Margery O’Hare leaned her backside against the desk at the front and gazed steadily out at the sea of faces. Alice noted a murmur of vague discontent moving around the room, and it seemed to be directed at her. She also noted that Margery O’Hare seemed supremely untroubled by it.
‘We have a large county to cover,’ Mrs Brady added. ‘We can’t do it with just two girls.’
A woman at the front of the hall called: ‘So, what would it mean? This horseback-librarian thing?’
‘Well, it would involve riding to some of our more remote dwellings, and providing reading materials to those who might not otherwise be able to travel to the county libraries, due to, say, ill-health, frailty or lack of transportation.’ She lowered her head so that she could see over her half-moon spectacles. ‘I would add that this is to aid the spread of education, to help bring knowledge to those places where it might currently be sadly lacking. Our president and his wife believe this project can bring knowledge and learning back to the foreground of rural lives.’
‘I ain’t letting my lady ride up in no mountain,’ came a call from the back.
‘You just afraid she won’t come back again, Henry Porteous?’
‘You can have mine. I’d be more’n happy if she rode off and never come home!’
A burst of laughter travelled across the room.
Mrs Brady’s voice lifted in frustration. ‘Gentlemen. Please. I am asking for some of our ladies to contribute to our civic good and sign up. The WPA will provide the horse and the books, and you would simply be required to commit to at least four days a week delivering them. There will be early starts and long days, given the topography of our beautiful county, but I believe there will be huge rewards.’
‘So why don’t you do it?’ came a voice from the back.
‘I would volunteer, but as many of you know I am a martyr to my hips. Dr Garnett has warned me that to ride such distances would be too great a physical challenge. Ideally we are looking for volunteers among our younger ladies.’
‘It ain’t safe for a young lady by herself. I’m agin it.’
‘’Tain’t proper. Women should be looking after the home. What’s next? Women down the mines? Driving lumber trucks?’
‘Mr Simmonds, if you can’t see there’s a world of difference between a lumber truck and a copy of Twelfth Night, then Lord help Kentucky’s economy, for I don’t know where we’ll be headed.’
‘Families should be reading the Bible. Nothing else. Who’s going to keep an eye on what they’re putting out there, anyhow? You know what they’re like up north. They might spread all kinds of crazy notions.’
‘It’s books, Mr Simmonds. The same you learned with when you were a boy. But, then, I seem to remember you were more keen on tweaking girls’ pigtails than you were on reading.’
Another burst of laughter.
Nobody moved. A woman looked at her husband, but he gave a small shake of his head.
Mrs Brady raised a hand. ‘Oh, I forgot to mention. It is a paid opportunity. Remuneration will be in the region of twenty-eight dollars a month. So, who would like to sign up?’
There was a brief murmur.
‘I can’t,’ said a woman with extravagantly pinned red hair. ‘Not with four babies under five.’
‘I just don’t see why our government is wasting hard-earned tax dollars dishing out books to people who can’t even read,’ said Jowly Man. ‘Why, half of ’em don’t even go to church.’
Mrs Brady’s voice had taken on a slightly desperate note. ‘A month’s trial. Come on, ladies. I can’t go back and tell Mrs Nofcier that not one person in Baileyville would volunteer. What kind of place would she think we were?’
Nobody spoke. The silence stretched. To Alice’s left, a bee bumped lazily against the window. People began to shift in their seats.
Mrs Brady, undaunted, eyed the assembly. ‘C’mon. Let’s not have another incident like the Orphans Fundraiser.”
There were apparently many pairs of shoes that suddenly required close attention.
‘Not a one? Really? Well … Izzy will be the first, then.’
A small, almost perfectly spherical girl, half hidden among the packed audience, raised her hands to her mouth. Alice saw rather than heard the girl’s mouth form the protest. ‘Mother!’
‘That’s one volunteer. My little girl will not be afraid to do her duty for our country, will you, Izzy? Any more?’
Nobody spoke.
‘Not one of you? You don’t think learning is important? You don’t think encouraging our less fortunate families to a position of education is imperative?’ She glared out at the meeting. ‘Well. This is not the response that I anticipated.’
‘I’ll do it,’ said Alice, into the silence.
Mrs Brady squinted, raising her hand above her eyes. ‘Is that Mrs Van Cleve?’
‘Yes, it is. Alice.’
‘You can’t sign up,’ Bennett whispered urgently.
Alice leaned forward. ‘My husband was just telling me that he believes strongly in the importance of civic duty, just as his dear mother did, so I would be happy to volunteer.’ Her skin prickled as the eyes of the audience slid towards her.
Mrs Brady fanned herself a little more vigorously. ‘But … you don’t know your way around these parts, dear. I don’t think that would be very sensible.’
‘Yes,’ Bennett hissed, ‘you don’t know your way around, Alice.’
‘I’ll show her.’ Margery O’Hare nodded to Alice. ‘I’ll ride the routes with her for a week or two. We can keep her close to town till she’s got a nose for it.’
‘Alice, I –’ Bennett whispered. He seemed flustered and glanced up at his father.
‘Can you ride?’
‘Since I was four years old.’
Mrs Brady rocked back on her heels in satisfaction. ‘Well, there you are, Miss O’Hare. You have another two librarians already.’
‘It’s a start.’
Margery O’Hare smiled at Alice, and Alice smiled back almost before she realized what she was doing.
‘Well, I do not think this is a wise idea at all,’ said George Simmonds. ‘And I shall be writing to Governor Hatch tomorrow to tell him as much. I believe sending young women out by themselves is a recipe for disaster. And I can see nothing but the foment of ungodly thoughts and bad behaviour from this ill-conceived idea, First Lady or not. Good day, Mrs Brady.’
‘Good day, Mr Simmonds.’
The gathering began to rise heavily from its seats.
‘I’ll see you at the library on Monday morning,’ said Margery O’Hare, as they walked out into the sunlight. She thrust out a hand and shook Alice’s. ‘You can call me Marge.’ She glanced up at the sky, wedged a wide-brimmed leather hat onto her head, and strode off towards a large mule, which she greeted with the same enthusiastic surprise as if it were an old friend she had just bumped into on the street.
Bennett watched her go. ‘Mrs Van Cleve, I have no idea what you think you’re doing.’
He’d said it twice before she remembered that this, in fact, was now her name.
2
Baileyville was unremarkable among the towns of southern Appalachia. Nestled between two ridges, it comprised two main roads of a stuttering mixture of brick and timber buildings, linked in a V, off which sprouted a multitude of winding lanes and paths that led at the lower level to distant hollers, as the small valleys were known, and at the higher, to a scattering of mountain houses across the tree-covered ridges. Those houses near the upper reaches of the creek traditionally housed the wealthier and more respectable families – it being easier to make a legitimate living on the flatter lands, and easier to hide a liquor still in the wilder, higher parts – but as the century had crept forward, the influx of miners and supervisors, the subtle changes in the demographics of the little town and its county, had meant that it was no longer possible to judge who was who simply by which leg of the road they lived on.