Kit's Law (5 page)

“Because Mope seen it and told before he blacked out,” May explained, frowning deeper with each card she picked up. “It was when he woke up the next mornin’ that he had it all forgot. What’s trump? Did you call trump, Lizzy?”

“Spades,” said Nan. “And Jimmy never see nothin’!” she added with a snort. “Someone chewed his ear off and he never seen nothin’. Well sir, that’s a strange thing.”

“It was his birthday,” said May, laying down the queen of spades. She looked around apologetically. “I expect everyone’s entitled to a drop on their birthday.”

“More than a drop; gets your ear chewed off and don’t remember nothin’,” countered Nan. “Be the Lord Jesus, he wouldn’t crawlin’ up the reverend’s arse that night, and you needn’t concern yourself with that one, Missus,” she added, turning to Mrs. Ropson. “It got nothin’ to do with you and the reverend.”

“Trumpin’ right off?” Old Joe asked May, lifting his cap to scratch the side of his head.

“Wait a minute, take back that queen,” said Mrs. Ropson, the fat on her cheeks jiggling as she reached out her flipper-like hand and flicked the card back to her partner. “You said clubs was trump, Lizzy.”

“No, sir, I never,” said Nan. “I said spades.”

“You said clubs. I remembers because I got the five.”

“Well, my dear, I’m not goin’ to bid twenty-five on clubs with you sittin’ there with the five of trump, and me sittin’ here with the five of spades. Unless you thinks I’m cheatin’!” Here, Nan threw her cards down on the table and scraped back her chair, looking wild-eyed from May to Mrs. Ropson.

“Now, now, Lizzy, pick up your cards. You’re foolin’ up the game,” pleaded Old Joe. “She said spades,” he said to Mrs. Ropson, trumping his king on May’s queen. “Now, Missus, lay your ace on that—if you got it.”

“I can renege,” said Mrs. Ropson, clutching her cards tighter to her bosom as Nan pulled her chair back in.

“No you can’t!” hollered Nan, planking both elbows back on the table. “Not when there’s a trump laid, you can’t renege! Not unless you got another trump!”

Looking like she was going to bawl, Mrs. Ropson threw her ace on Old Joe’s king and snatched back her hand as Nan’s sailed through the air, slamming her five of trump on the ill-fated ace.

“And you can thank your partner for that one,” said Nan, gleefully hauling in the trick. “Never lead off with a trump unless it’s for your partner, heh, heh.”

“Who we up agin, next?” she asked Old Joe after three more rounds had gone by and they had whumped their way to victory.

“Jimmy Randall and poor old Rube Gale’s mother,” said Old Joe with a wink at me as May and Mrs. Ropson limped away from the table. “And, Lizzy, this time will you let ’em get a bit warmed up afore you starts beatin’ the crap outta ’em?”

“Uummph, like poor old Ubert used to say now,” Nan said, rolling her sleeves back up as she spotted Jimmy Randall, fingering his chewed-off ear, slowly making his way towards her. “There’s plenty of ways to gut a fish, and I allows there’ll be one more afore this night is out, heh, Kitty Kat?”

By the time we got home from the card game, Nan was all tuckered out. Stoking up the fire, she eased herself into her rocker and coaxed Josie into taking down her hair from her hairnet and combing out her long, thick plaits. Aside from splitting wood, it was the only thing she trusted Josie to do, declaring me too short and light-fingered to maul at her head the way she liked it.

I sprawled on my back across the daybed, my eyes taking in all four corners of the small room. The wick was low in the lamp, creating the dim yellow light I liked best, and flickering shadows around the cups on the open-shelved cupboards, the legs of the wooden kitchen table, and the splits, stacked high behind the crackling, black-topped stove.

“Go to bed, me darlin’,” Nan murmured as my eyelids began to drop.

Shoving myself to my feet, I trudged down the hallway towards my room. Taking a quick look over my shoulder, I saw Nan with her eyes closed, and Josie with her brow knitted as she concentrated on combing out Nan’s braids. Inching away from my room door, I ducked into the small half-room that served as a closet at the end of the hall. It was shelved on both sides, and stacked with sheets, quilts and woollen blankets. Climbing onto the third shelf on the right-hand side, I crawled beneath the bedding and breathed deeply, savouring the musty smell of the mothballs Nan had poked amongst everything to keep it smelling fresh.

