Jessica Read Free Page B

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, least-ways 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.
    â€˜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,