The True Story of Spit MacPhee (24 page)

There was a moment’s silence. Then Mr Strapp raised his hands to indicate that he had finished, and there was a loud and heavy sigh from Betty Arbuckle. ‘That’s all, your honour,’ Mr Strapp said. ‘I have nothing more to say.’

‘Gentlemen,’ Judge Laker said, putting notebook and pencil into his waistcoat pocket. ‘I thank you both for your quite remarkable presentations, and I shall give my decision tomorrow morning at ten o’clock in this chamber. This hearing is over,
casus foederis
, so to speak. But if the parents don’t object I would like these two children, Ben Arbuckle and Sadie Tree, to come with me into the other room for a moment. Will you do it, Ben?’

‘Yessir,’ Ben said firmly.

‘And Sadie … you are not frightened are you? It’s for the good of your friend Spit, here. I just want to have a few words with you.’

‘All right,’ Sadie said, standing up and following the judge.

As Edward Quayle picked up the papers that were on the table before him (his self-made brief which he had not looked at) Grace waited a moment and then said, from what she felt was some far away place, ‘What do you think, Mr Quayle? We haven’t much hope, have we?’

‘Only tomorrow will tell us that, Mrs Tree,’ he said crisply and told Tom to come along.

Grace and Jack sat quietly, saying nothing and facing Betty and Frank Arbuckle across the empty room. And somewhere between them Spit MacPhee watched them all, swinging his legs, and waiting for Sadie to come back.

When they had returned home Grace told Sadie and Spit that they need not go back to school in the afternoon. ‘I suppose if you’ve lost a morning,’ she said to them, ‘you wouldn’t lose much in an afternoon.’

She was being a generous mother. She knew already that she was accepting defeat, sure now that this would probably be the last day that Spit and Sadie would enjoy together, so let them enjoy it.

She had tried to keep Spit close to her for a moment when they had arrived home by asking him to bring in more wood (‘I filled the box this morning’), to put the cart away in the garden (‘I did’), to see if there were one or two tomatoes left on the plants (‘There weren’t any left after the pickles’). It was her best attachment to Spit because she knew he would always do what he had to do: that had always been the closest response she could get out of him so that when she went out to the verandah where he slept to see if there might be something there to regret, she realised that apart from the bed he slept in there was almost nothing here to connect him to her. He owned nothing more than the school clothes he stood up in, an extra pair of trousers, two extra shirts, a toothbrush which she had persuaded him to use, and his school books.

‘It’s all so wrong,’ she said bitterly to herself. ‘It’s so terribly wrong.’ She heard Sadie calling out that they were going down to the river, and she called back in reply, ‘Don’t either of you go near the edge above the bend, because it crumbles away there now that the river is fast.’ She had learned that from Spit himself.

‘Don’t worry,’ Spit shouted.

‘Off you go then,’ she said, and she knew that she did not have to worry with Spit. He would look after Sadie.

The one thing that she could be grateful for, she decided, though it puzzled her, was Jack’s change of heart. He had driven them home in the Dodge, silent and unquestioning, and after a silent lunch he had gone straight to his desk. She knew that he had a genuinely urgent problem with a dairy herd test that was going on, but she guessed that he really wanted to think. As she sat in the kitchen, preparing a batch of scones, he joined her and sat at the table for a moment without saying anything. She looked at his tight, disciplined face and felt sorry for him, and she asked him why he had changed his mind about Spit.

‘I didn’t change my mind,’ he said stiffly. ‘I didn’t know anything about old Fyfe. I didn’t know about the wound in his head. I didn’t even know he’d been in the war. In fact I wonder why he never told anybody.’

‘Tell who?’ Grace said bitterly. ‘Everybody thought he was mad.’

‘He could have told the Returned Soldiers …’

‘What for? If he was so terribly wounded and in pain, he probably wanted to forget the war, not remember it.’

‘We could have helped him,’ Jack said. ‘He was in a bad way.’

‘Why should being a soldier have made any difference? In any case I don’t think he wanted your help. I think Mr Quayle was right. The only help he needed was to be left alone with Spit. It was probably the only way he could cope with everything, and with that awful pain. Anyway, the Returned Soldiers might have thought it best, like Betty Arbuckle, to help him by finding a place for Spit in some Boys Home,’ she said.

