Jessica

Bryce Courtenay was born in South Africa but has spent the greater part of his adult life in Australia. His bestselling books include The Power of One and its sequel Tandia, April Fool’s Day, The Potato Factory, Tommo & Hawk, Solomon’s Song, A Recipe for Dreaming, The Family Frying Pan, The Night Country and Smoky Joe’s Café.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I sometimes think my books are made up of all the things my friends know. I never cease to be amazed at how generously they share their considerable knowledge for my benefit. I thank you all.

But firstly, I thank Benita Courtenay who has been with me throughout the making of this book. It is never easy living with an author and once again we have survived the experience.

Margaret and Ian Duff, who brought me the story of Jessica in the first instance and gave generously of their time and hospitality in helping with the research. Without you, Margaret, there would have been no story to tell. The gracious assistance of your family is also appreciated.

Margaret Gee, for the countless hours she put into making sure the manuscript was clean and for so many other ways that made my writing life easier. Bruce Gee, my researcher with his eye for detail and his clever mind. Essie Moses, who helped in a dozen ways. Dr Brent Waters, for medical advice. Denis Savill, who always seems to come to the rescue with the cover art. The Bundanon Trust, for permission to use the Arthur Boyd painting featured on the cover, and to the Art Gallery of New South Wales. Robbee Spadafora, for her cover design and production supervision. Alan Jacobs of Consensus Research, for his insights and knowledge.

Susan Killham of the Narrandera Shire Library was very helpful. Leslie Niewodowski for the Yiddish translation. Dr Ken Winkel of the Australian Venom Research Unit. Kathryn Everett, Sylvia Manning, Polly Zack, Peter and Victoria Thompson, Christine Gee and Margaret Merrylees. The wonderfully co-operative people at the New South Wales State Library – a resource it is not possible to replace.

At Penguin Books, Peter Field, Peter Blake, my publishers Bob Sessions and Julie Gibbs for their constant encouragement and help, and finally, Clare Forster, quite the best editor it has been my good fortune to have working with me.

‘If you lose your pluck, you lose the most there is in you – all you’ve got to live with.’

Eighty-year-old grandmother of twenty-two children, forced to leave her Oklahoma farm during the Great Depression, 1936.

Out in the south-west along the banks of the Murrumbidgee the snakes come out at sundown to dance. The mulga, gwardar and the Eastern brown, the clumsy death adder, black-headed python and the harmless carpet snake. They sway and twist in streaks of twirling ribbon, loops of gunmetal grey and whips of bronze catching the late afternoon sun, reptilian lightning that sends puffs of grey dust into the baking air.

This is country to make hard men whimper and bite their knuckles in their sleep. Old man saltbush tethers the black soil to an endless horizon. By sunrise the day is already grown hazy from the heat. Dark pre-Cambrian rock and mulga scrub tremble in an illusion of moisture. Men see for the most part through squinting eyes plagued by a constant vexation of black flies that suck the moisture from creased skin and feed on the salty sweat stains on their flannel shirts. It is a place where the heat is so severe birds lose their strength to fly and drop like stones from the breathless air.

The women, their hips wide and slack from too many pregnancies, walk with a slow gait. It is as though their shadows contain the weight of their weariness, dark sacks dragging along the ground behind them. Their faces are hidden in the interior of deep bonnets, but it is their hands which first betray them, blunt, calloused fingers and broken nails, skin raw and puffy from the constant use of lye soap and slap of wet flannel against a corrugated washboard.

This is a place to break your heart and leave no sentiment to alleviate a life of bitterness and struggle. Three hundred days a year a hard-faced sky mocks any hope of rain and every miserable dog’s day dawn is much the same as the one before it. Monotony and stoicism are constant companions, imagination a bad habit to be quickly stamped out of young children so that they may be made useful and compliant. It is here where, at dusk, the snakes dance on the banks of the Murrumbidgee.

