The Giver of Stars Page 4

  “Fred says you took a fall before you even got on the horse. Takes some doing.”

  Alice glanced up to find Margery O’Hare looking down at her. She was atop a large, ugly-looking horse with excessively long ears, and leading a smaller brown and white pony.

  “Um—well, I—”

  “You ever rode a mule?”

  “Is that a mule?”

  “Sure is. But don’t tell him. He thinks he’s a stallion from Araby.” Margery squinted at her from under her wide-brimmed hat. “You can try this little paint, Spirit. She’s feisty but she’s sure-footed as Charley here, and she don’t stop at nothing. The other girl ain’t coming.”

  Alice stood up and stroked the little mare’s white nose. The horse half closed her eyes. Her lashes were half white and half brown and she gave off a sweet, meadow-grass scent. Alice was immediately taken back to summers spent riding around her grandmother’s estate in Sussex, when she was fourteen and free to escape for whole days at a time, rather than constantly being told how she should behave.

  Alice, you are too impulsive.

  She leaned forward and sniffed the baby-soft hair at the mare’s ears.

  “So you going to make love to her? Or you going to get on and ride?”

  “Now?” said Alice.

  “You waiting for permission from Mrs. Roosevelt? C’mon, we got ground to cover.”

  Without waiting, she wheeled the mule around and Alice had to scramble aboard as the little paint horse took off after her.

  * * *

  • • •

  For the first half-hour Margery O’Hare said little, and Alice rode silently behind, struggling to adjust to the very different style of riding. Margery wasn’t stiff-backed, heels down and chin up, like the girls she had ridden with in England. She was loose-limbed, swayed like a sapling as she steered the mule around and up and down slopes, absorbing every movement. She talked to him more often than she spoke to Alice, scolding or singing to him, occasionally turning 180 degrees in her saddle to shout behind, as if she had just remembered she had company: “You okay back there?”

  “Fine!” Alice would call, trying not to wobble as the mare tried again to turn and bolt back toward the town.

  “Oh, she’s just testing you,” said Margery, after Alice let out a yelp. “Once you let her know you’re in charge, she’ll be sweet as molasses.”

  Alice, feeling the little mare bunch crossly under her, wasn’t convinced, but she didn’t want to complain in case Margery decided she was not up to the job. They rode through the small town, past lush fenced gardens swollen with corn, tomatoes, greens, Margery tipping her hat to those few people who passed on foot. The horse and the mule snorted and backed up briefly as a huge truck bearing timber came past, but then abruptly they were out of town and headed up a steep, narrow track. Margery pulled back a little as the track widened, so they could travel side by side.

  “So you’re the girl from England.” She pronounced it Eng-er-land.

  “Yes.” Alice stooped to avoid a low-hanging branch. “Have you been?”

  Margery kept her face forward, so Alice struggled to hear her. “Never been further east than Lewisburg. That’s where my sister used to live.”

  “Oh, did she move?”

  “She died.” Margery reached up to break a switch from a branch and peeled the leaves from it, dropping the reins loose on the mule’s neck.

  “I’m so sorry. Do you have other family?”

  “Had. One sister and five brothers. ’Cept there’s just me now.”

  “Do you live in Baileyville?”

  “Just a lick away. Same house I was born in.”

  “You’ve only ever lived in one place?”

  “Yup.”

  “You’re not curious?”

  “’Bout what?”

  Alice shrugged. “I don’t know. What it would be like to go somewhere else?”

  “Why? Is it better where you come from?”

  Alice thought of the crushing silence of her parents’ front room, the low squeak of the front gate, her father polishing his motor-car, whistling tunelessly through his teeth every Saturday morning, the minute rearrangements of fish forks and spoons on a carefully ironed Sunday tablecloth. She looked out at the endless green pastures, the huge mountains that rose up on either side of them. Above her a hawk wheeled and cried into the empty blue skies. “Possibly not.”