I dozed sleepily. Soon after, Josie thumped off to bed. My eyes sprang open. I listened as Nan got up from her rocker
squeak squeak,
then walked to the sink for her glass of water
creak creak,
then hobbled down the hall
creak creak creak,
her room door opening
squeak
and shutting. And all was quiet. And I held my breath. Silence. Then
squeak,
and I tensed, waiting, my lungs bursting and the blankets near smothering me. Then a shriek from hell as Nan rammed her hands in under the blankets, jabbing at my ribs, my eyes, my belly, till I fell screaming out of the shelf, begging for mercy and running off to bed with her swatting at my behind.

“How can you tell?” I asked.

“Blankets don’t breathe.”

“I was holdin’ my breath.”

“That’s what I heard: you holdin’ your breath.”

“But that don’t sound like nothin’.”

“Nut-
theeng
, nut-
theeng,
not
nuthin’,”
bawled out Nan, taking on Margaret Eveleigh’s proud-sounding talk. “Be the Jesus, if May Eveleigh’s crowd can say nut-
theeng
, nut-
theeng
, then so can we. Now get to bed, you’re like the savage.”

L
IZZY’S
P
ROPHECY

T
HE SAVAGE WAS
M
ARGARET
E
VELEIGH
the next day in school when she hurtled a folded piece of paper on top of my desk with “GULLY TRAMP’S GIRL—I’M GOING TO KILL YOU” scratched across it. Turning around in his seat, Willard Gale, second cousin to Rube Gale, with clusters of sores crowding his raw, reddened nostrils and his dirt-grimed hair smelling as rancid as stale fat, snatched the note out of my hands and stuffed it in his pocket. “Willard!” snapped the teacher, Mr. Haynes. Grabbing the leather strap off the wall with large, chalky hands, he stomped down the aisle, his chunky legs hitting against the sides of everyone’s desks as he come. Willard cringed back in his seat, his chin bowed to his chest, and I quickly ducked my head into a book. “What did you put in your pocket?” asked Mr. Haynes. Willard said nothing. “Hold out your hand!”

Willard crouched deeper and … Crack! The leather belt smacked across the top of his desk.

“I said hold—out—your—hand!” Mr. Haynes ground out, and I knew without looking that his longish black hair had fallen over his forehead by now, and that the red bulb of his nose had changed into a livid purple.

Swish! The belt whistled through the air and thudded dully across padded flesh. Willard cried out, and he must’ve pulled his hand back because all I heard for the next savaged minute was the swishing of the belt smacking across the top of his desk, over and over and over, until Willard started bawling, more from the fright I allows, than of having the belt hit him. Then Mr. Haynes stomped back to the front of the room and, picking up a piece of chalk, scrawled across the board “I will not tell tales out of school” and ordered all of us to write the sentence one hundred times in our scribblers. Then, while we were writing as fast as our arms would let us, he marched up and down the aisle, ripping the pages out of our scribblers as we filled them up, and scrunching them into little balls, fired them into the coal bucket along the side of the stove at the back of the classroom.

The bell rung for recess, saving us from more writing, and flexing my fingers to get the cramp out of my hand, I ran out of the schoolhouse into the yard, savouring the fresh-smelling air. I had hardly filled my lungs when Margaret grabbed me by the collar and shoved me up against the picket fence.

“Your mother’s a tramp and your grandmother’s a loudmouth pig and you tell her I don’t look like no tramp of hers—you hear me, Gully Tramp’s Girl?”

I stood still as anything as Mr. Haynes, his hair smoothed back over his forehead and his nose still flecked with purple, come up behind Margaret.

“What’s the matter, Margaret?”

Margaret dropped her hands by her side and give Mr. Haynes a pouty look.

“Kit called me a tramp.”

I gaped at Margaret like a guppy fish and tried to keep my face straight as Mr. Haynes bent over, boring heavily squinted eyes into mine. I stiffened as he laid a heavy hand on my shoulder and gave me a little shake.

“Apologize to Margaret,” he said quietly.

“I’m sorry,” I half whispered.

“Say it agin!”

“I’m sorry.”

“Say—I’m—sorry—Margaret!” he stated slowly, lips peeling back over gritted teeth.

“I’m s-sorry, Margaret.”

He kept staring at me, his fingers digging into my shoulder, and my eyes wavered, not able to go far, as his face was a scant inch from mine, mostly to the bulb of his nose, and I saw that it wasn’t that his nose was purple, but that it looked purple from the dozens of tiny reddish veins meshing it.

“Is that all right, Margaret?” he asked, his eyes still searching out mine.

