The Untold (24 page)

A
S A TEENAGER
growing up in Australia in the Hunter Valley, about one hundred fifty miles north and inland from Sydney, I heard about a wild woman who hid out in a mountain cave not far from where I lived.

There was nothing written down about her life then. I didn't even know her name. And what I did know was all hearsay: she was a trick rider, horse rustler, wanted woman. Her story seemed to be made of air more than earth, like a fairy tale, and just like that it took hold of my imagination.

Apparently she had lived and roamed in the area in the early 1920s, but it felt truer to me that she was still out there in the mountains sleeping rough, eating weeds and scraping through the bush.

I thought about her every day.

Just as soon as I was old enough, I left the Hunter Valley and I forgot about her. I filled my mind with more immediate things—adventure, study, love. And each had a way of covering up her story. I came to it again only through dissatisfaction in what I was reading and seeing. I knew plenty of unlikely heroines in life, but they seemed to be missing from history and fiction.

In my twenties, I started teaching creative writing for a living.
I often launched the workshops with an appeal to students to “tell the story you most need to tell.” Of course, this is easy enough to say but much less easy to do.

Around this time, along with another writer, I was invited to travel to isolated country areas, including the Hunter Valley, to run a series of writing workshops. It was a wonderful gig. Mostly, I saw it as a chance to be paid well and escape the bustle of Sydney. I had no inkling of how the trip would shape me.

We drove happily down into the Hunter Valley and then out along the dusty roads to the Widden Valley. In each place we felt the fullness of local hospitality. One of the venues was an old timber hall in the middle of a paddock with the mountain ranges in view. For generations the hall had been the community meeting place for weddings, wakes and christenings. You could actually see dance steps worn into the floor.

After I had spent two days there, working with students of all stripes and ages—an equine dentist, a mother, the mayor—one woman gave me the gift of a book. It was an amateur historian's account of that wild woman who had lived in the mountain cave. But now she had a name. She was Jessie Hickman.

I drove back to Sydney with the queasiest feeling. In part, it was the strangeness of having forgotten about her, like forgetting a dear friend. And then this new and sudden sense of responsibility towards her or, more accurately, to her story. I hadn't even reached the highway and already there was a strong argument forming in my head. This woman had a name, a birthplace. She was fact and I wrote fiction.

This argument continued for the four-hour drive back to Sydney and then went on for the next five years or so. Fact versus
fiction. Even so, Jessie Hickman inspired enough daring in me to surreptitiously seek out prison records and social histories, all in the hope of finding more traces.

After years of her fantastical presence in my life, when I found Jessie's prison mug shot, she became solid to me. There she was: “Jessie McIntyre alias Bell alias Payne” (not yet known as Hickman), “of eyes brown,” “of hair dark brown,” “special features: nil.” For me, her smudged eyes were the missing piece. Coal-dark, they were earth itself, expressing everything that took me a whole novel to say.

I copied this image of Jessie, took it home, framed it. I hung it above my desk—which, in hindsight, was a foolish thing to do. Her face is so intimidating. The way her jaw juts out challenges all that might be false or whimsical. I was stuttering beneath it. I wanted to get her story right, to give her a voice, to tell her story from her point of view. But what I was learning of her, no question, was that here was a woman of action, not words.

Since the book's publication, some readers have asked me, “Why choose to tell the story through the dead and buried baby?”

The simplest answer is, I couldn't tell Jessie's story any other way.

For me, the child as narrator is that part of Jessie she had to bury because of the plain brutality of her life. Her softness had no place in the rough world where she found herself. So more than anything, that is what I wanted to give voice to, that is the story I needed to tell.

Recently, I went back to the Hunter Valley on a book tour. While I was there, I met an older woman who asked me how I knew that Jessie had given birth to a premature child who did not
survive. I told her I didn't know for sure, there was no record of it. Then I added, a little defensively, “Well, it is fiction, after all.”

The woman had no interest in my fact-versus-fiction debate. She began telling me her own story—how she'd lived her whole life at the foothills of the Widden Valley ranges where Jessie had roamed, how her father used to take her on long drives looking for lost sheep and cattle. One day he pulled up on the side of the road near a river and said, “This is where Jessie Hickman lost her child.”

I don't know if the woman's story is true. There is no way to know. It is hearsay, after all. And people do like to tell stories. But what I have learned, or rather, grown into, is a faith in fiction. Because no matter how far you take it, fiction always circles back. Somehow it always wants to tell the truth.

—Courtney Collins

F
OR THEIR UNIQUE PART
in the life of this book (in chronological order), heartfelt thanks to my agents Benython Oldfield and Sharon Galant of Zeitgeist Media Group, Jane Palfreyman, Clara Finlay, Ali Lavau, Juliette Ponce, Erika Abrams, Sam Redman, Clare Drysdale, Stéphanie Abou, Amy Einhorn, Liz Stein, Inés Planells, Silvia Querini, Ageeth Heising, Marianne Schönbach, Ilse Delaere, Maaike le Noble and Norbert Uzseka.

For their care and support, special thanks to Caroline Baum, Daniel Campbell, Kirsty Campbell, Siobhán Cantrill, Louise Cornegé, Alison Drinkwater, Angie Hart, Anna Helm, Fiona Kitchin, Lilith Lane, Gareth Liddiard, Kathryn Liddiard, Lisa Madden, Jeanmarie Morosin, Kate Richardson, Jackie Ruddock, Amanda Roff, Jasmin Tarasin, Jo Taylor and Meredith Turnbull.

And to my family—Collins, Diffley and Field combined, thanks and love
always.

C
OURTNEY
C
OLLINS
grew up in the Hunter Valley in New South Wales, Australia. When she is not traveling, she lives on seventy acres next to the Goulburn River in regional Victoria, Australia.
The Untold
is her first novel, and she is currently at work on her second,
The Walkman
Mix.