Filling out the form that Pat Stillman had given her Grace did her best with the obvious questions about her and Jack’s age, family, financial condition, social background, and religion (both their own and Spit’s). They were the sort of questions she hated answering, and she knew that Jack would hate them too. Yet she was sure that when the time came she would get Jack’s signature on the form. In fact she had to get it because the adoption application had to come from Jack as head of the family, rather than from Grace as the wife.
What made difficulties for her were the questions that needed permission of the natural parents, because the form assumed that adoption was mostly concerned with unwanted babies, rather than eleven-year-old orphans. Or, if the parents were both dead, she needed a signed release from the nearest relatives. Without that the form was invalid, which meant that her only recourse to the information she needed in order to write ‘no surviving relatives’ would have to be Spit himself. She could remember the fuss about Spit being left alone with his grandfather when his mother had come and gone so quickly and tragically, but it was only a hazy memory of casual rumours. She remembered Dorothy Evans telling her that there were no other relatives left. So Spit himself would have to be asked.
The trouble was that she didn’t know how she could do it. Spit was still a problem, and she didn’t want to open up his silent wounds. He had kept his word not to run away again, but she knew that he was being cautious with her, although she understood why. Even in her house he was in a sort of limbo. Sleeping on the verandah he was not quite in the house and at the same time not quite out of it. In studying him so that she could know how best to deal with him she had slowly unravelled some of his private rules for himself, which made Grace almost as cautious with him as he was with her.
Her first duty had been to clothe him, because he had come to her with nothing more than a pair of torn trousers and a shirt. She had discovered that he usually slept in an old shirt, so she had cut down one of Jack’s rejects for him. She had been a little nervous about giving it to him as a first offering, but Spit had taken if off-handedly without any fuss. She had then bought some cotton lengths and run him up two new shirts on her Singer, which he had also accepted with his own sort of pride, but without demur. Her trial attempts at making up trousers with an old sheet had defeated her, so she had bought him one pair of khaki shorts and also a grey woollen pair because school was about to start. She had taken him to Williams the draper, and bought him socks, sandals and a school cap which, on his thick, fair hair was a lost cause.
Grace’s only way of coping with his impersonal acceptance of her practical gesture was to repeat to herself a simple sentence that covered everything that Spit did: ‘He’s a strange boy.’ But she also knew that his years of self-sufficiency and his loud and childish equality with his tortured grandfather had made him more than just a tough little boy who should be treated as one. Whenever he did any service about the house it was not in gratitude to her, nor even a favour, but was an unthinking contribution to what had to be done. He chopped the wood for her, which saved Jack a daily chore. She had watched him swinging an axe which seemed to miss his bare feet by inches, but though she had winced and turned away at the prospect of a miss, nonetheless she knew that he wouldn’t miss and that she must let him do it. When he helped Sadie with the dishes, his tendency to clatter and treat the cups and saucers roughly bothered her, but she said nothing. He watered the garden for her, but unlike Jack, who was economical with water, Spit lavished it on everything in sight. He would walk – never run – up the slope to the shops if she wanted thread or an extra pint of milk or bread, and in this too he was neither willing nor unwilling. He simply did it, and when Sadie went with him it gave her a deep sense of satisfaction to see them go up the slope together without any thought now of being anything but a natural brother and sister. That was when she felt most deeply Jack’s reluctance. Why couldn’t Jack see it as she saw it?
Finally, she had discovered that, apart from the thick grime-ingrained soles of his bare feet (his sandals would be only for school), he was a very clean boy, although she had to persuade him to use the inside bathroom rather than the outside tap.
‘Where did you wash when you were living in the boiler?’ she had asked him.
‘Outside,’ he had told her.
Summer or winter (she discovered) Spit and his grandfather had used a basin of river water on a table outside, and Spit’s idea of washing himself was to stand naked to the waist over a basin and, having soaped his face and neck, simply douse himself with a mug full of water. He wouldn’t tell her how he did it below the waist, but she suspected something similar, and because there had been no chip-fed hot water heater in the boiler house, it had always been a cold douche. She let him go on doing it in his own way outside; but she persuaded him to finish his lower parts in the bathroom, although he insisted on locking the door.
What surprised her, although she knew she shouldn’t have been surprised, was her discovery that he had no naughtiness in him. It was not because he was good. In his certainties he seemed incapable of being silly or childish, even in his childish behaviour, which was another aspect of his self-sufficiency. But he had his faults, and the one that she knew she would have endless trouble with at home was his loud voice and his often aggressive answers of one harsh word in reply to a simple question. She knew that it was the way he and his grandfather had always spoken to each other, but she was a quiet person herself and it bothered her. She tried to correct it by speaking to him in a softer voice than her normal soft voice. She hoped that this would persuade him to speak quietly. It didn’t.
