Kit's Law

by Donna Morrissey

  “It makes more sense when you’re doing it,” he said, after he’d done with the scratching and looked up to encounter my blank stare.

  Feeling my stomach starting to heave, I got up and started walking along the beach towards the gully.

  “Hey, what are you running off for now?” he called out.

  “May Eveleigh is bringin’ over groceries.”

  He swore and chased after me.

  “Look, Haynes is gone,” he said, catching up from behind and taking my arm. “You don’t have to worry. Come on, let’s go sit down for a while.”

  I shrugged him off and kept walking.

  “Supposin’ the reverend finds out she’s doin’ it again?” I asked.

  “Who’s going to tell? Haynes?”

  “It’s not just Haynes she’s screwin’.”

  “Kit, listen to me.” He grabbed hold of my arm again, his hand warm against my bare skin. “We don’t know that she’s screwing any other men right now. This could be a onetime thing. Can you not worry about it? I don’t want you to be worried.”

  He spoke so earnestly, and his eyes were so blue. I looked away and saw the blue of the sky, the sea and the far distant hills. Could there be such a world where everything was blue, as blue as the blue of Sid’s eyes? I closed my eyes and held my head down, conscious only of the warmth now, of his hand upon my cool skin, and wondered, why on earth, on this day of all days, when I had just caught my mother screwin’ my teacher, that I would become so conscious of Sid Ropson’s eyes and his touch upon my skin.

  “I want to be there when May Eveleigh comes,” I finally said.

  He slackened his grip, his hand sliding down the length of my arm, his fingers twirling around my wrist before letting it go, and started walking besides me back up the beach to the gully. Josie was hiding in her room when we got back, with her bed jammed up against the door, as she always did whenever May Eveleigh came to visit—a habit she had taken up ever since the day May had come out on the stoop with my box of coloured glass. Aunt Drucie was sitting at the kitchen table, supping on a cup of tea and chatting as May packed away the groceries.

  “I can do this,” I said, reaching for the bag of peas in May’s hand.

  “I can manage,” May said, holding the bag of peas out of my reach. “How else can I know what you needs, if I don’t check out what got eaten last week. Now then, young lady, you were supposed to come in the store and get measured for your graduation dress. How come you never, and I told Margaret a dozen times to remind you at school?”

  She smiled as Sid appeared in the doorway, begging a glass of water from Aunt Drucie.

  “For sure you’re doin’ a fine job of cuttin’ down that wood pile and keepin’ the door place clean,” she said as she pulled a blue polka-dot dress out of the grocery box. “Here you are, Kit. Seein’ how you never come in and got measured, you’ll have to wear one of Margaret’s dresses.”

  “My, now isn’t that pretty,” Aunt Drucie said, handing Sid his glass of water, and reaching out to finger the starched cotton.

  “It’s one of her good ones,” May said. “Maisie’ll have to make another one for Margaret out of that new material I ordered for Kit’s. Here,” she looked at me accusingly. “Go try it on.”

  “I’m not goin’ to the graduation,” I said, as surprised as May at my decision.

  “You’re not goin’,” May repeated. “Why aren’t you goin’?”

  I shrugged, wishing upon wishing that Sid was out chopping wood where he was supposed to be, and not standing in the kitchen taking in everything that was being said, like an old fishwife.

  “Then for sure you’re goin’ to the graduation,” May Eveleigh said in a no-nonsense voice.

  “Aye, won’t you be wantin’ to wear such a pretty dress, Kit?” Aunt Drucie coaxed, lifting the garment from May’s hands and holding it out to me. “Here, go try it on now. Like a good girl.”

  “I’m not goin’,” I said stubbornly.

  “Don’t be foolish, girl,” May said irritably. “Now, hurry up and go put on the dress. And you can look a little more pleased, seein’ how Margaret was good enough to lend you one of her good ones.”

  “My, my, Lizzy’d be proud to see you wearin’ such a fine dress.” Pressing the garment in my hands, Aunt Drucie give me a coaxing grin. “Go on, now, Kittens, try it on.”

