The True Story of Spit MacPhee (6 page)

‘Can we do it again tomorrow?’ she asked him.

‘All right,’ Spit said. ‘But you have to learn to put your head under. It’s no use learning to swim unless you can put your head under.’

‘All right, all right,’ Sadie said. ‘I’ll give it a go.’

Mrs Tree watched them both, and in a moment’s pause between Spit’s long draughts of the red vinegar she said, ‘How old are you, Spit?’

‘Eleven,’ he said, and then as if in this silent kitchen he had suddenly heard the violence of his own voice for the first time, he said it again a little quieter, and he retreated too. ‘I’m eleven now, Mrs Tree,’ he said, ‘but I’ll be twelve next birthday.’

‘I thought so,’ Mrs Tree said. ‘You’re the same age as Sadie. She’ll be eleven in January. When is your birthday?’

‘Last week – the fourteenth,’ he said.

It was, in its way, another tie, and instead of wanting to get out quick Spit looked around him at the kitchen and, seeing an old, marbled, mantle clock above the fireplace, he said, ‘We can fix that if it stops.’

‘I know,’ Mrs Tree said. ‘But it’s still going strong. It belonged to my father.’

‘It probably needs cleaning,’ Spit said.

‘No. I think it’s all right,’ Mrs Tree said.

‘Well … if it stops,’ Spit said threateningly at the clock.

‘Don’t worry,’ Mrs Tree said. ‘We’ll have it around to your grandfather in a jiffy.’

Though Spit and his grandfather seemed only able to shout at each other, Spit was also used to long silences with old Fyfe, so it was easy for him to sit in this kitchen of silence with two people who said little or nothing at all. He had finished his raspberry vinegar and he was aware that Mrs Tree was looking at him the way nobody else in the town looked at him, although he didn’t know what exactly it meant. Sadie seemed simply to be waiting for him to do something or to tell them something. When he finally decided it was necessary he said to her at the top of his voice, ‘I’m going fishing tonight by the willows. Do you want to come?’

‘In the dark?’ she said.

‘Of course. That’s the best time, up by the willows.’

‘What will your grandfather say?’ Sadie asked him.

Spit looked surprised. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I’m always up there. Sometimes he comes with me.’

‘Is he going with you tonight?’ Sadie asked.

‘No. He’s …’ Whatever Spit was about to say he changed his mind about it. ‘Do you want to come?’ he said to Sadie.

Sadie was readily frightened and yet she was also determined. ‘Can I go?’ she said to her mother. ‘Just for a little while.’

‘But it’s so dark,’ her mother said. ‘You won’t be able to see your way near the river.’

‘That’s nothing,’ Spit said. ‘I know the way blindfold.’

Mrs Tree looked worried, but she too had her own way of making a difficult decision. ‘You’ll have to hold her hand, Spit. I shan’t let her go otherwise.’

‘You mean just on the way up there?’ Spit said.

‘Yes. And when you’re at the willows, Sadie has to sit right away from the river. No paddling or swimming. I want you to promise me that.’

‘That’s all right,’ Spit said. ‘It would frighten the fish anyway.’

Mrs Tree was still worried but she said to Sadie, ‘Do you really want to go?’

Sadie pulled in her lips nervously and nodded.

Spit said he would come at seven o’clock, and he would give a special whistle, which he demonstrated piercingly. Then, saying in a business-like way, ‘I have to go home now,’ he was up and out in a few seconds, leaving Sadie and Mrs Tree feeling rather sorry in their quiet kitchen that they had suddenly lost a noise and a force and a small attack on their isolation, which left them feeling rather empty.

‘It’s such a pity,’ Mrs Tree said to Sadie.

Sadie didn’t ask what was the pity, but her silence and her slight frown asked the question anyway.

‘He’s a very nice boy, considering all the problems he and old Mr MacPhee have had to live with.’

‘He doesn’t seem to mind,’ Sadie said.

‘I don’t think he really understands,’ Grace Tree said but did not go any further. She shook her head a little and left it there.

At first nobody was aware of Spit and Sadie’s friendship. It wasn’t difficult to keep it modest enough to be unobtrusive, and it gave them a chance to enjoy themselves. Sadie was a good pupil, and it wasn’t too long before she was swimming more than a few strokes and learning to dive and keep her head under water. Spit also taught her how to fish, how to bait with worm or mussels, and how to cast the line out. She knew where all his crayfish drums were, a secret that Spit normally kept to himself, because someone in town was sure to take a look at them and maybe steal the crayfish if they knew where they were. He couldn’t get her across to Pental Island because that was going too far for Mrs Tree’s comfort. But Mrs Tree no longer walked along the river bank at night waiting anxiously when Sadie went with Spit to the willows, or to inspect his crayfish drums. She had given Sadie an electric torch, but after trying it out one night when it was particularly dark, Sadie said to her mother, ‘It’s not much use, Mum, because when your eyes get used to the dark you can see a lot more than you can see with a torch. And Spit can see everything.’