But these were annoyances rather than serious faults. What she had to deal with was a brand of wickedness which genuinely surprised her. One morning when he was chopping the wood and a hard lump of mallee root had split off and hit his shins, his instinctive response had been a long line of such bad language that it shocked her. It was not the casual and childish kind of schoolboy curse, but an adult and shameful list of the worst. She didn’t say anything to him, but she asked Sadie as she sat on her bed that night, ‘Have you ever heard Spit swearing?’
‘Never,’ Sadie said, shocked that her mother asked her such a question. ‘He never swears.’
But Jack had also heard him swearing at the Evans’ dog, and he had told Grace that he would have to teach Spit a severe lesson – which meant giving him a good hiding.
But Grace said, ‘You’re not going to touch him, Jack. It won’t teach him anything. On the contrary, it would only make it worse.’
‘That’s a lot of tommy rot,’ Jack Tree said. ‘If you don’t stop him now pretty soon he’ll be using the same language in this house and I won’t have that. I won’t have it, Grace, so don’t start protecting him.’
Grace had not told her husband that she too had heard Spit in full flow, and she knew that she would have to do something about it. ‘I’ll talk to him,’ she said.
They were waiting for Sadie and Spit to come in for lunch. Sadie had been to her piano lesson, and Spit had been trying to sell what was probably the last catch of the season to the houses along the railway line.
‘You can’t treat Spit the way you treat Sadie,’ her husband said. ‘He’s a tough little beggar and he’s not going to listen to kind words and a soft voice.’
‘I’ll talk to him anyway. And afterwards, if you do hear him swearing, you can beat him as much as you like. But you’re not to touch him until I’ve told him not to do it.’
‘How will you know whether he’s swearing or not? You weren’t there when he was telling off Tim Evans’ kelpie in language a bullockie wouldn’t use.’
‘I’ll take his word for it,’ Grace said. ‘And you’ll have to sooner or later. You can’t always mistrust him.’
‘By God,’ Jack Tree said angrily. ‘I wish I’d been given some of this treatment when I was a kid.’
Grace smiled at her husband. ‘Never mind,’ she said. ‘Because now you have a chance to give it to somebody else.’
‘Well I’m damned if I’m going to let you joke about it,’ Jack said. ‘You’re dead wrong, Grace, and that’s all there is about it.’
Grace knew very well that she could be wrong, and what weakened her resolve was Jack’s blank wall facing Spit’s blank wall. As they ate their lunch of chops and potatoes and peas, she watched them both to see if she could detect even a glimmer of communication between them. Jack ignored Spit, and for his part Spit kept quiet throughout lunch, answering her questions or Sadie’s unusual chatter with loud monosyllables. Grace knew he wasn’t going to give anything back to Jack, neither a friendly word nor a whole sentence that Jack might use against him. Listening to his stiff, childish, serious voice in its bold disguise (the only way Spit knew how to talk), Grace knew how difficult it was going to be to break him down – with Jack or without Jack.
‘He’s still expecting to be tricked in some way,’ Grace decided, and after lunch when she organised Sadie to hunt for all the empty jam jars so that they could make some mixed pickles, she took Spit into the garden to help her pick the last of the green tomatoes on the dried up plants, and she asked him why he didn’t like Jack.
‘He’s all right,’ Spit said in his untouchable way. ‘I like him all right.’
‘Why don’t you talk to him?’ she asked.
‘He doesn’t talk to me much,’ Spit said, busy with the tomatoes, deeply involved in what he was doing as he always seemed to be in anything he did.
‘Well, try and talk to him, Spit, because we’re going to need his help soon.’
Spit didn’t ask her why they would need Jack’s help, and again she was aware of his suspicion and his childish caution. But she still had to settle the problem of his swearing. ‘Why do you swear, Spit?’ she said to him.
Spit looked up in surprise. ‘What makes you think I swear?’ he said.
‘I heard you swearing like a trooper the other day when you were chopping wood.’
Spit didn’t like that. ‘I only swear to myself,’ he said. ‘I don’t go around swearing.’
‘Do you know what the words mean?’ she asked him.
‘They don’t mean anything.’
