Kit's Law (14 page)

“Studyin’,” I said primly.

“What’re you studying?”

“Oh, English and stuff.”

“Hah, stuff! That’s what I like studying best. Stuff.”

Thinking he was making fun of me, I made to go inside.

“Hey, wait! Here!” he called out. “You forgot this.” He took a step closer, handing over the jug. “So, ah, what kind of stuff do you like best?” he asked as I ignored the jug and gave him a haughty look.

“If it’s fun-makin’ you come here to do, then you can just leave agin,” I said, preparing to dart inside.

“Fun-making! About stuff?” he asked incredulously, bringing the jug before his chest and clasping it with both hands. “I don’t fun-make about stuff. Leastways, not what I call stuff. Have you ever read about the man who tried to drink the ocean dry?”

I stood quiet.

“Well, he couldn’t do it,” he said, bending over and pouring what was left of the water over the back of his head.

“Why would he try?” I asked.

“Just to see if he could.”

“Sounds stupid.”

“Might be,” he said, flicking the water off his hair and pushing his glasses back up his nose. “Might be that if it could’ve been done, he would’ve done it.”

“That’s even more stupid,” I muttered, stepping back inside.

“Well, that’s the kind of stuff I study,” he called out before I had a chance to shut the door. “Things that don’t have reason until you attach reason to it.”

I slammed the door and went back to studying my catalogue. After a while, I managed to shut out the thud thud thud of the axe biting into the birch junks, and was dozing nicely when a loud yelp startled me to my feet. Dashing outside, I stood on the stoop and groaned. Sid was standing there, water dripping off his head and shoulders, and the galvanized water bucket, upside down by his feet. Bounding down over the gully was Josie, barking out her crazy laugh.

“Why’d she do that?” Sid growled, taking off his sloshed glasses and tossing them on top of his coat.

“Might be just to see if she could,” I say.

He looked at me with a scowl, then tore after her.

“You mightn’t want to do that,” I warned, but he was off and running, his gangling arms and legs fighting to plough through the deep snow.

It was a while later that they both trudged back up, him holding onto his ribs and walking with a slight limp, and her with water dripping out of her hair and wearing the dirty grin she use to give Nan any time she carried on inside the house and escaped the sting of Nan’s wet dishrag for having done so. For the rest of the afternoon that he stayed there splitting wood, she sat on the stoop watching him, barking out laughing at most anything he said to her, and winging snowballs past his ears whenever he sang out her name teasingly.

She took to sitting on the stoop each time he came, her head following the swinging of the axe as he hoisted it over his shoulder and swung it into a birch junk, and listening to each word he spoke as he kept up a steady stream of chatter.

“Birch is the best for splitting,” I’d hear him say from my spot by Nan’s room window. “For when the frost sets in, a baby can swing the axe and split the biggest, toughest junk in half with just one swing. Here, let’s see your swing,” he’d coax and she would snatch the axe out of his hand and start swinging every bit as good as him—and probably faster— while he sat back, rubbing a soothing thumb over his galled palms. “It just keeps you knowing that things aren’t always as hard as they might appear, sometimes. Wouldn’t you say so, Josie?” he’d say as he watched her slice the axe down through the biggest, knottiest junks.

She’d bark in agreement and it got so I could hear her laughing the second she spotted him walking down the gully. It seemed she never tired of listening to him talk and watching him swing that axe. And during those times when he’d nip a strip of birch rind taut between his thumbs and forefingers and blow on the edge of the rind, making a loud, shrill whistle, she’d squeal and press her hands to her ears, and chase him around and around the chopping block. Often, he’d whip around and, grabbing hold of her hair, tie it in a knot beneath her chin. Then he’d bolt for the gully with her after him like a surly dog, up and down the gully till she’d finally catch him and wrestle him into a snowbank in a different kind of knot.

“Doesn’t it bother you, his comin’ out here all the time?” I asked her one evening as we were finishing off supper and Aunt Drucie was taking a nap in Nan’s rocker.

“Who comes all the time? He don’t come all the time,” she said with scorn.

“Nan wouldn’t like it,” I said, stacking up the dirty plates.

“She would like it,” Josie barked, thumping her fist on the table and glaring at me. “She would like it,” she shouted again as I ignored her and carried the dirty dishes to the bin.

“What would Nan like about it?” I asked. “What do you like about it?”

