Page 51 of The Giver of Stars
‘Shut up!’
She felt her eyes brim with tears. ‘Why are you being like this when all I am trying to do is make you happy? I just want you to love me! I’m your wife!’
‘Stop talking! Why do you have to talk like a prostitute?’
‘How do you know how a prostitute talks?’
‘Just shut up!’
He hurled the lamp from the bedside table so that it shattered on the floor. ‘Shut up! Do you hear me, Alice? Will you ever just stoptalking?’
Alice sat frozen. From next door they heard the sound of Mr Van Cleve groaning his way out of bed, the springsshrieking a protest, and she dropped her face into her hands, braced for what would inevitably come next. Sure enough, a few short seconds later there was a loud rapping at their bedroom door.
‘What’s going on in there, Bennett? Bennett? What’s all the noise? Did you break something?’
‘Go away, Pa! Okay? Just leave me alone!’
Alice stared at her husband in shock. She waited for the sound of the fuse of Mr Van Cleve’s temper being lit again but – perhaps equally surprised by his son’s uncharacteristic response – there was only silence. Mr Van Cleve stood on the other side of the door for a moment, coughed twice, and then they heard him shuffle back to his room.
This time it was Alice who rose. She climbed off the bed, picking up the pieces of the lamp so that she didn’t tread on them in bare feet, and placed them carefully on the bedside table. Then, without looking at her husband, she straightened her nightdress, pulled on her bed-jacket, and made her way next door into the dressing room. Her face once again returned to stone as she lay down on the daybed. She pulled a blanket over herself and waited for morning, or for the silence from the next room to stop weighing like a dead thing on her chest, whichever would come first, or would deign to come at all.
10
One of the most notorious feuds of the Kentucky mountains began … in Hindman as a result of the killing of Linvin Higgins. Dolph Drawn, a deputy sheriff of Knott County, organized a posse and started for Letcher County with warrants for the arrest of William Wright and two other men accused of the murder … In the fight that followed several men were wounded and the sheriff’s horse was killed … (‘Devil John’ Wright, leader of the Wright faction, later paid for the animal because he ‘regretted the killing of a fine horse’.)
The feud lasted several years and was responsible for the death of 150 men.
WPA,Guide to Kentucky
Winter had come hard to the mountain, and Margery wrapped herself around Sven’s torso in the dark, hooking her leg around him for extra warmth, knowing that outside there would be four inches of ice to hack out of the top of the well and a whole bunch of animals waiting bad-temperedly to be fed and that these two facts, every morning, made the last five minutes under the huge pile of blankets all the sweeter.
‘Is this your way of trying to persuade me to make the coffee?’ Sven murmured sleepily, lowering his lips to her forehead, and shifting, just so she could be assured of quite how sweet he found it too.
‘Just saying good morning,’ she said, and let out a long,contented breath. His skin smelt so good. Sometimes when he wasn’t there she would sleep wrapped in his shirt, just to feel him near her. She trailed her finger speculatively across his chest, a question he answered silently. The minutes crept by pleasurably until he spoke again.
‘What’s the time, Marge?’
‘Um … a quarter to five.’
He groaned. ‘You do realize that if you’d stay with me we could get up a whole half-hour later?’
‘And it would be just as hard to do it. Plus Van Cleve would no more let me near his mine, these days, than he would ask me to take tea at his house.’
Sven had to admit she had a point. The last time she had come to see him – bringing a lunch pail he had forgotten – Bob at the Hoffman gate had informed her regretfully that he had specific orders not to let her in. Van Cleve had no proof, of course, that Margery O’Hare had anything to do with the legal letters about blocking the strip mining of North Ridge, but there were few enough people who had either the resources – or the courage – to have been behind it. And her public crack about the coloured miners had plainly stung.
‘So I guess it’ll be Christmas here, then,’ he said.
‘All the relatives as usual. A packed house,’ she said, her lips an inch from his. ‘Me, you, um … Bluey over there. Down, Blue!’ The dog, taking his name as a sign that food was imminent, had hurled himself onto the bed and across the coverlet, his bony legs scrabbling on top of their entwined bodies, licking their faces. ‘Ow! Jeez, dog! Oh, that’s done it. Okay. I’ll make the coffee.’ She sat up and pushed him away. She rubbed sleep from her eyes and detached regretfully the hand that had slid around her stomach.
‘You saving me from myself, Bluey boy?’ Sven said, andthe dog rolled over between them, tongue lolling, for his belly to be tickled. ‘Both of you, huh?’
She grinned as she heard him fussing over the dog, the damn fool, and kept grinning the whole way into the kitchen, where she stooped, shivering, to light the range.
‘So, tell me something,’ Sven said, as they ate their eggs, their boots entwined under the table. ‘We spend nearly every night together. We eat together. We sleep together. I know how you like your eggs, the strength of your coffee, the fact that you don’t like cream. I know how hot you run your bath, the way you brush your hair forty strokes, tie it back and then don’t look at it a lick for the rest of the day. Hell, I know the names of all your animals, even that hen with the blunt beak. Minnie.’
‘Winnie.’
‘Okay. Nearly all your animals. So what is the difference between us living like this and doing it but just with a ring on your finger?’
