The True Story of Spit MacPhee (17 page)

‘How will you know whether he’s swearing or not? You weren’t there when he was telling off Tim Evans’ kelpie in language a bullockie wouldn’t use.’

‘I’ll take his word for it,’ Grace said. ‘And you’ll have to sooner or later. You can’t always mistrust him.’

‘By God,’ Jack Tree said angrily. ‘I wish I’d been given some of this treatment when I was a kid.’

Grace smiled at her husband. ‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘Because now you have a chance to give it to somebody else.’

‘Well I’m damned if I’m going to let you joke about it,’ Jack said. ‘You’re dead wrong, Grace, and that’s all there is about it.’

Grace knew very well that she could be wrong, and what weakened her resolve was Jack’s blank wall facing Spit’s blank wall. As they ate their lunch of chops and potatoes and peas, she watched them both to see if she could detect even a glimmer of communication between them. Jack ignored Spit, and for his part Spit kept quiet throughout lunch, answering her questions or Sadie’s unusual chatter with loud monosyllables. Grace knew he wasn’t going to give anything back to Jack, neither a friendly word nor a whole sentence that Jack might use against him. Listening to his stiff, childish, serious voice in its bold disguise (the only way Spit knew how to talk), Grace knew how difficult it was going to be to break him down – with Jack or without Jack.

‘He’s still expecting to be tricked in some way,’ Grace decided, and after lunch when she organised Sadie to hunt for all the empty jam jars so that they could make some mixed pickles, she took Spit into the garden to help her pick the last of the green tomatoes on the dried up plants, and she asked him why he didn’t like Jack.

‘He’s all right,’ Spit said in his untouchable way. ‘I like him all right.’

‘Why don’t you talk to him?’ she asked.

‘He doesn’t talk to me much,’ Spit said, busy with the tomatoes, deeply involved in what he was doing as he always seemed to be in anything he did.

‘Well, try and talk to him, Spit, because we’re going to need his help soon.’

Spit didn’t ask her why they would need Jack’s help, and again she was aware of his suspicion and his childish caution. But she still had to settle the problem of his swearing. ‘Why do you swear, Spit?’ she said to him.

Spit looked up in surprise. ‘What makes you think I swear?’ he said.

‘I heard you swearing like a trooper the other day when you were chopping wood.’

Spit didn’t like that. ‘I only swear to myself,’ he said. ‘I don’t go around swearing.’

‘Do you know what the words mean?’ she asked him.

‘They don’t mean anything.’

‘Oh, but they do mean something. And it’s better that you don’t know what they mean. So please, Spit, don’t swear any more. Even when you think nobody is listening. Jack heard you, and the more you do it the more careless you’ll be with it, and I don’t want Sadie to hear that kind of language.’

‘I don’t swear in front of Sadie. She didn’t say so, did she?’

‘No, she said you didn’t. But don’t swear at all. That’s what I want you to promise. And you’ll have to keep your promise because we’re going to have a lot of trouble if you don’t.’

‘All right,’ Spit said, concentrating on the tomatoes. ‘I’ll stop swearing.’

‘That means you don’t swear at all, even when you’re alone. No swearing. Not the way you swear.’

Spit could be obliging and he said, ‘Don’t worry. I’m not going to hurt anybody.’

Grace was not quite sure what that meant but she accepted it as a promise. Encouraged now by this strange companionship she always felt for him, she asked him if he had any relatives left.

‘Anyone anywhere?’ she added. ‘Did your grandfather ever mention any?’

‘I had an uncle once,’ he said, ‘but he didn’t last long. He got killed a long time ago.’

‘Was that the only relation you had?’

‘Except for my mother and my grandfather.’

‘Do you remember your mother?’ Grace asked him, on her knees in the tomato patch but more interested in Spit than in the green tomatoes.

Spit was watching her now. ‘My mother got burnt in a fire,’ he told her.

‘Yes, I know. That was so sad.’ Grace hesitated, still not sure what to say to him. But then she made up her mind.

‘You know, Spit, that I’m trying to adopt you?’

‘Yes. I know,’ he said.

‘You know? How did you know?’

‘Mrs Evans told me, and a lot of other people asked me. A lot of people. Jack Ellison asked me yesterday.’

‘Then why on earth didn’t you come and ask me if it was true or not?’

‘I don’t know,’ Spit said. ‘I thought it might be another trick.’

