by Jojo Moyes
“The young ’uns may be having a few hiccups just now. She—she asked to stay with her friend. Bennett’s letting her just till things simmer down.” He ran a hand over his face. “The girl got very emotional, you know, about not being able to bear him a child . . .”
“Well, I’m sad to hear that, Geoff. But I have to tell you that’s not how it’s being parlayed.”
“What?”
“They say the O’Hare girl’s running rings around you.”
“Frank O’Hare’s daughter? Pfft. That little . . . hillbilly. She—she just hangs off Alice’s coattails. Got some kind of fascination with her. You don’t want to listen to anything anyone says about that girl. Hah! Last I heard, her so-called library was on its last legs anyway. Not that I’m much troubled by the library one way or another. Oh, no.”
The governor nodded. But he didn’t laugh and agree, slap Van Cleve on the back and offer him a whiskey. He just nodded, finished his drink, slid off his bar stool and left.
And when Van Cleve finally got up to leave the bar, several bourbons and a whole lot of brooding later, his face was the dark purple of the upholstery.
“You good, Mr. Van Cleve?” said the bartender.
“Why? You got an opinion as well as everyone else around here?” He sent the empty glass skidding and it was only the bartender’s sharp reflexes that stopped it flying off the end of the bar.
* * *
• • •
Bennett looked up as his father slammed the screen door. He had been listening to the wireless and reading a baseball magazine.
Now Van Cleve smacked it out of his hand. “I’m done with this. Go get your coat.”
“What?”
“We’re bringing Alice home. We’ll pick her up and put her in the trunk if necessary.”
“Pop, I told you a hundred times. She says she’ll just keep leaving until we get the message.”
“And you’re going to take that from a little girl? Your own wife? You know what this is doing to my name?”
Bennett opened his magazine again, mumbling into his collar. “It’s just folk talking. It’ll die down soon enough.”
“Meaning what?”
Bennett shrugged. “I don’t know. Just . . . we should maybe leave her be.”
Van Cleve squinted at his son, as if he might have been replaced by some alien he barely recognized. “Do you even want her to come home?”
Bennett shrugged again.
“What in hell does that mean?”
“I don’t know.”
“Oho . . . Is this because little Peggy Foreman’s been hanging around you again? Oh, yes, I know all about that. I see you, son. I hear things. You think your mother and I didn’t have our difficulties? You think there weren’t times we didn’t want to be around each other? But she was a woman who understood her responsibilities. You’re married. Do you understand, son? Married in the eyes of God and in the eyes of the law and according to the laws of nature. If you want to be fooling around with Peggy you do it quietly and on the side of things, not so that everybody’s looking and talking. You hear me?”
Van Cleve adjusted his jacket, checking his reflection in the mirror over the mantel. “You have to be a man now. I’m done with waiting around while some stuck-up English girl wrecks my family’s reputation. The Van Cleve name means something around here. Get your damn coat.”
“What are you going to do?”
“We’re going to fetch her.” Van Cleve looked up at the larger figure of his son, now standing in his way. “Are you blocking me, boy? My own son?”
“I won’t be part of it, Pa. Some things are best . . . left.”
The older man’s mouth, clamped shut, worked like a trap. He shoved past him. “This is the thin end of the wedge. You might be too pussy to send that girl a message. But if you think I’m the kind of man to sit by and do nothing, then you really don’t know your old pa at all.”
* * *
• • •
Margery rode home deep in thought, nostalgic for times when all she had to think about was whether she had enough food for the next three days. As she often did, when her thoughts grew deep and cold, she murmured to herself under her breath. “It’s not so bad. We’re still here, aren’t we, Charley boy? Books are still getting out there.”
