Kit's Law (2 page)

T
HROUGH THE
C
OLOURED
G
LASS

T
HE WALLS INSIDE THE CHURCH IN
Haire’s Hollow were sparkling clean up to the point where the A-shaped ceiling began. There they were coated grey by the smoke sifting out through the cast-iron, pot-bellied stove, and out of reach of the women who came with their scrubbing buckets once every month. Sometimes, when the sun shafted through the windows, I would watch the black specks of coal dust swirl through the air along with the silver glints of dust motes and lose sight of the rows of hat-coiffed heads and slicked-back brush cuts lining the pews in front of me. And sometimes I could almost shut out the tinny shrill of the Reverend Ropson’s voice as he flapped his black-clothed arms, shrieking God’s word down to us from the altar.

I snapped to attention as the reverend suddenly swooped around to the front of the pulpit and grabbed hold of the wooden coffin resting before it, sending the dust motes swirling madly.

“God’s law orders that there
be
order,” he rasped, his hoarse whispers snaking with the vengeance of a rattler’s hiss through the ears of everyone listening. “In all things—man, nature and animals! And when we cut short the life of another, as was done to Rube Gale, the man lying in this box before us today, we have broken this law! And we pay! Perhaps not today. Or tomorrow. But, hell burns forever, my brethren! And no sinner escapes!”

He paused, his eyes raking over the congregation and his tongue flicking over dry, bloodless lips. And what with his balding head crouched back in his shoulders as if he was about to spring on the first person that twitched and brought attention to himself, I felt that my grandmother Lizzy (known to me as Nan) was right when she leaned her hefty size across me and my mother, Josie, and muttered into Aunt Drucie’s dozing ear, “He might sound like the lily, but be the Jesus, God forgive me for cursin’ in church,” she hastily crossed herself, “he got the smell of a swampin’ bog hole to me.”

The Reverend Ropson’s eyes bore down on Nan, the flush in his clean-shaven cheeks breaking up to the roots of his thinning grey hair.

“And neither is it ours to judge the soul of the man who put him there!” he snapped, leaping back up to the pulpit. “It’s our own souls that God orders us to judge, orders us to look deep inside and witness. Else we become like the brute beasts and wallow in the stench of our own body’s desire for sin.”

“Heh, he’d be the one to know,” Nan muttered again, this time loud enough for those around us to hear. “If puttin’ yourself above others was against the commandments, then be Jesus his soul’s as crusted as a shit-covered rock in a gull’s roost.”

The reverend’s eyes flashed to our pew.

“Sinners!” he hissed, pointing his finger seemingly to Josie. “All of us! Sinners!”

With a yelp Josie rose out of her seat, long red hair flicking around her face, and before Nan could grab hold of her, she was scrabbling out of the pew and running towards the door. Necks twitched to turn, but the reverend’s finger, now moving across the room like the barrel of a British loader, kept everyone staring straight ahead. Except for Margaret Eveleigh’s haloed head of red ringlets. The second the reverend’s finger struck out, she was swivelling around, along with those of her ribbon-bedecked best friends, all staring after Josie’s back as she bolted through the door. Giggling into their white-gloved hands, they cowered beneath their parents’ chastising looks and whipped their heads back to Rube Gale’s coffin. The Reverend Ropson gave a small bow as the door slammed behind Josie, and with a look akin to satisfaction, made the motions of the cross in the name of our Father, and signalled for the pallbearers to lift Rube’s box and lead the march to the graveyard.

“Where’s you goin’, Lizzy?” Aunt Drucie whispered in surprise as Nan scurried out of the pew, dragging me behind her before the pallbearers had a chance to lay a hand on Rube’s box. Tightening her coat around her thin, stooped shoulders, Aunt Drucie hurried to catch up as Nan blazed through the church doors and heaved herself out into the chilly November air, taking the church steps two at a time, her feet splayed out like a duck’s as she shifted her weight first to one spike-heeled foot, then to the other.

“What about the buryin’?” Aunt Drucie gasped, catching up as Nan unhooked the church gate and swung through it.

“I’ve had all the preachin’ me stomach can take for one mornin’,” Nan said. “You go on and I’ll see you at the card game, tonight.”

“My, my, is something come over you, Lizzy? And how come Josie keeps runnin’ off like that?”

“Christ, Drucie, you’d sleep through your own funeral if you had a chance to sit through it,” Nan thundered, taking the turn around the corner of the church. She brought up short as Doctor Hodgins appeared before us, a deep frown between his dark, brooding eyes, and his tufts of white hair more tousled than usual as he drearily shook his head.

“Keep a berth, Lizzy,” he said, holding out an arm to warn us back. “There’s more to this day than the reverend’s Amen.”

Nan’s cross look was replaced by one of fright as she brushed aside Doctor Hodgins’s arm and stepped around him, me and Aunt Drucie crowding besides her. There, calm as anything, whittling on a slab of wood as he slouched against a limb-bared poplar tree outside of the cemetery, was Shine, the moonshine runner who had appeared on the shores of Haire’s Hollow some four years before. He, along with his drinking buddy, Rube Gale, had plagued the outporters ever since, with their stills and drunken rampages— till Rube was found dead a few days before, strangled and lying in dog’s shit besides Shine’s still, his face half chewed-off by human teeth. Shine’s teeth, the outporters argued.

“Will ye look at that!” Nan half whispered, as Shine, a brown worsted cap pulled down over his large, grizzled head, with the tips of his dirtied brown hair as greased as the sweat sliding down the slope of his nose, started whistling through his rot-rutted front teeth as he kicked at a mound of dirt piled high besides a fresh dug hole besides him.

“My God, that looks like a grave he got dug!” Aunt Drucie half whispered.

“His threat to anyone with thoughts of going to the Mounties,” said Doctor Hodgins.

“And I s’pose that’s their headstone he’s whittlin’ on,” snorted Nan. “Be the Jesus, he got the nerve, takin’ over the Almighty’s callin’.”

“And he’s a mean enough bastard to go through with it,” said Doctor Hodgins. “In all my years, I never seen anything as vile as Rube Gale’s corpse.”

“Why’d Shine do it?” asked Aunt Drucie. “They was buddies.”

“Buddies!” scorned Nan. “The likes of Rube Gale and Shine don’t have buddies, they haves Satan grovelin’ through their liquor-poisoned veins. And once they gets plastered, they’d carve their own youngsters into stewin’ meat, then go callin’ out for ’em the next day they sobers up.”

Aunt Drucie shivered.

“And Jimmy Randall’s ear!” she moaned. “My God, Doctor, did you ever see such a sight, the lobe chewed right off.”

“It was a sight,” said Doctor Hodgins, patting Aunt Drucie’s shoulder and nodding towards Nan. “I’ll see you girls, and you, too, Kit,” he added briskly, relaxing his puckered brow with a smile upon seeing me. “I got a baby waiting to be born.”

“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?”