Kit's Law (31 page)

“Are you finished?” Loret called out, tapping lightly on the door.

Edging the dresser back in place, I let her in and took my seat in front of the washstand.

“My, they took easy as anything,” she said, pulling out the clips and watching the curled strands of hair bounce down around my face. Running her fingers through them, she stretched them out and fingered them playfully. “Fine hair is best for curlin’. Do you curl it much?” she asked, gathering it in a bunch and holding it to one side of my face.

I shook my head, squirming with discomfort from so much attention. Loret watched me in the mirror, and her face went all tender like, and dropping my hair, she reached both arms around my shoulders and give me a tight hug.

“I swear I’ve never seen anything as shy as you,” she said. Pulling back, she wiped at her eyes and picked up the brush. “I suppose I should wait till we’re at the altar before I starts cryin’,” she sniffled, brushing out the curls. “Am I pullin’ too hard?”

I shook my head, too surprised to say anything. Even though my hands stayed in my lap whilst she had hugged me, it was a hug I never wanted to let go of. And while it was never something I had ever thought on before, it came to me that this was the first time a woman outside of Nan, Josie and Aunt Drucie had ever touched me.

“Well, the name of the Father!” Loret gasped as the door burst open and Emmy stumbled in through, her arms clutched around a bundle of creamy satin material, whilst the rest of it trailed around her legs and beneath her feet. “Here, lemme have it, oh Mother of Mercy, you’re as clumsy as they comes, Emmy, oh my God … ” Loret’s voice trailed off in a pitiful moan as she gingerly lifted the garment from her girl’s grasp and held it out so’s that it unfolded before me like one of Doctor Hodgins’s frothing waves.

“It’s beautiful,” I whispered.

“Hah, well now you knows the secret,” Loret said, holding the dress up against herself. “It’s whoever gets to wear this dress makes for the prettiest bride. It was my mother’s before me. She bought it off ole Briar Adams. He bought it for his youngest girl, but the weddin’ was cancelled on account of the groom gettin’ lost in the woods, moose huntin’ on his weddin’ day. He was found that evenin’, but the weddin’ never did go ahead because the bride said that any man that can’t stay out of the woods long enough to get married oughtn’t ever to get married. And she never did marry him, still for all, she ended up havin’ eight youngsters for him. Here now,” she said as she laid the dress carefully across the bed, “let’s see if it fits.”

“It fits,” I said, as the cool satin slipped down over my bare shoulders and swished against my legs.

“As nice as anything,” Loret murmured, doing up the buttons on the back. The door swung open and Josie stood there, her face beet-red from racing and mud up to her knees. “What do you think of Kit?” Loret asked her. “Isn’t she pretty?”

Josie looked at me the way one would a fragile Christmas tree bulb. Reaching out, she laid her hand on the sleeve, then pulled it back.

“It’s O.K.,” I said. “You can touch it. Here.” I picked up the tail of the dress and pressed it into her hands. “Sid and I are gettin’ married,” I said as she fingered the material curiously.

“Who’s gettin’ married? You’s not gettin’ married.”

“Yes I am gettin’ married, to Sid. Sid’s goin’ to live with us.”

“Sid’s goin’ to live with us? Sid’s not goin’ to live with us,” she barked, turning to Emmy with a grin.

“Why don’t you girls go pick me a bunch of black-eyed susans,” Loret said. “And some daisies and some buttercups, to make a wreath for Kit’s hair. Would you like that, Josie? You and Emmy?”

Then Sid’s voice, along with Fonse’s and Bruddy’s, sounded from outside. And for a split second, before Josie’s eyes left mine, a blaze of yellow streamed towards me, and she smiled, a jumbled-toothed smile that stretched boldly across her face.

I stared, never having seen her smile such a smile before, and then tried to smile back. But it was as if my smiling muscles had forgotten how to work, so I reached out my hand and touched her cheek instead.

“Thank you, Josie,” I said, wondering what in the name of the Lord I was thanking her for. But she nodded and kept on smiling, as if that was an easy one to figure, and then tore across the landing with Emmy in tow, leaving me staring after her with a warmth spreading through my heart like that of a mother the first time she sees a smile on the face of her newborn babe.