Jessica waits quietly with a shotgun cradled in her arm, her green eyes intent on the scene before her. In the pocket of her pinny are three cartridges, their faded red cases having been used and re-filled half a dozen times with birdshot, and tamped with wadding and cordite with a little black powder added to save money. Joe has shown her how and Jessica can now do it in her sleep: head-wadding, charge, mid-wadding, birdshot, cap and wadding and crimping. The worn cardboard casings with their reseated copper crowns are filled so that the birdshot will effectively spray in a three-foot arc at a distance of twenty feet, well, sometimes, anyway.

At first light when Jessica ventured out of the homestead to the chookhouse she saw that six chicks had gone missing from under the black hen, all taken by snakes, their serpentine slicks plain to see in patches of yard dust leading to the chicken run.

She’d vowed to get the bastards at sundown. Six of them for six chicks. Now, watching the dancing snakes, Jessica repeats her promise silently, ‘Six of you mongrels are gunna pay tonight.’ She knows she’d be safe cursing them out loud, warning them of the revenge that’s coming to them. Snakes are deaf and can’t see too well either, so they’re not likely to hear you coming except for the vibrations you make as you walk. They can smell, though – with their trembling forked tongues they pick up tiny particles on the ground and transfer them to the roof of their mouths where they have their smelling organs. ‘Like having your nose inside your mouth,’ Joe says. Jessica doesn’t know how he knows stuff like this, he’s not a book reader and claims he’s never had any proper learning. He can read all right when he’s got a newspaper, but like lots of folk his lips move and sometimes you can hear him whispering, struggling with a word, trying to hear its sound, make sense of it.

Jessica has taken care to stand downwind so the snakes won’t smell her and cop her presence. When they’ve come together to dance like this, on the banks of the river, though, they don’t seem to take the same notice of approaching danger.

High up in the dark foliage of the river gums the cockatoos and galahs are carrying on a treat, while the cicadas, ready for nightfall, singe the air with their humming. It’s all noise and mayhem at sunset, the bush doves kookarooing, crows cawing, grey herons calling out across the river and the kookas adding a good bit of laughing to the night anthem. Meanwhile, below the gum trees in the dust on the river bank the snakes are lost in silence.

Jessica feels, rather than hears, the smooth metallic click as she breaks the twelve-bore, then reaches into the pocket of her pinny for a cartridge and punches the cardboard cylinder into the left-hand barrel, pushing it firmly home. It feels solid and reassuring, the flat metal detonation cap warm against the pad of her small thumb. She charges the second barrel and then snaps the shotgun back into place, keeping her thumb well clear. Now she hears the well-oiled click as the breech closes back onto the stock. Two barrels, won’t get away with just the one, she thinks, resenting the extra shot.

Ideally Jessica wants one always ready up the spout in case of an emergency. What she’s about to do is not good practice and she knows it. But she’s only got one chance and is going to need both barrels if she wants six of the bastards. She can almost hear her father’s voice: ‘Snakes are risky bastards. Browns have a bad temper, come after you soon as sniff, follow you home, hunt you down. They strike high so the poison gets to yer heart sooner. Always keep one up the spout, girlie.

‘You’re too bloody cocky with that shotgun,’ Joe would say when she was ten years old and allowed to use the four-ten. ‘One day you’ll come undone, girlie. What then, hey?’

The bite from a six-foot mulga can kill a child, paralyse it in twenty minutes, and a healthy-sized Eastern brown will do a grown man in good and proper if the poison has an hour to work its way up to the heart. Jessica is eighteen and a bit over five feet tall, with her best Sunday button-up boots adding a further inch if she’s lucky. With her short fair hair, narrow hips and flat chest, she could pass for a small lad if it weren’t for her pinny. Last time she went into Narrandera she weighed in at a hundred and two pounds on the chemist’s scale. A bite from an Eastern brown and she’s dead as a doorknob in less than an hour, no risk.

But she’s got pluck. ‘If I can’t take six of the buggers with two barrels, might as well give the game away,’ she mutters.

