Jessica takes up Joe’s faded red shirt and helps Billy get himself into it. It fits perfectly. Then she brings over the pot of tea, refills Billy’s tin mug and ladles three heaped tablespoons of sugar into it and stirs it for him. The room is silent but for the clinking of the spoon against the sides of the mug.
‘Now Billy, what are we gunna do with you?’ Jessica asks, sitting on the stool beside him.
Billy looks confused then licks his lips. ‘Billy stay here, plenty good tucker.’
‘No, Billy, you can’t stay here, you’ve done wrong.’ Jessica can feel her heart start to pound again as she speaks. She doesn’t want to upset Billy, but she doesn’t know how else to put it.
‘Billy bad boy!’ he suddenly bursts out.
‘Billy, I’m going to have to take you in. Do you . understand?’ ‘Billy stay with Jessie.’
‘Billy, you’ve done something terrible, you can’t stay here.’
Billy looks as though he’s about to cry. ‘But d-d-ddogs bite Billy!’ he stammers. ‘Sorry kilt dogs, Jessie.’ ‘No, Billy, not the dogs! What you did at Riverview!’ Billy Simple looks as though he’s trying to recall something stuck way back in his past. He smiles. ‘Ah! Billy break gun! Missus Thomas shot-gun!’ Then he says urgently, ‘No! no! Billy not shoot them blacks.’
Jessica sighs. ‘No, Billy, not the shotgun, that was this mornin’. What you did yesterday, or was it in the night? Did you do it last night? You know, what you said you did to Mrs Thomas, Winifred and Gwen at Riverview?’ She can’t bring herself to be more specific.
Billy smiles again and claps his hands triumphantly. ‘Kilt ‘em!’
‘You killed them? Are you sure, Billy?’
‘Kilt, kilt, kilt!’ Billy repeats happily. He balls his fist in front of his face and his forefinger shoots up. ‘A-da!’ He looks at his finger proudly, then the second finger follows, ‘Win-fred!’ and then he wiggles his thumb, ‘Ga-wen!’
‘You killed them? All three?’
Billy looks at Jessica and nods his head vigorously. ‘One, two, three, Billy caught a flea, flea died, Billy cried, one, two, three!’ He recites the nursery rhyme perfectly and then claps his hands.
Billy stops clapping when he sees Jessica isn’t responding and hangs his head and then sniffs.
‘Billy, why did you come here?’ He sniffs again but doesn’t look up. ‘Look at me, Billy.’ He raises his head slowly and looks at Jessica as she asks again, ‘Billy, why did you come to Jessie?’
‘Billy bad boy!’ He looks slyly at Jessica. ‘Jessie hide Billy.’
Jessica shakes her head. ‘No, Billy, can’t be done, mate. They’ll be after you, they could be out looking for you already.’
Billy Simple looks over his shoulder as though he expects his pursuers to come through the kitchen doorway at any moment. ‘No, no, Jessie hide Billy!’ he cries again.
Jessica remains silent for some time, looking down at her hands, then she raises her head and, sighing, looks at Billy. ‘Billy, someone will have found Mrs Thomas and the two girls. They’ll see you’re missing and they’ll come after you. Look, if I hide you they’ll find you soon enough. And if you run away, they’ll run you down, find you in the bush.’ Jessica pauses, then adds, ‘They won’t be good men, Billy, they’ll shoot you down like a mad dog.’ Jessica’s heart skips a beat as she realises what she’s just said, but Billy doesn’t seem to notice.
Billy crosses himself. ‘Hail Mary -’
‘No, Billy, don’t!’
But this time he ignores her. ‘Hail Mary, Mother of God,’ he repeats, ‘would you like to see the big cock Jesus gave me?’
Jessica can see he’s getting upset again and she changes tack. ‘Billy, would you like to sleep, have a good kip, eh?’
Billy nods his head slowly as though he’s thinking about this idea.
‘Did you sleep last night?’ Billy shakes his head.
‘Where were you all last night, you poor bugger?
C’mon then, you can use Joe’s bed, it’s nice and long, out the back in the sleep-out.’
Billy looks suspiciously at Jessica. ‘Men come shoot Billy like mad dog.’
