by Jojo Moyes
* * *
• • •
Garrett Bligh died two days later, after weeks of hovering in a strange, rasping hinterland while those who loved him tried to work out whether his lungs or his heart would give out first. The word went round the mountain, the bell tolled thirty-four times, so that everyone nearby could tell who had departed. After they had finished their day’s work the neighboring men gathered at the Bligh household, carrying good clothes in case Kathleen had none, ready to lay out, wash and dress the body, as was the local custom. Others began to build the coffin that would be lined with cotton and silk.
Word reached the Packhorse Library a day later. Margery and Alice, by tacit agreement, shared out their routes between Beth and Izzy as best they could, then set out for the house together. There was a sharp wind that, instead of being blocked by the mountains, simply used them as a funnel, and Alice rode the whole way with her chin pressed into her collar, wondering what she could say when she reached the little house, and wishing she had an appropriate greetings card, or perhaps a posy to offer.
In England a house in mourning was a place of silence, of vaguely whispered conversation, shaded by a cloak of sadness, or awkwardness, depending on how well the deceased was known or loved. Alice, who often managed to say the wrong thing, found such hushed occasions oppressive, a trap that she would no doubt fall into.
When they reached the top of Hellmouth Ridge, though, there was little suggestion of silence: they passed cars and buggies dotted lower down the track, abandoned on the verge as the passing became impossible, and when they reached the house, strange horses’ heads poked out of the barn, whickering at each other, and muffled singing came from inside. Alice looked over to a small bank of pine trees, where three men were digging in heavy coats, their picks sending clanging sounds into the air as they hit rock, their faces puce, and their breath pale gray clouds. “Is she going to bury him here?” she said to Margery.
“Yup. His whole family’s up there.” Alice could just make out a succession of stone slabs, some large, some heartbreakingly small, telling of a Bligh family history on the mountain stretching back generations.
Inside, the little cabin was full to bursting. Garrett Bligh’s bed had been shoved to one side and covered with a quilt for people to sit on. Barely an inch of space remained that wasn’t covered with small children, trays of food, or singing matriarchs, who nodded at Alice and Margery as they entered, without breaking off their song. The windows, which, Alice remembered, had contained no glass, were shuttered and carbide lamps and candles lit the gloom so that it was hard to tell inside if it was day or night. One of the Bligh children sat on the lap of a woman with a prominent chin and kind eyes, and the others nestled into Kathleen, as she closed her eyes and sang too, the only one of the group to be somewhere far from there. A trestle table had been set up on which lay a pine coffin, and Alice could just make out within it the body of Garrett Bligh, his face relaxed in death, so much so that, for a moment, she wondered whether it was him at all. His hollowed cheekbones had somehow softened, his brow now smooth under soft, dark hair. Only his face was visible, the rest of him covered with an intricate patchwork quilt and strewn with flowers and herbs that scented the air. She had never seen a dead body, but somehow here, surrounded by the songs and warmth of the people around him, it was hard to feel shock or discomfort at its proximity.
“I’m so sorry for your loss,” Alice said. It was the only phrase she had been coached to say, and here it seemed sterile and useless. Kathleen opened her eyes and, taking a moment to register, smiled vaguely at Alice. Her eyes were rimmed pink and shadowed with exhaustion.
“He was a fine man, and a fine father,” said Margery, sweeping in and holding her tightly. Alice wasn’t sure she’d ever seen Margery hug someone before.
“He’d had enough,” Kathleen murmured, and the child in her arms looked at her blankly, her thumb thrust deep into her mouth. “I couldn’t wish him to stay any longer. He’s with the Lord now.”
The slack of her jaw and her sad eyes failed to mirror the conviction of her words.
“Did you know Garrett?” An older woman with two crocheted shawls around her shoulders tapped the four inches of bed-space beside her, so that Alice felt obliged to squeeze her way in too.
“Oh, a little. I—I’m just the librarian.”
The woman peered at her, frowning.
