Kit's Law (35 page)

“Nan rocked the baby. I rocked the baby.”

“Whose baby did Nan rock?” I asked, grabbing hold of her arm as she rocked, and holding her still. “Whose baby?”

She stared at me, her brow knitting the way it used to whenever she was trying to pin Nan’s hair back into her hairnets.

“I rocked the baby,” she barked. “Nan rocked the baby. You never rocked the baby.”

“Do you remember havin’ a baby, Josie? Do you remember Doctor Hodgins and Mrs. Ropson holdin’ a baby?”

She stopped rocking, her arms suddenly slack around Little Kitty, as her eyes, flooding with lights, darted from one of mine to the other. I held my breath, alarmed at the foolhardiness of my probing. Of what use would such memories serve us, now?

“Baby cries,” she said, tightening her hold around Little Kitty and resuming her rocking. “Baby cries. Boo! Boo!” She ducked her face into Little Kitty’s belly, rubbing it from side to side, making Little Kitty smile widely and flail at the red hair encasing her face. Sensing Loret watching us, I looked out over the water and gave her a wave, then tightened the blanket around the baby’s legs. At that second Georgie thundered along the beach bellowing, “Jimmy caught a flatfish, Jimmy caught a flatfish!” Rearing up from the rock, Josie planked Little Kitty into my arms, and tore up along the grey, rocky beach to where Jimmy and Emmy and the two younger ones were wildly examining a quivering sole they had just hooked out of the water. I strolled onto the wharf, holding Little Kitty’s squirming body upon my shoulder, as Fonse started paddling to shore.

“How’s my Queen?” boomed Fonse, steadying the boat against the side of the wharf for Loret to climb out.

“Beggin’ for her nap, no doubt,” said Loret, taking Kitty and holding her off so’s she could best see her face. “My, my, she’s the doll,” she crooned, her eyes caressing the small round face and puckered, petal mouth. “The little doll.”

“You can pass the doll right here, now, sir,” Fonse said, climbing onto the wharf and loping the painter around a post. “’Cuz it’s time I had a waltz with me little sweetheart. Here, give her to me. Oopsy, baby,” he said, lifting Little Kitty out of Loret’s arm and tossing her over his shoulder.

“Don’t toss her so hard, Fonse, for the love of the Lord,” Loret cried out, running after him as he danced across the wharf.

“Let’s get away from your mother, me little darlin’,” Fonse said, tucking Kitty’s face into the curve of his chin and lengthening his stride up the beach. “She’s a jealous woman, she is.”

“For the love of God, jealous!” Loret exclaimed, slowing her step as I caught up. “You’d think be the God she was a sack of spuds, the way he tosses her around.” She smiled as a charm went up from the rest of the youngsters as Josie wrestled the flatfish away from Jimmy and tore off along shore.

“They gets along well, don’t they?” she said, watching Jimmy and Georgie tear off after her, threatening her with a rock to the head if she didn’t give back the fish. “I heard somethin’ of what you were askin’ Josie, Kit. Words travel well over water, you know.”

I glanced at her sideways to check how she was meaning her words. Her dark hair was pinned back, with dozens of tiny, windblown curls dancing free around her warm brown eyes. She smiled. “You can tell me to mind my own business, you know.”

“You must think I’m silly,” I said.

“It ain’t silly to be curious about your mother. Do you think she understood any of it, I mean, havin’ a baby and all?”

“Nan said she believes she was havin’ bad cramps,” I laughed. “I bet she watched what she ate after that day.”

Loret draped her arm around my shoulders.

“Does it bother you much that she’s your mother?”

“I can’t think of her as my mother.” I gave a small laugh. “I only remember Nan, and this big, gallopin’ person who Nan had to protect me from, else she’d have trampled me to death.”

Loret laughed and we both turned up into the yard after Fonse, who had started singing to the high heavens with Little Kitty fidgeting on his shoulder.

There was only one thing missing in this full life in Godfather’s Cove with the Fords, and that was Sid. His cheques came regularly every month. There was never a return address, and they were never stamped from a fixed place. Halifax, Toronto, Boston, New York; I followed him on Fonse’s globe. It seemed he was no sooner settled in a place than he was moving on again.