She glared at me some more, and then for the first time since I could remember, she burst into giggles.

“Sid’s silly,” she said, getting up from the table and heading for the daybed.

“Sid’s silly,” I mimicked, throwing a handful of detergent into the dishpan. “You come help me wash dishes.”

“You wash dishes. I don’t wanna wash dishes.”

“You never wash dishes.”

“Heh, Kit, just pour the water and I’ll help you with the dishes,” Aunt Drucie mumbled from the rocker.

“It’s all right, I can do them,” I said, pouring the hot water from the kettle into the dishpan. But inside of me, it wasn’t all right at all. It picked at me how Josie would do just about anything Sid asked her, and not give me a second look no matter how many times I might ask her to do the one thing. And it also picked at me how Sid came and went as he liked, without ever knocking on the door to say good afternoon, that he was here to start chopping wood now, or goodbye, that he had finished chopping wood and was leaving now. He just came and went as he liked, which was most every second day after school, traipsing around the gully with Josie at his heels like a well-trained dog. And, too, with Sid’s coming, Josie was becoming a handful to manage, always wound up and stomping around twice as noisily as she had when Nan was about. Not that I minded the time she spent fooling around with Sid. It was a relief having her outside finally, and not moping around the house. But with Sid’s coming, the gully was more noisy than it used to be. And gone, too, was the chance to sit on the stoop, your back resting against the door, feeling the sun on your face, for he would always be watching, any time I come to the door, with his sneaking, sideways looks, and silly questions about
stuff.

“My, I haven’t seen her this lively since Lizzy died,” Aunt Drucie half whispered one day, coming up behind me in Nan’s room during a particularly noisy wrestling match and peering over my shoulder. Startled, I gave Aunt Drucie a haughty look and, marching out of the room, hauled on my boots and coats. Perhaps Crooked Feeder might be a place to get some quiet and privacy, I muttered. Snapping the door behind me, I headed down the gully, ignoring Sid and Josie in a heap by the chopping block. Within the minute, he was striding besides me.

“I thought you was here to chop wood,” I grumbled.

“Let’s not forget the spying part,” he said.

I sniffed.

“Seen anything unchristian like, yet?”

“Only in your ungrateful attitude towards my act of charity.”

“Act of spyin’, you mean.”

“Well, you’ve a right to be snotty, it was corn you planted, and you got radishes,” he replied, scooping up a handful of snow and letting it drift at Josie who was trailing behind. “It’s those that plant corn and then cry when they grow corn and not radishes that got no room to weep.”

I just kept on walking down the snowbanked gully and onto the beach.

“Now, there are those who
thought
they were planting radishes,” he went on, keeping step besides me, “but planted corn instead. Perhaps someone switched their seeds, or perhaps they thought corn was radishes, or that corn had the same taste as radishes. But they still planted the seeds, and
that
, you see, is what gets noted in the end, the seeds you planted up front.”

I came to a stop and looked him full in the face.

“Is you my radish?”

He grinned, his eyes slits of blue behind the lenses of his glasses.

“Lots of good can be done with a radish.”

I was spared having to answer by a fury of white charging out of the snowbank and whumping him in the stomach. Turning on my heel, I marched back up the shore. It appeared the days of doing anything alone in the gully were over.

It was a few weeks later that things came to a head. Unpinning the clothes off the line while Aunt Drucie finished off the supper dishes, I shut out the best as I could the sight of Sid taking on the biggest birch junk in the pile and carelessly swinging the axe with one hand, while keeping up a steady stream of yakking to Josie. Slewing his eyes my way to see if I was looking, he went into his speech about nothing being as hard as it seemed, and was just coming to the end of it, when the axe popped off a knot and bounced back, nearly hitting him on the lips. Josie leaped up from her seat, clapping her hands and snorting with laughter.

Taking another swing at the junk, he jumped back again as the axe bounced off the same knot. Then he turned the junk around and took another swing, this time getting the axe stuck. Prying it free, he attacked the junk from a different angle, but ended up getting the axe stuck all over again. I could tell that Josie’s ongoing barking and clapping was starting to get to him on account of the red coming and going in his face. But he never said nothing, just kept grinning and prying till he got the axe free. Then, he laid the junk on its side and started chopping. He chopped and chopped, turning the piece of wood this way and that, till the pulp surrounding the knot was a mass of splintered shards. And still he never put a scratch on the knot. And when the junk was splintered so much that it finally come apart, the knot was sticking up from one of the halves, as round and as intact as a steel pipe.