Jessica knows she shouldn’t be down here by the river side. If Joe found out he’d be mad as hell. In his book there’s enough trouble out there looking for you, without you going looking for it. Jessica has a third cartridge in her pocket but doubts she’ll have time to use it if things go really crook. It doesn’t occur to her to try for as many snakes as she can kill with one shot and keep one up the spout for an emergency. Six chicks, six snakes, an eye for an eye, that’s how her stubborn mind works. ‘Too stubborn for your own good,’ Joe always says to her.

Jessica is her father’s girl, from her stockman’s hat to the tips of her sturdy work boots. A small farm needs a boy and Joe being landed with two girls instead was a big disappointment. Joe brought up Jessica to be that son he’d never had. So it’s Jessica’s older sister, Meg, who takes the role of the girl – their mother, Hester, says Meg is a born lady.

Jessica has always been different, though half of her difference came about because Joe needed someone to help around the place. The other half, her love of the land, her understanding of it, seems to have been born in her.

That is how it was in the Bergman family, then. Hester and Meg indoors, baking, doing needlework, cooking, putting up preserves, churning butter, separating cream and collecting gossip. Jessica and Joe outdoors, doing all the things needed to keep a farm going.

Joe, who knew nothing about bringing up girls anyway, left Meg to his wife and took Jessica under his wing. He didn’t think about what it might mean to Jessica’s future; all he knew was that the little brat was always hanging around his knees, clutching at his moleskins, wanting to know things. So he just let her get on with it.

Jessica reckons she’s as good on the property as any boy her age. Maybe, now she’s eighteen, she can’t run as fast as a young bloke, but she can shoot as straight, ride as well as any of the young jackaroos in a muster, slaughter and dress a beast, crutch a sheep, brand a calf, build or fix a fence or plough and sow a paddock with winter oats. She’s a fair bushman, too. Since she was seven years old, Jessica has been Joe’s right-hand man.

This is fine by Jessica. Joe is a tough bastard but fair and you can’t ask for much more than that if you love someone as much as Jessica loves Joe. Joe’s not one to show his feelings, even to his daughter. Tough bugger, other blokes said so too.

As a young ’un, just twelve years old, Joe Bergman had come out to Australia from Denmark. He was a cabin boy on a tramp steamer, and jumped ship in Sydney. He headed west where they wouldn’t bother to come after him. Joe had wanted to work as a jackaroo, having heard wild tales of bush life on the voyage, but he started as a rouseabout, a general dogsbody, until he learned to ride a horse well enough not to come off in the scrub. At sixteen he became a boundary rider, the loneliest job in the world, and stayed at it until he was nearly thirty-five, by which time he’d lost all of his foreigner’s voice. The soft singsong cadence of Joe’s native tongue was replaced with the lazy vernacular, the slow, harsh twang of the Australian bush, punctuated with expletives, the plain talk of men who seldom see a woman and when they do, can’t find words beyond, ‘Mornin’, missus.’ Though most could do you a ballad or two if they were pissed enough and in a mellow mood.

Joe had taught Jessica one such poem, a favourite of his, when she was younger. She had recited it proudly to her class on the first day she’d attended the small bush school for the children of the farmers, shearers, drovers and stockmen.

‘Do any of you children know a nice rhyme to recite to the class?’ the teacher had asked on the very first morning.

That first day at school had set the pattern for Jessica’s doubtful career as a student, for she’d been the first child ever to be made to stand in the corner in the first hour of her first day at school. Even now, with the snakes swaying before her, she can remember the poem.

Oh, I dreamt I shore in a shearin’-shed, and it was a dream of joy,

For every one of the rouseabouts was a girl dressed up as a boy –

Dressed up like a page in a pantomime, and the prettiest ever seen –

They had flaxen hair, they had coal-black hair – and every shade between.

CHORUS

There was short, plump girls, there was tall, slim girls, and the handsomest ever seen –

They was four-foot-five, they were six foot tall and every height between.

The shed was cooled by electric fans that was over every chute;

The pens was of polished mahogany, and everything else to suit;

The huts had springs to the mattresses, and the tucker was simply grand,

And every night by the billabong we danced to a German band.