  Taking the dress, I dashed down the hall to my room and thankfully shut the door. Leaning against it for a minute, I looked at the despicable blue polka dots and kicked the thing under the bed. After a few minutes had passed by and I heard Sid back out chopping wood, I picked the dress up, shook it off, and went back out to the kitchen.

  “It don’t fit,” I said, laying it back on the table.

  “Well, blessed Saviour,” May sighed. “And how am I supposed to know that when you took it off before givin’ me a chance to see it on you? Now, go put it back on,” she ordered, leaning her long, reedy body towards me, and what with her wisps of brown hair framing her face, and the brown widow’s spots dotting her face, she minded me of a bulrush in the wind.

  “I got a dress,” I said.

  She exchanged an impatient look with Aunt Drucie.

  “Let me see it.”

  I went into my room and brought out the plain red shift I’d worn to Nan’s funeral.

  “That’s too short,” May said.

  I shook my head.

  “It was too short on you at the funeral, it’s too short on you now. Now go put that dress back on.”

  Sid’s face appeared in the window behind May, nodding furiously. Whether he was urging me to put the dress on, or not to put the dress on, I didn’t care. I wasn’t going to put that damn dress on and I wasn’t going to no damn graduation dance.

  “Are you goin’ to listen?” May Eveleigh demanded.

  I shook my head.

  “Well!” She looked sourly at Aunt Drucie, then back to me. “I allows if the reverend finds out you’re not going to the graduation dance, he might have a thing or two to say about that. After all, it’s fittin’ in with the rest of the girls that’s part of growin’ up, and if you’re not fittin’ in, then perhaps there should be another meetin’, now that you’re so high and mighty you’re not willin’ to take our help. And it’s been a while since I’ve seen you in church, not since Lizzy’s funeral, I believe.”

  I listened, watching a fly crawling up the window in front of Sid’s face. When May had finished her talk and I still had nothing to say, she snatched the dress off the table and stalked out the door.

  “Go catch her, Kit,” Aunt Drucie begged. “It was a pretty dress, heh, why wouldn’t you want to wear a pretty dress like that, and to your graduation, too? My, my, Lizzy’d turn over in her grave if you never went to your graduation and you gettin’ such high grades.”

  The door pushed open and Sid stalked to where I was standing.

  “I was telling you to put the dress on,” he said loudly.

  “And I was tellin’ her the same,” Aunt Drucie cried.

  “And I’m tellin’ you both that I ain’t going to no graduation dance,” I shouted and ran down the hall with Sid at my heels.

  “You heard what the old bat said, Kit,” he pleaded. “She can cause trouble.”

  A loud scraping sounded from Josie’s room as she shoved her bed away from the door.

  “Who caused trouble?” she barked at Sid, pushing open her room door the second I slammed mine. “May Eveleigh caused trouble. I don’t like May Eveleigh.”

  “Kit!” Sid rapped on my door. “Kit, come out.”

  “Go away!” I yelled.

  “Who go away? You go away!” Josie yelled back.

  “You go away!” Sid yelled to Josie. “Kit, please … ” His words were cut off by what must’ve been a whump to his stomach, because I heard the wind whoosh out of him in a soft moan. Loud thumps sounded off the walls as they wrestled their way back down the hall, with Sid pleading with Josie to give over, and she barking at him to gi
ve over. Then, Aunt Drucie was fussing irritably with them for carrying on in the house, and ushering them out the door. And then there was blessed silence.

  Diving across the bed, I buried my face in the pillow.

  “Kit!”

  I bolted upright.

  “Kit! I’ll take you to the dance.”

  I stared in horror at Sid’s face peering in through my bedroom window as I lay sprawled across my bed. Reaching over, I snapped the curtain shut and rolled onto my back, hugging the pillow across my face. The minutes ticked by. I listened. Nothing but ear-ringing silence. Sitting up, I lifted the end of the curtain and peeked out. He was nowhere to be seen.

  For the rest of the week I stayed in my room whenever I could, not wanting to see Josie, and not wanting to see Sid. At school I showed up just as the bell rang, and raced off the second we were let out for the day. And lunchtime I snuck down behind Old Joe’s brother’s stagehead and ate my lunch in peace. I imagine he could’ve caught up with me if he had wanted to. I figured perhaps he understood better than I did as to why I didn’t want to see him, and was content to leave me alone with it, which said a lot for Sid, because damned if I could figure out why I didn’t want to see him any more.

