The True Story of Spit MacPhee (5 page)

‘You’re always a problem, Spit,’ she would sigh, but not without affection.

‘Yes Miss,’ Spit would boom back.

Out of the classroom and out of school Spit was a come-and-go friend to most of the other boys, but when he played cricket or football with them he gave the game everything he had. This was often effective, though not always so, particularly at cricket when he wanted to hit every ball for six. If he connected it worked. If he missed the ball everybody nearby ducked in case the bat left his hand in its wild swing. If he was bowled out he always spat dispassionately at the wicket and handed the bat over to the next man.

His closest friend, Crispie Cornforth, was a country boy who rode to school on a bike from a poor and salty farm five miles up the little Murray. Spit would get a dink home on Crispie’s bike but they would always part at the railway line, and if he met Crispie out of school on a Saturday it was usually on Pental Island, not at the farm. Their friendship depended on no surroundings, and they knew it.

But Crispie was the only person in town who had ever questioned, indeed dared question Spit about his grandfather.

‘What does he do it for, Spit?’ Crispie asked him one summer’s day when they were lying on the hard cracked mud of the big river, out of sight and sound of town and people, fishing and making the best of a hot day on the big river. ‘I mean why does he go around shouting at everybody?’

‘He’s got something wrong with his head,’ Spit replied.

‘Everybody in town thinks he’s crazy.’

‘That’s what they think,’ Spit said. ‘They don’t know anything about it.’

‘My old man says he ought to be locked up.’

‘Well …’ And, with his usual habit of defending his grandfather, Spit turned his head and spat at a passing bee. ‘If they lock him up I’ll go and burn the place down. They don’t know anything about it, Crisp, that’s all I’m saying.’

‘Well, I always say, “Hello Mr MacPhee,” and you know what he says back to me?’

‘No,’ Spit said. ‘But I’ll bet he lets you have it.’

‘He always says, “You’ve got big ears, Willy Wastle.”’

‘He likes you,’ Spit said.

‘Why does he call me Willy Wastle?’

‘That’ll be his name for you, Crisp. He does that all the time. Sometimes he calls me Tam Glen or Davie Bluster,’ Spit said, and they both laughed at the old man’s wild sport with their proper names.

They were good friends – planned to be for life, but one day Crispie didn’t come to school. He didn’t come the next day, and on the fourth day Miss Masters told the class that Crispie had been bitten by a tiger snake in one of the canals near his house, and he had never recovered. He was being buried that day, and Spit decided on the spot that he would never forget Crispie and would never have another friend as long as he lived.

It was early summer. Spit was still ‘not quite eleven’, and now that his real trouble was about to begin he had no Crispie to support him. In the end it would be Sadie Tree who would become the other part of him – like Crisp, only being a girl Sadie was different.

Sadie Tree lived in a house downstream, where the little Murray and the big Murray joined. Her father, Jack, owned a Dodge tourer and he was the Pastoral and Livestock Inspector for the district: a strict, soldierly man who, as an Anzac at Gallipoli, had discovered something good in the best moments of soldiering. In the attack on Suvla Bay he had taken charge of a machine-gun position when all the officers and sergeants had been killed, and he had done it well enough and bravely enough for a General to raise him from Private to Officer in the field. Since then he had kept his faith in soldiering and in old soldiers as the best thing in his life. He was the Secretary of the St Helen’s branch of the Returned Soldiers League, and his first loyalty in the town (apart from his family) was to any man who had been a soldier. Old Anzacs always knew that he would help them if he could, they could count on him, but this belief in the comradeship and pride of arms made something of a disciplinarian of him at home, although for his luck he had married a silent and obedient and gentle wife, Grace, and now had a silent and obedient and gentle daughter, Sadie, both of whom accepted his discipline, and respected and loved him nonetheless. In the end, Spit’s predicament would make a change in this mix of modesty and discipline, but that was to be the end, not the beginning.

Sadie was a quiet girl and a clever girl who watched everything, saw everything, and said so little that she was hardly noticed even by girls her own age. Nobody resented her and nobody bothered her, and those who did notice her said that she got her silence from her father, the strong silent Jack. But if Sadie had inherited his silence (it was really her mother’s) she did not have his strength, because Jack was used to having his own way so that Sadie and her mother always gave into him, as if it was the normal and the right thing to do. There was never any conflict in the Tree family.

