The Giver of Stars Page 8

  Don’t you marry one of these fools, her mother would whisper to her and her sister, as she tucked them into the big hay bed in the back room. You make sure you two get as far from this damn mountain as you can. As soon as you can. You promise me.

  The girls had nodded solemnly.

  Virginia had got away all right, got as far as Lewisburg, only to marry a man who turned out to be just as handy with his fists as their father had been. Her mother, thank goodness, was not alive to see it, having caught pneumonia six months after the wedding and died within three days; the same strain that took three of Margery’s brothers. Their graves were marked with small stones on a hill overlooking the holler.

  When her father died, killed in a drunken gunfight with Bill McCullough—the latest sorry episode in a clan feud that had lasted generations—the residents of Baileyville noted that Margery O’Hare didn’t shed so much as a tear. “Why would I?” she said, when Pastor McIntosh asked her if she was quite all right. “I’m glad he’s dead. Can’t do no more harm to no one.” The fact that Frank O’Hare was reviled in town, and that everyone knew she was right, didn’t stop them deciding that the surviving O’Hare girl was as odd as the rest of them and that, frankly, the fewer of that bloodline still around, the better.

  “Can I ask you about your family?” Alice had said, as they saddled up the horses, shortly after dawn.

  Margery, her thoughts still lost somewhere in Sven’s strong, hard body, had had to be spoken to twice before she realized what Alice was saying. “Ask what you want.” She glanced over. “Let me guess. Someone tell you you shouldn’t be around me because of my daddy?”

  “Well, yes,” said Alice, after a pause. Mr. Van Cleve had given her a lecture on that exact subject the previous evening, accompanied by much spluttering and finger-pointing. Alice had wielded the good name of Mrs. Brady as a shield but it had been an uncomfortable exchange.

  Margery nodded, as if this was no surprise. She swung her saddle onto the rail and ran her fingers over Charley’s back, checking him for bumps and sores. “Frank O’Hare supplied moonshine to half the county. Shot up anyone who tried to take over his patch. Shot ’em if he reckoned they’d even thought about it. Killed more people than I know of, and left scars on everyone he was close to.”

  “Everyone?”

  Margery hesitated a moment, then took a couple of steps toward Alice. She rolled up her shirt-sleeve, tugging it above the elbow, revealing a waxy, coin-shaped scar on her upper arm. “Shot me with his hunting rifle when I was eleven years old because I sassed him. If my brother hadn’t pushed me out of the way he would have killed me.”

  Alice took a moment to speak. “Didn’t the police do anything?”

  “Police?” She said it poh-lice. “Up here people take care of things their own way. When Memaw found out what he’d done she took a horsewhip to him. Only two people he was ever scared of, his own mom and pop.”

  Margery put her head down so that her thick dark hair fell forward. She ran her fingers nimbly over her scalp until she found what she was looking for and pulled her hair to one side, revealing an inch-wide gap of bare skin. “That was where he pulled me up two flights of stairs by my hair three days after Memaw died. Pulled a handful of it clean out. They say he still had half my scalp attached to it when he dropped it.”

  “You don’t remember?”

  “Nope. He’d knocked me out before he did it.”

  Alice stood in stunned silence. Margery’s voice was as level as always.

  “I’m so sorry,” she faltered.

  “Don’t be. When he died there were two people in this whole town came to his funeral and one of those only did cos they felt sorry for me. You know how much this town loves to meet up? You imagine how much they hated him not even to show up at a man’s funeral.”

  “You . . . don’t miss him, then.”

  “Hah! Round here, Alice, you get a lot of what you call sundowners. They’re good old boys in daylight hours, but come nightfall when they get to drinking, they’re basically a pair of fists looking for a target.”

  Alice thought of Mr. Van Cleve’s bourbon-fueled rants and shivered, despite the heat.

  “Well, my daddy wasn’t even a sundowner. He didn’t need drink. Cold as ice. Don’t have a single good memory of him.”

  “Not a single one?”

  Margery thought for a moment. “Oh, no, you’re right. There was one.”

