The Giver of Stars

24

‘I loved something I made up, something that’s just as dead as Melly is. I made a pretty suit of clothes and fell in love with it. And when Ashley came riding along, so handsome, so different, I put that suit on him and made him wear it whether it fitted him or not. And I wouldn’t see what he really was. I kept on loving the pretty clothes – and not him at all.’

Margaret Mitchell, Gone with the Wind

By common agreement, on the opening day of the trial the WPA Packhorse Library of Baileyville, Kentucky, remained closed. As did the post office, the Pentecostal, Episcopalian, First Presbyterian and Baptist churches, and the general store, which opened only for an hour at 7 a.m. and then again for the lunch hour to cater to the influx of strangers who had arrived in Baileyville. Unfamiliar cars parked at haphazard angles all along the roadside from the courthouse, mobile homes dotted the nearby fields, and men with sharp suits and trilby hats walked the streets with notebooks in the dawn light, asking for background information, photographs, anything you like, on the murdering librarian Margery O’Hare.

When they reached the library, Mrs Brady waved a broom at them, told them she would take the head off any one of them who ventured into her building without an invitation, and they could put that in their darned paper and print it. She didn’t seem to care too much what Mrs Nofcier might think of that.

State policemen stood talking in pairs on the corners of the streets, and refreshment stands had been set up around the courthouse, while a snake-charmer invited the crowds to test their nerve and come closer, and the honky-tonks offered special deals on two-for-one keg beers at the end of every court day.

Mrs Brady decided there was little point in the girls trying to make their rounds today. The roads were clogged, their minds were all over the place, and each of them wanted to be in court for Margery. And, anyway, long before seven that morning there was a queue of people trying to get into the public gallery. Alice stood at the head of it. As she waited, joined by Kathleen and the others, the queue built swiftly behind them: neighbours with lunch pails, sombre recipients of library books, people she didn’t recognize, who seemed to think of this as fun, chatting merrily, joking and nudging each other. She wanted to scream at them, This is not some nice day out! Margery’s innocent! She shouldn’t even be here!

Van Cleve arrived, pulling his car into the sheriff’s parking slot, as if to let them all know just how close to the proceedings he was. He didn’t acknowledge her, but marched straight into court, jaw jutting, confident his own place had already been reserved. She didn’t see Bennett; perhaps he was minding business at Hoffman. He had never been much of a gossip, unlike his father.

Alice waited silently, her mouth dry and her stomach tight, as if it were she, not Margery, who was on trial. She guessed the others felt the same. They barely exchanged a word, just a nod of greeting, and a brief, tight clasp of hands.

At half past eight the doors opened, and the crowd flooded in. Sophia took a seat at the back with the other coloured folk. Alice nodded at her. It felt wrong that she wasn’t sitting with them, another example of a world out of kilter.

Alice took her seat near the front of the public gallery on the wooden bench, flanked by her remaining friends, and wondered how they were meant to endure this for days.

The jury was called – all men, mostly tobacco farmers judging by their clothes, Alice thought, and none likely to be sympathetic to a sharp-talking unmarried woman with a bad name. Women, the clerk announced, would be allowed to leave several minutes before the men at lunchtime and at the end of the day in order to prepare meals, a fact which caused Beth to roll her eyes. And then Margery was led into the dock with cuffs around her wrists, as if she were a danger to those present, her appearance in court accompanied by low murmurs and exclamations from the gallery. She sat pale and silent, apparently uninterested in her surroundings, and barely met Alice’s eye. Her hair hung lank and unwashed and she looked impossibly weary, deep grey shadows under her eyes. Her arms lay in an unconscious loop, in a way that might have supported a baby, had Virginia still been there. She looked unkempt and uncaring.

She looked, Alice thought, with dismay, like a criminal.

Fred had said he would sit a row behind Alice, for appearances’ sake, and she turned to him, anguished. His mouth tightened, as if to say he understood, but what could you do?

And then Judge Arthur D. Arthurs arrived, chewing ruminatively on a wad of tobacco, and they all were standing on the instructions of the clerk. He sat, and Margery was asked to confirm that she was, indeed, Margery O’Hare, of the Old Cabin, Thompson’s Pass, and the clerk read out the charge against her. How did she plead?

Margery seemed to sway a little, and her eyes slid towards the public gallery.

‘Not guilty,’ she answered quietly, and there was a loud scoffing sound from the right-hand side of the court, followed by the loud banging of the judge’s gavel. He would not, repeat not, have an unruly court and nobody here was to so much as sniff without his permission. Did he make himself understood?

