Kit's Law

by Donna Morrissey

  “Maisie, agin, no doubt,” said Nan as Doctor Hodgins tugged on a strand of my hair, making ready to leave. “Born to breed, that one was. Tell her to keep her legs crossed next time!” she hollered as Doctor Hodgins disappeared around the corner of the church. “Unless she’s thinkin’ on outfittin’ her own sealin’ boat some day. C’mon, Kit.” Nudging me alongside of her, Nan strolled boldly towards Shine.

  “My God, careful you don’t get too close to that lunatic, Lizzy,” Aunt Drucie warned, reaching after Nan to pull her back.

  “He’ll be some crazed before he ruffs up a hair on my head,” said Nan, marching steadily forward. “Stand back!” she suddenly hollered, swinging out her arm to shield me and Aunt Drucie as Shine’s runt of a skinny white crackie dog come running and yapping out from behind the pile of dirt alongside the hole. Ignoring the spike of one of Nan’s heels, the dog scampered over, sniffing its cold nose around my legs.

  “You like dogs?” Shine asked nasally, his mulish eyes creeping over my face.

  “Merciful Father,” Nan whispered, crossing herself as Shine weasled his eyes onto hers. She looked up as the Reverend Ropson came around the corner of the church into the cemetery, leading the pallbearers, the few weeping mourners and most everyone else from Haire’s Hollow to Rube’s grave site. They stopped at the sight of Shine, and a rippling of gasps shot through them as they took in the grave-like hole he had just dug, and at what appeared to be a headstone he was now whittling.

  Aiming her spike heel towards the dog’s face, Nan jabbed at the dog as it abandoned my leg for hers, and giving Shine the look of the dead, bawled out in a voice loud enough to be heard by those resting under the sod as well as those standing above it, “If you was to dig it bigger and put a few others includin’ yourself in it, I’d be glad to pitch the dirt in over ye.” With a fiery look at the reverend, and leaving Aunt Drucie gaping after her in wonder, she latched onto my arm and marched down the road, keeping me tight by her side as if I was the exclamation mark to everything she just hollered.

  The dirt road through Haire’s Hollow lay bare before us, the loudly coloured houses dotting its landside, heavily curtained against the wind blowing off the wide-open harbour. Hugging the bank to its waterside was a clutter of weatherbeaten sheds, stage heads and outhouses. Shafting through this clutterment was a long, planked wharf that cut out over the water amongst a fleet of painted punts and motorboats that were scattered across the lopping waters of the harbour like a handful of slung jellybeans. And squat to the side of the wharf near the road, wearing oilskin coveralls hitched up over his shoulders with elastic suspenders, and with a peaked cap pointing back over his matted grey hair, was Old Joe, slitting a knife across the belly of a codfish. Pulled up on the beach besides him and turned upside down to the sun was his motor boat, glistening from a fresh coat of kelp-green paint. His brows quirked upwards by way of greeting as Nan and me drew alongside.

  “Name a God, where’d you get that colour paint?” Nan asked with some wonder, leaning heavily on one hip as she caught sight of the boat.

  “Well, maid, I had a bit of blue and a bit of yellow and I mixed it up with a bit of tar, and that’s the colour I come out with,” said Old Joe, giving me a wink as he ripped out the fish guts and slung them to the gulls that were still flapping and squabbling over the last bloodied mess he had tossed their way.

  “Well, brother, you won’t have to worry about catchin’ any more fish,” snorted Nan, “’cuz they’ll be divin’ for the bottom when they sees that cuttin’ through the water.”

  “Hah, Lizzy, wait till you sees her floatin’,” said Old Joe, with a toothless grin. “She’ll be lookin’ good then, with her arse half outta the water. Have they buried Rube, yet?”

  “I allows the weeds are already takin’ root,” said Nan. “’Cuz for sure there won’t be many lilies sproutin’ outta the likes of Rube Gale’s liquor-rotted corpse.”

  “Hard to scrounge up tears for a moonshiner,” agreed Old Joe.

  “It’s not their killin’ each other that gets me goin’,” Nan went on, “but the terrorizin’ and tarmentin’ they brings on everyone else when they crawls outta the woods with their drunken nonsense—not that I’d give two cents for Jimmy Randall’s ear, mind you, for his heart is as black as any shinerunner that crawled outta the woods.”

  “Now, now, Lizzy,” said Old Joe.

  “It’s their cowardliness that gets me goin’,” argued Nan. “If the Mounties can’t pin Shine for murderin’ Rube, then why don’t we all gang together and put him in a boat and send him back down the bay where he come from?”

