The Giver of Stars Page 9

  “Then I’ll look out for some more Bible stories for you next week,” Alice said, and tried to make her smile brighter than it felt as the door closed.

  After the small victory at the Bligh house, she had begun to feel dispirited. She wasn’t sure if it was the books people were viewing with suspicion or her. She kept hearing Mrs. Brady’s voice, her reservations about whether Alice could do the job, given her foreignness. She was so distracted by this that it was some time before she realized she had stopped registering Margery’s red threads on the trees and was now lost. She stopped in a clearing, trying to gauge from her hand-drawn maps where she was meant to be, struggling to see the position of the sun through the dark green canopy above. Spirit stood stock still, her head drooping in the mid-afternoon heat that managed to penetrate the branches.

  “Aren’t you meant to be finding your way home?” said Alice, grumpily.

  She was forced to conclude she had no clue where she was. She would have to retrace her steps until she found her way back to a landmark. She turned the horse and wearily made her way up the side of the mountain.

  It was a full half-hour before she recognized anything. She had tamped down her rising sense of panic at the creeping realization that she could quite easily end up on the mountainside at night, in the dark, with snakes and mountain lions and goodness knew what all around, or, just as worrying, at one of the addresses she was on no account to make a stop at: Beever, on Frog Creek (crazy like a fox), the McCullough House (moonshiners, mostly drunk, not sure about the girls as no one ever sees ’em), the Garside brothers (drunk, ornery with it). She wasn’t sure whether she was more afraid of the prospect of being shot for trespass, or of Mrs. Brady’s response when it emerged that the Englishwoman had not, after all, known what on earth she was doing.

  Around her the landscape seemed to have stretched, revealing its vastness and her own ignorance at her place within it. Why hadn’t she paid more attention to Margery’s instructions? She squinted at the shadows, trying to work out where she might be according to their direction, then cursed when the clouds or the movement of the branches made them vanish. She was so relieved when she spied the red knot on the tree trunk that it took her a moment to grasp the identity of the house she was now approaching.

  Alice rode past the front gate with her eyes lowered and her head down. The weather-boarded house was silent. The iron kettle sat outside in a cold pile of ash, and a large ax lay abandoned in a chunk of tree stump. Two dirty glass windows eyed her blankly. And there they were, four books in a neat pile by the post, just where Margery had told Jim Horner to leave them if he decided he didn’t want books in his house after all. She pulled Spirit up and climbed off, one eye warily on the window, remembering the bullet-sized hole in Margery’s hat. The books appeared untouched. She picked them up under one arm, packed them carefully in her saddlebags, then checked the mare’s girth. She had one foot in the stirrup, her heart beating uncomfortably fast, when she heard the man’s voice echo out across the holler.

  “Hey!”

  She stopped.

  “Hey—you!”

  Alice closed her eyes.

  “You that library girl stopped here before?”

  “I wasn’t bothering you, Mr. Horner,” she called. “I just—I just came to pick up the books. I’ll be gone before you know it. Nobody else will come by.”

  “You was lying?”

  “What?” Alice took her foot out of the stirrup and spun round.

  “You said you was going to bring us some more.”

  Alice blinked. He wasn’t smiling, but he wasn’t holding a gun either. He stood in the doorway, his hands loosely by his sides, and lifted one to point at the gatepost. “You want more books?”

  “Said so, didn’t I?”

  “Oh, goodness. Of course. Um . . .” Nerves made her clumsy. She fumbled in the bag, pulling and rejecting what came to hand. “Yes. Well. I brought some Mark Twain and a book of recipes. Oh, and this magazine has some canning tips. You were all canning, weren’t you? I can leave that if you like.”

  “I want a speller.” He pointed loosely, as if that might summon it. “For the girls. I want one of them with just words and a picture each page. Nothing fancy.”

  “I think I have something like that . . . Hold on.” Alice rummaged in her saddlebag and eventually pulled out a child’s reading book. “Like this? This one has been very popular among—”

  “Just leave them by the post.”

  “Done! There they are! . . . Lovely!” Alice stooped to place the books in a neat pile, then backed away and turned to spring onto her horse. “Right. I’m . . . I’m going now. Be sure to let me know if there’s anything particular you want me to bring next week.”

  She lifted a hand. Jim Horner was standing in the doorway, two girls behind him, watching her. Although her heart was still beating wildly, when she reached the bottom of the dirt track she found she was smiling.

  FIVE

  Each mine, or group of mines, became a social center with no privately owned property except the mine, and no public places or public highway except the bed of the creek, which flowed between the mountain walls. These groups of villages dot the mountain sides down the river valleys and need only castles, draw-bridges, and donjon-keeps to reproduce to the physical eye a view of feudal days.

  • United States Coal Commission in 1923

  It pained Margery to admit it, but the little library on Split Creek Road was growing chaotic and, faced with the ever-growing demand for books, not one of the four of them had time to do much about it. Despite the initial suspicion of some inhabitants of Lee County, word had spread about the book ladies, as they had become known, and within a few short weeks it was more common for them to be greeted by eager smiles than it was for doors to be rapidly closed in their faces. Families clamored for reading material, from the Woman’s Home Companion to The Furrow for men. Everything from Charles Dickens to the Dime Mystery Magazine was ripped from their hands almost as soon as they could pull it from their saddlebags. The comic books, wildly popular among the county’s children, suffered most, being thumbed to death or their fragile pages ripped as siblings fought over them. Magazines would occasionally be returned with a favorite page quietly removed. And still the demand came: Miss, have you got new books for us?

