The Giver of Stars

18

An enterprising grocer in Oklahoma recently sold two dozen buggy whips in two days. Three customers however said theirs would be used for fishing poles, while one was sold to a mother who wanted to ‘whale’ her son.

The Furrow, September–October 1937

Margery was washing her hair on Sunday morning, her head low over a bucket of warm water, sluicing and wringing it into a thick glossy rope, when Alice walked in. Alice muttered an apology, half asleep and a little groggy – she hadn’t realized anyone was in there – and began to back out of the little kitchen when she caught sight of Margery’s belly, briefly visible through her thin cotton nightdress, and did a double-take. Margery looked sideways at her, wrapping a cotton sheet around her head, and caught it. She straightened up, placing her palm over her belly button.

‘Yes, it is, yes, I am, just over six months, and I know. Not exactly part of the plan.’

Alice’s hand flew to her mouth. She recalled suddenly the sight of Margery and Sven at the Nice ’N’ Quick the night before, how she had sat on his lap all evening, his hands wrapped protectively around her middle. ‘But –’

‘Guess I didn’t pay as much attention to that little blue book as I should have done.’

‘But – but what are you going to do?’ Alice couldn’t take her eyes off the roundness of it. It seemed so unlikely. Margery’s breasts, she saw now, were almost obscenely full, a hint of blue veins criss-crossing her chest where her robe had slipped to reveal a sliver of pale skin.

‘Do? Not much I can do.’

‘But you’re not married!’

‘Married! That’s what you’re fretting about?’ Margery let out a hoot. ‘Alice, you think I give a fig what people around here think of me? Why, Sven and I are good as married. We’ll bring the child up and we’ll be sweeter to her and to each other than most married people around here. I’ll educate her and teach her right from wrong, and as long as she has her ma and pa to love her, I can’t see as what I’m wearing on my left hand is anyone else’s business.’

Alice couldn’t get her head around the idea that someone could be six months pregnant and not care that her baby might be a bastard, that it might even go to Hell. And yet faced with Margery’s cheerful certainty, her – yes, looking closely at her face, one might even call it radiance – it was hard to maintain that this really was a disaster.

She let out a long breath. ‘Does … anyone … know?’

‘Aside from Sven?’ Margery rubbed at her hair vigorously, then paused to check the dampness of her hair with her fingers. ‘Well, we haven’t exactly hollered about it. But I can’t keep it quiet for much longer. Poor old Charley will be buckling at the knees if I get much bigger.’

A baby. Alice was filled with a complex mix of emotions – shock, admiration that, yet again, Margery had decided to play life by her own rules – but shot through it all, sadness: that everything had to change, that she might not again have her friend to gallop up mountainsides, to laugh with in the snug confines of the library. Margery would surely stay home now, a mother like everyone else. She wondered what would even happen to the library with Margery gone: she was the heart and backbone of it. And then a more worrying thought occurred. How could she stay here once the baby was born? There would be no room. There was barely enough for the three of them as it was.

‘I can pretty much hear you fretting from here, Alice,’ Margery called, as she walked back through to her bedroom. ‘And I’m telling you nothing needs to change. We’ll worry about the baby when it comes. No point winding yourself into a knot until then.’

‘I’m fine,’ Alice said. ‘Just pleased for you.’ And wished desperately that it was true.

Margery rode down to Monarch Creek on Saturday, nodding greetings as she passed families busy cleaning up, sweeping wet piles of silt out of their front doors, ferrying ruined furniture into piles only good enough to dry out for firewood. The floods had devastated the lower reaches of the town, home to the poorer families who were less likely to make a noise about it. Or at least have that noise listened to. In the more affluent parts of town, life had already pretty much returned to normal.

She pulled Charley to a halt outside Sophia and William’s house, her heart sinking as she surveyed the damage. You could know something to be true, but it was something else having to look it square in the eye. The little house stood – just – but positioned at the lowest part of the road, as it was, it had borne the brunt of the flood. The posts of the neat deck were cracked and broken, while the flowerpots and the rocking chair that had stood on it had been washed away, along with the two front windows.

