by Jojo Moyes
“No.” She didn’t blink.
“What do you mean, no?”
“I told you before. I’m a grown woman. You don’t get to ban me from anything.”
Afterward she remembered thinking distantly that old man Van Cleve’s face had grown so crimson that she feared his heart might give out. But instead he lifted his arm, and before she realized what was happening a white-hot pain exploded at the side of her head, and she collapsed against the table, her knees buckling under her.
Everything went black. Her hands gripped the tablecloth, the plates collapsing toward her as her fingers closed around the white damask, pulling it down until her knees hit the floor.
“Pa!”
“I’m doing what you should have done a long time ago! Knocking some sense into this wife of yours!” Van Cleve roared, his fat fist banging down on the tablecloth so that everything in the room seemed to shudder. Then, before she could gather her thoughts, her hair was pulled back sharply, and another blow, this time her temple, so that her head bounced off the edge of the table, and as the room spun, she was dimly aware of movement, shouting, the clatter of plates hitting the floor. Alice lifted an arm, tried to shield herself, braced for the next. But from the corner of her eye, she glimpsed Bennett in front of his father, an exchange of voices she could barely make out over the ringing in her ears.
She climbed heavily to her feet, pain clouding her thoughts, and staggered. As the room bucked around her she was dimly aware of Annie’s shocked face at the kitchen door. The taste of iron flooded the back of her throat.
She heard distant shouting, Bennett’s “No . . . No, Pa!” Alice realized that her napkin was still balled in her fist. She looked down. It was spattered with blood. She stared at it, blinking, trying to register what she was seeing. She straightened up, took a moment for the room to stop spinning, then placed it neatly on the table.
And then, without stopping to pick up her coat, Alice walked unsteadily past the two men into the hallway, opened the front door, and continued walking all the way up the snow-covered drive.
* * *
• • •
An hour and twenty-five minutes later, Margery opened the door a crack, her eyes narrowed in the dark, and found not McCullough or one of his clan, but the thin figure of Alice Van Cleve, shivering in a pale blue dress, her stockings ripped and her shoes crusted with snow. Her teeth chattered and the side of her head was bloodied, her left eye pursed into a livid purple bruise. Blood leached rust and scarlet into the neckline of her dress, and what looked like gravy spattered her lap. They stared at each other as Bluey barked furiously at the window.
Alice’s voice, when it came, was thick, as though her tongue was swollen.
“You . . . said we were friends?”
Margery un-cocked her rifle and placed it against the doorframe. She opened the door and took her friend’s elbow. “Come on in. You come on in.” She glanced around at the darkened mountainside, then closed and bolted the door behind her.
TWELVE
The woman of the mountains leads a difficult life, while the man is lord of the household. Whether he works, visits, or roams through the woods with dog and gun is nobody’s business but his own. . . . He is entirely unable to understand any interference in his affairs by society; if he turns his corn into “likker,” he is dealing with what is his.
• WPA, The WPA Guide to Kentucky
There were certain unspoken rules of society in Baileyville, and one lasting tenet was that you didn’t interfere in the private business of a man and his wife. There were many who might have been aware of beatings in their holler, man to woman, and, occasionally, the other way around, but few inhabitants would have dreamed of intervening, unless it directly infringed upon their own lives in lost sleep or disturbed routines. It was just the way things were. Words were shouted, blows were delivered, and occasionally apologies were given, or not, bruises and cuts healed and things returned to normal.
Luckily for Alice, Margery had never paid much heed to how other people did things. She cleaned the blood from Alice’s face and applied a comfrey paste to the bruises. She asked nothing, and Alice volunteered nothing, except to wince and tighten her jaw at the worst of it. Then, when the girl finally went to bed, Margery spoke discreetly to Sven and they agreed to take it in turns to sit downstairs in the small hours before dawn so that should Van Cleve come by he would find that there were circumstances in which a man might not simply drag his wife—or his daughter-in-law—home again, no matter what public embarrassment that might apparently entail for him.
