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  George turns up the wick in the kerosene lamp and leans over the mess. The doll’s severed head has fallen onto the floor. But its severed limbs are there with the body, everything covered with the doll’s innards of rag and straw.

  “Both of the girls will be punished,” George says. “You have my word on that, Mister.”

  George offers another long apology. When he presents his tobacco tin and a stack of cigarette rolling papers, the man shakes his head and reaches for his hat. After leading the man across the porch, George lights the front steps with the kerosene lamp held low. Descending, the man keeps his eyes directed toward the noise of boys gathering on the dark road.

  “I will inform my wife of your promise,” the man says, when he reaches his sedan. “But I cannot say for certain that will calm her down.”

  George remains in the yard until the rear lights on the sedan have disappeared. On the porch he finds Kiendra alone, her legs crossed at the ankle, her eyes directed down at her blistering patent leather shoes.

  “Whatcha loitering around here for, gal?” George asks. “Get your tail on home.”

  “I can’t go to my house by myself, Mr. Sebolt.”

  “It’s just a short walk, child.”

  “But I don’t have a lamp.”

  The boys are now gathering at the front steps. George calls the oldest to the porch and tells him to accompany Kiendra home. “Kerosene cost a pile of pennies,” George says, handing the boy the lamp. “Be back here lickety-split, or else I’ll beat your head so bad Jesus won’t recognize you.”

  Holding the lamp above his head, the boy leads Kiendra across the yard toward the side path. The other boys follow, jostling but keeping their voices low.

  A few yards down the path, the boys break into a loud song: What the fella gwine do? What he supposed to do. What the man gwine do? What the law say do. What the fella gwine do? What he supposed to do. What the fella gwine do? What the law say do.

  In the house down the hill, Kiendra Penncampbell’s father, Guivalier, does not add his voice to the call-and-response the boys have taken up again as they leave his front yard. Why would a man from Haiti chime in on an old Jamaican tune?

  Tall and lean, Guivalier strides into the living room, where Kiendra stands with her back exposed and the front of her dress held against her chest. Kiendra’s mother, Rosa, has not bothered to get out of bed. Her brother and sister have been warned: Come out of the bedroom and I will beat your black head to the white meat.

  Guivalier feels the warning to his other children was too harsh. Fearing his anger might get the best of him, he doesn’t select the cricket mallet from the trunk in the bedroom. His father used to swing the bat in the yard at the school in Port-au-Prince, before the family was forced back into the countryside and later onto the boat to Canada. The year he came with his family to Halifax as a four-year-old, many times he suffered the handle of the cricket mallet against his back. Never so many licks that he could not go to work the next day. When he was Kiendra’s age, by this hour he was dead tired from a day of pulling potatoes on the fields in Annapolis County. This evening he chooses for punishment a strap cut from a belt that once turned gears at the gristmill where he worked in his early twenties.

  Near the mantel, Guivalier opens the Bible his father used to recite from before meting out punishment. Flipping the pages, Guivalier feels his daughter’s brazen eyes watching. He has never told her how brash he was the evening he refused to offer his back to his father’s belt. That time he would not even acknowledge any wrongdoing. The cracked ribs he got in the tussle gave him the fortitude to pack his belongings and leave the cabin. At his father’s funeral, his job was to place the Bible in the casket, along with his father’s two French pistols. The pistols he hurled into the basin. But the Bible would not leave his hand.

  Unable to find a suitable passage, Guivalier closes the Bible. He reaches for the strap again, hearing the mannish boys return to his yard, rousting again, though they know full well that early evening calls for quiet in a Haitian yard. Guivalier raises the strap, recalling the voices of the parents of those boys, the residue of Jamaica, yes, but also Portugal, Trinidad, and the lower states in America. Sometimes, after he has thumped Kiendra’s noggin at the bus stop or whacked her neck with the edge of a cardboard hand fan during church service, one of the parents will come up close to say Kiendra deserves more leniency. They remind him of the medical treatments Kiendra endured when she was ill with the fever, as if he hadn’t been present during those weeks his daughter suffered, as if he hadn’t suffered, too. Blame gravity, his father often said before lowering the strap or the rod. Blame gravity and the creator who is working through me. But as his arm falls, Guivalier blames his own angry agency for the downward jerk of his arm as the strap strikes Kiendra’s back.