  When the librarians returned to their base at Frederick Guisler’s cabin, instead of plucking rigorously organized books from his handmade shelves, they were more often to be found on the floor, riffling through countless piles for the requested titles, yelling at each other when someone else turned out to be sitting on the one they needed.

  “I guess we’re victims of our own success,” said Margery, glancing around at the stacks on the floor.

  “Should we start sorting through them?” Beth was smoking a cigarette—her father would have whipped her if he’d seen it and Margery pretended she hadn’t.

  “No point. We’ll barely touch the sides this morning and it’ll be just as bad when we get back. No, I’ve been thinking we need someone here full time to sort it out.”

  Beth looked at Izzy. “You wanted to stay back here, didn’t you? And she ain’t the strongest of riders.”

  Izzy bristled. “I do not, thank you, Beth. My families know me. They wouldn’t like it if someone else took over my routes.”

  She had a point. Despite Beth’s sly digs, Izzy Brady, in six short weeks, had grown into a competent horsewoman, if not a great one, her balance compensating for her weaker leg, its difference now invisible in the dark mahogany leather boots that she kept polished to a high shine. She had taken to carrying her stick on the back of the saddle to aid her when she had to walk the last steps up to a house, and found it came in handy for whacking at branches, keeping mean dogs at bay, and shifting the occasional snake. Most families around Baileyville were a little in awe of Mrs. Brady, and Izzy, once she’d introduced hersel
f, was usually welcomed.

  “Besides, Beth,” Izzy added, slyly producing her trump card, “you know if I stay here you’ll have my mother fixin’ and fussin’ all the time. Only thing keeping her away now is thinking I’m out all day.”

  “Oh, I’d really rather not,” said Alice, as Margery turned toward her. “My families are doing well, too. Jim Horner’s eldest girl read the whole of The American Girl last week. He was so proud he even forgot to shout at me.”

  “I guess it’s Beth, then,” said Izzy.

  Beth stubbed out her cigarette on the wood floor with the heel of her boot. “Don’t look at me. I hate cleaning up. Do enough of it for my damn brothers.”

  “Do you have to curse?” Izzy sniffed.

  “It’s not just clearing up,” Margery said, picking up a copy of The Pickwick Papers, from which the innards sagged in a weary spray. “These were ratty to start with and now they’re falling apart. We need someone who can sew up the binders and maybe make scrapbooks out of all these loose pages. They’re doing that over at Hindman and they’re real popular. Got recipes and stories in them and everything.”

  “My sewing is atrocious,” said Alice, quickly, and the others concurred loudly that they, too, were awful at it.

  Margery pulled an exasperated face. “Well, I ain’t doing it. Got paws for hands.” She thought for a minute. “I got an idea, though.” She got up from behind the table and reached for her hat.

  “What?” said Alice.

  “Where are you going?” said Beth.

  “Hoffman. Beth, can you pick up some of my rounds? I’ll see y’all later.”

  * * *

  • • •

  You could hear the ominous sounds of the Hoffman Mining Company a good couple of miles before you saw it: the rumble of the coal trucks, the distant whumpf of the explosions that vibrated through your feet, the clang of the mine bell. For Margery, Hoffman was a vision of Hell, its pits eating into the scarred and hollowed-out hillsides around Baileyville, like giant welts, its men, their eyes glowing white out of blackened faces, emerging from its bowels, and the low industrial hum of nature being stripped and ravaged. Around the settlement the taste of coal dust hung in the air, with an ever-present sense of foreboding, explosions covering the valley with a gray filter. Even Charley balked at it. A certain kind of man looked at God’s own land, she thought, as she drew closer, and instead of beauty and wonder, all he saw was dollar signs.

  Hoffman was a town with its own rules. The price of a wage and a roof over your head was a creeping debt to the company store, and the never-ending fear of a misjudged measurement of dynamite, a lost limb from a runaway trolley, or worse: the end of it all, several hundred feet below, with little chance for your loved ones to recover a body to grieve over.

  And, since a year back, all of this had become suffused in an air of mistrust as the union-busters arrived to beat back those who had the temerity to campaign for better conditions. The mine bosses didn’t like change, and they had shown it not in argument and raised fists but with mobs, guns and, now, families in mourning.

  “That you, Margery O’Hare?” The guard took two steps toward her as she rode up, his hand shielding his eyes from the sun.

  “Sure is, Bob.”

  “You know Gustavsson’s here?”

  “Everything all right?” She felt the familiar metallic taste in her mouth whenever she heard Sven’s name.

  “Everyone accounted for. Think they’re just having a bite to eat before they head off. Last saw them over by B Block.”

