“It fits,” I said, as the cool satin slipped down over my bare shoulders and swished against my legs.
“As nice as anything,” Loret murmured, doing up the buttons on the back. The door swung open and Josie stood there, her face beet-red from racing and mud up to her knees. “What do you think of Kit?” Loret asked her. “Isn’t she pretty?”
Josie looked at me the way one would a fragile Christmas tree bulb. Reaching out, she laid her hand on the sleeve, then pulled it back.
“It’s O.K.,” I said. “You can touch it. Here.” I picked up the tail of the dress and pressed it into her hands. “Sid and I are gettin’ married,” I said as she fingered the material curiously.
“Who’s gettin’ married? You’s not gettin’ married.”
“Yes I am gettin’ married, to Sid. Sid’s goin’ to live with us.”
“Sid’s goin’ to live with us? Sid’s not goin’ to live with us,” she barked, turning to Emmy with a grin.
“Why don’t you girls go pick me a bunch of black-eyed susans,” Loret said. “And some daisies and some buttercups, to make a wreath for Kit’s hair. Would you like that, Josie? You and Emmy?”
Then Sid’s voice, along with Fonse’s and Bruddy’s, sounded from outside. And for a split second, before Josie’s eyes left mine, a blaze of yellow streamed towards me, and she smiled, a jumbled-toothed smile that stretched boldly across her face.
I stared, never having seen her smile such a smile before, and then tried to smile back. But it was as if my smiling muscles had forgotten how to work, so I reached out my hand and touched her cheek instead.
“Thank you, Josie,” I said, wondering what in the name of the Lord I was thanking her for. But she nodded and kept on smiling, as if that was an easy one to figure, and then tore across the landing with Emmy in tow, leaving me staring after her with a warmth spreading through my heart like that of a mother the first time she sees a smile on the face of her newborn babe.
It was a day of days for sure, what with Sid coming home from jail, and Loret’s hug and Josie’s smile. And it was just starting as sometime later Loret walked with me down the stairs, the creamy satin dress tucked tightly around my waist, a wreath of black-eyed susans circling my crown, and tendrils of soft yellow curls nuzzling against my cheeks. I didn’t know what was choking me up the most—wearing such a pretty dress or having everyone making such a fuss over me. Or perhaps it was the marrying Sid part, because every time I thought of being his wife, I cowered inside, feeling a little frightened of how things must be now, and preferring to think instead of how things were in the past, with us skipping rocks down the gully and soaking our feet in Crooked Feeder, and me listening as he talked about such foolishness as men trying to drink the ocean dry, and crying for radishes when it was corn that we planted. And when I saw him standing there on the porch, wearing Fonse’s wedding suit that drooped a little off his shoulders and was a little too long in the legs and sleeves, and him shifting nervously on his feet as he watched me walking towards him all swathed in satin and wreaths of wild flowers, it felt more like we were getting ready for our graduation dance than our wedding.
And after he put a narrow gold band on my finger, and we cut Mudder’s cake and toasted each other with Fudder’s brew, then waltzed amidst the sea of muddied brown eyes and square white teeth, I felt drunk. Everything was blurred, and nothing felt right—the dress, the tendrils, Loret, my mother’s smile—not even Sid at my side. But I wanted it— all of it. And as Fonse whipped the accordion into a jig and Sid grabbed me by the waist and swung me around and around, with our best man, Bruddy, whooping up a storm with the youngsters and cheering and dancing all around us, I held back my head and shrieked with laughter as I heard Nan lean down from the heavens and bellow, “And so you should, and so you should.”
And later that evening when Sid and I were crouched beneath the canvas, heading back up the bay, with Josie, Fonse and Loret hidden beneath a tent of their own in the rear of the boat, whilst the rain come down so hard it bounced bubbles two inches off the water, it was kissing him that I wanted, and the more I kissed him, the more it seemed fitting that I kiss him again, and again, and again …
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
FALL FROM GRACE
“YOU’LL SPEND THE NIGHT,” I begged as Fonse helped Josie out of the boat. “What with this rain … ”
“Heh, it’s the nets with Fudder in the mornin’, I’m thinkin’,” Fonse said. “Perhaps, we can pop up some time after the caplin rolls.”
