“Darling? Do you know what bird that is? I’ve never seen anything as red as that. Look! Even its beak is red.”

“I’m not much for reading up on birds and such, sweetheart.” She saw that Bennett’s eyes were closed. He slapped at a bug on the side of his cheek, and held out his hand for another ginger beer.

Margery knew all the different birds, Alice thought, as she reached across to the hamper. She resolved to ask her the following morning. As they rode, Margery talked to Alice of milkweed and goldenrod, pointing out Jack-in-the-pulpit and the tiny fragile flowers of touch-me-nots, so that once where Alice had just seen a sea of green, she had pulled back a veil to reveal a whole new dimension.

Below them the creek trickled peacefully; the same creek, Margery had warned her, that would become a destructive torrent during the spring. It seemed so unlikely. For now the earth was dry, the grass a soft thatch under their heads, the crickets a steady hum across the meadow. Alice handed her husband the bottle and waited as he lifted himself on one elbow to take a swig from it, half hoping that he would just lean over her and scoop her up. When he lowered himself down she tucked herself into his arm and placed her hand on his shirt.

“Well, I could just stay like this all day,” he said peaceably.

She reached her arm across him. Her husband smelled better than any man she’d ever met. It was as if he carried the sweetness of the Kentucky grass with him. Other men sweated and grew sour and grubby. Bennett always returned from the mine settlement as if he had just walked out of a magazine advertisement. She gazed at his face, at the strong contours of his chin, the way his honey-colored hair was clipped short just around his ears.

“Do you think I’m pretty, Bennett?”

“You know I think you’re pretty.” His voice was sleepy.

“Are you happy we got married?”

“Of course I am.”

Alice trailed a finger around his shirt button. “Then why—”

“Let’s not get all serious, Alice, huh? No need to go on about things, is there? Can’t we just have a nice time?”

Alice lifted her hand from his shirt. She twisted and lowered herself down onto the rug so that only their shoulders were touching. “Sure.”

They lay in the grass, side by side, looking up at the sky, in silence. When he spoke again, his voice was soft. “Alice?”

She glanced at him. She swallowed, her heart thumping against her ribcage. She placed her hand on his, trying to convey to him her tacit encouragement, to tell him without words that she would be a support, that it would be okay, whatever he said. She was his wife, after all.

She waited a moment. “Yes?”

“It’s a cardinal,” he said. “The red one. I’m pretty sure it’s a cardinal.”

FOUR

    . . . marriage, they say, halves one’s rights and doubles one’s duties.

• LOUISA MAY ALCOTT, Little Women

The first memory Margery O’Hare had was of sitting under her mother’s kitchen table and watching through her fingers as her father slugged her fourteen-year-old brother Jack across the room, knocking two teeth clean out of his jaw when he tried to stop him beating her mother. Her mother, who took a fair number of beatings but would not tolerate that fate for her children, promptly threw a kitchen chair at her husband’s head, leaving him with a jagged scar on his forehead that remained until he died. He hit her back with its smashed leg, of course, once he was able to stand straight, and the fight had only stopped when Papaw O’Hare had staggered round from next door with his rifle at his shoulder and murder in his eyes and threatened to blow Frank O’Hare’s damn head clean off his damn shoulders if he didn’t stop. It wasn’t that Grandpa believed his son beating his wife was inherently wrong, Margery discovered some time later, but Memaw had been trying to listen to the wireless and half the holler couldn’t hear past the screaming. There was a hole in the pinewood wall that Margery could put her whole fist into for the rest of her childhood.

Jack left for good that day, a wad of bloodied cotton in his mouth and his one good shirt in his kit bag, and the next time Margery heard his name (leaving was considered such an act of family disloyalty he was effectively disappeared from family history) was eight years later when they received a wire to say that Jack had died after being hit by a railroad car in Missouri. Her mother had cried salty, heartbroken tears into her apron, but her father had hurled a book at her and told her to pull her damn self together before he really gave her something to cry about and disappeared to his stills. The book was Black Beauty and Margery never forgave him for having ripped off the back cover while doing so and somehow her love for her lost brother and her desire to escape into the world of books became melded together into something fierce and obstinate in that one broken-backed copy.

Don’t you marry one of these fools, her mother would whisper to her and her sister, as she tucked them into the big hay bed in the back room. You make sure you two get as far from this damn mountain as you can. As soon as you can. You promise me.

The girls had nodded solemnly.

Virginia had got away all right, got as far as Lewisburg, only to marry a man who turned out to be just as handy with his fists as their father had been. Her mother, thank goodness, was not alive to see it, having caught pneumonia six months after the wedding and died within three days; the same strain that took three of Margery’s brothers. Their graves were marked with small stones on a hill overlooking the holler.

When her father died, killed in a drunken gunfight with Bill McCullough—the latest sorry episode in a clan feud that had lasted generations—the residents of Baileyville noted that Margery O’Hare didn’t shed so much as a tear. “Why would I?” she said, when Pastor McIntosh asked her if she was quite all right. “I’m glad he’s dead. Can’t do no more harm to no one.” The fact that Frank O’Hare was reviled in town, and that everyone knew she was right, didn’t stop them deciding that the surviving O’Hare girl was as odd as the rest of them and that, frankly, the fewer of that bloodline still around, the better.

“Can I ask you about your family?” Alice had said, as they saddled up the horses, shortly after dawn.

Margery, her thoughts still lost somewhere in Sven’s strong, hard body, had had to be spoken to twice before she realized what Alice was saying. “Ask what you want.” She glanced over. “Let me guess. Someone tell you you shouldn’t be around me because of my daddy?”

“Well, yes,” said Alice, after a pause. Mr. Van Cleve had given her a lecture on that exact subject the previous evening, accompanied by much spluttering and finger-pointing. Alice had wielded the good name of Mrs. Brady as a shield but it had been an uncomfortable exchange.

Margery nodded, as if this was no surprise. She swung her saddle onto the rail and ran her fingers over Charley’s back, checking him for bumps and sores. “Frank O’Hare supplied moonshine to half the county. Shot up anyone who tried to take over his patch. Shot ’em if he reckoned they’d even thought about it. Killed more people than I know of, and left scars on everyone he was close to.”