The True Story of Spit MacPhee (18 page)

Sadie, standing behind her father at his desk, had hesitated to interrupt him. He disliked being interrupted when he was filling in the long yellow form of stock lists, or the weigh bills of the summer’s wool clip shipped out of the town. But Jack looked up at his quiet daughter and felt for a moment the affection that always touched him when he was aware, as now, of Sadie’s natural and delicate shyness. He took off his spectacles.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘It must be something you want badly, so what’s up?’

Sadie was about to say that her mother wanted him to sign the form, but she changed her mind and said, ‘I just wanted you to sign this form about Spit. That’s all.’

‘What form?’

‘So that we can adopt him.’

‘Did your mother put you up to this?’

Sadie shook her head. ‘No, it’s me. I want us to adopt Spit so he can stay with us. It’s my own idea as much as Mum’s.’

‘It’s an idea I don’t think much of, Sadie, and your mother knows it.’

‘But it won’t hurt you,’ Sadie said.

‘Do you know what it means if we adopt Spit?’ he asked her.

‘Yes. He’ll have to live here with us all the time. I know that,’ she said.

‘That’s not even the half of it,’ Jack said. ‘We’ll have to bring him up like a son. We’ll have to be responsible for him, no matter what he does …’

‘He won’t do anything wrong, Dad. Not if he can help it.’

‘Even if he doesn’t, your mother will have to look after him all the time. Did you think of that?’

Sadie could keep very still and she was very still now. ‘She won’t mind. She likes him.’

‘And you’ll have to live with him every day. If you up and decide one day you don’t like him any more you won’t be able to send him packing off to Bendigo. Once I sign that paper Spit becomes as important to me as you are. Do you want that, Sadie?’

Sadie, like her mother, knew that she had to stand her ground. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘If you don’t mind, I don’t.’

‘You want me to treat him like a son?’

Sadie compressed her lips, but this time all she could manage was a vigorous nod.

‘Well I’m damned if I know any more,’ Jack said in despair. ‘I don’t know what you see in him.’

Sadie, finding her courage again, said, ‘Spit has never hurt anybody, and he never will.’

Jack was trying not to be impatient with Sadie but he laughed his dry, impatient, military laugh. ‘I’ll bet he’s had more fights in your school than any other boy his age,’ he said.

‘Spit only fights when they say something about his grandfather. Everybody likes him. And he knows how to do everything.’

Jack’s response was a surprise even to himself. He did not snatch the form from her hand and tear it up, which is what he wanted to do. Angry with Sadie’s resistance and angry with Grace, he wanted to make a punishing remark to his daughter, one that he knew would get a submissive reply. ‘So what do you think you’re going to do young lady,’ he said, ‘if I refuse to sign that form? What will you do then?’

Sadie, facing defeat, was silent for a moment. ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t do anything, could I?’

Jack knew that he had won his private little contest but, looking at his daughter’s calm face which was trying to give nothing away, he knew that her eyes (uncontrollably wet), and her lips grimly (for her) compressed were an argument and a conviction that he could not face up to any more. It was too much.

‘All right. All right,’ he said. ‘Give me the form.’

Taking it from her he turned it over, found the place where he had to sign, dipped the pen, scrawled his signature and gave it back to her.

‘Give it to your mother,’ he said.

Sadie was so surprised that she simply took the form. Uneducated in gestures and untaught in affection she said, ‘Thanks, Dad,’ and feeling very sorry for her father she took the signed form in to her mother in the kitchen.

Grace was not sure what should happen next but she was surprised when she gave the form to Pat Stillman at the Shire Office only to have him hand it back to her.

‘You’ll have to take it to the county court office,’ he told her.

‘What on earth for?’ she asked him.

‘Because it’s the court that will decide if you are a fit and proper person to adopt and care for that poor little orphan, Master Spit MacPhee.’

Grace wished Pat wouldn’t joke about it because suddenly it was irritating. ‘Why didn’t you tell me that before?’ she said to him.

‘Because I didn’t know. We’ve never had a legal adoption in this town before, and it was only when I wondered myself what happened next that I found out. I got that form from Henry Fennel at the county court, he’s the clerk of the court, and even he didn’t know. But then he found out, and so I found out, and now you’ve found out, and pretty soon everybody else will find out.’

