Kit's Law (42 page)
“Is it God you’ve come to visit?” he asked.
I took a deep sigh, then sank down on the altar steps.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
Doctor Hodgins came the rest of the way down the aisle and sank down on the step besides me. We sat in silence for some time.
“Might just as well have begged him to come back,” I said, finally, “for all the good I’m doin’. I swear to God, the way I keep listenin’ to the wind, I’m as bad as you for watchin’ the waves.” My voice caught and I laid my cheek on Doctor Hodgins’s shoulder, breathing deeply of his warm, familiar smell, allowing the few tears I had left to seep down my face. “I don’t know where all the water comes from,” I sobbed, “I’ve cried so much.”
“It’ll get better.”
“I know. It already has—sometimes. It’s just that … sometimes … ” I faltered and took a deep breath. “This mornin’ I heard Josie up choppin’ wood. It’s the first time she’s chopped wood since Shine … and I thought … ”
“Shh, it’s all right. These things will happen.”
“Sometimes I think back on how happy we were, just running up and down the gully—it don’t seem real that I ever felt that happy.”
“You’ll feel it again, life’s like that, patched with moments. Damned if I know why we expect to be happy all the time,” he went on, still rocking me. “Even when we were youngsters with everything being handed to us, we were never happy, always wanting more and bigger. But, there’s more than happy, Kit. There’s peace. And pride. And those things measure good. You must feel proud, knowing you walked away from what you wanted most in the world, all for a greater thing. There’s not lots who’ve shown your courage, Kittens, and you’re hardly more than a girl yet.” He rocked some more, then, kissing the top of my head, held me away from him.
“You’ve done Lizzy proud,” he whispered, smiling into my eyes. “Real proud. And it’ll be a blessed day when I’m called out to the gully again, in the middle of the night, to bring another Pitman into the world.”
I laid my face upon his shoulder, allowing him to rock me some more. The shaft of sunlight struck through one of the windows, and I managed a bit of a smile as I watched it broaden, catching zillions of dust motes in its ray as it crept up over the aisle and shrouded me in its warmth.
I
F YOU WERE TO PERCH ATOP A TREE
on Fox Point and look down, you would see a thin sliver of ice glazing the gully’s brook as it suckles its way down to the seashore. Flanking the gully’s sides are withered mats of timothy grass, struck down by a sudden frost and scented with a brew of wet ground, burning birch and fresh-cut sawdust. To the side of the weatherbeaten shack squat on the hillside besides the gully is a towering woodpile of fresh-sawed logs. And standing next to the woodpile is Josie, grunting loudly, her long red hair streaming around her face as she swings an axe into a birch junk resting sideways on the chopping block.
And if you were to hop onto a windowsill and look inside the house, you would see me, Kit, my fine yellow hair tucked back into a hairnet, humming softly as I check the lids on a row of preserving jars, still wet with steam and with a pink froth bubbling a quarter of an inch above the red berries inside. A sharp whistle cuts through the air and I run to the window, shielding my eyes from the sun as I look up over the bank to the road. A man with a thick, woolly beard gracing his chin treads slowly down over the bank. Josie drops the axe and stares. The man watches her, then lifts a piece of birch rind, taut between his forefingers and thumbs, to his lips and pierces the air with another ear-splitting whistle. Josie barks out a crazy laugh and charges towards him. Lifting back her fist, she reams it into his belly, and bounds down over the gully laughing wildly. He staggers after her, half-bent over, clutching his stomach, a grimace distorting his face.
He straightens up as I step off the stoop and start walking towards him, my arms held out before me. Tears wet his eyes and his hands tremble as he reaches for me. Choking back sobs, I embrace my brother who has come home.
A Penguin Readers Guide
Kit’s Law
An Interview with Donna Morrissey
ABOUT THE BOOK
The people of Haire’s Hollow, a remote outport in 1950s Newfoundland, can be as tough as the landscape, but no one proves tougher than Kit Pitman.
