“You! It’s you who done this,” Mrs. Ropson screamed, coming across the aisle towards me. “You and your tramp of a mother, you’ll pay for this, I swear. And you too, Doctor,” she cried out, as the reverend held her back. “I curse you this day, I curse you.” Her burst of anger spent, she crumpled piteously and began wailing again, “My boy, my boy, they’ve taken my boy! Mercy, mercy, they’ve taken my boy.”
Stumbling, she allowed the reverend to put his arm around her shoulders and help steady her. He looked at us then, over his wife’s weeping head, and in the haggard lines that drew across his face as he led her out through the door, it was clear that his was a look that was thirsting for his own killing instead.
The storm that had been threatening for the past few days broke as we were driving back home. Doctor Hodgins leaned towards the windshield, cursing his slow-sweeping wipers against the heavy rain and his useless headlights against the thickening fog. The trees twisted in fury along the roadside, and the gravelled road turned to grease. I was content to huddle in my corner and watch the dismal greyness outside play out what I was feeling inside. Once, Doctor Hodgins looked at me and growled, as if I was willing the storm through sheer spite. Once, he looked at me as if I was the storm itself.
Back at his house, he asked that we live with him for the coming winter, giving Josie time to get her health back, and me comfort while I attended school. I said no. I was fifteen come September, old enough to quit school and old enough to take care of Josie. Alone.
He argued, but I heard nothing excepting the judge sentencing Sid to two years, and the dragging of his footsteps as the two Mounties led him across the courtroom. Sid was in jail and it was me that helped put him there. I was wanting no comforting on this day.
Nor, did it seem, did Doctor Hodgins. The day after I moved back to the gully, he took his medical certificate off the wall and moved from the house that Haire’s Hollow had built for its doctors and took over a fishing shack belonging to one of old Joe’s brothers that had died from blood poisoning.
“Why?” I asked, going out to visit him some weeks later. He was sitting on a rickety wooden chair outside the shack, facing the ocean that blew full on his face, and drinking from a tumbler of brew that he rested on the window ledge behind him whilst he puffed on his pipe.
“I’m taking up fishing with Old Joe,” he said, his eyes still wandering over the sea.
“You’re no fisher.”
“Is that right, now?” he said, thoughtfully puffing his pipe. “You think everybody clings to a patch of ground the way you do, Kit?”
“I know you ain’t no fisher.”
“Sit down,” he said, patting a wooden bench besides him. Then, “It’s time someone younger took over. I’m getting too old to be borning babies all hours in the night.”
“But, they’re all still comin’ to you. Only difference is, no one’s payin’ you any more.”
“They pay in other ways.”
I looked through the door at the jars of stewed berries and rabbit sitting on a plank that served as a cupboard.
“Supposin’ me and Josie had stayed with you?”
“Supposing you had?”
“Would you still have moved out here?”
“I still would’ve closed the clinic doors.” He tapped the bench testily. “Sit down, I said, Kit. Sit down and watch. Watch the sea unfurl itself.”
He was drunk.
“It’s because of the lie, isn’t it?” I asked.
The weight was such as he lifted his eyes and looked up at me that I fell to my knees besides him.
“I’m sorry. You shouldn’t have had to do that.”
“Hush, now,” he patted my head. “There’s nothing for you to be thinking on here. It’s but a short path that we’ve travelled together.”
“Then why’d you do it?”
“Some things won’t make sense to you, Kittens. Hah!” he snorted. “They don’t make sense to myself, and I’ve been figuring them for years.”
I sat on the bench, turning my collar up against the wind, following his eyes out over the curdling waves sweeping up on the beach.
“It’ll be good to sit in a boat and ride those waves,” he took up after we had sat in silence for a bit. “They’ve been doing that for thousands of years. Thousands! Steadily rolling upon these shores. Can man ascribe to such a feat?
“Noo!” he replied drunkenly. “We’re weak! Broken! Still answering to the truths of our youth. And you, too, will answer, Kit. There’ll always be faces unfurling upon these shores. Any shore. All shores.” His face darkened as his thoughts took him to his most recent face.
