Free Jessica by Bryce Courtenay Page A

sharp twist of your thumb and forefinger, and lice swarmed over their heads.
    â€˜Poor bastards, all ribs and prick, like a drover’s dog,’
    Joe said.
    Jessica recalls how the adults smelled of rotting flesh. The torn, filthy rags they wore may have once been clothing but now concealed very little. They hung in bits and pieces over random parts of their skinny bodies, hardly hiding their private parts.
    Meg had come to the kitchen door first and ran screaming for Hester. Hester called to Jessica to bring the shotgun, but Joe came in and stopped his wife from driving them away.
    He’d given them a bag of flour for damper and let them have a wether, slaughtering the old sheep for them himself. He allowed them to stay in the bottom paddock which fronted the river and was well wooded and out of sight, warning them not to be seen or he’d have to send them away.
    He’d let Jessica use the shotgun to kill a roo for them every other day, or take the small-bore rifle, the .22, and shoot half a dozen rabbits. At this time of the year, though, there was hardly a bite of meat on a rabbit. ‘Vermin eating vermin,’ Joe would laugh, making a cheap joke out of his own charity. The roos she shot were full of worms but Joe said, ‘Blacks don’t care, don’t take any notice of things like that.’
    â€˜You mean people who are starving don’t care!’ she’d protested.
    â€˜Right,’ he said, seeing the look in her eyes and not wishing to take the matter any further.
    Jessica had gone into their camp every afternoon with strips of clean rags for bandages and a big jar of sulphur ointment Joe had produced for her. He said it was good for horses and he’d often enough used it on himself when he was a boundary rider and he’d come to no harm. She boiled water and cleaned the sores on the children’s little arms and legs with a strong permanganate of potash solution before applying Joe’s ointment. She tried not to retch at the suppurating flesh that came away on the dressings, often leaving only bone behind. The children hardly ever bawled when she dressed them and they loved the brightly coloured bandages and so were careful to keep them on afterwards.
    Joe told her she’d done good, but not to get too concerned, blacks were tough as old boots and had their own bush medicine. He said, ‘If they want to die they’ll just lay down and be dead on the spot, Jessie, wish themselves dead, and there’s nothing yiz can do about it.’ But Jessica didn’t see them gathering any of their own medicine and none of them seemed to want to lie down and die, so she kept on with the dressings.
    After a while one of the gins grew a bit friendly. She was younger than most of the women. Jessica thought she was sixteen, a year older than herself, though it was difficult to tell from her starving body. Her mission name was Mary Simpson and she spoke a little English, learned from the Lutheran Mission station up near the Lachlan Swamps.
    Mary was from the local Wiradjuri tribe, and had been taken as a bride by the Wongaibon tribe from the north who made up the rest of her small band. She first approached Jessica to say that some of the gins wanted to use Joe’s ointment on themselves as well as on the children. Soon Mary was helping her with the dressings and translating what Jessica told her into their own language. They were a sad little mob, but in a few days with a bit of tucker in them, they started to smile again. The children seemed to recover first and soon got strong enough to play in the river, which meant they didn’t smell quite as bad as before.
    One afternoon Mary came up to Jessica with all the kids in tow and they presented her with two yellowbelly and a redfin they’d caught.
    â€˜For you,’ Mary said shyly. ‘They catch for you, Missus Jessie.’
    They were starving but still they gave her the three fish, which she knew she