Fourteen-year-old Kit has never had it easy. She’s an outsider— the fatherless gully girl with a tramp for a mother. Her ferocious but loving grandmother, Nan, has died, leaving Kit to deal with her mother, Josie, and mind their small home in an isolated corner of the coastal community.
Josie’s an impossible woman-child, prone to violent outbursts and to running off with every man who’s out to sexually exploit her. What’s worse, Kit’s seen her with Shine, the drunken bootlegger who’s already believed to have murdered a man and who continues to threaten the villagers. If Reverend Ropson, with his talk of God and sin and damnation, discovers Josie spending time with Shine, he’ll be quick to ship Josie to an asylum and Kit to an orphanage.
Yet Kit finds small joys in her difficult life and some kindness in her community. There’s the gully itself—a place far removed from nosy neighbours, where Kit can hear Nan through the rush of the wind. There’s Doctor Hodgins, who, as Kit’s confidant and staunch protector following Nan’s death, is determined to keep Kit and Josie from being torn apart. There’s fresh fish and truckloads of wood from Old Joe, and unseen neighbours who drop off brin bags full of vegetables. And there’s Sid, the reverend’s son and an outsider in his own right.
Sent to the gully to chop wood and to act as the reverend’s spy, Sid soon worms his way into both Josie’s and Kit’s heart. He makes Josie laugh and makes Kit feel as though things might be okay—until bad luck, fate, God’s divination—whatever it is—tests Kit in ways she could never have imagined.
Kit’s Law
, Donna Morrissey’s atmospheric first novel, won the Canadian Booksellers Association Libris Award, the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, and the American Library Association’s Alex Award. It’s been compared to E. Annie Proulx’s
The Shipping News
and to the writing of Thomas Hardy, but
Kit’s Law
is a completely fresh story of Newfoundland. Drawing from her own upbringing in The Beaches, a small outport not unlike Haire’s Hollow, Morrissey deftly guides readers through life in an isolated outport, domestic violence, first love, murder, and the nuances of God’s law. Here we find old-fashioned values set against raunchy realities, God-fearing people with sinful secrets, and a host of characters you’ll love, hate, and remember.
AN INTERVIEW WITH DONNA MORRISSEY
Q:
Kit’s Law
was a huge success and a first novel. In reviews, it drew comparisons to Annie Proulx, Thomas Hardy, even Charles Dickens—how did this affect you as a writer?
No doubt they were heady compliments, but I’d already found my “voice,” so it didn’t affect my writing in any way. It certainly looks good as a blurb on the back of my novels, for which I am immensely grateful. I believe, too, it may help my agent when she’s gathering material to promote international sales …
Q:
It also won a number of awards—the 2000 Canadian Booksellers Association Libris Award, the Winifred Holtby Prize—and was shortlisted for the Chapters/ Books in Canada First Novel Award. Why do you think it drew such an incredible response?
I think Kit’s that archetypal orphan found in all of us, which makes it easy then for people to relate to her.
Q:
I think everyone who reads
Kit’s Law
falls for Kit. Where did she come from? What shaped her in your mind?
When I first left the outports for more largely populated centres, such as St. John’s, Toronto, and Vancouver, I felt very self-conscious of my accent, of the way people responded to it, of the attitudes and ridiculous belief systems the rest of Canada held towards Newfoundlanders. Actually, the greatest stigma came from the larger areas in Newfoundland itself. They really gave us “baywops” a rough time—it’s funny now, but as a teenager, I crippled beneath it. When I wrote the character Kit, I drew deeply from those feelings of rejection and the stigma of the stereotype.
Q:
Unlike Kit, you left your small community in The Beaches, Newfoundland, when you were a teenager. Do you ever imagine what your life might have been like had you stayed?
It doesn’t take much imagination … I simply look to my cousins who never left, and there it is … a sea-front house fully paid for, couple of robust kids, cabin down the shore, deep-freeze full of game … shikes, is it too late to go back …??