What had been a neat little vegetable garden was now a sea of black mud, from which random pieces of broken wood emerged in place of plants, and the stench was foul and sulphurous. A thick dark tidemark rode along the upper part of the frames and weatherboarding, and Margery didn’t need to go any further to guess what it was like inside. She shivered, recalling the water’s cold grip, and placed her palm against Charley’s soft neck, feeling a sudden visceral urge to head home to warmth and safety.

She dismounted – it took a little more effort to clear the saddle now – and hooked the reins on a nearby tree. There was nothing for the mule to graze; just dark sludge for some distance up the slopes.

‘William?’ she called, her boots squelching as she made her way towards the little cabin. ‘William? It’s Margery.’

She called a couple more times, waiting until it was clear that nobody was at home, then turned back to the mule, feeling the unfamiliar stretch and weight in her belly, as if the baby had decided she was now free to make her presence felt. She stopped by the tree, and was reaching for the reins when something caught her eye. She tilted her head, studying the tidemark several feet up from the base of the trunk. The whole way down from the library the marks left by the river had been red-brown, varying in colour but essentially mud or silt. The marks here were as black as pitch. She recalled how the water had turned dark abruptly, the chemical tang that had stung her eyes and caught the back of her throat.

Van Cleve had not been seen in town for the three days since the flood.

She squatted, running her fingers across the tree bark, then sniffed them. She stayed there, completely still, thinking. Then she wiped her hands on her jacket and, with a grunt, hoisted herself back into the saddle. ‘C’mon, Charley boy,’ she said, turning him around. ‘We’re not going home just yet.’

Margery rode high up into the narrow pass to the north-east of Baileyville, a route most considered impassable, given the steepness of the terrain and the dense undergrowth. But both she and Charley, having been raised on rough ground, could see a way through as instinctively as a boss could see a dollar sign, and she dropped the buckle of the reins onto his neck and leaned forward, trusting him to pick a path through while she lifted branches clear of her head. The air grew colder the higher they travelled. Margery wedged her hat down on her head and tucked her chin into her collar, watching her breath rise in damp clouds.

The trees grew closer the higher they went, and the ground was so steep and flinty that Charley, sure-footed as he was, began to stumble and hesitate. She climbed down finally by a rocky outcrop, hooked his reins on some saplings, and hiked the rest of the way to the top on foot, puffing a little with the extra weight of her new cargo. Every now and then she would pause, her hand in the small of her back. She had felt uncommonly tired since the flood and pushed away the knowledge of what Sven would say if he knew where she’d gone.

It took the best part of an hour to climb far enough on the ridge that she could finally see the back of Hoffman, the part of its 600-acre site not visible from the mines, and shielded from wider view by the horseshoe of steep, tree-covered slopes that surrounded it. She grabbed on to a trunk to haul herself up the last few feet and then stood a moment, allowing her breath to settle.

And then she looked down and cursed.

Three vast slurry dams stood behind the ridge, accessible only via a gated tunnel through the mountaintop. Two were full of dull, inky water, still swollen by the rains. The third was empty, its muddy base stained black, and its embankment crumbled to nothing where the slurry had burst out and down the other side, leaving a brackish trail along the winding riverbeds towards the lower end of Baileyville.

Of all the days that Annie could pick to suffer with her legs, this was just about the most inconvenient. Van Cleve muttered to himself as he waited in the booth for the girl to bring his food. Across from him Bennett sat in silence, his eyes sliding towards the other customers as if he were even now trying to gauge what people were saying about them. Van Cleve would have preferred a few more days steering clear of the town, but when your maid wasn’t there to cook a meal and your daughter-in-law had still not seen sense and returned home, what was a man to do? Short of driving halfway to Lexington, the Nice ’N’ Quick was the only place one could get a hot meal.

‘Here you are, Mr Van Cleve,’ said Molly, placing a plate of fried chicken in front of him. ‘Extra greens and mashed potato, just like you said. You was lucky you ordered when you did – cook’s nearly out today, what with the deliveries not getting through and all.’

