Kit's Law Read Online Free

replied, patting my cheek. “And almost as smart as your Sidney, they says. All hundreds, isn’t that what you gets, Kittens?”
    I nodded, eyes to the ground.
    “That’s nice. Well—good day, then,” Mrs. Ropson said, turning up her garden path.
    “Make sure to bar your door,” Aunt Drucie called after her. “What with Shine still on the loose and diggin’ graves, nobody’s safe.”
    “Ha!” Nan snorted. “I been barrin’ my door since long before Shine come up the bay. Tell the reverend it was a nice sermon,” she said to Mrs. Ropson’s back. “I s’pose even the likes of Rube Gale deserves some respect; pity you got to be dead to get it.
    “The bloody ones from away,” Nan charged, widening her stride to take Fox Point, the hill leading out of Haire’s Hollow, me and Aunt Drucie half running to keep up. “You’d think be the Jesus, God forgive me for cursin’, that they was born in God’s pocket, they sits so Lord Jesus straight. The way they walked into my house that day, brother—turned me stomach. And the likes of May Eveleigh!” Here, Nan spat as if she had potato rot in her mouth. “You’d swear be the Jesus, she was from away herself, the way she sucks up to the reverend and his wife. The same with Jimmy Randall! As if their own wouldn’t good enough for ’em. If you asked me, brother, they makes Shine look like a pussy-footed angel whenever they gets crossed, and they got crossed by me then. And the next time you gets a hundred in school, Kit, you make sure you brings that test home to me, and I plasters it betwixt the eyes of every face in Haire’s Hollow that thinks I’m not fit to raise a youngster.”
    “My, my, you keeps as clean a house as any, Lizzy,” Aunt Drucie answered, struggling to keep back a yawn and keep up with Nan at the same time. “You knows we all knows that.”
    “And I’d have the same as everyone else, too,” Nan snapped, “if poor old Ubert could’ve took to the sea. They put him in his grave; every year others gettin’ picked over him for the jobs on shore.”
    “Poor old Ubert, he was no fisher, but he was a good man. And the only brother I had to do anything for me,” said Aunt Drucie.
    “And he was as good a father to Jose as most others would’ve made.”
    “I dare say he was,” Aunt Drucie agreed. “’Tis not every man who’d put up with Josie and her ways.”
    “And he kept her youngster, same as if it were his own.”
    “And that he did, my dear.”
    “And he was one for work, never mind everyone thinkin’ he was a hangashore.”
    “The sea’s not for everyone, for sure,” said Aunt Drucie. “I gets sick meself just looking at it some mornin’s.” She came to a stop halfways up the hill, bent over, hand to her side. “Wait up, Lizzy, maid, I catches me breath.”
    Nan stopped, breathing heavily, and looked back over the stovepipes of Haire’s Hollow, puffing grey, wood-smoked clouds into the air. The parishioners had left the graveyard by now, and were standing around in smaller groups, some in front of May Eveleigh’s store, and others, mostly the men, trailing across the road to the wharf to talk with Old Joe, or to check on their boats bobbing alongside on the water. The youngsters were darting everywhere, and climbing over woodpiles, woodhouses and boats, and screeching louder than the seagulls fighting over Old Joe’s fish guts. Margaret Eveleigh and her best friends, I saw, were gathering around a mountain of cut spruce trees, piled high on the beach a little ways down from the wharf.
    “How come they’re havin’ a bonfire, tonight?” asked Aunt Drucie. “Guy Fawkes Night is not till November, ain’t it?”
    “They’ll probably have five more bonfires before Guy Fawkes Night,” said Nan. “Sure, the young can’t wait for nothin’ these days.”
    “My, my,” tisked Aunt Drucie. “Like goin’ to church on Thursday, sure. Is you goin’ to the fire, Kit?”
    “No,” I said, shaking my head.
    “Yes