Kit's Law
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Praise for Kit’s Law
Winner of the Canadian Booksellers Association Libris Award, the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize, and the American Library Association’s Alex Award
Shortlisted for the Thomas Head Raddall Atlantic Fiction Prize, the Chapters/Books in Canada First Novel Award, and the Atlantic Provinces Booksellers’ Choice Award
“Kit’s voice has a startling clarity and authenticity … Kit’s Law is a great read, an affecting, haunting, memorable tale told by a true, effortless storyteller.”
—Sunday Tribune (Dublin)
“Donna Morrissey has created in Kit’s Law an extraordinary trinity of women, and charted for our vast entertainment their piquant and heroic adjustments in relation to those who have power in Newfoundland’s Haire’s Hollow—men such as the starchy Reverend Ropson, his son Sid, the local doctor, and the murdering, raping jailbird Shine. Comparisons to Annie Proulx are inevitable, but Kit’s Law exists in a valley of its own saying, and in the directness of its tone, establishes its own authority.”
—Thomas Keneally, author of Schindler’s List
“[Kit’s Law] pursues its homage to melodrama to a beautifully structured resolution that speaks directly to the heart.”
—The Globe and Mail
“Kit Pitman … is an unforgettable character … Shy but tough … Kit will leave an indelible impression with the reader … No character is a cardboard cutout. All are flesh, emotions, difficulties and triumphs … A stunning debut novel from a very talented writer.”
—The Telegram (St. John’s)
“Like a twentieth century Brontë sister, Morrissey indulges in the full spectrum of passion and tragedy, sin and redemption, despair and impossible optimism … [Kit’s Law] makes for a helluva good read.”
—The Daily News (Halifax)
“A Dickensian brawl of a novel … never a dull moment! The reader is willingly swept along in the tide.”
—St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“A fast-paced charmer of a yarn.”
—The Coast (Halifax)
“Morrissey knows of what she writes … a lively narrative with an unquestionable sense of authenticity.”
—Toronto Star
“Donna Morrissey’s novel, Kit’s Law, lures you in with a soft, poetic beginning, then wrenches you into the harsh realities of life for 14-year-old Kit Pitman, who lives in an isolated Newfoundland outport. Morrissey understands the music of the language here … The novel carries a potent emotional impact that stays with you long after you walk away from the story … a wonderful addition to the great canon of Newfoundland literature.”
—Lesley Choyce, author of World Enough
“Kit’s Law has those timeless, mythic qualities you find in Hardy. Donna Morrissey takes the old and makes it new in a miraculous way. As do all good novels.”
—Eric McCormack, author of The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women
“Kit’s Law is a wonderful book. I love the sense of place and the vividly described people who inhabit Haire’s Hollow. Donna Morrissey has managed an intriguing plot-line in addition to characters, sounds and passions that light up the book so marvellously. The end brought a sense of peace to this emotionally fraught story. After holding my breath right through it was a relief to be able to exhale.”
—Anita Rau Badami, author of Tamarind Mem
“A stunning debut.”
—Telegraph (UK)
“There’s a sense in Morrissey’s writing that William Faulkner has met Annie Proulx … If her first novel is anything to go by, Morrissey is almost certain to set new boundaries in fiction in Canada.”
—Atlantic Books Today
“Kit is a heroine whom we immediately warm to … Kit’s Law is a charmer.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“[A] beautiful first novel … With a poet’s attention to sound, Morrissey combines wonderful, rich characters and compelling family intrigue with a powerful, almost meditative sense of place. Startling, vivid, and expertly crafted, this novel introduces an exciting writer whose career needs to be followed closely.”
—Booklist
“Morrissey has crafted an incredible debut novel … Impossible to put down.”
—The Sunday Business Post (Dublin)
“Kit’s Law offers the reader all the old-fashioned virtues: a vivid sense of place, larger-than-life characters, an intricate and suspenseful plot and a feisty heroine we can’t help rooting for on every page. Donna Morrissey has written a terrific novel.”
—Margot Livesey, author of Criminals
“Suffused with a wonder for the natural world like Thomas Hardy’s, and the tart forthrightness of Marilynne Robinson, this atmospheric coming-of-age story marks the promising debut of Canadian screen-writer Donna Morrissey … Like her beloved grandmother, Kit is valiant and impulsive, but most fetching is her voice: whether describing Josie’s ‘smell of rotting dogberries’ or the big Newfoundland skies, which Morrissey captures with thrilling verve and precision.”