A crack of thunder resounded down the gully, sending Loret jumping to her feet.
“Please yourself with your own doin’, Sire,” she said, jumping over the side of the boat onto the beach. “But it sounds like the good Lord’s orderin’ me inside on this night, and that’s just where I’m goin’, inside.”
“Here now, Loret,” Fonse called out, but his voice was drowned by another roll of thunder, and grasping hold of Loret’s arm, I ran with her up the gully.
Sid came up behind me as I ushered Loret inside the house.
“Kit!”
I stepped back.
“You want to go see your folks?” I asked.
“The reverend’ll be leaving early in the morning. I want to catch him before he goes.”
“You want me to come, too?”
“You’re part of the family now,” he said dryly.
Fonse strolled out of the gully.
“I’ll get the fire lit,” he said. “A cup of tea’ll be nice for when ye gets back.”
“I’ll just be a minute,” I said to Sid, and ducked inside.
“Show Loret where to find the sheets and blankets,” I said to Josie. “Then take her to Nan’s room.” I nodded at the sympathetic smile on Loret’s face and knew that Fonse must’ve told her by now about how Sid’s parents, and others, saw me as the gully tramp’s girl, and how Josie had killed a man, and Sid had taken the blame, damning me forever in his mother’s eyes.
“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” I said to Loret. Drawing on her look of encouragement, I pulled up the hood of my coat and went back out to Sid. Slipping my hand into his, we walked up over the bank to the road, our feet squelching in the mud, and the rain clattering against our oilskin coats.
Strangely enough, it weren’t thoughts of the reverend that was creating the uneasiness in my stomach, but Sid himself. Despite the warmth of his hand as he held mine, it wasn’t my husband who was walking into Haire’s Hollow with me on this night, but a mother’s son, just coming home from prison and bringing with him a wife. And not just any wife, but a wife that had helped jail him in the first place, and a wife who his own mother had taken a hand in trying to rid the town of, long before she beheld any thoughts of her son marrying and bringing home a daughter-in-law.
It was raining hard by the time we got to Haire’s Hollow, and aside from Old Joe and Doctor Hodgins, barely recognizable in their oilskins and sou’westers as they stared up at us from rigging up Old Joe’s boat for fishing in the morning, there was no one to come between us and the dreaded hour. And when Sid raised his hand to knock on his mother’s door, the fear inside me had grown into a living thing.
The door swung open and she stood there, looking as if she hadn’t strayed from the spot since the last time she waved him goodbye a year ago—waiting, waiting, for just such a moment.
“Mercy! Mercy!” she cried out. “He’s come back! He’s come home to me!”
And mercifully she didn’t see me at first, and was able to wrap her arms around his neck and drink from him like a starving mother with nothing left to feed on but her child’s scent. It was the reverend who first saw me. In a dark dressing gown and slippered feet, he came hurrying into the kitchen, a pensive look on his smooth, pale face. His face went blank when he saw me staring out at him from behind Sid and his sobbing mother, and with a soft moan he jerked forward and grasped hold of the back of the chair that was closest to him.
It was the first time I had seen him sinc
e the day of the trial, and I was struck by how poor he looked and how white his skin was. He became whiter as he continued to look at me, and if it weren’t for the chair that he was clinging onto, I felt he would have fallen. And so did Mrs. Ropson become white when she untangled her arms from around her son’s neck and saw me standing besides him. And then, just as the reverend’s body began to slacken further and he grasped more tightly to the chair, Mrs. Ropson’s became more rigid. She began to shake, as if in a rage, first her hands, then her arms, shoulders, head, as if the strength seeping out of the reverend’s body, leaving him sinking weakly onto the chair, was creeping into hers, filling her with the same scorning rage that had been sustaining him all these years. And it felt, as I stood there clutching onto Sid’s arm, watching the haggard lines appear on her face, then deepen as if they had been there all this time, hidden within her jowls of fat, that it was she who had spawned such rage, and out of some desperate need to keep soft her breast, had nurtured its growth in the reverend instead. And now, seeing me, the bastard child of a retarded tramp standing besides her precious son, she was taking it back, all of it. Only she had no inkling of its growth. And when she turned the full weight of it onto herself, she become like the old harp seal again, floundering for a pan of ice to hold her. And barring that, there was the fathomless sea, that once it took her, would carry her too far down to ever come back.
