Kit's Wilderness Read Free Page B

wilderness, where we passed through the children playing and came upon Askew himself. Jax was at his side. He sat on a rock above the river with his sketch pad on his knees. His hand moved quickly across the paper. He turned and saw us there, and his face darkened. I raised my hand, but he ignored me and quickly turned toward his work again. The dog Jax watched us and growled.
    “A guided tour of the Askews,” said Grandpa as we walked back home. He laughed. “They’re like the Watsons. True Stoneygate folk. Generation after generation of them, stretching back into the deep dark past. And aye, they’ve always been a queer crew, but when you needed a mate, they was always there.”
    Later that evening, he knocked on my door. “Thought I had this somewhere,” he said. He showed me a little pit pony carved from coal. “Lovely, eh?” he said.
    I held it in my palm. It was black and smooth as glass, worn by time, but you saw how real it was, how sharp its detail had been.
    “Carved by that lad’s grandpa,” he said. “Many years ago.”
    “Askew’s an artist as well,” I said.
    I showed him the drawing that Askew had done of me.
    “That’s how it goes,” he said. “Things passing down generation to generation.”

 

    I t was Allie Keenan who helped to draw me in. I walked through the gates one afternoon and saw Askew’s group gathering there. There was Bobby Carr, the others, then Allie standing silent on the fringes. She saw me watching and she grinned. She was in my year. She lived behind us in one of the houses by the green at Stoneygate’s heart. One morning she’d run to catch up with me as I walked to school.
    “Name’s Allie Keenan,” she said. “Knew your grandma. Used to baby-sit me sometimes when I was little. Led her a dance but she loved it really.” She laughed. “She used to tell me about her precious little Kit. Perfectly behaved, she used to say. Not like one little madam I could mention.”
    We walked on together.
    “Perfectly behaved,” she said. “Is that still true? Was it ever true?” She watched me and grinned.
    “Dunno,” I said.
    “Certainly the proper gent in class,” she said. “Or is that just the new boy’s way?” She kept on watching me, kept on grinning.
    “Dunno,” I said. “Dunno what to say.”
    “Ha. Butter wouldn’t melt, eh?”
    We kept on walking.
    “She was so lovely, though,” she said. “Must have been awful for you. We were all so sad when she passed away.”
    Allie was little and thin and got into trouble for the lipstick and eye shadow she wore in school. She wore red shoes and yellow jeans. In class she giggled at the teachers and hunched over her books and scribbled fast and frantic stories filled with dragons and monsters and maidens in distress. In classes she hated, like geography, she stared out of the window and picked her nails and daydreamed about being in a soap on television one day.
    “So?” asked Mr. Dobbs, the geography teacher one day. “So, Miss Alison Keenan, what have you learned of terminal moraines in the last half hour?”
    Allie blinked, refocused, pondered.
    “Forgive me, Mr. Dobbs,” she said. “But I simply fail to see the relevance of the subject to a person of my inclinations and ambitions.”
    For that she was given detention, and a warning letter was sent home.
    The morning after I saw her at the school gates we walked together again to school.
    “You’re one of John Askew’s friends,” I said.
    She looked at me, her lips tight shut. “Hm,” she said.
    “I saw you with the others, at the gates.”
    “Hm,” she said again. She quickened her step.
    “Okay. You’re not, then,” I said.
    I let her get ahead of me, but she hesitated. “Why d’you want to know?” she said. She turned and stared right at me.
    “Dunno,” I said. “There’s something . . .”
    “Something! He’s just a brute. He’s a caveman.”
    “I talked to him.”
    “And he grunted back, I bet.” She just watched me,