Kit's Law (32 page)

“Shut up!” Sid roared, his eyes never leaving the reverend’s. “Tell me the truth! Is it true?”

“He would never swear to it,” Mrs. Ropson cried, moving slowly towards the reverend. “Never swear that it wasn’t true. But I saw it. I know it to be true. And all this time I kept it a secret. For you,” she cried, turning towards Sid. “So’s you’d never know your father’s sin.”

The reverend’s hands trembled on his lap, and his paltry eyes were colourless as they struggled to hold Sid’s.

“I have paid for my sin,” he whispered.

Such simple words, and spoken reverently as if a penitence for a long-lasting grievance finally brought to light between the father and son. Yet, there was another presence, equally as connected, but for whom the words sealed a fate even more damning than that of the son, for had not the reverend just introduced himself as my father? I heard nothing else, excepting a soft moan from Sid, and the rain splashing against the window, sounding forever like the house was weeping for the sin committed within it—a sin that was still trying to make itself felt.

“Sid.”

Had I spoken? I struggled to breathe, and as hard as I tried to turn to him, my eyes were rooted to Mrs. Ropson, still, now that her venomous secret was out, and my numbed mind churned through the thought that just as lightning is the quietest, yet deadliest, part of a summer’s storm, so too had she lain quiet all those years since the reverend fathered me, preparing the grounds for devastation, then struck before battle was properly warned.

Fathered me. The reverend had fathered me. My father—this weak, decrepit thing that had screwed my mother all those years ago, then blasphemed her before God for his having done so. This was my father.

“It’s a lie!”

It was Sid’s voice, sounding from somewhere besides me, and I recognized that the wooden thing that I was clenching onto was his hand.

“No lie!” Mrs. Ropson cried. “I was there the night she was born. I saw. Show him!” she demanded, bearing down on the reverend. “Show him.” Then she swooped before him and fell to her knees, grabbing for his foot. The reverend shrank back, kicking at her, but I knew what she was going for. And when she finally grasped it and held it betwixt her fleshy underarm and her breast, staring at it triumphantly as if the webbed foot was some sordid sanctimonious medal, a trembling went through me that turned my stomach to water.

Wrenching his foot away, and knocking Mrs. Ropson sideways as he did so, the reverend staggered to his feet.

“I pay for my sin,” he shrilled, standing shakily before me and Sid, looking wildly betwixt us. Then he took a step closer to me, his ghastly eyes accusing mine, and his pointing finger weighting down a hand that was making one last attempt to cast blame.

“Each time I see you,” he whispered shrilly, “I suffer damnation. Each time I attempt to get rid of you, God brings you back to me. Your mother, the devil, the serpent in my garden,” his eyes took on a dull gleam. “She tempted my mortal weakness. And for this, I pay. I pay!”

My legs began to shake as his eyes sought wildly to take root in mine. But Sid was there, wrapping his arms around me and pulling me back from the reverend’s hypnotic hold. I sank against him, the weakening in my legs shored up by the weakening in his, when a knock sounded on the door. Having lumbered to her feet, Mrs. Ropson held out a restraining hand to Sid.

“Stay,” she ordered, but the door was quietly opening, and Doctor Hodgins stood there as he had the day of the meeting, with the same grave look on his face. The rain dripped off his sou’wester as he pulled it off his head, and his face tensed as he stared sickeningly at the sight of the reverend’s bared, web-toed foot and the slipper dangling from Mrs. Ropson’s hand.

“You!” Mrs. Ropson sneered, flinging the slipper to one side and limping towards Doctor Hodgins. “It’s all your fault. It’s you that stopped us from sending her away! Kept her here all these years, for me to see every time she walked by, you and your saint of a wife. Well, God did his part well, didn’t he? He took yours away from you, just as he took my boy from me. But, now mine’s come back.” She turned imploring eyes upon her son and grabbed piteously after him. “Haven’t you, Sidney? You’ve come back to me. You haven’t touched her, not as a wife. Tell them … ”

Sid pulled back from her touch as if it was fire and, holding onto me more tightly, turned savagely to Doctor Hodgins.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

Doctor Hodgins closed his eyes, hard, as if in silent prayer.

“I was going to,” he half whispered, then looked at Sid sorrowfully. “But then you went to jail. I thought fate had intervened.”

“Fate? You left it to fate? Is it fate that we’re man and wife now, as well as brother and sister?” Sid snapped. He turned to me for the first time since we had entered the house, and I closed my eyes against the nakedness of his pain. “Kit!” His voice had dropped to a whisper, and then he was thrusting me at Doctor Hodgins and backing out the door.

