The True Story of Spit MacPhee (2 page)

It’s almost an axiom of current young-adult literature that the central character must undergo some sort of change—in fact, it’s almost what defines the genre. And there are no shortage of people in this novel who want to change Spit MacPhee, from the hyper-Protestant Betty Arbuckle, who is determined in sending this ‘African heathen’ as she describes him to a Boy’s Home in Bendigo, to the kindly Grace Tree, who wants to adopt him.

Spit resists change, however. Ironically, it’s those who come into contact with him who are transformed in one way or another: Ben, Betty Arbuckle’s beleaguered son, discovers a spark of rebellion, Sadie Tree overcomes her fear of the river and learns to swim, Grace Tree finds the gumption to stand up against her authoritarian husband, and the husband himself, Jack Tree, finds the compassion to accept this awkward boy.

It is up to the reader’s imagination to keep the Murray flowing, to breathe further life into the characters, to decide what becomes of them. But my inkling is that Spit MacPhee will continue to be true to himself. Yes, he may very well wear shoes to school, but he will continue to be as Aldridge describes him:

The True Story of Spit MacPhee

Without giving too much away I should admit from the outset that I have stretched the 1928 Act which I mention here to its very limit, though not beyond its real terms. I have also borrowed a useful nickname from an old friend, who would forgive me if he were still alive. In any case it’s not about him or his family, it’s all fiction, but he would probably have enjoyed the use I have made of the name we so affectionately used on him.

Betty Arbuckle, a particularly good woman of St Helen, a natural beauty and a devoted evangelist, was trying once again to do something about Spit MacPhee. Betty was worried that, with no real parental care, this wild, barefoot and growing boy (he was almost eleven), needed more help now than he could get from a grandfather who was already half mad and becoming increasingly so. When old Fyfe MacPhee had first come to St Helen, in the State of Victoria, most people had thought him a bit odd, but in the last few years he was generally considered to be as mad as a hatter.

Spit himself would sometimes have to fight boys or girls or even adults when he heard them give that little laugh and tap their heads when old Fyfe walked by. Though not always. It depended on how Spit himself felt about his grandfather, or how angry they were with each other, because sometimes (though rarely) Spit didn’t care what they or anyone else said about him. Yet at other times, with the same boy or man who laughed, Spit’s fists would suddenly flash out, or his bare feet would kick hard at a man’s shins with surprising force if he thought that there was a case to answer.

What worried the lovely Betty Arbuckle was the obvious fact that the old man’s madness was becoming permanent rather than spasmodic, so that Spit himself was more often left to his own devices, living as they did in a world of their own down by the river. To Betty Arbuckle Spit was like a stray dog that either had to be put down or taken off gently to some home that could care for him properly. She had always been worried about the boy from the day of his arrival in the town, but now that he was already ten, almost eleven, he needed a safer haven than his half-mad grandfather could give him.

That was why Betty felt very strongly about it although she knew it was by no means the general opinion of the rest of the town. Whenever she had attempted to visit old Fyfe in his extraordinary little house, his quite crazy house by the river, she had been shouted at by both Spit and old Fyfe. She had been insulted in Scottish, even in Gaelic, and told to mind her own bloody business. She had been threatened with violence, and Spit himself had once emerged from the house and thrown a bucket of river water over her, drenching her from head to toe. A few hours later, still determined to do her best for the boy but refusing to be angry with him, she had returned with Sergeant Joe Collins, the policeman, insisting that he do something about the old man and his violent behaviour. ‘If only for the sake of the boy,’ she had said to Sergeant Collins.

Spit and his grandfather had seen Sergeant Collins coming. In fact Sergeant Collins had deliberately announced his noisy arrival in plenty of time for them to shut the front door on him. But he had called to them through the door that they ought to come out and apologise to Mrs Betty Arbuckle, or he would have to do something about it.

‘Do what? Ye old fool,’ Fyfe MacPhee shouted through the door. ‘Get out of my garden, Collins, or ye’ll get the same. And get ye away with that silly blasted woman. Get ye away with her …’ It was a cry of bitter pain from old Fyfe.