But it stood no chance of taking her just yet. I could tell by the way her body suddenly stilled and she turned her drowning eyes onto mine that she had something.
“Why did you bring her here?” she raged.
“Mum … ”
“Why!?”
“Kit’s my wife.”
Her eyes widened in horror, and a strangling sound came from the reverend. She turned to him, holding out a hand with which to steady herself, but oblivious to his wife’s need, and his body now leeched of the spite-driven strength and as emptied as a summer’s well, he sunk further into his chair, his face an ashen grey.
“Merciful father,” Mrs. Ropson whimpered, turning anguished eyes back to Sid. “When? When did you marry?” Her eyes lit onto mine, and she choked on another, more loathsome thought. “Have you touched her?” she whispered with such bile, as if I were the leech itself that she’d just used to sap the life’s blood out of the reverend.
Sid took my hand.
“We’re leaving, now,” he said in a voice sorely twisted with shame and hurt.
“No! You can’t leave with her. Tell him!” his mother shrieked at the reverend. “Tell him!” The reverend stared at her, and such a look of contempt filmed his eyes as ever I’d seen him cast towards Josie and me, leaving me knowing with certainty that while it was us that had been the objects of his scorn, it was his wife who had been its creator. With a cry, she turned towards Sid and spat out the poison that had been crucifying her all these years.
“She’s your sister!”
A stunned silence laid low the room. Then a low whimpering started deep in my throat, and I whipped my hand to my mouth as Mrs. Ropson turned to me with a look of the damned in their last desperate measure to gain justice.
“It’s a lie,” Sid whispered.
“No lie!” Mrs. Ropson cried out. “Ask him! Go on, ask him what did it, all this time, living with sin.”
The reverend coiled further back in his chair as all eyes weighed down on him.
“Is it true?” Sid rasped.
He shook his head, his hands clasping at the seat beneath him.
“You would lie?” Mrs. Ropson blazed. “Now, with our son married to your—bastard?”
“Shut up!” Sid roared, his eyes never leaving the reverend’s. “Tell me the truth! Is it true?”
“He would never swear to it,” Mrs. Ropson cried, moving slowly towards the reverend. “Never swear that it wasn’t true. But I saw it. I know it to be true. And all this time I kept it a secret. For you,” she cried, turning towards Sid. “So’s you’d never know your father’s sin.”
The reverend’s hands trembled on his lap, and his paltry eyes were colourless as they struggled to hold Sid’s.
“I have paid for my sin,” he whispered.
Such simple words, and spoken reverently as if a penitence for a long-lasting grievance finally brought to light between the father and son. Yet, there was another presence, equally as connected, but for whom the words sealed a fate even more damning than that of the son, for had not the reverend just introduced himself as my father? I heard nothing else, excepting a soft moan from Sid, and the rain splashing against the window, sounding forever like the house was weeping for the sin committed within it—a sin that was still trying to make itself felt.
“Sid.”
Had I spoken? I struggled to breathe, and as hard as I tried to turn to him, my eyes were rooted to Mrs. Ropson, still, now that her venomous secret was out, and my numbed mind churned through the thought that just as lightning is the quietest, yet deadliest, part of a summer’s storm, so too had she lain quiet all those years since the reverend fathered me, preparing the grounds for devastation, then struck before battle was properly warned.
Fathered me. The reverend had fathered me. My father—this weak, decrepit thing that had screwed my mother all those years ago, then blasphemed her before God for his having done so. This was my father.
“It’s a lie!”
It was Sid’s voice, sounding from somewhere besides me, and I recognized that the wooden thing that I was clenching onto was his hand.