  Alice waited.

  “Yup. The day the sheriff stopped by to tell me he was dead.”

  Margery turned from the mule and the two women finished up in silence.

  Alice felt completely out of her depth. Anyone else, she would have commiserated. Margery seemed to need less sympathy than anyone she’d ever met.

  Perhaps Margery detected some of these mental gymnastics, or perhaps she felt she’d been a little harsh, because she turned to Alice and smiled suddenly. Alice was struck by the fact that she was actually quite beautiful. “You asked me a while back if I was ever frightened, up there in the mountains, on my own.”

  Alice’s hand stilled on the girth buckle.

  “Well, I’ll tell you something. I’ve been afraid of nothing since the day my daddy passed. See that there?” She pointed toward the mountains that loomed in the distance. “That’s what I dreamed of as a child. Me and Charley, up there, that’s my heaven, Alice. I get to live my heaven every day.”

  She let out a long breath, and as Alice was still digesting the softening of her face, the strange luminosity of her smile, she turned and slapped the back of her saddle. “Right. You all set? Big day for you. Big day for us all.”

  * * *

  • • •

  It was the first week that the four women had split up and ridden their own routes. They planned to meet at the library at the beginning and end of each week, to debrief, try to keep the books in order, and check the condition of those returned. Margery and Beth rode the longer routes, often leaving their books at a second base, a schoolhouse ten miles away and bringing those back fortnightly, while Alice and Izzy did the routes closer to home. Izzy had grown in confidence now, and several times Alice had arrived as she was already riding out, her polished new boots from Lexington gleaming, her humming audible the whole way down Main Street. “Good morning, Alice,” she would call, her wave a little tentative, as if she were still not quite sure of the response she was going to get.

  Alice didn’t want to admit how nervous she felt. It wasn’t just her fear of getting lost, or of making a fool of herself, but the conversation she had overheard between Beth and Mrs. Brady the week before, as she had unsaddled Spirit outside.

  Oh, you all are just marvelous. But I confess I am a little anxious about the English girl.

  She’s doing fine, Mrs. Brady. Marge says she knows most of the routes pretty well.

  It’s not the routes, Beth dear. The whole point of using local girls to do the job was that the people you visit know you. They trust you not to look down at them, or to give their families anything unsuitable to read. If we have some strange girl going in talking with an accent and acting like the Queen of England, well, they’re going to be on their guard. I’m afraid it’s going to damage the whole scheme.

  Spirit had snorted and they had quieted abruptly, as if realizing someone might be outside. Alice, ducking back behind the window, had felt a spasm of anxiety. If local people wouldn’t take her books, she realized, they wouldn’t let her have the job. She imagined herself suddenly back inside the Van Cleve house, heavy with silence, Annie’s beady, suspicious gaze on her and a decade stretching ahead of her at every hour. She thought of Bennett, and the wall of his sleeping back, his refusal to try to talk about what was going on. She thought of Mr. Van Cleve’s irritation that they had not yet provided him with a “little grandbabby.”

  If I lose this job, she thought, and something solid and heavy set
tled in her stomach, I will have nothing.

  * * *

  • • •

  Good mornin’!”

  The whole way up the mountain Alice had been practicing. She had murmured, “Well, good morning! And how are you this fine day?” to Spirit over and over, rolling her mouth around the vowels, trying to stop herself sounding so clipped and English.

  A young woman, probably not much older than Alice, emerged from a cabin and peered at her, shading her eyes. In the sunlit, grassy patch in front of the house, two children looked up at her. They resumed their desultory fight over a stick while a dog watched intently. A bowl of unshucked sweetcorn had been left, as if awaiting transport, and a pile of laundry lay on a sheet on the ground. Some pulled weeds were thrown in a pile by the vegetable patch, the earth still on their roots. The house appeared surrounded by such half-finished tasks. From inside Alice could hear a baby crying, a furious, disconsolate wail.

  “Mrs. Bligh?”

  “Can I help you?”

