Kit's Law (4 page)

“I’s not a squall of wind! You’s a squall of wind!” snapped Josie.

“The Lords have mercy, what I got to put up with!” cried Nan.

“What you got to put up with! What you got to put up with?”

“What I got to put up with? The likes of you talkin’ back, is what I got to put up with! And me head’s splittin’ from that Serpent’s hissin’ still swarmin’ through me ears. Be the Jesus, Jose, if you ever gets up and runs outta church again because a him and his finger-pointin’, I’ll rake the hair off your head, haulin’ you back. Now for God’s sake go and make sure you got enough wood cleaved for the night.” Nan flopped down in her rocking chair by the stove, her face red from all of the walking and talking she was after doing this day.

“And where you been, my girl?” she asked as her eyes lit on me. “Fry up that bit of fish I got cleaned for supper, and you can take that scowl off your face because if the wind changes, you won’t be a pretty sight, and you’re goin’ to that bonfire, pretty or no pretty.”

I scowled harder and, snatching the knife off the bread-box, hacked the head off the fish lying across the cutting board. The wind never changed, yet the scowl stayed and grew deeper as we finished supper and the sun began to drop behind the hills. Belching loudly, Nan went into her room to take off her church dress and to wash up. Coming back out, she hauled on her coat, bawled out to Josie, who was napping on the daybed, to chop some wood for the night and pointed me out the door before her.

G
UTTIN’
F
ISH

I
T WAS DUSK BY THE TIME WE
got back to Haire’s Hollow. Shoving open the door to May Eveleigh’s store, Nan stepped inside and squinted through the bright white light thrown off from the two lanterns that started swinging on their ceiling hooks from the sudden gust of air. The store was empty except for May Eveleigh, tall and thinner than a reed, weighing out flour on a set of scales that sat on one end of the counter. She squared back her shoulders as Nan slammed the door shut, sending the shadows from the swinging lanterns ricocheting wildly across the shelves of canned food behind her. “How you doin’, maid?” Nan asked, as she trod across the floor, wheezing loudly, and leaned across the counter in front of May. “I’m fine, Lizzy,” said May, turning back to the bag of flour she was weighing and rolling down its flap. “Take your time, take your time,” said Nan, sticking her hand into the glass candy jar sitting on the counter and pulling out a handful of hard green candies. She popped one into her mouth and one into mine as May Eveleigh marked a price on the bag and laid it on the shelf behind her.

“Now, then, what can I get you this evenin’?” May asked, brushing flour dust off the front of her dress.

“A cut of cheese, for sure, maid. Kit, here, can’t do her homework unless she’s nibbling on a bit of cheese. Heh, I tells her she’d be mistook for a mouse if she weren’t so pretty and doing so smart in school.”

May gave me a tight smile, her eyes sticking to the spit glistening on my bottom lip from where the hard green candy had set my mouth to watering. Her hair was pulled back in a bun at her nape, showing up the brown spots dotting her temples and the hollows of her sunken, narrow cheeks. “Widow’s spots!” Nan had whispered to me once after May had grumbled about Nan’s store bill not getting paid on account of her government money getting lost in the mail. “Grows on the face of them that don’t got a lick of charity in their bones.”

“Will that be all, Lizzy?”

“My, my, I can’t think,” Nan grumbled. “Kitty Kat, do you remember anything else I needs?”

“A reel of white sewin’ cotton, bit of salt pork and a bag of marshmallows.”

“My, my, the mind on that one, twelve years old.” Nan preened as May started gathering up the order. “And I only muttered the words under me breath this mornin’.” She leaned forward to say something more as May shoved the order into a bag, but was interrupted by the door swinging open behind us, and the ringlet-haloed Margaret, May’s girl, come prancing in, the lanterns swaying overhead. “Well now, isn’t she the one!” Nan breathed. “And that red hair— sure, just like my Josie’s. Landsakes, they could be blood.”

Margaret halted in her tracks, her eyes widening in horror.

“It’s not red!” she gritted.

“It’s auburn,” May said, throwing Nan a frightful look of her own as she started flicking through the stack of credit books sitting on the counter, looking for Nan’s.

“All the same to these old eyes, maid,” Nan said, holding out a hard green candy to Margaret. “Here, my dear, want one? Sure, you’re in the same grade as Kittens, ain’t you?”

Margaret looked scornfully at the candy and, glaring at me, screwed up her nose.

“Well!” Nan sucked in her breath, scandalized.