“I stood a better chance of holding back those waves than talking him out of what he was doing. I seen that in his face, the way he stood there—and took it on himself. It was Josie, wasn’t it?”
“Yes,” I finally whispered, relieved at last to tell him the truth. “Sid saved me, just as he said. Then, it was him that Shine … was straddlin’. That’s when she come in. With the axe.”
“She saved you both,” he said, his voice suddenly low. “Now, he’s saving her.” He clucked his tongue and raised his glass to the sea. “It’s a beauty,” he roared over the thundering surf. “God above, can you ever touch him on this one?” He lapsed back into silence, watching the waves roll in. I watched along with him, looking to see some of his faces. I didn’t see anything, and after the sun went down and the September chill set in, I went along home.
It worried me with Doctor Hodgins living in old Joe’s brother’s fishing shack and going off fishing. I wondered if I might not have owed it to him to have stayed with him. But it didn’t seem right that I not live in the gully with Josie. After all, it was why Sid went to prison, so’s that she and I could live where we most wanted, and where he could think on us, knowing at all times what we were doing, and where we were sitting. I wanted his picture to be real, and for us to be waiting there when he came back. And there were other things I wanted. I wanted to hear his voice on the easterlies as they gunned up the gully, and the thumping of the axe as I dreamt of him splitting wood for our fire, and the rippling of his laughter as he chased Josie around and around the chopping block, tying her hair into knots.
Yet when I thought of Doctor Hodgins sitting on his front stoop, drinking brew and challenging the sea, I wondered that he might be right about those youthful truths he talked about—and might not his face be one to come unfurling upon my shores some day.
All of this I told in a letter to Sid when I got home, knowing how he liked to ponder things like the strength of the ocean and the strength of those who tried to drink it dry. And I laid the letter on the dresser in my room, waiting for word from him, and an address by which to send it. I wasn’t sure where the prison was that they kept Sid, somewhere near St. John’s, which was a full day’s journey by train and might as well have been on the moon itself, it appeared so distant from Haire’s Hollow. Each time I made mention to Doctor Hodgins of an address by which to mail Sid’s letters, he took on the same intense look that he had the day in the car on the way to the courtroom when he asked if Sid and I were dating. And each time he took on that look, I backed away, thinking back on the smell of rotting dogberries, and preferring a trip to the moon itself, rather than to endure that feeling of shame that always followed it.
Josie waited too for a word from Sid. But just as the fire had dulled in her hair that day as she had lain sick with the fever, so too had a spark died within her. Her skin was pale, and her eyes a flat brown without the yellow specks livening up the green. She moped around the house most days and never bounded down the gully no more, and would never go near the chopping block or the axe. Nor could she be persuaded to bring in a load of wood for the stove. And during those times when I persuaded her to come with me to Crooked Feeder, she’d drag behind, stumbling over rocks and giving to silence. She took to sitting in the rocker, much the same as she had done after Nan died, and was content to just rock and stare out over the gully through the ki
tchen window. Sometimes she’d spend the whole afternoon there, just rocking and gazing, rocking and gazing.
“Are you dreamin’ about Shine?” I asked her one evening when she was dozing in the rocking chair and come awake with a sudden cry.
“Shine’s dead, Shine’s dead,” she mumbled, starting to rock, again.
“Do you remember when Nan died?” I whispered.
She started rocking faster.
“Do you remember what Doctor Hodgins said about Nan being a big, soft spirit who’s always watchin’ over us? That’s what good spirits do, they make bad thoughts go away. Next time you haves a dream about Shine, you just think about Nan. All right? You think about Nan, and she’ll make the bad thoughts of Shine and the reverend go away.”
She nodded and kept on rocking.
They weren’t all bad dreams that she was having. Sometimes she’d give a sudden bark while she dozed off, like the kind she had often given Sid when she’d see him strolling down over the bank from the road, and I was soothed that she was also listening to his footsteps on the door place, and hearing his jesting laughter on the wind.
