EIGHT
Before today, Jody had been a boy, dressed in overalls and a blue shirt—quieter than most, even suspected of being a little cowardly. And now he was different. Out of a thousand centuries they drew the ancient admiration . . . that a man on a horse is spiritually as well as physically bigger than a man on foot. They knew that Jody had been miraculously lifted out of equality with them, and had been placed over them.
• JOHN STEINBECK, The Red Pony
Given the speed at which news traveled through Baileyville, its snippets of gossip starting as a trickle, then pushing through its inhabitants in an unstoppable torrent, the stories of Sophia Kenworth’s employment at the Packhorse Library and its trashing by three local men were swiftly deemed serious enough to warrant a town meeting.
Alice stood shoulder to shoulder with Margery, Beth and Izzy, in a corner at the back, while Mrs. Brady addressed the assembled gathering. Bennett sat two rows back beside his father. “You going to sit down, girl?” Mr. Van Cleve had said, looking her up and down as he entered.
“I’m fine right here, thank you,” she had answered, and watched as his expression turned disapprovingly toward his son.
“We have always prided ourselves on being a pleasant, orderly town,” Mrs. Brady was saying. “We do not want to become the kind of place where thuggish behavior becomes the norm. I have spoken to the parents of the young men concerned and made it clear that this will not be tolerated. A library is a sacred place—a sacred place of learning. It should not be considered fair game just because it is staffed by women.”
“I’d like to add to that, Mrs. Brady.” Fred stepped forward. Alice recalled the way he had looked at her on the night of Tex Lafayette’s show, the strange intimacy of his bathroom, and felt her skin prickle with color, as if she had done something to be ashamed of. She had told Annie the green dress belonged to Beth. Annie’s left eyebrow had lifted halfway to the heavens.
“That library is in my old shed,” said Fred. “That means, in case anyone here is in any doubt, that it is on my property. I cannot be responsible for what happens to trespassers.” He looked slowly around the hall. “Anyone who thinks they have business heading into that building without my permission, or that of any of these ladies, will have me to answer to.”
He caught Alice’s eye as he stood down, and she felt her cheeks color again.
“I understand you have strong feelings about your property, Fred.” Henry Porteous stood. “But there are larger issues to discuss here. I, and a good number of our neighbors, am concerned about the impact this library is having on our little town. There are reports of wives no longer keeping house because they are too busy reading fancy magazines or cheap romances. There are children picking up disruptive ideas from comic books. We’re struggling to control what influences are coming into our homes.”
“They’re just books, Henry Porteous! How do you think the great scholars of old learned?” Mrs. Brady’s arms folded across her chest, forming a solid, unbridgeable shelf.
“I’d put a dollar to a dime the great scholars were not reading The Amorous Sheik of Araby, or whatever it was my daughter was wasting her time with the other day. Do we really want their minds polluted with this stuff? I don’t want my daughter thinking she can run off with some Egyptian.”
“Your daughter has about as much chance of having her head turned by a Sheik of Araby as I do of becoming Cleopatra.”
“But you can’t be sure.”
“You want me to go through every book in this library to check for things that you might find fanciful, Henry Porteous? There are more challenging stories in the Bible than there are in the Pictorial Review and you know it.”
“Well, now you sound as sacrilegious as they do.”
Mrs. Beidecker stood. “May I speak? I would like to thank the book ladies. Our pupils have very much enjoyed the new books and learning materials, and the textbooks have proven very useful in helping them progress. I go through all the comic books before we hand them out, just to check what is inside, and I have found absolutely nothing to concern even the most sensitive of minds.”
“But you’re foreign!” Mr. Porteous interjected.
“Mrs. Beidecker came to our school with the highest of credentials,” Mrs. Brady exclaimed. “And you know it, Henry Porteous. Why, doesn’t your own niece attend her classes?”
“Well, maybe she shouldn’t.”
“Settle down! Settle down!” Pastor McIntosh climbed to his feet. “Now I understand feelings are running high. And yes, Mrs. Brady, there are some of us who do have reservations about the impact of this library on formative minds but—”
“But what?”
“There is clearly another issue here . . . the employment of a colored.”
“What issue would that be, Pastor?”
“You may favor the progressive ways, Mrs. Brady, but many in this town do not believe that colored folks should be in our libraries.”
