“Get away!” I yelled, stumbling backwards. “Get away.”
Snarling, it took a step towards me, then started walking around in a dazed circle. I took another step back. It appeared to be watching me, then, whimpering sickly, walked confusedly through the woods. I darted forward and grabbed the box, but having lain under the snow all winter, it came apart in my hands, its contents—a handful of black hairnets—tumbling to my feet like mangled webs. Nan’s hairnets. The torn ones that she had been throwing out for years, some with the clips still in them. Entangled in one of them was the piece of blue glass I had given Josie the day she slapped me in her room, and one of the little robin’s feathers. And sticking wetly onto the cardboard cover I still held in my hand was the letter from Sid that she had ripped from my hands and ran with down the gully.
A low snarl sounded from behind the bushes, and snatching up the clump of hairnets, I ran back through the woods and out on the meadow. The put-put of a motor boat echoed through the air. I ran to the back of the house and, looking down over the gully, saw Old Joe’s brother as he cut his motor and drifted towards shore. Stuffing the hairnets and piece of glass into my pocket, I shut the house door and ran down the gully to the beach. The letter from Sid I held in my hand against my heart.
“Hello!” I said, waving, as Old Joe’s brother lowered a paddle into the water and shoved himself ashore.
“It’s Josie,” he said by way of greeting. “She’s havin’ some kind of fit. Fonse Ford come up for Doctor Hodgins last evenin’. He’s not back yet.”
“A fit?”
“That’s what I overheard him sayin’ to the doctor. Said she throw’d herself down the well.”
“The well! Take me there. Please?”
“For sure, for sure. I knew you’d be wantin’ to go, when I seen it was you in the truck. Figured you was away and never heard yet.”
I lunged through the water, getting both feet wet and, heaving myself up over the side of the boat, climbed inside. There was a bit of a wind on, and the bow of the boat rocked hard against the swells, sending a steady spray of water over my face and a salty taste in my mouth. Old Joe’s brother tossed me a bit of canvas, and I wrapped myself good, staring straight ahead to Big Island, and beyond that, Godfather’s Cove.
The sound of Fonse’s hammer as he nailed a lock onto the wellhouse door was the first thing that greeted me as I come up from the cove and started up over the garden with Old Joe’s brother in tow.
“Loret!” he roared, tossing the hammer to one side, barely missing Fudder’s head, as he seen me coming. “She’s back. Kit’s back.”
The door flew open and Loret and Doctor Hodgins and Mudder came scrabbling onto the bridge, then Emmy and Jimmy and Bruddy, and lastly, Josie.
“You’s farmed!” she barked, leaping down over the steps, hair flying, and barging headlong towards me. “You’s farmed! You’s farmed!”
I held out my hands to stop her, but she ploughed headlong into my stomach, knocking me flat on my back. But not before I saw the frightened, wretched look on her face.
“Here, Josie!” Fonse shouted, coming up behind and taking her by the shoulders. “Leave off, girl! Leave off,” he ordered gently. But she was spitting mad as well as frightened, and flailed her fists angrily at my face, all the while screeching out “Farmed! Farmed!”
“Lord have mercy,” Loret sang out, helping me to my feet as Fonse pinned Josie’s arms behind her. “Thank God you’re back, Kit. She’s been throwin’ fits ever since she woke up and found you gone. I swear, if it wouldn’t for Doctor Hodgins, I don’t know what we would have done with her, hey Fonse?”
“She’s been a handful, all right,” Fonse said, trying to hold her still as she kept struggling to get free.
“Go home,” she yelled at me. “I’m goin’ home.”
“Hush now, we’ll have no more talk of that,” Loret scolded. “Kit’s back, everything will be fine.”
“Go home,” she yelled at Loret.
“We’re goin’ home,” I said, grasping her hands. “I just come from home, look, see what I found?” I pulled the clump of hairnets out of my pocket. “The box was soaked to pieces,” I said. “We’ll find you another one.”
