The Untold (12 page)

B
y the time she was fourteen her name was being chanted by crowds under the big top of Mingling Bros. Circus. She was the Amazing Miss Jessie. Every night it was the same: Mirkus, the ringmaster, announcing her, Jessie running into the ring, the crowds yelling out,
Miss Jessie! Miss Jessie!
as she launched herself onto the podium. Josephine/Joseph tying her to the wheel of fortune, the Caped Man cartwheeling in from the side, drawing his knife and aiming at her while Josephine/Joseph set the wheel spinning.

The Caped Man, knife in hand, would dash around the ring, brandishing his blade in the air as Josephine/Joseph gave chase. When they lassoed him, he would not stop running. He would slice the rope with his knife and throw the tail end of it into the crowd, who would be hissing. Josephine/Joseph would run back to the podium to spin the wheel. Then it was like this, always the same: the flung knife, the cackle, the bloodcurdling scream and the crowd whispering around,
Did he get her?

He never did.

Josephine/Joseph would untie her and she would cartwheel to a horse; still dizzy from spinning, she would jump neatly onto the horse's back and flip herself into a handstand for a whole lap of the ring.

One night, after the show, as the crowd spilt out of the circus tent, a waif ran beneath the stalls, through the streams of light and dust and columns of shadows. He ran until he reached the end of
the row and then, peering under the tent and seeing no one on guard, sprinted to the stables.

When Jessie reached for a clump of hay to feed her horse, she grabbed a fistful of the boy's shirt instead. She did not let go of it until she had pulled him right out of the feeder.

He was one of the filthiest creatures she had ever seen. Skinny legs and skinny arms and his head too big for his small shoulders.

Who do you belong to?
she said.

When the boy said nothing, she thought him mute. But he was not mute, he was mesmerized. Here was the Amazing Miss Jessie. The star of the show. He had seen her on all the posters.

At last he said
, Miss Jessie
. And then he bowed.

Where is your mother?

I don't have a mother
, he said.
I grew on a tree.

You're not a fruit
, she said.
Of course you have a mother.

I don't
, said the boy. And that was the truth of it.

What's your name then, kid?

My name is Bandy Arrow.

She laughed.
Who named you?

I named myself. I'm a performer, just like you.

Jessie walked him out of the stable and into the light to take a good look at him.

A performer? What can you do?

I can show you my roundoffs and turns
, he said.

Jessie watched as he launched his small body into motion. Blond hair like a flame, flame over feet, around and around he went and he did not stop until she told him to.

That was it. She was fourteen and he was seven and Bandy Arrow became my mother's pet, her sparrow. When the troupe
traveled from town to town they sat together on the back pole wagon. Their legs hung over the edge, way off the ground. It was their job to watch for horses that strayed from the procession. From the back of the wagon their view was wide and when a horse swayed out into open country, they would launch off the wagon and chase it down, pounding the ground with their bare feet, feeling the grass against their bare legs, without a care between them.

Jessie and Bandy spent a year like this, more days running through open country than performing under tents. Some days they wore wigs, just for their own amusement, and took turns leaping off the back of the wagon to do circus tricks. Jessie did not know how the sight of this little boy running with a curly blue wig bobbing from his head could make her laugh so hard, but it did.

One day when Bandy was running behind, the wig fell into the dirt. Sitting on the back of the wagon, Jessie pointed to the ground and yelled after him. Bandy slowed his running and Jessie stood up. The wagon rattled on, turning up clouds of dust. Jessie could just see Bandy's hands coming up to his head before she lost sight of him.

The sudden distance between them gave rise to a terrible feeling in her. She yelled to him again and then she heard her name as if it were an echo.
Jessie! Jessie!

She banged on the wooden panels of the cart for the driver to stop.

She leapt down and ran towards him. He was hobbling, blue wig in his hand, blood covering his knees.

I tripped, Jessie,
he said
, I fell. I couldn't see you and I didn't know what was coming.

Jessie lifted Bandy into the wagon and tore off the tail ends of
her shirt to clean him. The rest of the day she cooed over him, making him rest in the back of the wagon, blankets rolled up behind his head for pillows.

That day, she chased down the straying horses herself. Running into those wide fields away from him was the loneliest feeling.

Soon Jessie would come to understand that day as a terrible premonition, when Bandy Arrow fell and faded from her view.