The mule’s big ears flicked back and forth so that she swore he understood half her conversation. Sven laughed at the way she talked to her animals, and every time she would retort that they made more sense to her than half the humans around there. And then, of course, she would catch him murmuring to the damn dog like a baby when he thought she wasn’t looking—Who’s a good boy then, huh? Who’s the best dog? Soft-hearted, for all his bluntness. Kind with it. Not many men would have been so welcoming of another woman in the house. Margery thought about the apple pie Alice had rustled up the night before, half of which was still sitting on the side. Seemed like the cabin was always chock full of people, these days, bustling around, making food, helping with chores. A year ago she would have bridled at it. Now returning to an empty house seemed like a strange thing, not the relief she might have imagined.
A little delirious with tiredness, Margery’s thoughts meandered and splintered as the mule plodded up the dark track. She thought of Kathleen Bligh, returning to a home echoing with loss. Thanks to her, these last two weeks, despite the weather, they had managed to cover nearly all their rounds, and the loss of those families who had fallen out of the project due to Van Cleve’s rumors meant they were pretty much up to date. If she had the budget she’d take Kathleen on for good. But Mrs. Brady wasn’t much for talking about the future of the library just now. “I have held off writing to Mrs. Nofcier about our current troubles,” she had told her the previous week, confirming that Mr. Brady was as yet unbending on the issue of Izzy’s return. “I am hoping that we can win round enough townspeople that Mrs. Nofcier might never have to hear about this . . . misfortune.”
Alice had started riding again, her bruises luminous yellow echoes of the injuries she had endured. She had taken the long route up to Patchett’s Creek that day, supposedly to stretch Spirit out a little, but Margery knew it was so she, Margery, could have some time with Sven alone at the house. The families on the creek route liked Alice, made her speak English place names to them—Beaulieu and Piccadilly and Leicester Square—and fell about laughing at her accent. She never minded. She was slow to offend, that girl. It was one of the things Margery liked about her, she thought. While enough people round here would find a slight in the mildest of words, every compliment a secret barb aimed just at them, Alice still seemed primed to see the best in everyone she came across. Probably why she’d married that human beefsteak Bennett.
She yawned, wondering how long it was going to take Sven to come home. “What do you think, Charley boy? Have I got time to boil up some hot water and get this grime off me? Do you think he’ll care a whit one way or the other?”
She pulled the mule to a halt at the large gate, dismounting to open it up. “The way I feel, I’ll be lucky if I manage to stay awake long enough for him to get here.”
It took her a minute after replacing the catch to realize what was missing.
“Bluey?”
She walked up the path, calling him, her boots crunching in the snow. She hooked the mule’s reins over the pole by the porch, and lifted her hand to her brow. Where had the darn dog shot off to now? Two weeks ago he had made his way three miles across the creek to Henscher’s place, just to play with the young dog there. Came home sheepish with his ears down, like he knew he’d done wrong, his face so full of guilt that she didn’t have the heart to tell him off. Her voice echoed back across the holler. “Bluey?”
She took the porch steps two at a time. And then she saw him, at the far end by the rocker. A pale limp body, his ice-colored eyes staring blankly at the roof, his tongue loll
ing and his legs splayed, as if he had been stopped directly in the act of running. A clean dark red bullet hole ran straight through his skull.
“Oh, no. Oh, no.”
Margery ran to him and dropped to her knees and a wail emerged from somewhere she hadn’t known she possessed. “Oh, not my boy. No. No.”
She cradled the dog’s head, feeling the velvet-soft fur of his cheeks, stroking his muzzle, knowing even as she did that there was nothing to be done. “Oh, Bluey. My sweet baby.” She pressed her face to his—I’m sorry I’m so sorry I’m sorry—her hands clutching him to her, her whole body mourning a stupid young hound that would never bounce onto her bed again.
It was like this that Alice found her, as she rode up on Spirit half an hour later, her legs aching and her feet numb with cold.
