Kit's Law (6 page)

“So’s what’s the good of that?” Maisie Pynn sung out, coming up behind me and Nan, jiggling a squirming youngster on one hip. “If they did put him in jail for chewin’ off Jimmy’s ear, he’d only be out again afore winter’s out, shootin’ up the place.”

“Well, yes, if he gets back out,” said Old Joe, swinging himself onto the wharf and excitedly turning to face everyone. “But that’s not what they’re figurin’ on. See, it’s like this: if they can get Shine behind bars, then anybody that seen him killin’ Rube might get the courage to come forward and testify. Then, they can keep Shine in jail for good.”

“Well, if ye hadda come forward about him chewin’ off Jimmy’s ear, he’d already be in jail,” said Nan.

“Heh, Lizzy, there was more talk come outta that than good, for sure,” said Old Joe, “but it don’t matter about any of it no more ’cuz Shine’s gone.”

“Shine’s gone?!” muttered one of the fishers.

“Where’d he go?” asked Maisie.

“Hell’s blazes, for all I know,” exclaimed Old Joe. “He’s gone—that’s the main thing. The Mounties was out from Deer Lake last night and asked me if I knowed if Shine was makin’ moonshine somewheres around here. I ain’t never seen his camp, so I took ’em down to Mope’s shack to get Mope to tell ’em, because for sure Mope knows; Shine’s been keepin’ him drunk the past month to keep him quiet about seein’ him chewin’ off Jimmy’s ear. Anyway,” Old Joe give a gummy grin, winking at me as he seen me standing next to Nan, and went on with his story. “See, Mope’s just as scared of the Mounties as he is of Shine, and when he seen them comin’ through the woods, well, sir, he starts quiverin’ and shakin’ all over, with his eyes bulgin’ out of his scrawny little head and then, one of the Mounties says, ‘Mope, if you’ll tell us who makes the moonshine, we won’t put you in jail.’ And Mope goes runnin’ off down through the woods and out on the beach and everything was black as pitch with the moon shinin’ on the water, and Mope points up to the moon and says, ‘Up there, sir, is your man; it’s God that makes the moon shine.’”

Everybody burst out laughing, Old Joe the loudest.

“Was he drunk?” a fisher asked.

“Drunk?” Old Joe managed to get out between guffaws. “Sir, there was a stink a spirits comin’ off him that could’ve addled the heads of a cackle of saints.”

Another burst of laughing and Nan fair stomped her foot.

“Be the Jesus, ye’ll be laughin’ tomorrow when Shine gets drunk and takes his gun to shootin’ up the place, agin.”

“He won’t—I told ye, he’s gone,” sung out Old Joe. “When we left Mope on the beach and walked back up through the woods, we happened across Shine’s still. The Mounties blowed it up. And this morning when Sim and Jir went by checkin’ their snares, they heard Shine roarin’ through the woods like a cut bear. And now, he’s gone. I just went by his camp; nothin’ left but dog shit.”

“Nothin’ wrong with that, sir,” Old Joe’s brother said, standing his wiry self alongside Old Joe. “As long as he’s gone.”

“Aye. Gone to torture some other poor martles,” Nan said, gripping me by the arm and marching back off the wharf. “He’ll be back, mark my words,” she called out over her shoulder. “And it’ll be someone else that’ll pay for your cowardice.”

“Now, now, Lizzy,” Old Joe called cajolingly after Nan, but the rest of his words were lost as Maisie and everyone else took up in agreement or disagreement of Nan’s prophecy, and Nan kept walking straight ahead down the road to the gully, me tight by her side, and sputtering crossly about the lily-livered souls of timid men.

P
ARTRIDGEBERRY
P
ATCH

T
HE NEXT MORNING
N
AN WAS
up banging a wooden split on the side of the stove, yelling for us to get up; the frost was light on the ground and the time was right for picking the partridgeberries on her secret partridgeberry patch. “Not goin’,” mumbled Josie from beneath her feather pillow. “You’s goin’, whether you wants to or not,” Nan hollered, clanging the split louder. “Now haul your lazy arse outta bed and get dressed. Get up, Kit, get up; I got the porridge made.” I groaned, my feet hitting the cold canvas floor, and quickly skimmed on a pair of tights and a pair of slacks. There was no arguing with Nan when it come time to pick the partridgeberries, and even Josie, despite the arguing coming through her room door, stomped around, hauling on socks and sweaters. “Hurry on and eat,” Nan ordered as we walked sleepily into the kitchen and sat before the two bowls of porridge she had laid, steaming, on the table. “We wants to get goin’ afore anyone comes nosin’ around. Be the Jesus, they’d be hidin’ in the trees for a chance to get at my patch. Jose, how many more spoons of sugar you goin’ to put in them oats? Mother of Mary, you could sweeten a bucket of black tea with the sugar you got in them oats.”

