The True Story of Spit MacPhee (16 page)

What finally disturbed her was a visit from Betty Arbuckle as she was cleaning a cod which Spit had caught that day. Grace had never curtailed Spit’s life on the river, nor his fishing, nor even Sadie’s companionship. But Jack had forbidden Sadie to go too near the water now that it was high, and he had ordered Spit in a soldier’s voice not to take her any further up river than the boiler, so that when Betty Arbuckle came, unannounced, dressed in a long, dark, heavy frock and buckled shoes, Grace felt as if she was something of a libertine for allowing Spit and Sadie to be together on the river bank enjoying themselves. And she had to pay the price for Betty’s radiance – for Betty’s light and passionate eyes and for her almost ethereal beauty. Being a plain woman, Grace Tree couldn’t help but admire and envy the face that God had given Betty Arbuckle, even though she disagreed with the spirit that went with it.

‘Why didn’t you come and tell me you were going to take the boy away from me?’ Betty Arbuckle said in a hurt voice. ‘You know you had no right to do that, Grace.’

Grace Tree felt defensive, but she told herself that she would have to do her best. She must somehow match this curious woman’s childlike conviction which had always seemed impenetrable and inviolable. Grace remembered her as a girl at school, and she had been the same then as she was now, almost unchanged except in fulsomeness. ‘I didn’t take him away from you, Betty,’ she said. ‘Spit ran away on his own account.’

‘But Frank told me that when they rescued him from the river, you told him he was not to come back to me. You forbade him.’

‘I did no such thing,’ Grace Tree said, dropping the fish and the knife she was using, and standing up. She had been bent over the little table near the outside tap where she often peeled potatoes or cleaned fish. ‘I did say he was not going back to your place and that he was not leaving here; but that’s what I told those men who were dragging him naked by the scruff of the neck. All I told Spit was that he could do what he liked. And he chose to stay here. So please don’t come here accusing me, Betty. You are wrong.’

‘I’m not accusing you,’ Betty said. ‘But you know that I have always been worried about the boy, and for years I have been trying to help him. It was only his grandfather who made it difficult. Now we have a home for him in Bendigo, and I think you are wrong to interfere. You mustn’t try to keep him. It is best for him if he is properly looked after in a proper place, instead of running around like a poor, unfortunate, barefoot, African heathen.’

‘That is what I think too,’ Grace Tree said. ‘But I don’t want him to go to a Boys Home in Bendigo. I don’t think that’s the best thing for him and I won’t let you send him there.’

‘But everybody knows that your husband doesn’t want him,’ Betty insisted. ‘So he won’t be happy here. He would only turn bad. He needs all the things that will help with his own salvation.’

‘Don’t worry about that,’ Grace Tree said. ‘Jack will change his mind.’

‘But Spit’s one of us, Grace. He’s not one of yours.’

‘I don’t think Spit is one of anybody’s at the moment.’

‘But you’ll try to convert him, you always do.’

Grace was still determined not to get Spit mixed up in a religious quarrel and she said, ‘Does it matter what religion he is, Betty, as long as he has a good home?’

‘But that’s what a good home is. There’s a terrible difference between us. The Lord Jesus is not …’

‘Stop,’ Grace said. ‘Stop it, Betty.’

Betty Arbuckle and Grace Tree had been standing face to face in the sun, and for Grace it was a disturbing experience. Like most people in the town she had always, since childhood, considered Betty a bit of a crank, if only because Betty herself made such a point of elaborating her evangelism into a punishing oddity. But standing close to Betty, watching her face as it advertised her feelings, and looking into her crystal clear eyes, Grace knew that Betty was a naturally innocent woman who longed for the rest of the world to be innocent with her. Or, failing that, to be made innocent through salvation. And, in her passion for Spit’s future, Betty was also sure that what she wanted for Spit was his real welfare and his real salvation, so that without knowing why, Grace said to herself in a puzzled, incredulous way: ‘What a terrible pity. She would have made such a marvellous nun.’ But, dealing here with the subject of a barefoot boy, Grace knew that Betty’s innocence and passion and conviction were very down-to-earth, and she would probably be unbeatable if she went ahead with her plans for Spit to end up in a Boys Home in Bendigo.