It was a day of days for sure, what with Sid coming home from jail, and Loret’s hug and Josie’s smile. And it was just starting as sometime later Loret walked with me down the stairs, the creamy satin dress tucked tightly around my waist, a wreath of black-eyed susans circling my crown, and tendrils of soft yellow curls nuzzling against my cheeks. I didn’t know what was choking me up the most—wearing such a pretty dress or having everyone making such a fuss over me. Or perhaps it was the marrying Sid part, because every time I thought of being his wife, I cowered inside, feeling a little frightened of how things must be now, and preferring to think instead of how things were in the past, with us skipping rocks down the gully and soaking our feet in Crooked Feeder, and me listening as he talked about such foolishness as men trying to drink the ocean dry, and crying for radishes when it was corn that we planted. And when I saw him standing there on the porch, wearing Fonse’s wedding suit that drooped a little off his shoulders and was a little too long in the legs and sleeves, and him shifting nervously on his feet as he watched me walking towards him all swathed in satin and wreaths of wild flowers, it felt more like we were getting ready for our graduation dance than our wedding.

And after he put a narrow gold band on my finger, and we cut Mudder’s cake and toasted each other with Fudder’s brew, then waltzed amidst the sea of muddied brown eyes and square white teeth, I felt drunk. Everything was blurred, and nothing felt right—the dress, the tendrils, Loret, my mother’s smile—not even Sid at my side. But I wanted it— all of it. And as Fonse whipped the accordion into a jig and Sid grabbed me by the waist and swung me around and around, with our best man, Bruddy, whooping up a storm with the youngsters and cheering and dancing all around us, I held back my head and shrieked with laughter as I heard Nan lean down from the heavens and bellow, “And so you should, and so you should.”

And later that evening when Sid and I were crouched beneath the canvas, heading back up the bay, with Josie, Fonse and Loret hidden beneath a tent of their own in the rear of the boat, whilst the rain come down so hard it bounced bubbles two inches off the water, it was kissing him that I wanted, and the more I kissed him, the more it seemed fitting that I kiss him again, and again, and again …

F
ALL FROM
G
RACE

“Y
OU’LL SPEND THE NIGHT,”
I begged as Fonse helped Josie out of the boat. “What with this rain … ”

“Heh, it’s the nets with Fudder in the mornin’, I’m thinkin’,” Fonse said. “Perhaps, we can pop up some time after the caplin rolls.”

A crack of thunder resounded down the gully, sending Loret jumping to her feet.

“Please yourself with your own doin’, Sire,” she said, jumping over the side of the boat onto the beach. “But it sounds like the good Lord’s orderin’ me inside on this night, and that’s just where I’m goin’, inside.”

“Here now, Loret,” Fonse called out, but his voice was drowned by another roll of thunder, and grasping hold of Loret’s arm, I ran with her up the gully.

Sid came up behind me as I ushered Loret inside the house.

“Kit!”

I stepped back.

“You want to go see your folks?” I asked.

“The reverend’ll be leaving early in the morning. I want to catch him before he goes.”

“You want me to come, too?”

“You’re part of the family now,” he said dryly.

Fonse strolled out of the gully.

“I’ll get the fire lit,” he said. “A cup of tea’ll be nice for when ye gets back.”

“I’ll just be a minute,” I said to Sid, and ducked inside.

“Show Loret where to find the sheets and blankets,” I said to Josie. “Then take her to Nan’s room.” I nodded at the sympathetic smile on Loret’s face and knew that Fonse must’ve told her by now about how Sid’s parents, and others, saw me as the gully tramp’s girl, and how Josie had killed a man, and Sid had taken the blame, damning me forever in his mother’s eyes.

“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” I said to Loret. Drawing on her look of encouragement, I pulled up the hood of my coat and went back out to Sid. Slipping my hand into his, we walked up over the bank to the road, our feet squelching in the mud, and the rain clattering against our oilskin coats.

Strangely enough, it weren’t thoughts of the reverend that was creating the uneasiness in my stomach, but Sid himself. Despite the warmth of his hand as he held mine, it wasn’t my husband who was walking into Haire’s Hollow with me on this night, but a mother’s son, just coming home from prison and bringing with him a wife. And not just any wife, but a wife that had helped jail him in the first place, and a wife who his own mother had taken a hand in trying to rid the town of, long before she beheld any thoughts of her son marrying and bringing home a daughter-in-law.