Spit liked Mrs Tree because she was always silently there. She was often alone with Sadie when her husband was away on one of his inspections, and she would sometimes walk by herself, or with Sadie, along the river bank and stop to admire old Fyfe’s garden. But neither she nor Sadie would ever say anything at all to old Fyfe. They left him alone if they passed by when he was in the garden. When Spit, in turn, offered Mrs Tree a fresh cod at her back door on a Friday (they were Catholics) and wriggled it fiercely under her nose, she would smile, almost laugh, and wait without saying anything for Spit to name his price. She would always accept it, pay it, and take the fish without saying a word except to say, ‘Thanks Spit’. If Sadie was around when this was happening Spit hardly noticed her, although he was often faintly aware that she was always inspecting him as she did everybody else. But she would say, ‘Goodbye Spit,’ as he left, and that always startled him because he would shift a little on his bare feet and shout back, ‘G’day, Sade,’ and then forget her a few moments later.

It was the river that eventually made them friends. Spit’s passion for watching the currents and sending small, flat, pointed ‘boats’ along the river carrying messages to unknown destinations, took him often along the bank downstream to pass by the Trees’ house, which was not right on the river but a little way back from it nearer the railway line. Spit would write his left-handed messages on old newspaper saying, ‘Help. I’m shipwrecked. 20
longtude,
62
latude.
Come quick.’ His grandfather had once given him a hard and shortened version of
Kidnapped
. Tying the message around the mast of his little flat boat he would swim out to the middle of the river, launch it, and then walk along the bank to follow it through the swirls and eddies until it either lost its message, got stuck on the opposite bank where it was too far away to swim to, or finally disappear for ever into the faster mainstream of the big river.

He loved to guess or calculate the complex twists and turns in the currents and eddies, or puzzle over the reasons for their endless variety, and he was absorbed one day in one of his little boats when a voice behind him said, ‘They always end up under that big tree, near the bridge.’

Spit, surprised by the sudden and very quiet arrival of someone behind him, swung around and found Sadie Tree standing with her hands behind her back watching him.

‘How do you know?’ Spit said.

‘Sometimes I follow them when they’re in the big river.’

‘Tell us another one,’ he said disbelievingly. He knew that once they were in the big river they either got swamped by the fast current or were lost to view. ‘You can’t see them in the middle.’

‘Yes, you can,’ Sadie said. ‘They always come in on the other side near our place. Then they go around and around where the posts are, then they cross to the other side again and come back near the bridge.’

‘You can’t see them across the other side,’ Spit insisted.

‘Yes you can, with my father’s field glasses.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You can see for miles through them.’

‘Tell us another one,’ Spit said.

‘Honest, Spit. Wait here and I’ll show you.’

When she came back with the field glasses – a worn but good pair of military 8 x 30s – she showed Spit how to focus them, and then handed them over.

‘You’re right,’ Spit said generously. ‘You can see everything.’

Sadie blushed and put out her hand for the field glasses. But Spit wasn’t going to part with them so quickly. They were hanging around his neck and he meant them to stay there for a while.

‘If we run for it we’ll find the one I just put in,’ he said and set off along the river bank without waiting to see if Sadie was following.

She followed, and in thus proving the accuracy of her observations, she and Spit established their mutual fascination for the weird behaviour of the river. But it was a private discovery and it became at first a secret friendship. Sadie knew that her father would object because he thought Spit wild, and in need of discipline. So rather than create a situation which would end in a downright denunciation of it, Sadie kept it to herself. That is, she told only her mother.

Mrs Tree thought about it for a moment and then said, ‘Don’t tell your father. He’ll only tell you to keep away from Spit.’

Implied in this response was Mrs Tree’s permission for Sadie to talk to Spit if she wanted to, because Mrs Tree liked him and trusted him. And, in allowing it, there was also a silent contract between them which left Jack out of it, even though he liked to rule the house even in his absence. But it was not a serious conspiracy. Grace Tree respected and admired her husband, and Sadie loved her father, but because neither one had any particular friend they depended on each other to keep for themselves some of the fragments of their own lives – the unimportant fragments which mother and daughter considered harmless and inoffensive to Jack. After all, Spit was only a small boy, and Grace Tree had always felt, like Betty Arbuckle, that some day Spit was going to need help, although she wasn’t quite sure what sort of help it would be. Certainly not Betty Arbuckle’s Boys Home, she knew that much.

