The True Story of Spit MacPhee (4 page)

‘I don’t know, Dot,’ Bert said. ‘If you start doubting Spit’s word you know what to expect – a blast from the furnace.’

‘Well, I wish he wouldn’t shout the way he does.’

‘That’s the old man in him,’ Bert said. ‘The kid’s never known anything else. You can hear them shouting at each other any day of the week when you walk along the railway line. Day or night.’

Bert and Dot Evans were among the people in town who liked both Fyfe and Spit, despite the fact that Spit teased their dog, Patchy, which put Spit and Patchy into a curious relationship. Patchy would always bark fiercely and instantly whenever Spit came or went up the slope to and from the boiler house. It was enough for Patchy to hear Spit’s raised voice, even in the distance, and a fit of barking would follow. But if Spit went through the Evans’ front gate to offer a fish for sale Patchy was all over him with eager paws and licking tongue. Dot and Bert even took a quiet delight (being childless) in knowing when Spit came and went because of Patchy’s bark, and they were among those in town who thought that Betty Arbuckle had no right to march down to the boiler house to make trouble for them.

‘Betty’s been after young Spit ever since his mother died,’ Dot said.

‘So what the devil does she think she’s going to do with him, if she gets him?’ Bert asked her.

‘Send him off to that Boys Home in Bendigo she’s always talking about,’ Dot replied. ‘The trouble is that old Fyfe is getting madder and madder every day, and some day he’s going to go right off his head. The other day he tore up all the flowers in his garden and threw them into the river, and he and Spit were at each other for hours afterwards.’

‘It’s the kid who is looking after the old man these days,’ Bert said. ‘But I wonder, Dot, if they even know what they’re doing. They don’t seem to know what else they can do but live that half-mad life down there.’

That was where Bert and Dot left the problem, as most of the townspeople did whenever they gave a passing thought to the old man and the barefoot boy living in their red and green house on the river bank. That is, all except Betty Arbuckle.

The town knew almost everything visible about Spit and old Fyfe except what went on behind the front door of the little red and green boiler house. Spit now slept by himself in the boiler, and Fyfe had moved into the little cabin extension he had built for his daughter-in-law. To some people in town it was considered shameful that such a bright and active boy had to live in such a place, but others said it was nothing more than a sort of gypsy caravan made of riveted steel plates. Every boy in town envied Spit, but he had to defend his boiler against his grandfather’s need to attack it from time to time with a fourteen-pound hammer. He would wrestle with old Fyfe, get a grip on his arm and simply hang on, wrapping his bare legs around his grandfather’s spindly knees, shouting, ‘No you don’t, grandfather. Leave off … Take it away.’ It worked if Spit was there, but sometimes he would come home from school and find that his grandfather had been at work with his hammer, and everything inside the boiler was in shambles.

Spit’s life was divided into various separate parts. Living on the river became for him the source of life itself. He fished in it and swam in it. He set crayfish nets in it, long lines and shrimp tins. And he spent a lot of his time studying and trying to puzzle out the course of every curve and current in the little Murray, the depth of every hole, and where there could be perch or bream; or most important the tasty Murray cod. Whenever he caught a cod, even at night, he would try to take it alive and kicking to houses along the railway line. As late as nine o’clock there could be a knock at any one of the back doors along the line and Spit would be offering his catch hanging on a tether. He knew all the Catholic families along the line so he would try to offer them a fish on Thursday night or Friday morning early.

What he had become a specialist in was the big crayfish that lived in the little Murray. He knew better than anybody else in town where to lay the crayfish drums made of old bicycle wheels and chicken wire. He used a sheep’s head from the butcher’s for bait, and when he had caught two or three he would take them to one of the two hotels in town and demand five shillings each for them and get it. That became his own money, and he saved it in a tin which he hid in a curious little locker in the underside of the boiler where his grandfather couldn’t find it in one of his fits of unpredictable destruction.