  As for Josie, I couldn’t look at her without thinking of Mr. Haynes and his thing going in and out of her mouth. And try as I might, I could only figure one way that Nan would have chosen to deal with her—had it been her looking through Haynes’s car window that day. And even if I had been given the courage and strength of Nan, they had taken her gun the same day they had taken the rest of her things after she had passed on.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THE GRADUATION DANCE

  THE EVENING OF THE GRADUATION CAME and Aunt Drucie had gone home for the day, muttering as she went about the pretty dress I had turned down, and now here I was sitting home by myself on the night of the dance. A car horn sounded up on the road and I stared out the window, watching in dismay as Josie ran up over the bank and hopped inside a blue pickup truck. Sitting heavily in the rocking chair, I rocked, May Eveleigh’s threat about holding another meeting coming back to haunt me. I rocked for another minute, then rose and marched down the hall to my room. Pulling the red shift off its hanger and snatching a reel of sewing cotton and a needle out of the sewing basket, I flounced back into the kitchen and sat back down in the rocking chair. If I was going to that damn dance, it wasn’t going to be in a dress that was too short. The dress unhemmed and then hemmed again, I fumbled through the bottom of Nan’s closet and pulled out her black heels that the women had passed over when they had taken everything else belonging to her after she had passed on, and donated to the church sale. Stogging some brown paper in the toes to make them fit tighter, I wobbled around the house for practice while I waited for the iron to heat up.

  I wasn’t no more out of the gully when I felt the blisters popping out on my heels. Taking off the shoes, I started walking barefoot along the gravelled road, taking care to keep to the deepest tire ruts where the road was hardest packed and smoothest. Waving at Aunt Drucie propped up in her window, I hurried down over Fox Point and slipped the heels back on just before I come to the first house of Haire’s Hollow. I waved to Old Joe as he looked up at me from the wharf. I smiled at Doctor Hodgins as he stepped outside his clinic door. Lifting my head, I marched straight past May Eveleigh’s store, and ignored Maisie in her window and Elsie in hers, and whoever else might’ve been peeking through the curtain from the reverend’s house. Holding my breath, I marched up to the church basement door and walked in.

  There were dozens of teenagers shrieking and running around, and picking at plates of cakes and salads, and supping back glasses of raspberry syrup. From some of the flushed faces of the older boys, I dare say there was the scatter bottle of brew being passed around. I’d been to church dances with Nan before, and this wasn’t much different, excepting for the red and white strips of paper and dozens of balloons dangling down from the ceiling, and Happy Graduation made out of pink tissued roses arcing one of the walls. But Nan wasn’t besides me on this evening, with her shadow big enough to blot out the all of Haire’s Hollow, and when I started walking across that dance floor to the chairs lining the wall on the far side, it felt like every eye in the place was staring straight at the spot below my knee where the hemline of my dress hung an inch higher than it ought to have been. And giving the way Nan’s feet splayed out like a duck’s when she walked, it was the most I could do to crook up my toes inside her shoes and take up that extra bit of slack that the paper didn’t, to keep the things from sliding off my feet in opposite directions as I walked.

  Too, one of my stockings was hooked, but I figured they’d all be too busy staring at my too-short hemline to notice a run in my stocking. And seeing’s how I didn’t plan on moving from my seat once I got there, until it was time to go home, which to my figuring would be one hour from now, just long enough for the women to know that I was growing up proper and saving them from having to come out to the gully and pack me off to some God-forsaken orphanage in St. John’s, there wouldn’t be much of a chance for anyone to notice much of anything else about me. And when I finally made it to a chair and sat down, and crossed my legs and draped my arms around the front of my knees to cover where my hemline ended, I let go of my breath and fixed my eyes on a spot on the ceiling, while steeling my nerves against the feel of Margaret’s and everyone else’s eyes brailling over me and scrutinizing the blue ribbon I had tied around my ponytail, even though blue was not a colour to be wearing with red.

