Page 20 of The Giver of Stars
‘Do you think I’m pretty, Bennett?’
‘You know I think you’re pretty.’ His voice was sleepy.
‘Are you happy we got married?’
‘Of course I am.’
Alice trailed a finger around his shirt button. ‘Then why –’
‘Let’s not get all serious, Alice, huh? No need to go on about things, is there? Can’t we just have a nice time?’
Alice lifted her hand from his shirt. She twisted and lowered herself down onto the rug so that only their shoulders were touching. ‘Sure.’
They lay in the grass, side by side, looking up at the sky, in silence. When he spoke again, his voice was soft. ‘Alice?’
She glanced at him. She swallowed, her heart thumping against her ribcage. She placed her hand on his, trying to convey to him her tacit encouragement, to tell him without words that she would be a support, that it would be okay, whatever he said. She was his wife, after all.
She waited a moment. ‘Yes?’
‘It’s a cardinal,’ he said. ‘The red one. I’m pretty sure it’s a cardinal.’
4
‘… marriage, they say, halves one’s rights and doubles one’s duties.’
Louisa May Alcott,Little Women
The first memory Margery O’Hare had was of sitting under her mother’s kitchen table and watching through her fingers as her father slugged her fourteen-year-old brother Jack across the room, knocking two teeth clean out of his jaw when he tried to stop him beating her mother. Her mother, who took a fair number of beatings but would not tolerate that fate for her children, promptly threw a kitchen chair at her husband’s head, leaving him with a jagged scar on his forehead that remained until he died. He hit her back with its smashed leg, of course, once he was able to stand straight, and the fight had only stopped when Papaw O’Hare had staggered round from next door with his rifle at his shoulder and murder in his eyes and threatened to blow Frank O’Hare’s damn head clean off his damn shoulders if he didn’t stop. It wasn’t that Grandpa believed his son beating his wife was inherently wrong, Margery discovered some time later, but Memaw had been trying to listen to the wireless and half the holler couldn’t hear past the screaming. There was a hole in the pinewood wall that Margery could put her whole fist into for the rest of her childhood.
Jack left for good that day, a wad of bloodied cotton in his mouth and his one good shirt in his kitbag, and the next timeMargery heard his name (leaving was considered such an act of family disloyalty he was effectively disappeared from family history) was eight years later when they received a wire to say that Jack had died after being hit by a railroad truck in Missouri. Her mother had cried salty, heartbroken tears into her apron, but her father had hurled a book at her and told her to pull her damn self together before he really gave her something to cry about and disappeared to his stills. The book wasBlack Beautyand Margery never forgave him for having ripped off the back cover while doing so and somehow her love for her lost brother and her desire to escape into the world of books became melded together into something fierce and obstinate in that one broken-backed copy.
Don’t you marry one of these fools, her mother would whisper to her and her sister, as she tucked them into the big hay bed in the back room.You make sure you two get as far from this damn mountain as you can. As soon as you can. You promise me.
The girls had nodded solemnly.
Virginia had got away all right, got as far as Lewisburg, only to marry a man who turned out to be just as handy with his fists as their father had been. Her mother, thank goodness, was not alive to see it, having caught pneumonia six months after the wedding and died within three days; the same strain that took three of Margery’s brothers. Their graves were marked with small stones on a hill overlooking the holler.
When her father died, killed in a drunken gunfight with Bill McCullough – the latest sorry episode in a clan feud that had lasted generations – the residents of Baileyville noted that Margery O’Hare didn’t shed so much as a tear. ‘Why would I?’ she said, when Pastor McIntosh asked her if she was quite all right. ‘I’m glad he’s dead. Can’t do no more harm to no one.’ The fact that Frank O’Hare was reviled in town, and that everyone knew she was right, didn’t stop themdeciding that the surviving O’Hare girl was as odd as the rest of them and that, frankly, the fewer of that bloodline still around, the better.
‘Can I ask you about your family?’ Alice had said, as they saddled up the horses, shortly after dawn.
Margery, her thoughts still lost somewhere in Sven’s strong, hard body, had had to be spoken to twice before she realized what Alice was saying. ‘Ask what you want.’ She glanced over. ‘Let me guess. Someone tell you you shouldn’t be around me because of my daddy?’
‘Well, yes,’ said Alice, after a pause. Mr Van Cleve had given her a lecture on that exact subject the previous evening, accompanied by much spluttering and finger-pointing. Alice had wielded the good name of Mrs Brady as a shield but it had been an uncomfortable exchange.
Margery nodded, as if this was no surprise. She swung her saddle onto the rail and ran her fingers over Charley’s back, checking him for bumps and sores. ‘Frank O’Hare supplied moonshine to half the county. Shot up anyone who tried to take over his patch. Shot ’em if he reckoned they’d even thought about it. Killed more people than I know of, and left scars on everyone he was close to.’
‘Everyone?’
Margery hesitated a moment, then took a couple of steps towards Alice. She rolled up her shirt-sleeve, tugging it above the elbow, revealing a waxy, coin-shaped scar on her upper arm. ‘Shot me with his hunting rifle when I was eleven years old because I sassed him. If my brother hadn’t pushed me out of the way he would have killed me.’
Alice took a moment to speak. ‘Didn’t the police do anything?’
‘Police?’ She said itpoh-lice.‘Up here people take care of things their own way. When Memaw found out what he’ddone she took a horsewhip to him. Only two people he was ever scared of, his own mom and pop.’
Margery put her head down so that her thick dark hair fell forward. She ran her fingers nimbly over her scalp until she found what she was looking for and pulled her hair to one side, revealing an inch-wide gap of bare skin. ‘That was where he pulled me up two flights of stairs by my hair three days after Memaw died. Pulled a handful of it clean out. They say he still had half my scalp attached to it when he dropped it.’
‘You don’t remember?’
