Kit's Law (11 page)

Margaret Eveleigh grabbed me by the arm and pointed to the window, while most everyone else, their hands clapped to their mouths to keep back their groans, whipped around to see if I was seeing my mother walking down the road and puking into her hair. Ordering everybody to be quiet, Mr. Haynes snatched the strap off his shoulder and cracked it across his desk. It was as if my mother heard the smack, because at that second she looked up, and seeing everyone looking out the window and laughing at her, she stopped retching and smiled back, wiping at her mouth with the back of her hand. Then, upon seeing Mr. Haynes looking out as well, she waved. Everyone busted their gut and Mr. Haynes walked savagely down the aisles, welting his belt across whichever desk was nearest to him. Blissfully, the bell rang for lunchtime. There was a stampede as everyone tried to be first one out the door, bursting to let go with their jeering and hooting. For me, it was a choice of hanging back with Mr. Haynes and his strap, or heading for the door with everyone else. I headed for the door.

Surprisingly, it was big, blond-haired Josh Jenkins that come out of it the worst. Gaming for Margaret’s attentions, he stuck his finger down his throat and let go with a stomach-curdling urge that succeeded nicely in getting the attention of Margaret’s best friends. But not Margaret! She was too intent on swooping down on me, a look of utter disgust marking her pretty pink cheeks, to notice Josh Jenkins. Only, I was spared on this day. Gaining more and more courage from the giggles of Margaret’s best friends and getting carried away with the spirit of the moment, Josh ran up behind her and, grabbing hold of her ringlets, buried another gutretching gag into the flaming red coils. All around, everyone hooted with laughter, and the younger ones, who had yet to suffer from Margaret’s personal persecutions, started circling around her, bravely chanting “Josie, Josie.”

Clawing back her ringlets from Josh’s fanned fingers, Margaret spun around as if she had been whipped. Raising her fist to his quickly sobering face, she screeched loud enough for all of Haire’s Hollow to hear, “You ever touch me again, pus-faced Jenkins, and I’ll have you jailed—you and your slouch of a father for all the credit he got in our store and can’t pay for.” Her face burning brighter than the look of fervour dying in Josh’s eyes, she caught sight of me trying to sneak off around the school, and swooped before me, a fury of red.

“Your mother’s a dirty, rotten tramp!” she screamed, both fists flailing. “She’s not fit to walk the roads. Do you hear me, Gully Tramp’s Girl?”

Escaping to the back of the school, I huddled down on a small, flat-topped rock and rested my back against the wall. It was where I sat most days during lunchtime and recess. No one else came back here, and it was warm, out of the wind and with the sun burning red on my eyelids. Only I felt cold this day, as cold as the morning Doctor Hodgins walked up the gully, on his way to St. John’s. I was surprised that I felt cold. Not even when I was racing down the gully, with my feet slipping over the ice-covered rocks and the wind licking over my face with the breath of a thousand icebergs, did I ever feel the cold, outdoors. But it must’ve been a real cold day. Shivering, I pulled open my lunch bag and took out the slice of partridgeberry bread. That was when I first noticed Sid.

He was in grade ten, a different classroom from mine, and didn’t hang around the schoolyard. He was the reverend’s son and was born and raised in Haire’s Hollow. But his mother saw to it that he never spent much time running around with the outport boys, keeping him home to help her on account of her being crippled all the time with arthritis, and sending him away to St. John’s in the summers with her cousin’s boys. He was nicknamed Mommy Suck. And when he did come out and about in the outport, he looked a sight with his puffed-up shoulders and poker-back walk. And the way he talked was more grand than the outporters, what with his mother, who was born and raised in St. John’s, making him pronounce his “th” sounds and saying “catch” not “ketch,” and “goodbye” not “see ya”—all which made for more name-calling at school, with “Dead Sid” being the most popular some days, and “Sid the Kid” on others. And what with the black pressed jacket and white shirts he always wore, and the small, hardcover books that looked like prayer books that he always carried around in his pockets, he looked more like a preacher going off to church than a young fellow going off to school.

On this day, when he came around the corner of the school to where I was sitting, he was pale as anything, with fleshy red lips, squinty eyes that looked like blue dots behind his black-framed glasses, and his skin whiter than flour. His hair was yellow, the colour of mine, and he was looking at me the way he looked at everybody—his mouth partly opened and his lips working as if he was wanting to protest about something, but hadn’t yet figured out what that something was.

