True History of the Kelly Gang Read Online Free PDF Page B

lie down as she had planned. Little Jem tried to help and were shouted at for his trouble. Mother instructed me to come and hold her hand then squatted on the table it had one loose leg my father had neglected to repair. The light were very poor just the one tallow light burning but I could see my mother’s pain and were vexed I could do nothing to please her. She asked for water but would not let me go to fetch it. She cursed me for a fool and my father for abandoning her. All the while we expected the doctor but there were no sound from outside not even a mopoke nothing save a steady rain on the bark roof and the thumping of flotsam in the flooding waters of Hughes Creek.
    All through the endless night I stood at her side and with every hour her cries and curses got wilder in the end Dan and Jem just fell asleep.
    Around 4 o’clock Mother got herself once more onto the table and I thought the baby were finally coming but she swore at me and would not let me look. I heard a high thin wail like a lamb and knew my sister were arrived but she told me keep my back turned and find her best scissors in her tin box and then to put them in the flame of the fire. I done as ordered.
    I heard her shifting on her table she gave a little cry of pain then she spoke more tenderly. All right come on here and see the little girl.
    My mother sat on the table holding your Aunty Grace to me. She were a little foal a calf her eyes were wide her newborn skin glistening white and bloody nothing bad had ever touched her.
    Cut says Mother cut.
    Where I asked.
    Cut she said and I saw the pearly cord going from her stomach down to the dark I shut my eyes and cut and it were just as the old scissors crunched into the flesh that Maggie led Dr May into our hut and there he saw a 11 yr. old Irish boy assisting at his sister’s birth. He seen the earthen floor the soot black scissors the frightened children peering out from behind the curtained beds and all this he would feel free to gossip about so every child at Avenel School would soon get the false idea I seen my mother’s naked bottom.
    After the old drunk checked my sister with his instrument he handed her to me and attended to my mother. Don’t drop her lad said he it were not likely I held our precious baby in my arms her eyes so clear and untroubled. She looked me frankly in the face and I loved her as if she were my very own.
    By the time he finished doctoring to my mother it were dawn a luminous grey light filled the little hut and all the world seemed bright and new. I were happy then.
    Said she Go tell him now.
    I’ll go later.
    Go now.
    But I did not wish to leave my new sister with her soft downy black hair and her white white skin how it glowed like a sepulchre inside that earth floored hut. Go tell your da he has a little girl.
    So as the Doctor ambled his groggy way along the track I cut across through the wet winter grass. There were a low mist lying across the police paddock lapping the edges of my father’s solitary gaol. I approached the logs they was always damp and stained green with moss and mildew they give off a bad smell like dog shit in the rain.
    You got a girl I yelled.
    The magpies was carolling the lories screeching and fighting in the gums but from the walls of the lockup come no sound at all.
    Her name is Grace.
    No answer the prison were silent as the grave but then I seen a movement from the corner of my eye it were my father’s big buck cat standing on the mound where the mare were buried. The cat looked at me directly with its yellow eyes and then he arched his back and swished his tail once more as if I was no more than a robin or a finch. I threw a stone at him and went home to see my sister.
    Soon all the scholars at Avenel School heard of my role at the birth. They never dared venture nothing to me but Eliza Mutton said something to Annie it made her most distressed. Them scholars was all proddies they knew nothing about us save Ned Kelly couldnt spell he