She went still as I pressed the hairnets and the piece of glass into her hand. Then, lifting her eyes, she stared at me through the curtain of hair, blinking rapidly, as if holding back tears. Only once had I seen her cry. The night in the rocker after Nan had passed on. Not even during her darkest hour with Shine had she cried. What turbulence was this, then, moving her so? A tightening of my heart as she continued to stand there, sullenly blinking back tears, told me what Sid had tried to tell me all along, that it was never her. It was always me. Despite my feeling timid by everyone’s watching, I took a step closer to her and tucked a strand of hair behind her ears. And without knowing I was going to, as if the movement towards her was too great to halt, I leaned even closer and kissed the bared cheek.
“I’m never leavin’ agin,” I said shyly. “Tomorrow, I’m takin’ you home.”
A grin tugged the corners of her lips and the yellow flickered in her eyes. Pressing the hairnets back in my hand, she fished out the piece of glass and gave a loud, barking laugh. Then she went running across the garden, holding the piece of glass over one eye.
“Go chase her, Emmy,” Doctor Hodgins said, prodding the younger girl on the shoulder as she dallied besides him.
“You too, Jimmy,” said Loret, nudging her son. “Run on now. Josie’s fine.”
The two chased after Josie, and Doctor Hodgins turned to me, along with Mudder, Fudder and Loret. Bruddy stood a little to the side, his hands jammed in his pockets as he silently appraised me, his eyes shorn of the merriment that usually accompanied them. I looked guiltily at my feet.
“Did she—did she jump in the well?” I asked.
“I guess she thought you’d gone the path of Lizzy,” Doctor Hodgins said. “And—Sid.” At the mention of Sid’s name, everyone’s eyes fell away from mine, and then Mudder and Fudder was inviting Old Joe’s brother back to the house for tea. Bruddy turned to follow them.
“Wait, Bruddy!”
He halted his step, but kept looking after the others.
“I—I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have taken off like that.”
“I’ve been rused by pretty girls, before,” he said with a curt nod, and then with a trace of his old grin touching his face, “but hear me well, Kit Pitman, you only get one shot at a shell bird.” The others laughed, and Bruddy, his grin becoming more bashful, raised his hand in parting and followed after Mudder and the rest.
Loret, Fonse and Doctor Hodgins stood silently. The breeze ruffled their hair, yet their eyes were steady on mine, waiting, studying. Loving. My heart, which I’d thought dead, fluttered a little.
“He’ll be back someday,” I said. And then, after a small pause, my voice deepened with feeling. “But, it’ll be my brother who’s come home.”
Loret broke down with a sob.
“My heart’s breakin’ for you, Kit,” she cried, flinging her arms around me.
“Lord, Loret, it ain’t more tears that I’m needin’,” I muffled into her neck. “I swear I could float my own boat if I saved them up this past day.”
She laughed, pulling me tighter.
“I vow, if you ever run off agin, I’ll come after you like I would one of the youngsters.”
“Now you’d best hear me,” I said, pushing her back. “I mean it when I say I’m goin’ home tomorrow.”
“Hush now, there’s no reason for you to be sayin’ that …” But Fonse took hold of her arms, pulling her away from me.
“We’ll talk about it, later, Loret,” he said. “Right now Kit needs a bite to eat, she looks like she’s goin’ to faint.” Taking hold of my shoulders, he leaned over and kissed my brow. “I’m proud of you, Kit. I know you could’ve persuaded him, but you done what the Gods feared to do—you cast down your pride, and you found peace. I can see it in your f
ace.” And then Loret was sobbing into her hands and running for the house.
“Loret!” shouted Fonse. “Lord, Loret … ” And then he was chasing after her, leaving me alone with Doctor Hodgins.
“You were right,” he said, watching after Josie as she climbed a fence, Jimmy and Emmy scrabbling after her. “She wouldn’t survive without you.”
“Are you goin’ to try and keep me from goin’ back home?” I asked with a sigh.
“Not likely,” said he, ruffling his hands through his tufts. Then, “I’m sorry, Kittens. You know I would’ve stood behind you, no matter how it had turned out.”
“I know. Come.” I tucked my hand into his and we walked up over the yard to where the Fords were waiting for us.
