When the librarians returned to their base at Frederick Guisler’s cabin, instead of plucking rigorously organized books from his handmade shelves, they were more often to be found on the floor, riffling through countless piles for the requested titles, yelling at each other when someone else turned out to be sitting on the one they needed.
‘I guess we’re victims of our own success,’ said Margery, glancing around at the stacks on the floor.
‘Should we start sorting through them?’ Beth was smoking a cigarette – her father would have whipped her if he’d seen it and Margery pretended she hadn’t.
‘No point. We’ll barely touch the sides this morning and it’ll be just as bad when we get back. No, I’ve been thinking we need someone here full time to sort it out.’
Beth looked at Izzy. ‘You wanted to stay back here, didn’t you? And she ain’t the strongest of riders.’
Izzy bristled. ‘I do not, thank you, Beth. My families know me. They wouldn’t like it if someone else took over my routes.’
She had a point. Despite Beth’s sly digs, Izzy Brady, in six short weeks, had grown into a competent horsewoman, if not a great one, her balance compensating for her weaker leg, its difference now invisible in the dark mahogany leather boots that she kept polished to a high shine. She had taken to carrying her stick on the back of the saddle to aid her when she had to walk the last steps up to a house, and found it came in handy for whacking at branches, keeping mean dogs at bay, and shifting the occasional snake. Most families around Baileyville were a little in awe of Mrs Brady, and Izzy, once she’d introduced herself, was usually welcomed.
‘Besides, Beth,’ Izzy added, slyly producing her trump card, ‘you know if I stay here you’ll have my mother fixin’ and fussin’ all the time. Only thing keeping her away now is thinking I’m out all day.’
‘Oh, I’d really rather not,’ said Alice, as Margery turned towards her. ‘My families are doing well, too. Jim Horner’s eldest girl read the whole of The American Girl last week. He was so proud he even forgot to shout at me.’
‘I guess it’s Beth, then,’ said Izzy.
Beth stubbed out her cigarette on the wood floor with the heel of her boot. ‘Don’t look at me. I hate cleaning up. Do enough of it for my damn brothers.’
‘Do you have to curse?’ Izzy sniffed.
‘It’s not just clearing up,’ Margery said, picking up a copy of The Pickwick Papers, from which the innards sagged in a weary spray. ‘These were ratty to start with and now they’re falling apart. We need someone who can sew up the binders and maybe make scrapbooks out of all these loose pages. They’re doing that over at Hindman and they’re real popular. Got recipes and stories in them and everything.’
‘My sewing is atrocious,’ said Alice, quickly, and the others concurred loudly that they, too, were awful at it.
Margery pulled an exasperated face. ‘Well, I ain’t doing it. Got paws for hands.’ She thought for a minute. ‘I got an idea, though.’ She got up from behind the table and reached for her hat.
‘What?’ said Alice.
‘Where are you going?’ said Beth.
‘Hoffman. Beth, can you pick up some of my rounds? I’ll see y’all later.’
You could hear the ominous sounds of the Hoffman Mining Company a good couple of miles before you saw it: the rumble of the coal trucks, the distant whumpf of the explosions that vibrated through your feet, the clang of the mine bell. For Margery, Hoffman was a vision of Hell, its pits eating into the scarred and hollowed-out hillsides around Baileyville, like giant welts, its men, their eyes glowing white out of blackened faces, emerging from its bowels, and the low industrial hum of nature being stripped and ravaged. Around the settlement the taste of coal dust hung in the air, with an ever-present sense of foreboding, explosions covering the valley with a grey filter. Even Charley balked at it. A certain kind of man looked at God’s own land, she thought, as she drew closer, and instead of beauty and wonder, all he saw was dollar signs.
Hoffman was a town with its own rules. The price of a wage and a roof over your head was a creeping debt to the company store, and the never-ending fear of a misjudged measurement of dynamite, a lost limb from a runaway trolley, or worse: the end of it all, several hundred feet below, with little chance for your loved ones to recover a body to grieve over.
And, since a year back, all of this had become suffused in an air of mistrust as the union-busters arrived to beat back those who had the temerity to campaign for better conditions. The mine bosses didn’t like change, and they had shown it not in argument and raised fists but with mobs, guns and, now, families in mourning.
‘That you, Margery O’Hare?’ The guard took two steps towards her as she rode up, his hand shielding his eyes from the sun.
‘Sure is, Bob.’
‘You know Gustavsson’s here?’
‘Everything all right?’ She felt the familiar metallic taste in her mouth whenever she heard Sven’s name.
‘Everyone accounted for. Think they’re just having a bite to eat before they head off. Last saw them over by B Block.’
She dismounted and tied up the mule, then walked through the gates, ignoring the glances from miners clocking off. She walked briskly past the commissary, its windows advertising various on-sale bargains that everyone knew to be no bargain at all. It stood on the hillside at the same level as the huge tipple. Above it were the generous, well-maintained houses of the mine bosses and their foremen, most with neat backyards. This was where Van Cleve would have lived, had Dolores not refused to leave her family home back in Baileyville. It was not one of the larger coal camps, like Lynch, where some ten thousand homes scattered the hillsides. Here a couple of hundred miners’ shacks stretched along the tracks, their roofs covered with tar-paper, barely updated in the forty-odd years of their existence. A few children, mostly shoeless, played in the dirt beside a rootling pig. Car parts and washing pails were strewn outside front doors, and stray dogs trotted haphazard paths between them. Margery turned right, away from the residential roads, and walked briskly over the small bridge that led to the mines.
She spied his back first. He was sitting on an upturned crate, his helmet cradled between his feet as he ate a hunk of bread. She’d know him anywhere, she thought. The way his neck met his shoulders and his head tilted a little to the left when he spoke. His shirt was covered with smuts and the tabard that read ‘FIRE’ on his back was slightly askew.
‘Hey.’
He turned at the sound of her voice, stood and lifted his hands as his workmates began a series of low whistles, as if he were trying to tamp down a fire. ‘Marge! What are you doing here?’ He took her arm, steering her away from the catcalls as they walked around the corner.
She looked at Sven’s blackened palms. ‘Everyone okay?’
His eyebrows lifted. ‘This time.’ He shot a look at the administrative offices that told her everything she needed to know.
She reached up and wiped a smudge from his face with her thumb. He stopped her and pressed her hand to his lips. It always made something flip inside her, even if she didn’t let it show on her face.
‘You missed me, then?’
‘No.’
‘Liar.’
They grinned at each other.
‘I came to find William Kenworth. I need to speak to his sister.’
‘Coloured William? He isn’t here no more, Marge. He got injured out, oh, six, nine months back.’
She looked startled.
‘I thought I told you. Some powder monkey messed up his wires and he was in the way when they blasted that tunnel through Feller’s Top. Boulder took his leg clean off.’