  A Way Out

  A shriek of delight erupts in the Sebolt living room the following Tuesday afternoon as Kath Ella reads the note from Mrs. Eatten. It states that Kath Ella is invited to travel downtown this coming Thursday, March 23, for a 10:00 a.m. scholarship interview. Her eyes shut tightly, her shoulders tensed, Kath Ella cannot stop her body from shaking.

  “Take a breath, child,” Shirley says, picking up the note from where it has fallen onto the floor, “or else you’re going to pass out.”

  The lingering exasperation Shirley still harbors over the trouble Kath Ella got into the previous Saturday is evident in the quick rub she gives to the girl’s back before sending her off to tell her father the good news. Out back near the shed, George reads the note with pursed lips. “You’re going to bring your narrow behind home right after your interview,” he says, handing back the note. “Or I will tear your hide good.”

  Both of my parents will be proud of me again, Kath Ella tells herself two days later in the study room at the Victorian Maternal Order, where she sits admiring the wood paneling and brass wall lamps. At a shiny oak table in the library, her conversation with the two scholarship matrons is a delight. One of the ladies seems to know every pleasant reason Kath Ella wants to be a teacher.

  Outside the building later, Kath Ella walks down the sidewalk toward the other students from Woods Bluff Elementary and Secondary who have come for an interview. All three are there, several blocks away waiting for the bus. When the students have boarded a bus, she pretends to hurry down the sidewalk, but lets the bus depart without her.

  Walking by herself, the afternoon sun warming her arms and neck, Kath Ella likes the freedom she feels after having traversed so many city blocks alone. She hopes her pleated dress and white gloves will deter strangers she meets in the South End from accosting her to ask why she is in the neighborhood. Her father will be angry that she has disobeyed his orders to come directly home after her interview. After what Kiendra told her yesterday evening, she feels she has a good reason.

  Having snuck out of her house, after her father had grounded her, and sprinted up the hill, Kiendra climbed through the window of Kath Ella’s bedroom talking up a streak. “You should have seen the look on the wife’s face there at the house in the South End when her husband said that me and my mother could come inside and get back to cleaning,” Kiendra said, nearly out of breath. “Then the wife told the husband, ‘If you know what is good for you, you better dismiss Rosa and hire a new housekeeper.’ Fat chance of that,” Kiendra said. “My mother practically raised that man.”

  But, Kiendra said, the wife has now threatened to visit her big-shot cousin at the Wales and London Hotel, where Kath Ella’s mother worked in housekeeping.

  “Oh, dear,” Kiendra said, climbing out the bedroom window. “I hope the wife’s not going to convince her cousin to fire Shirley.”

  The uneasiness that welled up in Kath Ella yesterday as she watched Kiendra leave returns now as she spies the marker for Henry Street. Shirley had taken a week off from her job at the hotel years ago, when Kath Ella was suffering with dogtrot fever. For that she lost her position serving the hotel’s wealthiest customers. To show
that she is a daughter worthy of her mother’s sacrifice is one reason Kath Ella works hard in school.

  Now my mother might lose her job altogether, Kath Ella concludes, knocking on the front door of the house. As she did yesterday, she tries to banish that thought from her head. She has heard that, these days, even jobs cleaning houses are difficult to get.

  I didn’t come back here to cause any more trouble,” Kath Ella says, inside a bedroom on the second floor. “I came to apologize.”

  The bedroom is sparsely furnished. Besides the large bed, there is a padded armchair and a dressing table. A full-length mirror leans against a beige wall. The mother, seated in the padded armchair in her undergarments, looks younger than she did last Saturday evening. She cannot be more than a few years older than Kath Ella. “Kiendra didn’t seem very sincere when she apologized,” she says, spreading talcum powder on her ankles. “Why should I believe you?”

  Kath Ella tries to think. The woman’s husband had escorted Kath Ella to the bedroom, then hurried out. But has he gone back downstairs? The baby’s crib sitting in the far corner also distracts. Is the baby asleep there? Kath Ella is also irritated that the first words the woman says to her are about Kiendra. Kiendra had said she would be here. Where is she?