I cursed him his freedom to just keep running like that. Moving easily through my chores, and helping with the baby, I managed to keep a contented look. And so I was content. At least, with all those around me. But Sid felt like a shadow that grew longer as the year wore on, and beneath my quietness was a clatter of emotions more severe than ever the Fords could make over a Sunday morning breakfast. That the reverend had bedded my mother filled me with a revulsion that could never be outmatched, not even by Shine. That I was born out of such sin was as far removed from my order of things as was the idea to others that I appeared in the gully one day, with an offering in my mouth, the same as Pirate. And that Sid was my half-brother was as impossible to grasp as was the fact that the woman-child who thundered across the meadows, barking out laughter and jumping with glee, was my mother.

Yet, no matter how twisted with shame, disgust, despair my stomach became, I felt an emptiness that no amount of Mudder’s pudding or Loret’s hugs could fill. Sometimes I caught Loret watching me, and I knew that she wasn’t without understanding. Nor was she without hoping that, in time, I would get over Sid. And I wasn’t without knowing that she was hoping for a courtship between me and Bruddy.

From the first, I could tell he was taken with me, always passing me more bread at the supper table, and offering to help me with the weeding, or the stacking of Little Kitty’s diapers. Mudder, Fudder and Fonse noted it also, and many was the time during that year Bruddy got more than his fair share of attention as everyone praised his good looks, his manners around the women, his way with youngsters, his laugh, his cowlick and whatever he happened to be doing, saying or thinking whenever I walked into the room. It got so he became more hesitant to set foot inside the door, from all of the blushing that he was doing from the constant praising. And while I loved the warmth of his chuckle and the softness of his eyes, it was Sid’s eyes that I saw every single morning that I opened mine, and Sid’s laugh that I heard every single night before I fell asleep. And while I wished upon wishing that the terrible aching in my heart would stop, I simply missed him more and more with each passing day.

Another year was almost gone by, and Little Kitty was just after taking her first step, when Loret first made mention of her thoughts. We were in Loret’s room, with me folding up a stack of diapers on the bed, and Loret sitting in the rocking chair that Fonse had made for her out of a kitchen chair, trying to get Little Kitty down for her afternoon nap.

“Bruddy’s thinkin’ about clearin’ off a piece of land and buildin’ a house of his own this spring,” she said easy enough, pulling up her sweater and poking a nipple into Kitty’s groping mouth. “Might be he’s thinkin’ on gettin’ married someday,” she added when I never spoke.

I stacked another diaper onto the growing pile, and smiled down into Kitty’s drooping eyes as she suckled noisily on her mother’s tit.

“Might be that he got his eye on somebody,” Loret mused. “Lord, Kit, ain’t you even curious?”

“About what?” I asked. “She’s drooling a lot. I think she’s cuttin’ another tooth.”

“About who he might be interested in,” Loret nailed out. “Unless, of course, you knows who the lucky girl is.”

I shook my head.

“Bruddy’s one of the best catches around,” she went on. “All the girls are linin’ up around him.”

“Um humm.”

“Kit, don’t you think he’s handsome?”

“Yes.”

“Well then … ”

“Well then what?”

“Well then,” Loret sighed. “Well then, you might want to stand in line yourself,” she all but snapped. “For Pete’s sake, maid, have you never noticed the way he looks at you?”

“I don’t think on Bruddy that way.”

She plucked her nipple out of Kitty’s mouth.

“You keep thinkin’ he’s comin’ back, don’t you?”

I pressed down hard on the stack of diapers.

“You’ve got to get past him, Kit. And if there’s one sure way of doin’ that, it’s findin’ someone else. You can trust me on that one. Lord, I thought I’d die when Joe Reid dropped me, and took up with the Widow Burton. But then, along come Fonse, and it felt like I’d seen the sun for the first time in my life. It’ll be like that for you, too, if you’ll let it.”

“I could never love another man,” I said quietly.

“Yes, you can and you will,” Loret argued. “Just give Bruddy a chance.”

“No! Sid is the only man I could ever love. Know that, Loret.”

I cringed at her pitying look.

“I think I do know it,” she whispered sadly. “God bless you, but I think I do know it.”

We were both quiet for a while, her feeding the baby, and me slowly folding the last diaper.

“It’s such a joy to hold your own child,” she murmured, tracing Kitty’s button of a nose with her finger. “I want that for you, Kit. You never had a mother. Perhaps I’m thinkin’ if you were one, you might get back some of the love what’s owed you.”

“You’ve already given me more than what my heart could hold. I feel blessed.”