What became a habit, too, was Spit’s visits to the Trees’ kitchen, although he would never accept their invitation to eat his six o’clock tea there. ‘I have to eat with my grandfather,’ he would say, and they didn’t press him. But he knew, without being told, to keep away when Jack Tree was at home, although he was now curious about Mr Tree. Previously he had taken no more notice of Jack than he had of most of the adults in town who either greeted him, ignored him, or treated him and his grandfather as freaks. Occasionally Jack Tree – deciding to notice him – would say ‘Goodday, Spit,’ in his crisp, upright, disciplined way, and Spit would return the greeting equally at the top of his voice.

So, like everyone else in town, Spit kept his distance from the Tree household when he had to. But the day that he saw Mr Tree by the river looking carefully at the water’s edge, Spit considered himself to be on equal ground. The river was his domain. He watched Mr Tree without greeting him, and when he was finally noticed Mr Tree said, ‘Hello, Spit. It’s still pretty low, isn’t it? It isn’t rising at all.’

‘It hasn’t started yet,’ Spit said.

‘It’s been a long summer,’ Jack Tree said.

To Spit the longer the summer lasted and the longer it took for the river to begin its autumn rise, the better. But for Jack Tree, and his district stock and pasture problems, it was a question of water in the Riverrain where the dairy herds were. Jack would always look back on these long dry summers as harbingers of drought, and if the weather didn’t change soon there could be trouble.

‘You haven’t noticed any rise at all in the last week or so?’ he said to Spit.

Spit always kept a willow sprig on the very edge of the river at right-angles to see if it was rising or falling, and he could report to Mr Tree that the river had fallen another two inches in the last week. ‘It’s still going down,’ he said.

‘They’re keeping the weir wide open too,’ Mr Tree said thoughtfully. ‘So we’re going to be in trouble. How are the fish?’ he asked Spit.

‘All right,’ Spit said. ‘Do you want to buy a cod?’

‘You shouldn’t catch so many,’ the soldier replied. ‘You’re depleting them.’ And he was on his way up the slope to his house when Sadie came running along the river path from upstream calling, ‘Spit, it’s your grandfather. You’ll have to come quick.’ Then she saw her father and stopped where she stood.

Spit said, ‘Goddamn,’ and was off, running like a muscular, fleet-footed hare along the path, with Sadie and Mr Tree following him. They found old Fyfe lying twisted-up on the very edge of the river, his hands clamped tight over his ears, his face distorted as he groaned and swung his head from side to side, and his legs stiff and straight. He was shouting something that was too broken to understand.

‘He’s having a fit,’ Mr Tree said, kneeling over him.

‘No he isn’t,’ Spit shouted. ‘It’s not a fit. Don’t touch him.’

‘We’ll have to get him inside,’ Mr Tree said.

‘That’s no good,’ Spit said. ‘Just leave him alone. Don’t touch him.’ And Spit tried to push Jack Tree out of the way.

‘He’ll fall in the river if you don’t move him,’ Jack insisted as Spit kept pushing him off.

‘No, he won’t. Just leave him alone, and go away. Go away.’ Sadie and Mr Tree stood for a moment, undecided, watching the old man’s suffering. But then Sadie said, ‘Come on, Dad,’ and she pulled at his arm. ‘Spit will do everything.’

‘He needs some help.’

‘No, he doesn’t,’ Sadie said, pulling at her father. ‘You’ve got to leave them.’

Reluctantly, Mr Tree allowed himself to be led away by Sadie as Spit took one of the buckets of water, always waiting at the river bank for kitchen use, and threw it over his grandfather. Fyfe groaned a little and ground his teeth but then he subsided, and as Mr Tree followed the fleeing Sadie up the slope they heard Fyfe shouting, and Spit replying angrily, ‘You’re too near the river, Grandpa. You’ve got to get up.’

‘Poor Mr MacPhee,’ Sadie said miserably as they hurried around the big trees to their fenced-in house to get to the back door instead of the front.

‘He’s a tough old bird,’ Mr Tree said. ‘Although I’ve never seen him like that before.’

‘Why is he like that?’ Sadie asked her father. ‘Is he really mad?’

‘Not all the time,’ her father said. ‘But he’s getting worse, and some day he’s going to go clean off his head. No doubt about it.’

‘What’ll happen to Spit then?’ Sadie asked. ‘What’ll he do?’

