“I don’t like black tea, you go get black tea,” Josie said loudly, glaring at Nan as she dumped another spoonful of sugar into her bowl.
“I said put that sugar down,” Nan all but roared, lifting the rifle off its hook on the wall and slinging its strap over her shoulder. “Where’d I put them bullets, Kit? I’d like to get a couple of partridges today, but I allows if anybody hears me shootin’, they’ll make it a fine excuse to follow the shots and come lookin’ with the guise of worryin’ about me. Be the Jesus, you can’t fart around here without them crawlin’ up your hole to have a look. Where’s them bullets? Anybody see them bullets? Hurry up, hurry up, we’re losin’ the day.”
The sun crept up over the eastside hills, its rays scarcely touching the quilted leaves that were still fixed to the trees as we bundled out the door, weighed down with buckets, backpacks and the loaded rifle. Nan sniffed at the frost in the air to figure its temperature, while her eyes scanned the road from Haire’s Hollow, then swept down over the gully and the wind-driven sea, checking for snoopers.
“Follow ahead, Jose,” she called out, “and don’t ramble too far in front. I don’t wanna have to go searchin’ for you, this day.”
“Don’t wanna go berrypickin’, don’t wanna go berrypickin’,” Josie kept muttering, cutting up to the mouth of the gully and heading across the meadow. I followed behind, the heat from the Thermos of tea inside my backpack like a hot sun burning through my skin. The Queen Anne’s lace, knee-high with the grass, were wheat-brown beds of fluff, stilled beneath the thin sliver of frost that veiled them.
“You sure it’s the right frost?” I called over my shoulder to Nan.
“You can tell by the way it creeps up the window in the mornin’,” said Nan. “When it’s clear like ice and ribbed on the bottom—that’s the killin’ frost. Your berries are dead. Good for moose and caribou pickin’s. Now, there’s them that picks ’em anyway, and that’s why their jam is as tart as a whore’s arse. It’s when the frost is still white, more snow-like than ice, that’s when you picks ’em, that’s when they’re the plumpest from their summer juices. Now, too, there’s them that picks ’em too early, and their jam is just as tart because the worm is still inside the berry and gets cooked into their jam.”
“Margaret Eveleigh said there’s no worms in berries.”
“Bah, Margaret Eveleigh!” Nan snorted, her bucket clanging against a tree trunk as we left the meadow and fought our way through the woods. “What would that little snot know about pickin’ berries? For sure her mother’s jam is the worst I ever put in me mouth. Pig’s mash! And that’s why none of ’em got any berry patches left any more and schemes to find mine; becuz they cooks the berry before the worm gets a chance to get out and plant their next year’s pickin’s.”
“Margaret said worms don’t have mouths to carry seeds.”
“Oh, and is that what Miss Hollywood Star says,” Nan said, panting heavily and dropping the bucket at her feet. “Well you tell her that the worm is the bleedin’ seed, and when it crawls into the ground, it plants itself, and there you got next year’s berry. And if her mother and everybody else caught on to that, I wouldn’t be the only one left with a berry patch, and them nosyin’ up me hole to find it.”
Nan kicked the bucket to one side and sat down on a rock, resting her back against a white birch. “Sit for a spell, I catches me breath,” she said. “Sit down, Jose, we might see a partridge. Jose! Jose!” she bellowed as Josie kept charging through the woods. “Sit down, we looks for a partridge.” Nan watched till Josie kicked the leaves off a rock and squatted down, before hoisting the gun off her shoulder and resting the butt betwixt her breasts. “Margaret Eveleigh, bah!” she went on, quietening her voice and aiming the barrel towards the bush in front of us. “It’s the timin’, Kittens. You got to wait for the right timin’, and it ain’t always as easy as lookin’ at the frost on the window. Look at your poor mother over there. She haven’t got the sense God give a nit, but, be the Jesus, she knows when to lit out a door when she’s tryin’ to get her own way with something. And she knows how to back down from a fight, even when she’s the one that started it. And that’s what the likes of Margaret Eveleigh won’t ever know, when to keep her trap shut, and when to keep it open. Shhh … ” Nan grabbed a tighter hold of the gun and squinted hard into the bush. She looked over to make sure Josie was still sitting there, and cocked the trigger. A twig snapped and something brown and furry appeared through the leaves.