“I don’t like black tea, you go get black tea,” Josie said loudly, glaring at Nan as she dumped another spoonful of sugar into her bowl.

“I said put that sugar down,” Nan all but roared, lifting the rifle off its hook on the wall and slinging its strap over her shoulder. “Where’d I put them bullets, Kit? I’d like to get a couple of partridges today, but I allows if anybody hears me shootin’, they’ll make it a fine excuse to follow the shots and come lookin’ with the guise of worryin’ about me. Be the Jesus, you can’t fart around here without them crawlin’ up your hole to have a look. Where’s them bullets? Anybody see them bullets? Hurry up, hurry up, we’re losin’ the day.”

The sun crept up over the eastside hills, its rays scarcely touching the quilted leaves that were still fixed to the trees as we bundled out the door, weighed down with buckets, backpacks and the loaded rifle. Nan sniffed at the frost in the air to figure its temperature, while her eyes scanned the road from Haire’s Hollow, then swept down over the gully and the wind-driven sea, checking for snoopers.

“Follow ahead, Jose,” she called out, “and don’t ramble too far in front. I don’t wanna have to go searchin’ for you, this day.”

“Don’t wanna go berrypickin’, don’t wanna go berrypickin’,” Josie kept muttering, cutting up to the mouth of the gully and heading across the meadow. I followed behind, the heat from the Thermos of tea inside my backpack like a hot sun burning through my skin. The Queen Anne’s lace, knee-high with the grass, were wheat-brown beds of fluff, stilled beneath the thin sliver of frost that veiled them.

“You sure it’s the right frost?” I called over my shoulder to Nan.

“You can tell by the way it creeps up the window in the mornin’,” said Nan. “When it’s clear like ice and ribbed on the bottom—that’s the killin’ frost. Your berries are dead. Good for moose and caribou pickin’s. Now, there’s them that picks ’em anyway, and that’s why their jam is as tart as a whore’s arse. It’s when the frost is still white, more snow-like than ice, that’s when you picks ’em, that’s when they’re the plumpest from their summer juices. Now, too, there’s them that picks ’em too early, and their jam is just as tart because the worm is still inside the berry and gets cooked into their jam.”

“Margaret Eveleigh said there’s no worms in berries.”

“Bah, Margaret Eveleigh!” Nan snorted, her bucket clanging against a tree trunk as we left the meadow and fought our way through the woods. “What would that little snot know about pickin’ berries? For sure her mother’s jam is the worst I ever put in me mouth. Pig’s mash! And that’s why none of ’em got any berry patches left any more and schemes to find mine; becuz they cooks the berry before the worm gets a chance to get out and plant their next year’s pickin’s.”

“Margaret said worms don’t have mouths to carry seeds.”

“Oh, and is that what Miss Hollywood Star says,” Nan said, panting heavily and dropping the bucket at her feet. “Well you tell her that the worm is the bleedin’ seed, and when it crawls into the ground, it plants itself, and there you got next year’s berry. And if her mother and everybody else caught on to that, I wouldn’t be the only one left with a berry patch, and them nosyin’ up me hole to find it.”

Nan kicked the bucket to one side and sat down on a rock, resting her back against a white birch. “Sit for a spell, I catches me breath,” she said. “Sit down, Jose, we might see a partridge. Jose! Jose!” she bellowed as Josie kept charging through the woods. “Sit down, we looks for a partridge.” Nan watched till Josie kicked the leaves off a rock and squatted down, before hoisting the gun off her shoulder and resting the butt betwixt her breasts. “Margaret Eveleigh, bah!” she went on, quietening her voice and aiming the barrel towards the bush in front of us. “It’s the timin’, Kittens. You got to wait for the right timin’, and it ain’t always as easy as lookin’ at the frost on the window. Look at your poor mother over there. She haven’t got the sense God give a nit, but, be the Jesus, she knows when to lit out a door when she’s tryin’ to get her own way with something. And she knows how to back down from a fight, even when she’s the one that started it. And that’s what the likes of Margaret Eveleigh won’t ever know, when to keep her trap shut, and when to keep it open. Shhh … ” Nan grabbed a tighter hold of the gun and squinted hard into the bush. She looked over to make sure Josie was still sitting there, and cocked the trigger. A twig snapped and something brown and furry appeared through the leaves.