Jessica sighs. ‘True enough.’ She shrugs her shoulders. ‘But if you won’t come to Narrandera with me you might as well have a good sleep.’ She continues with this peculiar logic, ‘It’s a bloody sight better than sitting on yer arse shittin’ yer britches, waiting for them to come and get ya. Ain’t it now, Billy?’
Billy looks up, surprised. ‘Narran-dera?’
Jessica remembers that Billy is afraid to ride a horse. ‘It’s near twelve hours by sulky. They won’t think you’d head for Narrandera, they’ll expect you to go bush, into emu country,’ she says, knowing it’s a lie, that he’d be dead of thirst and the sun in a day and a half. Billy would be driven back towards the river if he were on his own without water.
He suddenly removes his hat and drops his head and parts his hair with his hands, exposing the scarred pathway. ‘Narran-dera Hos-pit-al fix me ‘ead, Jessie.’ He removes his hands from his head and looks up at her eagerly. ‘Narran-dera good! Jessie take Billy to Narrandera to fix me, eh?’ He takes his hat and pulls it back over his head.
Jessica can’t believe her luck. ‘Yes, Billy, someone there will know what to do with you.’ ‘Jessie come too!’ Billy says in sudden alarm. Jessica nods her head. ‘You won’t make it alone, mate.’
She now realises she’s been on the edge of panic, worrying that someone may already have discovered the murdered women at Riverview and be heading straight over, Joe’s place being the nearest property to the Thomases’ station. But she knows that their cook has Saturday afternoon and Sunday off to visit her sister, the cook at North Yanco Station, and won’t return to Riverview till this Sunday evening. And she figures it can’t be much past nine o’clock, still a little early to expect callers. With Jack and his old man out mustering, there’s just a chance there’ll be no one at the homestead and the bodies may not yet have been found.
Although if a stable boy comes in to groom the horses or to harness the Thomas sulky for church, he’d be sure to raise the alarm.
Anyone going for help would probably ride to one of the bigger stations to report the murders. Narrandera and Whitton are both too far, a good nine hours on horseback. They might go looking for Jack and old man Thomas in the bush but they’d be lucky to spot them inside a couple of hours, or more if they’re working one of the more distant runs. They’d know Joe’s the nearest male to Riverview and might sensibly decide to begin recruiting a search party by starting with him.
Jessica reckons it’ll take half a day to gather a mob of men to come looking for Billy, maybe even longer. She probably has four hours or a little more lead on them if she and Billy get going soon. If she stays here with Billy and if the mob arrives, probably drunk, they’re just as likely to lynch Billy on the spot, string him from the windlass. She can’t just sit here and wait for that to happen, and Jessica shudders at the thought of more death. No, she makes up her mind, she doesn’t know what she’s going to do with Billy, but she’s got to get going in the next half-hour.
‘Billy, I’ll have to go harness the sulky, will you come with me?’ Billy nods and goes to stand up but she raises her hand. ‘No wait, I’ll pack some food for the way first.’ She finds a large basket and puts in two of the loaves, adds half a packet of tea and a small tin of sugar, then slices several thick wedges from the leg of bacon and wraps them in a cloth. Finally she makes a nest of straw and puts a dozen eggs carefully into the basket. The eggs remind Jessica that she hasn’t fed the chickens or the pigs and she hastily makes a bucket of meal mash for the pigs and fills an old jam tin with cracked corn for the chooks. It’s double rations for both so if she’s away tomorrow, as she expects, they’ll be hungry but they’ll last until she returns. ‘Billy, will you go to the well and draw water for the chook
s, and then go back and get another couple of buckets for the pigs.’
Billy rises from the stool and Jessica sees he is now limping very badly.
‘You orright, mate?’ Jessica carries a bottle of kero for the hatcher lamp and, with the cracked corn in one hand and the bucket of mash in the other, she walks towards the door.
‘Leg hurts,’ Billy groans, limping behind her. Well, that’s one good thing, Jessica thinks, he won’t be trying to escape by running for it.
When they return to the kitchen it’s obvious to Jessica that Billy’s leg is troubling him badly. He is sweating buckets and sits down as they come in. He grabs his leg in both hands, holding it behind the knee so his foot doesn’t touch the floor.
‘Here, let’s have another squiz at your leg,’ she says.
‘Take off yer boot, mate.’