Our pay was the wool on the jumbucks’ back, so we shore ’til all was blue –

The sheep was washed before they was shore (and the rams was scented too);

And all of us wept when the shed cut out, in spite of the long, hot days,

For every hour them girls waltzed in with whisky and beer on trays!

There was three of them girls to every chap, and six of them picked on me;

We was draftin’ them out for the homeward track and sharin’ them round like steam,

When I woke with my head in the blazin’ sun to find ’twas a shearer’s dream.

Joe never really went to the trouble of cleaning up his language when he took up land of his own and came into regular contact with womenfolk. At home, with a wife and two daughters, he still talks the same rough bush lingo. On those rare occasions when the family goes into town for a wedding or some such, or when there’s ladies and strangers about, Joe says nothing until he’s forced, then chooses words that won’t get him into trouble.

‘Best keep me flamin’ mouth shut, eh girlie, ’case yer sister can’t get herself a rich bloke on account of me openin’ me trap,’ he’d chaff Jessica in front of Hester and Meg, coming home in the sulky from a wedding, or one of their get-togethers with Ada Thomas and her two ugly daughters, Winifred and Gwen.

Joe’s wife Hester has got her beady eye on the Thomas boy for Meg. Hester put a lot of work into her oldest daughter, doing the best she knows how. She comes from good stock herself, with her respectable shopkeeper relatives the Heathwoods, but she doesn’t have the education to take it too far, though she reads and writes well enough and speaks nicely too when she likes. She’s a sensible woman, though, who knows what she wants and has the determination needed to get it. What she wants is a way out of poverty and being ordinary, and a good marriage for Meg would do the trick. Meg took to her encouragement right away, reading and speaking properly, with her rounded vowels and fancy ways.

Right from the word go, Jessica never seemed to get the hang of being anybody but herself. Like Joe, Jessica makes her mind known the moment she opens her mouth, not much of an asset if you’re going to be a lady. But Jessica watches her own language around Joe – she’d never call him ‘Joe’ to his face! – and if she says even one of Joe’s bad words half under her breath he’s got hearing like a bloody fox and she’ll cop an earful to keep her quiet for the rest of the day.

Now Jessica rests the stock of the shotgun on the ground between her feet, gripping either side of the worn butt with the insteps of her boots. Then, bending down so that the twin barrels rest against her right shoulder, she uses both thumbs to force the first of the firing hammers back and then the second.

All this is done by feel – not once does she look down at the shotgun. Instead, her wide green eyes never leave the reptiles less than fifteen feet away. Jessica knows she isn’t being cocky like Joe often said she was when she was a brat. She remembers how he’d hit her once for this and she’s never forgotten the lesson.

When Jessica was eleven a school inspector had come all the way up from Sydney to visit their little school. In her excitement, she’d foolishly boasted to the inspector that her father wasn’t scared of snakes. That when Joe saw a snake he’d bend down and grab it behind the head, his thumb and finger pressing behind the jaws so they’d be open wide showing the terrible poisonous fangs. Then he’d hold it up and kiss it on the head, with the tip of its tail hanging free off the ground, squiggling and squirming. Meg, sly and superior even then, gleefully carried this exaggeration home and Jessica had gotten into terrible trouble with her old man at tea that night.

All of them were sitting at the table, she and Joe glaring at each other, Meg proud as punch at having just spilled the beans, Hester looking on, her nerves on edge.

‘But I seen it!’ young Jessica protests, turning to Joe for confirmation. ‘You done it! I seen it, remember?’

‘Bullshit. That were a bloody carpet snake and you know it,’ Joe replies. ‘Big harmless buggers.’

‘Well how was I supposed to know it was harmless?’ Jessica shouts at her sister. ‘He picked it up, didn’t he? He kissed it! That’s all I said to the government man!’

‘Who’s “he”, the cat’s father?’ Hester chides in her tired and exasperated voice.

‘Father!’ Jessica points to Joe at the head of the table. ‘I seen Father do it!’

