by Jojo Moyes
Alice’s stomach gurgled unexpectedly and loudly, and she pressed a hand to it, trying not to blush.
“Well, someone approves,” Fred said evenly. He stood and walked over to pull out a chair for her.
She put her hat on the desk, and unwound her scarf. “Fred, I—”
“I know. But I enjoy your company, Alice. And being a man in these parts, I don’t get to entertain someone like you too often.” He leaned toward her to pour her a glass of wine. “So I’d be much obliged if you’d . . . indulge me?”
She opened her mouth to protest, then found she wasn’t sure what she was protesting. When she looked up, he was watching her, waiting for a sign. “This all looks wonderful,” she said.
He let out a little breath then, as if perhaps even up to that point he had not been sure whether she would cut and run. And then, as he began to serve the food, he smiled, a slow, broad smile that was so filled with satisfaction she couldn’t help but smile back at him.
The Packhorse Library had become, in the months of its existence, a symbol of many things, and a focus for others, some controversial and some that would provoke unease in certain people however long it stayed around. But for one freezing damp evening in March, it became a tiny, glowing refuge. Two people locked safely inside, briefly released from their complicated histories and the weighty expectations of the town around them, ate good food and laughed and discussed poetry and stories, horses, and mistakes they had made, and while there was barely a touch between them, apart from the accidental brushing of skin against skin while passing bread or refilling a glass, Alice rediscovered a little part of her that she hadn’t known she missed: the flirtatious young woman who liked to talk about things she had read, seen and thought about as much as she liked to ride a mountain track. In turn Fred enjoyed a woman’s full attention, a ready laugh at his jokes and the challenge of an idea that might differ from his own. Time flew, and each ended the night full and happy, with the rare glow that comes from knowing your very being has been understood by somebody else, and that there might just be someone out there who will only ever see the best in you.
* * *
• • •
Fred lifted the table easily down the last of the steps, ready to move it back into his house, then turned back to double-lock the door. Alice stood beside him, wrapping her scarf around her face, her belly full and a smile on her lips. Both were shielded from view by the library and somehow found themselves standing just inches apart.
“You sure you won’t let me drive you back up the mountain? It’s cold, and dark, and that’s a long walk.”
She shook her head. “It’ll feel like five minutes tonight.”
He studied her in the half-light. “You ain’t spooked by much these days, are you?”
“No.”
“That’ll be Margery’s influence.”
They smiled at each other and he looked briefly thoughtful. “Wait there.”
He jogged up to the house and returned, a minute later, with a shotgun, which he handed to her. “Just in case,” he said. “You might not be spooked, but it’ll allow me to rest easy. Bring it back tomorrow.”
She took it from him without protest, and there followed a strange, elongated couple of minutes, the kind in which two people know they have to part, and don’t want to, and while neither can acknowledge it, each believes the other feels it too.
“Well,” she said, at last, “it’s getting late.”
He rubbed his thumb speculatively across the table-top, his mouth closed over words he could not say.
“Thank you, Fred. It was honestly the nicest evening I’ve had. Probably since I came here. I—I really appreciate it.”
A look passed between them that was a complicated mixture of things. An acknowledgment, of the kind that might normally make a heart sing, but cut with the knowledge that some things were impossible and that your heart could break a little knowing it.
And suddenly a little of the magic of the evening dissipated.
“Goodnight, then, Alice.”
“Goodnight, Fred,” she said. Then, placing the gun over her shoulder, she turned and strode up the road before he could say anything that would make more of a mess of things than they already were.
SIXTEEN
That’s the one trouble with this country: everything, weather, all, hangs on too long. Like our rivers, our land: opaque, slow, violent; shaping and creating the life of man in its implacable and brooding image.
• WILLIAM FAULKNER, As I Lay Dying
The rain came late into March, first turning the frozen sidewalks and stones into skating rinks, and then, through sheer relentlessness, obliterating the snow and ice on the lower ground in an endless gray sheet. There was limited pleasure to be found in the slight lifting of temperatures, the prospect of warmer days ahead. Because it didn’t stop. After five days the rain had turned the unfinished roads to mud or, in some places, washed away the top layers completely, revealing sharp boulders and holes on the surface that would catch the unwary. Waiting horses stood tethered outside, their heads low and resigned, their tails clamped to their hindquarters, and cars bucked and growled along the slippery mountain roads. Farmers muttered in the feed store, while the shopkeepers observed that the Lord only knew why that much water was still hanging up there in the heavens.
Margery arrived back from her 5 a.m. round soaked to her socks, to find the librarians sitting with steepled fingers and fidgeting feet with Fred.
“Last time it rained like this, the Ohio burst its banks,” said Beth, peering out of the open door, from where you could hear the gurgle of surface water as it made its way down the road. She took a last drag of her cigarette and ground it under the heel of her boot.
“Too wet to ride, that’s for sure,” said Margery. “I’m not taking Charley out again.”
Fred had looked out first thing and warned Alice it was a bad idea, and though there was little that would normally stop her, she took him seriously. He had moved his own horses up onto high land, where they could just be seen in a slick, wet huddle.