All of this I told to Sid in letters. And placed them, one after the other, on the growing pile on my dresser.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
WISHING UPON A STARFISH
OCTOBER CAME, AND STILL NO LETTER FROM SID. Yet news came in other ways. “He’s took up his schoolin’ in jail,” Old Joe volunteered, dropping off a load of dried, split wood and a salted cod. “His mother had a letter the week. There’s a priest that goes to the jail every day and teaches him.” “They says he’s doin’ right well,” Aunt Drucie yawned comfortably from Nan’s rocker during one of her visits. “Puttin’ on weight, doin’ his homework—what you ought to be doin’. My, my, Kit, Lizzy’d be in some way if she knowed you was quit school. Sure you knows I didn’t mind comin’ over and seein’ to a bit a housework and takin’ care of poor old Josie. I misses it, I do, gettin’ up in the mornin’ and comin’ over. Is Margaret still bringin’ you over homework?” I dropped my head in my hands with a groan. There were many from Haire’s Hollow that came to visit since the killing, but it was Margaret’s visits that served me the worst. Claiming me to be her best friend since the day of the trial, and bringing over schoolwork on account of my teaching myself grade ten at home, she came to visit about once a week, and took on an importance in Haire’s Hollow as being the one most closest to me, and the one with the most knowing about how Josie and I were doing out here in the gully. She became good at reporting back everything I said about the killing—which was nothing—and real good at reporting back what she figured I wanted to say, but couldn’t.
“Must be you got lots on your mind, Kit, and that’s why you quit school. What do you think Sid is doin’ right now?”
“I’ve not heard.”
“He don’t write? Well, he writes his mother most every day. The poor thing near faints every time she gets her mail and there’s nothin’ there. My gawd, she’s in some way, never comes out of her house exceptin’ to get her mail. And the reverend either, exceptin’ to preach on Sundays. But I don’t expect Sid tells her everything. They says the jail is a awful place—murders and everything goes on in there. What say he’s not writin’ you though, Kit? My gawd, I was sure he was right after you, my dear. And what with everything you both went through … it was here, was it, at my feet that Shine was straddlin’ you? My gawd, what’d you do, Kit?”
“I screamed,” I’d say, praying for the kettle to boil. “Have another cookie, Margaret?”
“My yes, they’re lovely. They’re Mrs. Haynes’s, aren’t they?” Margaret leaned forward. “They says he hits her. You know, Mr. Haynes. Sure, she always got a bruise or a limp, but she tells Mom it’s because she’s as clumsy as Mope on a drunk, always fallin’ down. Sure he’s bad as Shine, hittin’ his wife. Did Shine hit you when he was straddlin’ you?”
“No. I don’t like to think on it.”
“Course you don’t, my gawd, you must still be dreamin’ about it.”
“I sleeps pretty good,” I’d say, and curse the kettle for not boiling, and heap more cookies on her plate, and pray they’d soak up all the spit in her mouth, leaving her too dry to talk. But it was with the same pending excitement that a prettily wrapped Christmas present held out for a youngster that I held out for Margaret.
“You looks nice with your hair tied back. Next time I’ll bring some ribbons and plait your hair with the ribbons pleated in. They’d look real nice on you, and, my dear, when Sid gets out of jail, he won’t know you.” She leaned forward with a wink and half whispered, “He’s after you, I knows he is.” Then her eyes widened and she reached for the cloth bag by her feet. “My gawd, I almost forgot,” she exclaimed, pulling out a bottle of blueberry jam. “Mom sent this over. She’s a bit cross that you won’t let her bring out your groceries any more, but she won’t see you do without, Kit.”
I shoved another junk of birch into the stove and centred the kettle back on the top. It wasn’t so much Margaret’s lifting the lid of Shine’s coffin and keeping the smell of his rotting corpse drifting cross the nostrils of every soul in Haire’s Hollow that bothered me the most, but her pointing out to me, every single solitary time that she visited, how poor I was. Others came too, besides old Joe with his truckloads of wood, and Margaret with her bottles of jam. Gert, Elsie, Maisie, Jimmy Randall’s wife—they all came, bringing with them bottled moose, rabbit, seal, and salt water trout and salt water ducks. Plus the cellar was filled with turnip, potato, cabbage and carrots.
