The Giver of Stars

28

From the body of the loved one’s simple, sweetly coloured flesh, which our animal instincts urge us to desire, there springs not only the wonder of a new bodily life, but also the enlargement of the horizon of human sympathy, and the glow of spiritual understanding which one could never have attained alone.

Dr Marie Stopes, Married Love

Sven and Margery were married in late October, on a clear, crisp day where the mists had lifted from the hollers by dawn and the birds sang loudly about the importance of a blue sky and squabbled noisily on branches. Margery had told him she would agree under sufferance because she didn’t want Sophia yammering on at her till the end of time, and only if they told nobody and Sven ‘didn’t make a thing of it’.

Sven, who was agreeable in almost all things where Margery was concerned, greeted this invitation with a hard no. ‘If we marry, we do it in public, with the town, our child and all our friends in attendance,’ he said, his arms folded. ‘That’s what I want. Or we don’t marry at all.’

And so they were wed in the small Episcopalian church up at Salt Lick, whose minister was a little less picky than some about children born out of wedlock, and in attendance were all the librarians, Mr and Mrs Brady, Fred and a fair number of the families they had brought books to. Afterwards they held a reception at Fred’s house, and Mrs Brady presented the couple with a wedding quilt that her quilting circle had embroidered, and a smaller one for Virginia’s cot to match it, and Margery, despite looking somewhat awkward in her oyster-coloured dress (borrowed from Alice, the seams let out by Sophia), wore an expression of embarrassed pride and managed not to change back into her breeches until the following day, even though it clearly pained her. They ate food brought by neighbours (Margery hadn’t intended so many people to come, and had been a little taken aback by the endless stream of guests), someone started up a hog roast outside and Sven wore a look of intense happiness, showing off Virginia to everyone, and there was fiddling and some fine dancing. At six, just as dusk was falling, it was Alice who left the wedding party and finally located the bride sitting alone on the library steps, gazing up at the darkening mountain.

‘Are you all right?’ Alice said, sitting down beside her.

Margery didn’t turn her head. She stared up at the tips of the trees, sniffed loudly, then let her gaze slide sideways towards Alice. ‘Feels kind of weird to be this happy,’ she said, and it was the most unsettled Alice had ever seen her.

Alice considered this, then nodded. ‘I understand,’ she said. And she gave her friend a nudge. ‘You’ll get used to it.’

Two months later, after the Gustavssons had acquired a dog (a wall-eyed runt of a puppy, unwanted, some way from the quality hound Sven had suggested – he was, of course, crazy about it), Margery went back to work at the library. Virginia was minded four days a week by Verna McCullough, along with her own baby, a rather frail, freckled child by the name of Peter. Sven and Fred, aided by Jim Horner and a couple of the others, raised a small cabin a short walk from Margery’s, with two separate rooms, a chimney and a working WC outside, and the McCullough sisters moved into it willingly. They returned to their old home only to bring back a jute bag of clothing, two pans and the mean dog. ‘The rest of it stunk of our daddy,’ Verna said, and never spoke of it again.

Verna had begun to make the walk down into town once a week, mostly just to buy provisions with her wages, but also to have a look around, and people generally tipped their hat or left her alone, and her presence swiftly became unremarkable. Neeta, her sister, was still not much inclined to leave the house, but they both doted on the babies and seemed to enjoy a little socializing, and over time passers-by (who were not many in number) would remark that the dilapidated cabin up on Arnott’s Ridge had began to collapse, roof shingles first, then the chimney, and then, as the high wind caught the loose weatherboarding, the house itself, broken window by broken window, until it was half reclaimed by nature, shoots and brambles clawing it back to the earth, as they had so nearly done with its owner.

Frederick Guisler and Alice were married a month after Margery and Sven, and if anybody noticed how much time they seemed to spend alone in Fred’s house before they were legally tied, nobody seemed much inclined to comment on it. Alice’s first marriage had been annulled quietly, and with little fuss, once Fred had explained the bones of it to Mr Van Cleve who, for once, did not seem to feel the need to shout, but engaged a lawyer who was able to facilitate such things swiftly and with, perhaps, a little greasing of the wheels to ensure confidentiality. The prospect of his son’s name being associated publicly with the word annulment seemed to stay his habitual temper, and after that meeting he barely mentioned the library publicly again.

Under the agreement they let Bennett marry again first. The librarians felt they owed the younger Van Cleve for the help he had given them, and Izzy even attended the day with her parents and said it was lovely, all things considered, and that Peggy made a beautiful and very contented bride.

Alice barely noticed. She was so ridiculously happy that most days she didn’t know how to contain it. Every morning before dawn she would unwrap her long limbs reluctantly from those of her husband, drink the coffee he insisted on making for her, then walk down to open the library and get the stove going, ready for the others to arrive. Despite the cold and the brutal hour, she was almost always to be found smiling. If Peggy Van Cleve’s friends chose to remark that Alice Guisler had let herself go something awful since she’d started up at that library, what with her un-set hair and her mannish outfits (and to think her so refined and well dressed when she came, and all!), then Fred couldn’t have noticed less. He was married to the most beautiful woman in the world, and every night after they had each finished work, and put away the dishes side by side, he made sure to pay homage. In the still air of Split Creek it was not unusual for those who were walking past in the darkness to shake an amused head at the breathless and joyous sounds emanating from the house behind the library. In Baileyville, in winter, there was not much to do after the sun went down, after all.