Loret smiled sadly.

“It’s a frightened little heart you have, Kit. No more than a bird’s. Do you know that when a bird gets hurt, it mostly dies of a heart attack, and not from what hurt it in the first place? That’s what you remind me of, a little bird that’s been badly hurt and threatens to run off the second anyone tries to make it fly agin. Well, you ain’t no brittleboned bird, Kit. You’re a fullblooded woman who deserves more than what you’ve gotten. And I won’t watch you die!” This last was spoken with a note of such fierceness that Little Kitty startled awake. “Hey now, go to sleep,” her mother soothed, stroking her cheek. “It’s your Aunt Kit who ought to be quakin’ in fear, not you, little sweet.”

I left her there, rocking and cooing the baby to sleep. Pulling on a sweater, I walked down to the beach and around the cove, the aching in my heart more fierce than ever before. Not because I was wanting a baby to hold, for every time Kitty opened her mouth and started bawling, I gratefully passed her back to her mother, thanking the good Lord babies weren’t something that jumped out of the grass and stuck to your breeches like burrs and came home with you. Nor was I caught up on likening myself to a bird, holding that uninteresting thought for Josie. It was the “brittleboned” part that caught me by surprise. And the “fullblooded woman.”

I couldn’t ever remember feeling like a girl, most certainly not brittle. Running up and down the gully every day, and back and forth to Haire’s Hollow, and always keeping everything inside when Margaret Eveleigh, or Mr. Haynes, or even Josie or Nan was hollering things at me, I always felt like I could stand straight-faced through any kind of ill wind. And a woman was May Eveleigh, Mrs. Haynes, even Loret herself. Not even when I started menstruating had I felt much difference in how I saw things, and according to what Nan had said once, when a girl starts menstruating, that’s when she becomes a woman. I guessed somewhere I had crossed a line without knowing it. Till Sid came along. And that’s what was making my heart ache all the more, the knowing that I had become a woman somewhere, since the day he first strolled down the gully. And he was the reason for it. And now that I was growing into the best of me, he was gone.

M
RS.
R
OPSON’S
P
LEA

S
ENSING THAT SHE HAD CAUSED
me some unrest, Loret was especially kind that evening. Warming up some milk and climbing up to the attic, she sat besides my bed, and we supped, quietly. When we had done, she kissed me on the forehead and went to her room. I lay there for long after, thinking on nothing special. I must’ve fallen asleep, for the sky was much darker when something woke me. “Kit!” It was Bruddy, whispering my name from halfways up the ladder to the attic. I held my breath, thinking Loret must’ve said something to him. The ladder creaked. He was coming up. “What is it?” I whispered back loudly, hoping not to wake Josie. “There’s someone come to see you.” I sprang upwards. “Who is it?” “A woman.”

A woman. Throwing back the covers, I pulled on my housecoat and crept down the ladder. A low murmur sounded from Fonse’s and Loret’s room as I passed by, and then Mudder’s and Fudder’s, and I sensed the entire household awake, listening to hear who was visiting me in the middle of the night—and why. Perhaps it was Aunt Drucie. Perhaps something had happened to Doctor Hodgins … Hurrying into the kitchen, I stopped and placed my hand to my heart. It was Mrs. Ropson.

My mouth dropped and I felt the blood leave my soul. Something had happened to Sid. And it was his dying wish that she come and tell me. I must’ve gone faint, for Bruddy quickly led me to a chair besides the table, where Mrs. Ropson was sitting. She was wearing a black cape, with the hood barely resting on the back of her head, and her black gloved hands clutched around each other in a claw-like grasp. Her eyes were sunken black holes in the gaunt light of the oil lamp, and the wrinkles on her face heavily shadowed. And if it weren’t for the quivering of her mouth and the glistening of what could very well have been a tear trickling down her cheek, she would’ve far more resembled the jackdaw than the reverend had that time he made off with Josie.

Clutching my arms around myself, I gave a small nod and waited for her to speak. She tilted her head to look at Bruddy, and I saw the oldness around her eyes as the light from the lamp shone into them.

“Leave us, Bruddy,” I said, and grasped my hands in my lap to keep them from shaking. Bruddy reluctantly walked out of the room. Her lips quivered as she watched him go, and it felt as if she was still wrestling with herself as to the wisdom of making such a journey, yet here she was suddenly in front of me, still not having come to a decision.