  Alice took a breath. “Good maoahning! Ah’m from the traveling laahbrurry,” she said carefully. “Ah wuz wondering if yew would lahk some bewks, fer you and the young’uns. Fer to do some book learnin’.”

  The woman’s smile faded.

  “It’s okay. They don’t cawst nuffink,” Alice added, smiling. She pulled a book from her saddlebag. “Yew kin borreh four and ah’ll jest come pick ’em up next week.”

  The woman was silent. She narrowed her eyes, pursed her lips and looked down at her shoes. Then she brushed her hands on her apron and looked up again.

  “Miss, are you mocking me?”

  Alice’s eyes widened.

  “You’re the English one, right? Married to Van Cleve’s boy? Because if you’re after mocking me you can head straight off back down that mountain.”

  “I’m not mocking you,” Alice said quickly.

  “Then you got somethin’ wrong with your jaw?”

  Alice swallowed. The woman was frowning at her. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I was told people wouldn’t trust me enough to take books from me if I sounded too English. I was just . . .” Her voice trailed away.

  “You was trying to sound like you was from round here?” The woman’s chin pulled into her neck.

  “I know. Said like that it sounds rather—I—” Alice closed her eyes and groaned inwardly.

  The woman snorted with laughter. Alice’s eyes snapped open. The woman started to laugh again, bent over her apron. “You tried to sound like you was from round here. Garrett? You hear that?”

  “I heard,” came a man’s voice, followed by a burst of coughing.

  Mrs. Bligh clutched her sides and laughed until she had to wipe the corners of her eyes. The children, watching her, began to chuckle too, with the hopeful, bemused faces of those who weren’t quite sure what they were laughing at.

  “Oh, my. Oh, Miss, I ain’t laughed like that since as long as I can remember. You come on in now. I’d take books off you if you was from the other side of the world. I’m Kathleen. C’mon in. You need some water? It’s hot enough to fry a snake out here.”

  Alice tied Spirit to the nearest tree and pulled a selection of books out of her pack. She followed the young woman up to the cabin, noting that there was no glass in the windows, just wooden shutters, and wondered absently what it must be like in the winter. She waited in the doorway, as her eyes acclimatized to the darkness, and gradually the interior revealed itself. The cabin appeared to be divided into two rooms. The walls of the front one were lined with newspaper, and on the far side stood a large wood-burning stove, beside which stood a stack of logs. Above the fireplace hung a string of tied candles, and a large hunting rifle on the wall. A table and four chairs stood in the corner, and a baby lay in a large crate beside it, its little fists pummeled the air as it cried. The woman stooped and picked it up with a vague air of exhaustion and the crying stopped.

  It was then that Alice noticed the man in the bed across the room. The quilted covers pulled up to his chest, he was young and handsome, but his skin had the waxy pallor of the chronically ill. The air was still and stale around him, despite the open windows, and every thirty seconds or so he coughed.

  “Good morning,” she said, when she saw he was looking at her.

  “Morning,” he said, his voice weak and raspy. “Garrett Bligh. Sorry I can’t stand just now to—”

  She shook her head, as if it was of no matter.

  “Have you got any of those Woman’s Home Companion magazines?” said the young woman. “This baby is just a devil to settle right now and I was wondering if they had anything would help? I can read good enough, can’t I, Garrett? Miss O’Hare brought me some a while back and they had advice on all sorts. I think it’s his teeth but he don’t want to chew on nothin’.”

  Alice startled, pulled back into action. She began flicking through the books and magazines, eventually pulling out two that she handed over. “Would the children like something?”

  “You got any of those picture books? Pauly’s got his alphabet but his sister just looks at the pictures. She loves them, though.”

  “Of course.” Alice found two primers and handed them over.

  Kathleen smiled, placing them reverently on the table, and handed Alice a cup of water. “I got some recipes. Got one for honey apple cake handed down from my mama. If you want it, I’d be happy to write it out and give it to you.”