  Margery slowed so that Alice could draw level with her. “Got everything I need here. I suit myself, and people generally leave me be.” She leaned forward and stroked the mule’s neck. “That’s how I like it.”

  Alice heard the faint barrier in her words, and was quiet. They walked the next couple of miles in silence, Alice conscious of the way the saddle was already rubbing the inside of her knees, the heat of the day settling on her bare head. Margery signaled that they would turn left through a clearing in the trees.

  “We’re going to pick up a little here. You’d best take a grip, case she spins round again.”

  Alice felt the little horse shoot forward under her and they were cantering up a long flint track that gradually became more shadowed until they were in the mountains, the horses’ necks extending, their noses lowering with the effort of picking their way up the steep stony pathways between the trees. Alice breathed in the cooler air, the sweet damp scents of the forest, the path dappling with broken light in front of them, and the trees creating a cathedral canopy high above, from which birdsong trickled down. Alice leaned over the horse’s neck as they surged forward, and felt suddenly, unexpectedly happy. As they slowed she realized she was smiling broadly, without thinking about it. It was a striking sensation, like someone suddenly able to exercise a lost limb.

  “This is the northeast route. Thought it would be wise if we divided them into eight.”

  “Goodness, it’s so beautiful,” Alice said. She stared at the huge sand-colored rocks that seemed to loom out of nowhere, forming natural shelters. All around her the boulders emerged almost horizontally from the side of the mountain in thick layers, or formed natural stone arches, weathered by centuries of wind and rain. Up here she was separated from the town, from Bennett and his father, by more than geography. She felt as if she had landed on a different planet entirely, where gravity didn’t work in the same way. She was acutely aware of the crickets in the grass, the silent slow glide of the birds overhead, the lazy swish of the horses’ tails as they swept flies from their flanks.

  Margery walked the mule under an overhang, and beckoned to Alice to follow. “See in there? That hole? That there’s a hominy hole. You know a hominy hole?”

  Alice shook her head.

  “Where the Indians ground their corn. If you look over there you’ll see two worn patches in the stone where the ol’ chief used to rest his backside while the women worked.”

  Alice felt her cheeks glow and stifled a smile. She gazed up at the trees, her relaxed mood evaporating. “Are they . . . are they still around?”

  Margery peered at her from under her wide-brimmed hat for a moment. “I think you’re safe, Mrs. Van Cleve. They tend to go to lunch about now.”

  They stopped to eat their sandwiches under the shelter of a railroad bridge, then rode through the mountains all afternoon, the paths winding and doubling back so that Alice couldn’t be sure of where they had been or where they were headed. It was hard to gauge north when the treetops spanned high above their heads, obscuring sun and shadow. She asked Margery where they might stop to relieve themselves, and Margery waved a hand. “Any tree you like, take your pick.”

  Her new companion’s conversation was infrequent, pithy and mostly seemed to revolve around who was and wasn’t dead. She herself, she said, had Cherokee blood from way back. “My great-granddaddy married a Cherokee. I got Cherokee hair, and a good straight nose. We was all a little dark-skinned in our family, th
ough my cousin was born white albino.”

  “What does she look like?”

  “She didn’t live past two. Got bit by a copperhead. Everyone thought she was just cranky till they saw the bite. Course, by then it was too late. Oh, you’ll need to watch out for snakes. You know about snakes?”

  Alice shook her head.

  Margery blinked, as if it were unthinkable that someone might not know about snakes. “Well, the poisonous ones tend to have heads shaped like a spade, you know?”

  “Got it.” Alice waited a moment. “One of the square ones? Or the digging ones with the pointy ends? My father even has a drain spade, which—”

  Margery sighed. “Maybe just stay clear of all snakes for now.”

  As they rose up, away from the creek, Margery would jump down periodically and tie a piece of red twine around a tree trunk, using a penknife to slice through it, or biting it and spitting out the ends. This, she said, would show Alice how to find her way back to the open track.

