Kit's Law (26 page)

“There is one thing, and I want the truth on this one,” he said after a spell. He kept looking at the road ahead, yet every sense of him was leaning towards me, listening, feeling for any sound or movement on my part that might tell him a little bit more than what I was willing.

“Are you and Sid … dating?”

This last word was spoke with such a thickening of his tongue that I cowered from its loathing. Staring out the window at the unfamiliar brooks and meadows sweeping past us, I felt again the wrath of the reverend the day he caught me with my foot in Sid’s lap, and the repulsive smell of rotting dogberries as I had stood before him—somehow, shamed.

“I didn’t do anything,” I muttered bitterly.

Doctor Hodgins stared at me in some surprise.

“I’m not suggesting that you did. I only meant … ” He turned back to the road and sighed heavily. “There’s nothing wrong with having a boyfriend, Kit. I’m simply asking if Sid’s your boyfriend.”

“I don’t have boyfriends!”

“That’s fine! That’s fine! I—it just appeared that way, that’s all.”

I said nothing more, but my sense of Doctor Hodgins’s relief was so sharp that it left me wondering why something that was so fine could affect him so badly.

We spoke no more until we entered the courthouse. Doctor Hodgins and I sat on one side, with the reverend and his wife on the other. I took care to not look their way, but the sobbing that broke forth from Mrs. Ropson every time she looked up and seen her boy with the handcuffs on and the look of pain that flickered across Sid’s face each time he looked her way pricked my heart like a well-whittled stave. Yet each time his eyes lit onto mine, a light shone from them as fierce as any that came from the reverend’s on a good preaching day. Only Sid’s was pure, as pure as the white of an angel’s robe because it shone from his heart, a heart of honour, and without him even knowing the weight of his offering, or whether his mind was yet strong enough to carry such a load.

My heart swelled with a proud love. And when Doctor Hodgins testified to seeing Sid’s blood-stained shirt in the stove out at the house that day, and then swore under oath that Josie’s fever had started up a day before the killing, making it seem as though she would’ve been much too weak to do any lifting of axes and implanting them in the crowns of grown men, I knew he was feeling, too, the rightness of God’s law and Sid’s choice to act upon it. And when I moved to sit on the witness chair, my legs trembling and my voice quaking with each word spoke, I kept looking to Sid and letting that fierce light of his shine through me and bring forward every damning word that would condemn him for a murder that my mother had committed. And when the verdict was done, and the judge handed down his sentence of two years in prison, I sat paralyzed by shock, listening to Mrs. Ropson’s wails cut through the room with the anguish of a thousand grieving mothers. I fell to my knees, watching as they led Sid out the door, his face white from the sudden fright, and his heart breaking into two halves—one for his mother and one for me.

“They’ll reduce it,” Doctor Hodgins was saying, pulling me to my feet. “The reverend won’t let it stick. His wife’ll see to that.”

“No, no,” I whimpered, my knuckles white from gripping the railing in front of me. “It isn’t right. I’ve got to tell them, it isn’t right.”

“It’s done, Kit,” Doctor Hodgins said harshly. “You can’t change it, now.”

“You! It’s you who done this,” Mrs. Ropson screamed, coming across the aisle towards me. “You and your tramp of a mother, you’ll pay for this, I swear. And you too, Doctor,” she cried out, as the reverend held her back. “I curse you this day, I curse you.” Her burst of anger spent, she crumpled piteously and began wailing again, “My boy, my boy, they’ve taken my boy! Mercy, mercy, they’ve taken my boy.”

Stumbling, she allowed the reverend to put his arm around her shoulders and help steady her. He looked at us then, over his wife’s weeping head, and in the haggard lines that drew across his face as he led her out through the door, it was clear that his was a look that was thirsting for his own killing instead.

The storm that had been threatening for the past few days broke as we were driving back home. Doctor Hodgins leaned towards the windshield, cursing his slow-sweeping wipers against the heavy rain and his useless headlights against the thickening fog. The trees twisted in fury along the roadside, and the gravelled road turned to grease. I was content to huddle in my corner and watch the dismal greyness outside play out what I was feeling inside. Once, Doctor Hodgins looked at me and growled, as if I was willing the storm through sheer spite. Once, he looked at me as if I was the storm itself.