Predictably, for a man used to getting his own way, Van Cleve did come by shortly before dawn, though Alice would never know that, sleeping the sleep of the profoundly shocked in Margery’s spare room. Margery’s cabin was not accessible by road, and he was obliged to walk the last half-mile so that he arrived florid and sweaty despite the snow, a torch held up in front of him.
“O’Hare?” he roared. And then when no answer came: “O’HARE!”
“You going to answer him?” Sven, who was making coffee, lifted his head.
The dog barked furiously at the window, earning a muttered curse from outside. In the stables Charley kicked at his bucket.
“Don’t really see why I should answer a man who won’t give me the courtesy of a title, do you?”
“No, I don’t believe you should,” said Sven, calmly. He had sat playing solitaire for half the night, one eye on the door, a river of dark thoughts running through his head about men who beat women.
“Margery O’Hare!”
“Oh, Lord. You know he’ll wake her if he carries on this loud.”
Wordlessly, Sven handed Margery his gun and she walked to the screen door and opened it, the rifle held loosely in her left hand as she stepped out onto the stoop, making sure Van Cleve could see it. “Can I help you, Mr. Van Cleve?”
“Fetch Alice. I know she’s in there.”
“And how would you know that?”
“This has gone far enough. You bring her out and we’ll say no more about it.”
Margery stared at her boot, considering this. “I don’t think so, Mr. Van Cleve. Good morning.”
She turned to walk back in and his voice lifted. “What? Wait, you don’t shut a door on me!”
Margery turned slowly until she was facing him. “And you don’t beat up on a girl who answers you back. Not a second time.”
“Alice did a foolish thing yesterday. I admit tempers were running high. She needs to come on home now so we can sort things out. In the family.” He ran a hand over his face and his voice softened. “Be reasonable, Miss O’Hare. Alice is married. She can’t stay here with you.”
“The way I see it, she can do what she likes, Mr. Van Cleve. She’s a grown woman. Not a dog, or a . . . a doll.”
His eyes hardened.
“I’ll ask her what she wants to do when she wakes. Now I have work to get to. So I’d be obliged if you’d leave me to wash up my breakfast dishes. Thank you.”
He stared at her for a moment, his voice lowering. “You think you’re mighty clever, don’t you, girl? You think I don’t know what you did with them letters over at North Ridge? You think I don’t know about your filthy books and your immoral girls trying to steer good women into the path of sin?”
For a few seconds the air seemed to disappear around them. Even the dog fell quiet.
His voice, when he spoke again, was thick with menace. “You watch your back, Margery O’Hare.”
“You have a nice day now, Mr. Van Cleve.”
Margery turned and walked back inside the cabin. Her voice was calm and her gait steady, but she stopped by the curtain and watched from the side of the window until she was sure Van Cleve had disappeared.
* * *
• • •
Where the heck is Little Women? I swear I’ve been searching fo
r that book for ages. Last time I saw it checked out was for old Peg down at the store, but she says she returned it and it’s been signed off in the book.”
Izzy was scanning the shelves, her finger tracing the spines of the books as she shook her head in frustration. “Albert, Alder, Allemagne . . . Did somebody steal it?”
“Maybe it got ripped and Sophia’s fixing it.”
“I asked. She says she ain’t seen it. It’s bugging me because I got two families asking and nobody seems to know where it’s gone. And you know how ornery Sophia gets when books go missing.” She adjusted her stick under her arm and moved to her right, peering closely at the titles.
The voices quieted as Margery walked through the back door, closely followed by Alice.
“You got Little Women tucked away in your bag somewhere, Margery? Izzy’s bitching fit to bust and—whoo-hoo. Looks like someone took a beating.”
“Fell off her horse,” said Margery, in a tone of voice that brooked no discussion. Beth stared at Alice’s swollen face, then her gaze slid to Izzy, who looked down at her feet.
There was a brief silence.