‘Well, aren’t we the lucky ones!’ he exclaimed. Van Cleve’s mood lifted at the golden, crispy-skinned sight of his dinner. He let out a sigh of satisfaction and tucked his napkin into his collar. He was about to suggest Bennett did the same, rather than fold his on his lap like some damned European, when a gobbet of black mud dropped through the air above his plate and landed with an audible slop on his portion of chicken. He stared at it, struggling to register what he was seeing. ‘What the –’

‘You missing something, Van Cleve?’

Margery O’Hare stood over his table, her colour high and her voice shaking with rage. She held her arm extended, her fist blackened with slurry. ‘That wasn’t floods took out those houses round Monarch Creek. That was your slurry dam and you knew it. You ought to be ashamed of yourself!’

The restaurant fell silent. Behind her a couple of people stood up to see what was going on.

‘You dropped mud on my dinner?’ Van Cleve stood, his chair pushing back with a squeal. ‘You come in here, after all you’ve done, and drop dirt on my food?’

Margery’s eyes glittered. ‘Not dirt. Coal slurry. Poison. Your poison. I went up on the ridge and I saw your busted dam. It was you! Not the rains. Not the Ohio. The only houses destroyed were the ones your filthy water ran right over.’

A murmur went around the restaurant. Van Cleve wrenched his napkin from his collar. He took a step towards her, his finger raised. ‘You listen here, O’Hare. You want to be very careful before you start throwing accusations around. You’ve caused enough trouble –’

But Margery squared up to him. ‘I’ve caused trouble? Says the man who shot my dog? Who knocked two teeth right out of his daughter-in-law’s head? Your flood almost drowned me, and Sophia and William! They had near on nothing to start with and now they got less! You would have drowned three little girls if my girls hadn’t got there to save them! And you swagger around here pretending like it’s nothing to do with you? You want arresting!’

Sven appeared behind her and placed a hand on her shoulder but she was in full flow and shook him off. ‘Men die because you prize dollars over safety! You trick people into signing away their own houses before they understand what they’ve done! You destroy lives! Your mine is a menace! You are a menace!’

‘That’s enough.’ Sven now had his forearm around Margery’s collarbone and was pulling her backwards, even as she pointed at Van Cleve, still yelling. ‘C’mon. Time to go outside.’

‘Yes! Thank you, Gustavsson! Take her outside!’

‘You act like you’re the goddamn Almighty! Like the law doesn’t count for you! But I’m watching you, Van Cleve. For as long as I have breath in my lungs, I’ll tell the truth about you and –’

‘Enough.’

The air in the room seemed to have disappeared into a vacuum as Sven steered her, still struggling, out of the restaurant door. Through its glass panel she could be seen hollering at him in the road, her arms flailing as she tried to free herself.

Van Cleve glanced around and sat back down. The other diners were still staring.

‘The O’Hares, huh!’ he said, too loudly, tucking his napkin back in. ‘Never know what that family’s going to get up to next.’

Bennett’s eyes flickered from his plate and back down again.

‘Gustavsson’s sound. He knows. Oh, yes. And that girl out there is the craziest of the lot of them, right? … Right?’ Van Cleve’s smile wavered a little until people started to drift back to their food. He let out a breath and motioned to the waitress. ‘Molly? Sweetheart? Could you – uh – get me a fresh plate of chicken, please? Thank you kindly.’

Molly pulled a face. ‘I’m so sorry, Mr Van Cleve. The last of it just went out.’ She eyed his plate, wincing slightly. ‘I have some soup and a couple of biscuits I could warm up for you?’

‘Here. Have mine.’ Bennett pushed his untouched meal towards his father.

Van Cleve ripped his napkin out of his collar. ‘Lost my appetite. I’ll get Gustavsson a drink and we’ll head home.’

He glanced through the door to where the younger man still stood outside with the O’Hare girl. ‘He’ll be in once he’s seen her off.’ He was aware of a vague sense of disappointment that it hadn’t been his own son who had stood to push the girl out.

But the strangest thing: as O’Hare continued to yell and gesticulate outside, Gustavsson, rather than dusting off his hands and returning to the restaurant, took a step forward, his forehead lowered towards Margery O’Hare’s.