Inside the house or the boiler he had his duties, some given him by his grandfather, others taken on unplanned simply because they were necessary. Old Fyfe was calmest and quietest when he was bent over his bench, magnifying glass pushed into his fire-rimmed eye, and the fine tools of his craft gripped delicately in his short, square, quivering fingers. Almost from the first day that he had brought Spit with him from Bendigo he had allowed the boy to peer through the eye-piece at watches and clocks, whole or in pieces, and eventually he had given Spit an old clock and a set of clockmaker’s screwdrivers and a pair of fine pliers and let him do what he liked. Spit had little difficulty taking the old Westclox Big Ben apart, but in the more complicated business of putting it together again he and his grandfather had shouted at each other, and only by trial and error had Spit put it all back, aged eight, with deft fingers. He could now assemble simple escapements in pocket-watches, and often did so for his grandfather; but he was not allowed to touch wrist-watches or old time-pieces.

When someone from the town brought a watch to old Fyfe for repair Spit would often receive it and write out the little tag in his heavy large left-handed writing. He would take money, and sometimes give an approximate date for completion, and would often have to shout at his grandfather to get it done in time. On occasions the old man would abandon his bench for days on end, and that was usually when he wandered into the town, talking to himself, shouting at anybody who took his fancy, gesticulating and making incomprehensible demands on unlucky neighbours in such braw Scots that they couldn’t understand him and sent him packing with a laugh or a joke. Though violent in speech, old Fyfe was never physically violent except when Jack Taylor and Peter Mayfair, both in their early teens, had tried to snatch off his hat. At first Fyfe had brushed them off like bothersome flies, but when he realised what they were after he had ripped a paling from Mrs Burns’ picket fence and lashed out at both boys and chased them down the street shouting, ‘Ye think I’m mad, ye naughty dogs, ye carnal little beasties. But I’ll show ye.’

Next day Spit had confronted Jack Taylor, who was twice his size, and warned him to leave his grandfather alone. ‘And don’t touch his hat. You leave that alone, Jack.’

‘Okay, Spit,’ Jack said. ‘We didn’t mean your old man any harm.’

‘Well you’d better watch out,’ Spit warned. ‘He’ll make mincemeat of you if you go after his hat.’

‘Okay, okay …’ Jack said, taking it too as a warning from Spit himself.

In fact only Spit knew the agony and pain his grandfather suffered after one of these bouts of madness. The worst of them was not those he suffered in the street, but inside the house when he would suddenly crouch on the floor with his head between his knees, groaning and hitting the top of his head with his fists, while Spit looked on, helpless, aware that he must not say or do anything until the agony had passed. If it happened at the wrong time Spit would have to prepare the lunch or the dinner, or water the garden with buckets from the river, or light the oil lamps which he kept filled with kerosene, or put people off if they came for their watches or their re-set tools.

After one of these bouts Fyfe MacPhee would usually say in a drenched voice to Spit, ‘How long did me noise last this time?’

‘A couple of hours, grandfather,’ Spit would reply. ‘You got up twice, and then you were on the floor again. You couldn’t get up.’

‘You didn’t leave me did ye?’ the old man would shout anxiously.

‘Not me,’ Spit would reply at the top of his voice.

‘Are you sure?’

‘I tell you I was cleaning the wicks, and filling the lamps.’

‘I saw ye …’ the old man would roar.

‘Well, that’s what I was doing, wasn’t I?’

‘I know what you were doing.’

Thus they would return to their usual behaviour, to their endless giving and taking in response to each other.

What they had to share they shared without decision. Every Saturday morning at dawn Spit would light a fire under the copper near the big peppercorn tree and fill it with water from the river. Then Fyfe would throw in all the clothes that needed washing, the sheets and shirts and shorts and anything else handy. After twenty minutes boiling he would lift the washing out piece by piece with a wooden stick, wring it out, and hang it all on the line between the trees. Spit also had to light the kitchen fire every morning and prepare the porridge at night in a black iron pot. Fyfe had once kept half a dozen hens and a few pullets for the eggs, but he had cut off their heads in one of his fits and thrown the headless bodies, still wriggling, into the river. It was one of the few times when Spit was in tears. He had come home to find the devastation, and because he had known every hen and pullet by name, and was used to them eating out of his hand, he had considered them his pets. But he said nothing to his grandfather and the old man was surprised the next day when he went out to get the eggs and realised what had happened to the hens.