—Publishers Weekly
PENGUIN CANADA
KIT’S LAW
DONNA MORRISSEY is the award-winning author of four novels, Kit’s Law, Downhill Chance, Sylvanus Now, and What They Wanted, all set in Newfoundland and all subsequently translated into several languages. Kit’s Law won the CBA Libris Award, the Winifred Holtby Prize, and the American Library Association’s Alex Award. Both Downhill Chance and Sylvanus Now won the Thomas Head Raddall Atlantic Fiction Prize, and Sylvanus Now was the winner of the Atlantic Independent Booksellers Choice Award. Her screenplay, Clothesline Patch, won a Gemini Award. Morrissey grew up in The Beaches, a small fishing outport in Newfoundland, and now lives in Halifax.
ALSO BY DONNA MORRISSEY
Downhill Chance
Sylvanus Now
What They Wanted
DONNA
MORRISSEY
Kit’s Law
PENGUIN CANADA
Published by the Penguin Group
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First published in Viking Canada hardcover by Penguin Group (Canada), a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 1999
Published in Penguin Canada paperback by Penguin Group (Canada), a division of Pearson Canada Inc., 2000
Published in this edition, 2009
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Copyright © Donna Morrissey, 1999
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the pro
duct of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Manufactured in Canada.
LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION
Morrissey, Donna, 1956-
Kit’s law / Donna Morrissey.
ISBN 978-0-14-317034-1
I. Title.
PS8576.O74164K57 2009a C813’.54 C2009-903800-5
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
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To my mom and dad, Claudine and Enerchius Osmond, who loved me.
For their love and kindness during the writing of this book, I would like to thank my publisher, Cynthia Good, and my agent, Beverly Slopen, Michael Chadwick, Ann Kilcher, Lori Maruk and, most especially, my esteemed mentor, Mrs. Dianne Senechal.
Kit’s Law
IF YOU WERE TO PERCH ON A TREETOP and look down on Fox Cove, you would see a gully, about twenty feet across and with a brook gurgling down its spine to the seashore below and flanked on either side by a sea of rippling grass, cresting with Queen Anne’s lace, and scented with a brew of burning birch, wet ground and kelp.
To the right of the gully, and about a hundred yards down from a dirt road, is a grey, weather-beaten house, its windows opened to the sea, and its walls slanted back, as if beaten into the hillside by the easterly winds gusting off the Atlantic and whistling up the gully’s channel. And if you were to hop onto a windowsill and look inside that house, you would see three women. The eldest sits in a rocker by a fire-blistering wood stove, her iron-grey hair hanging down around her fat-padded shoulders, and a pinched look on her wrinkled old face as she sucks on something sharp. Standing behind her, drawing a comb through the grey tresses, is another, younger, with flaming red hair, a furrow deepening her brow, and her tongue nipped betwixt her teeth as she clumsily attempts to gather the old woman’s hair into a bun and fit it into a hairnet that she dangles from one finger. Sprawled across the daybed and watching the two is me, the youngest, with fine yellow hair falling away from my forehead, and a smile, I imagine, rounding the curve of my cheek as I watch.
CHAPTER ONE
THROUGH THE COLOURED GLASS
THE WALLS INSIDE THE CHURCH IN Haire’s Hollow were sparkling clean up to the point where the A-shaped ceiling began. There they were coated grey by the smoke sifting out through the cast-iron, pot-bellied stove, and out of reach of the women who came with their scrubbing buckets once every month. Sometimes, when the sun shafted through the windows, I would watch the black specks of coal dust swirl through the air along with the silver glints of dust motes and lose sight of the rows of hat-coiffed heads and slicked-back brush cuts lining the pews in front of me. And sometimes I could almost shut out the tinny shrill of the Reverend Ropson’s voice as he flapped his black-clothed arms, shrieking God’s word down to us from the altar.
I snapped to attention as the reverend suddenly swooped around to the front of the pulpit and grabbed hold of the wooden coffin resting before it, sending the dust motes swirling madly.
“God’s law orders that there be order,” he rasped, his hoarse whispers snaking with the vengeance of a rattler’s hiss through the ears of everyone listening. “In all things—man, nature and animals! And when we cut short the life of another, as was done to Rube Gale, the man lying in this box before us today, we have broken this law! And we pay! Perhaps not today. Or tomorrow. But, hell burns forever, my brethren! And no sinner escapes!”
He paused, his eyes raking over the congregation and his tongue flicking over dry, bloodless lips. And what with his balding head crouched back in his shoulders as if he was about to spring on the first person that twitched and brought attention to himself, I felt that my grandmother Lizzy (known to me as Nan) was right when she leaned her hefty size across me and my mother, Josie, and muttered into Aunt Drucie’s dozing ear, “He might sound like the lily, but be the Jesus, God forgive me for cursin’ in church,” she hastily crossed herself, “he got the smell of a swampin’ bog hole to me.”
The Reverend Ropson’s eyes bore down on Nan, the flush in his clean-shaven cheeks breaking up to the roots of his thinning grey hair.
“And neither is it ours to judge the soul of the man who put him there!” he snapped, leaping back up to the pulpit. “It’s our own souls that God orders us to judge, orders us to look deep inside and witness. Else we become like the brute beasts and wallow in the stench of our own body’s desire for sin.”
