she would agree under sufferance because she didn’t want Sophia yammering on at her till the end of time, and only if they told nobody and Sven “didn’t make a thing of it.”
Sven, who was agreeable in almost all things where Margery was concerned, greeted this invitation with a hard no. “If we marry, we do it in public, with the town, our child and all our friends in attendance,” he said, his arms folded. “That’s what I want. Or we don’t marry at all.”
And so they were wed in the small Episcopalian church up at Salt Lick, whose minister was a little less picky than some about children borne out of wedlock, and in attendance were all the librarians, Mr. and Mrs. Brady, Fred and a fair number of the families they had brought books to. Afterward they held a reception at Fred’s house, and Mrs. Brady presented the couple with a wedding quilt that her quilting circle had embroidered, and a smaller one for Virginia’s cot to match it, and Margery, despite looking somewhat awkward in her oyster-colored dress (borrowed from Alice, the seams let out by Sophia), wore an expression of embarrassed pride and managed not to change back into her breeches until the following day, even though it clearly pained her. They ate food brought by neighbors (Margery hadn’t intended so many people to come, and had been a little taken aback by the endless stream of guests), someone started up a hog roast outside and Sven wore a look of intense happiness, showing off Virginia to everyone, and there was fiddling and some fine dancing. At six, just as dusk was falling, it was Alice who left the wedding party and finally located the bride sitting alone on the path to the library steps, gazing up at the darkening mountain.
“Are you all right?” Alice said, sitting down beside her.
Margery didn’t turn her head. She stared up at the tips of the trees, sniffed loudly, then let her gaze slide sideways toward Alice. “Feels kind of weird to be this happy,” she said, and it was the most unsettled Alice had ever seen her.
Alice considered this, then nodded. “I understand,” she said. And she gave her friend a nudge. “You’ll get used to it.”
* * *
• • •
Two months later, after the Gustavssons had acquired a dog (a wall-eyed runt of a puppy, unwanted, some way from the quality hound Sven had suggested—he was, of course, crazy about it), Margery went back to work at the library. Virginia was minded four days a week by Verna McCullough, along with her own baby, a rather frail, freckled child by the name of Peter. Sven and Fred, aided by Jim Horner and a couple of the others, raised a small cabin a short walk from Margery’s, with two separate rooms, a chimney and a working WC outside, and the McCullough sisters moved into it willingly. They returned to their old home only to bring back a jute bag of clothing, two pans and the mean dog. “The rest of it stunk of our daddy,” Verna said, and never spoke of it again.
Verna had begun to make the walk down into town once a week, mostly just to buy provisions with her wages, but also to have a look around, and people generally tipped their hat or left her alone, and her presence swiftly became unremarkable. Neeta, her sister, was still not much inclined to leave the house, but they both doted on the babies and seemed to enjoy a little socializing, and over time passersby (who were not many in number) would remark that the dilapidated cabin up on Arnott’s Ridge had began to collapse, roof shingles first, then the chimney, and then, as the high wind caught the loose weatherboarding, the house itself, broken window by broken window, until it was half reclaimed by nature, shoots and brambles clawing it back to the earth, as they had so nearly done with its owner.
* * *
• • •
Frederick Guisler and Alice were married a month after Margery and Sven, and if anybody noticed how much time they seemed to spend alone in Fred’s house before they were legally tied, nobody seemed much inclined to comment on it. Alice’s first marriage had been annulled quietly, and with little fuss, once Fred had explained the bones of it to Mr. Van Cleve who, for once, did not seem to feel the need to shout, but engaged a lawyer who was