‘I wouldn’t trick you. Don’t you know that?’

‘I didn’t mean you. I meant them.’

‘Who?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t know … It’s no good asking me … It’s Mrs Arbuckle and all the others. They’ll trick me again if they get a chance.’

‘I don’t think they want to trick you,’ Grace said to him. ‘They want to do what they think is best for you, and that’s why I’m trying to adopt you. I wasn’t going to tell you because I didn’t want you to think I had worked it all out. I haven’t. I have to get Jack’s signature on the paper, then I have to take it to the Shire Office. But I can’t do anything at all without Jack, which is why I wanted you to get on with him a bit better.’

Spit was silent. She did not expect any gratitude from him because she knew where his attitude came from; she knew that years ago he had been forced to acquire a childish skin of stoicism so that he could cope with his grandfather, and at the same time help him to survive as a boy. But she suspected that he was secretly frightened now, aware that he was a wisp of nothing, and that his only defence against everybody else’s plans for him was to keep himself to himself. There was nothing else he could do.

‘Jack doesn’t like me much,’ he said dispassionately.

‘It’s not that,’ she said unhappily. ‘Jack’s a kind man, Spit, but he’s a bit rigid, and he doesn’t like things to disturb his life. Sadie and I learned that a long time ago. But when he sees something is right he’ll stick by it. And sooner or later he’ll see that we are right, don’t worry.’

‘All right,’ Spit said, and once again Grace knew that he had gone as far as he could.

But that night when Grace sat down at the kitchen table, just before sunset, and carefully opened up the adoption form to write into it that Spit had no living relatives, she knew she was about to change the light and shadow of her own life, and she half-wished that when she handed in the form tomorrow that nothing would come of it. She was frightened of what she was undertaking. Until now she had never felt lonely or separated from Jack. On the contrary, she had always been satisfied with his set of rules for Sadie and herself. She had thought of them as no more than the ministry of a rather stiff man who was trying to order life decently, knowing that he was married to a very quiet woman who had no rules of her own except a desire to live from day to day without harshness or conflict. She had always been satisfied with the kind of protection and care that Jack gave her with his certainty that he knew best.

But now, for Spit’s sake, she was undoing the pattern of it.

‘I hope to God I’m doing the right thing,’ she said because she now had to get Jack’s signature on the adoption form, and how was she going to manage that?

Grace had no guile, she was incapable of scheming, particularly against her husband, so that when she decided to use Sadie she was not thinking up a quiet little plot of her own. She was trying to influence Jack, she told herself, the only way she knew how. As she waited for Sadie and Spit to come back from the railway station with the two boxes of laboratory test phials that Jack had sent them for, she looked around at her home and knew how valuable it was, and how safe and secure it had always been. Even the mustardy smell of it at the moment made the point.

Grace had spent the afternoon preparing and boiling the marrow, cauliflower, cucumber, tomatoes and onions for the mixed pickles she made every year for Jack. Sadie had helped to wash and cut and salt the vegetables, and Spit had fed the fire and scattered the peel and skins to the hens, and then stirred the mixture of mustard and vinegar as she poured the vegetables into the big copper kettle. Now the sideboard was packed with twelve jars of mustardy pickles, and the kitchen was still heavy with the air of pickling which Jack always liked. When he came in after six o’clock and said, ‘I could smell those pickles halfway to Nooah,’ she was pleased, because they needed that reminder of their old peace and security, even in the smell of cauliflower and tomatoes and onions and mustard and sugar and spiced vinegar.

But the evening meal was not familiar, nor was it relaxed, and she was glad when it was over, when Sadie and Spit were helping her with the dishes and Jack was at his roll-top desk. It was quiet and dark outside, and it was only a matter of waiting now for the right moment to send Sadie in to her father. Grace was on the point of doing it when the Evans’ dog began to bark, and because she knew how that dog annoyed Jack she decided to wait. It was a persistent and worried dog, and the barking went on long enough for Spit to say, ‘What does he think he’s barking at?’

‘It’s not you this time,’ Sadie said.

‘Maybe he knows I’m in your kitchen,’ Spit said.

‘He’s not that good,’ Sadie told him, and they heard someone at the back door calling out in a loud whisper, ‘Spit, are you there? Spit, can you hear me?’

‘Who on earth is that?’ Grace said.

