Grace had spent the afternoon preparing and boiling the marrow, cauliflower, cucumber, tomatoes and onions for the mixed pickles she made every year for Jack. Sadie had helped to wash and cut and salt the vegetables, and Spit had fed the fire and scattered the peel and skins to the hens, and then stirred the mixture of mustard and vinegar as she poured the vegetables into the big copper kettle. Now the sideboard was packed with twelve jars of mustardy pickles, and the kitchen was still heavy with the air of pickling which Jack always liked. When he came in after six o’clock and said, ‘I could smell those pickles halfway to Nooah,’ she was pleased, because they needed that reminder of their old peace and security, even in the smell of cauliflower and tomatoes and onions and mustard and sugar and spiced vinegar.
But the evening meal was not familiar, nor was it relaxed, and she was glad when it was over, when Sadie and Spit were helping her with the dishes and Jack was at his roll-top desk. It was quiet and dark outside, and it was only a matter of waiting now for the right moment to send Sadie in to her father. Grace was on the point of doing it when the Evans’ dog began to bark, and because she knew how that dog annoyed Jack she decided to wait. It was a persistent and worried dog, and the barking went on long enough for Spit to say, ‘What does he think he’s barking at?’
‘It’s not you this time,’ Sadie said.
‘Maybe he knows I’m in your kitchen,’ Spit said.
‘He’s not that good,’ Sadie told him, and they heard someone at the back door calling out in a loud whisper, ‘Spit, are you there? Spit, can you hear me?’
‘Who on earth is that?’ Grace said.
‘I don’t know,’ Spit said and went around the table to the back door, with Sadie and Grace at his elbow. When they looked into the darkness all they could see was a small figure with a cart.
‘It’s me, Ben Arbuckle.’
Ben’s defiant whisper suggested a father and mother ready and waiting in the shadows to catch him. ‘I brought your things back, Spit. I’ve got them in the cart.’
Spit had been missing his cart and the small store of family possessions he had left under the Arbuckles’ house. He had thought once or twice of going back in the middle of the night to get them, but he had decided against it because Mrs Arbuckle might be waiting to catch him, using the cart and his grandfather’s things as bait.
‘Come in, Ben,’ Grace said to him. ‘Don’t stand out there in the dark.’
‘Well … I don’t know, Mrs Tree,’ Ben said.
But Grace insisted. ‘Come on in,’ she said, and went down the steps to take Ben by the arm and bring him into the kitchen.
The usually neat Ben was in a mess. He had no boots on, his smock and trousers were dirty, and his legs and arms and face were smeared with the mallee dust the town was built on. Spit knew why he was dirty. Ben had obviously crawled under the house in the dark to get the bits and pieces of his grandfather’s things.
‘You haven’t got your boots on,’ Sadie told him, pointing to his bare feet.
‘No,’ Ben said. ‘I threw them in the river.’
Spit laughed, but it was Grace who noticed that Ben’s dirty face was smeared and streaked as if he had been crying, and she asked him if his mother knew that he was here.
‘No, and I’m not going to tell her,’ Ben said.
‘Do you want a piece of cake?’ Grace asked him.
‘I’m not allowed,’ Ben said, but then changed his mind. ‘All right,’ he said, and he turned to Spit and told him that he had borrowed his cart a couple of times. ‘But I’ve got some wheels of my own.’
‘Where did you get them from?’ Spit asked him.
‘From Billy Cotsman. I’ve hidden them under the house.’
‘What about an axle?’ Spit said as Ben bit into the cake Grace had given him. ‘They’re not going to be any good without an axle.’
‘Billy didn’t have one, but I’ll get one somewhere.’
‘All you have to do is get the fruit box and the axle,’ Spit said. ‘But if you want me to help you build it you’ll have to get the stuff down to the old boiler yourself. I’m not going up to your place.’
‘All right,’ Ben said, and with his mouth full of cake he backed out as if his defiance was rapidly running out. Grace saw what was happening to him and hurried after him, catching him by the arm before he could run off. ‘Are you sure your mother doesn’t know you came down here?’ she said to him. ‘Is that why you’ve been crying?’
‘She doesn’t know anything,’ Ben said. ‘I got into trouble for throwing my boots in the river.’
‘What did you do that for?’ Grace said.
‘Well …’ But Ben’s defiance was now exhausted. And shouting, ‘S’long Spit,’ he was off on his bare feet, not to the gate but to the nearest part of the fence which he scrambled over as a last gesture of resistance to good order.
‘Poor old Ben,’ Spit said.
‘What do you think he’s up to?’ Sadie asked. ‘Why would he throw his boots away?’
‘I don’t know,’ Spit said. ‘But it’s not his fault. He can’t help it.’