Margery O’Hare, a woman who had remained dry-eyed throughout her own father’s funeral, who had bitten her lip until it bled as she buried her sister, a woman who had taken the best part of four years to confess her feelings to the man she loved most in the world, and still swore she had not a sentimental bone in her body, sat keening like a child on the porch, her back doubled over with grief and her dead dog’s head cradled tenderly in her lap.
* * *
• • •
Alice saw Van Cleve’s Ford before she saw him. For weeks she had backed into the shadows when he passed, had turned her face, her heart in her mouth, braced for another puce-faced demand that she come home right now and stop all this nonsense or she might just find herself regretting it. Even in company the sight of him made her tremble a little, as if some residual memory was lodged in her cells that still felt the impact of that blunt fist.
But now, propelled by a long night of grief that had been somehow so much more painful to witness than her own, she dug in her heels as she saw the burgundy car heading down the hill, sending Spirit wheeling hard across the road so that she was directly in front of him and he had to stamp on the brakes, screeching to a halt in front of the store, causing all passersby—a fair number, given that the store had a special deal on flour—to stop and observe the commotion. Van Cleve blinked at the girl on the horse through his windshield, unsure at first who it was. He wound down his window. “You properly lost your mind now, Alice?”
Alice glared at him. She dropped her reins and her voice carried, clear as cut glass, through the still air, glittering with anger. “You shot her dog?”
There was a brief silence.
“You shot Margery’s dog?”
“I shot nothing.”
She lifted her chin and looked steadily at him. “No, of course you didn’t. You wouldn’t get your own hands dirty, would you? You probably got your men to come out here just to shoot that puppy.” She shook her head. “My God. What kind of man are you?”
She saw then from the questioning way Bennett swiveled to look at his father that he hadn’t known, and some small part of her was glad.
Van Cleve, who had been open-mouthed, swiftly recovered his composure. “You’re crazy. Living with that O’Hare girl has turned you crazy!” He glanced out of his window, noting the neighbors who had stopped to listen, murmuring to each other. This was rich meat indeed for a quiet town. Van Cleve shot Margery O’Hare’s dog. “She’s crazy! Look at her, riding her horse straight into my car! As if I’d shoot a dog!” He slapped his hands on the steering wheel. Alice didn’t move. His voice rose a register. “Me! Shoot a damn dog!”
And finally, when nobody moved, and nobody spoke: “Come on, Bennett. We got work to do.” He wrestled the wheel so that the car spun around her and accelerated briskly up the road, leaving Spirit to prance and shy as the gravel sprayed at her feet.
* * *
• • •
It shouldn’t have been a surprise. Sven leaned over the rough wooden table with Fred and the two women and relayed the tales coming out of Harlan County, of men dynamited clean out of their beds because of the escalating union disputes, of thugs with machine-guns, of sheriffs turning the blindest of eyes. In the light of all this a dead dog shouldn’t have been much of a surprise. But it seemed to knock the fight right out of Margery. She’d been sick twice with the shock of it, and she cast around for her hound reflexively when they were home, her palm pressed to her cheek, as if even now she half expected him to come bounding around the corner.
“Van Cleve’s canny,” muttered Sven, as she left the room to check on Charley, as she did repeatedly through each evening. “He knew Margery wouldn’t bat an eyelid if someone looked at her down the barrel of a gun. But if he picked off the things she loves . . .”
Alice considered this. “Are . . . you worried, Sven?”
“For me? No. I’m a company man. And he needs a fire captain. I’m not unionized, but anything happens to me, all my boys go out. We’re agreed on that. And if we walk, the mine shuts down. The sheriff might be in Van Cleve’s pocket but there are limits to what the state will tolerate.” He sniffed. “Besides, this one’s about him and you two girls. And he won’t want attention drawn to the fact that he’s engaged in a fight with a pair of women. Oh, no.”
He took a slug of bourbon. “He’s just trying to spook you. But his men wouldn’t hurt a woman. Even those thugs of his. They’re bound by the code of the hills.”