  Within minutes, the drone of Old Joe’s brother’s accordion sounded from a distance, and the shrieking gaiety of everyone dancing to his jig become a muted haze, like when you’re sitting on a rock sometimes, leaning out over the water following a wave with your eyes till it slips away, and you follow another one, and another one, until it feels like you’re slipping away with it, far far away, over the wrinkled face of the sea.

  “Kit!”

  I looked up startled. It was Margaret. And her flock of best friends. Fluttering around me in their shiny shoes, coloured ribbons and well-hemmed dresses, they all perched around me, with Margaret sitting the closest, pecking me over from head to toe, twittering as they pecked.

  “My, that’s a nice dress,” Margaret said, even though her upturned nose said it wasn’t, and, “Why didn’t you bring back that blue ribbon Mom brought you and get one to match your shoes? My gawd, couldn’t they have gotten Joey Bennet’s record player? I can’t stand the accordion.”

  “Ohh, that record, ‘Standin’ on the Corner,’ I loves it,” Melissa Haynes said.

  “Oh my Lord, look who else is here,” Margaret said with drawled-out wonder. “Sidney Kidney. Looking more like a preacher than the reverend.”

  I struggled to breathe, the air too warm, and all I could think on as I watched Sid striding towards me, wearing his black pressed pants and black pressed jacket, was Rose Parsons, who was as poor off as me, and how she was always chasing after Margaret and her best friends, and how once, at the church dance with Nan, I rose up to go pee and she must’ve thought that I was coming over to sit besides her because as soon as she looked up and seen me coming towards her, her face went shocked white, as if someone had aimed a spawny caplin at her, and squeezed the guts till the eggs squirted all over her new dress.

  “My gawd, he’s comin’ over,” someone shrieked. “He’s fixin’ on askin’ one of us to dance,” another chirped, and “Oh my gawd, he’s lookin’ at you, Margaret, he’s goin’ to ask you, Margaret,” and a flutter of squeals went up, and Margaret leaped to her feet and ran off, and the rest rose in a flutter and fled after her, leaving me feeling as stripped as a bird feeder in a cat house. I glued my eyes to my shoes and fingered the hemline of my too-short dress as he came to stand before me.

  “Begging your pardon, your royal highness, your jewels look lovely tonight.”

  I felt my face flush.

  “I’ve left my looting pirates outside
,” he said. “At least, for as long as you’ll promise to dance with me.”

  I heard Margaret’s twittering breaking through the noise.

  “I—I don’t want to dance,” I stammered, taking a quick glance up at him.

  His eyes shone a brighter blue without the covering of his glasses, and a small smile curved the corner of his fleshy, red lips. Bending over, he placed his mouth near my ear and whispered, “Mum just taught me how. It’s easy.”

  I shook my head vigorously, my hands clenching onto my hemline as someone shouted “Sid the Kid” from amongst the dancers on the floor.

  Sid stood back up and the look on his face was the one on Rose Parsons’s after I had come back from peeing and saw that Margaret and her friends had just ran off, leaving her standing by herself in the middle of the dance floor, and before I could help myself, I jumped to my feet.

  “I’ll dance.”

  Another squeal went up from Margaret and her best friends as I walked onto the dance floor with Sid, and steering him away from where they were standing, I tried to keep my leg with the running stocking hidden behind my good one, which was difficult enough to do when I was standing still and not learning how to dance. And all the while I kept stooping down so’s the too-short hemline might look as if maybe it was longer, and maybe, just maybe, I prayed that if I kept my toes scrunched up real good, then the too-big shoes would keep from slipping off my feet and sliding across the dance floor as I tried to keep rhythm with Sid’s feet.

  It felt like a thousand waves had slipped by before the dance was over. And finally, finally, Sid was walking me back to my chair.

  “The reverend’s down the bay this evening, and Mum’s feeling sick,” Sid said, sitting down next to me. “I told her I’d be back early. Would you like for me to walk you back as far as Fox Point?”

  I nodded and we both got up and walked across the dance floor to the door. Everybody always noticed whenever me, Nan or Josie walked into the store, the post office, the church or even just down the road. Nobody ever noticed when we left. But they all noticed on this night. And that’s how it was that everyone started saying I was Sid’s girl.