“I only knew him from my visits.” It came out apologetically, as if she knew she shouldn’t really be there.
“You’re the lady used to read to him?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, child! That was such a comfort to my son.” The woman reached out and pulled Alice to her. Alice stiffened, then gave in to her. “Kathleen told me many times how much Garrett looked forward to your visits. How they would take him quite out of himself.”
“Your son? Oh, my goodness. I’m so sorry.” She meant it. “He really did seem the nicest of men. And he and Kathleen were so very fond of each other.”
“I’m much obliged to you, Miss . . .”
“Mrs. Van Cleve.”
“My Garrett was a fine young man. Oh, you didn’t see him before. He had the broadest shoulders this side of the Cumberland Gap, didn’t he, Kathleen? When Kathleen married him there were a hundred crying girls between here and Berea.”
The young widow smiled at the memory.
“I used to tell him I had no idea how he could even make his way into that mine with a build like his. Course, now I wish he hadn’t. Still—” the older woman swallowed and lifted her chin, “—not for us to question God’s plan. He’s with his own father and he’s with God the Father. We just have to get used to being down here without him, don’t we, sweetheart?” She reached out and squeezed her daughter-in-law’s hand.
“Amen,” someone called.
Alice had assumed that they would pay their respects and leave, but as morning became afternoon and afternoon swiftly fell to dusk, the little cabin grew fuller, with miners arriving after their shift, their wives bringing pies and souse and fruit jellies, and as time slid and stalled in the dim light, more people piled in, and nobody left. Chicken appeared in front of Alice, then soft biscuits and gravy, fried potatoes and more chicken. Somebody shared some bourbon, and there were outbreaks of laughter, tears and singing, and the air in the tiny cabin grew warm, thick with the scents of roasted meats and sweet liquor. Someone produced a fiddle and played Scottish tunes that made Alice feel vaguely homesick. Margery occasionally shot her a look, as if checking she was okay, but Alice, surrounded by people who would clap her on the back and thank her for her service, as if she were a military man, not just an Englishwoman delivering books, was oddly glad just to sit and absorb it all.
So Alice Van Cleve gave herself to the strange rhythms of the evening. She sat a few feet from a dead man, ate the food, sipped a little of the drink, sang along to hymns she barely knew, clasped the hands of strangers, who no longer felt like strangers. And when night fell and Margery whispered in her ear that they really should get going now, because a hard frost would be setting in, Alice was surprised to find that she felt as if she was leaving home, not heading back to it, and this thought was so disconcerting that it pushed away all else for the whole of the slow, cold, lantern-lit ride back down the mountain.
NINE
Many medical men now recognize that numerous nervous and other diseases are associated with the lack of physiological relief for natural or stimulated sex feelings in women.
• DR. MARIE STOPES, Married Love
According to the local midwives, there was a reason most babies came in summer, and that was because there wasn’t a whole heap to do in Baileyville once the light had gone. The picture house tended to get its movies some months after they had been and gone elsewhere. Even when they came Mr. Rand, who ran it, loved his liquor, to the extent that you could never be sure that you’d see the end of
the show before a reel crumpled and burned on screen, victim to one of his impromptu naps, prompting jeers and disappointment across the audience. Harvest festival and hog-slaughter had slid past and it was too early for Thanksgiving, which left a long month with nothing but darkening skies, the increasing smell of wood smoke in the air, and the encroaching cold to look forward to.
And yet. It was apparent to anybody who took notice of such things (and Baileyville’s residents made whole careers out of taking notice) that this fall an inordinate number of local men seemed oddly cheerful. They raced home as soon as they could and whistled their way through their days bug-eyed with sleep deprivation but shorn of their usual short tempers. Jim Forrester, who drove for the Mathews lumber yard, was barely seen at the honky-tonks, where he usually spent his non-working hours. Sam Torrance and his wife had taken to walking around holding hands and smiling at each other. And Michael Murphy, whose mouth had been welded into a thin line of dissatisfaction for most of his thirty-odd years, had been seen singing—actually singing—to his wife on his porch.