“What about the ones he’s bringing in from out of state?” said Fred. “You sure they’re bound by the code of the hills, too?”
Sven didn’t seem to have an answer for that.
* * *
• • •
Fred taught her how to use a shotgun. He showed her how to balance the stock and pull the butt against her shoulder, how to factor in the hefty kick backward when she lined up her sights, reminding her not to hold her breath but to release the trigger as she breathed out slowly. The first time she pulled the trigger he was standing close behind her, his hands on hers, and she bounced so hard against him that her face stayed pink for an hour.
She was a natural, he told her, lining up cans on the fallen tree at the edge of Margery’s land. Within days she could pick them off, like apples falling from a branch. At night, as she secured the new locks on the doors, Alice would run her hands along the barrel, lift it speculatively to her shoulder, firing imaginary rounds at unseen intruders coming up the track. She would pull the trigger for her friend; she had no doubt of that.
Because something else had changed too, something fundamental. Alice had discovered how, for a woman at least, it was much easier to feel anger on behalf of someone you cared about, to access that cold burn, to want to make someone suffer if they had hurt someone you loved.
Alice, it turned out, was no longer afraid.
FOURTEEN
Riding all winter, a librarian would wrap up so heavily it was hard to remember what she looked like underneath: two vests, a flannel shirt, a thick sweater and a jacket with maybe a scarf or two over the top—that was the daily uniform up in the mountains, perhaps with a pair of man’s thick leather gloves over her own, a hat rammed low as she could get it, and another scarf pulled high over her nose, so that her breath might bounce back and warm her skin a little. At home, she’d strip off reluctantly, revealing only the swiftest slice of bare skin to the elements between shedding undergarments and sliding, shivering, under her blankets. Aside from cloth-washing, a woman working for the Packhorse Library could go for weeks without seeing her body much at all.
Alice was still locked into her own private battle with the Van Cleves although, thankfully, they seemed to have gone quiet for now. She could most often be found in the woods behind the cabin practicing with Fred’s old gun, the crack and zing of bullets hitting tin cans echoing through the still air.
Izzy could be seen only in glimpses, trailing her mother miserably around town. And there were only intermittent appearances from Beth, the one person who could be relied on to notice these things, or joke about them, and she was mostly preoccupied wit
h her arm and what she could and couldn’t do. So nobody observed that Margery had put on a little weight, or thought to comment upon it. Sven, who knew Marge’s body like he knew his own, understood the fluctuations that occurred in the female form and enjoyed all of them equally, and was a wise enough man not to say anything.
Margery herself had become accustomed to being bone-tired, trying to double up on routes, fighting every day to convince the disbelievers of the importance of stories, of facts, of knowledge. But this and the constant air of foreboding left her struggling each morning to lift her head from the pillow. The cold was etched into her after months of snow, and the long hours outside had left her permanently, ravenously hungry. So a woman could be excused for not noticing the things that other women might have picked up on faster, or if she did, for sweeping the thought away under the larger pile of things she had to worry about.
But there is always a point at which these things become impossible to ignore. One night in late February Margery told Sven not to stop by, adding with deceptive casualness that she had a few things to catch up on. She helped Sophia with the last of the books, waved Alice off into the snowy night and bolted the door behind her until it was just her alone in the little library. The log burner still glowed warm because Fred, God bless him, had packed it full of logs before he, too, disappeared to eat, his mind full of someone else entirely. She sat in the chair, her thoughts hanging low around her head in the darkness, until eventually she stood, pulled a heavy textbook from the shelf and flicked through the pages until she found what she was looking for. Brow furrowed, she scanned the information carefully. She absorbed it, then counted off her fingers: one, two, three, four, five, five and a half.
And then she did it a second time.
Despite what people might have thought around Lee County about Margery O’Hare’s family, about the kind of woman she must surely be, given where she came from, she was not prone to cursing. Now, however, she cursed softly once, twice, and let her head sink silently into her hands.