  She dismounted and tied up the mule, then walked through the gates, ignoring the glances from miners clocking off. She walked briskly past the commissary, its windows advertising various on-sale bargains that everyone knew to be no bargain at all. It stood on the hillside at the same level as the huge tipple. Above it were the generous, well-maintained houses of the mine bosses and their foremen, most with neat backyards. This was where Van Cleve would have lived, had Dolores not refused to leave her family home back in Baileyville. It was not one of the larger coal camps, like Lynch, where some ten thousand homes scattered the hillsides. Here a couple of hundred miners’ shacks stretched along the tracks, their roofs covered with tar-paper, barely updated in the forty-odd years of their existence. A few children, mostly shoeless, played in the dirt beside a rootling pig. Car parts and washing pails were strewn outside front doors, and stray dogs trotted haphazard paths between them. Margery turned right, away from the residential roads, and walked briskly over the small bridge that led to the mines.

  She spied his back first. He was sitting on an upturned crate, his helmet cradled between his feet as he ate a hunk of bread. She’d know him anywhere, she thought. The way his neck met his shoulders and his head tilted a little to the left when he spoke. His shirt was covered with smuts and the tabard that read “FIRE” on his back was slightly askew.

  “Hey.”

  He turned at the sound of her voice, stood and lifted his hands as his workmates began a series of low whistles, as if he were trying to tamp down a fire. “Marge! What are you doing here?” He took her arm, steering her away from the catcalls as they walked around the corner.

  She looked at Sven’s blackened palms. “Everyone okay?”

  His eyebrows lifted. “This time.” He shot a look at the administrative offices that told her everything she needed to know.

  She reached up and wiped a smudge from his face with her thumb. He stopped her and pressed her hand to his lips. It always made something flip inside her, even if she didn’t let it show on her face.

  “You missed me, then?”

  “No.”

  “Liar.”

  They grinned at each other.

  “I came to find William Kenworth. I need to speak to his sister.”

  “Colored William? He isn’t here no more, Marge. He got injured out, oh, six, nine months back.”

  She looked startled.

  “I thought I told you. Some powder monkey messed up his wires and he was in the way when they blasted that tunnel through Feller’s Top. Boulder took his leg clean off.”

  “So where is he now?”

  “No idea. I can find out, though.”

  * * *

  • • •

  She waited outside the administrative offices while Sven went in and sweet-talked Mrs. Pfeiffer, whose favorite word was “no” but she rarely used it on Sven. Everyone across the five coal patches of Lee County loved Sven. He had, along with solid shoulders and fists the size of hams, an air of quiet authority, a twinkle in his eye, which told men he was one of them, and women he liked them, not just in that way. He was good at his job, kind when he felt he needed to be, and he spoke to everyone with the same uncommon civility, whether it was a ragged-trousered kid from the next holler, or the big bosses at the mine. Most days she could reel off a whole list of the things she liked about Sven Gustavsson. Not that she’d tell him.

  He came down the steps from the office holding a piece of paper. “He’s over at Monarch Creek, at his late mother’s place. Been pretty poorly by all accounts. Turns out they’d only treat him the first couple of months in the hospital here, then he was out.”

  “Good of them.”

  Sven knew well how little she regarded Hoffman. “What do you want him for, anyway?”

  “I wanted to find his sister. But if he’s sick, I don’t know if I should be bothering him. Last I heard she was working in Louisville.”

  “Oh, no. Mrs. Pfeiffer just told me his sister’s the one looking out for him. Chances are you head over there, you’ll find her, too.”

  She took the piece of paper from him and looked up. His eyes were on her, and his face softened under the black. “So when will I see you?”

  “Depends when you stop yammering on about getting married.”

  He glanced behind him, then pulled her aro
und the corner, placing her back against the wall as he stood close, as close as he could get. “Okay, how’s this? Margery O’Hare, I solemnly promise never to marry you.”

  “And?”

  “And I won’t talk about marrying you. Or sing songs about it. Or even think about marrying you.”

  “Better.”

  He glanced around him, then lowered his voice, placing his mouth beside her ear so that she squirmed a little. “But I will stop by and do sinful things to that fine body of yours. If you’ll allow me.”

  “How sinful?” she whispered.

  “Oh. Bad. Ungodly.”

  She slid her hand inside his overalls, feeling the faint sheen of sweat on his warm skin. For a moment it was just the two of them. The sounds and scents of the mine receded, and all she could feel was the thumping of her heart, the pulse of his skin against hers, the ever-present drumbeat of her need for him. “God loves a sinner, Sven.” She reached up and kissed him, then delivered a swift bite to his lower lip. “But not as much as I do.”

  He burst out laughing and, to her surprise, as she walked back to the mule, the safety crew’s catcalls still ringing out, her cheeks had gone quite, quite pink.

  * * *

  • • •

  It had been a long day, and by the time she reached the little cabin at Monarch Creek, both she and the mule were weary. She dismounted and threw her reins over the post.

  “Hello?”

  Nobody emerged. A carefully tended vegetable patch lay to the left of the cabin, and a small lean-to skimmed it, with two baskets hanging from the porch. Unlike most of the houses around this holler, it was freshly painted, the grass trimmed and weeds beaten into submission. A red rocker sat by the door looking out across the water meadow.