It took the town a little while to realise that Spit MacPhee had disappeared. By the time everybody in St Helen knew about it there were rumours that he had drowned himself or hidden in one of the trains going to Melbourne. He had been seen from one end of town to the other, but nobody could offer any real facts to Sergeant Collins whose duty it was to find him. The river was a logical place to look for Spit, but where exactly?
The first news of his absence had come from Betty Arbuckle who had waited for him at six o’clock tea time, and after questioning Ben and ringing the hospital she realised by eight o’clock, when it was fully dark, that Spit was being wicked again. But it was ten o’clock before she told her husband Frank to go down to the boiler to see if he was there.
‘He won’t be there, Bet,’ Frank said. ‘He’d know that I’d come and get him by the scruff of the neck if he was there.’
‘He may be hiding there, just crying,’ Betty said.
‘He won’t cry,’ Ben told his mother.
‘You get back to bed,’ Betty told Ben, who had heard the fuss and was in the kitchen to see what it was about.
‘I’ll go down to the boiler,’ Ben volunteered.
‘No you won’t. You get back to bed,’ his father said sharply.
‘Well … I’ll bet he’s not there anyway,’ Ben said boldly.
‘You don’t bet in this house,’ Betty told him, and took him firmly on his way to the verandah.
‘I won’t sleep,’ Ben told his mother defiantly as he got into bed. ‘Not until Spit comes back.’
Betty Arbuckle was not in a mood to deal with her son’s new rebelliousness, so she tucked him up and returned to the kitchen to tell her husband to go on. ‘You’ll have to look somewhere,’ she said.
Frank Arbuckle put his boots on and walked through the dark streets to the railway line, then along the line to the path leading down to the river and the trees and the boiler. It was a dark night and he stumbled once or twice, but he found the boiler among its ashes, looked inside it, called, ‘Spit where are you?’ once or twice, and then went back home to tell Betty, ‘He’s not there. He’s up and gone, Bet.’
‘But he must be somewhere,’ Betty said unhappily. ‘He can’t just sleep in the street.’
‘Spit can sleep anywhere.’ It was Ben again.
This time he got a quick and surprising slap across the backside which brought tears to his eyes and quick obedience, but he was mumbling in protest as he went back to bed, ‘I told you so. I told you, didn’t I?’
It was almost eleven o’clock and by now Betty Arbuckle was sure that Spit was not coming back at all. ‘I’ll ring Sergeant Collins,’ she said. ‘He’ll have to do something.’
‘What can he do?’ Frank said. ‘If Spit has disappeared it’ll take more than Sergeant Collins to find him at this time of the night.’
‘He might have fallen in the river,’ Betty said.
‘In that case he’s well on his way to Adelaide by now, swimming like a fish.’
‘That’s enough, Frank,’ Betty said. ‘You ought not to be heartless about it. I’m going to ring Sergeant Collins.’
That was the first step in the town’s discovery that Spit had run away. And, as the first man to hear about it, Sergeant Collins’ attitude was predictable.
‘That damned little dingo,’ he said. ‘Why can’t he stay put somewhere. I don’t even know where to look for him at this hour of the night, Mrs Arbuckle. But you can bet that he’s safe and secure somewhere. He knows how to look after himself, so don’t worry. He’ll turn up all right.’
‘But I have to worry, and you ought to do something.’
‘Well you tell me where I can find him and I’ll go and get him. Leave it until morning and I’ll be after him first thing.’
‘You ought to be able to do better than that,’ Betty Arbuckle said angrily.
‘Tomorrow morning,’ Sergeant Collins told her and hung up.
‘He’s right,’ Frank Arbuckle said, and in an unusual act of defiance took off his boots and told Betty, ‘I’m going to bed.’
Betty Arbuckle, determined in her conscience to do something, walked to the front gate, looked under the house hopefully, turned her eyes to the clear and starlit sky above and asked the Lord Jesus to protect the wandering boy. Then she went to bed.
It was another two days before all the town became involved in Spit’s disappearance, but not everybody in St Helen recognised Spit’s problem. Those who were curious but not particularly concerned assumed that with his grandfather’s death he would end up in an orphanage anyway, which meant Bendigo or even Melbourne itself. That should be the end of it. But there were plenty of others who realised that Spit had disappeared because he didn’t want to be taken off to an orphanage, and though his disappearance seemed like a hopeless gesture of defiance, there was plenty of sympathy and support for him. Also enough confidence in Spit’s character to believe that he could look after himself.
But where was he?