“You might got to work harder on some things, that’s all,” he said, swinging the axe down in one last triumphant swing across the knot.

Then they were both clasping hands, dancing and screaming. At first I didn’t know whose blood it was that was spreading over their hands and dripping crimson onto the snow. Dropping the sheet I was folding, I ran to them the same time as Aunt Drucie come running out of the house.

“Lord above, lemme see, lemme see,” Aunt Drucie cried, trying to pull their hands apart, and then I seen the gash on the back of Sid’s hand, clear down to the bone, and felt the breath ooze out of me. When I spluttered awake, Aunt Drucie’s pointy, wrinkled face was staring down at me as she held the water bucket in her hands, ready to slouze me again. I held up my hand to ward her off and saw that Sid was slumped weakly by her side. Behind them Josie was dancing and singing out like she’d gone mental, “Doctor Hodgins! Doctor Hodgins! Run! Doctor Hodgins! Doctor Hodgins!”

“Sweet Jesus, run,” Aunt Drucie chimed in, scooping another handful of water out of the bucket and dousing my face. And then she was hauling Sid to his feet, and me to mine. “Hurry on and get to the doctor, Christ Almighty, get to the doctor!”

Then Sid and I were chasing after Josie, who was half running, half leaping down the road to Haire’s Hollow, a trail of blood staining the snow behind us. Taking no time to talk with anyone, we raced past Old Joe on the wharf, and Maisie Parsons and a bunch of youngsters on the road, and got to the clinic where Sid near fainted again when he held out his gashed hand to Doctor Hodgins. I collapsed in a chair, dropping my head between my legs while Josie helped Sid lie back on the examining bed for Doctor Hodgins to better stitch him up.

“There’s nothing here that won’t heal in a couple of days,” Doctor Hodgins said, examining the cut before sinking the needle into it. “Just keep it steady now, it’s only blood.”

The stitching was mostly done when Mrs. Ropson blowed in through the clinic door.

“What have they done to my Sidney? Oh, Lord, Lord!” she shrieked, turning whiter than Doctor Hodgins’s coat as she seen the doctor sticking the needle through Sid’s hand.

“It’s O.K., Mum,” Sid managed weakly, rising his head up off the pillow.

“Ooh, my God, my God!” Mrs. Ropson sank down on a chair, and let her head flop back against the wall.

“Calm yourself,” Doctor Hodgins said. “Sid’s going to be fine, thanks to Josie for getting him here as fast as she did.”

A wail cut forth from Mrs. Ropson’s gaping mouth as Josie turned her blood-splattered face towards her. Then she fainted dead away, her body rolling off the chair and thumping to the floor, sprawling at my feet like a beached whale. Sid tried to sit up, but Doctor Hodgins gave him another jab with the needle.

“Leave her where she’s the least trouble, son. Kit, get a wet cloth for Mrs. Ropson. We’re almost done.”

Pouring some water onto a rag, I dropped it onto Mrs. Ropson’s face and stood back as she blubbered to. Lumbering to her feet, she fell heavily onto her chair.

“Mercy, what happened? Can somebody tell me what happened?” she asked pitifully.

“I chopped my hand with the axe,” Sid said weakly. “It’s nothing.”

“Nothing!” Mrs. Ropson repeated in astonishment. “You got your hand near chopped off and it’s nothing?”

“He still has ten working fingers,” Doctor Hodgins said matter-of-factly. “There you are, Sid. All finished. Keep it clean and get in here tomorrow for me to have a look at it. It’ll be a week before you can handle an axe, again.”

“Handle an axe, again!” Mrs. Ropson charged to her feet, and glared down at Sid’s face. “You won’t be going back to that hole of a gully on this day—or never no more. And God forbid if I ever catches you with an axe in your hands again, not even if the good Lord strikes your father dead tomorrow and we freezes to death ourselves, will you ever touch another axe!”

“Mum, now stop it, Mum,” Sid begged. He climbed down off the bed and tried to turn her towards the door, but she was as wound up as ever I’d seen anyone, and turning her attention to Doctor Hodgins, let loose with another mouthful that sounded like she’d been saving up for some time.