Back at his house, he asked that we live with him for the coming winter, giving Josie time to get her health back, and me comfort while I attended school. I said no. I was fifteen come September, old enough to quit school and old enough to take care of Josie. Alone.

He argued, but I heard nothing excepting the judge sentencing Sid to two years, and the dragging of his footsteps as the two Mounties led him across the courtroom. Sid was in jail and it was me that helped put him there. I was wanting no comforting on this day.

Nor, did it seem, did Doctor Hodgins. The day after I moved back to the gully, he took his medical certificate off the wall and moved from the house that Haire’s Hollow had built for its doctors and took over a fishing shack belonging to one of old Joe’s brothers that had died from blood poisoning.

“Why?” I asked, going out to visit him some weeks later. He was sitting on a rickety wooden chair outside the shack, facing the ocean that blew full on his face, and drinking from a tumbler of brew that he rested on the window ledge behind him whilst he puffed on his pipe.

“I’m taking up fishing with Old Joe,” he said, his eyes still wandering over the sea.

“You’re no fisher.”

“Is that right, now?” he said, thoughtfully puffing his pipe. “You think everybody clings to a patch of ground the way you do, Kit?”

“I know you ain’t no fisher.”

“Sit down,” he said, patting a wooden bench besides him. Then, “It’s time someone younger took over. I’m getting too old to be borning babies all hours in the night.”

“But, they’re all still comin’ to you. Only difference is, no one’s payin’ you any more.”

“They pay in other ways.”

I looked through the door at the jars of stewed berries and rabbit sitting on a plank that served as a cupboard.

“Supposin’ me and Josie had stayed with you?”

“Supposing you had?”

“Would you still have moved out here?”

“I still would’ve closed the clinic doors.” He tapped the bench testily. “Sit down, I said, Kit. Sit down and watch. Watch the sea unfurl itself.”

He was drunk.

“It’s because of the lie, isn’t it?” I asked.

The weight was such as he lifted his eyes and looked up at me that I fell to my knees besides him.

“I’m sorry. You shouldn’t have had to do that.”

“Hush, now,” he patted my head. “There’s nothing for you to be thinking on here. It’s but a short path that we’ve travelled together.”

“Then why’d you do it?”

“Some things won’t make sense to you, Kittens. Hah!” he snorted. “They don’t make sense to myself, and I’ve been figuring them for years.”

I sat on the bench, turning my collar up against the wind, following his eyes out over the curdling waves sweeping up on the beach.

“It’ll be good to sit in a boat and ride those waves,” he took up after we had sat in silence for a bit. “They’ve been doing that for thousands of years. Thousands! Steadily rolling upon these shores. Can man ascribe to such a feat?

“Noo!” he replied drunkenly. “We’re weak! Broken! Still answering to the truths of our youth. And you, too, will answer, Kit. There’ll always be faces unfurling upon these shores. Any shore. All shores.” His face darkened as his thoughts took him to his most recent face.

“I stood a better chance of holding back those waves than talking him out of what he was doing. I seen that in his face, the way he stood there—and took it on himself. It was Josie, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” I finally whispered, relieved at last to tell him the truth. “Sid saved me, just as he said. Then, it was him that Shine … was straddlin’. That’s when she come in. With the axe.”

“She saved you both,” he said, his voice suddenly low. “Now, he’s saving her.” He clucked his tongue and raised his glass to the sea. “It’s a beauty,” he roared over the thundering surf. “God above, can you ever touch him on this one?” He lapsed back into silence, watching the waves roll in. I watched along with him, looking to see some of his faces. I didn’t see anything, and after the sun went down and the September chill set in, I went along home.

It worried me with Doctor Hodgins living in old Joe’s brother’s fishing shack and going off fishing. I wondered if I might not have owed it to him to have stayed with him. But it didn’t seem right that I not live in the gully with Josie. After all, it was why Sid went to prison, so’s that she and I could live where we most wanted, and where he could think on us, knowing at all times what we were doing, and where we were sitting. I wanted his picture to be real, and for us to be waiting there when he came back. And there were other things I wanted. I wanted to hear his voice on the easterlies as they gunned up the gully, and the thumping of the axe as I dreamt of him splitting wood for our fire, and the rippling of his laughter as he chased Josie around and around the chopping block, tying her hair into knots.