An ear-splitting crack sounded through the air as Nan pulled the trigger.
“Aagghh!” she bawled out as the gun jumped and the barrel slammed against her collarbone.
“Aagghh!” I screamed as Pirate leaped out of the woods, meowing like a fire-singed demon, and tore back across the path we had just come.
“That’s Pirate!” Josie barked, coming to her feet and pointing to where Pirate disappeared through the underbrush.
“Hell’s tarnation, what’s the cat doin’ out in the middle of the woods!” Nan roared, hauling me back down as I made to run after Pirate.
“That’s Pirate! That’s Pirate!” Josie kept yelling, stomping back towards Nan, still pointing after the cat.
“I knows it’s Pirate, Jose,” Nan cried out, slinging the gun back over her shoulder and shoving herself back up on her feet. “I can tell a cat from a bleedin’ partridge, now get on ahead, else there’ll be no time to pick berries on this day. My gawd,” she muttered, picking up her bucket as Josie started back through the woods again, with me following, looking over my shoulder after Pirate. “You’d think I killed him, the way you’s are all gettin’ on. What in hell’s flames is a cat doin’ out here, anyway?”
“He follows me,” I said.
“Heh, he won’t be followin’ you much after this,” Nan said. “It’s like I said now; timin’s everything, but sometimes, ’tis only the hand of God that can save ye.”
Another half-hour walk and we broke onto the barrens, a rolling land that began with the edge of the cliffs looking out over the bay and rolled inland as far as the eye could see. Bereft of trees from a fire near on twenty years ago, it was wide open to the wind and fog, and a hunter’s nightmare on snow-drifted days or fog-blanketed evenings, with not even a stump to mark a path or point to the edge of the cliffs. And there were stories aplenty about berrypickers getting lost or near falling over the cliffs on bright, sun-lit days from being hunched over, picking berries and not watching where they were wandering. Nan’s partridgeberry patch was another half-hour’s walk over the barrens, along the cliff, and spreading down over a grade that dipped about halfways down to the sea. With a bit of skill and a good pair of boots, it was possible to climb the rest of the way down the cliff and come out onto the beach.
“Your grandfather and me use to climb down to the beach and build a fire for our cup of tea, years ago when he was alive, God bless him,” Nan said after we had picked the firm, red berries for a while and was taking a rest, leaning our backs against a matted mound of rocks. “We use to bring her with us,” Nan murmured, gazing after Josie as she wandered around the back of a knoll, her hair as red as the moss that capped it. “Like the goat, she was, climbin’ over them cliffs.” Nan turned her face to the wind, listening as the gulls screamed out over the surf. I watched as she closed her eyes and her jaw slackened. It was what she liked doing best, she’d often say, sitting on the sun-splotched barrens with the moss crusty beneath her feet and wild with purple, reds and browns. And on sunny days like today, she once said, up here on the cliffs and with no trees breaking the sight, the air was so blue that it felt like she was living amongst sky.
“Nan,” I said after she had dozed for a bit and was snorting herself awake again, “do you think they’ll try and put me in the orphanage, agin?”
Nan sat up straight.
“Be the Jesus, Kit, is they startin’ on you in school, agin?”
“No, Nan.”
“Tell me, now … ”
“Noo, N
an.”
“Is you worryin’?”
I shrugged and plucked a handful of berries from a bush nearby.