Billy is reluctant to reach down to his boot, not sure how to go about it without hurting himself more. ‘Wait on,’ Jessica says and kneels down on the floor and gently works the broken boot off his foot. Then she pulls up the leg of Joe’s moleskins again and sees that the blood has seeped through the bandage and some has run down over Billy’s ankles. His heel is sticky with blood and the inside of his boot is full of it.
She cleans up his foot and the boot, then removes the blood-soaked bandage and examines the tear in his calf, which appears to have opened even further. ‘It needs to be stitched,’ she says, more to herself than to Billy.
‘Billy, I’m gunna have to stitch it, or it’ll bleed or worse, get infected and make you real crook.’ Jessica knows that she’s losing time now but she’s got no alternative. She has to try to stem the blood by closing the wound. She makes a thick swab of rag and shows Billy how to hold it against his calf.
‘I’ll be back soon, Billy, just going out the back to get the stuff I need to fix you.’
Billy nods and Jessica goes back to the sleep-out and Joe’s medicine box. She opens one of the little drawers in it and takes out the gramophone needle box in which Joe keeps his suturing needles. Then she removes a packet of horsehair from the drawer next to it. She’s stitched the dogs several times when they’ve been caught on a fence and many a calf, and once a bad cut to Joe’s arm he got stringing barbed wire. She knows she’s not too strong at suturing a wound, Joe’s a lot better at it, but Billy’s leg is not going to close without a dozen or more stitches.
Jessica finds a scrap of paper and a pencil stub on Joe’s apple box and hurriedly writes him a note:
Dear Father,
Billy Simple’s gone crazy and murdered Mrs Thomas and the girls. I’ve taken him to the magistrate at Narrandera, left Sunday morning.
Don’t worry about me, I’ll be all right.
Jessica.
P.S. I’ve taken the Winchester.
She places the note inside Joe’s medicine box and returns to the kitchen, where she takes the kettle off the hob and sterilises the needle and then swabs the dog bite, wiping away all the blood and sulphur ointment and making sure to clean the wound deep into the muscle fibre. Billy grips both hands tightly above his knee, his eyes closed, tears running silently down his cheeks.
‘Sorry, mate, it’s gunna get worse before I’m finished with you. You can yell out if you like, there’s nobody here but us.’ Jessica sutures the wound the way Joe’s shown her. By now Billy’s swallowing his bottom lip and Jessica, glancing up at him, thinks it’s a damn good thing Billy hasn’t got any teeth or he’d slice it right off. He’s sweating heavily and still gripping his leg with both hands, but he doesn’t once cry out.
Jessica knots and then cuts the end of the horsehair. Her work is by no means a thing of beauty and Joe would probably scold her for a messy job, but she figures it will probably hold unless Billy has to run for it. She swabs the stitched wound with iodine and wraps a bandage tightly about it, then sterilises the needle again and puts it back into the little gramophone needle box. Jessica leaves what remains of the horsehair and the little tin box on the kitchen table. She knows Joe will see the gear on his return and will take it to his medicine box. Joe has a tidy mind and has drilled her since she was a brat about putting things back where they’ve come from. Jessica knows he’ll find her note.
‘There you go, put your boot back on, Billy. You’ll have to stay here in the kitchen while I harness the sulky, no use opening that up again trying to walk down to the paddock.’ Jessica is anxious now — time is running out.
Billy looks frightened. ‘D-d-d ... don’t leave me, Jessie.’
‘I’m not going nowhere without ya, love.’ Jessica smiles at him, then folds her arms in front of her and pretends to rest her forehead on them. ‘Good chance to get some shut-eye, what say, eh, Billy?’ She points to the table.
Billy obediently folds his arms and places them on the table and rests his head between them, closing his eyes. ‘Good boy. Won’t be long. You stay there and be good, Billy.’
On her way to the paddock Jessica passes the windlass and sees a crow pecking at Billy’s bloody clothes, which are draped over the wall of the well. She shouts and the crow flies off in a clatter of urgent wings, cawing its protest. Bloody vermIn, doesn’t take them long, Jessica thinks.