S
ergeant Andrew Barlow thought of himself as a Man of Science. It was more than just his fondness for scientific props, vials and test tubes or his previous experiments in preparing opium. For him, it alleviated the pressure that was in him. It was the inherent discipline of it, the formulas, and he regarded it as another man might regard his religion. Barlow believed in gravity. Gravity helped him make sense of things. Every night as the sky opened up he knew it was gravity that was keeping the planets in orbit. And the days that he felt as though he might just float off the earth, he reminded himself of the fact of gravity. It consoled him.

Riding through Fitz's forest, it was gravitational forces that Barlow had in mind. From his study of Newton's
Principia
, Barlow knew well enough the pull that large planetary bodies had on one another. But until now, it had not concerned him what force humans, in distance or closeness, might exact on each other.

He was thinking of my mother.

His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of bellowing. He caught up to Jack Brown and they rode on the track side by side, listening out.

The sound was disorienting until they found the source, a cow with its head caught in Fitz's barbed-wire fence. They swung down from their horses and Barlow pulled a small pair of pliers from his saddlebag.

Jack Brown looked surprised at Barlow's initiative and he held
down the cow's head while Barlow cut the wire from around it, and then they both stood back as the cow scrambled to its feet and took off down the track.

They rode out into Fitz's paddock, Barlow wondering how all of it—himself, Jack Brown, Jessie, a bellowing cow—could fit into an ordered universe of perfect pull, perfect force.

But arriving at Fitz's, Barlow was reminded of the catch in Newton's theorem, his deus ex machina. It looked to him as though some furious hand had swept in and in one violent blow crushed the house.

With Jack Brown's help, Barlow raked through the house, examined every surface. There were footprints leading in and out and Barlow concluded that a day or so after the fire the place had likely been ransacked, and if there were ever bodies to be found there, they had been carted away with the kitchen sink.

Life in the valley was grim. The place was full of desperate men and thieves. By Jack Brown's telling, many of them were ex-soldiers who had been given plots of land, but they were not farmers and they did not know the land or how to survive it.

In terms of finding Fitz or Jessie, there was little for Barlow to go on. The only way he knew how to approach the investigation was scientifically and methodically. He would begin by visiting every hut in the valley. He would piece together a trail. He could not guess, yet, what would be at the end of it.

It was Jack Brown's idea that they ride to the postmaster's hut, as the postmaster was the only person in the valley who knew what places were inhabited and what places were not. Arriving there, Barlow talked the postmaster through the fire and the disappearance of Jessie and Fitz. The postmaster seemed inspired and he
began to make an elaborate drawing of individual huts. He had even begun to draw rooftops and chimneys when Barlow said,
Thank you for your artistry, sir, but an X on the page will do well enough to mark a hut.

But, Sergeant
, said the postmaster,
I am trying to show you that these are the huts I have delivered to and these are the huts I have not—the ones that in all my time have never received a letter or a telegram. And, sir, you can imagine what kind of man that is. Not used to visitors I would say. But the huts with the chimneys, shaded thusly, are the ones that I have seen lately blowing smoke. So you know there is something live in there and will perhaps be cautious and prepared in approaching the others that may not.

May not what?
said Barlow, confused by the postmaster's explanation.

Have anything live in there, sir. The winter always claims some.

And whose work is it to find them, or bury them?

Well, sir,
said the postmaster,
unless they're receiving mail, it's not my work to do. Perhaps it's yours, Sergeant.

Barlow paced in front of the postmaster's desk while he finished the drawing.

When it was done Barlow presented it to Jack Brown, who had been watering the horses.
It's a work of art
, said Barlow, handing him the map,
only I have no notion where to begin.

Jack Brown smoothed it out across the horse's saddle.
Not bad
, he said.
The man is particular.
For a start you can tell north by that ridge of the mountains. Over there are marked the plots given away to the ex-soldiers. But you see the river is over here. If you want to visit them all, you'll need to ride more or less in a circle. So, Sergeant, it won't matter what direction you set off in first.

Jack Brown mounted his horse.

Where are you going, Jack Brown?

I've done what I can, Sergeant. I reported the crime, I took you to it, I delivered you here. Now the fact of it is that my boss has gone and he's left me unpaid and idleness does not suit me. I need to find another employer.

Barlow began to panic. He needed Jack Brown. He knew he could not negotiate the valley without him and he knew there would be nothing more derided or endangered than a cop alone. Or, he guessed, a black man. So at least they had that in common.

How black are you, Jack Brown?
asked Barlow.

Jack Brown turned on his horse.
Are you asking me what caste I am, Sergeant?

What I mean to say, Jack Brown, and I hope this doesn't cause a man offense, is are you black enough to be my tracker?

Jack Brown laughed.
What are you offering, Sergeant?

Room and a wage.

What's the wage?