I didn’t want Mister Sidney Kidney staring at me, so I closed my eyes and pretended he wasn’t there. When I looked up, he was gone. Along with everyone else in the schoolyard.

I began to breathe more easily in the silence. When I first started coming to school, it used to hurt my ears with everyone seemingly talking at once. Sid was to say later that it was because I had spent so much time alone in the gully, that I had gotten too used to the quiet. Funny, but I’d never thought of the gully as being quiet, what with the wind scratching the trees, and the water pounding upon the rocks, and Josie barking, and Pirate meowling, and Nan bawling out. And in the evenings when the seagulls all fought for roosting space in the tucamores around the shore, they made more noise than a thousand schools at recess time. Yet it all seemed to go together, somehow—the wind and the sea and the birds and Nan. Sitting there on the rock behind the school, I heard nothing but the occasional raised voice of some youngster tardying on his way home, and the joints in the schoolhouse squeaking from the frost. An empty, churning feeling weakened my stomach, in much the same way as it did on that first day of school when Nan left me alone at the schoolyard gate. Shucking my slice of bread to the crows, I got up and walked home.

T
HE
R
EVEREND’S
P
LEDGE

J
OSIE WAS IN BED WHEN
I
GOT HOME.
Burning the last of the split wood to boil the kettle, I made us a pot of tea. The smell of vomit greeted me as I entered her room. I stood for a moment, staring down at her stiffened red strands splayed out on her pillow, and the glazed look in her eyes as she stared back at me. “Doctor Hodgins,” she said hoarsely. “He’s still in St. John’s,” I said. She winced, swallowing against the rawness of her sore throat, then turned her cheek onto her dirtied hair. I thought of Nan, pointing the dripping rag towards me and hollering how it was a God-given right to be clean, but how He left it for us to do some of the work, and how she might be a tramp, but she was better than them that made her so. But the chanting of Margaret and the others in the schoolyard sounded over the rest of what Nan had said, and laying her cup on the small, wooden table besides her bed, I backed out of the room. She watched me, a glimmer of yellow igniting in her eyes. Turning my back, I left her room and wandered into my own. Climbing into bed I stared dismally at Old Joe’s orange speckled starfish nailed to my door, and spent the rest of the day with my head buried beneath my pillow.

The next morning I knew I should’ve went to school. But, I never. Instead, I tackled the axe and the birchwood Old Joe had dropped off the day before. And with waddles of birch rind and bark, and a few splits of wood, I got a fire going long enough to fry up some potatoes and eggs. Josie was still sleeping, so I laid her plate next to the cold cup of tea she hadn’t touched from the day before, and went back to my room. Pulling on one of Nan’s old, flannelette nightdresses that hung around me like a tent and had a ragged edge around its tail from where Nan had ripped off a piece to make a good cleaning rag, I crawled back into bed—my throat sore, my bones aching and my feet knobs of ice from standing on the freezing canvased floor. Hoping Aunt Drucie wouldn’t show up, I shoved my feet down to the warm spot beneath where Pirate was snoozing, and after eating the eggs and potatoes, pulled out the box of coloured glass from beneath the bed. Sorting the little robin’s feathers to one corner, I picked out the bigger pieces of glass and idly lined them up against the window to catch the light.

It was a bright, sunny day, and cold clear up to the sun. And the sea was blue-black against the white of the snow. Closing one eye, I peered down over the gully through the largest piece of yellow. It tinted golden the wings of the seagulls gliding over the sea, but for the first time that I could remember, I took no heart from my childish game, and flicked the pieces of glass back into the box.

Around lunchtime, I heard Josie get out of bed, her step slow, heavy, its quickness buried along with Nan. Worried that she might go into Haire’s Hollow again, I jumped out of bed and ran to the kitchen window. She was ploughing her way through the snow down into the gully. I watched her for a minute, her body heaving from side to side like a wearied old woman whose thoughts were so burdened that likely the snow was hardening and turning to ice beneath her feet. Pulling my coat on over Nan’s nightdress and shoving my feet into a pair of rubber boots, I followed her.

