The True Story of Spit MacPhee by James Aldridge Page B

knew that at the first opportunity he would block a water valve again.
    What puzzled Spit was Betty Arbuckle’s concern over dinner that he should get enough to eat. She offered him more potatoes and peas, and encouraged him to eat. She was a good cook, better than Spit’s grandfather, and better than Spit himself who knew how to roast a leg of lamb. She was lavish with the bread and butter pudding, which normally Spit would not have looked at. He did not like milk. But he had to admit that Betty Arbuckle had made a delicious pudding of it. A cup of hot, sweet tea and Spit was satisfied, waiting now for Ben who was a slow and careful eater.
    When Ben had finished, Betty Arbuckle gave them both a small square of torn white cloth, part of an old sheet, and she told Spit to wipe his hands and his mouth clean before she thanked the Lord for what they had received.
    Spit followed Ben’s example, and though he knew that grace was usually said before a meal rather than after it he listened as Betty Arbuckle thanked the Lord Jesus for His benefice, for His grace abounding and for His harvest of good for their bodies’ health. He didn’t bend his head or close his eyes, like Ben, but he watched Betty Arbuckle, fingers tightly laced together, her head held high in some secret esteem, her eyes closed, and Spit saw a beautiful woman in a moment of ecstasy. He could remember his mother, but only in confusion – his mother with an unblemished face and then his mother with the disfigured face which she had tried to hide from him, although he had seen it enough to remember it. After her death his only contact with women had been his business affairs at back doors, or an exchange of greetings, or lately his friendship with Sadie and her mother. But it was this woman whom he had insulted and punished, and who had punished him in return and threatened him, and who now had a veto on everything he did – it was this one who puzzled him with her conventions for sin and her begging appeals to the Lord to save her from wickedness. She fascinated him and frightened him, and he wished his grandfather would get better, even if he couldn’t re-build the boiler. He wished above all that he could run away, because he knew for sure now that Betty Arbuckle’s determination to do what was best for him would sooner or later end in the Boys Home in Bendigo, and he didn’t know how he was going to escape that.

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    He decided in self-defence and as a temporary measure to do as he was told. He managed to get through the rest of the day helping Ben in the garden, mowing the lawn and trimming the already trimmed hedges. The interior walls of Betty Arbuckle’s small house were bare of anything from floor to ceiling, because to Betty a picture on a wall was a wicked indulgence. Yet her garden plot was a gem, as if in suppressing her own temporal beauty she had to protect its equal in nature with roses, violets, pansies, zinnias, lilies, dahlias, little vines, passionfruit, and a neat lawn. It was one of the loveliest gardens in St Helen, and Spit liked it.
    At night, sitting next to Ben’s sister, Joannie, who moved a few inches away from him because she whispered to him, ‘You smell,’ he had to repeat the words of the grace after the meal, and before Betty Arbuckle put him down in the hard but comfortable little bed made of an old door with a mattress on fruit boxes, she insisted that he say, as a fledgling in prayer, that now he lay himself down to sleep he must pray the Lord his soul to keep, and if he should die before he was awake, he pray the Lord his soul to take.
    He could accept that, but what was still difficult for him were clothes and the socks and the boots he would have to put on in the morning if he was going to be allowed to see his grandfather.
    ‘We have to begin right, Spit,’ Betty Arbuckle said in a kindly way. ‘So, starting today, you won’t be running around like an African heathen any more.’
    Spit had never worn boots and