Joe’s voice cuts in quietly. ‘You did know it was harmless, girlie. ’Cause I told both of yiz meself.’ He turns to Meg. ‘What’s a carpet snake look like, Meg?’

Meg smiles. ‘Black and brown mottled patches against a sort of creamy background, Father. They can get to be nine feet long,’ she adds gratuitously.

‘Good.’ Joe faces Jessica again. ‘You bragging to that bloke from the government has made a bloody fool outa me, girlie,’ he says.

Jessica flushes deeply, biting her bottom lip, looking down into her lap. Meg is a real bitch. But worse, she, Jessica, has made Joe look stupid and that is more than she can bear to think about.

‘Country folk don’t get cocky with snakes, ya hear? They fear ’em something terrible,’ Joe continues, still in a low voice. ‘City folk think snakes are evil, it’s something that they’ve taken out of the Bible.’ He pauses, then adds, ‘But we know different, don’t we? Snakes is just another sort of vermin. Crows, rats, mice and feral cats, dingoes and foxes, they’re vermin too, all of them meat-eaters. They’ll have a go at chooks and take a newborn lamb once in a while, but they won’t go humans, they don’t kill people. Snakes do. Snakes kill. Nobody fools around with Joe Blakes, girlie. Bloke who fools around with snakes is a flamin’ idiot.’

Suddenly he swings his arm across the table and backhands Jessica hard across the cheek, his knuckles making her skull ring and the teeth rattle in her head. ‘You knew it were a carpet. Don’t ever brag about me to no bastard, you hear? I don’t want no flamin’ school inspector from Sydney thinking your old man’s a bloody fool! Some sort of Injun snake charmer!’

It feels as though she’s been hit by a rock. Jessica gasps, shocked by the unexpected attack and the sudden, fearful pain. The blow almost knocks her from her stool and she has to grab hold of the table’s edge in order to retain her balance. Joe never hits her indoors, the house is Hester’s territory and her head is ringing as she looks to her mother for help.

Hester jumps up from the table, her chair skidding backwards in her haste. Jessica thinks she is going to have a go at her father for hitting her, but Hester only looks down at her, wiping her mouth with the back of her puffy hand. Jessica can see from her mother’s expression that she isn’t going to come to her rescue. Hester, she realises, wants no part of what’s going on between her and Joe. All this has happened in a few moments – it is as if the blow to her head has given Jessica a sudden clarity of vision, an insight into her mother’s heart where there is no longer any room for her younger daughter.

Jessica knows her mother thinks she’s becoming a handful, too headstrong. ‘Can’t tell you anything you don’t already know and you’ve got no manners, just like your father.’ She says it often enough and there it is again in her eyes as she turns and leaves the table. Jessica knows her mother has finally given up on her. From now on Jessica must stick with Joe, and Hester gives all her affection to Meg.

Jessica, not daring to touch her face, turns and nods dumbly to Joe, accepting her punishment. Then she looks down into her lap, fighting back her tears, determined not to show Meg how she feels.

The room is silent. She can hear her mother in the kitchen, angrily scraping the bottom of the meat pan with the metal gravy spoon. Then the clank of Joe’s knife and fork on his tin plate as he resumes eating his tea. Joe won’t eat his tucker off proper plates, he says tin makes food seem hard-earned by decent folk.

Jessica waits until she can be certain her voice has recovered enough before turning to her sister. ‘Fuck you,’ she whispers from the side of her mouth.

‘Jessie just swore at me, Father! She used a terrible word, too!’ Meg howls.

Joe looks up from his dinner plate at Meg. His mind is already elsewhere, his temper cooled down. In his opinion the matter is settled, Jessica has took her punishment fair and square. He plants both elbows on the table, still chewing. His massive sun-bronzed arms give the appearance of two hocks of well-cooked meat with a knife protruding from the end of one and a fork from the end of the other. Swallowing, he asks mildly, ‘What’d she say?’

‘I can’t say it!’ Meg looks directly down into her plate as though she’s addressing the potatoes.