  “Aye, but Shine got a way of gettin’ back at them that goes after him,” said Old Joe, waving a bloodied hand to Aunt Drucie as she come huffing up behind us.

  “Merciful Father, he’s fixin’ on killin’, agin,” she cried, rapidly patting her chest as if to hold back a racing heart. “Did you see him, Joe? He got the hole dug outside the cemetery, just like the grave, waitin’ to kill the first one who reports him to the Mounties!”

  “Hah, he won’t have to worry about liftin’ his shovel any more this day—or the morrow!” said Nan, taking up her stride and starting back down the road. “’Cuz the cowardliest souls in all of Newfoundland cowers in this Godforsaken bay.”

  “Hold on, Lizzy, here, take a fish for your suppers,” Old Joe called out, scrounging around in his bucket and coming up with two gutted codfish.

  “They looks a bit soft,” said Aunt Drucie, peering more closely at the fish.

  “Aye! Shore fish. I don’t like goin’ too far out this time of the year,” said Old Joe, slapping the fish inside a cardboard box besides him, and tucking in the flaps. “The bloody squid is a mile thick. I allows if you fell overboard, they’d have the skin sucked off your bones before your clothes got wet.”

  “Pooh! You’re one for fishin’, you are, afraid of a squid,” Nan called back from the side of the road.

  “Just bury me on the land, Lizzy,” sung out Old Joe, passing the cardboard box to Aunt Drucie. “’Tis the watery grave that plays on me mind, not squid. Here you go, Kit.” He scrounged back down into his bucket and come up with an orange-speckled starfish. “Heh, your very own star. Dry it out and nail it to your room door so’s you can make wishes every night ’fore you goes to sleep.”

  “Mind now, she don’t get her hands dirty,” said Nan, as I squirmed back from Old Joe’s gift with an apologetic smile. “My son, the young are too proud these days to be seen walkin’ with a fish, they rather a canned turnip from May Eveleigh’s store.”

  “How old you be, Kitty?” asked Old Joe, leaning forward, the sun glistening merrily in his rheumy old eyes.

  “Twelve, almost thirteen,” said I.

  “Thirteen!” exclaims Old Joe, his brows bushing together in mock shock. “Sure, ’twas only yesterday you was born! Tell you what, Kitty Kittens, how’s about if Old Joe dries your star and brings it out to you?”

  I smiled and, waving goodbye, ran to catch up with Nan and Aunt Drucie who were dodging on down the road.

  “Good day to ye,” he called out.

  “Good day to ye,” Nan called back without breaking stride. “Be the Jesus, if you can expect something good from a day that starts off with the dead!”

  “Heh, Lizzy, ’tisn’t Rube Gale that got you goin’ this mornin’, for sure,” said Aunt Drucie.

  “I’ll tell you what got me goin’ this mornin’!” Nan said, coming to a stop and glaring down into Aunt Drucie’s pointy, wrinkled face. “The reverend and his bleedin’ pointin’ finger is what got me goin’. Be the Lord Jesus, they knows who to pick on. If they had the guts to go after murderin’ lunatics the way they goes after helpless babies, they wouldn’t be all holed up in their houses now, too scared to go out for fear of gettin’ their faces chewed off.”

  “Name a God, did you see Rube’s face afore they shut the coffin?” Aunt Drucie asked, keeping after Nan as she swung around and started off down the road, again. “No
different than if the dogs got at him. And you can still see the tooth marks on Jimmy’s ear. Shine’s a dog, a bleedin’ bloody dog … ”

  “And there’s the blessin’ of it,” Nan cut in. “Lunatics like Shine don’t take much to figure, not like some others we know,” she added as her sights fell on the Reverend Ropson’s wife unlatching her gate. “Good day to you, Missus,” she called out, marching straightaways towards Mrs. Ropson.

  Mrs. Ropson dropped the latch at the sound of Nan’s voice, her short, fat arms flapping off from her sides like a pair of seal’s flippers. And what with the little pockets of fat jiggling around the corners of her mouth as she turned to face us, she reminded me of an old harp seal floundering on thin ice.

  “Good day, Lizzy,” she returned in the same tones one might say goodbye.

  “The sight of Shine drive you outta the graveyard, too?” Nan asked, chatty enough, leaning on one of the fence pickets.

  “I caught sight of him as I passed by,” Mrs. Ropson replied with a small smile, reaching for the latch again. “Sidney’s asthma gets bad this time of the year. I thought it best to come straight home after the service.”