It had snowed heavily during the night, and the drifts were up to my waist. Flapping my arms to keep warm, I followed in her footsteps down the centre of the gully, the brook long since frozen and buried. It was easier walking along the beach, the sea having kept it clear of snow. Yet the wind was strongest, cutting tears out of my eyes as I walked along, heading for Crooked Feeder. I climbed on top of a snowbank just before I got to the brook, and stopped. She was hunched down by the half-frozen water, rocking back and forth, back and forth, the way that she had on the day of Nan’s passing. An easterly gust swept over me, its stinging coldness jarring a picture in my mind of her sitting in the rocking chair and rocking me all through the night. I thought to go over to where she was sitting. I shivered, and turning instead, I walked back up the beach.

I didn’t see the car parked by the side of the road on account of the snow being piled so high. Climbing over the edge of the gully, I walked back to the house and shuffled in through the door. There, my eyes widened in fright. Standing by the stove was the Reverend Ropson. He was dressed in black as he always was, with a flush of pink staining his hairless face, and his paltry blue eyes as cold as the stove he leaned against. In one fluid movement he was across the kitchen and standing in front of me, the coiled thrusting of his serpent’s head striking to within a hair’s width of mine.

“Where’s Drucie?” he half snarled, his whispering tone ricocheting round the house like a fiery wind.

I pressed back against the wall, fear rooting my feet to the floor.

“S-she’s sick.”

“And your mother?”

“Crooked Feeder.”

“What’s she doing down there?”

“N-nothin’.”

He stared me over, his nose wrinkling as if the sight of me was more than his stomach could take. Then something of a satisfied smile caught at his lips as he took in my unbuttoned coat, and oversized nightdress ripped up around the tail and wet from dragging in the snow, and my fingers red from the cold, and the snot oozing out of my nose.

“Your teacher is concerned,” he whispered severely, a thin smile marring his face. “He saw your mother sick yesterday, and now today you aren’t in school. I thought we’d have a little meeting to see what can be done. Come with me, and I’ll see to it that you’re taken care of.”

The knowing of just how the reverend meant to take care of me, and remembering that this time there was no Doctor Hodgins to stop him, jarred my rooted feet into action. I darted around him, heading for the hallway, but he clamped a hand onto my arm and yanked me back.

“No!” I screamed, kicking at his legs as he dragged me to the door. “It’s just a cold! It’s just a cold!”

“Quiet!” he snapped, dragging me kicking and screaming out of the house, and paying no more heed to my desperate cries than one would a vixen youngster. Grappling an arm around my waist, he half dragged, half carried me up over the snow-trenched path and onto the road by his car. Shoving me inside, he slammed the door shut against my flailing arms and legs and, scrambling round to the other side, quickly climbed in while I grasped desperately at the locked door handle.

“Sit back,” he ordered, clamping both hands on my shoulders and shoving me back against the seat. I kicked and screamed harder. Then the palm of his hand smashed against the side of my face with the force of Mr. Haynes’s belt, startling me into stunned silence. Revving up the motor, he speeded down the road, the car slipping and sliding, and sending me into another round of terror as I realized there was no escaping the moving car.

Twisting around, I flung my arms up over the back of the seat and scuffed my way up over. His fingers dug into my shoulders as he clawed me back down, but not before I saw Josie’s flaming red head poke up over the snowbank by the road. Screaming and kicking with another burst of vigour, I fought back the reverend’s arm holding me down, then gasped for breath as he hit the brakes, throwing me forward and slamming my head against the dash. The reverend cursed as we skidded out of control, and what with the smack to my head, and the car skidding from side to side, the queasy feelings that had been sitting in my stomach for the past two days erupted into a sour bile in my mouth and spewed out over the reverend’s feet and onto the fine yellow strands of my hair.

Queer enough, it wasn’t Josie’s walking past the school windows and vomiting into her hair that shot through my mind as I hung upside down in the car, puking, but Josh Jenkins and the flush of red riding up over his ears when Margaret Eveleigh shot off her mouth about his father’s unpaid store bill. And when the reverend slowed to a stop and got out of the car, cursing like no reverend man is supposed to curse, and climbed back in, dumping handfuls of snow into my face, I was already sitting back up and welcomed the sweet relief of the clean-smelling snow. And when we finally pulled up in front of the reverend’s house, and Sid opened the door to greet us, I was calm.