Kit's Law (27 page)

“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 herself 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 partridgeberry 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.

Aunt Drucie helped with the preserving.

“For sure Lizzy’d be proud to know you’re makin’ the best of her patch, Kit,” she said, tightening the cap on a jar of berries and passing it to me. “And that you’re keepin’ it secret. More than once I threatened to follow her in, but I allows she would’ve led me to God’s end and left me for the caribou to trek over. By the cripes, she was stingy over that patch.”

“Perhaps I’ll let you come with me and Josie next fall,” I say, taking the jar and placing it in the pot of boiling water with the rest. “How long should they boil?”

“Oh, till you sees the pink bubblin’ above the berries. Now, I lets mine boil a bit longer than Lizzy, to sweeten the tarty taste. But Lizzy now, she use to haul hers outta the water at the first sight of a bubble. I’d never say it in front of her, Kit, but I always thought her jam a bit tarty. Better than May Eveleigh’s, for sure, ’cuz hers taste worse than pig’s slop, as Lizzy always used to say. But I likes mine a bit of sweet, I do. Now, let’s have a rest till they’s boiled.”

It was a stark winter’s morning when I handed over the first bottle of partridgeberry preserves.

“Looks every bit as good as Lizzy’s,” Old Joe beamed. “Heh, you wouldn’t mind givin’ Old Joe a hint as to where to find a patch of his own, now would you, Kit? Lizzy always said she meant to tell me, someday.”

“And so I will, Joe,” I said solemnly. “So I will. Good day, now, and don’t forget to pass your brother over his bottle.”

“Aye, you’re gettin’ to be as hard as Lizzy, God help us,” Old Joe muttered, dodging on up over the hill.

“And just as scrooge,” Doctor Hodgins glowered as I shooed him away from my stack of jars gleaming on the bin one evening. Slouching down in the rocker, he stared warily at the chimney as the stormy February winds rattled down through, blazing up the fire and spurting smoke up through the cracks around the stove-tops. He’d been coming regularly since the day of the trial, making sure we had enough split wood to last through the nights, and that the roof wasn’t going to blow off over our heads.

Or so’s he said. I knew it was for different reasons that he came. A man with learning can’t lay claim to the youthful truths that he had talked about that evening sitting by the sea. So it was mine that he clung to, and Sid’s. And that’s why he kept coming out to the gully as often as he did, to see me and Josie, and judge it right that he had lied under oath and helped land a mother’s boy in jail. And other things too kept him rooted to Nan’s rocking chair that winter; things he brooded over, but seldom spoke of.

“You look like her,” he said after we had sat quietly for a spell one evening, and Josie had taken herself off to bed.

“Like who?” I asked, laying my history book to one side and looking up from where I was sprawled on the daybed.

“My wife. When she was your age.” He smiled. “With your blonde hair and pretty blue eyes, you could’ve been her girl.”

“Aunt Drucie said she wanted to adopt me.”

“She did, and that she did. From the second you were born and she laid eyes on you.”

“She was there?”

“Yes, she was, she and … Mrs. Ropson,” he added after a slight pause.

My eyes popped open.

“Mrs. Ropson?”

“She was a good friend of Elsie’s back then. She— happened to be visiting when word come that Josie was in labour.” He shrugged. “She’d often helped me with birthings back then, so, she came along.” He rested his hand on his chin, and went back to brooding again, as if the memory had become distasteful.

“Mrs. Ropson helped born me?”

“That she did,” he replied.

“You … didn’t want babies?” I asked, anxious to shut out the picture of Mrs. Ropson handling my squirming, naked body at birth.

“I always figured God would have given us one of our own, if He had meant for us to be parents,” Doctor Hodgins said. “Elsie went along with that. Course, I didn’t leave her much choice. I thought she’d gotten over it,” he paused, “until you were born. Everyone knew Josie couldn’t take care of you, and that Lizzy was getting on in years, so she set her mind on adopting you. With Lizzy’s blessings, of course.”

“And Nan said no?”

Doctor Hodgins’s brow shot up.

“And a whole lot more. And right she was to say no. She had love to give you, and love’s a better guarantee of happiness than someone else’s need to rescue.” He rose slowly from the rocker and, striding across to the window, looked down over the gully. His voice was quieter when he began talking again, as if he were speaking to himself.

“It was her needs that I misunderstood—again. Had I but tried, perhaps she might’ve found in me what she was looking for in a child. And too, there’s those that deserve to be rescued—God help them.”

Striding back to the rocker, he sat down heavily and started rocking again, the chair creaking beneath his weight. And long after I’d gone to bed I heard him sitting out there, creaking his way through the night, and brooding … all the time, brooding …

I brooded too, lying there in my bed. What with the wind trying to wrench every board in the house apart, and Doctor Hodgins creaking up his own storm out in the kitchen, there was small chance of blissful sleep on this night, or of hearing Sid’s laugh sounding up the gully. It was nights like this that I mostly missed Pirate. And nights like this that I prayed the hardest upon my orange speckled star. Starfish, star bright, starfish, star bright …

T
HE
L
ETTER

I
T WAS COMING INTO SPRING AND STILL
no word from Sid. And if it wasn’t for Old Joe and Margaret and Aunt Drucie reporting back from his letters to his mother, I wouldn’t know even if he was alive. Josie became my true source of comfort. At least with her I could say his name. Oftentimes while she sat there rocking, and the gulls were calling out as they circled above the house, and the winter’s sun sparkled off the snow on the windowsill, I would chat while dicing up potatoes about how one day soon Sid would be walking down that hill again, with his white shirt and padded jacket, and whistling some nonsense song as he pulled a book of ancient proverbs out of his pocket and began prattling, and how he’d be chasing her around the chopping block, tying her hair into knots and wrestling her to the ground. She’d never say anything, but I could tell by the way the chair would stop rocking that she was listening. Sometimes while she rocked and dozed, her face would redden and her eyes would bulge, and her humming would start coming in short moans, and she would rock harder and faster, harder and faster. I knew then that she wasn’t dreaming of Sid whistling and prattling and tying knots in her hair, but that she was standing on the edge of the gully and seeing again Shine’s wind-driven boat lunging over the waves and heading for the shores of Haire’s Hollow. On those times I’d grip her shoulders and pull her head back against my chest and stroke her forehead, soothing her with more soft-spoken words, thinking all the time that this is what Sid would have me do, this is what Sid would have me do.