  A sudden whooped cough from Nan cut short the splurt of sympathies setting forth from Aunt Drucie. Then, cranking her brow and lifting her chin a tad higher, she firked a strand of hair from across my cheek to fit behind my ear. Mrs. Ropson followed the gesture, her eyes barely grazing mine before dropping the latch properly into place and turning back to Nan.

  “So, how’s Kit?” she finally asked in the silence that followed.

  “Healthier than the cure, maid,” Nan promptly replied, patting my cheek. “And almost as smart as your Sidney, they says. All hundreds, isn’t that what you gets, Kittens?”

  I nodded, eyes to the ground.

  “That’s nice. Well—good day, then,” Mrs. Ropson said, turning up her garden path.

  “Make sure to bar your door,” Aunt Drucie called after her. “What with Shine still on the loose and diggin’ graves, nobody’s safe.”

  “Ha!” Nan snorted. “I been barrin’ my door since long before Shine come up the bay. Tell the reverend it was a nice sermon,” she said to Mrs. Ropson’s back. “I s’pose even the likes of Rube Gale deserves some respect; pity you got to be dead to get it.

  “The bloody ones from away,” Nan charged, widening her stride to take Fox Point, the hill leading out of Haire’s Hollow, me and Aunt Drucie half running to keep up. “You’d think be the Jesus, God forgive me for cursin’, that they was born in God’s pocket, they sits so Lord Jesus straight. The way they walked into my house that day, brother—turned me stomach. And the likes of May Eveleigh!” Here, Nan spat as if she had potato rot in her mouth. “You’d swear be the Jesus, she was from away herself, the way she sucks up to the reverend and his wife. The same with Jimmy Randall! As if their own wouldn’t good enough for ’em. If you asked me, brother, they makes Shine look like a pussy-footed angel whenever they gets crossed, and they got crossed by me then. And the next time you gets a hundred in school, Kit, you make sure you brings that test home to me, and I plasters it betwixt the eyes of every face in Haire’s Hollow that thinks I’m not fit to raise a youngster.”

  “My, my, you keeps as clean a house as any, Lizzy,” Aunt Drucie answered, struggling to keep back a yawn and keep up with Nan at the same time. “You knows we all knows that.”

  “And I’d have the same as everyone else, too,” Nan snapped, “if poor old Ubert could’ve took to the sea. They put him in his grave; every year others gettin’ picked over him for the jobs on shore.”

  “Poor old Ubert, he was no fisher, but he was a good man. And the only brother I had to do anything for me,” said Aunt Drucie.

  “And he was as good a father to Jose as most others would’ve made.”

  “I dare say he was,” Aunt Drucie agreed. “’Tis not every man who’d put up with Josie and her ways.”

  “And he kept her youngster, same as if it were his own.”

  “And that he did, my dear.”

  “And he was one for work, never mind everyone thinkin’ he was a hangashore.”

  “The sea’s not for everyone, for sure,” said Aunt Drucie. “I gets sick meself just looking at it some mornin’s.” She came to a stop halfways up the hill, bent over, hand to her side. “Wait up, Lizzy, maid, I catches me breath.”

  Nan stopped, breathing heavily, and looked back over the stovepipes of Haire’s Hollow, puffing grey, wood-smoked clouds into the air. The parishioners had left the graveyard by now, and were standing around in smaller groups, some in front of May Eveleigh’s store, and others, mostly the men, trailing across the road to the wharf to talk with Old Joe, or to check on their boats bobbing alongside on the water. The youngsters were darting everywhere, and climbing over woodpiles, woodhouses and boats, and screeching louder than the seagulls fighting over Old Joe’s fish guts. Margaret Eveleigh and her best friends, I saw, were gathering around a mountain of cut spruce trees, piled high on the beach a little ways down from the wharf.

  “How come they’re havin’ a bonfire, tonight?” asked Aunt Drucie. “Guy Fawkes Night is not till November, ain’t it?”

  “They’ll probably have five more bonfires before Guy Fawkes Night,” said Nan. “Sure, the young can’t wait for nothin’ these days.”

  “My, my,” tisked Aunt Drucie. “Like goin’ to church on Thursday, sure. Is you goin’ to the fire, Kit?”

  “No,” I said, shaking my head.

  “Yes you is goin’,” said Nan, starting back up Fox Point. “S’posin’ I got to drag you there. She’s a bit like meself, is Kit,” she added to Aunt Drucie. “Won’t go nowhere.”

