Jessica by Bryce Courtenay Page B

chunk out of his ear. Billy manages to scramble to his feet, but his knee won’t hold . up. Then three of the tar boys rush at him, collecting him in the midriff, and he careers backwards into the rump of Jack’s tethered horse. The frightened beast tries to move away but finds it is pushed hard up against the mallee stump and rears and begins to fall, its hooves lashing out frantically as it tries to keep its balance. Billy lands sprawling in the dirt under Jack’s horse as its rear hoof strikes out backwards, collecting Billy’s head and cracking his skull open like a pumpkin fallen from a cart. A moment later the horse, still trying to regain its footing, drives a second hoof into Billy’s face.
    In the confusion that followed, Jessica can remember little of what happened next. Jack, it seemed, pulled her away and she was told much later she was screaming hysterically and he had to slap her across the face several times to make her stop. Even now, four years later, she is sick at the thought of that day. She still carries the guilt of Billy Simon with her. She’s told herself a thousand times she wasn’t to know what would happen. That she was only trying to save her job so Joe could get her money. But still the guilt lingers.
    They bandaged the two sides of Billy’s skull together, then wrapped the bandages with baling twine so the sides would hold firm. One of the shearers told Jessica later that the crack down his skull was about half an inch wide, and through it he could see Billy’s brain, a throbbing bloody sponge. Then they bandaged his shattered face. His nose was badly broken and all but the very back teeth smashed out of his mouth. When they’d finished with him he looked like one of those Egyptian mummies — all they left showing were two holes for his nose and mouth.
    Jack rode all the way to Narrandera with Billy Simon, sitting in the back of the horse cart himself to look after his mate. The trip took nearly fourteen hours and the others who’d gone with Billy, following the cart on horseback, told how Jack never left Billy and twice stopped to change his blood-soaked bandages, doing the dressings himself.
    They told how Billy would come round and Jack would talk quietly to him and he would stop moaning at the sound of his mate’s voice. Then Jack would roll a smoke and hold it to the crimson opening in the bandage and make him draw back for the small comfort the tobacco might bring him. Jack also poured brandy mixed with a little water down Billy’s throat every time he regained consciousness, sitting him up so he wouldn’t choke. The men joked that poor Billy was pissed as a newt, feeling no pain, by the time they got him to the doctor at Narrandera.
    When Billy came out of the hospital three months later Jack paid all his expenses and took him home, even though he was brain-damaged and the doctor said nothing could be done further, that he’d never be right in the head again. The accident had left a huge, ugly scar that ran the length of Billy’s skull to an inch above his left eyebrow, a pinkish track through his black curls. Not that you’d ever see it — the day Billy came home from Narrandera he had his hat pulled down hard over his eyes, and was never after seen without it firmly on his noggin.
    Folk soon took to calling him Billy Simple, which was a cruel sort of joke. Before the accident, no bastard would have been game to attempt such a play on Billy Simon’s name for fear of having their own features rearranged. Now he was treated as a harmless idiot.
    Billy Simple, when he became well enough, was given a job for life as the gardener at Riverview homestead. All of this was Jack’s doing, against the wishes of George Thomas, Winifred and Gwen, these last two protesting that it was degrading to have a lunatic wandering around the garden.
    Surprisingly, Jack wouldn’t have succeeded in his endeavour to help Billy