The crowd settled, albeit with an air of vaguely suppressed mutiny. Margery looked up at the judge and, after a moment, he nodded at her to sit down again, and that would be the extent of her animation until she was allowed to leave the courtroom.

The morning crept forward in legal increments, women fanning themselves and small children fidgeting in their seats, as the prosecuting counsel outlined the case against Margery O’Hare. It would be clear to all, he announced, in a somewhat nasal, showman’s voice, that before them was a woman brought up without morals, without concern for the decent, rightful way of doing things, without faith. Even her most visible enterprise – the so-called Packhorse Library – had proven to be a front for less savoury preoccupations, and the state would show evidence of these through evidence from witnesses shaken by examples of her moral laxity. These deficiencies in both character and behaviour had found their apotheosis one afternoon up on Arnott’s Ridge when the accused had come across the sworn enemy of her late father, and taken advantage of the isolated position and inebriation of Mr Clem McCullough to finish what their feuding descendants had started.

While this went on – and it did go on, for the prosecuting counsel loved the sound of his own voice – the reporters from Lexington and Louisville scribbled furiously in small lined notebooks, shielding their work from each other and looking up intently at every new piece of information. When he came to the bit about ‘moral laxity’, Beth called out ‘Bullcrap!’ earning herself a cuff from her father, who sat behind her, and a stern rebuke from the judge, who announced that one more word from her and she would be sitting outside in the dust for the rest of the trial. She listened to the remainder of the statement with her arms folded and the kind of expression that made Alice fear for the prosecution lawyer’s tyres.

‘You watch. Those reporters will write that these mountains run red with blood feuds and such nonsense,’ muttered Mrs Brady, from behind her. ‘They always do. Makes us sound like a bunch of savages. You won’t read a word about all the good this library – or Margery – has done.’

Kathleen sat silently on one side of Alice, Izzy the other. They listened carefully, their faces serious and still, and when he finished they exchanged looks that said they now understood what Margery was up against. Blood feuds aside, the Margery the court had described was so duplicitous, so monstrous, that if they had not known her they might have been afraid to sit just a few feet away from her too.

Margery seemed to know it. She looked deadened, as if the very thing that made her Margery had been squeezed out of her, leaving only an empty shell.

Alice wished for the hundredth time that Sven had not absented himself. Surely, no matter what she’d told him, Margery would have taken some comfort from having him there. Alice kept imagining what it must be like to be sitting in the dock, facing the end of everything she loved and held dear. It hit her then that Margery, who loved nothing better than solitude, to be left alone, unexamined, and who belonged outside, like a mule or a tree or a buzzard, was going to be in one of those tiny dark cells for ten, twenty years, if not the rest of her life.

And then she had to stand and push her way out of the gallery because she knew she was going to throw up from fear.

‘You okay?’ Kathleen arrived behind her as she spat into the dust.

‘Sorry,’ Alice said, straightening. ‘I don’t know what came over me.’

Kathleen passed her a handkerchief and she wiped her mouth.

‘Izzy’s holding our seats. But we’d best not be too long. People are already eyeing ’em.’

‘I just … can’t bear it, Kathleen. Seeing her like that. Seeing the town like this. It’s like they just want the slightest excuse to think badly of her. It should be the evidence on trial, but it feels like it’s the fact that she doesn’t behave like they think she should.’

‘It’s ugly, that’s for sure.’

Alice stopped for a minute. ‘What did you just say?’

Kathleen frowned.

‘I said it’s ugly. Seeing the town close against her like this.’ Kathleen looked at her. ‘What? … What did I say?’

Ugly. Alice kicked at a stone on the ground, digging her toe in until it dislodged. There is always a way out of a situation. Might be ugly. Might leave you feeling like the earth has gone and shifted under your feet. When she looked up her face had cleared. ‘Nothing. Just something Marge once said to me. Just …’ She shook her head. ‘Nothing.’

Kathleen held out her arm and they walked back in.

There were lengthy lawyers’ arguments behind the scenes and these blurred into a break at lunchtime, and when the women left the courtroom they didn’t know quite what to do with themselves so ended up walking slowly back towards the library in a clump, followed by Fred and Mrs Brady, deep in conversation.

‘You don’t have to go back in this afternoon, you know,’ said Izzy, who was still a little appalled by the idea of Alice throwing up in public. ‘If it’s too much for you.’

‘It was just nerves getting the better of me,’ said Alice. ‘I was the same when I was a little girl. Should have made myself eat some breakfast.’

They walked on in silence.

‘It’ll probably be better once our side gets to speak,’ Izzy said.

‘Yeah. Sven’s fancy lawyer will put them straight,’ said Beth.