Sometimes old Fyfe would bake bread – hard, dry, bannocky bread, but Spit preferred white bread, and he would insist on bringing it home after school from the baker’s, or he would catch one of the delivery vans on the other side of the railway line in the early morning.

But buying and selling were part of the second category of his life. This was Spit in town. He did most of the shopping for butter and jam and meat, and he would collect the four-gallon tins of kerosene for the lamps in a little cart he had made from a fruit box and a pair of old pram wheels. He would also use the cart to bring home horse manure from Mr Walker’s stables for his grandfather’s garden. But most of his carrying was done in an old leather hunting bag he had found under the boiler, and he carried it over one shoulder, so that it reached almost to his ankles. He wouldn’t carry fish in it but he used it for anything else he sold in season: potatoes or tomatoes or beans from Fyfe’s garden, and because they were usually perfect vegetables there were always women at their back doors who would buy them because Spit always chose households near the centre of the town which didn’t have their own vegetable gardens.

He sometimes had problems with the vegetables when Mrs Andrews, for instance, always asked, ‘What have you got today Spit?’ and when he said, ‘Peas,’ she would say, ‘Let me see them.’ Normally this could have produced a vigorous response from Spit: what did she want to see them for? But Mrs Andrews had always said to him, ‘And how is your grandfather, Spit?’ which was enough to remove her from one of his sharp rejections.

Spit had his other friends in town. He would sometimes turn the blower on the forge for Tom Smythe the blacksmith, and he would hitch a ride with Bob Taylor the baker in his horse-drawn cart, or a dink home on Jack Burrow’s bike as he delivered the meat. But though he kept his stocky, barefoot distance with most people, he had no real enemies. Even Mrs Betty Arbuckle was not so much an enemy as a crank, and when his mate, Crispie Cornforth, told him that Betty Arbuckle was after him again, and was determined to get him to the Boys Home in Bendigo, Spit shrugged it off and said, ‘She doesn’t know what she’s doing. My grandfather’ll make mincemeat of her. And anyway how does she think she’s going to get me off to an orphanage in Bendigo when I am not an orphan?’

‘That’s what she’s after though,’ Crispie said.

But to Spit Mrs Betty Arbuckle wasn’t really a menace, she was simply a permanent troublemaker who made his grandfather angrier than usual. Once out of the way she was out of mind, except when he decided on the spur of the moment to pick on Joannie or Ben.

There were two more categories to Spit’s life in St Helen which, when his real troubles began, were an established part of his special environment. One was his life at school, and the other was his friendship with Sadie Tree.

School to Spit was a winter period when the river was swollen and he couldn’t fish effectively or lay his crayfish drums or swim across to Pental Island. He didn’t mind school, he could even like it, and he could always sit still long enough to tolerate lessons because he had always been used to sitting still with his grandfather on the step by the river, or in the house, or on the seat in the vegetable garden or even at the workbench. The only real trouble he gave Miss Masters, his teacher, was the boom of his voice and the size of his writing. Spit always writ everything large – big bold letters which too soon filled a line and a page. No discipline that Miss Masters put on him could reduce the size of his letters, and being left-handed he held his exercise book sideways to write towards him. Though Miss Masters never tried to make him write with his right hand, she had tried consistently to correct his letters by insisting that he keep the book straight.

‘That way,’ she told him, ‘you can see what you’re doing.’

‘Yes Miss,’ Spit said, ‘but then I can’t do what I’m seeing.’

‘You’re too stubborn,’ Miss Masters would say in despair.

‘Yes Miss …’ Spit would boom.

Miss Masters had long ago given up trying to soften his voice although sometimes it was unbearable, but she did her best with Spit. She always knew when old Fyfe was going through a quiet period because Spit’s primitive homework was then reasonably disciplined. But during the bad patches Spit would ignore all homework and take his punishment without resentment or concern. Next year Spit would pass into the first grade of the secondary school, and Miss Masters, a grey-haired professional who always kept two pencils stuck into her thick grey hair like antennae, was concerned for him because he was the only boy in her class who still did not wear shoes or socks; and that would not do at the higher school. But she knew there was little that she could do about it because she couldn’t talk to old Fyfe. Nobody could. She could only hope that they would solve the problem between them in their own way.