‘Betty Arbuckle will probably get him,’ Mr Tree said.

‘But she’d send him away to the Boys Home in Bendigo, wouldn’t she?’

‘Probably.’

‘That’s not fair.’

Mr Tree was surprised to hear so much sudden conviction from his daughter. ‘It doesn’t have to be fair or unfair,’ he told her severely. ‘It’s just the way it is. Spit needs some discipline, and that’s the sort of place where he’d get it.’

Sadie didn’t accept it, even though she knew she must accept it.

‘You keep away from that old man,’ Mr Tree told her. ‘In case he gets dangerous.’

‘Yes, Dad,’ she said, and when they had joined Mrs Tree in the kitchen Sadie said nothing at all about old Fyfe because if anything was to be said about it her father would do the saying.

That night, when Sadie had gone to bed, Jack Tree told his wife what had happened. ‘The old man was lying there like a grizzly bear in agony,’ he told her. ‘His hat was off, but he had on a sort of felt skull cap which looked as if it was glued to his head.’

‘Last week,’ Grace Tree said, ‘Mrs Evans told me he was seen walking around the town in the middle of the night, shouting at all the dogs and opening all the front gates, with Spit walking behind him closing the gates again.’

‘You keep the back door locked,’ Mr Tree told her.

‘But he’s harmless, Jack,’ Mrs Tree said quietly. ‘He could never hurt anybody.’

They were sitting in Mrs Tree’s spotless, linoleum kitchen. While Mrs Tree labelled the glass jars of her preserved apricots, Mr Tree was saving electricity by working on his reports at the other end of the kitchen table – not only a soldierly man but a neat man with a neat moustache, organised papers, and a dry pipe in his mouth which he sucked but didn’t smoke.

‘You’re not to take a chance,’ he ordered his wife. ‘The old boy could easily turn violent.’

Mrs Tree didn’t argue, but she inspected her husband carefully for a moment before saying, ‘We really ought to do something about that boy, Jack.’

‘What do you mean – do something? Do what?’

‘I don’t know,’ Mrs Tree said. ‘But he and old Fyfe can’t go on much longer the way they are. Spit is a nice boy, and someone should help him.’

‘How?’

‘I don’t know how,’ Mrs Tree said unhappily. ‘But there must be some way.’

‘Leave him to Betty Arbuckle. She’ll do something. The best thing for him is probably that home in Bendigo.’

‘That’s not right Jack.’

‘Well, right or wrong, there’s nothing you can do about it, Grace, so leave him alone. He’s a grubby little devil, and he’s like the old man. He can look after himself.’

‘He can’t be grubby if he spends so much time in the river.’

‘Keep him away, that’s all I’m saying. Don’t let him hang around.’

‘He doesn’t hang around.’

‘Then what are we arguing about?’

Grace felt guilty now. She wanted to tell her husband more about Spit, but Jack had made his position too firm and clear to do it now. Nonetheless, when he went off again on one of his inspection tours she allowed Sadie to go on swimming and fishing with Spit. The trouble was that other people had seen the children together, the Evanses, Mrs Andrews up the slope, the station master’s wife, and Mr Moon the butcher. Sooner or later it would all leak out.

It was Sadie who told her more than anyone else could possibly know about Spit and his grandfather, because Sadie had been watching and listening and thinking about them, and she had reported everything she had seen and done to her mother. Sadie had not only seen inside the boiler, but she could now sit quietly in Mr MacPhee’s workroom with Spit and watch them together. It had been quite simple. She had said to Spit after they had been swimming one day, ‘Can I see inside your boiler house?’

Spit’s first reluctant reply was, ‘I dunno …’ But Sadie simply waited as if she knew he would change his mind, and he did so. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘But no telling anybody.’

‘No. I won’t tell anybody.’

Spit took her through the front door of the house, through the workroom where old Fyfe was working on a clock, and into the extension which finally opened into the boiler itself.

What she saw amazed her, because there was nothing else like it in the town of St Helen. The inside walls of the boiler were painted yellow, and though rust from the rivets had streaked the sides, the whole interior had its own painted designs – not the wavy line of the outside walls but a black fish, a lily-like flower with a green stem, something that looked like a firework bursting, and a red tomato. She had never seen anything like it. Spit’s narrow, wooden bunk with an old quilt on it was at one end under a cut-out window, and at the other end she could see a table painted bright red, and on it a bundle of old books, mussel shells, lines, and the bits and pieces of clocks and watches. She could not take it all in at a glance, but afterwards she remembered a flower pot with a fern in it, an old acetylene bike lamp, and a painted kerosene tin which had been cut into curls and twists around the top. It was full of old wire and pieces of wood and horseshoes and dried crayfish claws.