“Take her back to the gully. Tell Fonse I’ll send money.”

A wail went up from his mother as she charged after Sid. Pushing away from Doctor Hodgins, I blocked her path and went chasing after him, myself.

“Sid!”

Rain pelted against my face as I tore into the night.

“Sid!”

He was marching up the road leading out of Haire’s Hollow, with his head bent low and the rain pelting at his back.

“Sid!”

He turned as I caught up with him and grabbed me tightly by the arms.

“Go back, Kit. There’s nothing for us, now!”

“I’m comin’ with you.”

“No, ooh, my sweet Kit,” he moaned, gathering me against him. “It’s not fair. It’s just not fair.”

“I don’t care, I don’t care, I’m comin’ with you.”

“Sshh, no.” He pulled back and looked at me, his rain-soaked face made all the more wet with his crying. “It’s more laws, Kit.”

“Damn the laws, Sid Ropson! Since when do you care about laws?”

“I can’t touch this one, Kit. It’s mine as well as God’s. Hell, it’s every damn one of them.” Then he was kissing my face, my eyes, my lips, and holding me closer and tighter, and I clung to him with a wanting that I felt straight through to my soul, and a wanting that I knew would never stop, not on this rain-filled night, and not on a million rain-filled nights.

“I love you, Sid,” I cried out. “There’s nothin’ that can change that.”

“It’s damned, Kit!”

“No!”

“Yes! Damned!” He shoved me away savagely. “There’s none that can escape this one, not even the Gods. Do you hear me?”

“Gods aren’t real, Sid!” I gasped, clinging to him. “They’re just stories, bloody stories!”

“We’re each of us a story, Kit,” he cried, almost gently now. “What of Josie, isn’t hers a story, unlike ours, but one of pain despite her innocence. And it’s you who’s suffered for it. Is that what you’d have for our children, to suffer the pain of our love? They’d be marked, Kit. Just like Josie’s marked. It’s the way of blood. It’s the way of God.”

I listened, stunned with knowing that he was already gone. Even as he stood before me, he was already gone. He turned and ran into the night, the rain washing away his footsteps as if he never was, excepting for the growing pain in my chest, and the incestuous burning of the wedding ring upon my finger.

Then Doctor Hodgins was holding onto me, pleading with me to turn back, that there were people watching, and to not say anything as word was out that Sid and I were married, and we wouldn’t want it known that we were brother and sister as well.

The trip back to the gully was one in silence. Doctor Hodgins kept up behind me as I marched straight ahead, ignoring the curious faces appearing in the windows, and the cursed boldness of Margaret Eveleigh as she came skipping out of the store to stall me in my headlong flight. Blissfully Doctor Hodgins cut her off before she had a chance to open her mouth, and I kept right on walking. The rain poured with a vengeance of its own, determined to make itself felt through to the marrow on this evening of human misery. There was still light in the sky when I turned down the gully, yet the kitchen lamp glowed softly through its grim greyness, and a bellowing of smoke poured from the chimney.

Shoving open the door, I stomped the water off my boots, Doctor Hodgins behind me, and stared with misgiving at the shocked look on Fonse’s and Loret’s faces as they beheld whatever look of torment that must’ve been imprinted on mine.

“Sid’s gone,” I said, as Josie barrelled from the hallway into the kitchen.

“Who’s gone? Sid’s not gone,” she barked.

“Sid’s gone. This time he’s never comin’ back,” I said loudly, as much for my own ears as for everyone else’s. Then, feeling the strength leaving my legs, I turned and walked towards my room.

She was on my back like a scalded cat.

“Sid’s back. Sid’s back,” she hollered. “You’s farmed. Farmed!” she yelled, as Doctor Hodgins pried her arms from around my neck. Then, Fonse and Loret were helping Doctor Hodgins hold her back, and Doctor Hodgins was telling them who he was, and I slammed my room door shut and pounded my fist against the door. I yelped as the side of my fist scratched across the nail holding Old Joe’s starfish in place, and in a frenzied cry, I pried the dead fish from my door and flung it into an opened dresser drawer. Falling across the bed, I plunged my face into the pillow and chewed back the spiteful cries wailing up in my throat.

