Harder Ground by Joseph Heywood

Author:Joseph Heywood
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lyons Press
Published: 2015-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

One and One Is a Future Crowd

Mary Thomisine Kyd knew she was unusual, had known it since she was five and already twice as tall as her kindergarten classmates, a difference teachers, doctors, and social workers insisted would even out over time.

It didn’t.

Mary Kyd, distant kin of the famous English author Thomas Kyd, Shakespeare’s contemporary and possible colleague and collaborator, was six-foot-six and two hundred pounds of muscle. Division Two volleyball All-American, she had opted to become a cop, not just any kind of cop, but a conservation officer, called a game warden in her old kin’s sixteenth century.

In college at Ferris State Mary Kyd had majored in English literature and criminal justice and had done everything she could to learn all she could about her ancestor, the writer. Failing to secure a place in law enforcement, she would end up a reporter for the East Yoop Gazette, her dad’s weekly rag with circulation that went all over the world. Papa Kyd looked forward to the day his daughter would take over the editor-­publisher’s chair. It had nearly broken his heart when she announced choosing a badge and gun over a notebook, not that paper notebooks really existed anymore, except as artifacts of old-time reporters from a far different era when millions of trees died to bring news to the public. Pa Kyd was a veteran of the AP in Korea and Vietnam, and longtime outdoor editor of the Saginaw News before moving the family to St. Ignace in the southeastern Upper Peninsula.

There was in Mary’s mind some poetic thread reaching from her to playwright Thomas, whose specialty was eye-popping violence, a difficult effect to create in an audience with a ruling queen with a penchant for lopping the heads off legitimate criminals. Some folks in Thomas’s time merely ran afoul of her majesty’s erratic moods and ended up with their heads chopped off and spiked, body parts dropped in various parts of London as grisly reminders of the penalty for crossing her majesty, discarded like so much fertilizer to give root to fear among the hoi polloi. Thomas Kyd wrote of crime and passion, violence and madness, the same things Mary Kyd dealt with every day in her job.

Never mind that Kyd died penniless and broken at thirty-six, her very age now, and died a snitch to boot, having accused playwright Kit Marlowe of heresy, said accusations made only after weeks of brutal torture of Kyd after Marlowe accused him of the same offense, the sort of professional back-biting and a falling out that quick-stepped from sad to tragic. Released from prison, Kyd was persona non grata among all player companies and condemned to obscurity. Marlowe, meanwhile, stayed out on bail and was murdered in a barroom brawl. Kyd’s fault, some insisted.

She had been tempted to write, but the politics among such creatures was more base than among the basest criminal class, which described the fish and game poachers and violators who were her daily clients.

Happy in my job? Sure.

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