  As Kath Ella begins to speak, the woman raises her hand. “That will be plenty,” she says, pointing. “Bring me that.”

  Kath Ella reaches for a green-and-gold gown lying on the bed. Now she is confused. This woman said she could come upstairs to apologize. But the woman has cut her off before she can finish. Perhaps the woman allowed her to come upstairs simply because she wanted to show off this expensive dress.

  After opening the back of the dress, Kath Ella inspects the lining for hidden buttons or hooks. With the top of the dress draped over her shoulder, she kneels and holds the dress open. “This is how you hold the dress,” she says. “Isn’t that right?”

  The woman steps into the dress without answering. “I hear you’re finishing your schooling,” she says, turning to let Kath Ella fasten the back of the dress. “I imagine you’ll get married yourself.”

  “Not soon. I plan to attend college.”

  “You’re sounding grown up this afternoon. So why were you so stupid the other day? Hand me that brush.”

  At the dressing table, Kath Ella picks up the brush, wondering if it was a mistake to brag about going to college. So few children from the bluff do. “But I might not go to college,” she says, presenting the brush. “I might get a job at the Wales and London like my mother. My sister works there when she’s not at the trade school. My grandmother used to work there, too.”

  “Your grandmother worked at the hotel?”

  “Before she died.”

  The woman accepts the brush with a softer face. “I never get to visit my grandmother anymore,” she says. “Nor any of my friends down the coast. My mother says I must be grown up and settle in here in Halifax. She complains when I miss mass. But I don’t intend to raise my daughter the way she raised me. My husband agrees.”

  “I’m sorry I came here uninvited the other day,” Kath Ella says. “Please don’t make trouble for my mother about it.”

  The woman runs the brush through her wavy brown hair a few times, looking deep in thought. As she lowers the brush to her lap, her face hardens again. “I wanted my husband to let Rosa go,” she says. “I’ll wager Kiendra didn’t tell you that. But did my husband comply? Not hardly. Philip does nothing I tell him. Nothing.”

  On Monday, March 27, when classes resume at Woods Bluff Elementary and Secondary, Kiendra Penncampbell remains missing the entire school day. She is absent the next day, too.

  “I know very well that Kiendra has missed two days of school,” Guivalier tells Kath Ella on Wednesday morning on the front porch of the Penncampbells’ house. “I am her father.”

  “Is she sick?” Kath Ella asks, clutching her schoolbooks closer to her chest.

  Guivalier sits on the banister peeling a hard-boiled egg, but with his eyes cast down the hill. He claims he can hear the rumble of the gray-and-white Acadian bus he takes to work miles before it has reached the municipal dump. “Kiendra’s going away,” he says.

  “Where’s she going?”

  “Rosa is sending your partner in trouble to her aunt in Wells Bridge.”

  “For good?”

  “No, for bad.” Guivalier chuckles and takes a bite of the egg. “This was not my decision,” he says, looking a bit helpless, “but I support it.”

  “When will Kiendra be back?”

  “When her mother tells her she can come back.”

  Kath Ella steps toward the front door and tries to look inside the house, but Rosa pushes the screen door open and comes outside. “You got what you came for,” she says, pulling her housecoat closed. “Now scoot on to school before you stir up more trouble.”

  Kiendra’s mother has never spoken to me like that, Kath Ella tells herself, heading off. She must still be under the weather. By the end of the second period, with the one-piece metal-and-wood desk assaulting her body as she corrects her scholarship essay, Kath Ella’s shock at Rosa’s words has turned to anger. How dare that woman talk to her that way?

  “Your composition is the strongest, my dear,” Mrs. Eatten says, handing Kath Ella her essay at the end of the day. “Still, I’m afraid it is not yet good enough to send downtown. I suggest you stay for an hour after school with the others and work on it.”

  Usually when Mrs. Eatten has instructed her students to rework an assignment, she paces the classroom in her busy print dress, her plump brown arms hanging heavy at her sides whenever she stops to check a student’s work. But the hour ends without Mrs. Eatten having gotten up once from her desk to examine the corrections Kath Ella has made to her essay. And later, after she gives Kath Ella the messy job of changing the sticky ribbons on the two school typewriters, Mrs. Eatten talks with several students standing at her desk, asking questions about their essays.