‘That’s why Tim Evans’ dog barked,’ Sadie said as they went inside.
‘What do you mean?’
‘He thought it was you with the cart.’
Spit was delighted. ‘Well I fooled him that time, didn’t I?’ he said.
Grace listened, and when they were in the kitchen she sent Spit to check the front gate in case Ben had left it open when he brought the cart in. ‘Otherwise the dogs will get in,’ she said.
Alone in the kitchen with Sadie she gave her the adoption form and said, ‘This is what I had to fill in so that we can adopt Spit, so take it in to your father and ask him to sign it.’
Sadie knew about the adoption. She knew about the tension it had caused between her mother and father, but mother and daughter were so close that they both knew what had to be done, so she took the form in to her father.
When Spit came back Grace, who was tense now and nervous, sat him down at the kitchen table and asked him if he had a birth certificate somewhere. ‘Because,’ she said, ‘I think I’ll need that too.’
Spit shook his head. ‘I never saw one,’ he told her.
‘Do you know where you were born?’
‘In White Hills near Bendigo,’ Spit said.
‘Then I suppose I’ll have to get your certificate from Bendigo,’ Grace said, not quite sure that what she was saying really mattered. She was simply talking in order to talk while she waited for Sadie to return.
Sadie, standing behind her father at his desk, had hesitated to interrupt him. He disliked being interrupted when he was filling in the long yellow form of stock lists, or the weigh bills of the summer’s wool clip shipped out of the town. But Jack looked up at his quiet daughter and felt for a moment the affection that always touched him when he was aware, as now, of Sadie’s natural and delicate shyness. He took off his spectacles.
‘All right,’ he said. ‘It must be something you want badly, so what’s up?’
Sadie was about to say that her mother wanted him to sign the form, but she changed her mind and said, ‘I just wanted you to sign this form about Spit. That’s all.’
‘What form?’
‘So that we can adopt him.’
‘Did your mother put you up to this?’
Sadie shook her head. ‘No, it’s me. I want us to adopt Spit so he can stay with us. It’s my own idea as much as Mum’s.’
‘It’s an idea I don’t think much of, Sadie, and your mother knows it.’
‘But it won’t hurt you,’ Sadie said.
‘Do you know what it means if we adopt Spit?’ he asked her.
‘Yes. He’ll have to live here with us all the time. I know that,’ she said.
‘That’s not even the half of it,’ Jack said. ‘We’ll have to bring him up like a son. We’ll have to be responsible for him, no matter what he does …’
‘He won’t do anything wrong, Dad. Not if he can help it.’
‘Even if he doesn’t, your mother will have to look after him all the time. Did you think of that?’
Sadie could keep very still and she was very still now. ‘She won’t mind. She likes him.’
‘And you’ll have to live with him every day. If you up and decide one day you don’t like him any more you won’t be able to send him packing off to Bendigo. Once I sign that paper Spit becomes as important to me as you are. Do you want that, Sadie?’
Sadie, like her mother, knew that she had to stand her ground. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘If you don’t mind, I don’t.’
‘You want me to treat him like a son?’
Sadie compressed her lips, but this time all she could manage was a vigorous nod.
‘Well I’m damned if I know any more,’ Jack said in despair. ‘I don’t know what you see in him.’
Sadie, finding her courage again, said, ‘Spit has never hurt anybody, and he never will.’
Jack was trying not to be impatient with Sadie but he laughed his dry, impatient, military laugh. ‘I’ll bet he’s had more fights in your school than any other boy his age,’ he said.
‘Spit only fights when they say something about his grandfather. Everybody likes him. And he knows how to do everything.’
Jack’s response was a surprise even to himself. He did not snatch the form from her hand and tear it up, which is what he wanted to do. Angry with Sadie’s resistance and angry with Grace, he wanted to make a punishing remark to his daughter, one that he knew would get a submissive reply. ‘So what do you think you’re going to do young lady,’ he said, ‘if I refuse to sign that form? What will you do then?’
Sadie, facing defeat, was silent for a moment. ‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘I couldn’t do anything, could I?’
Jack knew that he had won his private little contest but, looking at his daughter’s calm face which was trying to give nothing away, he knew that her eyes (uncontrollably wet), and her lips grimly (for her) compressed were an argument and a conviction that he could not face up to any more. It was too much.
‘All right. All right,’ he said. ‘Give me the form.’
Taking it from her he turned it over, found the place where he had to sign, dipped the pen, scrawled his signature and gave it back to her.
‘Give it to your mother,’ he said.
Sadie was so surprised that she simply took the form. Uneducated in gestures and untaught in affection she said, ‘Thanks, Dad,’ and feeling very sorry for her father she took the signed form in to her mother in the kitchen.