These were not developments that the elders of the town felt able to complain about, exactly, but certainly added, they confided to each other with a vague feeling of discombobulation, to a sense that things were shifting in a way they were at a loss to understand.
The inhabitants of the Packhorse Library were not quite as perplexed. The little blue book—which had proven more popular and more useful than any number of bestsellers, and required almost constant repair—was dispatched and returned week after week, under piles of magazines, with quick, grateful smiles, accompanied by whispered murmurings of My Joshua never even heard of such a thing, but he sure does seem to like it! And No baby this springtime for us. I cannot tell you the relief. A honeymooner’s blush would accompany many of these confidences, or a distinct twinkle in the eye. Only one woman returned it stony-faced, with the admonition that she had never seen the devil’s work cast into print before. But even then Sophia noted that there were several pages where the corners had been carefully turned to keep their place.
Margery would slide the little book back into its home in the wooden chest where they kept cleaning materials, blister liniment and spare stirrup leathers, and a day or two later the word would be passed to another remote cabin, and the query would be made, tentatively, to another librarian: “Um . . . before you go, my cousin over at Chalk Hollow says you have a book that covers matters of . . . a certain delicacy . . .” and it would find itself on its way again.
“What are you girls doing?”
Izzy and Beth sprang back from the corner as Margery walked in, kicking mud from the heels of her boots in a way that would infuriate Sophia later. Beth was quite helpless with laughter, and Izzy’s cheeks glowed pink. Alice was at the desk, entering her books into the ledger and pretending to ignore them.
“Are you girls looking at what I think you’re looking at?”
Beth held up the book. “Is this true? That ‘female animals may actually die if denied sexual union’?” Beth was open-mouthed. “Because I’m not hanging off no man and I don’t look like I’m fit to drop, do I?”
“But what do you die of?” said Izzy, aghast.
“Maybe your hole closes up and then you can’t breathe properly. Like one of them dolphins.”
“Beth!” exclaimed Izzy.
“If that’s where you’re breathing out of, Beth Pinker, then lack of sexual congress isn’t the thing we need to be worrying about,” said Margery. “Anyway, you girls shouldn’t be reading about that. You’re not even married.”
“Nor are you, and you’ve read it twice.”
Margery pulled a face. The girl had a point.
“Jeez, what are the ‘natural completions of a woman’s sex-functions’?” Beth started to giggle again. “Oh, my, look here, this says that women who don’t get satisfaction may suffer an actual nervous breakdown. Can you believe that? But if they do get satisfaction, ‘every organ in their bodies is influenced and stimulated to play its part, while their spirits, after soaring in the dizzy heights of rapture, are wafted to oblivion.’”
“My organs are meant to be wafting?” said Izzy.
“Beth Pinker, will you just shut up for five minutes?” Alice slammed her book down on the desk. “Some of us are actually trying to work here.”
There was a brief silence. The women exchanged sideways looks.
“I’m just joking with you.”
“Well, some of us don’t want to hear your horrible jokes. Can you just cut it out? It’s not funny.”
Beth frowned at Alice. She picked casually at a piece of cotton on her breeches. “I’m so sorry, Miss Alice. I hate that I might have caused you distress,” she said, solemnly. A sly smile spread across her face. “You’re not . . . you’re not having a nervous breakdown, are you?”
Margery, who had lightning-quick reaction times, managed to get between them just before Alice’s fist made contact. She raised her palms, pushing them apart, and gestured Beth toward the door. “Beth, why don’t you check those horses have fresh water? Izzy, put that book back in the trunk and come and sweep up this mess. Miss Sophia gets back from her aunt’s tomorrow and you know what she’ll have to say about it all.”
She looked at Alice, who had sat down again and was now staring with intense concentration at the ledger, her whole demeanor warning Margery not to say another thing. She would be there long after the rest of them had gone home, as she was every working night. And Margery knew she wasn’t reading a word.
