And he and Kathleen were so very fond of each other.”
“I’m much obliged to you, Miss . . .”
“Mrs. Van Cleve.”
“My Garrett was a fine young man. Oh, you didn’t see him before. He had the broadest shoulders this side of the Cumberland Gap, didn’t he, Kathleen? When Kathleen married him there were a hundred crying girls between here and Berea.”
The young widow smiled at the memory.
“I used to tell him I had no idea how he could even make his way into that mine with a build like his. Course, now I wish he hadn’t. Still—” the older woman swallowed and lifted her chin, “—not for us to question God’s plan. He’s with his own father and he’s with God the Father. We just have to get used to being down here without him, don’t we, sweetheart?” She reached out and squeezed her daughter-in-law’s hand.
“Amen,” someone called.
Alice had assumed that they would pay their respects and leave, but as morning became afternoon and afternoon swiftly fell to dusk, the little cabin grew fuller, with miners arriving after their shift, their wives bringing pies and souse and fruit jellies, and as time slid and stalled in the dim light, more people piled in, and nobody left. Chicken appeared in front of Alice, then soft biscuits and gravy, fried potatoes and more chicken. Somebody shared some bourbon, and there were outbreaks of laughter, tears and singing, and the air in the tiny cabin grew warm, thick with the scents of roasted meats and sweet liquor. Someone produced a fiddle and played Scottish tunes that made Alice feel vaguely homesick. Margery occasionally shot her a look, as if checking she was okay, but Alice, surrounded by people who would clap her on the back and thank her for her service, as if she were a military man, not just an Englishwoman delivering books, was oddly glad just to sit and absorb it all.
So Alice Van Cleve gave herself to the strange rhythms of the evening. She sat a few feet from a dead man, ate the food, sipped a little of the drink, sang along to hymns she barely knew, clasped the hands of strangers, who no longer felt like strangers. And when night fell and Margery whispered in her ear that they really should get going now, because a hard frost would be setting in, Alice was surprised to find that she felt as if she was leaving home, not heading back to it, and this thought was so disconcerting that it pushed away all else for the whole of the slow, cold, lantern-lit ride back down the mountain.
NINE
Many medical men now recognize that numerous nervous and other diseases are associated with the lack of physiological relief for natural or stimulated sex feelings in women.
• DR. MARIE STOPES, Married Love
According to the local midwives, there was a reason most babies came in summer, and that was because there wasn’t a whole heap to do in Baileyville once the light had gone. The picture house tended to get its movies some months after they had been and gone elsewhere. Even when they came Mr. Rand, who ran it, loved his liquor, to the extent that you could never be sure that you’d see the end of the show before a reel crumpled and burned on screen, victim to one of his impromptu naps, prompting jeers and disappointment across the audience. Harvest festival and hog-slaughter had slid past and it was too early for Thanksgiving, which left a long month with nothing but darkening skies, the increasing smell of wood smoke in the air, and the encroaching cold to look forward to.
And yet. It was apparent to anybody who took notice of such things (and Baileyville’s residents made whole careers out of taking notice) that this fall an inordinate number of local men seemed oddly cheerful. They raced home as soon as they could and whistled their way through their days bug-eyed with sleep deprivation but shorn of their usual short tempers. Jim Forrester, who drove for the Mathews lumber yard, was barely seen at the honky-tonks, where he usually spent his non-working hours. Sam Torrance and his wife had taken to walking around holding hands and smiling at each other. And Michael Murphy, whose mouth had been welded into a thin line of dissatisfaction for most of his thirty-odd years, had been seen singing—actually singing—to his wife on his porch.
These were not developments that the elders of the town felt able to