Page 23 of The Giver of Stars
‘Much obliged to you,’ came the whispering voice from the bed, and then the words were lost in another bout of coughing.
The outside seemed impossibly bright after the gloom of the cabin. Alice found herself squinting as she waved goodbye to the children and made her way back across the grass to Spirit. She hadn’t realized how high up they were here: she could see halfway across the county. She stopped for a minute, revelling in the view.
‘Miss?’
She turned. Kathleen Bligh was running towards her. She stopped a few feet from Alice, then compressed her lips briefly as if she were afraid to speak.
‘Is there something else?’
‘Miss, my husband, he loves to read but his eyes ain’t too good in the dark and, to be honest, he struggles to focus because of the black lung. He’s in some pain most days. Could you read to him a little?’
‘Read to him?’
‘It takes his mind away. I can’t do it because I got the house to mind and the baby, and kindling to chop. I wouldn’t ask but Margery did it the other week, and if you could spare a half-hour just to read him a chapter of something, well … it would mean the world to both of us.’
Kathleen’s face, away from her husband, had collapsed into exhaustion and strain, as if she dared not show what she felt in front of him. Her eyes glittered. She lifted her chin abruptly, as if she were embarrassed to be asking for anything. ‘Of course if you’re too busy –’
Alice reached out and put a hand on her arm. ‘Why don’t you tell me a little of what he likes? I have a new book of short stories here that sounds like it might be just the ticket. What do you think?’
Forty minutes later Alice picked her way down the mountain. Garrett Bligh had closed his eyes while she read and, sure enough, twenty minutes into the story – a stirring tale of a sailor shipwrecked on high seas – she had glanced from her stool beside the bed and observed that the muscles of his face, which had been taut with discomfort, had indeed relaxed as if he had taken himself somewhere else entirely. She kept her voice low, murmuring, and even the baby seemed to settle at the sound. Outside, Kathleen was a pale blur, chopping kindling, fetching, picking and carrying, alternately calming arguments and scolding. By the time the story finished, Garrett was asleep, his breath rasping in his chest.
‘Thank you,’ Kathleen said, as Alice loaded her saddlebags. She held out two large apples and a piece of paper on which she had carefully written a recipe. ‘That’s what I was telling you about. These apples are good for baking because they don’t go all to a mush. Just don’t overcook them.’ Her face had brightened again, her former resolve apparently restored.
‘That’s very kind of you. Thank you,’ said Alice, and tucked them carefully into her pockets. Kathleen nodded, as if a debt had been repaid, and Alice mounted her horse. She thanked her again and set off.
‘Mrs Van Cleve?’ Kathleen called, when Alice had gone some twenty yards down the track.
Alice turned in her saddle. ‘Yes?’
Kathleen folded her arms across her chest and lifted her chin. ‘I think your voice sounds real fine just like it is.’
The sun was fierce and the no-see-ums, the biting midges, were relentless. Through the long afternoon Alice, slapping at her neck and cursing, was grateful for the canvas-brimmed hat Margery had lent her. She managed to press an embroidery primer onto twin sisters who lived down by the creek and seemed to view even that with suspicion, was chased from a large house by a mean-looking dog, and gave a Bible reader to a family of eleven in the smallest house she had ever seen, where a series of hay mattresses lay on the porch. ‘Children of mine read nothin’ but the Good Book,’ the mother had said, from behind a half-closed door, and set her jaw, as if braced for contradiction.
‘Then I’ll look out for some more Bible stories for you next week,’ Alice said, and tried to make her smile brighter than it felt as the door closed.
After the small victory at the Bligh house, she had begun to feel dispirited. She wasn’t sure if it was the books peoplewere viewing with suspicion or her. She kept hearing Mrs Brady’s voice, her reservations about whether Alice could do the job, given herforeignness. She was so distracted by this that it was some time before she realized she had stopped registering Margery’s red threads on the trees and was now lost. She stopped in a clearing, trying to gauge from her hand-drawn maps where she was meant to be, struggling to see the position of the sun through the dark green canopy above. Spirit stood stock still, her head drooping in the mid-afternoon heat that managed to penetrate the branches.
‘Aren’t you meant to be finding your way home?’ said Alice, grumpily.
She was forced to conclude she had no clue where she was. She would have to retrace her steps until she found her way back to a landmark. She turned the horse and wearily made her way up the side of the mountain.
It was a full half-hour before she recognized anything. She had tamped down her rising sense of panic at the creeping realization that she could quite easily end up on the mountainside at night, in the dark, with snakes and mountain lions and goodness knew what all around, or, just as worrying, at one of the addresses she was on no account to make a stop at:Beever, on Frog Creek (crazy like a fox), the McCullough House (moonshiners, mostly drunk, not sure about the girls as no one ever sees ’em), the Garside brothers (drunk, ornery with it).She wasn’t sure whether she was more afraid of the prospect of being shot for trespass, or of Mrs Brady’s response when it emerged that the Englishwoman had not, after all, known what on earth she was doing.
Around her the landscape seemed to have stretched, revealing its vastness and her own ignorance at her place within it. Why hadn’t she paid more attention to Margery’s instructions? She squinted at the shadows, trying to workout where she might be according to their direction, then cursed when the clouds or the movement of the branches made them vanish. She was so relieved when she spied the red knot on the tree trunk that it took her a moment to grasp the identity of the house she was now approaching.
Alice rode past the front gate with her eyes lowered and her head down. The weather-boarded house was silent. The iron kettle sat outside in a cold pile of ash, and a large axe lay abandoned in a chunk of tree stump. Two dirty glass windows eyed her blankly. And there they were, four books in a neat pile by the post, just where Margery had told Jim Horner to leave them if he decided he didn’t want books in his house after all. She pulled Spirit up and climbed off, one eye warily on the window, remembering the bullet-sized hole in Margery’s hat. The books appeared untouched. She picked them up under one arm, packed them carefully in her saddlebags, then checked the mare’s girth. She had one foot in the stirrup, her heart beating uncomfortably fast, when she heard the man’s voice echo out across the holler.
‘Hey!’
She stopped.
‘Hey – you!’
Alice closed her eyes.
‘You that library girl stopped here before?’
‘I wasn’t bothering you, Mr Horner,’ she called. ‘I just – I just came to pick up the books. I’ll be gone before you know it. Nobody else will come by.’