“That’s right,” said Mr. Van Cleve. He stood, and surveyed the sea of white faces. “The 1933 Public Accommodations Law authorizes—and I quote here—‘the establishment of segregated libraries for different races.’ The colored girl should not be in our library. You believe you’re above the law now, Margery O’Hare?”
Alice’s heart had lodged somewhere in her throat, but Margery, stepping forward, appeared supremely untroubled. “Nope.”
“Nope?”
“No. Because Miss Sophia isn’t using the library. She’s just working there.” She smiled at him sweetly. “We’ve told her very firmly she is under no circumstances to open any of our books and read them.”
There was a low ripple of laughter.
Mr. Van Cleve’s face darkened. “You can’t employ a colored in a white library. It’s against the law, and the laws of nature.”
“You don’t believe in employing them, huh?”
“It’s not about me. It’s about the law.”
“I’m most surprised to hear you complaining, Mr. Van Cleve,” she said.
“What do you mean by that?”
“Well, given the number of colored folk you got over there at your mine . . .”
There was an intake of breath.
“I do not.”
“I know most of them by person, as do half the good people here. You listing them as mulatto on your books doesn’t change the facts.”
“Oh, boy,” said Fred, under his breath. “She went there.”
Margery leaned back against the table. “Times are changing and colored folk are being employed in all sorts of ways. Now, Miss Sophia is fully trained and is keeping published material in commission that wouldn’t otherwise be able to stay on the shelves. Those Baileyville Bonus magazines? You all enjoy them, right? With the recipes and the stories and all?”
There was a low murmur of agreement.
“Well, those are all Miss Sophia’s work. She takes books and magazines that have been spoiled and she stitches what she can save back together to create new books for you all.” Margery leaned forward to flick something from her jacket. “Now, I can’t stitch like that and neither can my girls, and as you know, volunteers have been hard to come by. Miss Sophia isn’t riding out, visiting families or even choosing the books. She’s just keeping house for us, so to speak. So until it’s one rule for everyone, Mr. Van Cleve, you and your mines and me and my library, I will keep on employing her. I trust that’s acceptable to y’all.”
With a nod, Margery walked out through the center of the room, her gait unhurried and her head held high.
The screen door slammed behind them with a resounding crash. Alice had said nothing the whole journey back from the meeting hall, walking a way behind the two men, from where she could hear the kind of muttered expletives that suggested an imminent and volcanic explosion. She didn’t have long to wait.
“Who the Sam Hill does that woman think she is? Trying to embarrass me in front of the whole town?”
“I don’t think anyone felt you were—” Bennett began, but his father threw his hat on the table, cutting him off.
“She’s been nothing but trouble her whole life! And that criminal daddy of hers before her. And now standing there trying to make me look a fool in front of my own people?”
Alice hovered in the doorway, wondering if she could sidle upstairs without anybody noticing. In her experience Mr. Van Cleve’s tantrums rarely burned out quickly—he would fuel them with bourbon and continue shouting and declaiming until he passed out late in the evening.
“Nobody cares what that woman says, Pop,” Bennett began again.
“Those coloreds are listed as mulatto at my mine because they’re light-skinned. Light-skinned, I tell you!”
Alice pondered Sophia’s dark skin, and wondered, if she was sister to a miner, how siblings could be completely different colors. But she said nothing. “I think I’ll head upstairs,” she said quietly.
“You can’t stay there, Alice.”
Oh, God, she thought. Don’t make me sit on the porch with you.
“Then I’ll come—”
“At that library. You ain’t working there no more. Not with that girl.”
“What?”
She felt his words close around her like a stranglehold.
“You’ll hand in your notice. I’m not having my family aligned with Margery O’Hare’s. I don’t care what Patricia Brady thinks—she’s lost her mind along with the rest of them.” Van Cleve walked to the drinks cabinet and poured himself a large glass of bourbon. “And how the heck did that girl see who was on the mine’s books, anyway? I wouldn’t put it past her to be sneaking in. I’m going to put a ban on her coming anywhere near Hoffman.”
There was a silence. And then Alice heard her voice.
“No.”
Van Cleve looked up. “What?”
“No. I’m not leaving the library. I’m not married to you, and you don’t tell me what I do.”
