The True Story of Spit MacPhee Read Online Free PDF

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