by Jojo Moyes
Margery shifted awkwardly. “Ah, come on, Mrs. Brady. Nobody pays any heed to Mr. Van Cleve.”
“You think? Well, Izzy’s father, for one, has put his foot down.”
“What?”
“Mr. Brady has tonight insisted Izzy withdraw from the program.”
Margery’s jaw dropped. “You’re kidding.”
“I most certainly am not. This library relies on the goodwill of locals. It relies on the notion of the public good. Whatever it is you’re doing, you have created a controversy and Mr. Brady does not want his only child dragged into it.”
She raised a hand suddenly to her cheek. “Oh, my. Mrs. Nofcier will not be happy when she hears about this. She will not be happy at all.”
“But—but Beth Pinker just broke her arm. We’re already one librarian down. If we lose Izzy, too, the library won’t be able to continue.”
“Well, perhaps you should have thought about that before you started mixing things up with your . . . radical literature.” It was then that she noticed Alice’s face. She blinked hard, frowned at her, then shook her head as if this, too, were evidence of something going deeply wrong down at the Packhorse Library. Then she swept out, Izzy throwing a despairing glance their way as she was pulled along by her sleeve toward the door.
* * *
• • •
Well, that’s torn it.”
Margery and Alice stood on the stoop of the now empty meeting hall as the last of the buggies and murmuring couples disappeared. For the first time Margery seemed truly at a loss. She was still holding a crumpled leaflet in her fist and now threw it down, grinding it under her heel into the snow on the step.
“I’ll ride tomorrow,” said Alice. Her voice still emerged muffled from her swollen mouth, as if she were speaking through a pillow.
“You can’t. You’d spook the horses, let alone the families.” Margery rubbed at her eyes and took a deep breath. “I’ll take what extra routes I can. But Lord knows the snow has pushed everything back already.”
“He wants to destroy us, doesn’t he?” said Alice, dully.
“Yes, he does.”
“It’s me. I told him where to put his fifty dollars. He’s so mad he’ll do anything to punish me.”
“Alice, if you hadn’t told him where to put his fifty dollars, I would have done it and in capital letters. Van Cleve’s the kind of man can’t bear to see a woman take any kind of place in the world. You can’t go blaming yourself for a man like him.”
Alice shoved her hands deep into her pockets. “Maybe Beth’s arm will heal quicker than the doctor said.”
Margery gave her a sideways look.
“You’ll work something out,” Alice added, as if she were confirming it to herself. “You always do.”
Margery sighed. “C’mon. Let’s head back.”
Alice took two steps down and pulled Margery’s jacket tight around her. She wondered whether Fred would come with her to pick up the last of her belongings. She was afraid of going by herself.
Then a voice broke into the silence. “Miss O’Hare?”
Kathleen Bligh appeared around the corner of the meeting hall, holding an oil lamp in front of her with one hand and the reins of a horse in the other. “Mrs. Van Cleve.”
“Hey, Kathleen. How are you doing?”
“I was at the meeting.” Her face was drawn under the harsh light. “I heard what your man there was saying about y’all.”
“Yes. Well. Everyone has an opinion in this town. You don’t want to believe everything you—”
“I’ll ride for you.”
Margery tilted her head, as if she wasn’t sure she was hearing right.
“I’ll ride. I heard what you was saying to Mrs. Brady. Garrett’s ma will mind the babies for me. I’ll ride with you. Until your girl’s arm is mended.”
When neither Margery nor Alice responded, she said: “I know my way around every holler for twenty miles yonder. Can ride a horse as well as anyone. Your library kept me going and I won’t see some old fool shut it down.”
The women stared at each other.
“So what time do I come by tomorrow?”
It was the first time Alice had seen Margery truly lost for words. She stuttered a little before she spoke again. “A little after five would be good. We got a lot of ground to cover. Course, if that’s too difficult because of your bab—”
“Five it is. Got my own horse.” She lifted her chin. “Garrett’s horse.”
“Then I’m obliged to you.”
Kathleen nodded at them both, then mounted the big black horse, steered him round, and was lost in the darkness.
* * *
• • •
When she looked back afterward, Alice would remember January as the darkest of months. It wasn’t just that the days were short and frozen, and that much of their riding was now done in the pitch black, collars high around their necks and their bodies swaddled in as many clothes as they could wear and still move. The families they visited were often blue with cold themselves, children and old people tucked up together in beds, some coughing or rheumy-eyed, huddled around half-hearted fires and all still desperate for the diversion and hope that a good story could bring. Getting books to them had become infinitely harder: routes were often impassable, the horses staggering through deep snow or sliding on ice on steep paths so that Alice would dismount and walk, haunted by the image of Beth’s red and swollen arm.
True to her word, Kathleen would turn up at 5 a.m. four mornings a week on her husband’s rangy black horse, collect two bags of books, and ride off wordlessly into the mountains. She rarely needed to double-check the routes, and the families she served met her with open doors, and expressions of pleasure and respect. Alice observed that leaving the house was good for Kathleen, despite the travails of the job and the long hours away from her children. Within weeks she carried a new air of, if not happiness, then quiet accomplishment, and even those families swayed by Mr. Van Cleve’s emphatic takedown of the library were persuaded to stay with it, given Kathleen’s insistence that the library was a good thing, and she and Garrett had honest reasons for believing so.