“You’ll do what I say! You live under my roof, young lady!”
She didn’t blink.
Mr. Van Cleve glared at her, then turned to Bennett, and waved a hand. “Bennett? Sort your woman out.”
“I’m not leaving the library.”
Mr. Van Cleve turned puce. “Do you need a slap, girl?”
The air in the room seemed to disappear. She looked at her husband. Don’t you think of laying a hand on me, she told him silently. Mr. Van Cleve’s face was taut, his breath shallow in his chest. Don’t you even think about it. Her mind raced, wondering suddenly what she would do if he actually lifted his hand to her. Should she hit back? Was there something she could use to protect herself? What would Margery do? She took in the knife on the breadboard, the poker by the range.
But Bennett looked down at his feet and swallowed. “She should stay at the library, Pa.”
“What?”
“She likes it there. She’s . . . doing a good job. Helping people and all.”
Van Cleve stared at his son. His eyes bulged out of his beet-red face, as if someone had squeezed him from the neck. “Have you lost your damned mind as well?” He stared at them both, his cheeks blown out and his knuckles white, as if braced for an explosion that wouldn’t come. Finally he threw the last of the bourbon down his throat, slammed down his glass and set off outside, the screen door bouncing on its hinges in his wake.
Bennett and Alice stood in the silent kitchen, listening to Mr. Van Cleve’s Ford Sedan starting up and roaring into the distance.
“Thank you,” she said.
He let out a long breath, and turned away. She wondered then whether something might shift. Whether the act of standing up to his father might alter whatever had gone so wrong between them. She thought of Kathleen Bligh and her husband, the way that, even as Alice read to him, Kathleen would stroke his head as she passed, or place her hand on his. The way, sick and frail as he was, Garrett would reach out for her, his hollowed face always finding even the faintest smile for his wife.
She took a step toward Bennett, wondering if she might take his hand. But, as if reading her mind, he thrust both into his pockets.
“Well, I appreciate it,” she said quietly, stepping back again. And then, when he didn’t speak, she fixed him a drink and went upstairs.
Garrett Bligh died two days later, after weeks of hovering in a strange, rasping hinterland while those who loved him tried to work out whether his lungs or his heart would give out first. The word went round the mountain, the bell tolled thirty-four times, so that everyone nearby could tell who had departed. After they had finished their day’s work the neighboring men gathered at the Bligh household, carrying good clothes in case Kathleen had none, ready to lay out, wash and dress the body, as was the local custom. Others began to build the coffin that would be lined with cotton and silk.
Word reached the Packhorse Library a day later. Margery and Alice, by tacit agreement, shared out their routes between Beth and Izzy as best they could, then set out for the house together. There was a sharp wind that, instead of being blocked by the mountains, simply used them as a funnel, and Alice rode the whole way with her chin pressed into her collar, wondering what she could say when she reached the little house, and wishing she had an appropriate greetings card, or perhaps a posy to offer.
In England a house in mourning was a place of silence, of vaguely whispered conversation, shaded by a cloak of sadness, or awkwardness, depending on how well the deceased was known or loved. Alice, who often managed to say the wrong thing, found such hushed occasions oppressive, a trap that she would no doubt fall into.
When they reached the top of Hellmouth Ridge, though, there was little suggestion of silence: they passed cars and buggies dotted lower down the track, abandoned on the verge as the passing became impossible, and when they reached the house, strange horses’ heads poked out of the barn, whickering at each other, and muffled singing came from inside. Alice looked over to a small bank of pine trees, where three men were digging in heavy coats, their picks sending clanging sounds into the air as they hit rock, their faces puce, and their breath pale gray clouds. “Is she going to bury him here?” she said to Margery.
“Yup. His whole family’s up there.” Alice could just make out a succession of stone slabs, some large, some heartbreakingly small, telling of a Bligh family history on the mountain stretching back generations.
