and there were few that didn’t have a pig or two or a flock of hens. There was one general store, huge sacks of flour and sugar lining the doorway, and its shelves thick with cans. And there was just the one restaurant: the Nice ’N’ Quick with its green door, firm instruction that patrons must wear shoes, and which served things she’d never heard of, like fried green tomatoes and collard greens and things they called biscuits that were actually a cross between a dumpling and a scone. She once attempted to make some, but they emerged from the temperamental range not soft and spongy like Annie’s but solid enough to clatter when dropped onto a plate (she swore Annie had jinxed them).
She had been invited to tea several times by local ladies and tried to make conversation but found she had little to say, being hopeless at quilting, which seemed to be the local preoccupation, and knowing nothing about the names they bandied around in gossip. Every tea after the first seemed obliged to begin with the story of how Alice had offered “biscuits” with her tea instead of “cookies” (the other women had found this hysterical).
In the end it was easier just to sit on the bed in her and Bennett’s room and read again the few magazines she had brought from England or write Gideon yet another letter in which she tried not to reveal how unhappy she was.
She had, she realized gradually, simply traded one domestic prison for another. Some days she couldn’t face another night watching Bennett’s father reading scripture from the squeaking rocking chair on the porch (God’s word should be all the mental stimulation we require, wasn’t that what Mother said?), while she sat breathing in the oil-soaked rags they burned to keep the mosquitoes away and mending the worn patches in his clothes (God hates waste—why, those pants were only four years old, Alice. Plenty of life left in them). Alice grumbled inwardly that if God had had to sit in the near dark stitching up someone else’s trousers He would probably have bought Himself a nice new pair from Arthur J. Harmon’s Gentleman’s Store in Lexington, but she smiled a tight smile and squinted harder at the stitches. Bennett, meanwhile, frequently wore the expression of someone who had been duped into something and couldn’t quite work out what and how it had happened.
* * *
• • •
So, what the Sam Hill is a traveling library, anyway?” Alice was startled out of her reverie with a sharp nudge from Bennett’s elbow.
“They got one in Mississippi, using boats,” called a voice near the back of the hall.
“You won’t get no boats up and down our creeks. Too shallow.”
“I believe the plan is to use horses,” said Mrs. Brady.
“They’re gonna take horses up and down the river? Crazy talk.”
The first delivery of books had come from Chicago, Mrs. Brady continued, and more were en route. There would be a wide selection of fiction, from Mark Twain to Shakespeare, and practical books containing recipes, domestic tips and help with child-rearing. There would even be comic books—a revelation that made some of the children squeal with excitement.
Alice checked her wristwatch, wondering when she would get her shaved ice. The one good thing about these meetings was that they weren’t stuck in the house all evening. She was already dreading what the winters would be like, when it would be harder for them to find reasons to escape.
“What man has time to go riding? We need to be working, not paying social calls with the latest edition of Ladies’ Home Journal.” There was a low ripple of laughter.
“Tom Faraday likes to look at the ladies’ undergarments in the Sears catalog, though. I heard he spends hours at a time in the outhouse reading that!”
“Mr. Porteous!”
“It’s not men; it’s women,” came a voice.
There was a brief silence.
Alice turned to look. A woman was leaning against the back doors in a dark blue cotton coat, her sleeves rolled up. She wore leather breeches, and her boots were unpolished. She might have been in her late thirties or early forties, her face handsome and her long dark hair tied back in a cursory knot.
“It’s women doing the riding. Delivering the books.”
“Women?”
“By themselves?” came a man’s voice.
“Last time I looked, God gave ’em two arms and two legs, just like the men.”
A brief murmur rippled through the audience. Alice peered more closely, intrigued.
“Thank you, Margery. Over at Harlan County