Free Jessica by Bryce Courtenay

charity or the Lord’s compassion.
    â€˜They should have gone to the Lutherans,’ she’d said with a toss of her head, followed by a sniff which clearly indicated her opinion of this denomination.
    â€˜Be that as it may, Mrs Thomas, may I remind you that in things temporal we don’t go around shooting blacks,’ the magistrate replied.
    â€˜Why not?’ Ada Thomas demanded. ‘Be that as it may, Mr Craddock, we’ve been doing it for the past hundred years and may I remind you, I only used birdshot!’
    There was much laughter at this and the magistrate was forced to clear the court, sending the crowd out into Larmer Street where they watched the proceedings through the open bay windows.
    The whole town had turned up for the hearing. When the magistrate pronounced the fine, Ada Thomas took a ten-shilling note out of her handbag and in an imperious voice demanded a receipt from the clerk of the court. When he’d written it out and handed it to her she’d looked the magistrate straight in the eye and said, ‘This could not have happened if Mr Donaldson had been here. He knew me for a good Christian lady.’ She paused before delivering her ultimate judgement of the magistrate. ‘God is not mocked, Mr Craddock!’
    The police magistrate did not bat an eyelid at the mention of his predecessor. ‘Maybe God is not mocked, but I am, Mrs Thomas. You have twice referred to me by name. You will kindly refer to the bench in this court as “Your Worship”!’
    Ada Thomas merely sniffed at this rebuke, to a ripple of sympathetic laughter from the open windows. The magistrate had finally had enough. ‘The defendant is fined another one pound ten shillings for contempt of this court!’ he bellowed. Later the crowd outside the window would quip that being rude to a magistrate was a threefold bigger crime than shooting an Abo.
    Jack Thomas had his brand new De Dion motor car waiting outside the courthouse, its engine cranked and ready for a quick getaway when his mother emerged. The large crowd greeted her with cheers, surrounding the handsome vehicle, many of them shouting, ‘Good on ya, Mrs Thomas! Australia for the white man!’
    Jessica remembers being told how Ada Thomas climbed up into the seat beside Jack and then started to smile and wave at the crowd like bloody Queen Mary at her own coronation, finally departing in a cloud of dust and smoke from young Jack’s motor.
    The cheering townsfolk, or the men anyway, repaired to the pub across the street to drink the health of a woman who was a fair dinkum hero, who’d done the right thing by decent society. Except, they laughed, she should have used buckshot. If they had their way, Ada Thomas would be given a medal by the governor.
    Joe said that blacks were ‘useless bastards’, but then he’d tell Jessica how he’d worked with some up north, good blokes who’d been hard-working stockmen. ‘But that sort are few and far between,’ he reckoned. ‘They’re mostly dirty and drunk and you couldn’t trust one as far as you could throw him.’
    But when a small group of blacks, drifting down from the same drought along the, Darling River as Ada’s unfortunate lot, had come to their back door a couple of months after her court case, Joe hadn’t turned them away like she had.
    Jessica remembers what a pitiful sight they’d been, no more than skin and bone. Their arms and legs were covered in open sores where the flies clustered in swarms. The stomachs of the naked children were distended to the size of small watermelons and their dark eyes seemed too large in their woolly little heads. She could see the shape of their skulls under the tightly stretched skin covering their coal-black faces. Flies crawled at the corners of their eyes and up their nostrils and they seemed too tired to brush them aside. Their limbs were like twigs you could snap with a