But it was hard all the same. Something like a quarter of the mountain families had dropped out, and a good number in the town, and the rumor mill had gone into overdrive so that those who had previously welcomed them now viewed them with wary eyes.
Mr. Leland says one of your librarians is with child out of wedlock after becoming crazed with lust from a romance novel.
I heard all five sisters over at Split Willow are refusing to help their parents in the house after having their heads turned by political texts slipped into their recipe books. One of them has grown hair on the back of her hands.
Is it true that your English girl is really a Communist?
Occasionally they even received insults and abuse from people they visited. They had started to avoid riding past the honky-tonks on Main Street as men would catcall obscenities from the doorways, or follow them down the street, mimicking what they claimed was in the reading material. They missed Izzy’s presence, her songs and her cheerful, awkward enthusiasms, and while nobody spoke openly of it, the absence of Mrs. Brady’s support felt like they had lost their backbone. Beth stopped by a few times but was so grumpy and despondent that she—and eventually they—found it easier for her not to be there at all. Sophia spent the hours she no longer had to fill with filing books by making up more scrapbooks. “Things can still change,” she would tell the two younger women firmly. “Have faith.”
Alice plucked up courage and made her way to the Van Cleve House, flanked by Margery and Fred. She felt weak with relief when Van Cleve wasn’t there and it was Annie who silently handed her two neatly packed suitcases and closed the door with an all-too-emphatic slam. But once back in Margery’s cabin, despite Margery’s assurances that she cou
ld stay as long as she liked, Alice couldn’t help feeling like an interloper, a refugee in a world whose rules she still didn’t entirely understand.
Sven Gustavsson was solicitous; he was a kind man who never made Alice feel unwelcome, and took time to ask her during every visit about herself, her family back in England, what she had done with her day, as if she were a favored guest he was always quietly delighted to find there, not just a lost soul clogging up their living area.
He told her about what really went on at Van Cleve’s mines: the brutality, the union-breakers, broken bodies and conditions she could barely stand to picture. He explained it all in a voice that suggested this was simply how it was, but she felt a deep shame that the comforts in which she had lived at the big house had been provided from its proceeds.
She would retreat to a far corner and read one of Margery’s 122 books, or she would lie awake through the unlit hours, her thoughts periodically interrupted by the sounds emerging from Margery’s bedroom and their frequency. Their uninhibited nature and unexpected joyfulness left her feeling first acute embarrassment then, after a week, curiosity tinged with sadness at how Margery and Sven’s experience of love could be so different from her own.
But mostly she would sneak glances at the way he was around Margery, the way he watched her move with quiet approval, the way his hand strayed to her whenever she was nearby, as if the touch of his skin on hers was as necessary to him as breathing. She marveled at how he discussed Margery’s work with her, as if it were something he took pride in, offering suggestions or words of support. She noted that he pulled Margery to him without embarrassment or awkwardness, murmuring secrets into her ears and sharing smiles lit with unspoken intimacies, and it was then that something in Alice would hollow out, until she felt there was something cavernous inside her, a great gaping hole that grew and grew until it threatened to swallow her whole.
Focus on the library, she would tell herself, pulling the counterpane up to her chin and blocking her ears. As long as you have that, you have something.
THIRTEEN
There is no religion without love, and people may talk as much as
they like about their religion, but if it does not teach them to be good
and kind to man and beast, it is all a sham.
• ANNA SEWELL, Black Beauty
In the end they sent Pastor McIntosh, as if God’s word might hold sway where Van Cleve’s could not. He knocked on the door of the Packhorse Library on a Tuesday evening and found the women in a circle, cleaning their saddles, a bucket of warm water between them, chatting companionably as the log burner roared in the corner.
He removed his hat, folding it to his chest. “Ladies, I am sorry to interrupt your work but I wondered if I might have a word with Mrs. Van Cleve here.”
“If it’s Mr. Van Cleve sent you, Pastor McIntosh, I’ll save your breath and tell you exactly what I told him, and his son, and his housekeeper, and anyone else who wants to know. I’m not going back.”
“Lord, but that man is relentless,” muttered Beth.
“Well, that’s an understandable emotion, given the high feelings of recent weeks. But you are married now, dear. You are subject to a higher authority.”
“Mr. Van Cleve’s?”
“No. God’s. Those whom God has joined together, let no man put asunder.”
“Good thing she’s a lady, then,” muttered Beth, and sniggered.
Pastor McIntosh’s smile wavered. He sat heavily on the seat by the door, and leaned forward. “You were married under God, Alice, and it’s your duty to return home. You just walking out like this is . . . well, it’s causing ripples. You need to think about the wider effects of your behavior. Bennett’s unhappy. His father is unhappy.”
“And my happiness? I’m guessing that doesn’t come into it.”
