Read The True Story of Spit MacPhee for Free Online Page B

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