Sergeant Collins wanted nothing to do with Betty Arbuckle, or with Fyfe or Spit, but he shouted through the door, ‘Mind your language, Fyfe, or I’ll put you in charge.’

‘What charge?’ Fyfe shouted back, his fists hammering on the other side. ‘Get out of here, ye old fool.’

A few more heated Scottish insults began to escalate the situation, and Sergeant Collins urged Mrs Betty Arbuckle out through the gate, ignoring her protests. Kicking disgustedly at a lump of hard mud, Sergeant Collins told Betty, ‘There’s nothing I can do, Mrs Arbuckle. They haven’t broken any law, and though old Fyfe is as mad as a hatter, I can’t do anything about it.’

‘But that boy is growing up like an African heathen.’

‘That’s not my business. If you want to do something about that you’ll have to go to the Shire Council or the magistrate or someone. Not me. And anyway you had no right to come down here telling the old man you want to inspect the house and take the boy away.’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘No, but that’s what you want. And that’s none of my business.’

‘It’s not right …’

Betty Arbuckle’s loveliness was always enhanced by her religious passion, but in her own kind of abnegation of it she did her best to disperse her loveliness by a blunt cut to her hair and by wearing dull and dowdy clothes and buckled shoes with flat heels. But even this could not spoil her beauty. In fact the more she tried to disfigure it the more she seemed to enhance it. Her house, her husband (he was the Water Board inspector for the town) and her two children were also encouraged to be barren, and the sight of Fyfe MacPhee’s wildly painted little house on the river bank and his habit of walking around the town shouting at people in the middle of the night had long ago convinced her that Fyfe MacPhee, sane or insane, was something of a devil in the flesh.

It was true that old Fyfe could look the part, and what hinted at some sort of hell in his background was that nobody in the town knew anything about him, even though he had now lived in it for more than ten years. His secrecy, his shouting hostility to any kind of questioning, his sudden fits of madness, and finally the arrival five years ago of Spit as a five-year-old boy, were all facts looking for trouble. And as Betty Arbuckle walked up the slope, across the railway line and away from the little house, she was still arguing with Sergeant Collins that she must do something about the boy. She must somehow get him away from that dangerous old man and find him a place in her evangelical sect’s Boys Home in Bendigo.

‘For his own sake,’ Betty said unhappily.

Fyfe MacPhee had arrived in St Helen not long after the First World War, and even then he had looked like an old man because he was small and grey and grizzled, with hard, wild eyes, a harsh voice that shouted everything in a bri-braw Scottish accent, and a battered old hat pulled tight on his head. Nobody had even seen him without that tight little hat which sat there as if it were part of his scalp.

He had arrived in O. Gilpin’s Rolls Royce, which was not a limousine but a van that furnished supplies to the O. Gilpin stores throughout the mallee towns: a dusty but familiar visitor. After a few weeks, when the town’s curiosity had been aroused by old Fyfe’s behaviour, all that anybody could discover was that he had come from Manangatang. He had paid O. Gilpin’s driver five shillings for the lift and had walked the last mile into town because the driver didn’t want the manager of the local store to know that he had given anyone a lift. A few people saw him arrive – walking along the main road carrying a small suitcase and a wooden box which, in the light of what followed, contained his tools as a clock and watch repairer and an expert tool setter.

Fyfe lived at first in a small room behind Charlie Kruger’s garage where he began his work as a watch and clock repairer and tool setter by going from house to house asking the women, who were usually the only ones at home, if they had clocks or watches needing repair, or if their husbands’ razors needed resetting, or their chisels, planes or anything else with a double-edge needed re-shaping. But these were a reluctant necessity to his clock and watch repairing.

If one of the ladies said, ‘Will you sharpen my scissors for me?’ Fyfe would shake his head and shout, ‘I am not a scissors sharpener. If they need to be set I’ll do it and sharpen them for ye, but I’m no scissors sharpener.’ He would not sharpen any plane or chisel or any other tool unless it was double-edged and needed to be re-set, and if someone persisted he would shout angrily at them and leave. But as he began to do a fair business at back doors he was soon to be recognised not only as the kind of tool setter that even carpenters would take their tools to, but the best watch and clock repairer in town and the cheapest as well.