Sergeant Collins spent a wasted day looking into all the turns and twists of the river bank upstream and downstream, and into the two deserted houses and the old lean-to that Spit had used sometimes to store his crayfish drum in during the winter. He asked the Italians who ran the pea farm if they had seen Spit; then the Walkers, and at the other dairy farms that bordered the little river. The one person he didn’t ask was Sadie Tree who was the only person in town who knew where Spit was. But when he asked the boys and girls who normally used the Point for a swimming hole if they had seen Spit (he never swam there anyway) they all told the Sergeant, ‘He’s over on Pental Island, somewhere on the big river.’ In fact they didn’t know for sure where Spit was, but they knew that the island and the big river were Spit’s territory, so where else would he be?
It was something that Sergeant Collins also knew but was reluctant to accept because it meant rowing a boat across to the island and searching the strip of bush – the tall old eucalypts – that bordered the big river. Even then, unless Spit could be surprised in his sleep, the chances were that he would hear or see anybody looking for him, and could easily hide somewhere if he was determined enough. He knew every inch of the bush along the big river.
‘That little wombat is so bloody determined, God knows where he is,’ Sergeant Collins told his wife as he sat down to tea after his wasted day.
The next morning, when Sergeant Collins crossed the river in the boat he had borrowed from the power station, Spit was fishing from a fallen tree on the big river where he could see all that was happening. He saw Sergeant Collins rowing across the river, and rolling up his lines he buried them with his bed rolls under a pile of leaves and ran along the edge of the bank as fast as he could go.
Spit felt safe enough as he picked his way along the river bank, but he was always alert for any one of the three threats to his bare feet which, though hardened and almost always suffering a missing toe nail or a bloody big toe, could be attacked on the ground. He was afraid of the poisonous black or brown or tiger snakes that lived in the grass or under the trees or on the river bank, and were often difficult to see until you almost stepped on them. He could not forget what had happened to his friend Crispie. He was also afraid of the big goannas which were like prehistoric monsters and were often aggressive and could run as fast as he could if they wanted to. But the nuisance which always made him yelp or swear were the hard little seeds – three-pointed spikes called bindi-eyes which lay on the ground almost anywhere in the open, and jabbed deep into his flesh if he stood on them. He had to hop several times to extract a bindi-eye as he ran, but he knew he was safe because he could move faster than Sergeant Collins, and could hide in dozens of places among the trees or on the river bank.
When he had plenty of distance between him and Sergeant Collins, he heard the Sergeant calling out to him, swearing sometimes and adding the threat: ‘You’d better come out now, Spit, because we’ll catch up with you sooner or later, and then I’ll lock you up, you little devil, for wasting my bloody time.’
And finally, but more effectively: ‘Your grandfather’s going to be buried tomorrow, so you ought to be there, Spit. You can’t miss the old man’s funeral.’
Spit could still see Sergeant Collins who was dabbing his face with his wet handkerchief. It was a hot day, the Sergeant’s jacket was undone and his cap was on the back of his head. He looked around from river to bush as if he knew that Spit was not far away.
‘Come on Spit, be a sport. Nobody’s going to hurt you,’ he was shouting.
Emboldened by the Sergeant’s obvious disarray, Spit shouted back, ‘It’s just another trick, and I’m not coming back.’
He turned then and ran as fast as he could through the tall gums to the river bank where he could still watch almost everything that Sergeant Collins did. As the Sergeant retreated to the little river Spit followed him all the way until the Sergeant was back in the boat and rowing across the little river to St Helen.
Spit returned then to his fishing because he had discovered that he was going to be short of food sooner than he had expected. He was forever hungry, he had finished the bread and all but two eggs, and because it was late in the season the fish were not always biting, so he had only caught one Murray cod and a couple of small perch. But now he made his fire on the river bank where it was safe and couldn’t be seen from any distance. He had made, in his life, many fires, and cooked many a fish and boiled many a billy. It was easy and routine now. But he had to be careful. He climbed to the top of the bank from time to time to see if Sergeant Collins or anyone else was on the way back. Finally, when he had eaten the last of the cod and the last hard end of his white bread, he sat on top of the bank sipping hot sweet tea and thinking of his grandfather, wishing without any admission of his final and ghostly loss that his grandfather would be waiting for him in the boiler house again, and that their life there would go on forever.
But he knew he had to fight for himself now, and he cursed (in his best all-round selection) Sergeant Collins not for being the local policeman or a particular enemy but because he was the agent of everybody else who was out to get him. Finishing his tea he stood up, took the last dregs of sugar out of the enamel mug with his finger and said aloud, ‘They’re never going to get me.’
He washed out the mug and the billy and the plate in the river, covered the ashes of his fire, and began to dig with his feet in the soft sand and mud, looking for the big river mussels which were the best bait for Murray cod.