An ear-splitting crack sounded through the air as Nan pulled the trigger.

“Aagghh!” she bawled out as the gun jumped and the barrel slammed against her collarbone.

“Aagghh!” I screamed as Pirate leaped out of the woods, meowing like a fire-singed demon, and tore back across the path we had just come.

“That’s Pirate!” Josie barked, coming to her feet and pointing to where Pirate disappeared through the underbrush.

“Hell’s tarnation, what’s the cat doin’ out in the middle of the woods!” Nan roared, hauling me back down as I made to run after Pirate.

“That’s Pirate! That’s Pirate!” Josie kept yelling, stomping back towards Nan, still pointing after the cat.

“I knows it’s Pirate, Jose,” Nan cried out, slinging the gun back over her shoulder and shoving herself back up on her feet. “I can tell a cat from a bleedin’ partridge, now get on ahead, else there’ll be no time to pick berries on this day. My gawd,” she muttered, picking up her bucket as Josie started back through the woods again, with me following, looking over my shoulder after Pirate. “You’d think I killed him, the way you’s are all gettin’ on. What in hell’s flames is a cat doin’ out here, anyway?”

“He follows me,” I said.

“Heh, he won’t be followin’ you much after this,” Nan said. “It’s like I said now; timin’s everything, but sometimes, ’tis only the hand of God that can save ye.”

Another half-hour walk and we broke onto the barrens, a rolling land that began with the edge of the cliffs looking out over the bay and rolled inland as far as the eye could see. Bereft of trees from a fire near on twenty years ago, it was wide open to the wind and fog, and a hunter’s nightmare on snow-drifted days or fog-blanketed evenings, with not even a stump to mark a path or point to the edge of the cliffs. And there were stories aplenty about berrypickers getting lost or near falling over the cliffs on bright, sun-lit days from being hunched over, picking berries and not watching where they were wandering. Nan’s partridgeberry patch was another half-hour’s walk over the barrens, along the cliff, and spreading down over a grade that dipped about halfways down to the sea. With a bit of skill and a good pair of boots, it was possible to climb the rest of the way down the cliff and come out onto the beach.

“Your grandfather and me use to climb down to the beach and build a fire for our cup of tea, years ago when he was alive, God bless him,” Nan said after we had picked the firm, red berries for a while and was taking a rest, leaning our backs against a matted mound of rocks. “We use to bring her with us,” Nan murmured, gazing after Josie as she wandered around the back of a knoll, her hair as red as the moss that capped it. “Like the goat, she was, climbin’ over them cliffs.” Nan turned her face to the wind, listening as the gulls screamed out over the surf. I watched as she closed her eyes and her jaw slackened. It was what she liked doing best, she’d often say, sitting on the sun-splotched barrens with the moss crusty beneath her feet and wild with purple, reds and browns. And on sunny days like today, she once said, up here on the cliffs and with no trees breaking the sight, the air was so blue that it felt like she was living amongst sky.

“Nan,” I said after she had dozed for a bit and was snorting herself awake again, “do you think they’ll try and put me in the orphanage, agin?”

Nan sat up straight.

“Be the Jesus, Kit, is they startin’ on you in school, agin?”

“No, Nan.”

“Tell me, now … ”

“Noo, Nan.”

“Is you worryin’?”

I shrugged and plucked a handful of berries from a bush nearby.

“Now, you listen to me, Kittens,” Nan said, resting her hands on her knees and leaning sideways to see into my face. “As long as I walks the face of this earth, no one got the guts to come after you, agin. I met ’em at the door, I did. And it wouldn’t everyone, just May Eveleigh and Jimmy Randall, and the reverend and his wife. I bade ’em to come in, I did, and pointed out to ’em where to sit. They sat. And when they was finished tellin’ me what they come for, I went into the room and come out with you wrapped in a blanket in one arm, and the rifle loaded and cocked in the other. Be the Jesus, they never had much to say after that. One be one, they rose up and walked out, the reverend first, then his Missus, and May, and Jimmy Randall last. And if it wouldn’t for throwin’ a fright into you, I believe I would’ve put a bullet in Jimmy Randall’s leg that day, ’cuz the ones from away, they got no sense of how things are around here. But, when your own kind turns on you, that’s what turned my stomach that day, and been turnin’ me stomach every bleedin’ day since, and they knows that me finger itches to pull a trigger every time I walks past their judgin’, shameless faces.”

I fingered the berries that were resting on the palm of my hand, hearing Nan’s breathing over the sound of the wind and the surf.