  “You see old man Muller’s house on the left there? See the wood smoke? That’s him and his wife and four children. She can’t read but the eldest can and he’ll teach her. Muller don’t much like the idea of them learning but he’s down the mine from dawn till dusk so I’ve been bringing them books anyway.”

  “He won’t mind?”

  “He won’t know. He’ll come in, wash off the dust, eat what food she’s made and be asleep by sundown. It’s hard down there and they come back weary. Besides, she keeps the books in her dress trunk. He don’t look in there.”

  Margery, it emerged, had been running a skeleton library single-handed for several weeks already. They passed neat little houses on stilts, tiny derelict shingle-roofed cabins that looked like a stiff breeze might blow them down, shacks with ramshackle stands of fruit and vegetables for sale outside, and at each one Margery pointed and explained who lived there, whether they could read, how best to get the material to them, and which houses to steer clear of. Moonshiners, mostly. Illegal liquor that they brewed in hidden stills in the woods. There were those who made it and would shoot you for seeing it, and those who drank it and weren’t safe to be around. She seemed to know everything about everyone, and delivered each nugget of information in the same easy, laconic way. This was Bob Gillman’s—he lost an arm in one of the machines at a factory in Detroit and had come back to live with his father. That was Mrs. Coghlan’s house—her husband had beat her something awful, until he came home boss-eyed and she sewed him up in his bed sheet and went after him with a switch until he swore he’d never do it again. This was where two moonshine stills had exploded with a bang you could hear across two counties. The Campbells still blamed the Mackenzies and would occasionally come past shooting the house up if they got drunk enough.

  “Do you ever get frightened?” Alice asked.

  “Frightened?”

  “Up here, by yourself. You make it sound like anything could happen.”

  Margery looked as if the thought had never occurred to her. “Been riding these mountains since before I could walk. I stay out of trouble.”

  Alice must have seemed skeptical.

  “It ain’t hard. You know when you have a bunch of animals gathering at a waterhole?”

  “Um, not really, no. Surrey isn’t big on watering holes.”

  “You go to Africa, you got the elephant drinking next to the lion, and he’s drinking next to a hippo, and the hippo’s drinking next to a gazelle. And none of them is bothering each other, right? You know why?”

  “No.”

  “Because they’re reading each other. And that old gazelle sees that the lion is all relaxed, and that he just wants to take a drink. And the hippo is all easy, and so they all live and let live. But you put them on a plain at dusk, and that same old lion is prowling around with a glint in his eye—well, those gazelles know to git, and git fast.”

  “There are lions as well as snakes?”

  “You read people, Alice. You see someone in the distance and it’s some miner on his way home and you can tell from his gait he’s tired and all he wants is to get back to his place, fill his belly and put his feet up. You see that same miner outside a honky-tonk, half a bottle of bourbon down on a Friday and giving you the stink-eye? You know to get out of the way, right?”

  They rode in silence for a bit.

  “So . . . Margery?”

  “Yup.”

  “If you’ve never been further east than—where was it, Lewisburg?—how is it you know so much about animals in Africa?”

  Margery pulled her mule to a halt and turned to face her. “Are you seriously asking me that question?”

  Alice stared at her.

  “And you want me to make you a librarian?”

  It was the first time she had seen Margery laugh. She hooted like a barn owl, and was still laughing halfway back down to Salt Lick.

  * * *

  • • •

  So how was it today?”

  “It was fine, thank you.”

  She didn’t want to talk about how her backside and thighs ached so badly that she had nearly cried lowering herself onto the seat of the lavatory. Or the tiny cabins they had passed, where she could see the inside walls were papered with sheets of newspaper, which Margery told her were “to keep the drafts out in winter.” She needed time to process the scale of the land she had navigated, the feeling, as they had picked a horizontal path through a vertical landscape, of being truly in the wild for the first time in her life, the huge birds, the skittering deer, the tiny blue skink lizards. She thought she might not mention the toothless man, who had sworn at them on the road, or the exhausted young mother with four small children running around outside, naked as the day they were born. But mostly the day had been so extraordinary, so precious, that she really didn’t want to share any of it with the two men.