“No lie!” Mrs. Ropson cried. “I was there the night she was born. I saw. Show him!” she demanded, bearing down on the reverend. “Show him.” Then she swooped before him and fell to her knees, grabbing for his foot. The reverend shrank back, kicking at her, but I knew what she was going for. And when she finally grasped it and held it betwixt her fleshy underarm and her breast, staring at it triumphantly as if the webbed foot was some sordid sanctimonious medal, a trembling went through me that turned my stomach to water.
Wrenching his foot away, and knocking Mrs. Ropson sideways as he did so, the reverend staggered to his feet.
“I pay for my sin,” he shrilled, standing shakily before me and Sid, looking wildly betwixt us. Then he took a step closer to me, his ghastly eyes accusing mine, and his pointing finger weighting down a hand that was making one last attempt to cast blame.
“Each time I see you,” he whispered shrilly, “I suffer damnation. Each time I attempt to get rid of you, God brings you back to me. Your mother, the devil, the serpent in my garden,” his eyes took on a dull gleam. “She tempted my mortal weakness. And for this, I pay. I pay!”
My legs began to shake as his eyes sought wildly to take root in mine. But Sid was there, wrapping his arms around me and pulling me back from the reverend’s hypnotic hold. I sank against him, the weakening in my legs shored up by the weakening in his, when a knock sounded on the door. Having lumbered to her feet, Mrs. Ropson held out a restraining hand to Sid.
“Stay,” she ordered, but the door was quietly opening, and Doctor Hodgins stood there as he had the day of the meeting, with the same grave look on his face. The rain dripped off his sou’wester as he pulled it off his head, and his face tensed as he stared sickeningly at the sight of the reverend’s bared, web-toed foot and the slipper dangling from Mrs. Ropson’s hand.
“You!” Mrs. Ropson sneered, flinging the slipper to one side and limping towards Doctor Hodgins. “It’s all your fault. It’s you that stopped us from sending her away! Kept her here all these years, for me to see every time she walked by, you and your saint of a wife. Well, God did his part well, didn’t he? He took yours away from you, just as he took my boy from me. But, now mine’s come back.” She turned imploring eyes upon her son and grabbed piteously after him. “Haven’t you, Sidney? You’ve come back to me. You haven’t touched her, not as a wife. Tell them … ”
Sid pulled back from her touch as if it was fire and, holding onto me more tightly, turned savagely to Doctor Hodgins.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
Doctor Hodgins closed his eyes, hard, as if in silent prayer.
“I was going to,” he half whispered, then looked at Sid sorrowfully. “But then you went to jail. I thought fate had intervened.”
“Fate? You left it to fate? Is it fate that we’re man and wife now, as well as brother and sister?” Sid snapped. He turned to me for the first time since we had entered the house, and I closed my eyes against the nakedness of his pain. “Kit!” His voice had dropped to a whisper, and then he was thrusting me at Doctor Hodgins and backing out the door.
“Take her back to the gully. Tell Fonse I’ll send money.”
A wail went up from his mother as she charged after Sid. Pushing away from Doctor Hodgins, I blocked her path and went chasing after him, myself.
“Sid!”
Rain pelted against my face as I tore into the night.
“Sid!”
He was marching up the road leading out of Haire’s Hollow, with his head bent low and the rain pelting at his back.
“Sid!”
He turned as I caught up with him and grabbed me tightly by the arms.
“Go back, Kit. There’s nothing for us, now!”
“I’m comin’ with you.”
“No, ooh, my sweet Kit,” he moaned, gathering me against him. “It’s not fair. It’s just not fair.”
“I don’t care, I don’t care, I’m comin’ with you.”
“Sshh, no.” He pulled back and looked at me, his rain-soaked face made all the more wet with his crying. “It’s more laws, Kit.”
“Damn the laws, Sid Ropson! Since when do you care about laws?”
“I can’t touch this one, Kit. It’s mine as well as God’s. Hell, it’s every damn one of them.” Then he was kissing my face, my eyes, my lips, and holding me closer and tighter, and I clung to him with a wanting that I felt straight through to my soul, and a wanting that I knew would never stop, not on this rain-filled night, and not on a million rain-filled nights.
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