The Giver of Stars(115)
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.