IT WAS A GOOD SIX MONTHS LATER, just before dawn, when I woke to hear a thud thud thud coming from the front of the house. My heart leaped. I lay there for a minute, foolishly telling myself it was Doctor Hodgins having another broody night and taking it out on the wood. Thud! Thud! Thud! Rising, I pulled on a dress and sweater and crept slowly through the half-darkened house. Thud! Thud! Thud! I came into the kitchen. Th-thud! Th-thud! It was mixed up now with the sound of my heart beating. The rocking chair creaked as I stepped past it, and the wind rustled at the window. How full the morning felt now, with its offering of something more …
I opened the door. The thudding stopped. I stepped outside. It was Josie. She was standing by the chopping block, her hair streaming over her forehead as she rested on the axe. She grinned as I came onto the stoop, then hooking the axe into another junk of birch, flicked it onto the chopping block and started chopping.
I sat down shakily on the door stoop.
“Fool!” I whispered to myself.
She tore a strip of birch rind off the junk and, holding it taut between her thumbs and forefingers, held it to her lips and blew on it, startling the air with a sharp whistle. She barked out laughing as I cringed, and giving her a bit of a smile, I rose from the stoop and idly walked up over the bank onto the road. Once there, I turned towards Haire’s Hollow and kept walking. There was nothing I wanted to do, and no one I wanted to see. Yet I kept walking. The sun popped a ray over the south-side hills, brightening the sky and chasing the morning shadows from around my feet. A thin dribble of smoke spurted from Aunt Drucie’s chimney, and I hurried past, not wanting her to see me walking by and not dropping in for tea. I kept walking, keeping to the smooth, rutted tire tracks. Down the last part of the hill, then along the road through Haire’s Hollow, past May Eveleigh’s store, the reverend’s house—empty, now, with Mrs. Ropson visiting Sid in St. John’s—the wharf, the spot on the water where Old Joe’s boat used to float. I paused for a moment. Doctor Hodgins was squat on the beach nearby, putting the finishing touches to a fresh coat of kelp-green paint on Old Joe’s boat, hauled up and flipped over, its keel to the sun. Past the clinic, the schoolhouse, the jailhouse, Shine’s makeshift grave on the hill just outside the graveyard, long since filled in and with a piece of clapboard nailed to the tree above it, like a tombstone, with the words “Guy Fawkes” stroked on it in white paint. And finally, the church.
My step slowed. Then, without further thought, I walked up to the door and pulled it open. It was dark, shadowed inside, and silent. My breathing became shallow. Reaching out my hand, I trailed it across the back of the pew where Nan, me and Josie use to sit, as far away from the Reverend Ropson and his pointing finger as we could get. Slowly, I started walking up the aisle, my breathing of a sudden coming so fast I could scarcely keep up with it, past the pew where Margaret Eveleigh and her best friends sat, and then, where the upper-ups sat, and the very front pew where I sat with Doctor Hodgins the day of Nan’s funeral. I stopped there, looking up at the pulpit. I half expected to see the reverend standing there, his eyes raking over the congregation as he preached hell and damnation, and his tongue flicking over dry, bloodless lips. Surprisingly, I neither saw nor heard anything, only silence, muted, heavy silence. The door creaked open behind me, but I didn’t turn, knowing who it would be.
“Is it God you’ve come to visit?” he asked.
I took a deep sigh, then sank down on the altar steps.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
Doctor Hodgins came the rest of the way down the aisle and sank down on the step besides me. We sat in silence for some time.
“Might just as well have begged him to come back,” I said, finally, “for all the good I’m doin’. I swear to God, the way I keep listenin’ to the wind, I’m as bad as you for watchin’ the waves.” My voice caught and I laid my cheek on Doctor Hodgins’s shoulder, breathing deeply of his warm, familiar smell, allowing the few tears I had left to seep down my face. “I don’t know where all the water comes from,” I sobbed, “I’ve cried so much.”
“It’ll get better.”
“I know. It already has—sometimes. It’s just that … sometimes … ” I faltered and took a deep breath. “This mornin’ I heard Josie up choppin’ wood. It’s the first time she’s chopped wood since Shine … and I thought … ”
“Shh, it’s all right. These things will happen.”
