Kit's Law Read Online Free Page B

Martle,” said Nan, jabbing a finger at me as Josie ran off around the house, leaving me rubbing my arm and glaring after her, “you can wipe that look off your face, ’cuz she’s your mother, retarded or no, and is as good as anybody else in Haire’s Hollow to ask you an important question about where you’re goin’ without gettin’ her eyes clawed out. Here, where you goin’?” Nan bawled out as I started running away.
    “To get Pirate,” I said, skidding down over the lip of the gully. Coming to the brook that gushed down the gully’s cleft, I started running with it, leaping rocks that bubbled out of its waters, jolting to quick halts when nothing appeared to catch my foot, and springing to the gully’s side, slipping and sliding down its muddied slopes, then back onto the rocks again, leap leap leaping till finally I was racing full tilt down onto the beach, with the wind washing my hair back off my face and streaming the water out of my eyes. Tipping my face to the sun, I dashed along the frothing edge of the waves thundering upon the shore, licking the salt off my lips, and feeling my feet scrunching down through the pebbled grey beach rocks to the black wet sand below.
    The sun glinted on something yellow and I stopped running. It was a piece of yellow glass, a big piece as wide as my hand. I marvelled at its clearness and, holding it over my eyes, smiled as the warm golden colour shrouded everything with Midas gold. Surely a worthy piece for our treasure, heh Pirate, I thought, spotting the tom as he appeared through the trees and skirted along the woods’ edge, as far up from the water as he could get. For a pirate, he certainly didn’t like water.
    Slipping the piece of glass into my pocket, I sauntered along to Crooked Feeder, a noisy river that spliced down through the woods some ways ahead, and splayed out over the beach, cutting it in half, and pouring into the sea. It use to be a favourite game of mine, when I was smaller and Pirate first wandered out of the woods looking for a home, to scavenge the beach, looking for pieces of coloured glass. Jewels, I called them, for my growing treasure. And Pirate would become a pirate—henceforth his name—who would try to waylay me, claiming the jewels for his own looted treasure. And when I became tired of battling down Pirate and his fleet of thieves lurking in the woods, I would lie on my back, looking up through the pieces of coloured glass, and imagine myself living in such coloured worlds as the Midas world, where everything I touched turned to gold.
    Only I wouldn’t want to stay in such a world, I thought, coming up to Crooked Feeder. It would be a hard thing to see nothing but yellow all day long. Despite the cold, it was warm to snuggle amongst the boulders along the river’s edge and have them break the wind and let the sun shine full on your face. It didn’t matter what colour anything was when the wind was broken and the sun was shining. Simply close your eyes to the burst of red the sun made burning onto your eyelids, and listen to the gulls crying out to one another, and to the waves rolling up on the shore and suckling their way back out, and soon enough even the most horrid day turned quiet inside of you. And that, I imagined, on days like today, with the reverend pointing the finger of shame at Josie again, and Nan threatening to bury the half of Haire’s Hollow in one grave, and Margaret and her best friends hooting and giggling behind their gloved hands, was what everyone must want the most—to feel quiet.
    “What you doin’, hey? What you doin’?”
    Startled, I opened my eyes. Josie was kneeling on top of one of the boulders, staring down at me, her browny green eyes squinting in the sun, her windblown hair tangling around her face. Scrambling to my feet, I glowered at her and started walking back up the beach towards the gully. She barrelled past me as she most always did, even when I was a youngster, bawling to catch up