“Thank you, Mr. Haynes,” said Margaret, smiling sweetly. Then she ran off, leaving me struggling between the meshed, red veins and the boring, squinting eyes.

“Do you remember what I told you about reform school, girl?” he asked, his voice dropping lower, still.

I nodded.

“That’s good,” he half whispered. “You keep remembering, you hear me?” He gripped his fingers deeper into my shoulder, giving me another little shake, then stood back up and walked across the yard into the school. I watched, surprised that he had left me standing by the fence with no further threat of punishment, and churning through the things he had told me about reform school. For sure, he’d told me enough times. From the very first day when I started school and cried to go back to the gully with Nan, he took time to tell me about the reform school. It was a place near the orphanage where bad orphan youngsters were sent, where awful things happened to them, like having their heads shaved and dunked in kerosene for getting head lice, and being stripped naked and thrown into tubs of ice-cold water for daydreaming when you was suppose to be listening, and being strapped for getting a sum wrong, even if you’d never seen that kind of sum before. Now, here I was in grade six and never cried for Nan no more, never got a sum wrong, never got head lice, never yawned or daydreamed or not listened, and here he was, still threatening to send me to reform school.

I trailed back inside the school after recess and paid strict attention to working out long-division sums, careful not to come under Mr. Haynes’s attention. But, while I was readying to leave my seat after the bell rung for the end of the day, he ordered me to stay behind and write “I will not say bad words” one hundred times in my scribbler. I scribbled as fast as I could, knowing Nan was outside, waiting to walk me home from school. She always came to get me these days, what with Shine chewing up people and whittling out tombstones. By the time I got my one hundred lines wrote and met her at the school gate, she was after learning from some of the youngsters as to why I was kept in.

“What in hell’s flames bad words was you usin’?” she bawled out the second she seen me coming through the school door.

“None,” I mumbled.

“None? He kept you in for sayin’ None? That’s a bejesus bad word to be sayin’—None! Out with it, my girl; what bad word was you sayin’?”

“I never said one. Honest!”

“Then what did he keep you in for?” Nan’s eyes flew open, and she tore off towards the school door. “Be the Lord Jesus, if he starts pickin’ on you, agin … ”

“No, wait—it was an accident,” I cried out, running after her and grabbing hold of her hand.

She stopped and swung around.

“What do you mean—an accident?”

“Me and Margaret and Melissa were callin’ out words and a bad one popped out.”

“Outta whose mouth?”

“Outta mine.”

“How come it popped out outta yours and not one of theirs?”

“It popped outta theirs, too.”

“Then how come alcohie Haynes never kept them back?”

“H-he never heard theirs.”

“Uummph, but he heard yours? Be the Jesus, if I thought for one second he punished you and let the rest of ’em off with it, I’d fix his features around to the back of his head.”

“He just never heard them, that’s all. C’mon, Nan.”

I managed to get her out of the schoolyard and walking down the road.

“I’d have liked for him to been standin’ there when that precious red-headed Margaret Eveleigh mocked me last night,” she grumbled. “I dare say she’s the picture when the teachers and doctors and reverends and every other uppity-up from away is lookin’ at her. Miss Hollywood Star! What bad word did she say?”

“I … dunno.”

“You dunno?” Nan stopped walking. “How come you dunno when you was there?”

“I forgets.”

“Forgets? I thought you was smart? Is you keepin’ something back?”

“No. It was a bad word. I can’t say it.”

“Well, I’m tellin’ you to say it.”

“She said Jesus.”

“‘Jesus!’ The likes a that little snot saying Jesus. Well sir, if I had to say curse words like that and my mother found out, I wouldn’t be pitched yet and she been dead for thirty years. What word popped outta your mouth?”

“Ah … damn.”

“Damn? Sure, that’s not a bad word.”

“Look!” I pointed to a bunch of people gathering on the wharf as Old Joe cut across the harbour towards them in his kelp-green motorboat, waving his cap in his hand excitedly.

“Name a God, what’s goin’ on now?” Nan asked, lurching forward and heading for the wharf. I followed after, glancing back at the schoolhouse door with a sigh of relief.

“It was as good as anything I ever seen, sir,” Old Joe was saying, balancing his spindly legs on the bow of his boat while tossing up the painter to his brother. “See, it’s like this. The Mounties figure on gettin’ Shine for buildin’ stills and runnin’ shine, seein’ how they can’t get him for murderin’ Rube. So … ”