‘You mean it will have to be some sort of court case?’

Pat shrugged. ‘All I know is that you’ve got to go before a county court judge, and he will take everything into consideration,’ he said in a sepulchral voice. ‘That’s what Henry says.’

In love with his stuffed office, lovingly in command of his square pigeon holes that told him how much water was used in the town, how much the roads and footpaths cost to repair and what were the regulations about drains and fires, Pat was smiling at Grace because he couldn’t help it, even though he was sorry for what he was about to report to her. ‘There’s now another little fly in your ointment, Grace. Betty Arbuckle is doing exactly what you’re doing.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘She wants to adopt Spit herself. She was here yesterday asking for one of these forms, and she wanted to know if you had already made an application.’

Grace had always known that Betty Arbuckle would do something drastic, but she had not expected Betty to put in a rival claim for adoption. It shocked her. It was all right for Betty to think of Spit as an orphan in need of the care and protection of her evangelical Boys Home, but Grace thought it cruelly personal and wrong for Betty to want to adopt Spit herself.

‘Why would she want such a thing?’ Grace said. ‘She knows that Spit ran away from her, and I’m sure she doesn’t really want him.’

‘She wants to save his soul,’ Pat said with a laugh.

‘Don’t laugh, Pat. It’s serious. Spit would hate living with Betty in that house. He would only run away again if she tried to make him stay with her. He’d never stay.’

‘Are you sure that your little switch-ditcher would stick it out with you, Grace? He’s a wild kid.’

‘He’s not wild, Pat. He’s had to look after himself, and it’s made him a strange little boy, but he’s certainly not wild. I know that much about him.’

‘Well, he certainly seems to have dug himself under your thin skin, and now that he’s getting himself between Betty Arbuckle’s teeth God help the both of you.’

‘Spit’s all right,’ Grace insisted firmly, ‘and I don’t know now what I’d do if they took him away from me, Pat. That’s how I feel about it.’ Grace was surprised that she could say such a thing to Pat Stillman who was no more than an old acquaintance from school. But she needed to talk to someone about it.

‘What do you think I should do now?’ she said, appealing for help even though she knew that he couldn’t give it.

‘Take that form to Henry Fennel down at the court house and he’ll tell you what to do with it.’

‘Henry’s a Protestant, isn’t he?’

‘Yes, but he’s pretty dinkum, old Henry.’

‘But that means Betty will have the advantage, won’t she?’

‘I don’t know, Grace. Anyway it won’t be Henry Fennel who decides it. It’ll be Judge Laker.’ Pat still had the form in his hand, and he turned it over and glanced at Jack’s signature. ‘You didn’t forge it did you?’ he said teasingly.

‘Of course not.’

Pat laughed. ‘Then you must have hit him on the head with a sledge hammer,’ he said. ‘Knowing Jack …’ he added.

‘I didn’t think it was going to be so complicated,’ Grace said, taking the form.

‘That’s because you think life’s a bowl of cherries,’ Pat said, ‘whereas it’s really a whacking big basket of unbreakable monkey nuts.’

‘Thanks anyway,’ Grace said and left him in his square pigeon holes, escaping the smell of his carbon paper and cigarettes and the mallee dust and the onions that Pat seemed to eat raw, even for breakfast.

She knew Henry Fennel by sight and she couldn’t imagine him giving her much help. He was a short, tight, springy man with eyes that told you not to treat him in any way but seriously. Gingery, with a small moustache and rimmed pince-nez spectacles, he seemed to Grace to be a friendless sort of man. She remembered him as a boy, several classes ahead of her at school, who didn’t seem to want friends and didn’t have a nickname, so that when she knocked at the door of his little office and he shouted, ‘Come in,’ she was already sure that he would dismiss her in some way if he could.

‘Hello Henry,’ she said nervously.

Henry Fennel’s serious eyes behind his spectacles flashed their serious warning. ‘Hello, Grace,’ he said.

Grace looked around her and knew that Henry, as the clerk of the court, was a very square peg in a very square hole. Everything here was in order: rows of curious files tied with blue tape, a neat desk with neat papers on it, a bookshelf with large green books that seemed fitted to size. She decided that she must not waste this man’s time; or rather she must not give him the impression that she was wasting his time. She came straight to the point.