“I’d put them in the barn,” he had told her, as she helped him walk the last two up, “but they’re safer up there.” His father had once lost an entire locked barn of mares and foals when Fred was a boy: the river had flooded while the family was sleeping and by the time they woke only the hayloft was still above water. His father had wept in telling him, the only time Fred had ever seen that happen.
He told Alice of the great flood the previous year, how water had flipped whole houses and sent them downriver, of how many people died, and how they had found a cow wedged twenty-five feet up in a tree when the waters receded and had to shoot it to put it out of its misery—nobody could work out how to get it down.
The four of them sat in the library for an hour, nobody keen to leave, yet with nothing to be there for. They talked of misdeeds they’d performed as children, of the best bargains to be had in animal feed, of a man three of them knew who could whistle tunes through a missing tooth and add his voice to become a one-man orchestra. They talked about how if Izzy were here she would have sung them a song or two. But the rain grew heavier, and slowly the conversation ebbed away, and they were all left glancing at the door with a creeping sense of foreboding.
“What do you think, Fred?” Margery broke the silence.
“I don’t like it.”
“Me neither.”
At that moment they heard the sound of horses’ hoofs. Fred strode to the door, perhaps concerned it might be an escapee. But it was the mailman, water sluicing from the brim of his hat.
“The river’s rising, and fast. We need to warn people on the creek beds but there’s no one at the sheriff’s office.”
Margery turned to Beth and Alice.
“I’ll get the bridles,” said Beth.
* * *
• • •
/> Izzy was so deep in thought that she didn’t notice when her mother took the embroidery off her lap and tutted loudly. “Oh, Izzy. I’m going to have to unpick all those stitches. That’s nothing like the pattern whatsoever. What have you been doing?”
Mrs. Brady dragged a copy of Woman’s Home Companion to her lap and flicked through until she found the pattern she was looking for. “Absolutely nothing like it. Why, you’ve done running stitch where it should be a chain stitch.”
Izzy dragged her attention to the sampler. “I hate sewing.”
“You never used to mind it. I don’t know what’s got into you lately.” Izzy didn’t rise to it, which made Mrs. Brady tut more loudly. “I’ve never met a girl more out of sorts.”
“You know very well what’s got into me. I’m bored and I’m stuck here, and I can’t bear that you and Daddy have been swayed by an idiot like Geoffrey Van Cleve.”
“That’s no way to talk. Why don’t you do some quilting? You used to enjoy it. I have some lovely old fabrics in my chest upstairs and—”
“I miss my horse.”
“He was not your horse.” Mrs. Brady closed her mouth and took a diplomatic moment before she opened it again. “But I was thinking we could perhaps buy you one if you think horseback riding is something you’d like to pursue.”
“For what? To go around and around in circles? To make it look pretty, like a stupid doll? I miss my job, Mother, and I miss my friends. I had real friends for the first time in my life. I was happy at the library. Doesn’t that mean anything to you?”
“Well, now you’re just being dramatic.” Mrs. Brady sighed, and sat down on the settle beside her daughter. “Look, dear, I know how you love singing. Why don’t I talk to your father about some proper lessons? We could perhaps find out if there’s anybody in Lexington who might help you work on your voice. Perhaps when Daddy hears how good you are he’ll change his mind. Oh, Lord, though, we’ll have to wait until this rain eases. Have you ever seen anything like it?”
Izzy didn’t answer. She sat by the parlor window, gazing out at the blurred view.
“You know, I think I’m going to telephone your father. I’m anxious the river will flood. I lost good friends in the Louisville floods and I haven’t felt the same about the river since. Why don’t you unpick that last bit of stitching and we’ll go back over it together?”
Mrs. Brady disappeared into the hallway and Izzy could hear her dialing her father’s office, the low murmur of her voice. Izzy stared out of the window at the gray skies, her finger tracing the rivulets that zigzagged down the pane, squinting at a horizon that was no longer visible.
* * *
• • •
Well, your father thinks we should stay put. He says we might call Carrie Anderson in Old Louisville and see if she and her family want to rest here a day or two just in case. Lord knows what we’ll do with all those little dogs of hers, though. I don’t think we could cope with the—Izzy? . . . Izzy?” Mrs. Brady spun around in the empty parlor. “Izzy? Are you upstairs?”
She walked down the hall and through the kitchen, where the maid turned from her dough-rolling, nonplussed, and shook her head. And then Mrs. Brady saw the back door, the inside slick with raindrops. Her daughter’s leg brace lay on the tiled floor, and her riding boots were gone.
* * *
• • •
Margery and Beth trotted hard down Main Street, a blur of hoofs and spraying water. Around them the unfinished road sent water sweeping down the hill and over their feet, while gutters gurgled, protesting against the weight of it. They rode with their heads low and their collars up, and when they got to the verges they cantered, the horses’ feet sinking into the boggy grass. At the lower reaches of Spring Creek, they split to each side of the road and dismounted, running to each front door and hammering on it with wet fists.
“Water’s rising,” they yelled, as the horses pulled back on their reins. “Get to higher ground.”