Joe picks at a tooth with his pinkie nail and turns to Jessica. ‘What’d you say to your sister, girlie?’

Jessica, even more furious at Meg, no longer cares if she ends up copping another backhander from her father. She grips the sides of the table with both hands and glares defiantly at Meg, angry tears welling. ‘I said, Fuck you!’

She shouts out the words in such a bold manner that Joe is left in no doubt that they are now meant to include him as well.

Jessica closes her eyes and pulls her head back so that her neck is held rigid, her jaw exposed to take the clout she expects from her father. Her cheek still burns and the left side of her mouth is numb from his previous blow. She can feel her eye starting to close.

Joe smiles to himself. He likes the courage he’s seen in the eyes of his youngest daughter. She’s game, all right, he thinks. He turns his gaze on Meg who sits with downcast eyes, straight-backed, chin tucked in, her hands folded in her lap. A man would need a bloody pickaxe to crack open that one’s heart, he thinks to himself. Pity the poor bastard who gets her.

How could two girls be so different? Meg, cunning as a shithouse rat, the perfect little lady, at fourteen already a woman with all the looks and tricks that turn men’s eyes soft with longing. But what’s between her legs you can be sure she’ll keep locked up tight until the exact right moment. That one’s got her mind firmly set on a better life than most of the men in the district could offer a lass. Good on her, he doesn’t mind that, she’s got bugger-all inheritance coming from him. The property’s mortgaged to the hilt and the bank’ll get the bloody lot when he’s gone, unless Jessica can keep it going. Meg’ll marry the Thomas boy and have babies dressed in ribbons and booties – it’s written all over her sulky little face.

Joe thinks of young Jack Thomas, just two years older than his daughter with five thousand acres coming to him when George Thomas finally carks it. A thousand already under the plough and most of that fronting the river. Meg is putting in a lot of groundwork with the two Thomas girls these days. She’s gone over to the Anglicans and got Hester to do the same. It’s good tactics – the Thomases wouldn’t marry a Lutheran or a Catholic for that matter, strictly C of E that lot. If Meg wins over Ada Thomas and the two girls, you can put down your glasses, George Thomas and his boy Jack don’t stand a chance. Joe can see it all, the future rolling out like a Sunday church carpet, the same red carpet they use for weddings at St Stephen’s: his eldest daughter emerging from the church, Mrs Meg Thomas of Riverview homestead, soon to take to squatters’ ways as though she’s bloody born to them. Hester will die happy as a pig in mud, she’s put that much into the girl.

But what of young Jessie here, waiting, expecting him to clout her again? He sighs and shakes his head sadly as he thinks of what lies ahead for Jessica. The bush ain’t the kind of place where defiance gets anyone very far, leastways a woman without a dowry looking for a husband. And Jessie’s having real trouble knowing she’s a girl. Maybe he should put her back in her mother’s charge. Maybe she’ll grow out of it, he thinks. After all, she’s only eleven years old. Though Joe knows his youngest daughter pretty well by now and he doesn’t much like her chances of losing that stubborn streak. But most of all Joe knows he can’t manage without Jessica, he needs her around the place. He decides this time he’ll let it pass, leave her be. She’s copped enough for one day. He forgets how little she is – the blow he give her, meant to be no more than a reminder not to be cheeky, bloody near knocked her head off. She hasn’t blubbed, though. You’ve got to admire the little bugger for that. She took her medicine like a man. That’s the whole trouble, though, if she’d been a real girl she’d be holding her cheek and bawling her eyes out, sniffing and howling and burying her face in her mother’s apron.

Joe sighs again and looks directly at Meg. ‘What Jessie just said, that’s not swearin’. Swearin’s only when you don’t mean it.’

Jessica grins to herself as she recalls this incident. She remembers how Meg burst into tears at Joe’s clever remark and fled howling from the table. The backhander from her father and the black eye that followed were worth it just to see the look on her sister’s face. Maybe Joe can’t say it out aloud, but she knew then, at that moment, that he loved her.