He was considered no more than a bit odd because he never spoke without shouting, as if he had no other way of talking, even though he talked sense. But one day he had walked around the streets shouting nonsense for no reason. Afterwards he had locked himself in his room and emerged two days later in his normal, grizzled form. It was obvious then that there was something awfully wrong with him, but because it had not happened again for some time, some people forgot it and simply thought of him as being a little crazy. Thereafter, he was tolerated as a bit of a joke, and eventually he had made casual friends whom he could talk to: Tom Smythe the blacksmith, the two Benson brothers who looked after the telegraph poles, and Tom Yard who was a carter with a fine team of horses. But he shouted at them all as he did with everybody else. What he said to them was considered friendly enough, but with them too his shouting could seem quarrelsome and aggressive.

What became his craziest venture was his shift to the river bank. Fyfe had discovered on one of the shady banks of the little Murray river an old square boiler that had been there for years. After some enquiries he found out that it was owned by Tom Smythe the blacksmith, and that the river bank where it lay was under the jurisdiction of the State Rivers and Water Supply Commission. Fyfe bought the boiler from Tom Smythe, and paid two pounds a year for the use of a patch of river bank big enough for the boiler and a small garden. Then, after cutting a couple of holes in one side of it with Tom Smythe’s help, he had turned the old boiler into a curious little house. The boys who swam in the river further upstream believed that it had once been the boiler of an old river boat, the
Mundoo
, which had sunk thirty or forty years ago in a bend of the river. But it was too big for that. It was really the remnant of an old plan to build a big pumping system for a canal to be drawn from the little river, a plan that had been abandoned even before the big pumps had arrived.

Fyfe MacPhee had worked hard on the interior of the boiler, and eventually he had built a little extension to the side of it which had become his workshop. And though the extension was a visible part of Fyfe’s house, nobody had ever seen inside the boiler or the extension. Outside, he painted the boiler bright red and green, with a blue wavy line all around the sides. He completed the house with a picket fence and a sign on the front gate which said IN and OUT, which Fyfe adjusted every time he came and went. He planted a flower garden on the river side (the front), and a vegetable garden at the back; and under the big gum tree he kept chickens for eggs. The boiler itself was tucked into the shade of a big peppercorn tree and another tall, dry gum, and here old Fyfe settled down to live a strange and secret sort of life which meant keeping himself to himself.

He was, by now, nothing more than a town character who had unlucky moments of madness but was always harmless, although difficult to get on with because of his inability to talk in anything but an aggressive shout. Moreover he never seemed to listen, although somehow he did hear everything that was said to him. But there was one other aspect to his madness that encouraged the laughs at his expense. On occasions he would attack the outside of his boiler with a fourteen-pound hammer, hitting it all over its sides and top and bottom, knocking all its internal decoration to the floor, and shouting with each blow, ‘Ye never had any steam in ye, no pipes, but I’ll show ye … I’ll show ye …’ Smash would go the hammer, and after five minutes, when his fury was spent, Fyfe would become a broken old man, sitting on the step of the boiler holding his head, helpless now instead of the grizzly and bad-tempered and shouting old Scot the town was used to.

All this was before the appearance of Spit, who had arrived one day in early summer. The old man had disappeared for two weeks to return with a five-year-old boy whom the town discovered (by guesswork and a few captured hints) was his grandson, Angus MacPhee. Where the boy had come from, and what he was doing in St Helen with his grandfather, nobody knew. Most people thought the boy would stay a few days or weeks and then return to his mother, wherever she was. But he stayed on, and while he was there old Fyfe began to build another extension to his boiler. This time it was a proper little cabin, which he built solidly with timber and old windows and a serious door. He built it day and night, so that the people above the railway line would sometimes hear his hammer going at two o’clock in the morning. They knew better than to ask Fyfe why he was in such a hurry, but when he had finished it what the curious among the town’s people saw was a tiny two-room house with a corrugated iron roof barely eight feet above the ground, but all neat and solid. As a final touch Fyfe painted it red and green, like the boiler, and painted the same wavy blue line all the way around it. To many of the town’s people it was worth a Sunday stroll down by the river to see it, providing they didn’t stop to stare, or provoke Fyfe into showing his temper.