“Dear girl—it is through domestic life that you will achieve true contentment. A woman’s place is in the home. Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church, and he is the savior of the body. Ephesians, Chapter five, Verse twenty-two.”
Margery rubbed vigorous circles into the saddle soap without looking up. “Pastor, you know you’re talking to a room full of happily unmarried women here, right?”
He acted like he couldn’t hear. “Alice, I urge you to be guided by the Holy Bible, to hear the word of God. I will therefore that the younger women marry, bear children, guide the house, give none occasion to the adversary to speak reproachfully—that one is from the first epistle to Timothy, Chapter five, Verse fourteen. Do you understand what he is saying to you, dear?”
“Oh, I think I understand, thank you, Pastor.”
“Alice, you don’t have to sit here and—”
“I’m fine, Margery,” Alice said, holding up a hand. “The pastor and I have always had interesting conversations. And I do think I understand what it is you’re telling me, Pastor.”
The other women exchanged silent looks. Beth gave a tiny shake of her head.
Alice scrubbed at a stubborn patch of dirt with a rag. She cocked her head, thinking. “I would be much obliged if you could advise me a little further, though.”
The pastor steepled his fingers. “Why, yes, child. What is it you want to know?”
Alice compressed her mouth for a moment, as if choosing her words carefully. Then, without looking up, she started to speak. “What does God say about smashing your daughter-in-law’s head repeatedly into a table because she had the audacity to give two old toys to some motherless girls? Do you have a verse for that one? Because I’d love to hear it.”
“I’m sorry—what did you—”
“Perhaps you have one for when a woman’s sight is still blurred in one eye because her father-in-law smacked her so hard in the face that she saw stars? Or what’s the Bible verse for when a man tries to give you paper money to make you behave as he wants you to? Do you think Ephesians has a view on that? Fifty dollars is quite a sum, after all. Large enough to ignore all kinds of sinful behavior.”
Beth’s eyes widened. Margery thrust her head down.
“Alice, dear, this—uh—this is all a private ma—”
“Is that godly behavior, Pastor? Because I’m listening really hard and all I’m hearing is everyone telling me what I’m apparently doing wrong. When actually I think I may have been the godliest one in the Van Cleve household. I might not spend enough time in church, granted, but I actually do minister to the poor and sick and needy. Never looked at another man, or given my husband reason to doubt me. I give away what I can.” She leaned forward over the saddle. “I’ll tell you what I don’t do. I don’t call in men with machine-guns from across state lines to threaten my own workforce. I don’t charge that same workforce four times the fair amount for groceries and sack them if they try to buy food anywhere but the company store, until they run up debts they’ll die before they can pay back. I don’t throw the sick out of their company homes when they can’t work. I certainly don’t beat up young women until they can’t see, then send a servant over with money to smooth it over. So tell me, Pastor, who really is the ungodly one in all this? Just who needs a lecture on how to behave? Because I’m darned if I can work this one out.”
The little library had fallen completely silent. The pastor, his mouth working up and down, regarded each of the women’s faces: Beth and Sophia stooped innocently over their work, Margery’s gaze flickering between the two of them, and Alice, her chin up, her face a blazing question.
He placed his hat on his head. “I—I can see you’re busy, Mrs. Van Cleve. Perhaps I’ll come back another time.”
“Oh, please do, Pastor,” she called, as he opened the door and hurried off into the dark. “I do so enjoy our Bible studies!”
* * *
• • •
With that final attem
pt by Pastor McIntosh—a man who could not accurately be described as the soul of discretion—word had finally traveled around the county that Alice Van Cleve really had left her husband and was not coming back. It had not improved Geoffrey Van Cleve’s mood—already weighted down by those rabble-rousers at the mine—one jot. Emboldened by the anonymous letters, the same troublemakers who had tried to resurrect the unions were now rumored to be doing so again. This time, however, they were smarter about it. This time it had been done in quiet conversations, in casual talks down at Marvin’s Bar or the Red Horse honky-tonk, and often mentioned so swiftly that by the time Van Cleve’s men had arrived all there was to see was a few Hoffman men legitimately downing a cold beer after a long week’s work and just a vague sense of disturbance in the air.
“Word is,” said the governor, as they sat in the hotel bar, “you’re losing your grip.”
“My grip?”
“You’ve been obsessing about that damn library and not focusing on what’s going on at your mine.”
“Where did you hear such nonsense? I have the firmest of grips, Governor. Why, didn’t we discover a whole bunch of those troublemakers from the UMWA just two months ago and shut that down? I got Jack Morrissey and his boys to see them off. Oh, yes.”
The governor gazed into his drink.
“I got eyes and ears all over this county. I’m keeping track of these subversive elements. But we have sent a warning, if you like. And I have friends at the sheriff’s office who are very understanding about such matters.”
The governor raised the slightest of eyebrows.
“What?” said Van Cleve, after a pause.
“They say you can’t even keep control of your own home.”
Van Cleve’s neck shot to the back of his collar.
“Is it true that your Bennett’s wife ran off to a cabin in the woods and you ain’t been able to get her home again?”