‘Of course he will,’ said Alice.

But none of them sounded convinced.

Day Two, it turned out, was not much better. The prosecution team outlined the autopsy report on Clem McCullough. The victim, a fifty-seven-year-old man, had died from a traumatic head injury consistent with a blunt instrument to the back of the head. He also had suffered facial bruising.

‘Such as, for example, could be caused by a heavy hard-backed book?’

‘That could be the case, yes,’ said the physician who had conducted the autopsy.

‘Or a bar fight?’ suggested Mr Turner, the defence lawyer. The physician thought for a moment. ‘Well, yes, that too. But he was some way from a bar.’

The area around the body had not been carefully examined, given the remoteness of the trail. Two of the sheriff’s men had carried it down the mountain track, a journey that had taken several hours, and a late snowfall had covered the ground where it had lain, but there was photographic evidence of blood, and possibly hoof-prints.

Mr McCullough had not owned a horse or mule.

The prosecution counsel then interviewed their witnesses. There was old Nancy, who was pushed again and again to confirm that her first statement had stated clearly that she had heard Margery up on the ridge, followed by the sound of an altercation.

‘But I didn’t say it like you’ve made it sound,’ she protested, her hand reaching for her hair. She turned to look at the judge. ‘They twisted my words all this way and that. I know Margery. I know she would no more murder a man in cold blood than she would … I don’t know … bake a cake.’

This prompted laughter in the courtroom and a furious outburst from the judge, and Nancy put both hands to her face, guessing, probably correctly, that even that simile would add to the idea that Margery was somehow transgressive, that in her non-baking habits she went against the laws of nature.

The prosecution counsel got her to talk some more, about how isolated the route was (very), how often she saw anyone up there (rarely) and how many people regularly made the trip. (Only Margery, or the odd hunter.)

‘No further questions, Your Honour.’

‘Well, I would like to add one thing,’ Nancy announced, as the court clerk made to lead her out of the witness box. She turned to point at the dock. ‘That there is a good, kindly girl. She’s brought us reading books through rain and shine, both for me and my sister who ain’t left her bed since 1933, and you so-called Christian folk judging her might want to think hard about how much you do for your fellow man. Because you’re none of you so high and mighty that you’re beyond judgement. She’s a good girl, and this is a terrible wrong you’re doing her! Oh, and, Mr Judge? My sister has a message for you too.’

‘That would be Phyllis Stone, older sister of the witness. She is apparently bedridden and could not make it down the mountain,’ murmured the clerk to the judge.

Judge Arthurs leaned back. There may have been a faint roll of his eyes.

‘Go ahead, Mrs Stone.’

‘She wanted me to tell you … “Y’all can go to Hell, because who’s going to bring us our Mack Maguire books now?”’ she said loudly. Then she nodded. ‘Yup, y’all can go to Hell. That was it.’

And as the judge began to bang his gavel again, Beth and Kathleen, on each side of Alice, couldn’t help but let out a small burst of laughter.

Despite that moment of cheer, the librarians left the building that evening in muted mood, their faces drawn, as if the verdict could only be a formality. Alice and Fred walked together at the rear, their elbows bumping occasionally, both deep in thought.

‘It might improve once Mr Turner gets his say,’ said Fred, as they reached the library building.

‘Perhaps.’

He stopped as the others went inside. ‘Would you like something to eat before you head off?’

Alice glanced behind her at the people still spilling out of the upper level of the courthouse and felt suddenly mutinous. Why shouldn’t she eat where she wanted? How much of a sin could it be, given everything else that was going on? ‘That would be lovely, Fred. Thank you.’

She walked up to Fred’s house alongside him, her back straight, daring anybody to comment, and they moved around each other in the kitchen, preparing a meal, in some strange facsimile of domesticity, one that neither of them felt able to remark upon.

They didn’t talk of Margery, or Sven, or the baby, even though those three souls were lodged almost permanently in their thoughts. They didn’t talk of how Alice had divested herself of almost all the belongings she had acquired since arriving in Kentucky, and that just one small trunk now sat in Margery’s cabin, neatly labelled and awaiting her passage home. They remarked on the good taste of the food, the surprising harvest of apples that year, the erratic behaviour of one of his new horses and a book Fred had read called Of Mice and Men, which he wished he hadn’t, despite the quality of the writing, as it was too darn depressing just now. And two hours later, Alice set off for the cabin and, while she smiled at Fred as she left (because it was almost impossible for her not to smile at Fred), within minutes of her departure she found that, behind her benign exterior, she was filled with a now semi-permanent rage: at a world where she could sit alongside the man she loved for only a matter of days more, and at a small town where three lives were about to be ruined for ever because of a crime a woman had not committed.