  “Sure, it’ll be fun for you, maid,” Aunt Drucie puffed, patting my arm. “The fun we use to have on bonfire nights, hey, Lizzy?”

  “We use to have the fun then, for sure,” said Nan, breathing hard. They stopped talking, saving their strength for the last part of the hill. Finally we were at the top of Fox Point, out of sight of Haire’s Hollow, and with thick evergreens lining both sides of the road. A muddied, leaf-strewn path led off the road to Aunt Drucie’s small, two-roomed house, wedged amongst an entangled growth of lichen-flowing spruce trees.

  “I swear to God, it gets harder and harder to get home every day,” groaned Aunt Drucie, giving way to a yawn and trudging wearily onto her path. “See you at the card game, tonight, maid.”

  “What about me fish?” asked Nan.

  “Your fish! My, my, I forgot I was luggin’ it,” said Aunt Drucie, unflapping the box and hooking her finger through the gill of a cod. “Here,” she said, hoisting out the fish for herself and passing the box over to me. “You carry it for your grandmother.”

  “Here, give me, she’ll get it on her good dress,” Nan said, nudging me to one side and taking the box from Aunt Drucie and tucking it under her arm.

  “Sure, she’s goin’ on thirteen and you still treats her like a youngster,” Aunt Drucie grumbled.

  “I s’pose, maid,” said Nan. “That’s probably ’cuz Jose never ever grow’d up, and I keeps thinkin’ the same of Kit as I do of her, don’t I, me darlin’?” she asked, chucking me under the chin.

  I grinned, and started down the road besides Nan.

  “See you at the card game,” Nan called after Aunt Drucie.

  “Aye, see ye in a bit,” called back Aunt Drucie.

  Another hundred yards and me and Nan come clear of the trees, the wind hitting us bold in the face, looking down over the sea, a mile wide and forty miles long, flanked high on each side by hills of green forested wood, patched red and yellow by the fall air. A short distance ahead was the turnaround, where the road come to an end in a wide circle, and down over its edge, on the seaward side, was our grey, weathered house, shining silver in the sun, and squat against the side of the hill. The mouth of a gully, just off from our front door, was steeped in shadow, and disappeared down the sharp incline of the bank onto the beach below.

  Nan and I walked
in silence, her brewing over May Eveleigh’s and Jimmy Randall’s proud ways, and me stewing over having to go back to Haire’s Hollow and stand around a bonfire all evening, listening to Margaret Eveleigh and her best friends squeal and laugh foolishly over the slightest thing. Perhaps, I could talk Nan over. I liked it when I could stay home, and have the house to myself, and sit quietly in the rocking chair next to the stove, listening, as my own fire crackled its way up the chimney.

  Josie come bounding up over the gully to greet us, hair streaming onto the wind, and squelching any thoughts of a quiet evening alone, even if I were allowed to stay. Usually when there was something taking place, like garden parties or Guy Fawkes Night, she would be gone with her men friends by now, no matter how hard Nan fought to keep her home. Seeing my cat, Pirate, shoot out from beneath the house and scoot down the gully past Josie, I made to run after him.

  “Where you goin’, hey? Where you goin’?” Josie demanded in her rough, bark-like tone, grabbing hold of my arm as I darted past her.

  “Get away,” I yelled, hitting at her hand and scrabbling to get away.

  “Get away, you get away,” she barked, yanking on my arm.

  “Stop it, stop it!” Nan ordered, slicing her hand between the hold Josie had on my arm. “And for the love of the Lord, Jose, go comb out that maggoty head of hair, and you, Miss Martle,” said Nan, jabbing a finger at me as Josie ran off around the house, leaving me rubbing my arm and glaring after her, “you can wipe that look off your face, ’cuz she’s your mother, retarded or no, and is as good as anybody else in Haire’s Hollow to ask you an important question about where you’re goin’ without gettin’ her eyes clawed out. Here, where you goin’?” Nan bawled out as I started running away.

  “To get Pirate,” I said, skidding down over the lip of the gully. Coming to the brook that gushed down the gully’s cleft, I started running with it, leaping rocks that bubbled out of its waters, jolting to quick halts when nothing appeared to catch my foot, and springing to the gully’s side, slipping and sliding down its muddied slopes, then back onto the rocks again, leap leap leaping till finally I was racing full tilt down onto the beach, with the wind washing my hair back off my face and streaming the water out of my eyes. Tipping my face to the sun, I dashed along the frothing edge of the waves thundering upon the shore, licking the salt off my lips, and feeling my feet scrunching down through the pebbled grey beach rocks to the black wet sand below.