* * *
• • •
Alice waited until Margery and the others had left, raising her head to mutter good-bye. She knew they would talk about her when they were gone but she didn’t care. Bennett wouldn’t miss her: he would be out with friends. Mr. Van Cleve would be late at the mine, as he was most nights, and Annie would be tutting about three dinners gone dry and shriveled in the bottom of the range.
Despite the companionship of the other women, she felt so lonely she could weep with the weight of it. She spent most of her time alone in the mountains and some days she talked more to her horse than any other living being. Where once it had offered her a welcome sense of freedom, now the vast expanses seemed only to emphasize her sense of isolation. She would turn up her collar against the cold, wedge her fingers into her gloves, with miles of flinted track in front of her and only the ache in her muscles to distract her. Sometimes she felt as if her face was set in stone, apart from when she finally stopped to deliver her books. When Jim Horner’s girls ran to her for hugs it was all she could do not to hold tight to them and let out an involuntary silent sob. She had never thought of herself as someone who needed physical contact, but night after night, yards away from Bennett’s sleeping body, she felt herself slowly turning to marble.
“Still here, huh?”
She jumped.
Fred Guisler had put his head around the door. “Just came to bring a new coffee pot. Marge said the old one had sprung a leak.”
Alice wiped at her eyes and gave him a bright smile. “Oh, yes! Go right ahead.”
He hesitated on the threshold. “Am I . . . disturbing something?”
“Not at all!” Her voice was forced, too cheery.
“I won’t be a minute.” He walked over to the side, replacing the metal coffee pot and checking the tin for supplies. He kept the women in coffee every week without so much as mentioning it, and brought in logs to keep the fire burning so that they could get warm between rounds. “Frederick Guisler,” Beth would announce every morning, smacking her lips at her first cup, “is a veritable saint.”
“Brought you all some apples too, thought you could take a couple each to work. You’ll be getting hungrier now the days are colder.” He pulled a bag from inside his overcoat and put them on the side. He was still wearing his work clothes, his boots hemmed by a layer of mud around the sole. Sometimes sh
e would hear him outside as she arrived, talking to his young horses with a yip! And a “C’mon, now, smartypants, you can do better than that,” as if they were just as much his friends as the women in the cabin, or standing, arms crossed, beside some fancy horse-owner from Lexington, sucking his teeth as they discussed conformation and price. “These here are Rome Beauties. They ripen a little later than the rest.” He shoved his hands into his pockets. “I always like . . . to have something to look forward to.”
“That’s very kind of you.”
“It’s nothing. You girls work hard . . . and don’t always get the credit you deserve.”
She thought he would leave then, but he hesitated in front of the desk, chewing the side of his lip. She lowered her book and waited.
“Alice? Are you . . . all right?” He spoke the words as if this was a question he had already rolled over in his head twenty, thirty times. “It’s just, well, I hope you don’t mind me mentioning, but you . . . you seem—well, you seem so much less happy than you did. I mean, when you first came.”
She felt her cheeks color. She wanted to say I’m fine but her mouth had dried and nothing would come.
He studied her face for a moment and then he walked slowly across to the shelves to the left of the front door. He scanned them, a nod of satisfaction escaping him when he found what he was looking for. He pulled a book from the shelf and brought it to her. “She’s a bit of a misfit, but I like the fire in her words. When I felt low, a few years back, I found some of these were . . . helpful.” He took a scrap of paper, marking the page he had sought, and handed it to her. “I mean, you may not like them. Poetry is kind of a personal thing. I just thought . . .” He kicked at a loose nail on the floor. Then finally he looked up at her. “Anyways. I’ll leave you to it.” Then, as if compelled, he added, “Mrs. Van Cleve.”
She didn’t know what to say. He walked to the door, raising a hand in awkward salute. His clothes were scented with wood smoke.