Free Jessica by Bryce Courtenay Page B

couldn’t refuse. She thanked them, tears in her eyes. Yellow-belly is a good eating fish and she’d taken them home and cooked them. Hester and Meg turned up their noses but Joe said, apart from tasting a bit muddy this time of year, they were real good.
    Hester commanded Jessica not to speak of Joe’s kindness. ‘You don’t breathe a word, you hear? Not to anyone. Folk are terrible tattle-tales — if people hear Joe Bergman is helping blacks it will do your father’s reputation no good.’ Hester knew well enough that any threat to Joe would keep her younger daughter’S trap firmly shut.
    But Jessica, even then, knew what her mother really meant. On the basis of the popularity she’d gained over the shooing of the Aborigines off Riverview Station, Ada Thomas was thinking of standing for the position of councillor in the Shire elections, the first woman in the Riverina ever to contemplate such an action. If Joe’s kindness to the Aborigines was known then the Bergmans could be seen as nigger lovers, which would do Meg’s chances any amount of harm. But, despite all Hester’s fears, Ada Thomas lost the election anyway. People may have thought she was a hero but she was still a bossy boots and no one wanted to give her any more power than she already had.
    As Jessica arrives at the homestead, she can hear that the dogs have worked themselves up into a howling frenzy. She’s locked the three kelpies in the shed so they wouldn’t follow her down to the river and get themselves bit to death. Red is gunna be real cranky, Jessica thinks to herself. Red is her dog, the oldest of the three, and he likes to be around her, always on the lookout in case she comes to harm. Red sees Jessica as his responsibility and he doesn’t like to be insulted by being shut away when there’s something going on.
    By way of making up to them, Red in particular, Jessica decides they’ll get a bit extra in their bucket of bones and boiled hogget scraps. Maybe she’ll toss in a ladle or two of Hester’s soup gravy — that, she decides, should cheer ‘em up a treat. She can just hear Joe’s voice now, scolding her: ‘They’re working dogs, girlie.
    Spoil a dog and it’ll never come good again. Sit on its bum under a tree all flaming day!’
    But it would just be another of Joe’s gloomy predictions. Any deviation from the normal makes Joe uncomfortable and brings out his sense of impending disaster, what Jessica has come to think of as his ‘never come trues’. Red and the two other kelpies love to work and if one of them were to lay down on the job you could be damned sure something was seriously wrong with it — distemper, maybe, or a tick or a bite from a snake.
    Jessica grins because she’s long since called her father’s bluff — she knows he’s not the cranky old bugger he pretends to be. He’s kind enough for anyone’s liking, but he just doesn’t want to be caught at it.
    The Aborigines aren’t the only instance where Jessica’s caught Joe not practising his dog-eat-dog theory. He’ll slaughter a two-tooth and leave the dressed carcass at the back door of someone’s ‘place, or do the same with a side of bacon. He’ll hear a farmer is taken ill, and he’ll turn up to put in a couple of days’ ploughing, shearing, harvesting or whatever needs doing.
    It’s just that you never know what Joe is up to when he is doing good because he never speaks of it. If you catch him at it he’ll get stroppy and deny any dogooding. He’ll claim he’s sold the two-tooth for good money, or obtained a more than fair price for the bacon, or been paid wages for his labour. Meanwhile, it’s as plain as the nose on your face that the people who’ve received his kindness can no more afford a side of bacon than pay cash for the crown jewels. Yes, Jessica knows her old man,