that remains is a heap of charred and smouldering timber with small fires still licking independently in half a dozen places. Only Hester’s bed remains upright, standing defiant in the smoking ruins. The bed from which Joe was banished to the sleep-out after his children were born, where Meg seduced Jack and where, unbeknownst to Jessica, old Mrs Baker was murdered, now stands l
ike Hester herself — hard, unforgiving, unrepentant and determined to survive.
A near-full moon has risen in the east across the saltbush plains and it is light enough to see the lazy curls of acrid smoke rising upwards from the charred remains of the homestead. Jessica thinks of the words in Jack’s last letter when he described the full moon in the desert.
Can you remember? The moon is sometimes bright like it is on a summer night at home. ‘You can read a newspaper by its light,’ folk would always say, though I never saw anyone who did.
Jessica thinks also of Joe’s funeral and the ‘ashes to ashes, dust to dust’ words intoned over his grave by the Reverend Mathews, M.A. Oxon. And then Joe’s own prophetic interpretation of the Biblical sentiment, ‘That’s the whole flamin’ story o’ the plains, everything turns to dust or bloody ashes.’
Jessica opens her bed-roll and wraps herself in a blanket and, with her head resting against the saddle, she prepares to go to sleep. Tomorrow she’ll move down to the tin hut and start her new life as a supplier of plump turkeys to Solly Goldberg, Kosher Butchery, Hall Street, Bondi Beach. ‘Chickens — second to none! Turkeys — the very best!’
Jessica is almost asleep when she has a sudden impulse. She decides that, in the morning, even before she goes to the boundary rider’s hut, she’ll ride to Yanco Siding and hire a man with a cart to bring Billy Simple’s gravestone back to Warralang, the ten acres she owns beside the creek. Though it’s black soil country, Jessica has now named the place ‘Redlands’ after Red, her beloved kelpie who was shot by Billy Simple when he tried to defend her.
On the afternoon following the fire, Jessica returns to the burnt-down homestead from Yanco Siding, where she’s arranged for Solly Goldberg’s beautiful gift to be brought to Redlands. Finding a slightly cracked glass preserving jar near the windlass, she washes it clean and then walks among the still-warm ashes until she locates what remains of her cot. Jessica tells herself she has come to rid herself of the terrible curse her mother had placed on her by arranging Billy Simple’s bloody garments on her bed. Jessica is certain now her mother was mad, for she must have kept Billy Simple’s garments after finding them in the tub beside the windlass after Hester, Joe and Meg had returned from the reading of Agnes’s will in Whitton — the incident of the famous silver tea service.
Using a twig to poke among the debris, Jessica collects almost half a jarful of tiny burnt scraps that were Billy Simple’s shirt and moleskins. She thinks to herself that some of the now invisible blood soaked into the material is Billy’s own and he has paid the ultimate price for his sins. It is time to bury them together with his virtues.
And so she’d buried the preserving jar with the tiny scraps of burnt cotton under the gravestone. In her mind, she restored Billy Simple from being a nonperson buried in quicklime to the real person who had once been her and Jack’s good mate.
From that day on, Jessica truly believed in her heart that there was more of the true spirit of Billy Simple lying under the beautiful old river gum, with the quiet stream flowing by, than ever there could be in the chalky remains beneath the hard, anonymous flagstones of Long Bay Prison.