As Van Cleve watched, frowning, Margery’s hands briefly covered her face and both of them stood very still. And then, clear as anything in the moonlight, Sven Gustavsson placed a protective hand on the swell of O’Hare’s belly, waiting until she looked up at him, and covered it gently with her own, before he kissed her.

‘Exactly how much trouble do you want to get yourself into?’

Margery pushed at Sven blindly, trying to free herself, but he held tight to her upper arms.

‘You didn’t see it, Sven! Thousands of gallons of his poison! And him acting like it’s just the river, and William and Sophia’s house ruined, and all the land and water round Monarch Creek destroyed for I don’t know how long.’

‘I don’t doubt it, Marge, but going at him in front of a restaurant full of people isn’t going to help anything.’

‘He should be shamed! He thinks he can get away with anything! And don’t you dare pull me out of there like I’m a – a badly trained dog!’ She pushed hard with both hands, finally breaking his grip, and he lifted his palms.

‘I just … I just didn’t want him to come at you. You saw what he did to Alice.’

‘I’m not scared of him!’

‘Well, maybe you should be. You got to be clever with a man like Van Cleve. He’s cunning. You know that. C’mon, Margery. Don’t let your temper trip you up. We’ll go about this the right way. I don’t know. Talk to the foreman. The unions. Write to the governor. There are ways.’

Margery seemed to subside a little.

‘C’mon now.’ He reached out a hand. ‘You don’t have to fight every damn battle by yourself.’

Something gave in her then. She kicked at the dirt, waiting for her breathing to slow. When she looked up, her eyes glittered with tears. ‘I hate him, Sven. I do. He destroys everything that’s beautiful.’

Sven pulled her to him. ‘Not everything.’ He placed his hand on her belly and left it there until he felt her soften in his arms. ‘C’mon,’ he said, and kissed her. ‘Let’s go home.’

Small towns being what they were, and Margery being who she was, it wasn’t too long before word got out that she was carrying, and for a few days at least, every place where townspeople were prone to meeting – the feed merchant, the churches, the general store – was thick with the news of it. There were those for whom this just confirmed everything they thought of Frank O’Hare’s daughter. Another no-good O’Hare child, no doubt destined for disgrace or disaster. There would always be those for whom any baby out of wedlock was a matter for vocal and emphatic disapproval. But there were also those whose minds were still thick with the flood and memories of what she’d said about Van Cleve’s part in it. Luckily for her, they seemed to comprise most of the townspeople, who believed that when so much bad had taken place, a new baby, whatever the circumstances, was nothing to get too aerated about.

Apart from Sophia, that was.

‘You gonna marry that man now?’ she said, when she heard.

‘Nope.’

‘Because you selfish?’

Margery had been writing a letter to the governor. She put down her pen and shot Sophia a look.

‘Don’t you side-eye me, Margery O’Hare. I know what you think about being joined under the Lord. Believe me, we all know your views. But this ain’t just about you any more, is it? You want that baby to get called names in the schoolyard? You want her to grow up second class? You want her to miss out because people won’t have one of them in the house?’

Margery opened the door so that Fred could drop another load of books back into the library. ‘Can we at least wait for her to get here before you start scolding me?’

Sophia raised her eyebrows. ‘I’m just saying. Life’s hard enough growing up in this town without you giving the poor child another yoke around its neck. You know darn well how people made judgements about you based on what your parents did, decisions you had no hand in.’

‘All right, Sophia.’

‘Well, they did. And it’s only because you’re so pig-headed that you was able to make the life you wanted. What if she ain’t like you?’

‘She’ll be like me.’

‘Shows how much you know about children.’ Sophia snorted. ‘I’m going to say it once. This ain’t just about what you want any more.’ She slammed her ledger down on her desk. ‘And you need to think about that.’

Sven was no better. He sat on the rickety kitchen chair, polishing his boots while she sat on one side of the settle, and although his words were fewer, and his voice calmer, his point was just the same.

‘I’m not going to ask you again, Margery. But this changes things. I want to be known as this child’s father. I want to do it all properly. I don’t want our baby to be brought up a bastard.’