The water remains in the tub and Jessica can see what’s left of the soap lying on the bottom. Pushing her shirt sleeve up well past her elbows, she reaches down into the scummy water for the soap and places it to dry on the wall of the well, then she retrieves the scrubbing brush floating on the surface and puts it beside the soap. Her arm’s now covered in a film of pink scum and several of Red’s hairs stick to her. She’ll have to leave poor Red to the crows and the meat ants, she sighs. And tonight there’ll be a fox or two to have a good feed off him and the other dogs. It’ll be a couple of days before she can bury their bones and what bits of skin and fur remain.
Jessica fills up a bucket of water from the tank and, scooping her left hand into the bucket, she splashes her arm clean and unrolls and buttons her sleeve at the wrist again. She casts about for a stick. Finding a stout twig, she uses it to lift Billy’s shirt, now almost dried and beginning to stiffen in the hot morning sun. She drops it gingerly into the tin tub where it floats on the surface of the water. Jessica pushes it down under the water, forcing the air pockets from it with the stick. Then in go Billy’s torn moleskins. After this she departs to get the horse, a pony named Napoleon, who’ll go all day at five miles an hour if you give him a bit of a spell every now and then and let him poke his nose into a bag of oats. Back in the kitchen she finds Billy Simple asleep, his head still cupped in his arms. She loads the basket into the back of the sulky and returns to fetch a couple of blankets, which she rolls and ties with a piece of twine.
It’s not yet cold enough to damp down the heat of the day but in the early mornings there’s just the beginning of a chill in the air. Finally she carries a billy and a canvas water bag she’s filled out to the sulky and hangs both on a hook behind the front seat. It’s time to go.
She shakes Billy awake. ‘Wake up, Billy, got to kick the dust, mate.’
Billy is drugged for want of sleep and he whimpers, protesting, ‘No, no, Billy sleep now!’
‘Billy, wake up! We’ve got to get moving, the mob coming after you will be here soon enough.’
Billy rises painfully to his feet. Jessica knows she’s got no more than an outside chance of getting Billy all the way to Narrandera in the sulky, especially if the men are out after him now on their horses. As Joe would say, ‘Not a good risk, girlie, you’re on a hiding to nothing, better give it a miss this time.’
But Jessica knows she can’t do that, she’s got to try to bring Billy to safety. Along with Jack Thomas, she’s Billy’s only friend. You don’t let a mate down when the going gets rough, no matter what. Joe says it’s a rule you can never break. She knows that to do what he’s done, poor Billy Simple must have been provoked beyond any possible endurance — sh
e knows he’s suffered for so long now in that household. She is aware that he can’t ever be forgiven and will die for his crime. Jessica knows this for sure, but she’s not going to let a mob of drunken shearers and stockmen string him up, give him a dose of bush justice and have a real good time doing it, then boast to their grandsons one day how they did this noble deed. She feels certain Jack would do the same as her if he were standing in her boots right at this moment. This last thought gives Jessica some comfort. Jessica watches as Billy limps over to the sulky. He struggles to climb aboard, glancing anxiously at Napoleon. Poor bugger can’t even run for it, she thinks. Then she remembers the Winchester in the wood box and races to the kitchen to retrieve it. She can hear Joe’s voice chiding her for her carelessness, ‘You’re getting too bloody cocky, girlie. Remember the poor bastard’s mad as a meat axe — if he comes for yiz, shoot him dead!’
Billy sees the gun and pulls back in alarm. ‘It’s for Joe Blakes, Billy. We may have to camp the night. Don’t want you bitten by a mulga, now, do we?’ Jessica wonders what else they’ll find out there, apart from snakes. If a mob catches up with them, would she stand her ground, use the Winchester? Like standing up to George Thomas? She doesn’t know, can’t think about it now.
She climbs aboard and sits beside Billy, placing the gun at her feet and taking up the reins. ‘Ha, Napoleon!’ She raps the reins across the pony’s rump and he moves off, happy to be out and about.
Jessica knows she’s got the next twelve hours to try to keep Billy Simple alive in the bush, away from a drunken, hostile mob out to get him. Joe wouldn’t care for the odds on her succeeding, she thinks. Jessica knows she doesn’t much care for them herself.
CHAPTER FIVE
They hug the river, keeping the sulky close to the trees. Jessica knows that anyone coming after them from the open ground will have difficulty picking them up against the darkness of the river gums. They’re two hours away from the punt where she and Billy must cross the river if they are to make it to Narrandera.
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