“Now, you listen to me, Kittens,” Nan said, resting her hands on her knees and leaning sideways to see into my face. “As long as I walks the face of this earth, no one got the guts to come after you, agin. I met ’em at the door, I did. And it wouldn’t everyone, just May Eveleigh and Jimmy Randall, and the reverend and his wife. I bade ’em to come in, I did, and pointed out to ’em where to sit. They sat. And when they was finished tellin’ me what they come for, I went into the room and come out with you wrapped in a blanket in one arm, and the rifle loaded and cocked in the other. Be the Jesus, they never had much to say after that. One be one, they rose up and walked out, the reverend first, then his Missus, and May, and Jimmy Randall last. And if it wouldn’t for throwin’ a fright into you, I believe I would’ve put a bullet in Jimmy Randall’s leg that day, ’cuz the ones from away, they got no sense of how things are around here. But, when your own kind turns on you, that’s what turned my stomach that day, and been turnin’ me stomach every bleedin’ day since, and they knows that me finger itches to pull a trigger every time I walks past their judgin’, shameless faces.”
I fingered the berries that were resting on the palm of my hand, hearing Nan’s breathing over the sound of the wind and the surf.
“Heh, me darlin’,” she said, so low that it might have been the wind whispering. “I’m not one for pretty words, but it was a blessed evenin’ the day that you were born, ’cuz the shack’s been warmed ever since—even though I knows the cold you feels sometimes.”
The berries rolled onto the ground and I turned my face from Nan’s as I tried to pick them back up.
“Do you want your tea?” I asked.
“There’s a girl,” Nan said, sitting back on her rear, and splaying her black-stockinged legs out in front of her like two rounded stovepipes. “You got me maudlin, you have. Now, go stand on them rocks and see where Jose is. Heh, I dare say she’s tucked into a sod, havin’ a nap by now. Be the Jesus, she’s not one for work, heh?”
Josie was nowhere to be seen. I scampered around several more mounds, calling out her name and searching over the barrens. Nothing. I heard Nan bawling out something and I turned back. Climbing on top of the knoll where I had last seen Josie, I saw Nan standing on the edge of the cliff, her fists raised and flailing through the air, the wind breaking her screams and tossing them thither. I stood for a minute, a sickness creeping through my stomach. Then Nan started running back to where we had left our backpacks. Only it wasn’t a backpack that she was reaching for, but the rifle. Turning, she ran towards the edge of the cliff again, her body loping from side to side as she thrust her heavy frame forward. Then I was running, too.
“Get the hell’s flames back, Kit!” Nan hollered as I come up behind her on the edge of the cliff. Roaring out Josie’s name, she pointed the gun down to the beach and fired. I shoved myself in front of her and stared in horror as Josie, cuddling up to Shine on a log besides a bonfire, dropped the liquor jug that she was holding to her mouth and, scrabbling to her feet, started running up the beach. Shine come to his feet behind her, a stream of blood running down his face from where Nan’s bullet had winged him, and railed his fists up towards Nan.
Bang! Another shot fired out from besides me and Shine leaped backwards as the bullet slammed into the rocks beneath his feet. Then he was running down the opposite end of the beach from Josie.
“Run, you bastard!” Nan screamed, firing off another shot, this time at a punt that was pulled up alongside and must have been Shine’s. It jumped as the bullet rammed into its side, and Shine come running back into sight, swinging his fist up at Nan, and trying to push his boat off from shore. Another bang, and a piece of the rudder splintered beneath Shine’s hand, and Shine, his roars broken on the wind, cursed Nan to hell before scrabbling out of sight down the beach again, blood dripping from his face and fingers.
“Get everything together, Kit,” Nan sung out, swinging herself back to the backpacks. “There’s no tellin’ what that bastard’ll do next.”
“What about Josie?” I asked, hurrying after her.
“She’ll make her way home along the beach,” Nan said. “There’ll be no catchin’ her on this day.”
“S’pose the tide comes in.”
“Then she’ll have to swim alongside the cliffs, and it’ll be one bleedin’, bloody lesson she won’t forget for a song.”
Tossing a backpack on my back, and picking up the buckets with their bottoms scarcely covered with berries, I chased through the woods after Nan.
