Page 10 of The Giver of Stars
‘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 sceptical.
‘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 draughts 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 hugebirds, 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?’