“Something wrong?” May asked, pulling out Nan’s book.

“Your girl just mocked me.”

“I don’t look like no Jose Pitman,” Margaret sung out.

“Margaret!” May scolded. “Here.” She took a bag of marshmallows off the shelf and tossed them on the counter to Margaret. “Now, go on down to the fire.”

“First I wants a bag of candies,” Margaret demanded of her mother.

“Mercy,” Nan said under her breath.

“Lizzy just offered you a candy; you didn’t want it. Now, go on. Right now!” May said, her voice rising threateningly.

“I wants my own candies,” Margaret yelled, a sideways glare at Nan. “You said I could.”

“Margaret … !”

“You said!” Margaret insisted.

May give a fitful laugh.

“So I did,” she said, ignoring a sniff from Nan. Reaching inside the jar, she took out a handful of the hard green candies and, rolling them inside a small brown paper bag, tossed them along the counter to Margaret. “Now, get on. And mind you don’t get sick on marshmallows.”

Smiling brightly, Margaret sallied past me and Nan and ran for the door, muttering something under her breath.

“What’d you say?” Nan roared, shoving herself off from the counter and turning to face Margaret.

“Noth-
theeng
!” said Margaret grandly, taking care to stress the “th” sound the way the ones from away did. Screwing up her nose at me again, she flounced out the door, then slammed it.

“Well, sir!” Nan half whispered, turning back to May as the lanterns swung wildly.

“Must’ve been a fight she and Kit had at school,” May said. “Is there anything else you need, Lizzy?”

“Humph! If there was, it’s gone outta me mind, now,” Nan said crossly. “Can’t says I remembers a time when one of mine mocked me; still for all, Jose is only half there. But it’s like they says, now,” she said, leaning across the counter towards May and dropping her voice as if she was parting with a mighty secret, “you never believes of your own what you believes of others. C’mon, Kittens, afore you makes me eat my words.” Wrapping an arm around her grocery bag, she pushed away from the counter and tramped heavily towards the door. “See you at the card game, May, maid,” she hollered, as I skitted through the door ahead of her.

“Spotty-faced old bag,” she sputtered, slamming the door as Margaret had done, and setting off down the road in the growing dark. “Be the Jesus, you don’t have to look far down that one’s gullet to see what’s in it. Nothin’! Soul as parched as a sun-dried sponge! Here’s your marshmallows, Kit,” she said, digging into the bag. “After you’s finished with the fire, come on over to the church basement and we walks home, together.”

“Can’t I just go home from the fire?”

“Why? So’s you can sneak off home the second me back is turned? You’s goin’ to that fire, girl, and say no more.

C’mon, I goes with you.”

“No, Nan, I’ll go,” I said quickly.

“And I’m goin’ to make sure you do,” she huffed. “C’mon, c’mon, the card game’s startin’.”

Orange-flamed smoke tunnelled along the beach from the bonfire, and every youngster in Haire’s Hollow was shrieking and running through it. Excepting for Margaret Eveleigh and her best friends. They were all crowding around the far side, roasting marshmallows on skinned alder sticks, and looking snootily at the younger ones running around. One of the older boys, big, blond-haired Josh Jenkins, showing off the way he always did around Margaret, grabbed the stumped end of a chopped spruce from the pile of boughs nearby and rolled it onto the fire, nearly smothering it. Thick white smoke poured up through the branches, and Josh started bouncing the spruce, so’s to fan the flames beneath.

Suddenly, Shine’s white crackie dog appeared out of the smoke, yapping crazily at the fire. Looming behind him was Shine, his whiskered face as black as the night, and his eyes flickering red in the firelight. The youngsters stopped their running and stared in surprise. Then Shine grabbed a young boy by the ankles, and whilst everyone watched in stunned horror, he held him upside down and started swinging him towards the smoking boughs. A shriek sounded from the boy, and with that, the rest of the youngsters started back to life and began running and shrieking up over the bank onto the road, Margaret and her friends amongst them.

“Mother of the Blessed Virgin, he’s gone mad this time,” Nan cried out, shoving the bag of groceries into my arms and lunging towards Shine. Grabbing hold of the back of his shirt, she started shaking him. “Put him down, put him down,” she hollered as Shine held the struggling youngster even closer to the fire. A flame shot up through the boughs, frighteningly close to the boy’s fear-stricken eyes, and he screamed louder.