  “Did I hear you was riding out with Margery O’Hare?” Mr. Van Cleve took a swig of his drink.

  “I was. And Isabelle Brady.” She didn’t mention that Isabelle had failed to turn up.

  “You want to steer clear of that O’Hare girl. She’s trouble.”

  “How is she trouble?”

  She caught Bennett’s flashed look: don’t say anything.

  Mr. Van Cleve pointed his fork at her. “You mind my words, Alice. Margery O’Hare comes from a bad family. Frank O’Hare was the biggest ’shiner between here and Tennessee. You’re too new to understand what that means. Oh, she might dress herself up in books and fancy words, these days, but underneath she’s still the same, just like the no-good rest of ’em. I tell you, there’s no decent ladies around here would take tea with her.”

  Alice tried to imagine Margery O’Hare giving a flying fig about taking tea with any ladies. She took the plate of cornbread from Annie and put a slice on her plate before passing it on. She realized she was ravenously hungry, despite the heat. “Please don’t worry. She’s just showing me where to deliver the books.”

  “I’m just saying. Mind you don’t hang around her too much. You don’t want her ways rubbing off on you.” He took two slices of cornbread and put half a slice straight into his mouth and chewed for a minute, his mouth open. Alice winced and looked away. “What kind of books are these, anyway?”

  Alice shrugged. “Just . . . books. There’s Mark Twain and Louisa May Alcott, some cowboy stories and books to help around the home, recipes and suchlike.”

  Mr. Van Cleve shook his head. “Half those mountain people can’t read a word. Old Henry Porteous thinks it’s a waste of time and tax dollars, and I have to say I’m minded to agree. And, like I said, any scheme with Margery O’Hare mixed up in it has to be a bad thing.”

  Alice was about to speak up in Margery’s defense but a firm pressure from her husband’s hand under the table warned her off.

  “I don’t know.” Mr. Van Cleve wiped away some gr
avy at the side of his mouth. “I’m pretty sure my wife would not have approved of a scheme like this.”

  “But she did believe in charitable acts, Bennett tells me,” said Alice.

  Mr. Van Cleve looked across the table. “She did, yes. She was a most godly woman.”

  “Well,” Alice said, after a moment, “I do believe that if we can encourage godless families to read, we can encourage them to turn to scripture, and the Bible, and that can only be good for everyone.” Her smile was sweet and wide. She leaned forward over the table. “Can you imagine all those families, Mr. Van Cleve, finally able to truly grasp the word of God through a proper reading of the Bible? Wouldn’t that be a marvelous thing? I’m sure your wife would have had nothing but encouragement for something like that.”

  There was a long silence.

  “Well, yes,” said Mr. Van Cleve. “You could have a point.” He nodded, to suggest that that was the end of the matter, for now at least. Alice saw her husband deflate slightly with relief and wished she didn’t hate him for it.

  * * *

  • • •

  Three days in, bad family or not, Alice had swiftly realized that she would rather be around Margery O’Hare than almost anyone else in Kentucky. Margery didn’t speak much. She was utterly uninterested in the slivers of gossip, veiled or otherwise, that seemed to fuel the women at the endless teas and quilting sessions Alice had sat in on up to now. She was uninterested in Alice’s appearance, her thoughts or her history. Margery went where she liked, and said what she thought, hiding nothing behind the polite courtly euphemisms that everyone else found so useful.

  Oh, is that the English fashion? How very interesting.

  And Mr. Van Cleve Junior is happy for his wife to ride alone in the mountains, is he? Goodness.

  Well, perhaps you’re persuading him of the English ways of doing things. How . . . novel.

  Margery behaved, Alice realized with a jolt, like a man.

  This was such an extraordinary thought that she found herself studying the other woman at a distance, trying to work out how she had come to this astonishing state of liberation. But she wasn’t yet brave enough—or perhaps still too English—to ask.