I could never keep track of who was bringing what— they would just dump brin bags full of vegetables down the hatch each time they came, and I’d never know it was there until I went down the ladder to fill up a bag and bring some inside the house. Except for Mrs. Haynes. I always knew what she brought. It wasn’t so much the cookies, but what the giving of them did for her that kept me noticing. Each time she passed over the brown paper bag, still warm and staining up with melting butter from the just-baked cookies inside, it felt as if I were receiving the bounty of her life’s work, she passed them over with such reverence. She never come inside. Just held the bag out over the stoop and smiled a sad little smile which always seemed to be more for her than for me. And then she’d walk back up over the hill, pausing every so often to look down over the gully before getting in her car and driving away.
It wasn’t that I minded them coming and bringing things. It was the same as what they did for everybody else— never mind the fact that each of their pantries was filled with the same things. It was the sharing that counted, and the knowing that there was always something that set one bottle of jam off from another—a different spice, the size of the jar, how long it was left to boil, to cool and, as Nan had always sworn by, knowing how long to leave the berry on the patch before the killing frost got it.
It was after one of Margaret’s visits in early November that it struck me how me and Josie could return the generosity of the people in Haire’s Hollow.
“We’re goin’ berrypickin’,” I said, tossing Josie her rubber boots and coat, and thinking also how a jaunt on the barrens might put some colour back in her cheeks.
“Who’s goin’ berrypickin’? You’s goin’ berrypickin’.”
“I can’t do it all by myself. And we got to do our share with payin’ people back.”
“I don’t like berries. You pick berries.”
“Yeah you do like them. You’re just lazy.”
“You just lazy. I’m not lazy.”
“You’re always lazy when it comes to pickin’ berries. Now, put on them boots,” I said, shouting as I’d heard Nan do a hundred times when it come time to get Josie ready to go berrypicking.
“You go berrypickin’. I’m not goin’ berrypickin’.”
“You’re goin’,” I shouted in my best Nan imitation. “Or be the Jesus, I’ll strap you onto me back and carry you in.”
She reared up from the rocker and threw h
erself on the floor and began hauling on the boots, barking and scowling as she went. Then, snatching up her dipper, she barrelled out the door and in her old-fashioned way bounded across the meadow and up through the woods towards the partridge-berry patch.
It was dark when we got back. Our fingers and mouths were stained with berry juice, and our backs aching from bending over. But our two dippers and pot were full. I spent the better part of the next day picking the berries clean of leaves, sticks and spiders, and two days later we went back to the patch and picked and picked until we had another two gallons. Snow fell, but the ice was not yet ribbed on the glass, and whether or not the worm had crawled out of the berry and planted itself for next year’s pickings, I could only guess. By the end of two weeks, we nearly had the patch cleaned.
It was soothing work, picking berries. Although it was much later in the year than Nan would have done the picking, and the sun colder, there were times when I could almost see her, sat down by a moss-covered rock, her legs splayed out in front of her, smiling as the wind brushed her face and the last of the fall leaves drifted around her. It gave me courage to keep picking. At times the wind cut tears out of our eyes and our noses were constantly running, but we kept steady at it—picking, picking, picking, until sometimes we were picking up sticks and throwing away berries, picking up sticks and throwing away berries.
A good way to work the knots out of your stomach, Nan used to say, soaking her feet in a pan of hot water after a day’s picking. And now, sitting back with my own two feet in a pan of hot water, and looking over at the two five-gallon buckets of ruby red berries, all cleaned and waiting to be preserved and handed around to the people of Haire’s Hollow, I sighed contentedly, wondering how much of Nan’s good feeling about picking and preserving partridgeberries was due to the good, honest work, and how much to the pleasure that she received from giving.
Josie showed no such looks of contentment. Coming home from the patch, she’d kick off her boots and storm down the hall to her room, the red in her cheeks as much from her fuming as from the exercise. I sighed, much the same as Nan had done. Berrypicking was never Josie’s cup of tea in the best of times. I expect that wasn’t about to change.
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