“Heh, he’d be the one to know,” Nan muttered again, this time loud enough for those around us to hear. “If puttin’ yourself above others was against the commandments, then be Jesus his soul’s as crusted as a shit-covered rock in a gull’s roost.”
The reverend’s eyes flashed to our pew.
“Sinners!” he hissed, pointing his finger seemingly to Josie. “All of us! Sinners!”
With a yelp Josie rose out of her seat, long red hair flicking around her face, and before Nan could grab hold of her, she was scrabbling out of the pew and running towards the door. Necks twitched to turn, but the reverend’s finger, now moving across the room like the barrel of a British loader, kept everyone staring straight ahead. Except for Margaret Eveleigh’s haloed head of red ringlets. The second the reverend’s finger struck out, she was swivelling around, along with those of her ribbon-bedecked best friends, all staring after Josie’s back as she bolted through the door. Giggling into their white-gloved hands, they cowered beneath their parents’ chastising looks and whipped their heads back to Rube Gale’s coffin. The Reverend Ropson gave a small bow as the door slammed behind Josie, and with a look akin to satisfaction, made the motions of the cross in the name of our Father, and signalled for the pallbearers to lift Rube’s box and lead the march to the graveyard.
“Where’s you goin’, Lizzy?” Aunt Drucie whispered in surprise as Nan scurried out of the pew, dragging me behind her before the pallbearers had a chance to lay a hand on Rube’s box. Tightening her coat around her thin, stooped shoulders, Aunt Drucie hurried to catch up as Nan blazed through the church doors and heaved herself out into the chilly November air, taking the church steps two at a time, her feet splayed out like a duck’s as she shifted her weight first to one spike-heeled foot, then to the other.
“What about the buryin’?” Aunt Drucie gasped, catching up as Nan unhooked the church gate and swung through it.
“I’ve had all the preachin’ me stomach can take for one mornin’,” Nan said. “You go on and I’ll see you at the card game, tonight.”
“My, my, is something come over you, Lizzy? And how come Josie keeps runnin’ off like that?”
“Christ, Drucie, you’d sleep through your own funeral if you had a chance to sit through it,” Nan thundered, taking the turn around the corner of the church. She brought up short as Doctor Hodgins appeared before us, a deep frown between his dark, brooding eyes, and his tufts of white hair more tousled than usual as he drearily shook his head.
“Keep a berth, Lizzy,” he said, holding out an arm to warn us back. “There’s more to this day than the reverend’s Amen.”
Nan’s cross look was replaced by one of fright as she brushed aside Doctor Hodgins’s arm and stepped around him, me and Aunt Drucie crowding besides her. There, calm as anything, whittling on a slab of wood as he slouched against a limb-bared poplar tree outside of the cemetery, was Shine, the moonshine runner who had appeared on the shores of Haire’s Hollow some four years before. He, along w
ith his drinking buddy, Rube Gale, had plagued the out-porters ever since, with their stills and drunken rampages— till Rube was found dead a few days before, strangled and lying in dog’s shit besides Shine’s still, his face half chewed-off by human teeth. Shine’s teeth, the outporters argued.
“Will ye look at that!” Nan half whispered, as Shine, a brown worsted cap pulled down over his large, grizzled head, with the tips of his dirtied brown hair as greased as the sweat sliding down the slope of his nose, started whistling through his rot-rutted front teeth as he kicked at a mound of dirt piled high besides a fresh dug hole besides him.
“My God, that looks like a grave he got dug!” Aunt Drucie half whispered.
“His threat to anyone with thoughts of going to the Mounties,” said Doctor Hodgins.
“And I s’pose that’s their headstone he’s whittlin’ on,” snorted Nan. “Be the Jesus, he got the nerve, takin’ over the Almighty’s callin’.”
“And he’s a mean enough bastard to go through with it,” said Doctor Hodgins. “In all my years, I never seen anything as vile as Rube Gale’s corpse.”
“Why’d Shine do it?” asked Aunt Drucie. “They was buddies.”
“Buddies!” scorned Nan. “The likes of Rube Gale and Shine don’t have buddies, they haves Satan grovelin’ through their liquor-poisoned veins. And once they gets plastered, they’d carve their own youngsters into stewin’ meat, then go callin’ out for ’em the next day they sobers up.”
Aunt Drucie shivered.
“And Jimmy Randall’s ear!” she moaned. “My God, Doctor, did you ever see such a sight, the lobe chewed right off.”
“It was a sight,” said Doctor Hodgins, patting Aunt Drucie’s shoulder and nodding towards Nan. “I’ll see you girls, and you, too, Kit,” he added briskly, relaxing his puckered brow with a smile upon seeing me. “I got a baby waiting to be born.”