Now, as she watches the dancing serpents, Jessica wonders why the different kinds of snakes don’t seem to need to dance separately, each species in some sort of poison pecking order. They all look to mix happily enough on the river bank, mulga, Eastern brown and gwardar. Even the harmless carpet snakes play with their deadly neighbours, the whole tangle of them moving like they are listening to some kind of secret bush orchestra that humans can’t hear. Then she remembers snakes are deaf – it must be the vibrations they make among themselves, she reckons.

Some snakes sway and arch in lazy loops, some spiral in a ribbon of silver light, while others rise to balance momentarily on the tips of their tails and then whip downwards, striking the earth with a thud to send a small explosion of ochre dust into the air.

The thumping and writhing of the reptiles soon causes the dust, lit from behind by the setting sun, to form a translucent curtain in the surrounding air. The snakes now seem to be shadows moving in rippling patterns across a screen of light.

Jessica squints and judges the distance at roughly fifteen feet then waits, holding the gun in both hands below her waist, ready for the pattern she thinks she needs.

‘Those two on the right first,’ she murmurs. ‘The mulgas.’ Joe says they’re to be called mulgas, though most people round here call them king browns. Joe likes to be right about things, even though king brown sounds better, more deadly. Jessica must wait until the two snakes are at the highest point of their dance when their heads are thrown back, flicking tongues testing the air. That’s when they show the soft underside of the jaw where the scales are the colour of putty.

She must make head shots all, her first shot a deadly conclusion of blood, mashed vertebrae, scales and fang. Snakes have their brains encased in hard bone, so she’s got to smash the jaws when she fires, make them harmless. She sees them dead already, mangled heads and necks thickened with black flies.

To bag her haul, she must kill four more with her second shot. It’s tricky stuff, she must judge it finely, so that when she fires the first shot at the two mulgas, the four snakes three feet to the left must already be in the process of rising. The blast from the second barrel must reach them at the height of their dance with their underjaws exposed to the birdshot.

Jessica knows she will have to shoot fast, empty the two barrels almost as if a single explosion. Six snakes must be left writhing in the grey river dust, too stupid to know they are already dead, taken care of in the name of the black hen and her stolen chicks.

She now sees the pattern she needs, sees it forming, the two large mulgas swaying high, then four more snakes to her left beginning to rise. Two Eastern browns and another mulga and a carpet snake, all of them hopefully contained within the sweep of a double-barrel shot.

In the one sure movement she swings the heavy shotgun up to her shoulder and fires, the second blast following almost instantly. The kick from the double explosion knocks her backwards into a large clump of scrub.

‘Bloody hell!’ she yells, still holding onto the shotgun with its barrel now pointed into the heavens above. The galahs and cockatoos take to the air in a raucous pink and white mass. The cicadas go silent, their collective hum cut as though sliced cleanly with a sharp knife. The twin echoes of the shotgun blasts race across the river and over the flat country beyond to disappear over the horizon, sucked up into the dark maw of the approaching twilight.

Jessica reaches frantically into the pocket of her pinny for the spare cartridge. She grabs at it and grips it between her teeth, at the same time scrambling from the bush into clear ground, though she’s still up to her knees in scrub. Panting with fear, she breaks the shotgun and expels the casings. A curl of gunsmoke still issues from the hot breech. She drops the spent cartridges into her pocket, then takes the live cartridge from between her teeth and pushes it home, snapping the breech shut. Trying to stay calm she positions the butt of the shotgun between her feet and with both thumbs again pulls the hammer back. Her heart beats furiously, she can barely hear for the drumming sound it makes in her chest.

She knows what she’s doing is almost useless. If she’s killed the partner of one of the mulgas or Eastern browns now fleeing from the vibrations of the blast, it will come back for her. Or if she’s in the way of a fleeing snake she’ll be long bitten before she’s got the bloody shotgun in place. She can hear Joe’s words in her head: ‘A brown will hunt you down, stalk you all the way home. If it’s cranky there’ll be no stopping it. If you’ve shot one of them mongrels, always keep a fresh shot up the spout for its mate, girlie.’

