as she did that there was nothing to be done. “Oh, Bluey. My sweet baby.” She pressed her face to his—I’m sorry I’m so sorry I’m sorry—her hands clutching him to her, her whole body mourning a stupid young hound that would never bounce onto her bed again.
It was like this that Alice found her, as she rode up on Spirit half an hour later, her legs aching and her feet numb with cold.
Margery O’Hare, a woman who had remained dry-eyed throughout her own father’s funeral, who had bitten her lip until it bled as she buried her sister, a woman who had taken the best part of four years to confess her feelings to the man she loved most in the world, and still swore she had not a sentimental bone in her body, sat keening like a child on the porch, her back doubled over with grief and her dead dog’s head cradled tenderly in her lap.
* * *
• • •
Alice saw Van Cleve’s Ford before she saw him. For weeks she had backed into the shadows when he passed, had turned her face, her heart in her mouth, braced for another puce-faced demand that she come home right now and stop all this nonsense or she might just find herself regretting it. Even in company the sight of him made her tremble a little, as if some residual memory was lodged in her cells that still felt the impact of that blunt fist.
But now, propelled by a long night of grief that had been somehow so much more painful to witness than her own, she dug in her heels as she saw the burgundy car heading down the hill, sending Spirit wheeling hard across the road so that she was directly in front of him and he had to stamp on the brakes, screeching to a halt in front of the store, causing all passersby—a fair number, given that the store had a special deal on flour—to stop and observe the commotion. Van Cleve blinked at the girl on the horse through his windshield, unsure at first who it was. He wound down his window. “You properly lost your mind now, Alice?”
Alice glared at him. She dropped her reins and her voice carried, clear as cut glass, through the still air, glittering with anger. “You shot her dog?”
There was a brief silence.
“You shot Margery’s dog?”
“I shot nothing.”
She lifted her chin and looked steadily at him. “No, of course you didn’t. You wouldn’t get your own hands dirty, would you? You probably got your men to come out here just to shoot that puppy.” She shook her head. “My God. What kind of man are you?”
She saw then from the questioning way Bennett swiveled to look at his father that he hadn’t known, and some small part of her was glad.
Van Cleve, who had been open-mouthed, swiftly recovered his composure. “You’re crazy. Living with that O’Hare girl has turned you crazy!” He glanced out of his window, noting the neighbors who had stopped to listen, murmuring to each other. This was rich meat indeed for a quiet town. Van Cleve shot Margery O’Hare’s dog. “She’s crazy! Look at her, riding her horse straight into my car! As if I’d shoot a dog!” He slapped his hands on the steering wheel. Alice didn’t move. His voice rose a register. “Me! Shoot a damn dog!”
And finally, when nobody moved, and nobody spoke: “Come on, Bennett. We got work to do.” He wrestled the wheel so that the car spun around her and accelerated briskly up the road, leaving Spirit to prance and shy as the gravel sprayed at her feet.
* * *
• • •
It shouldn’t have been a surprise. Sven leaned over the rough wooden table with Fred and the two women and relayed the tales coming out of Harlan County, of men dynamited clean out of their beds because of the escalating union disputes, of thugs with machine-guns, of sheriffs turning the blindest of eyes. In the light of all this a dead dog shouldn’t have been much of a surprise. But it seemed to knock the fight right out of Margery. She’d been sick twice with the shock of it, and she cast around for her hound reflexively when they were home, her palm pressed to her cheek, as if even now she half expected him to come bounding around the corner.
“Van Cleve’s canny,” muttered Sven, as she left the room to check on Charley, as she did