‘I don’t know,’ Spit said and went around the table to the back door, with Sadie and Grace at his elbow. When they looked into the darkness all they could see was a small figure with a cart.

‘It’s me, Ben Arbuckle.’

Ben’s defiant whisper suggested a father and mother ready and waiting in the shadows to catch him. ‘I brought your things back, Spit. I’ve got them in the cart.’

Spit had been missing his cart and the small store of family possessions he had left under the Arbuckles’ house. He had thought once or twice of going back in the middle of the night to get them, but he had decided against it because Mrs Arbuckle might be waiting to catch him, using the cart and his grandfather’s things as bait.

‘Come in, Ben,’ Grace said to him. ‘Don’t stand out there in the dark.’

‘Well … I don’t know, Mrs Tree,’ Ben said.

But Grace insisted. ‘Come on in,’ she said, and went down the steps to take Ben by the arm and bring him into the kitchen.

The usually neat Ben was in a mess. He had no boots on, his smock and trousers were dirty, and his legs and arms and face were smeared with the mallee dust the town was built on. Spit knew why he was dirty. Ben had obviously crawled under the house in the dark to get the bits and pieces of his grandfather’s things.

‘You haven’t got your boots on,’ Sadie told him, pointing to his bare feet.

‘No,’ Ben said. ‘I threw them in the river.’

Spit laughed, but it was Grace who noticed that Ben’s dirty face was smeared and streaked as if he had been crying, and she asked him if his mother knew that he was here.

‘No, and I’m not going to tell her,’ Ben said.

‘Do you want a piece of cake?’ Grace asked him.

‘I’m not allowed,’ Ben said, but then changed his mind. ‘All right,’ he said, and he turned to Spit and told him that he had borrowed his cart a couple of times. ‘But I’ve got some wheels of my own.’

‘Where did you get them from?’ Spit asked him.

‘From Billy Cotsman. I’ve hidden them under the house.’

‘What about an axle?’ Spit said as Ben bit into the cake Grace had given him. ‘They’re not going to be any good without an axle.’

‘Billy didn’t have one, but I’ll get one somewhere.’

‘All you have to do is get the fruit box and the axle,’ Spit said. ‘But if you want me to help you build it you’ll have to get the stuff down to the old boiler yourself. I’m not going up to your place.’

‘All right,’ Ben said, and with his mouth full of cake he backed out as if his defiance was rapidly running out. Grace saw what was happening to him and hurried after him, catching him by the arm before he could run off. ‘Are you sure your mother doesn’t know you came down here?’ she said to him. ‘Is that why you’ve been crying?’

‘She doesn’t know anything,’ Ben said. ‘I got into trouble for throwing my boots in the river.’

‘What did you do that for?’ Grace said.

‘Well …’ But Ben’s defiance was now exhausted. And shouting, ‘S’long Spit,’ he was off on his bare feet, not to the gate but to the nearest part of the fence which he scrambled over as a last gesture of resistance to good order.

‘Poor old Ben,’ Spit said.

‘What do you think he’s up to?’ Sadie asked. ‘Why would he throw his boots away?’

‘I don’t know,’ Spit said. ‘But it’s not his fault. He can’t help it.’

‘That’s why Tim Evans’ dog barked,’ Sadie said as they went inside.

‘What do you mean?’

‘He thought it was you with the cart.’

Spit was delighted. ‘Well I fooled him that time, didn’t I?’ he said.

Grace listened, and when they were in the kitchen she sent Spit to check the front gate in case Ben had left it open when he brought the cart in. ‘Otherwise the dogs will get in,’ she said.

Alone in the kitchen with Sadie she gave her the adoption form and said, ‘This is what I had to fill in so that we can adopt Spit, so take it in to your father and ask him to sign it.’

Sadie knew about the adoption. She knew about the tension it had caused between her mother and father, but mother and daughter were so close that they both knew what had to be done, so she took the form in to her father.

When Spit came back Grace, who was tense now and nervous, sat him down at the kitchen table and asked him if he had a birth certificate somewhere. ‘Because,’ she said, ‘I think I’ll need that too.’

Spit shook his head. ‘I never saw one,’ he told her.

‘Do you know where you were born?’

‘In White Hills near Bendigo,’ Spit said.

‘Then I suppose I’ll have to get your certificate from Bendigo,’ Grace said, not quite sure that what she was saying really mattered. She was simply talking in order to talk while she waited for Sadie to return.