Now that he was discovered, and having carelessly revealed himself to Sergeant Collins, he decided to move further up the big river. Packing his two blanket rolls he slung them over his shoulder and made his camp in another clump of gums where he could still see anybody crossing the little river, although it was much farther away now. Since there was nothing to do but fish, he fished, and sometimes he sang one of the Scottish songs his grandfather had taught him, although he didn’t understand the words because they were too Scottish to make any sense of. When it became dark, which always settled quickly now that summer was almost over, he made his way back to the little river, smacking the path in front of him with a stick so that he didn’t step on a coiled up and sleeping snake. He swam the little river, climbed out cautiously, found a fragment of wood among the ashes of the boiler, cut a little boat from it, found also a fragment of brown paper, wrote ‘2 bread and some eggs’ on it with a blackened splinter of burnt wood, made it into a sail, and set the boat on its way down to Pental Island by the time Mr Evans’ dog, Patchy, put his visit on record, although nobody paid that much attention to connections like that except Sadie.
He knew that he had to be particularly careful with his camp at night, in case Sergeant Collins or someone else decided to sneak up on him in darkness. He made his fire under an overhang on the bank and he doused it when he had cooked his last perch and boiled his billy. He slept in his blankets, hidden under a fallen gum near the overhang, although he knew that snakes often lay along that particular tree when they sunned themselves.
He slept nervously alert, and spent the next day avoiding not only Sergeant Collins but Jack Tree and Frank Arbuckle and Tim Evans who had organised themselves into a posse to search out the bush along the banks of the big river. Seeing all three hunting him like a bushranger it became a challenge to Spit, and though he found little difficulty in avoiding them (sometimes he got around behind them and simply followed them) he was worried at the end of the day when he heard Sergeant Collins say to Mr Tree, ‘We’re in for some rain, Jack, and the poor little beggar will probably come in, once it starts to pour.’
‘I’m not so sure,’ Jack Tree said. ‘He’s a barefoot barnacle and he’s not likely to be afraid of a little rain.’
‘It’s going to get awfully muddy, and if we get a bit of wind it’s also going to be pretty miserable. In any case we’ll bring Doug Stewart and half a dozen others tomorrow and we ought to get him somewhere sooner or later.’
‘Maybe … maybe …’ Jack Tree said doubtfully. ‘In any case doing it this way is a dead loss. He’s probably watching us right now, and laughing up his bare sleeve.’
‘Maybe he’ll get hungry,’ Frank Arbuckle said, ‘and that’ll bring him in. Don’t you think?’ he appealed, knowing he would have to face Betty on his return without Spit.
‘I don’t know about that either, Frank,’ Jack Tree said. ‘He’s better at catching fish in this river than anyone else in town. Anyway, let’s go. We’re just wasting our time doing it this way.’
Spit had heard enough and he did a wide circle around his pursuers to pick up his blanket rolls and then head for one of the thickest clumps of gums where he could shelter best from the rain when it came. He had not noticed the sky to the north-west because the timber and his concentration on his pursuers had obscured it. Now that he took a good look at the sky, he saw in the shadow of the setting sun a silhouette of thick black clouds etching a flat line along the distant horizon, and he knew it was going to be a bad night.
Rain, when it came to St Helen, was always a visible aggressor behind a waning in the sky, and its first splashing gum-drops were usually sudden and heavy once the thick clouds were overhead, particularly in late summer. He knew that this time it would probably arrive in the middle of the night, and he wished that he had brought his little tomahawk that he normally used to cut kindling with. It was still there in the garden shed. Now, when he reached the triangle of thick gums where there was some overhead protection, he tried to construct a lean-to with dead limbs and thick grass against one of the trees. But he knew it was hopeless so he returned to the river bank, found a sandy edge with an overhang under some exposed roots, and decided to sleep out any storm here if he had to.
But first he must cross the little river again to get the bread and eggs he had asked Sadie for. It took time to cover the longer distance to the little river, but he swam as quietly as he could, aware now of the faster currents of the rising river. He waited at the mud steps in the darkness for a moment before running quickly to the shelf under the boiler.
‘Good old Sadie,’ he said softly as he felt the bread and eggs and something else – a tin of sardines. They were all together in a sugar bag and there was a note tied with string around the sardine tin which he couldn’t read in the darkness. He heard Tim Evans’ dog bark, and somewhere above the railway line he heard a motor bike. It was enough to hurry him on his way, and he set out higher than usual to allow for the faster current and swam on his back, holding the sugar bag as high as he could. But again it got wet and he swore at Sergeant Collins for trying to trap him. At this moment he wasn’t thinking of Betty Arbuckle and the Boys Home, he was far more concerned with the men at his heels.
He beat his way back under the threatening sky to his shelter beneath the roots of the big gum tree, and it began to rain as he tucked himself into his blankets. He heard the storm slowly rumbling overhead and he looked up at the big tree which, he knew, could topple over at any time once the winds began.
‘But not tonight,’ he begged the tree. ‘Any old time, but not tonight.’