Jessica forces back her fear and makes herself face the river bank, knowing there must be snakes all about her, expecting one to rear up at any moment. An Eastern brown strikes high in an S shape, and could come up out of the scrub to her left or right any second. She waits a few seconds longer, holding the shotgun at the ready, then she runs for the path up from the river. Reaching the path she begins the half-mile walk back to the homestead, trying to keep a steady pace, looking back over her shoulder every few moments. It is only when she is well away from the river and clear of the scrub, with open country about her, that Jessica slows down and she releases the hammer from the firing position so that it seats back into safety. Then she carefully lowers the shotgun, and brings her hand up to rub her painful right shoulder.

Jessica knows only too well what the kick from a twelve-bore feels like. She’s padded her right shoulder with a cunningly fashioned pin-cushion contraption which has a looped tape sewn to one end and two tapes to the corners of the other. The loop fits around her neck with the two further tapes, one pulled under her armpit and tied to the other at the top of her shoulder. Tied in this manner the cushion fits snugly into the curve of her shoulder to protect her right breast and collarbone.

The kick from the first barrel must have pushed the padding up above her collarbone and she’s received the second blast fair and square in her chest. In a week’s time a purple patch of broken blood vessels the size of a man’s hand will have spread across her right shoulder and breast.

‘Milking’s gunna be a bugger,’ she sighs ruefully, gingerly rubbing her damaged shoulder with the tips of her fingers. It could be worse, though, she could’ve broken her collarbone. If she had, Joe would call her a useless bludger trying to get out of her fair share. He’d want to know what she was doing with the shotgun. She couldn’t lie to him. Couldn’t lie anyway. Then he’d go mad about her going down to the river at sunset. ‘Revenge? What for? Six flamin’ new-hatched chicks? Jesus Christ, girlie, you got pig shit for brains, eh?’ He doesn’t hit her now she’s grown up, but Jessica knows he’d be well within his rights to do so if she told him about hunting the snakes with both barrels.

Anyway, Jessica’s done what she said she would. For the moment she doesn’t care what Joe thinks, or even about her bruised shoulder. ‘Gotcha, you slimy bastards!’ she yells back in the direction of the river bank, where, in her mind’s eye, the serpents lie twisting and writhing in their last dance by the river.

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, for 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 dunno,’ 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.’

‘Mr Malloy, what with the Wolseley engine and the wool press, there’s such a racket going on 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?’

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.

Joe touches the brim of his hat, too proud to lift it off his head altogether. ‘Afternoon Mr Thomas, sir,’ he says and puts his big hand on Jessica’s shoulder. ‘Jessica, this is Mr Thomas.’

George Thomas grunts, ignoring the greeting. ‘This isn’t girl’s work, Joe.’ He turns to Jessica. ‘What do you know about sheep, eh?’

It’s a cruel question, Jessica is plainly too small to handle a fully grown ewe. ‘If it’s a lamb, sir,’ she replies, looking up at George Thomas for the first time.

‘The first three, sir. I reckon I’ll be able to do the other when I’ve grow’d a bit and they’ve learned me.’ Jessica holds George Thomas’s eyes for a moment then looks down at her boots again.

‘She’s a cheeky young bugger,’ the boss of Riverview Station replies. ‘Got all the answers. If you ask me, she’s too clever for her own good.’

Joe stiffens, not knowing how to take the remark, but Thomas doesn’t seem to notice. ‘Joe Bergman, you’ve been shearing in my shed for fifteen years and I’ve no quarrel with your work. I know you haven’t a boy of your own to help, but…’

Joe cuts in quickly, ‘I wouldn’t take a boy in her place, sir. The girl’s a damn sight better than any lad her age.’

George Thomas is unimpressed. He’s not the sort to take notice of other folks’ opinions. ‘It’s putting temptation in the way of the men, I don’t like it.’

Joe looks surprised – the idea that Jessica might be a temptation to men hasn’t entered his head. ‘I’ll be in the shed meself, Mr Thomas, keeping a sharp eye on her.’