The True Story of Spit MacPhee (19 page)

‘Well …’

‘It’s all right. I work with my father,’ Tom said.

Grace liked Tom, but he looked so young and out of place that she was reluctant to explain anything to him.

‘All right,’ he said, ‘I’ll see if my father is busy. You wait here.’

Grace waited while Tom went into another little room, and though she could hear voices she couldn’t understand what they were saying until Tom put his head around the door and said, ‘Come on in, Mrs Tree. Come in.’

What Grace found was another modest room, neatly but hopelessly over-stacked with files and books and papers so that there was little room left, even on the floor. She knew then that Edward Quayle – represented here by his office – was a man who cared little for anything extra to the law and order of his profession, so that he would not expect anything more than the bare information needed to get his work done.

‘Good morning, Mrs Tree,’ Edward Quayle said in his English voice, flinging his spectacles on his desk. ‘Please sit down.’ He pointed to a hard chair near his desk, and he swivelled his around to face her. ‘Tom,’ he said, ‘if Mr Jackson comes in, tell him I shan’t be a minute. Now,’ he went on. ‘What’s on your mind, Mrs Tree?’

She handed him the adoption form. ‘I want to adopt young Spit MacPhee,’ she said, ‘and here’s the form I had to fill in. I’ve been told that it had to come up before a county court, and I think I’ll need some help with it.’

‘Why? Isn’t it straightforward?’

‘I don’t know, Mr Quayle,’ Grace said.

She waited while Mr Quayle looked at the application. He turned it over. ‘It seems all right,’ he said. ‘Why would you need my help?’

‘You see,’ she said, realising now why Henry Fennel had sent her here: Edward Quayle was the same kind of man as Henry himself, except that he wasn’t gingery. But he was red-faced. ‘Somebody else is making an application to adopt him.’

‘Ahhh …’

‘It’s Mrs Betty Arbuckle.’

‘I see.’ Mr Quayle seemed to be making a quick summation of the problem. ‘That does make it a little more complicated,’ he said.

‘Yes, and there’s one other thing,’ she went on.

‘Yes?’

‘I’m a Catholic and the boy is a Protestant. And Mrs Arbuckle is a Protestant too. That will make it difficult for me, won’t it?’

Edward Quayle sighed, and later he would say to Grace that according to the Greeks a man usually sighed when he didn’t want to feel the inevitability of pain. But obviously he understood. ‘It will certainly make some difference,’ he said, and before she could say anything further he held up his hand. ‘In fact this may not be able to come to judgement at all. There may be some stipulation about it in the legislation on adoption – religion being what it is in this country. Particularly with a child. It’s most likely, therefore, that a mutual religion will be a requirement for court consent, whatever else is concerned.’

‘Even though it would be wrong for the boy to go to someone who happens to be a Protestant?’

‘Right or wrong may not have anything to do with it, Mrs Tree. It’s possibly a negative requirement you will have to face. That is, the boy simply may not go to you because you’re Roman Catholic. But this doesn’t mean that he will go automatically to someone else.’

‘In other words he could even end up in the Boys Home in Bendigo.’

‘Wait … wait …’ Edward Quayle said. ‘I don’t know yet what the law says about adoption, I am only warning you before you go any further that you could be disqualified from the outset.’

‘That wouldn’t be fair,’ Grace said.

‘It may not even be the case,’ Edward Quayle told her, ‘but you asked me about the possibility of religion being important, and I am simply warning you in answer that it may be decisive. I cannot say what it is in law until I’ve looked into it. And if you want me to look into it I’ll do what I can. Although I am rather busy at the moment.’

‘I’m worried that Betty Arbuckle will get her application in before mine, and that she will …’

‘Don’t worry. If it can be argued before the court I’ll see that your application is there. But I’ll have to look into it, and if I need any more information from you I’ll send Tom down to get it.’

Grace stood up. She half closed her eyes and said what she had to say. ‘Will it cost a lot of money, Mr Quayle?’

‘Money? Well, it depends on what I have to do.’

‘I’ve got fifty pounds of my own money.’

‘It won’t be that, Mrs Tree. It will never be that. Just let me look into it, and I’ll tell you what your chances are, and what you have to do. But don’t worry. It won’t cost you a fortune.’

Relieved, Grace thanked him and went out through Tom’s office, sorry now that she had not opened up more to Tom, who could at least have listened.

‘It’s about Spit MacPhee,’ she said now to Tom as she stood by his desk for a moment. ‘I want to adopt him.’