‘Why do you say that?’ Jack said indignantly.

‘Because … oh, it doesn’t matter now. I’m sure we’ve lost him anyway.’

‘Well if we have, don’t for God’s sake blame me for what happened,’ Jack said.

‘I’m not blaming you, Jack,’ Grace said, and she took a good new look at her husband, because Jack defending himself was a new experience for her. Forgiving him was another one.

‘You did all you could, and I suppose the only thing we can do now is wait.’

Jack got up to go and it seemed to Grace that he wanted to say something more, but the best he could manage was, ‘Maybe you’ll be surprised.’ Which, she decided, was sufficient reparation for his resistance to Spit. In fact she loved her husband for those few conciliatory words, and she watched him walking up the back path to the Dodge as if she was watching a stranger, because she knew that if, by some miracle, she did get Spit, Jack would do his best for him as he had promised to do.

But it was still her own private problem, and she knew that somewhere along the river bank there were her two children, which was the only way she could think of them now. And, thinking of them, she watched her tears splashing noisily on the kitchen table as if they were the heavy raindrops which one always longed for as the heavenly relief to a hellish drought. It helped her, because she was normally too quiet to weep.

The children she was suffering for were themselves trying to find some method of constructing a small plank boat that would stay upright in the fast currents of the river. There had been heavy rains at the source of the big river, and the Water Board had opened up the weir on the little river to relieve the flow. It was now fast and full, so that Spit’s little boats could not survive in it. But Sadie said she had seen in one of her father’s magazines a picture of a south sea island catamaran which would survive anything, ‘Even huge waves.’

‘You build two arms on the boat, like that,’ she said, spreading her arms and dropping her hands.

‘What’s the point?’ Spit said.

‘It stops the canoe tipping over one way or the other. Can’t you do that, instead of trying to put a keel on the bottom? It just turns over anyway if it bumps something.’

Spit spread his own arms. ‘It’ll be too big,’ he said. ‘Too wide.’

‘It doesn’t matter if it’s too wide,’ Sadie insisted.

They were in the boiler where Spit’s limited restorations had given him a place to work. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘I’ll give it a go.’

She watched him cutting, sawing, shaping, nailing, binding, and hammering, and she gave him advice until he had made a trimaran two feet long and, with outriggers, two feet wide. As he put the mast in the centre-piece he said, ‘Where’s the message?’

‘I haven’t written one,’ Sadie said.

‘I’ll bet you forgot the pencil.’

‘No I didn’t. I’ve got an old red crayon.’ Sadie had the crayon and a sheet of paper ready and she asked Spit what to write.

‘Write …’ Spit thought for a moment, ‘Write … “
this boat belongs to Spit MacPhee and Sadie Tree. If found, please return to owners.
”’

‘Return to owners where? You have to put an address.’

‘Your place,’ Spit said.

‘All right. But you have to give a reason, otherwise people won’t care. They’ll just throw it away.’

‘Say we are trying to find out how far it goes.’

‘Do you think that’ll work?’

‘I don’t know,’ Spit said. ‘But what else can you say?’

Sadie didn’t know. The old days of piratical messages were over, they had grown out of their possibilities. So she wrote the message in red pencil and handed it to Spit.

‘Wrap it around tight,’ she said, ‘and tie it on with string.’

Spit did as he was told, and as they walked up river to put the boat into the stream Spit asked Sadie, ‘What did that old judge ask you?’

‘All sorts of questions,’ Sadie said.

‘What about?’

‘About you and your grandfather and what you did and things like that. What my father and mother did and what you and I did all the time. All sorts of questions like that.’

‘What did he ask Ben?’

‘Same thing,’ Sadie said. ‘Where are you going to put the boat in?’ she asked him.

‘Just above the bend,’ he said.

‘My mother said not to go near the edge there, Spit, because it crumbles.’

‘She was telling that to you, so you’d better keep right back,’ Spit said. ‘She knows I won’t fall in.’

But as Spit lay on the bank, pushing out the trimaran with a long piece of bamboo so that it could flow out into the fast current, the bank gave way and Spit went into the water with it. When Sadie saw his head emerge he was already being carried out to the middle of the river and downstream.

‘Spit,’ she screamed.

Spit was already in action, arms and feet working, but he lifted his head and spat out some water and shouted, ‘I’m all right. I’ll come in around the bend.’ But then he disappeared again.

