The Giver of Stars

5

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 clamoured 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 favourite 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 herself, 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 towards 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 grey 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 towards 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.’

‘Coloured 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 favourite 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 around 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.

‘Hello?’

A woman’s face appeared at the screen door. She glanced out, as if checking something, then turned away, speaking to someone inside. ‘That you, Miss Margery?’

‘Hey, Miss Sophia. How you doing?’

The screen door opened and the woman stood back to let Margery in, her hands on her hips, thick dark coils of hair pinned to her scalp. She lifted her head as if surveying her carefully. ‘Well, now. I haven’t seen you in – what – eight years?’

‘Something like that. You haven’t changed none, though.’

‘Get in here.’

Her face, so thin and stern in repose, broke into a lovely smile, and Margery repaid it in full. For several years Margery had accompanied her father on his moonshine runs to Hoffman, one of his more lucrative routes. Frank O’Hare figured that nobody would look twice at a girl with her daddy making deliveries into the settlement and he figured right. But while he made his way around the residential section, trading jars and paying off security guards, she would make her way quietly to the coloured block, where Miss Sophia would lend her books from her family’s small collection.

Margery had not been allowed to go to school – Frank had seen to that. He didn’t believe in book learning, no matter how hard her mother had pleaded. But Miss Sophia and her mother, Miss Ada, had fostered in her a love of reading that, many evenings, had taken her a million miles from the darkness and violence of her home. And it wasn’t just the books: Miss Sophia and Miss Ada always looked immaculate, their nails perfectly filed, their hair rolled and braided with surgical precision. Miss Sophia was only a year older than Margery, but her family represented to her a kind of order, a suggestion that life could be conducted quite differently from the noise, chaos and fear of her own.

‘You know, I used to think you were going to eat those books, you were so hungry for them. Never knew a girl read so many so fast.’

They smiled at each other. And then Margery spied William. He was seated in a chair by the window and the left leg of his pants was pinned neatly under the stump where it ended. She tried not to let the shock of it show as even a flicker on her face.

‘Good afternoon, Miss Margery.’

‘I’m real sorry to hear about your accident, William. Are you in much pain?’

‘It’s tolerable,’ he said. ‘Just don’t like not being able to work, that’s all.’

‘He’s about as ornery as all get out,’ said Sophia, and rolled her eyes. ‘He hates being in the house more than he hates losing that leg. You sit down and I’ll fetch you a drink.’

‘She tells me I make the place look untidy.’ William shrugged.

The Kenworth cabin was the neatest, Margery suspected, for twenty miles. There was not a speck of dust or an item out of place, testament to Sophia’s fearsome organizational skills. Margery sat and drank a glass of sarsaparilla, and listened as William told her how the mine had laid him off after his accident. ‘Union tried to stand up for me but since the shootings, well, nobody wants to stick their neck out too far for a black fellow. You know what I’m saying?’

‘They shot two more union men last month.’

‘I heard.’ William shook his head.

‘The Stiller brothers shot the tyres out of three trucks headed out from the tipple. Next time they went into the company store at Friars to organize some of the men, a bunch of thugs trapped them in there and a whole bunch had to come over from Hoffman’s to get them out. He’s sending a warning.’

‘Who?’

‘Van Cleve. You know he’s behind half of this.’

‘Everybody knows,’ said Sophia. ‘Everybody knows what goes on in that place but nobody wants to do nothing.’

The three of them sat in silence for so long that Margery almost forgot why she had come. Finally she put her glass down. ‘This isn’t just a social call,’ she said.

‘You don’t say,’ said Sophia.

‘I don’t know if you heard, but I’ve been setting up a library over at Baileyville. We got four of us librarians – just local girls – and a whole lot of donated books and journals, some on their last legs. Well, we need someone to organize us, and fix up the books, because it turns out you can’t do fifteen hours a day in the saddle and keep the rest of it straight, too.’

Sophia and William looked at each other.

‘I’m not sure what this has to do with us,’ Sophia said.

‘Well, I was wondering if you’d come and organize it for us. We have a budget for five librarians, and there’s a decent wage. Paid for by the WPA, and the money’s good for at least a year.’

Sophia leaned back in her seat.

Margery persisted: ‘I know you loved working at the library at Louisville. And you could be back here in an hour each day. We’d be glad to have you.’

‘It’s a coloured library.’ Sophia’s voice hardened. She folded her hands in her lap. ‘The library at Louisville. It’s for coloured folk. You must be aware of that, Miss Margery. I can’t come work for a white person’s library. Unless you’re actually asking me to ride horses with you and I can sure as anything tell you I’m not going to be doing that.’

‘It’s a travelling library. People don’t come in and out borrowing stuff. We go to them.’

‘So?’

‘So nobody even needs to know you’re there. Look, Miss Sophia, we’re desperate for your help. I need someone I can trust to mend the books, and get us straight, and you are, by anyone’s standards, the finest librarian for three counties.’

‘I’m going to say it again. It’s a white person’s library.’

‘Things are changing.’

‘You tell the men in hoods that when they come knocking at our door.’

‘So what are you doing here?’

‘I’m looking after my brother.’

‘I know that. I’m asking you what you’re doing for money.’

The two siblings exchanged a look.

‘That’s a mighty personal question. Even for you.’

William sighed. ‘We ain’t doing too good. We’re living off what we got saved and what our mama left. But it ain’t much.’

‘William!’ Sophia scolded him.

‘Well, it’s the truth. We know Miss Margery. She knows us.’

‘So you want me to go get my head busted working in a white folks’ library?’

‘I won’t let that happen,’ said Margery, calmly.

It was the first time Sophia did not answer. There were few advantages to being the offspring of Frank O’Hare, but people who had known him understood that if Margery promised something would happen, then in all likelihood, it would. If you had survived a childhood with Frank O’Hare, not much else was going to stand in your way.

‘Oh, and it’s twenty-eight dollars a month,’ said Margery. ‘Same wage as the rest of us.’

Sophia looked at her brother, then down at her lap. Finally she lifted her head.

‘We’ll have to think about it.’

‘Okay.’

Sophia pursed her lips. ‘You still as messy as you was?’

‘Probably a little worse.’

Sophia stood and straightened her skirt. ‘Like I said. We’ll think about it.’

William saw her out. He insisted, raising himself laboriously from his chair while Sophia handed him his crutch. He winced with the effort of shuffling to the door, and Margery tried not to let on that she saw it. They stood at the door and looked out at the relative peace of the creek.

‘You know they’re fixing to take a chunk out of the north side of the ridge?’

‘What?’

‘Big Cole told me. They’re going to blow six holes straight through it. They reckon there’s rich seams in there.’

‘But that part of the mountain is occupied. There’s fourteen, fifteen families just down by the north side alone.’

‘We know that and they know that. But you think that’s gonna stop them once they sniff paper money?’

‘But – what’ll happen to the families?’

‘Same thing that happens every time.’ He rubbed his forehead. ‘Kentucky, huh? Most beautiful place on earth, and the most brutal. Sometimes I think God wanted to show us all His ways at once.’

William leaned against the doorframe, adjusting his wooden crutch under his armpit while Margery digested this.

‘It’s good to see you, Miss Margery. You take care now.’

‘You too, William. And tell your sister to come work at our library.’

He raised an eyebrow. ‘Huh! She’s like you. No man going to tell her what to do.’

She could hear him chuckling as he closed the screen door behind him.