Page 74 of The Giver of Stars
Alice glared at him. She dropped her reins and her voice carried, clear as cut glass, through the still air, glittering with anger. ‘You shot herdog?’
There was a brief silence.
‘You shot Margery’sdog?’
‘I shot nothing.’
She lifted her chin and looked steadily at him. ‘No, of course you didn’t. You wouldn’t get your own hands dirty, would you? You probably got your men to come out here just to shoot that puppy.’ She shook her head. ‘My God. What kind of manareyou?’
She saw then from the questioning way Bennett swivelled to look at his father that he hadn’t known, and some small part of her was glad.
Van Cleve, who had been open-mouthed, swiftly recovered his composure. ‘You’re crazy. Living with that O’Hare girl has turned you crazy!’ He glanced out of his window, noting the neighbours who had stopped to listen, murmuring to each other. This was rich meat indeed for a quiet town.Van Cleve shot Margery O’Hare’s dog.‘She’s crazy! Look at her, riding her horse straight into my car! As if I’d shoot a dog!’ He slapped his hands on the steering wheel. Alice didn’t move. His voice rose a register. ‘Me! Shoot a damn dog!’
And finally, when nobody moved, and nobody spoke: ‘Come on, Bennett. We got work to do.’ He wrestled the wheel so that the car spun around her and accelerated briskly up the road, leaving Spirit to prance and shy as the gravel sprayed at her feet.
It shouldn’t have been a surprise. Sven leaned over the rough wooden table with Fred and the two women and relayed the tales coming out of Harlan County, of men dynamited clean out of their beds because of the escalating union disputes, of thugs with machine-guns, of sheriffs turning the blindest of eyes. In the light of all this a dead dog shouldn’t have been much of a surprise. But it seemed to knock the fight right out of Margery. She’d been sick twice with the shock of it, and she cast around for her hound reflexively when they were home, her palm pressed to her cheek, as if even now she half expected him to come bounding around the corner.
‘Van Cleve’s canny,’ muttered Sven, as she left the room to check on Charley, as she did repeatedly through each evening. ‘He knew Margery wouldn’t bat an eyelid if someone looked at her down the barrel of a gun. But if he picked off the things she loves …’
Alice considered this. ‘Are …youworried, Sven?’
‘For me? No. I’m a company man. And he needs a fire captain. I’m not unionized, but anything happens to me, all my boys go out. We’re agreed on that. And if we walk, the mine shuts down. The sheriff might be in Van Cleve’s pocket but there are limits to what the state will tolerate.’ He sniffed. ‘Besides, this one’s about him and you two girls. And he won’t want attention drawn to the fact that he’s engaged in a fight with a pair of women. Oh, no.’
He took a slug of bourbon. ‘He’s just trying to spook you. But his men wouldn’t hurt a woman. Even those thugs of his. They’re bound by the code of the hills.’
‘What about the ones he’s bringing in from out of state?’ said Fred. ‘You sure they’re bound by the code of the hills, too?’
Sven didn’t seem to have an answer for that.
Fred taught her how to use a shotgun. He showed her how to balance the stock and pull the butt against her shoulder, how to factor in the hefty kick backwards when she lined up her sights, reminding her not to hold her breath but to release the trigger as she breathed out slowly. The first time she pulled the trigger he was standing close behind her, his hands on hers, and she bounced so hard against him that her face stayed pink for an hour.
She was a natural, he told her, lining up cans on the fallen tree at the edge of Margery’s land. Within days she could pick them off, like apples falling from a branch. At night, as she secured the new locks on the doors, Alice would run her hands along the barrel, lift it speculatively to her shoulder, firing imaginary rounds at unseen intruders coming up the track. She would pull the trigger for her friend; she had no doubt of that.
Because something else had changed too, something fundamental. Alice had discovered how, for a woman at least, it was much easier to feel anger on behalf of someone you cared about, to access that cold burn, to want to make someone suffer if they had hurt someone you loved.
Alice, it turned out, was no longer afraid.
14
Riding all winter, a librarian would wrap up so heavily it was hard to remember what she looked like underneath: two vests, a flannel shirt, a thick sweater and a jacket with maybe a scarf or two over the top – that was the daily uniform up in the mountains, perhaps with a pair of man’s thick leather gloves over her own, a hat rammed low as she could get it, and another scarf pulled high over her nose, so that her breath might bounce back and warm her skin a little. At home, she’d strip off reluctantly, revealing only the swiftest slice of bare skin to the elements between shedding undergarments and sliding, shivering, under her blankets. Aside from cloth-washing, a woman working for the Packhorse Library could go for weeks without seeing her body much at all.
Alice was still locked into her own private battle with the Van Cleves although, thankfully, they seemed to have gone quiet for now. She could most often be found in the woods behind the cabin practising with Fred’s old gun, thecrackandzingof bullets hitting tin cans echoing through the still air.
Izzy could be seen only in glimpses, trailing her mother miserably around town. And there were only intermittent appearances from Beth, the one person who could be relied on to notice these things, or joke about them, and she was mostly preoccupied with her arm and what she could and couldn’t do. So nobody observed that Margery had put on a little weight, or thought to comment upon it. Sven, whoknew Marge’s body like he knew his own, understood the fluctuations that occurred in the female form and enjoyed all of them equally, and was a wise enough man not to say anything.
Margery herself had become accustomed to being bone-tired, trying to double up on routes, fighting every day to convince the disbelievers of the importance of stories, of facts, of knowledge. But this and the constant air of foreboding left her struggling each morning to lift her head from the pillow. The cold was etched into her after months of snow, and the long hours outside had left her permanently, ravenously hungry. So a woman could be excused for not noticing the things that other women might have picked up on faster, or if she did, for sweeping the thought away under the larger pile of things she had to worry about.
But there is always a point at which these things become impossible to ignore. One night in late February Margery told Sven not to stop by, adding with deceptive casualness that she had a few things to catch up on. She helped Sophia with the last of the books, waved Alice off into the snowy night and bolted the door behind her until it was just her alone in the little library. The log burner still glowed warm because Fred, God bless him, had packed it full of logs before he, too, disappeared to eat, his mind full of someone else entirely. She sat in the chair, her thoughts hanging low around her head in the darkness, until eventually she stood, pulled a heavy textbook from the shelf and flicked through the pages until she found what she was looking for. Brow furrowed, she scanned the information carefully. She absorbed it, then counted off her fingers:one, two, three, four, five, five and a half.
And then she did it a second time.
Despite what people might have thought around LeeCounty about Margery O’Hare’s family, about the kind of woman she must surely be, given where she came from, she was not prone to cursing. Now, however, she cursed softly once, twice, and let her head sink silently into her hands.
15
The small town bankers, grocers, editors and lawyers, the police, the sheriff, if not the government, were all apparently subservient to the money and corporate masters of the area. It was their compulsion, if not always their desire, to stand well with these who had the power to cause them material or personal difficulties.
Theodore Dreiser, introduction toHarlan Miners Speak