‘I guessed it was that,’ Tom said. ‘And what does old Spit have to say about it, Mrs Tree?’

‘Nothing much,’ Grace said. ‘I think he’s as confused as I am.’

As she left Tom and walked out into the street she realised that she had forgotten that Edward Quayle was a Protestant, which seemed to prove Henry Fennel right. In any case she felt relieved that it was now in the hands of an expert, even though he was considered to be a bigoted sort of man, not always liked by many people in the town.

When the school year finally started, Spit felt like a stranger to himself as he put on Grace’s home-made shirt, new grey trousers, grey socks and sandals.

‘I’m sorry about the sandals, Spit,’ Grace said to him that first morning, ‘but you’ll have to wear shoes and socks sooner or later, and you’re too old now to go to school barefoot. I think they’d send you home if you turned up with no shoes on.’

‘It’s all right,’ Spit said, looking down at his feet. ‘I don’t care about the sandals.’

What he
had
cared about was Grace Tree’s efforts to get the soles of his feet clean. She had made him sit on a chair near the outside tap, and she had scrubbed the soles of his feet with a hard brush. Spit had submitted to it in silence. But he wasn’t used to anyone washing him or fussing over him, and though Mrs Tree didn’t fuss he had almost enjoyed the experience of sitting there with his feet in her aproned lap, and that bothered him.

But it was only when he was on his way to school that he knew his old carefree life was coming to an end. It was the clothes and the shoes and the new school bag and the house he now lived in, and Sadie chattering at his side. Pressed, housed, fed and looked after – the Spit MacPhee who accepted Mrs Tree’s care and attention was not the Spit MacPhee who was expecting to disappear again at any moment. And something else frightened him. On Sunday, at nine o’clock, Mrs Betty Arbuckle, with Ben at her side, knocked at the kitchen door and said to Grace, ‘I’ve come to take Spit to church.’

Spit, who normally spent most Sunday mornings scouring the town for anything he could find to help him rebuild his workshop in the boiler (which he had been working on now for weeks), was not at that moment wandering around the town. He was making a kite out of old newspapers on the kitchen table, so that when he heard Betty Arbuckle he dropped the scissors he was using and said to Sadie, who was mixing a flour paste, ‘I’m off …’

‘No, Spit,’ Sadie said. ‘Wait.’

‘What for?’ Spit said. ‘She’s after me again.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Sadie whispered. ‘My mother won’t let her get near you.’

‘She won’t be able to stop her,’ Spit said.

In fact Grace was trying to cope with her own surprise, opening the door and suddenly seeing Betty there. It always confused Grace, because Betty’s beauty was forever a shock when it arrived on you like that, and Grace was speechless for a moment.

‘Why on earth should you come here to take him to church?’ Grace said when she had recovered.

‘Because I want to be sure that you don’t take him to Catholic mass.’

‘What a thing to say,’ Grace told her.

‘Then he must come with me, Grace.’

‘Why?’

‘Because you haven’t been sending him to church or to Sunday school, have you? And you know that is wrong.’

Grace as always felt at a disadvantage with Betty Arbuckle, and the best she could manage was an excuse. ‘But Spit doesn’t go to any church at all. He’s never been to any church.’

‘Then how can you expect him to grow up a good Christian if he doesn’t go to church. It’s wicked.’

Grace knew that Betty Arbuckle was right, and it was a dilemma she had been trying not to face. Sadie went to mass, not every Sunday, but often enough to justify her upbringing as a good Catholic. Grace herself and Jack were not very regular churchgoers, in fact Jack almost never went to church at all. They were, to that extent, pale Catholics but they were loyal ones nonetheless. In fact she had found it difficult even to encourage Spit to go to a Protestant church. It went against her Catholic grain, but here was Betty Arbuckle making a necessity of it. Grace needed a quick ally so she called Spit.

‘What for?’ Spit said to her.

‘Just come here a moment,’ Grace said. ‘I want to ask you something.’

Spit, beside her, looked over the threshold of his safety at Betty Arbuckle who said to him, ‘Spit, dear, I’ve come to take you to church.’

Spit was ready to take off but Grace stopped him.

‘Did your grandfather ever send you to church, Spit?’ she asked him before Betty could say anything more to him.

‘No. Not me.’

‘You have never been to any church, have you?’