It was raining hard by the time we got to Haire’s Hollow, and aside from Old Joe and Doctor Hodgins, barely recognizable in their oilskins and sou’westers as they stared up at us from rigging up Old Joe’s boat for fishing in the morning, there was no one to come between us and the dreaded hour. And when Sid raised his hand to knock on his mother’s door, the fear inside me had grown into a living thing.

The door swung open and she stood there, looking as if she hadn’t strayed from the spot since the last time she waved him goodbye a year ago—waiting, waiting, for just such a moment.

“Mercy! Mercy!” she cried out. “He’s come back! He’s come home to me!”

And mercifully she didn’t see me at first, and was able to wrap her arms around his neck and drink from him like a starving mother with nothing left to feed on but her child’s scent. It was the reverend who first saw me. In a dark dressing gown and slippered feet, he came hurrying into the kitchen, a pensive look on his smooth, pale face. His face went blank when he saw me staring out at him from behind Sid and his sobbing mother, and with a soft moan he jerked forward and grasped hold of the back of the chair that was closest to him.

It was the first time I had seen him since the day of the trial, and I was struck by how poor he looked and how white his skin was. He became whiter as he continued to look at me, and if it weren’t for the chair that he was clinging onto, I felt he would have fallen. And so did Mrs. Ropson become white when she untangled her arms from around her son’s neck and saw me standing besides him. And then, just as the reverend’s body began to slacken further and he grasped more tightly to the chair, Mrs. Ropson’s became more rigid. She began to shake, as if in a rage, first her hands, then her arms, shoulders, head, as if the strength seeping out of the reverend’s body, leaving him sinking weakly onto the chair, was creeping into hers, filling her with the same scorning rage that had been sustaining him all these years. And it felt, as I stood there clutching onto Sid’s arm, watching the haggard lines appear on her face, then deepen as if they had been there all this time, hidden within her jowls of fat, that it was she who had spawned such rage, and out of some desperate need to keep soft her breast, had nurtured its growth in the reverend instead. And now, seeing me, the bastard child of a retarded tramp standing besides her precious son, she was taking it back, all of it. Only she had no inkling of its growth. And when she turned the full weight of it onto herself, she become like the old harp seal again, floundering for a pan of ice to hold her. And barring that, there was the fathomless sea, that once it took her, would carry her too far down to ever come back.

But it stood no chance of taking her just yet. I could tell by the way her body suddenly stilled and she turned her drowning eyes onto mine that she had something.

“Why did you bring her here?” she raged.

“Mum … ”

“Why!?”

“Kit’s my wife.”

Her eyes widened in horror, and a strangling sound came from the reverend. She turned to him, holding out a hand with which to steady herself, but oblivious to his wife’s need, and his body now leeched of the spite-driven strength and as emptied as a summer’s well, he sunk further into his chair, his face an ashen grey.

“Merciful father,” Mrs. Ropson whimpered, turning anguished eyes back to Sid. “When? When did you marry?” Her eyes lit onto mine, and she choked on another, more loathsome thought. “Have you touched
her
?” she whispered with such bile, as if I were the leech itself that she’d just used to sap the life’s blood out of the reverend.

Sid took my hand.

“We’re leaving, now,” he said in a voice sorely twisted with shame and hurt.

“No! You can’t leave with her. Tell him!” his mother shrieked at the reverend. “Tell him!” The reverend stared at her, and such a look of contempt filmed his eyes as ever I’d seen him cast towards Josie and me, leaving me knowing with certainty that while it was us that had been the objects of his scorn, it was his wife who had been its creator. With a cry, she turned towards Sid and spat out the poison that had been crucifying her all these years.

“She’s your sister!”

A stunned silence laid low the room. Then a low whimpering started deep in my throat, and I whipped my hand to my mouth as Mrs. Ropson turned to me with a look of the damned in their last desperate measure to gain justice.

“It’s a lie,” Sid whispered.

“No lie!” Mrs. Ropson cried out. “Ask him! Go on, ask him what did it, all this time, living with sin.”

The reverend coiled further back in his chair as all eyes weighed down on him.

“Is it true?” Sid rasped.

He shook his head, his hands clasping at the seat beneath him.

“You would lie?” Mrs. Ropson blazed. “Now, with our son married to your—
bastard
?”