‘I can’t let you do it, Grace,’ Betty was saying to her, and Betty was now at her most obdurate. ‘I can’t let you interfere.’ And after a brief search into each other’s souls over a Murray cod, Grace knew now for sure that she was facing a real opponent who would fight her to the end.

Picking up the half-gutted fish she said, ‘You think I am wrong, Betty, and I think that you are wrong. But I have to do what I think is right. I know that Spit is better off with me, and I am not going to let him go to any home in Bendigo. That would be cruel.’

‘Then I’ll have to make you give him up,’ Betty said in her soft voice. ‘You’re a good woman, Grace, but your faith is in your priests and your Pope. Our faith is in salvation, and I’m surprised that you don’t understand the difference. A boy saved for us becomes a vessel of the Lord, and Spit can only be saved if he is taken to the right place and taught the right lessons and given a chance to save himself.’

Betty Arbuckle turned to leave, but Grace followed her to the gate, feeling rather like a disciple in the steps of the Master. ‘I don’t think it is salvation that Spit needs,’ she said to Betty, ‘but a decent home, which is what I thought of giving him.’

‘I’m sorry,’ Betty said, upset now by Grace Tree’s unusual stubbornness, ‘but you have no right to do this to the boy. I shall pray for you to give him up, because I am sure that right is on my side. And I am sure that the law is on my side too.’

As she watched Betty walk away like a heavenly body up the slope, Grace was not so much afraid of her influence with the Lord as she was of Betty’s secular determination to use even the law if necessary. She knew that Betty would go to almost any lengths to do what she thought was right for Spit, and that meant the Boys Home in Bendigo rather than a Catholic family in St Helen.

‘We’ll just have to see,’ Grace said to herself and went back to cleaning the fish which was one of Spit’s silent offerings to the house he now lived in.

Filling out the form that Pat Stillman had given her Grace did her best with the obvious questions about her and Jack’s age, family, financial condition, social background, and religion (both their own and Spit’s). They were the sort of questions she hated answering, and she knew that Jack would hate them too. Yet she was sure that when the time came she would get Jack’s signature on the form. In fact she had to get it because the adoption application had to come from Jack as head of the family, rather than from Grace as the wife.

What made difficulties for her were the questions that needed permission of the natural parents, because the form assumed that adoption was mostly concerned with unwanted babies, rather than eleven-year-old orphans. Or, if the parents were both dead, she needed a signed release from the nearest relatives. Without that the form was invalid, which meant that her only recourse to the information she needed in order to write ‘no surviving relatives’ would have to be Spit himself. She could remember the fuss about Spit being left alone with his grandfather when his mother had come and gone so quickly and tragically, but it was only a hazy memory of casual rumours. She remembered Dorothy Evans telling her that there were no other relatives left. So Spit himself would have to be asked.

The trouble was that she didn’t know how she could do it. Spit was still a problem, and she didn’t want to open up his silent wounds. He had kept his word not to run away again, but she knew that he was being cautious with her, although she understood why. Even in her house he was in a sort of limbo. Sleeping on the verandah he was not quite in the house and at the same time not quite out of it. In studying him so that she could know how best to deal with him she had slowly unravelled some of his private rules for himself, which made Grace almost as cautious with him as he was with her.

Her first duty had been to clothe him, because he had come to her with nothing more than a pair of torn trousers and a shirt. She had discovered that he usually slept in an old shirt, so she had cut down one of Jack’s rejects for him. She had been a little nervous about giving it to him as a first offering, but Spit had taken if off-handedly without any fuss. She had then bought some cotton lengths and run him up two new shirts on her Singer, which he had also accepted with his own sort of pride, but without demur. Her trial attempts at making up trousers with an old sheet had defeated her, so she had bought him one pair of khaki shorts and also a grey woollen pair because school was about to start. She had taken him to Williams the draper, and bought him socks, sandals and a school cap which, on his thick, fair hair was a lost cause.