Yet when I thought of Doctor Hodgins sitting on his front stoop, drinking brew and challenging the sea, I wondered that he might be right about those youthful truths he talked about—and might not his face be one to come unfurling upon my shores some day.

All of this I told in a letter to Sid when I got home, knowing how he liked to ponder things like the strength of the ocean and the strength of those who tried to drink it dry. And I laid the letter on the dresser in my room, waiting for word from him, and an address by which to send it. I wasn’t sure where the prison was that they kept Sid, somewhere near St. John’s, which was a full day’s journey by train and might as well have been on the moon itself, it appeared so distant from Haire’s Hollow. Each time I made mention to Doctor Hodgins of an address by which to mail Sid’s letters, he took on the same intense look that he had the day in the car on the way to the courtroom when he asked if Sid and I were dating. And each time he took on that look, I backed away, thinking back on the smell of rotting dogberries, and preferring a trip to the moon itself, rather than to endure that feeling of shame that always followed it.

Josie waited too for a word from Sid. But just as the fire had dulled in her hair that day as she had lain sick with the fever, so too had a spark died within her. Her skin was pale, and her eyes a flat brown without the yellow specks livening up the green. She moped around the house most days and never bounded down the gully no more, and would never go near the chopping block or the axe. Nor could she be persuaded to bring in a load of wood for the stove. And during those times when I persuaded her to come with me to Crooked Feeder, she’d drag behind, stumbling over rocks and giving to silence. She took to sitting in the rocker, much the same as she had done after Nan died, and was content to just rock and stare out over the gully through the kitchen window. Sometimes she’d spend the whole afternoon there, just rocking and gazing, rocking and gazing.

“Are you dreamin’ about Shine?” I asked her one evening when she was dozing in the rocking chair and come awake with a sudden cry.

“Shine’s dead, Shine’s dead,” she mumbled, starting to rock, again.

“Do you remember when Nan died?” I whispered.

She started rocking faster.

“Do you remember what Doctor Hodgins said about Nan being a big, soft spirit who’s always watchin’ over us? That’s what good spirits do, they make bad thoughts go away. Next time you haves a dream about Shine, you just think about Nan. All right? You think about Nan, and she’ll make the bad thoughts of Shine and the reverend go away.”

She nodded and kept on rocking.

They weren’t all bad dreams that she was having. Sometimes she’d give a sudden bark while she dozed off, like the kind she had often given Sid when she’d see him strolling down over the bank from the road, and I was soothed that she was also listening to his footsteps on the door place, and hearing his jesting laughter on the wind.

All of this I told to Sid in letters. And placed them, one after the other, on the growing pile on my dresser.

W
ISHING UPON A
S
TARFISH

O
CTOBER CAME, AND STILL NO LETTER FROM
S
ID.
Yet news came in other ways. “He’s took up his schoolin’ in jail,” Old Joe volunteered, dropping off a load of dried, split wood and a salted cod. “His mother had a letter the week. There’s a priest that goes to the jail every day and teaches him.” “They says he’s doin’ right well,” Aunt Drucie yawned comfortably from Nan’s rocker during one of her visits. “Puttin’ on weight, doin’ his homework—what you ought to be doin’. My, my, Kit, Lizzy’d be in some way if she knowed you was quit school. Sure you knows I didn’t mind comin’ over and seein’ to a bit a housework and takin’ care of poor old Josie. I misses it, I do, gettin’ up in the mornin’ and comin’ over. Is Margaret still bringin’ you over homework?” I dropped my head in my hands with a groan. There were many from Haire’s Hollow that came to visit since the killing, but it was Margaret’s visits that served me the worst. Claiming me to be her best friend since the day of the trial, and bringing over schoolwork on account of my teaching myself grade ten at home, she came to visit about once a week, and took on an importance in Haire’s Hollow as being the one most closest to me, and the one with the most knowing about how Josie and I were doing out here in the gully. She became good at reporting back everything I said about the killing—which was nothing—and real good at reporting back what she figured I wanted to say, but couldn’t.