“Sometimes I think back on how happy we were, just running up and down the gully—it don’t seem real that I ever felt that happy.”
“You’ll feel it again, life’s like that, patched with moments. Damned if I know why we expect to be happy all the time,” he went on, still rocking me. “Even when we were youngsters with everything being handed to us, we were never happy, always wanting more and bigger. But, there’s more than happy, Kit. There’s peace. And pride. And those things measure good. You must feel proud, knowing you walked away from what you wanted most in the world, all for a greater thing. There’s not lots who’ve shown your courage, Kittens, and you’re hardly more than a girl yet.” He rocked some more, then, kissing the top of my head, held me away from him.
“You’ve done Lizzy proud,” he whispered, smiling into my eyes. “Real proud. And it’ll be a blessed day when I’m called out to the gully again, in the middle of the night, to bring another Pitman into the world.”
I laid my face upon his shoulder, allowing him to rock me some more. The shaft of sunlight struck through one of the windows, and I managed a bit of a smile as I watched it broaden, catching zillions of dust motes in its ray as it crept up over the aisle and shrouded me in its warmth.
IF YOU WERE TO PERCH ATOP A TREE on Fox Point and look down, you would see a thin sliver of ice glazing the gully’s brook as it suckles its way down to the seashore. Flanking the gully’s sides are withered mats of timothy grass, struck down by a sudden frost and scented with a brew of wet ground, burning birch and fresh-cut sawdust. To the side of the weather-beaten shack squat on the hillside besides the gully is a towering woodpile of fresh-sawed logs. And standing next to the woodpile is Josie, grunting loudly, her long red hair streaming around her face as she swings an axe into a birch junk resting sideways on the chopping block.
And if you were to hop onto a windowsill and look inside the house, you would see me, Kit, my fine yellow hair tucked back into a hairnet, humming softly as I check the lids on a row of preserving jars, still wet with steam and with a pink froth bubbling a quarter of an inch above the red berries inside. A sharp whistle cuts through the air and I run to the window, shielding my eyes from the sun as I look up over the bank to the road. A man with a thick, woolly beard gracing his chin treads slowly down over the bank. Josie drops the axe and stares. The man watches her, then lifts a piece of birch rind, taut between his forefingers and thumbs, to his lips and pierces the air with another ear-splitting whistle. Josie barks out a crazy laugh and charges towards him. Lifting back her fist, she reams it into his belly, and bounds down over the gully laughing wildly. He staggers after her, half-bent over, clutching his stomach, a grimace distorting his face.
He straightens up as I step off the stoop and start walking towards him, my arms held out before me. Tears wet his eyes and his hands tremble as he reaches for
me. Choking back sobs, I embrace my brother who has come home.
A Penguin Readers Guide
Kit’s Law
About the Book
An Interview with Donna Morrissey
Discussion Questions
ABOUT THE BOOK
The people of Haire’s Hollow, a remote outport in 1950s Newfoundland, can be as tough as the landscape, but no one proves tougher than Kit Pitman.
Fourteen-year-old Kit has never had it easy. She’s an outsider— the fatherless gully girl with a tramp for a mother. Her ferocious but loving grandmother, Nan, has died, leaving Kit to deal with her mother, Josie, and mind their small home in an isolated corner of the coastal community.
Josie’s an impossible woman-child, prone to violent outbursts and to running off with every man who’s out to sexually exploit her. What’s worse, Kit’s seen her with Shine, the drunken bootlegger who’s already believed to have murdered a man and who continues to threaten the villagers. If Reverend Ropson, with his talk of God and sin and damnation, discovers Josie spending time with Shine, he’ll be quick to ship Josie to an asylum and Kit to an orphanage.
Yet Kit finds small joys in her difficult life and some kindness in her community. There’s the gully itself—a place far removed from nosy neighbours, where Kit can hear Nan through the rush of the wind. There’s Doctor Hodgins, who, as Kit’s confidant and staunch protector following Nan’s death, is determined to keep Kit and Josie from being torn apart. There’s fresh fish and truckloads of wood from Old Joe, and unseen neighbours who drop off brin bags full of vegetables. And there’s Sid, the reverend’s son and an outsider in his own right.
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