What does a man expect? Six or seven quid a week?

I'll ride to the first hut with you, Sergeant. And I'll consider it.

They had not reached the first hut when Jack Brown said,
Sergeant, for seven quid a week I won't get you lost. For nine, I'll track anything with feet.

W
ith the Great War came the Great Suspicion. It rolled into Mingling Bros. Circus of the World like a dense fog that clung to its stalls. Suddenly, there were no more crowds jostling outside to get in and those that did turn up came less to admire the performers and more to determine if the performers were not the enemy themselves.

The word was out—Miss Spangellotti and Mirkus were German. Patriotism in cities and country towns meant there was no place that would welcome them.

Regardless, the troupe moved from town to town in the hope there was somewhere that had not caught on to the spirit of the time. They tried novel things to bring audiences in, changing into their costumes by the side of the road and marching into towns with an elephant in the lead to create a grand procession. But most often by the time they reached the town their costumes were dusty and as they marched down the main street people eyeballed them from behind shop fronts or curtained windows. Some sent their children out to throw rocks.

It didn't take long before the performers, including my mother, were missing their cues. No amount of putting on a brave face or colored sequins could make up for their hearts no longer being in it.

The night a man in the audience threw a dead possum at Mirkus, it happened to be the most well-timed stunt of the evening. The
dead possum hit Mirkus's shoulder and slid down his velvet jacket, landing at his feet.

Mingling Bros. was over. Mirkus and Miss Spangellotti called in the troupe: the Indian cyclists, Josephine/Joseph, Maximus and Minimus, the Russian dancers, the Spanish acrobats and Señor Donata. And, of course, my mother.

That's it, my friends
, said Mirkus.
Let's lickety-split. Let's blow the whistle. Take your costumes and take your horses. And for goodness' sake, take care of yourselves. The people are going mad and I fear this is just the beginning.

Everyone in the circus had a partner except Jessie, and this was evident again in their departing. Maximus and Minimus. The cyclists. Josephine/Joseph and Señor Donata. Jessie realized that she was the only one who would ride off alone. She thought of Bandy Arrow, her pet, her sparrow, who had disappeared one day as suddenly as he had appeared. No one in the circus ever spoke of him and she wondered if, in her loneliness, she had not conjured him then as she would like to conjure him now, an imagined and perfect friend.

After the demise of Mingling Bros., Jessie turned her hand to all kinds of things, and mostly they were other people's things and other people's horses. There was an industry in it, selling horses to the army for the war. Broken-in horses were in hot demand and my mother knew where to find them.

She was swift and efficient and, thanks to her circus days, she could pull off many disguises. She appeared in Parramatta Court half a dozen times with her different aliases—Jessie Hunt, Jessie Bell, Jessie Payne—but the evidence was usually already gone, being shipped across the seas.

Until it wasn't.

She was twenty-one years old when she was finally convicted.

By then she was a seasoned and well-regarded horse thief, and when the crime was too effortless she would raise the stakes for her own amusement. It was when she swiped two chickens after stealing a horse that she was captured.

When she snatched the chickens from their coop, they were sleeping. With one hand she held both chickens upside down by their feet, and with the other she twisted their necks to kill them. But things did not go so well in the dark: one of the chickens began to flap its wings and she dropped it and it made a fearful racket. Unfortunately for Jessie, the owner of the chickens and the horse was listening—lately his chickens had been preyed on by a fox. When he heard the sound of their distress he tiptoed out into the night poised to shoot with his rifle under his chin. He was surprised to see not a fox but my mother coming out of the pen. He waited until she tried to mount the horse again, this time with two chickens under her arms, and then he stepped out of the dark and pressed the gun against her back and said,
Lady, you're a goner.

The man directed her, at gunpoint, to the police station. There was no one around in the middle of the night so he sat there, with the gun at her back, until morning. And then he stood over her, satisfied, as two policemen pushed her fingers onto a pad of ink and took her fingerprints. By the time the policemen got her into a holding cell she had smeared them with blue ink. She kicked and punched them and spat out insults.

We've got a wild one here
, they said.

Before my mother faced the judge she did her best to make herself look neat. But even with her hair pinned up in braids, when she
stood before the judge she could feel his judging eyes upon her and knew that he saw her every imperfection, inside and out.

For the judge there was nothing to consider. My mother had been caught in the act. He tallied up her sentence: twelve months for the horse, three months for each chicken and six months for the assault of the police officers, which he assured the court was lenient.

He said,
In giving this sentence, it is my hope that this young woman might grow virtue, like a virtuous child in her womb, and the law will claim its paternity
.