He regarded her over the wooden table, and she felt suddenly mulish and defensive, as she had when she was ten years old, so that she picked distractedly at a wool blanket and refused to look at him. ‘You think we don’t have anything more important to talk about just now?’

‘That’s all I’m going to say.’

She pushed her hair away from her face and chewed at her lower lip. He crossed his arms, brow lowered, ready for her to yell that he was driving her crazy, that he had promised not to keep going on, and she had had enough and he could git on back to his own house.

But she surprised him. ‘Let me think about it,’ she said.

They sat in silence for a few minutes. Margery drummed her fingers on the table and stretched out a leg, turning her ankle this way and that.

‘What?’ he said.

She picked at the corner of the blanket again, then straightened it, and then looked sideways at him.

‘What?’ he said, again.

‘You ever going to come and sit by me then, Sven Gustavsson? Or have I lost all appeal to you, now you’ve got me blown up like a milch-cow?’

Alice let herself in late, thoughts of Fred crowding out everything she had seen that day, the apologies of families whose library books had drowned along with the rest of their belongings, the black slurry that marked the base of trees, the scattered belongings, odd shoes, letters, pieces of furniture, broken or ruined, that lined the paths of the now sedate creeks.

All I can give you, Alice, is words.

As she had every morning and every night since, she felt Fred’s fingers tracing her cheek, saw his narrowed, serious eyes, wondered how it would feel to have those strong hands tracing her body in that same gentle, purposeful way. Her imagination filled those gaps in her knowledge. Her memories of his voice, the intensity of his expression left her faintly breathless. She thought about him so much she suspected the others could see right through her, maybe catch snatches of the constant fevered hum in her head as it trickled out through her ears. It was almost a relief to reach Margery’s cabin, her collar turned up against the April wind, and know that she would be forced to think about something else for a couple of hours at least – book bindings or slurry or string beans.

Alice walked in, closing the screen door quietly behind her (she’d had a horror of slamming doors since she’d left the Van Cleve house), and removed her coat, hanging it on the hook. The cabin was silent, which usually meant that Margery was out back, attending to Charley or the hens. She walked over to the bread bin and peered inside, pondering how empty the place still felt without Bluey’s boisterous presence.

She was about to call out back when she heard a sound that had been absent these last weeks: muffled cries, soft moans of pleasure coming from behind Margery’s closed door. She stopped dead in the middle of the floor and, as if in response, the voices suddenly rose and fell in unison, threaded through with terms of endearment and suffused with emotion, springs creaking and the head of the bed banging emphatically against the wooden wall and threatening to build to a crescendo.

‘Oh, ruddy marvellous,’ Alice muttered softly to herself. And she put her coat back on, stuffed a piece of bread between her teeth and went to sit outside on the front porch on the squeaky rocker, eating with one hand, and plugging her good ear with the other.

It was not unusual for the snows to last a whole month longer on the mountaintops. It was as if, determined to ignore whatever was going on down in the town, they refused to relinquish their icy hold until the last possible moment, right up until waxy buds were already poking through the thinning crystalline carpet, and on the upper trails the trees were no longer brown and skeletal but shimmered with a faint hint of green.

So, it was some way into April before the body of Clem McCullough was revealed, his frostbitten nose visible first, as the snows melted high on the uppermost ridge, and then the rest of his face, gnawed in places by some hungry creature and his eyes long missing, found by a hunter from Berea, who had been sent to the hillsides above Red Lick looking for deer, and would have nightmares for months afterwards about rotting faces with fathomless holes for eyes.

To find the body of a well-known drunk was not that much of a surprise in a small town, especially in moonshine country, and might normally have guaranteed just a few days’ chatter and shaking of heads, as news got around.

But this was different.

Clem McCullough’s head, the sheriff announced, not long after he and his men came back down the mountainside, had been stove in on the back of a pointed boulder. And resting on the upper part of his chest, revealed as the last of the snow melted away, was a heavily bloodstained, fabric-bound edition of Little Women, marked Baileyville Packhorse Library WPA.