Behind them, a straggle of occupants began to move, faces peering around doors, out of windows, trying to work out how seriously to take this instruction. By the time they were a quarter-mile down the road some behind them had begun hoisting furniture to the top floors of those houses that were double-storied, the rest loading wagons or trucks with what might be protected. Tarpaulins were thrown over the backs of open vehicles, small, querulous children wedged between gray-faced adults. People in Baileyville had had enough experience of floods to know that they were a threat to be taken seriously.
Margery hammered on the last door of Spring Creek, water plastering her hair to her face. “Mrs. Cornish? . . . Mrs. Cornish?”
A woman in a wet headscarf appeared at the door, waves of agitation rising off her. “Oh, thank goodness. Margery dear, I can’t get my mule.” She turned and ran, motioning to them to follow.
The mule was at the bottom of his paddock, which backed onto the creek. The lowest slopes, boggy on the driest of days, were now a thick slick of toffee-colored mud and the little brown and white mule stood immobile, apparently resigned, up to his chest in it.
“He can’t seem to budge. Please help him.”
Margery pulled at his halter. Then, when that made no difference, she placed her weight against him, trying to tug at a lone foreleg. The mule lifted his muzzle, but no other part of him moved.
“You see?” Mrs. Cornish’s gnarly old hands wrung together. “He’s stuck fast.”
Beth ran to the other side and tried her best too, slapping on his rear end, yelling, and placing her shoulder against him, to no effect. Margery stepped back and looked over at Beth, who gave a small shake of her head.
She tried again with her shoulder against him but, apart from his ears flicking, not a part of the mule moved. Margery stopped, thinking.
“I can’t leave him.”
“We’re not going to leave him, Mrs. Cornish. You got your harness? And some rope? Beth? Beth? C’mere. Mrs. Cornish, hold Charley for me, will you?”
As the rain beat down, the two younger women ran for the harness, then waded back to the mule. The water had risen even since they had arrived, creeping upward across the grass. Where for months it had been a sweet-sounding trickle, a sunlit brook, now it rushed in a wide, unforgiving yellow torrent. Margery slid the harness over the mule’s head and fastened the buckles, her fingers slipping on the wet straps. The rain roared in their ears, so that they had to yell at each other and point to be understood, but months of working alongside each other had granted them a shorthand. Beth did the same on the other side, until both shouted: “Done!” They buckled the traces to the surcingle, then looped the rope through the brass hook at his shoulder.
Not many mules would tolerate a strap from their girth running through their legs but Charley was smart, and needed to be reassured just once. Beth attached her traces to her horse Scooter’s breastplate, and, in unison, each began to urge their animal forward along the less waterlogged ground. “Go on! Go on, Charley, now! Go on, Scooter!”
The animals’ ears flicked, Charley’s eyes widening uncharacteristically as he felt the unfamiliar dead weight behind him. Beth urged him and Scooter forward while Margery tugged at the rope, yelling encouragement at the little mule, which flailed, his head bobbing as he felt himself being pulled forward.
“That’s it, fella, you can do it.”
Mrs. Cornish crouched on the other side of him, two broad planks laid on the mud in front of his chest, ready to give him something to brace against.
“Come up, boys!”
Margery turned, saw Charley and Scooter straining, their flanks shivering with effort as they dug into the ground in front, stumbling, mud clods flying up around them, and realized with dismay that the mule really was stuck fast. If Charley and Scooter kept digging down with their hoofs like that they would be stuck soon too.
Beth looked at her, her own mind already there
. She grimaced. “We gotta leave him, Marge. Water’s coming up real fast.”
Margery placed a hand on the little mule’s cheek. “We can’t leave him.”
They turned toward a shout. Two farmers were running toward them from the houses further back. Solid, middle-aged men Margery knew only by sight from the corn market, in overalls and oilcloths. They didn’t say a word, just slid down beside the mule and began hauling at the harness along with Charley and Scooter, boots braced against the earth, their bodies at a forty-five-degree angle.
“Go on! Go on, boys!”
Margery joined them, put her head down, placing her whole weight against the rope. An inch. Another inch. A terrible sucking sound, and then the little mule’s near front leg was freed. His head lifted in surprise, and the two men hauled again in unison, grunting with the effort, their muscles bulging against the rope. Charley and Scooter staggered in front of them, heads low, hind legs quivering with the effort, and suddenly, with a lurch, the mule was up, flipped on his side and pulled along the muddy grass a couple of feet before Charley and Scooter knew to stop. His eyes were wide with surprise and his nostrils flared before he stumbled to his feet, so that the men had to leap backward out of his way.
Margery barely had time to thank them. The briefest of nods, a tip to a wet hat brim, and they were gone, running back through the deluge to their own homes to retrieve what they could. Margery experienced a brief moment of pure love for the people she had grown up alongside, those who would not see a man—or a mule—struggle alone.
“Is he okay?” she yelled at Mrs. Cornish, who was running her weathered hands down the mule’s mud-covered legs.
“He’s good,” she shouted back.
“You need to get to higher ground.”
“I can take it from here, girls. You git on now!”