The Giver of Stars(77)
Alice glared at him. She dropped her reins and her voice carried, clear as cut glass, through the still air, glittering with anger. ‘You shot her dog?’
There was a brief silence.
‘You shot Margery’s dog?’
‘I shot nothing.’
She lifted her chin and looked steadily at him. ‘No, of course you didn’t. You wouldn’t get your own hands dirty, would you? You probably got your men to come out here just to shoot that puppy.’ She shook her head. ‘My God. What kind of man are you?’
She saw then from the questioning way Bennett swivelled to look at his father that he hadn’t known, and some small part of her was glad.
Van Cleve, who had been open-mouthed, swiftly recovered his composure. ‘You’re crazy. Living with that O’Hare girl has turned you crazy!’ He glanced out of his window, noting the neighbours who had stopped to listen, murmuring to each other. This was rich meat indeed for a quiet town. Van Cleve shot Margery O’Hare’s dog. ‘She’s crazy! Look at her, riding her horse straight into my car! As if I’d shoot a dog!’ He slapped his hands on the steering wheel. Alice didn’t move. His voice rose a register. ‘Me! Shoot a damn dog!’
And finally, when nobody moved, and nobody spoke: ‘Come on, Bennett. We got work to do.’ He wrestled the wheel so that the car spun around her and accelerated briskly up the road, leaving Spirit to prance and shy as the gravel sprayed at her feet.
It shouldn’t have been a surprise. Sven leaned over the rough wooden table with Fred and the two women and relayed the tales coming out of Harlan County, of men dynamited clean out of their beds because of the escalating union disputes, of thugs with machine-guns, of sheriffs turning the blindest of eyes. In the light of all this a dead dog shouldn’t have been much of a surprise. But it seemed to knock the fight right out of Margery. She’d been sick twice with the shock of it, and she cast around for her hound reflexively when they were home, her palm pressed to her cheek, as if even now she half expected him to come bounding around the corner.
‘Van Cleve’s canny,’ muttered Sven, as she left the room to check on Charley, as she did repeatedly through each evening. ‘He knew Margery wouldn’t bat an eyelid if someone looked at her down the barrel of a gun. But if he picked off the things she loves …’
Alice considered this. ‘Are … you worried, Sven?’
‘For me? No. I’m a company man. And he needs a fire captain. I’m not unionized, but anything happens to me, all my boys go out. We’re agreed on that. And if we walk, the mine shuts down. The sheriff might be in Van Cleve’s pocket but there are limits to what the state will tolerate.’ He sniffed. ‘Besides, this one’s about him and you two girls. And he won’t want attention drawn to the fact that he’s engaged in a fight with a pair of women. Oh, no.’
He took a slug of bourbon. ‘He’s just trying to spook you. But his men wouldn’t hurt a woman. Even those thugs of his. They’re bound by the code of the hills.’
‘What about the ones he’s bringing in from out of state?’ said Fred. ‘You sure they’re bound by the code of the hills, too?’
Sven didn’t seem to have an answer for that.
Fred taught her how to use a shotgun. He showed her how to balance the stock and pull the butt against her shoulder, how to factor in the hefty kick backwards when she lined up her sights, reminding her not to hold her breath but to release the trigger as she breathed out slowly. The first time she pulled the trigger he was standing close behind her, his hands on hers, and she bounced so hard against him that her face stayed pink for an hour.
She was a natural, he told her, lining up cans on the fallen tree at the edge of Margery’s land. Within days she could pick them off, like apples falling from a branch. At night, as she secured the new locks on the doors, Alice would run her hands along the barrel, lift it speculatively to her shoulder, firing imaginary rounds at unseen intruders coming up the track. She would pull the trigger for her friend; she had no doubt of that.
Because something else had changed too, something fundamental. Alice had discovered how, for a woman at least, it was much easier to feel anger on behalf of someone you cared about, to access that cold burn, to want to make someone suffer if they had hurt someone you loved.
Alice, it turned out, was no longer afraid.
14
Riding all winter, a librarian would wrap up so heavily it was hard to remember what she looked like underneath: two vests, a flannel shirt, a thick sweater and a jacket with maybe a scarf or two over the top – that was the daily uniform up in the mountains, perhaps with a pair of man’s thick leather gloves over her own, a hat rammed low as she could get it, and another scarf pulled high over her nose, so that her breath might bounce back and warm her skin a little. At home, she’d strip off reluctantly, revealing only the swiftest slice of bare skin to the elements between shedding undergarments and sliding, shivering, under her blankets. Aside from cloth-washing, a woman working for the Packhorse Library could go for weeks without seeing her body much at all.
Alice was still locked into her own private battle with the Van Cleves although, thankfully, they seemed to have gone quiet for now. She could most often be found in the woods behind the cabin practising with Fred’s old gun, the crack and zing of bullets hitting tin cans echoing through the still air.