Spit looked from Grace Tree to Betty Arbuckle and wondered what made them both so determined to get him. ‘I went to the Presbyterian church a couple of times,’ he said slowly, ‘when the Minister came down to get me, and when my grandfather didn’t know what he was doing. But my grandfather didn’t send me to church, and that’s all I’m saying.’

‘What your grandfather did wasn’t your fault,’ Betty Arbuckle told him. ‘But now you are on your own and you’ll grow up a heathen ignorant of the Lord if you don’t go to church.’

‘I’m not a heathen,’ Spit said. ‘I’m a Presbyterian.’

‘Yes,’ Grace said quickly, ‘He’s a Presbyterian. He doesn’t belong to your church.’

‘Then I’ll take him to the Presbyterian Church,’ Betty Arbuckle said. ‘But he must go to church.’

‘Not with you, Betty,’ Grace said firmly.

Betty looked at Spit’s Sunday bare feet. She neatened her small, black, straw hat which would have been an ugly mistake on anybody else, but surrounding Betty’s face it became a perfect frame for her immaculate beauty. ‘Spit,’ she said firmly, ‘you now have sandals to wear, I’ve seen you with them, so please go and put them on and I’ll take you to church.’

They had all been so concentrated on each other that none of them had noticed Jack’s presence. Joining them on the step he said to Betty, ‘What do you think you’re doing, Betty?’

‘I’ve come to take Spit to church,’ Betty said.

‘You’ve come all the way down here knocking at our back door for that?’ Jack said.

‘Yes.’

‘Listen, Bet,’ Jack said grimly. ‘You may think you can come down here and tell us what to do but you’re way off the mark.’

‘I’m not telling you what to do, Jack. I’m telling the boy. It’s a sin …’

‘The boy lives here, and if anybody is going to tell him what to do we’ll do it ourselves. It’s nothing to do with you.’

‘But you’ll never tell him to go to his own church. You know you won’t.’

‘Whether we send him to church or not it’s got nothing to do with you.’

‘I’ve brought Ben with me,’ Betty said. ‘He can go with Spit.’

Ben, booted and smocked, was now in the same arena as Spit. Why were they all so keen to get hold of Spit MacPhee? It was more than Spit’s bare feet. He glanced at Sadie. She smiled at him. Spit smiled at nobody. He was out of it. He would do what he wanted to do, and Ben showed his admiration by saying boldly, ‘What were you and Sadie making?’

Spit still had the scissors in his hand, Sadie’s pinafore was dusted with flour, and nothing could have given Ben such a feeling of hopeless envy and longing as much as scissors and flour on a Sunday morning.

‘We were making a kite,’ Spit said, ‘but we haven’t finished yet.’

‘You shouldn’t do that on the Lord’s day,’ Grace said to him.

Jack gave Spit and Sadie a little push and said to Grace, ‘Go inside, all of you. I’ll deal with this.’ When they were inside they heard him say, ‘Now don’t waste your time, Betty. Go and preach the gospel somewhere else. But don’t come here telling us how to be good Christians. You don’t even know what Christianity is.’

Betty’s ‘Oh’ was audible in the kitchen, and they heard her retreating down the steps and disappearing up the path.

Jack joined them in the kitchen and he stood still for a moment and looked at Grace as if she was little better than the children with her. ‘I told you she would be after you,’ he said, ‘and you didn’t listen.’

‘I think she was just trying it on, Jack.’

‘Well she’s going to try a lot more on,’ Jack told her. ‘In fact she’s asked J.C. Strapp to present her own application for adoption to the county court.’

‘Who told you that?’ Grace said, hardly believing it.

‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘You’ve got Edward Quayle, and she’s got J.C. Strapp. So you can guess who’s going to win that battle.’

Edward Quayle was known in the town as the poor man’s lawyer, and J.C. Strapp was considered a rich man’s advocate.

‘But how can she afford it?’ Grace said miserably.

‘How can you afford it?’ Jack said.

‘I told you, I’ll pay for it out of Aunt Cissie’s money.’ When, yesterday, she had told Jack that she was asking Edward Quayle to help her, he had groaned in exasperation and complained of the expense, but she had told him then that she would pay for it out of her own money.

‘All right, all right,’ Jack said, returning to his work. ‘It’s your problem so you’ll have to deal with it in your own way.’

‘Yes, I know,’ Grace said slowly, and catching sight of Sadie and Spit who had their eyes on her, trapped as she was in this undesired confrontation, she said to them, ‘Get on with your kite, you two, and please clean up your mess when you’ve finished.’