CHAPTER FIVE
JOSIE’S BATH
IT WAS AROUND TWO IN THE AFTERNOON when we got home. There was no sign of Josie. Nan paced back and forth, back and forth across the kitchen, stopping every so often to rest her elbows on the windowsill and look through the window down over the gully. Then she’d sit back in the rocking chair and rock, her arms folded across her breasts, and a deep scowl etched across her brow. I picked the few berries clean that we had brought back, and stewed them in a dipper on the stove, checking out the window myself at the slightest sound made by the wind or by Pirate. “We’ll give her another twenty minutes,” Nan finally said, coming to her feet and crossing over to look through the window, again. “If she’s not back by then, you’ll have to run for Old Joe, Kit, and tell ’em to come over in his boat, I wants him. And you don’t tell nobody what it is we wants with him,” Nan ordered, pointing a warning finger my way. “They got enough dirt on us to wag their tongues about, they don’t need more. Especially the shootin’,” she added, walking back to the rocking chair and sitting back down. “That’s just what the Reverend Ropson needs, be Jesus, a reason to bring the law on us. Then it won’t be just you and your mother he’ll be tryin’ to poke away somewheres, but me too. And that’s where I’d shoot him dead, swear to God.”
The door suddenly thrust open and Josie was standing there, her hair a wind-tangled heap around her muddied face, and her clothes soaked from the waist down. Nan come to her feet, but before she had chance to open her mouth, Josie was stomping past her, down the hallway to her room.
I shut the door behind her, wrinkling my nose. There was always a smell that come off her, like the smell of rotting dogberries after they had dropped and laid fermenting over time. And it was always strongest when she came back from being with her men friends. Today, mixed with the smell of moonshine and saltwater, it smelled worse.
“What’re you wrinklin’ your nose, at?” Nan demanded.
“She stinks,” I muttered, going over to the stove, not thinking to take a look at Nan before speaking. A blast of air swiped across my face as Nan reared her face before mine and let go with the spite she had been saving for Josie.
“Stinks! Oh, she stinks do she, Miss High and Mighty Sweet Smellin’ Kit Pitman!”
“That’s what May Eveleigh says,” I whimpered, backing away.
“May Eveleigh says?! Who says May Eveleigh says?”
“Margaret said she says.”
“Haa! Back to Margaret, agin, is we? That brazen little bitch!”
Then Nan went into a fit as ever I’d seen. Snatching the poker from behind the stove, she stoked up the fire, cursing and swearing, and then dragged the wooden wash tub out from the back room and kicked it up the hall to the middle of the kitchen floor. Emptying the kettle of hot water into it, and dipping out what was left in the hot-water tank on the side of the stove, she stalked, still cursing and swearing, to the hallway and bawled out Josie’s name. Josie yanked open her room door, still wearing her wet clothes, and stood glaring down the hallway at Nan.
“Come here!” Nan roared.
“I won’t come here, you come here,” Josie roared back, stomping up the hall into the kitchen. Then all hell broke loose.
“You’ll come here like I tells you,” Nan bawled out, catching Josie by the arm and dragging her, kicking and barking, towards the tub
of steaming hot water. “Be the Jesus, it’s a God-given right to be clean, but He left it for we to do some of the work,” Nan ranted, ripping open the front of Josie’s blouse and sending the buttons spinning through the air like ice pellets.
“Who’s clean? You’s clean! Stop, stop!” Josie yelled.
“I’ll stop when I’s finished,” Nan yelled back, hauling the blouse off Josie’s back, and raking the straps of her slip down over her arms. Gripping her by the bare shoulders, she shoved her to her knees by the side of the tub and I was reminded of Mary Magdalene at the Altar of Benediction, weeping over Jesus’ feet and then wiping them dry with her hair. Only there were no humbling tears on Josie’s face as Nan snatched up handfuls of her thick, matted strands and shoved Josie’s head into the soapy water—just bubbles, burbling up to mix with the rest of the suds. Pulling her head back up, Nan slouzed the cloth across her face and down the broad of her back and beyond, scrubbing with the same vigour she used on dirty socks, lathered in lye and splayed across the front of the scrub board.
Gripping onto the edge of the tub, Josie screwed up her face and cried like a baby. Still Nan kept scrubbing. When finally she was done, Josie got to her feet and tandered down the hall to her room, her body redder than a cooked beet.
Kit's Law Page 5