The week slid forward in fury-inducing fits and starts. Every day the librarians took their seats at the front of the public gallery, and every day they listened to various expert witnesses expounding and dissecting the facts of the case – that the blood on the edition of Little Women matched that of Clem McCullough, that the bruising to the front of his face and forehead was consistent with a blow from the same. As the week drew on, the court heard from the so-called character witnesses: the purse-mouthed wife who announced that Margery O’Hare had pressed upon her a book she and her husband could only describe as ‘obscene’. The fact that Margery had just had a baby out of wedlock, and with no visible shame whatsoever. There were the various older men – Henry Porteous for one – who felt able to testify to the length of the O’Hares’ feud with the McCulloughs, and the capacity for meanness and vengeance in both families. The defence counsel tried to pick apart these testimonies in the interests of balance: ‘Sheriff, isn’t it true that Miss O’Hare has never been arrested once in her thirty-eight years for any crime whatsoever?’

‘It is,’ the sheriff conceded. ‘Mind you, plenty of moonshiners around here ain’t never seen the inside of a cell either.’

‘Objection!’

‘I’m just saying, Your Honour. Just because a person ain’t been arrested don’t mean they behave like an angel. You know how things work around these parts.’

The judge ordered the statement expunged from the record. But it had done what the sheriff had known it would, and stained Margery’s name in some vague, unformed way, and Alice watched the jurors frowning and making little notes on their pads and saw Van Cleve’s slow, satisfied smile along the bench. Fred had noted that the sheriff now smoked the same brand of fancy cigar as Van Cleve, imported all the way from France.

How was that for a coincidence?

By Friday evening the librarians were despondent. Lurid headline had followed lurid headline, the crowds, while having thinned a little, at least to the point where baskets of food and drink were no longer having to be raised and lowered from the second floor, were still transfixed by the Bloodthirsty Girl Librarian From The Hills, and when Fred had driven over to see Sven on Friday afternoon after the court had gone into recess for the weekend to give him a report from inside the court, Sven had put his head in his hands and not spoken for a full five minutes.

That day the women walked down to the library and sat in silence, not having anything to say, but none of them wanting to leave for home either. Finally Alice, who had begun to find the silence oppressive, announced that she was going to head to the store to get some drinks. ‘I reckon we’ve earned them.’

‘You don’t mind being seen buying alcohol?’ said Beth. ‘’Cause I can go get some ’shine from my daddy’s cousin Bert, if you’d prefer. I know it’s hard for you with –’

But Alice was already at the door. ‘To Hell with them. I’ll most likely be gone within the week,’ she said. ‘They can gossip about me all they like by then.’

She walked down the dusty street, weaving in and out of the strangers who, having exhausted the day’s entertainments at the courthouse, were now zigzagging to the honky-tonks or the Nice ’N’ Quick, all of which were struggling to feel too bad for Margery O’Hare, given the roaring trade. She walked briskly, her head down and her elbows slightly out, not wanting to exchange small-talk or even acknowledge any of those neighbours to whom she and Margery had brought books over the past year, and who now appeared traitorous enough to be enjoying the week’s events. They could go to Hell, too.

She pushed her way into the store, stopping in her tracks and sighing inwardly as she realized there would be at least fifteen people in the queue before her, and glanced behind her, wondering if it was worth heading to one of the bars to see if they would sell her something instead. What kind of a crowd would be in there? She was so full of anger, these days, that she felt like a tinder box, as if it would take only one wrong comment from one of these fools for her to –

She felt a tap on her shoulder.

‘Alice?’

She turned. And there, by the preserves and canned goods, dressed in his shirtsleeves and his good blue trousers, without a speck of coal dust on him, stood Bennett. He had probably just finished work, but looked, as ever, as fresh as if he’d stepped out of the pages of a Sears catalogue.

‘Bennett,’ she said, blinked and looked away. It wasn’t as if she was physically moved by him any more, she realized, searching for the reason for her sudden discomfort. There was only the vaguest hint of residual affection. What she felt was mostly disbelief that this man, standing here, was someone she had wrapped herself around, skin to skin, kissed and pleaded for physical contact with. This strange, unbalanced intimacy made her feel vaguely ashamed now.

‘I … I heard you were leaving town.’

She picked up a can of tomatoes, just for something to do with her hands. ‘Yup. Trial looks to end on Tuesday. I’ll be headed out on Wednesday. You and your father won’t have to worry about me hanging around.’