“Hope you—uh—didn’t hurt yourself too bad, Alice,” said Izzy, quietly.
“Is she wearing your breeches?” said Beth.
“You think I’ve got the only pair of leather breeches in the state of Kentucky, Beth Pinker? I’ve never known you so fixated on someone’s appearance before. Anyone would think you’d got nothing better to do.” Margery walked up to the ledger on the desk and began to flick through it.
Beth took the rebuke cheerfully. “Reckon they look better on her than you anyway. Lord, it’s colder than a well-digger’s backside out there. Anyone seen my gloves?”
Margery scanned the pages. “Now, Alice is a little sore so, Beth, you take the two routes over at Blue Stone Creek. Miss Eleanor is staying with her sister so she won’t need new books this time round. And, Izzy, if you could take the MacArthurs? Would that work? You can cut across that forty-acre field to tie in with your usual routes. The one with the falling-down barn.”
They agreed without complaint, sneaking glances at Alice, who said nothing, her attention fixed on some unidentified point three feet from her toes, her cheeks burning. As Izzy left she put out her hand and squeezed Alice’s shoulder gently. Alice waited until they had packed their bags and mounted their horses, and then she sat, gingerly, on Sophia’s chair.
“You all right?”
Alice nodded. They sat and listened to the sound of hoofs fading up the road.
“You know the worst thing about a man hitting you?” Margery said finally. “Ain’t the hurt. It’s that in that instant you realize the truth of what it is to be a woman. That it don’t matter how smart you are, how much better at arguing, how much better than them, period. It’s when you realize they can always just shut you up with a fist. Just like that.”
Alice remembered how Margery’s demeanor had changed when the man in the bar had placed himself between them, how her gaze had landed hard where the man touched Alice’s shoulder.
Margery pulled the coffee pot from its stand and cursed as she discovered it was empty. She mulled over it for a moment, then straightened up, and flashed Alice a tight smile. “Course, you know that only happens till you learn to hit back harder.”
* * *
• • •
Despite the daylight hours being now so short, the day ran lengthy and strange, the little library filled with a vague sense of suspense, as if Alice were not quite sure whether she should be waiting for someone or for something to happen. The blows hadn’t hurt too much the night before. Now she grasped that was her body’s reaction to shock. As the hours crept by, various parts of her had begun to swell and stiffen, a dull throb pushing at the parts of her head where it had made contact with Van Cleve’s meaty fist or the unforgiving table-top.
Margery left, after Alice assured her that, yes, she was fine, and, no, she didn’t want any more people missing out on their books, promising to bolt the door all the time she was gone. In truth, she needed time alone, time where she didn’t have to worry about everybody else’s reactions to her, as well as everything else.
And so, for a couple of hours, it was just Alice in the library, alone with her thoughts. Her head ached too much to read, and she didn’t know what to look at anyway. Her thoughts were muddied, tangled. She found it hard to focus, while the questions of her future—where she would live, what to do, whether even to try to return to England—seemed so huge and intractable that eventually it seemed easier simply to concentrate on the small tasks. Tidy some books. Make some coffee. Step outside to use the outhouse, then return swiftly to bolt the door again.
At lunchtime there was a knock on the door and she froze. But it was Fred’s voice that called, “It’s only me, Alice,” and she raised herself from the chair and slid back the bolt, stepping behind it as he came in.
“Brought you some soup,” he said, placing a bowl with a cloth draped over its rim on the desk. “Thought you might be getting hungry.”
It was then that he saw her face. She registered the shock, suppressed as quickly as it flared, to be supplanted by something darker, and angrier. He walked to the end of the room and stood there for a minute, his back to her, and it was as if he were suddenly made of something harder, as if his frame had turned to iron.
“Bennett Van Cleve is a fool,” he said, and his jaw barely moved, as if he were having trouble containing himself.
“It wasn’t Bennett.”