  Mountain people, Margery had instructed her, were proud. Many of them didn’t feel comfortable receiving without giving something back. “I’d love that. Thank you so much.” Alice drank the water and handed back her cup. She made to leave, muttering about time getting on, when she realized that Kathleen and her husband were exchanging a look. She stood, wondering if she had missed something. They looked back at her, and the woman smiled brightly. Neither said a word.

  Alice waited a moment, until it became awkward.

  “Well, it’s lovely to meet you all. I’ll see you in a week and I’ll make sure to look out for more articles about teething babies. Anything you want, I’ll be happy to search it out. We have new books and magazines coming in by the week.” She gathered up the remaining books.

  “I’ll see you next time, then.”

  “Much obliged to you,” came the whispering voice from the bed, and then the words were lost in another bout of coughing.

  The outside seemed impossibly bright after the gloom of the cabin. Alice found herself squinting as she waved good-bye to the children and made her way back across the grass to Spirit. She hadn’t realized how high up they were here: she could see halfway across the county. She stopped for a minute, reveling in the view.

  “Miss?”

  She turned. Kathleen Bligh was running toward her. She stopped a few feet from Alice, then compressed her lips briefly as if she were afraid to speak.

  “Is there something else?”

  “Miss, my husband, he loves to read but his eyes ain’t too good in the dark and, to be honest, he struggles to focus because of the black lung. He’s in some pain most days. Could you read to him a little?”

  “Read to him?”

  “It takes his mind away. I can’t do it because I got the house to mind and the baby, and kindling to chop. I wouldn’t ask but Margery did it the other week, and if you could spare a half-hour just to read him a chapter of something, well . . . it would mean the world to both of us.”

  Kathleen’s face, away from her husband, had collapsed into exhaustion and strain, as if she dared not show what she felt in front of him. Her eyes glittered. She lifted her chin abruptly, as if she were embarrassed to be asking for anything. “Of course if you’re too busy—”

  Alice reached out and put a hand on her arm. “Why don’t you tell me a little of what he likes? I have a new book of short stories here that sounds like it might be just the ticket. What do you th
ink?”

  * * *

  • • •

  Forty minutes later Alice picked her way down the mountain. Garrett Bligh had closed his eyes while she read and, sure enough, twenty minutes into the story—a stirring tale of a sailor shipwrecked on high seas—she had glanced from her stool beside the bed and observed that the muscles of his face, which had been taut with discomfort, had indeed relaxed as if he had taken himself somewhere else entirely. She kept her voice low, murmuring, and even the baby seemed to settle at the sound. Outside, Kathleen was a pale blur, chopping kindling, fetching, picking and carrying, alternately calming arguments and scolding. By the time the story finished, Garrett was asleep, his breath rasping in his chest.

  “Thank you,” Kathleen said, as Alice loaded her saddlebags. She held out two large apples and a piece of paper on which she had carefully written a recipe. “That’s what I was telling you about. These apples are good for baking because they don’t go all to a mush. Just don’t overcook them.” Her face had brightened again, her former resolve apparently restored.

  “That’s very kind of you. Thank you,” said Alice, and tucked them carefully into her pockets. Kathleen nodded, as if a debt had been repaid, and Alice mounted her horse. She thanked her again and set off.

  “Mrs. Van Cleve?” Kathleen called, when Alice had gone some twenty yards down the track.

  Alice turned in her saddle. “Yes?”

  Kathleen folded her arms across her chest and lifted her chin. “I think your voice sounds real fine just like it is.”

  * * *

  • • •

  The sun was fierce and the no-see-ums, the biting midges, were relentless. Through the long afternoon Alice, slapping at her neck and cursing, was grateful for the canvas-brimmed hat Margery had lent her. She managed to press an embroidery primer onto twin sisters who lived down by the creek and seemed to view even that with suspicion, was chased from a large house by a mean-looking dog, and gave a Bible reader to a family of eleven in the smallest house she had ever seen, where a series of hay mattresses lay on the porch. “Children of mine read nothin’ but the Good Book,” the mother had said, from behind a half-closed door, and set her jaw, as if braced for contradiction.