‘Oh, but they do mean something. And it’s better that you don’t know what they mean. So please, Spit, don’t swear any more. Even when you think nobody is listening. Jack heard you, and the more you do it the more careless you’ll be with it, and I don’t want Sadie to hear that kind of language.’
‘I don’t swear in front of Sadie. She didn’t say so, did she?’
‘No, she said you didn’t. But don’t swear at all. That’s what I want you to promise. And you’ll have to keep your promise because we’re going to have a lot of trouble if you don’t.’
‘All right,’ Spit said, concentrating on the tomatoes. ‘I’ll stop swearing.’
‘That means you don’t swear at all, even when you’re alone. No swearing. Not the way you swear.’
Spit could be obliging and he said, ‘Don’t worry. I’m not going to hurt anybody.’
Grace was not quite sure what that meant but she accepted it as a promise. Encouraged now by this strange companionship she always felt for him, she asked him if he had any relatives left.
‘Anyone anywhere?’ she added. ‘Did your grandfather ever mention any?’
‘I had an uncle once,’ he said, ‘but he didn’t last long. He got killed a long time ago.’
‘Was that the only relation you had?’
‘Except for my mother and my grandfather.’
‘Do you remember your mother?’ Grace asked him, on her knees in the tomato patch but more interested in Spit than in the green tomatoes.
Spit was watching her now. ‘My mother got burnt in a fire,’ he told her.
‘Yes, I know. That was so sad.’ Grace hesitated, still not sure what to say to him. But then she made up her mind.
‘You know, Spit, that I’m trying to adopt you?’
‘Yes. I know,’ he said.
‘You know? How did you know?’
‘Mrs Evans told me, and a lot of other people asked me. A lot of people. Jack Ellison asked me yesterday.’
‘Then why on earth didn’t you come and ask me if it was true or not?’
‘I don’t know,’ Spit said. ‘I thought it might be another trick.’
‘I wouldn’t trick you. Don’t you know that?’
‘I didn’t mean you. I meant them.’
‘Who?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know … It’s no good asking me … It’s Mrs Arbuckle and all the others. They’ll trick me again if they get a chance.’
‘I don’t think they want to trick you,’ Grace said to him. ‘They want to do what they think is best for you, and that’s why I’m trying to adopt you. I wasn’t going to tell you because I didn’t want you to think I had worked it all out. I haven’t. I have to get Jack’s signature on the paper, then I have to take it to the Shire Office. But I can’t do anything at all without Jack, which is why I wanted you to get on with him a bit better.’
Spit was silent. She did not expect any gratitude from him because she knew where his attitude came from; she knew that years ago he had been forced to acquire a childish skin of stoicism so that he could cope with his grandfather, and at the same time help him to survive as a boy. But she suspected that he was secretly frightened now, aware that he was a wisp of nothing, and that his only defence against everybody else’s plans for him was to keep himself to himself. There was nothing else he could do.
‘Jack doesn’t like me much,’ he said dispassionately.
‘It’s not that,’ she said unhappily. ‘Jack’s a kind man, Spit, but he’s a bit rigid, and he doesn’t like things to disturb his life. Sadie and I learned that a long time ago. But when he sees something is right he’ll stick by it. And sooner or later he’ll see that we are right, don’t worry.’
‘All right,’ Spit said, and once again Grace knew that he had gone as far as he could.
But that night when Grace sat down at the kitchen table, just before sunset, and carefully opened up the adoption form to write into it that Spit had no living relatives, she knew she was about to change the light and shadow of her own life, and she half-wished that when she handed in the form tomorrow that nothing would come of it. She was frightened of what she was undertaking. Until now she had never felt lonely or separated from Jack. On the contrary, she had always been satisfied with his set of rules for Sadie and herself. She had thought of them as no more than the ministry of a rather stiff man who was trying to order life decently, knowing that he was married to a very quiet woman who had no rules of her own except a desire to live from day to day without harshness or conflict. She had always been satisfied with the kind of protection and care that Jack gave her with his certainty that he knew best.
But now, for Spit’s sake, she was undoing the pattern of it.
‘I hope to God I’m doing the right thing,’ she said because she now had to get Jack’s signature on the adoption form, and how was she going to manage that?
Grace had no guile, she was incapable of scheming, particularly against her husband, so that when she decided to use Sadie she was not thinking up a quiet little plot of her own. She was trying to influence Jack, she told herself, the only way she knew how. As she waited for Sadie and Spit to come back from the railway station with the two boxes of laboratory test phials that Jack had sent them for, she looked around at her home and knew how valuable it was, and how safe and secure it had always been. Even the mustardy smell of it at the moment made the point.