L
ORET’S
B
ARGAIN

T
HE NEXT MORNING
I
STOOD STUBBORNLY
on the beach and shook my head for the hundredth time at Fonse’s and Loret’s plea that I pack mine and Josie’s things and move with them to Godfather’s Cove. “It’s what Sid wants,” Loret cried. “Doc Hodgins said. Please, Kit, come with us.” “No,” I said quietly. “I thank ye for everythin’.” “Dammit, you’re as stubborn as they comes,” Fonse said. “I’ll be leavin’ you this mornin’, but I’ll be back. I promise you, we won’t rest with ye here alone.” “We’ll be fine,” I said. I stood on shore, waving until they were a dark blot on the sea. Turning, I caught sight of Josie looking down on me from a little ways up the gully. A scowl darkened her face, and she raced back to the house. Summer came. It felt like I was being lifted up and carried along by a mindless wind, my feet never touching the ground, rocks, grass beneath them. The leaves turned to red, gold, brown, and Old Joe come by with the winter’s wood. The caribou trekked across the barrens, and I trekked with them, filling the pantry with buckets of partridgeberries, and watching the clouds drift overhead. Everyone came as before, but I ignored all their questions about Sid. Word had spread quickly about the wedding in Godfather’s Cove, and what exactly Doctor Hodgins had told everyone, I didn’t ask. But from the well-intended comments made in passing, I expect it must’ve been that the reverend and his wife weren’t willing to accept me as their daughter-in-law. So, choosing neither, Sid had ran.

“Lord, it’s hard to think of you as a married woman, Kit,” Margaret said during one of her visits as I stogged the stove full of birch. “Yet, you looks different, somehow. Not like the same Kit at all.”

“Have a piece of cake, Margaret.”

“Mmm, looks good. Who made it?”

“Aunt Drucie.”

“Aunt Drucie!” Margaret shuddered. “Don’t take it to heart, Kit, but the way she drools in her bread dough, brrr, turns my stomach. It was the reverend, wasn’t it, that couldn’t hold the thought of havin’ you in the family? I must say, Kit, you looks awful calm about everything, what with Sid runnin’ off and leavin’ you like that.”

Strangely enough, I was feeling the same calm inside. It was as if I had stepped into somebody else’s shoes and were allowing them to walk my path with no inkling of touching, tasting or feeling. With Sid’s leaving I could no longer imagine a world where such things as love, desire or joy could exist; better to sense nothing at all, to move through the world and glimpse it from a distance, than to split God’s gift in half and live in its underside with no rays of light dispersing the darkness.

Not so what Doctor Hodgins thought.

“It’s Godfather’s Cove you should be thinking on,” he advised repeatedly from his seat in the rocker, a seat that was most always taken up by him the past six months since Sid left. “Fonse, Loret—they’re wonderful people, Kit. And they care for you and Josie.”

“This is my home.”

“It’s become your coffin.”

“I won’t leave here.”

“He’s not coming back this time.”

I fell silent. I always fell silent whenever Doctor Hodgins tossed that one in.

“You’ve got to give yourself a chance. Living here in the gully, waiting, every day, waiting, you’ll waste away. And that’s not what he wants for you.”

“I’m tired,” I said, rising and heading for my room.

“Name of God, Kit,” he yelled, coming out of the rocker and grabbing me by the arm. “You can’t wait forever. And even if he did come back, he’d still be your brother. Time won’t change that.”

“No one can be sure.”

“The reverend admits to the timing of it. And with the marked foot … it’s pretty certain.”

“But you can’t be sure.”

“You know it. Sid knows it. That’s why he left. Now you’ve got to be strong, too. Go with Fonse. Take Josie and make a life. A new life. That’s why he left you, Kit, so’s you could be free.”

“We’re married.”

“It can be annulled.”

“Not in my heart it can’t.”

I stared helplessly into Doctor Hodgins’s eyes and, seeing pity in them, shook off his hands and flew down the hallway to my room. He took a couple of steps after me, then paused for a second before turning back and taking his seat in the rocker. I lay across my bed, staring up at the night sky and listening to him creak, creak, creak his way through the night. Come morning I swore I would take that damn rocker and drag it out to his shack, and see, perhaps, if it might serve to keep him home a bit more.

Come morning he was gone and Josie was in his place, creaking her way through the morning. She hardly spoke to me since the night I told her that Sid wasn’t coming back, and spent most of her time as she had during his time in jail, sitting in the rocker and creak, creak, creaking. Except this time there was an anger in her towards me, a hard anger that wouldn’t let me touch her the way that I used to, or even talk to her. And a couple of times she had hit me square across the face and ran off before I had a chance to catch my breath.