Bennett glanced behind him, perhaps conscious that people might be watching, but all the customers were out-of-towners, and nobody saw anything gossip-worthy in a man and a woman exchanging a few words in the corner of the store.

‘Alice –’

‘You don’t have to say anything, Bennett. I think we’ve said enough. My parents have engaged a lawyer and –’

He touched her sleeve. ‘Pa says nobody managed to speak to his daughters.’

She pulled back her hand. ‘I’m sorry? What?’

Bennett looked behind him, his voice low. ‘Pa said the sheriff never spoke to McCullough’s daughters. They wouldn’t open the door. They shouted to his men they had nothing to say on the matter and they wouldn’t be talking to nobody. He says they’re both crazy, like the rest of the family. Says the state’s case is strong enough not to need them anyway.’ He looked at her intently.

‘Why are you telling me this?’

He chewed at his lip. ‘Figured … I figured … it might help you.’

She stared at him then, at his handsome, slightly unformed face, and his baby-soft hands, his anxious eyes. And briefly she felt her own face fall a little.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said quietly.

‘I’m sorry too, Bennett.’

He took a step back, ran a hand down his face.

They stood for a moment longer, shifting a little on their feet.

‘Well,’ he said eventually. ‘If I don’t see you before you leave … safe travels.’

She nodded. He headed for the door. As he reached it he turned, his voice lifting a little to be heard. ‘Oh. Thought you’d like to know I’m fixing to get the slurry dams made up. With proper housing and a cement base. So they can’t burst again.’

‘Your father agreed to that?’

‘He will.’ The smallest smile, a flash of someone she had once known.

‘That’s good news, Bennett. Really good news.’

‘Yeah. Well.’ He looked down. ‘It’s a start.’

With that her husband tipped his hat, opened the door, and was swallowed by the crowds still milling around outside.

‘The sheriff didn’t speak to his daughters? Why not?’ Sophia shook her head. ‘It doesn’t make no sense to me.’

‘Makes perfect sense to me,’ said Kathleen, from the corner, where she was stitching a broken stirrup leather, grimacing as she forced the huge needle through the leather. ‘They got all the way up to Arnott’s Ridge, to a family they was expecting trouble from. They figure the girls wouldn’t know nothing about their daddy’s movements, given he was a known drunk who used to disappear for days on end. So they knock a few times, get told to git, then give up and come back down, and it takes them half a day each way to do it.’

‘McCullough was a sundowner and a mean one at that,’ said Beth. ‘Might be the sheriff didn’t want to push them too hard in case they told him something he didn’t want to hear. They need him to sound like a good man to make Marge seem bad.’

‘But surely our lawyer should have gone asking questions?’

‘Mr Fancy Pants out of Lexington? You think he’s going to ride a mule half a day up to Arnott’s Ridge to speak with a bunch of angry hillbillies?’

‘I don’t see how this is going to help us none,’ said Beth. ‘If they won’t talk to the sheriff’s men they ain’t hardly going to talk to us.’

‘That may be exactly why they would talk to us,’ said Kathleen.

Izzy pointed at the wall. ‘Margery put the McCullough house on the list of places not to go to. On no account. Look, it says so right here.’

‘Well, maybe she was just doing what everyone’s done to her,’ said Alice. ‘Going on gossip without actually looking at the facts.’

‘Those girls haven’t been seen in town for nigh on ten years,’ Kathleen murmured. ‘Word is their daddy wouldn’t let them leave the house after their mama disappeared. One of those families that just stays in the shadows.’

Alice thought of Margery’s words, words that had rung through her head for days: There is always a way out of a situation. Might be ugly. Might leave you feeling like the earth has gone and shifted under your feet. But there is always a way around.

‘I’m going to ride up there,’ said Alice. ‘I can’t see what we have to lose.’

‘Your head?’ said Sophia.

‘Right now, the way my head is, it wouldn’t make that much difference.’

‘You know the stories come out of that family? And you know how much they hate us right now? You just fixing to get yourself killed?’

‘You want to tell me what other chance Margery has right now?’ Alice said. Sophia gave Alice a hard look but didn’t answer. ‘Right. Does anyone have the map for that route?’ For a moment Sophia didn’t move. Then she opened the drawer wordlessly and flicked through the assembled papers until she found it and handed it over.

‘Thank you, Sophia.’

‘I’m coming with you,’ said Beth.

‘Then I’m coming, too,’ said Izzy.

Kathleen reached for her hat. ‘Looks like we got us an outing. Here, eight tomorrow?’

‘Let’s make it seven,’ said Beth.

For the first time in days Alice found she was smiling.

‘Lord help the lot of you,’ said Sophia, shaking her head.