Sadie ran downstream to the bank around the bend, watching for Spit as he struggled to get free of the currents that swept him along in midstream. She knew that he wasn’t going to make it, but then he put his head under, lashed out with his feet and arms in an Australian crawl and, as he was swept around the bend and reached a patch of dead water, he was momentarily free of the current. After another forceful plunge of arms and legs he reached the bank.

‘Look at you,’ Sadie said as he pulled himself up on the dry bank. ‘You’re sopping wet.’ Sadie was not sure whether she was near to tears because of fright, or because she was angry with him for his mistake.

‘What do you expect me to be?’ Spit said as if he too had to make up his mind about momentary fright or his silly mistake.

‘You shouldn’t have done it,’ she said to him.

‘The whole bank must have been rotten,’ Spit said indignantly, squelching in his sandals, shaking his legs to let the water run free from his trousers.

‘Come on,’ Sadie said. ‘You’ll have to get out of your clothes. And wait until my mother sees you.’

Spit, rarely shamefaced, had to keep his direct gaze averted when he presented himself at the kitchen door for Grace to see.

‘He fell in,’ Sadie said as she held open the door.

‘You fell in!’ Grace said. ‘My God, look at your clothes.’

‘They’re wet,’ Spit said firmly.

‘How on earth did it happen?’

‘I was pushing something in the water and I just fell in.’

‘Where?’

‘Above the bend,’ Spit said loudly.

‘I told you not to go near the edge up there,’ Grace said angrily, already pulling off his jumper and shirt as he stood outside the door.

‘I thought you meant Sadie,’ Spit said.

‘I meant you too,’ she said. ‘How on earth am I going to dry your clothes in this weather, and you haven’t got another pair of shoes.’

‘I don’t need shoes,’ Spit said.

‘Yes you do,’ she said, still furious with him. ‘I don’t know what to do with you, Spit. You should not have gone near the edge up there. Take your shoes and socks off and then go inside the bathroom and take your pants off and dry yourself, and I’ll bring you what’s left of your old clothes. I don’t know how I am going to dry your jumper and trousers. And look at your sandals.’

‘You can put them in the oven,’ Spit said.

‘And ruin them?’ Grace said. ‘You get yourself dry, and when you’re dressed you can stoke up the fire. And Sadie, you should have known better.’

‘She told me not to do it,’ Spit said.

‘Then thank heavens one of you listens to me,’ Grace said.

She told Sadie to go and get the clothes horse to put before the fire, and as Spit walked barefoot into the bathroom Grace stood for a moment clutching the wet shirt and jumper and socks.

In the grip of what seemed to her to be the worst day in her life, she knew that in losing her temper with Spit she had broken the curious barrier that had always been there between them. After all, he was no more than a boy and she was an adult, and whatever had been equal in their companionship had suddenly been replaced by the response of a mother reprimanding a son. She felt it so deeply that once again, in her failure to keep him, she knew that she would have to go somewhere and have a quiet weep. But that, she decided, would not rinse and dry his clothes. It would not help Sadie, who was looking at her with a curious, worried expression, as if she too was upset, not by Spit’s behaviour but by what was happening to her mother.

‘I’m all right,’ she said to Sadie. ‘Go and get the clothes horse.’

‘I’m going,’ Sadie said, and Grace wondered how she was going to survive until ten o’clock next morning.

As they sat waiting for Judge Laker to appear like a materialising ghost through the door at the back of the chamber, Grace whispered to Tom, ‘Do you know how much I’ll owe you, Tom? I have the money.’

‘You don’t have to pay now, Mrs Tree,’ Tom said. ‘My father will send you a bill.’

‘But I have the money.’

‘He won’t take it here,’ Tom said. ‘And anyway I don’t think he’s worked it out yet. It won’t be much.’

‘All right, but I wanted him to know that no matter what happens, I think he did his best. It won’t be his fault if I don’t get Spit.’

‘I’ll tell him,’ Tom said, and as Judge Laker appeared so did Edward Quayle – head a little in the air as if he had everything else on his mind except the problem in hand.

‘Good morning Mr and Mrs Tree,’ he said in his English voice, and Grace was always a little frightened by that slight reserve. He sat down near her and thereafter ignored her and Jack too.