It seemed natural thereafter for Spit to devise a system of sending messages downstream to Sadie, rather than addressing them to unknown and unlikely persons. At first it was a trial run of one little flat pine boat which they both followed, and the message on this one was written by Sadie and read, ‘
I am sick. Send me a doctor
,’ which Spit had instantly rejected.

‘If he’s sick, all he has to do is walk up to the railway line and ask somebody in one of the houses to get Doctor Stevens. So what’s the use of that?’

‘What’s the use of saying you’re shipwrecked?’ Sadie said. ‘It’s the same thing.’

‘No it isn’t. Nobody’s around when you’re shipwrecked, so you can’t ask somebody up the railway line to help you.’

‘You can’t get shipwrecked in a river,’ Sadie insisted.

‘What do you mean? What about the old
Mundoo
where the boiler came from?’

‘That was years ago. There aren’t any river boats on the little Murray anymore, so nobody would believe you.’

Spit conceded the point because his private world had finally been penetrated, and his imagination now had a companion.

They operated their message system successfully all summer, so that in the end Spit was writing genuine messages to Sadie. ‘I am going swimming tonight.’ Or ‘I am up at the old Point. Home at six.’ When Spit went swimming off the steps near the boiler (he never swam with the other boys higher up) Sadie would sit on the hard mud steps and watch him. She couldn’t swim herself, and when he tried to persuade her she said, ‘Not me, Spit. I’m afraid of the water.’

‘But it’s dangerous living by the river and not being able to swim. What if there’s a flood?’ he told her.

‘My father doesn’t want me to go in when he’s away,’ Sadie said. ‘That’s why I’m afraid, I think.’

‘He won’t know.’

‘He’d find out.’

‘What does your mother say?’

‘I don’t know, Spit. If you ask her she might let me.’

‘Me? Why should I ask her?’

‘She trusts you. Only don’t tell anyone else.’

Spit as a plenipotentiary was blunt rather than diplomatic. ‘It’s no good if she can’t swim, Mrs Tree,’ he said, and this was his one-and-only argument.

In fact Mrs Tree agreed with him. ‘But I’ll have to be there, Spit. At first anyway, and she’s never to go in unless you’re near her.’

‘Okay, Mrs Tree,’ Spit agreed.

With Mrs Tree sitting on the mud steps, and Sadie in a new bathing suit, he taught her to swim. His methods were not persuasive but impatient, as if it astounded him that she couldn’t just walk straight in and do what he did.

‘Just paddle your arms and legs,’ he shouted at her.

Mrs Tree listened and watched and took the girl’s punishment for her, but she said nothing. Sadie was twice in tears, shouting (for her) at Spit, ‘I can’t. I can’t …’ which Spit treated with anguish and contempt. ‘Yes you can,’ he said. ‘You’re not even trying, Sadie. Look.’

To demonstrate the ease of it, Spit was under and over the water and halfway across the river and back in a violent, skilful, splashing demonstration of how easy it was.

‘I’ll never get it,’ Sadie said.

‘Go on. You just have to do it.’

In the end she did it, so that in those first miraculous strokes of a dog-paddle Sadie accepted thereafter a lifelong debt to Spit. Her mother too was so pleased that she insisted on Spit (dripping wet) sitting in the kitchen and drinking a glass of raspberry vinegar. It was the first time that Spit had been invited to sit in anybody’s kitchen, and though he was always bold in the grip of a new experience, he was about to leave quick. But then Mrs Tree offered him a second glass. Anything more than the essentials was manna to Spit. He would sometimes buy an icecream or an aniseed ball because he had a sweet tooth, or a snowball for a penny, but this was a different kind of indulgence so he said, ‘Yes thanks,’ and Mrs Tree gave him the second glass of the thick red cordial. Sadie had been watching him and smiling, still happy with her first few strokes in the water.