  “I do hope you are not planning to serve as ringleader for any more pranks, my dear,” Mrs. Eatten says at the door, where she makes hurried corrections to Kath Ella’s composition. “And to think I once believed Kiendra was the prankster.”

  Has someone cranked a handle to turn on a new world where everybody thinks she is a bad girl? Kath Ella wonders. Rosa and Mrs. Eatten believe so. So do her parents. But what sane person believes Kiendra wasn’t the girl who planned the prank? Nobody, that’s who.

  Kath Ella carries no schoolbooks home, just the two marked-up pages. A ways up Dempsey Road she can hear behind her the boys from the high elementary rows, racing toward Nobody’s Acre carrying oversized baseball gloves. She envies their freedom. Yet, so far, her only punishment for the mischief she got into has been to come home directly after school. Her father knows that being confined to her bedroom is no penance for a girl who is perfectly content to be alone reading a book or perusing old letters. It has been over a week now since she got into trouble. When will she learn about the real punishment? And what will the real punishment be?

  Answers to Kath Ella’s questions about her punishment seem to be imminent when she arrives home to find the leather-bottom chair in the living room placed to face the sofa.

  “I hope you have enjoyed your leisurely walks home from school these last few days, young lady,” George says, ashes falling off the cigarette he waves, motioning Kath Ella to sit. “Because from now whenever school lets out, you will have exactly fifteen minutes to get home.”

  Kath Ella nods, but the tone of her father’s voice makes her uneasy. In these situations Shirley usually sits beside George on the sofa. But Shirley stands rigid in her housecoat, guarding the doorway. “Your mother was let go from her job at the hotel today,” George says. “And I believe you know why.”

  Kath Ella looks up. “Momma was let go?”

  George shoves his cigarette lighter into the pocket of his work pants. “No more trips to the gymnasium or the swimming pool after school for a
while, young lady,” he says. “I am not spending another gray nickel on the bus for your entertainment. Do you follow?”

  Shirley uncrosses her arms and moves to the sofa. “First you talk Kiendra into going on a prank. Then you go back to the house and bother the mother again? What possessed you to do that?”

  “I didn’t talk Kiendra into going on the prank.”

  “You didn’t talk her out of it,” Shirley says. “And you didn’t talk yourself out of going back to that house. Has someone stolen your senses?”

  George puts a hand on Kath Ella’s knee. “Now your mother and I have to go back to the hotel and ask her boss to change his mind.”

  “I doubt he will,” Shirley says. “Which means we’ll have less money to run this house.”

  “I’m sorry,” Kath Ella says.

  “Not as sorry as you’re going to be,” Shirley says. “I’m putting you to work this summer. You’re going to find a job.”

  “At the hotel?”

  Shirley’s open palm lands hard against her daughter’s cheek, and Kath Ella winces at the sharp pain. With a hand on her cheek, she looks at the doorway. Her sister must be there in the hallway, out of sight, because she has heard a gasp. Now footsteps bring Luela closer.

  “Just look at all the correction marks on this whatchamacallit thing you are writing for the scholarship,” Shirley says, pointing at the page on Kath Ella’s lap. “I want this schoolwork fixed before you get a bite of dinner.”

  Kath Ella looks at George, who also seems startled at the force of Shirley’s blow. “If I was you I’d skedaddle out of your mother’s sight,” he says. “And I would do it lickety-split.”

  One of the benefits of rereading her scholarship essay this evening is that Kath Ella can turn her mind to her deceased elders. Not a single grandparent that she can remember was ever as mean as her parents. At least that is how she feels at the moment. Her paternal grandfather, who built the house she lives in, was still alive when she was born, but try as she might she doesn’t remember him. She knows her grandfather used the old Sebolt family home, the narrow cabin behind the house, as a woodshop. There he made tables, chairs, and wooden utensils on a workbench he constructed using railroad ties. He earned good money repairing shutters, floors, and other house parts during the year before he died of a heart attack. She and her sister spent plenty of afternoons in the storage shed rummaging through trunks and crates, looking for dress-up clothes or items to use for made-up games. After her grandfather’s tools were sold and the bulky workbenches cleared out, there was room to play jacks or skip rope in bad weather.