It took him a moment to absorb this. “Well, damn.” He walked back and stopped in front of her. She turned her head away from him, color rising in her cheeks, as if it were she who had done something to be ashamed of. “Please,” she said, and she wasn’t sure what she was asking of him.
“Let me see.” He stood before her and lifted his fingertips to her face, studying it with a frown. She closed her eyes as they traced the line of her jaw, his fingers gentle. He was so close she could smell the warmth of his skin, the faint scent of horse he carried on his clothes. “You seen a doctor?”
She shook her head.
“Can you open your mouth?”
She obliged. Then closed it again with a wince. “Brushed my teeth this morning. Think a couple of them may have rattled a bit.”
He didn’t laugh. His fingertips moved up the sides of her face, so gently that she barely felt them, even across the cuts and bruises, the same way they moved softly across a young horse’s spine, checking for misalignments. He frowned as they crossed her cheekbones and met at her forehead where he hesitated, then pushed aside a lock of hair. “I don’t think anything’s broken.” His voice was a low murmur. “Doesn’t make me want to hurt him any less, though.”
It was always the kindness that would kill you. She felt a tear slide slowly down her cheek, and hoped he didn’t see it.
He turned away. She could hear he was now by the desk, clattering a spoon onto it. “It’s tomato. Make it myself with herbs and a little cream. Figured you wouldn’t have brought anything. And it—uh—doesn’t require chewing.”
“I don’t know many men who cook.” Her voice emerged in a little sob.
“Yeah. Well. Would’ve gone pretty hungry by now if I didn’t.”
She opened her eyes and he was placing the spoon to the side of her bowl, laying a folded gingham napkin neatly beside it. For a moment she had a flashback of the place setting the previous evening, but shoved it down. This was Fred, not Van Cleve. And she was surprised to find that she was hungry.
Fred sat while she ate, his feet up in a chair as he read a book of poetry, apparently content to let her be.
She ate almost all the soup, wincing every time she opened her mouth, her tongue occasionally working back toward the two loose teeth. She didn’t speak, because she didn’t know what to say. A strange and unexpected sense of humiliation hung
over her, as if she had somehow brought this on herself, as if the bruises on her face were emblematic of her failure. She found herself replaying and replaying the night’s events. Should she have kept quiet? Should she simply have agreed? And yet to do those things would have left her—what? No better than one of those damned dolls.
Fred’s voice interrupted her thoughts. “When I found out my wife was carrying on, I reckon every second man from here to Hoffman asked me why I hadn’t given her a good hiding and brought her home again.”
Alice moved her head stiffly to look at him, but he was studying his book, as if he were reading from the words within it.
“They said I should teach her a lesson. I never got it, not even in the first flush of anger, when I thought she had pretty much stomped all over my heart. You beat a horse and you can break it all right. You can make it submit. But it’ll never forget. And it sure as hell won’t care for you. So if I wouldn’t do it to a horse, I could never work out why I should do it to a human.”
Alice pushed the bowl away slowly as he continued.
“Selena wasn’t happy with me. I knew it, though I didn’t want to think about it. She wasn’t made for out here, with the dust and the horses and the cold. She was a city girl, and I probably paid that too little mind. I was trying to build the business after my daddy died. Guess I thought she’d be like my ma, happy to forge her own path. Three years of it and no babies, I should have known the first sweet-talking salesman to promise her something different would turn her head. But, no, I never laid a hand on her. Not even when she was standing in front of me, suitcase in hand, telling me all the ways I had failed to be a man to her. And I reckon half this town still thinks I’m less of a man because of it.”
Not me, she wanted to tell him, but the words somehow wouldn’t emerge from her mouth.
They sat in silence a while longer, alone with their thoughts. Finally he stood and poured her some coffee, set it before her and walked to the door with the empty bowl. “I’ll be working with Frank Neilsen’s young colt at the near paddock this afternoon. He’s a little unbalanced and prefers the level ground. Anything you’re worried about, you just bang on that window. Okay?”