‘I’ve come to give you this form,’ she said. ‘Pat Stillman told me this was the place.’

He took it without comment, spread it carefully on his desk after moving aside the papers he had been working on and, with a sharp pencil in his hand, he checked one by one the questions and answers. When he came to Jack’s signature he looked up.

‘You should have printed your husband’s names under his signature,’ he said.

‘Oh, I’m sorry.’

‘Does Jack have a middle name?’

‘Yes. Edward.’

‘All right,’ Henry said. ‘I’ll print it in for you.’ And with a clipped almost bouncy action he took pen to paper and printed Jack’s full name under his signature. ‘You want it dated today?’ he asked.

‘I suppose so,’ Grace said.

He added the date and looked up. Grace waited, but he said nothing more.

‘Is that all I have to do?’ she asked.

‘You’ll have to be present when the application is considered by the county court. But we’ll call on you when we know the date and time.’

Grace hesitated. ‘I know that Betty Arbuckle has made an application …’ she began.

‘I can’t say anything about that,’ Henry interrupted in his clipped voice.

‘I don’t want you to,’ Grace went on quickly. ‘All I want to know is if they’ll stop me adopting Spit because of my religion.’

Henry looked at her without saying anything, and Grace knew then that in the cold blood of his honesty he would give her a fair chance.

‘I know you’re a Protestant …’ Grace began.

‘That’s got nothing to do with it,’ Henry said sharply.

‘I know that, Henry. But you know that I’m a Catholic and Spit is a Protestant, so can’t you tell me if that’s going to make it impossible?’

Again Henry hesitated. ‘I don’t know. But religion does count. It always counts. And in a case like this it could be decisive. So if I were you, Grace, I’d get some legal help.’

‘How?’ Grace asked. ‘What sort of legal help?’

‘You’ll need someone to argue your case if you hope to have even half a chance,’ Henry said slowly. ‘So I would advise you to get a barrister – a lawyer – to appear for you.’

‘A lawyer? But that would cost money, wouldn’t it?’

‘Certainly.’

‘How much money?’

‘That depends on the man, and the sort of arguments he’ll have to prepare.’

‘I see …’ Grace said. ‘But who on earth can I go to?’

Henry’s cold eyes had never left her face, and Grace had stared back at him as if in their different shades of honesty they had found a direct route between them.

‘That’s not for me to say. It’s not my business to advise you. But … if I were you I would go and ask Edward Quayle if he would help you.’

‘Mr Quayle? But he’s a Protestant.’

‘Nonetheless, if you want your case argued, and argued in your favour, he’s the man I would go to in a situation like this.’

‘But surely he hates Catholics. You know all about him and Lockie MacGibbon.’

‘Never mind that. He’s the one who might give you a chance. And I would get to him quick before someone else does.’

Grace looked back at those threatening eyes as if, in all these years, she had missed the value of the boy and the man behind them.

‘All right, Henry,’ she said. ‘I’ll do as you say.’

He returned the form. ‘He’ll need this,’ he said, and as she left he called after her, ‘Whatever you do don’t tell him I sent you.’

Wondering now if she should wait and consult Jack before she took another step, another plunge into what was becoming a multifarious mess, she walked slowly down the main street until she reached the little sign that said,
Edward Quayle. Barrister and Solicitor.

She stopped for a moment but walked on past it, quarrelling with herself about the expense, about Jack, about the deepening complications she was getting into. It was the possible expense of it that she must decide on first. She was determined not to ask Jack for money, which meant that the fifty pounds which had been left her by her Aunt Cissie, which she kept in the Commonwealth Savings Bank, would have to pay for the lawyer. She wondered if that would be enough. And, as well, would she have to pay something to the court or the State for adopting Spit? Turning back, she went into Mr Quayle’s office, having decided that if she began to question anything now she would probably give up the whole idea of adopting Spit.

In the first little office it was Tom Quayle, Edward Quayle’s younger son, she saw. He was sitting at a tiny desk writing vigorously. Even in his penmanship Tom looked like an athletic boy who should be anywhere at all except in an office when the sun was shining outside.

‘Hello Tom,’ she said. ‘I’ve come to see your father. Is he in?’

‘Yes, he’s in, Mrs Tree,’ Tom said. ‘But I think he’s working on something. What’s it about?’