Inside, the little cabin was full to bursting. Garrett Bligh’s bed had been shoved to one side and covered with a quilt for people to sit on. Barely an inch of space remained that wasn’t covered with small children, trays of food, or singing matriarchs, who nodded at Alice and Margery as they entered, without breaking off their song. The windows, which, Alice remembered, had contained no glass, were shuttered and carbide lamps and candles lit the gloom so that it was hard to tell inside if it was day or night. One of the Bligh children sat on the lap of a woman with a prominent chin and kind eyes, and the others nestled into Kathleen, as she closed her eyes and sang too, the only one of the group to be somewhere far from there. A trestle table had been set up on which lay a pine coffin, and Alice could just make out within it the body of Garrett Bligh, his face relaxed in death, so much so that, for a moment, she wondered whether it was him at all. His hollowed cheekbones had somehow softened, his brow now smooth under soft, dark hair. Only his face was visible, the rest of him covered with an intricate patchwork quilt and strewn with flowers and herbs that scented the air. She had never seen a dead body, but somehow here, surrounded by the songs and warmth of the people around him, it was hard to feel shock or discomfort at its proximity.
“I’m so sorry for your loss,” Alice said. It was the only phrase she had been coached to say, and here it seemed sterile and useless. Kathleen opened her eyes and, taking a moment to register, smiled vaguely at Alice. Her eyes were rimmed pink and shadowed with exhaustion.
“He was a fine man, and a fine father,” said Margery, sweeping in and holding her tightly. Alice wasn’t sure she’d ever seen Margery hug someone before.
“He’d had enough,” Kathleen murmured, and the child in her arms looked at her blankly, her thumb thrust deep into her mouth. “I couldn’t wish him to stay any longer. He’s with the Lord now.”
The slack of her jaw and her sad eyes failed to mirror the conviction of her words.
“Did you know Garrett?” An older woman with two crocheted shawls around her shoulders tapped the four inches of bed-space beside her, so that Alice felt obliged to squeeze her way in too.
“Oh, a little. I—I’m just the librarian.”
The woman peered at her, frowning.
“I only knew him from my visits.” It came out apologetically, as if she knew she shouldn’t really be there.
“You’re the lady used to read to him?”
“Yes.”
“Oh, child! That was such a comfort to my son.” The woman reached out and pulled Alice to her. Alice stiffened, then gave in to her. “Kathleen told me many times how much Garrett looked forward to your visits. How they would take him quite out of himself.”
“Your son? Oh, my goodness. I’m so sorry.” She meant it. “He really did seem the nicest of men. And he and Kathleen were so very fond of each other.”
“I’m much obliged to you, Miss . . .”
“Mrs. Van Cleve.”
“My Garrett was a fine young man. Oh, you didn’t see him before. He had the broadest shoulders this side of the Cumberland Gap, didn’t he, Kathleen? When Kathleen married him there were a hundred crying girls between here and Berea.”
The young widow smiled at the memory.
“I used to tell him I had no idea how he could even make his way into that mine with a build like his. Course, now I wish he hadn’t. Still—” the older woman swallowed and lifted her chin, “—not for us to question God’s plan. He’s with his own father and he’s with God the Father. We just have to get used to being down here without him, don’t we, sweetheart?” She reached out and squeezed her daughter-in-law’s hand.
“Amen,” someone called.
Alice had assumed that they would pay their respects and leave, but as morning became afternoon and afternoon swiftly fell to dusk, the little cabin grew fuller, with miners arriving after their shift, their wives bringing pies and souse and fruit jellies, and as time slid and stalled in the dim light, more people piled in, and nobody left. Chicken appeared in front of Alice, then soft biscuits and gravy, fried potatoes and more chicken. Somebody shared some bourbon, and there were outbreaks of laughter, tears and singing, and the air in the tiny cabin grew warm, thick with the scents of roasted meats and sweet liquor. Someone produced a fiddle and played Scottish tunes that made Alice feel vaguely homesick. Margery occasionally shot her a look, as if checking she was okay, but Alice, surrounded by people who would clap her on the back and thank her for her service, as if she were a military man, not just an Englishwoman delivering books, was oddly glad just to sit and absorb it all.
So Alice Van Cleve gave herself to the strange rhythms of the evening. She sat a few feet from a dead man, ate the food, sipped a little of the drink, sang along to hymns she barely knew, clasped the hands of strangers, who no longer felt like strangers. And when night fell and Margery whispered in her ear that they really should get going now, because a hard frost would be setting in, Alice was surprised to find that she felt as if she was leaving home, not heading back to it, and this thought was so disconcerting that it pushed away all else for the whole of the slow, cold, lantern-lit ride back down the mountain.