Page 109 of The Giver of Stars
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 calledOf 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 ofLittle Womenmatched 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 – HenryPorteous 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 theBloodthirsty 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.