“I said put him down! Put him down!” roared Nan, yanking harder on Shine’s shirt. The crackie come yapping and snapping at her ankles, and letting go of Shine, she lifted her foot and planked it in the dog’s belly, sending it tumbling backwards, howling. Dropping the youngster at Nan’s feet, Shine raised his hand in mock salute to the elders, who were by now running down over the bank with their youngsters half-hiding behind them.

“It’s the bitch he is,” Nan shouted, flailing her fist in Shine’s face. And he, grinning like the lunatic, backed his way into the tunnel of flaming white smoke after his dog.

Then everyone was crowding around Nan, and the youngster stopped crying as his mother swooped her arms around him, and the father, Jimmy Randall with the chewed-off ear, started shaking his fist and cursing Shine’s cowardly soul to hell. And then everyone was arguing and talking at the same time over how you couldn’t even let the youngsters go to a bonfire any more without worrying about them being killed, and how the Mounties was too God-damn scared to go after the likes of a murdering lunatic like Shine, and how it was left to women to save the youngsters, and God bless Lizzy Pitman’s heart for taking no heed of her own keeping, and saving young Teddy Randall from being roasted alive like a dried squid.

Then the smaller youngsters were ordered home for the night, while the bigger ones were allowed to stay out for a while longer with the fire, as long as they kept their eyes open and come yelling if Shine poked his black heart back amongst them. And then the men and women started back to their card game in one of the rooms in the three-room schoolhouse, and Nan, lifting the grocery bag out of my arms, clamped a tight grip onto my hand and brought me along with her.

“For sure the higher-ups might be comin’ after me tomorrow if I leaves her outside with Shine on the loose,” Nan said, taking her seat across from her partner, Old Joe, at one of the card tables, and dragging my chair in closer. “Still for all, their own is out gallivantin’,” she added a bit loud, glancing around at the other outporters taking their seats across from their partners at the half-dozen or so other tables scattered around the schoolroom.

“Heh, Lizzy, it’s a thing of the past. Kit’s too grow’d up now to be sent to some orphanage,” Old Joe replied, lifting off his cap and smoothing back his mat of curly grey hair, before tossing a deck of cards on the table.

“Thing of the past, me arse. If I was one to let others walk over me, they’d be out to me house in the morning with their fancy white gloves on … and that Jimmy, hah! Too bad Shine never chewed his bald face off!” Nan said, hauling in her chair and popping a hard green candy into my mouth. “Who we up against, first?”

“The reverend’s wife and May Eveleigh,” said Old Joe. “Now, Lizzy, don’t go gettin’ heated up,” he cautioned. “It’s not May and Mrs. Ropson who’s out terrorizin’.”

“Heh, not so’s anybody could understand it,” Nan said, rolling up her sleeves and grabbing up the card deck as their two opponents started walking skittishly towards them. “Have a seat, May, Missus,” she invited, dealing out a round, and scooping up her hand.

“Your bid, May,” said Old Joe as May and Mrs. Ropson sat down and pensively picked up their cards.

“I’ll pass,” said May, folding her hand and sitting poker-back straight on the edge of her chair. “Praise the Lord, if the Mounties hears about tonight, they might come out and haul Shine off.”

“If they can’t pin him for murder, they won’t pin him for foolin’ around with a youngster at a bonfire,” said Old Joe. “Pass me, too, Lizzy. You got a bid, Mrs. Ropson?”

“They can’t put a man in jail for murder without witnesses,” said Mrs. Ropson, carefully scrutinizing the faces around her before folding her cards. “I pass.”

“Twenty-five,” shouted Nan, tossing two cards to the wayside and leaning her face close up to Mrs. Ropson’s. “Shine wouldn’t be on the loose to murder anybody,” she shot out, “if others hadn’t been too cowardly to tell the Mounties about him chewin’ off ear lobes.”

“I thought it was only Mope that seen him chew off Jimmy’s ear,” said May.

“That’s right, it was only Mope,” said Old Joe. “And Mope’s always too drunk to remember anything the next day, we all knows that. What’s your trump, Lizzy?”

“Clubs,” said Nan. “Funny thing, sir,” she went on, dealing out fresh cards as everyone ditched their non-trumps, “how everyone knows how Shine was growlin’ and snarkin’ like a mangy dog when he was chewin’ Jimmy’s ear off, yet nobody was there to see it. How come we all knows he was snarkin’ and growlin’ if nobody was there and seen it? Here, Kittens.” Nan leaned forward and popped another candy into my mouth, getting herself a good view of Mrs. Ropson’s cards and the five of clubs that was sure to down her and Old Joe.