Sophia and William moved back to Louisville. She did not want to leave the library, she told the other women, but she had been offered a job back at the Louisville Free Public Library (Coloured Branch) and, given their cabin hadn’t been the same since the floods, and William’s chances of work were limited, they figured they would do better in the city, especially a city where there were large populations of people like themselves. Professional people. Izzy cried, and the others didn’t feel much better about it, but there was no arguing with good sense – and not much arguing with Sophia. Some time later, when they started to receive the letters she forwarded from the city, and the photograph of her promotion, they framed it, and put it up on the wall, next to the one of them all together, and felt a little better about it. Though it had to be said, the shelves were never quite as well organized again.

Kathleen, true to her word, did not remarry, although there was no shortage of men who stopped by asking to court her once a decent amount of time had passed. She had no time for all that, she told the other librarians, what with the washing and the cleaning and looking after her children on top of her work. Besides, there was not a man who could measure up to Garrett Bligh in the whole state. Though she would admit, when pushed, that she had been a little taken aback at how Jim Horner had scrubbed up at Alice’s wedding, having received the attention of a professional barber and put on his good suit. His face was quite pleasing, liberated from all that hair, and his general appearance was much improved out of his dirty overalls. She would not marry again, oh, no, she was adamant, but within a few months it was not unusual for the two of them to be seen taking a stroll around the town with their children and maybe attending a local fair together in the spring. It was good for his girls to have a feminine influence after all, and if there were some sly looks and raised eyebrows, well, that was their business. And Beth could stop looking at her like that, thank you very much.

Beth’s life remained largely unchanged immediately following the trial. She remained at home with her father and brothers, complained bitterly about them at every turn, smoked in private, drank in public, then surprised everybody six months later by announcing that she had saved every penny she had ever earned and was about to leave on an ocean liner to see the continent of India. They laughed at this at first – Beth was possessed, after all, of the strangest sense of humour – but she pulled the ticket from her saddlebag to show them. ‘How on earth did you raise all that money?’ said Izzy, confused. ‘You told me your daddy took half of it towards running the house.’

Beth grew uncharacteristically tongue-tied and stammered out some response to do with extra work and savings that were her own and not knowing why everyone in this darn town needed to know each other’s business anyway. And when, a month after she had departed, the sheriff uncovered an abandoned still over by Johnsons’ fallen-down cow barn, the ground around it littered with cigarette butts, it was decreed that the two things could not possibly be related. Or, at least, that was how they put it to her father.

Her first letter came from a place called Surat and had the fanciest postmark you ever saw and contained a picture of her wearing a brightly coloured embroidered robe called a sari and holding a peacock under her arm. Kathleen exclaimed that it wouldn’t shock her a whit if Beth ended up marrying the King of India because that girl was plumb full of surprises. To which Margery responded drily that that would certainly surprise them all.

Izzy cut a record, with her father’s permission. Within two years she had become one of Kentucky’s most popular singers, known for the purity of her voice and her penchant for performing in floor-length flowing dresses. She recorded a song about a murder in the hills that was popular across three states and performed an on-stage duet with Tex Lafayette at a music hall in Knoxville that left her quite overcome for the best part of a week afterwards, not least because he held her hand during the high notes. Mrs Brady said that when it reached number four in the gramophone charts, it was the proudest moment in her life. Second only, she admitted privately, to the letter she had received from Mrs Lena C. Nofcier some two months after the close of the trial, thanking her for her extraordinary efforts in keeping the WPA Packhorse Library, Baileyville, running in a time of crisis.

We women face many unexpected challenges when we choose to step outside what are considered our habitual boundaries. And you, dear Mrs Brady, have proven yourself more than a match to any such challenge that has arisen. I look forward to discussing this and many other pertinent issues in person with you one day.

Mrs Nofcier had not yet made it as far as Baileyville but Mrs Brady was pretty sure it was going to happen.

The library opened five days a week, its management split between Alice and Margery, and during that time the women continued to lend every possible kind of novel, manual, recipe book and magazine. Memories of the trial faded quickly, especially among those who realized they might like to continue to borrow books after all, and life in Baileyville returned to its normal rhythms. Only the Van Cleve men seemed at pains to avoid the library, driving their cars at speed up and down Split Creek, and mostly taking a route some way around town to avoid that building altogether.

So when, several months into 1939, Peggy Van Cleve stopped by, it came as something of a surprise. Margery watched her spend some moments loitering outside as if searching for something vitally important in her purse, then peering through the window to check if Margery was on her own. She wasn’t known to be the most voracious of readers, after all.

Margery O’Hare was a busy woman, what with Virginia, the dog and her husband, and all the many distractions her home seemed to hold, these days. But that evening she would break off what she was doing and smile to herself, wondering whether to tell Alice Guisler how the new Mrs Van Cleve had stepped inside, lowered her voice, and after some prevarication and a lot of theatrical scanning of random titles on the shelves, asked whether there was truth in the rumour that there was a book here that advised ladies regarding certain sensitive matters relating to the bedroom. Or how Margery had kept a straight face and said, why, yes, of course. It was just the facts, after all.

She would still be thinking about it – and still trying not to smile – when they all arrived back at the library the following day.