Grace’s only way of coping with his impersonal acceptance of her practical gesture was to repeat to herself a simple sentence that covered everything that Spit did: ‘He’s a strange boy.’ But she also knew that his years of self-sufficiency and his loud and childish equality with his tortured grandfather had made him more than just a tough little boy who should be treated as one. Whenever he did any service about the house it was not in gratitude to her, nor even a favour, but was an unthinking contribution to what had to be done. He chopped the wood for her, which saved Jack a daily chore. She had watched him swinging an axe which seemed to miss his bare feet by inches, but though she had winced and turned away at the prospect of a miss, nonetheless she knew that he wouldn’t miss and that she must let him do it. When he helped Sadie with the dishes, his tendency to clatter and treat the cups and saucers roughly bothered her, but she said nothing. He watered the garden for her, but unlike Jack, who was economical with water, Spit lavished it on everything in sight. He would walk – never run – up the slope to the shops if she wanted thread or an extra pint of milk or bread, and in this too he was neither willing nor unwilling. He simply did it, and when Sadie went with him it gave her a deep sense of satisfaction to see them go up the slope together without any thought now of being anything but a natural brother and sister. That was when she felt most deeply Jack’s reluctance. Why couldn’t Jack see it as she saw it?

Finally, she had discovered that, apart from the thick grime-ingrained soles of his bare feet (his sandals would be only for school), he was a very clean boy, although she had to persuade him to use the inside bathroom rather than the outside tap.

‘Where did you wash when you were living in the boiler?’ she had asked him.

‘Outside,’ he had told her.

Summer or winter (she discovered) Spit and his grandfather had used a basin of river water on a table outside, and Spit’s idea of washing himself was to stand naked to the waist over a basin and, having soaped his face and neck, simply douse himself with a mug full of water. He wouldn’t tell her how he did it below the waist, but she suspected something similar, and because there had been no chip-fed hot water heater in the boiler house, it had always been a cold douche. She let him go on doing it in his own way outside; but she persuaded him to finish his lower parts in the bathroom, although he insisted on locking the door.

What surprised her, although she knew she shouldn’t have been surprised, was her discovery that he had no naughtiness in him. It was not because he was good. In his certainties he seemed incapable of being silly or childish, even in his childish behaviour, which was another aspect of his self-sufficiency. But he had his faults, and the one that she knew she would have endless trouble with at home was his loud voice and his often aggressive answers of one harsh word in reply to a simple question. She knew that it was the way he and his grandfather had always spoken to each other, but she was a quiet person herself and it bothered her. She tried to correct it by speaking to him in a softer voice than her normal soft voice. She hoped that this would persuade him to speak quietly. It didn’t.

But these were annoyances rather than serious faults. What she had to deal with was a brand of wickedness which genuinely surprised her. One morning when he was chopping the wood and a hard lump of mallee root had split off and hit his shins, his instinctive response had been a long line of such bad language that it shocked her. It was not the casual and childish kind of schoolboy curse, but an adult and shameful list of the worst. She didn’t say anything to him, but she asked Sadie as she sat on her bed that night, ‘Have you ever heard Spit swearing?’

‘Never,’ Sadie said, shocked that her mother asked her such a question. ‘He never swears.’

But Jack had also heard him swearing at the Evans’ dog, and he had told Grace that he would have to teach Spit a severe lesson – which meant giving him a good hiding.

But Grace said, ‘You’re not going to touch him, Jack. It won’t teach him anything. On the contrary, it would only make it worse.’

‘That’s a lot of tommy rot,’ Jack Tree said. ‘If you don’t stop him now pretty soon he’ll be using the same language in this house and I won’t have that. I won’t have it, Grace, so don’t start protecting him.’

Grace had not told her husband that she too had heard Spit in full flow, and she knew that she would have to do something about it. ‘I’ll talk to him,’ she said.

They were waiting for Sadie and Spit to come in for lunch. Sadie had been to her piano lesson, and Spit had been trying to sell what was probably the last catch of the season to the houses along the railway line.

‘You can’t treat Spit the way you treat Sadie,’ her husband said. ‘He’s a tough little beggar and he’s not going to listen to kind words and a soft voice.’

‘I’ll talk to him anyway. And afterwards, if you do hear him swearing, you can beat him as much as you like. But you’re not to touch him until I’ve told him not to do it.’