“Just leave them by the post.”

“Done! There they are! . . . Lovely!” Alice stooped to place the books in a neat pile, then backed away and turned to spring onto her horse. “Right. I’m . . . I’m going now. Be sure to let me know if there’s anything particular you want me to bring next week.”

She lifted a hand. Jim Horner was standing in the doorway, two girls behind him, watching her. Although her heart was still beating wildly, when she reached the bottom of the dirt track she found she was smiling.

FIVE

   Each mine, or group of mines, became a social center with no privately owned property except the mine, and no public places or public highway except the bed of the creek, which flowed between the mountain walls. These groups of villages dot the mountain sides down the river valleys and need only castles, draw-bridges, and donjon-keeps to reproduce to the physical eye a view of feudal days.

• United States Coal Commission in 1923

It pained Margery to admit it, but the little library on Split Creek Road was growing chaotic and, faced with the ever-growing demand for books, not one of the four of them had time to do much about it. Despite the initial suspicion of some inhabitants of Lee County, word had spread about the book ladies, as they had become known, and within a few short weeks it was more common for them to be greeted by eager smiles than it was for doors to be rapidly closed in their faces. Families clamored for reading material, from the Woman’s Home Companion to The Furrow for men. Everything from Charles Dickens to the Dime Mystery Magazine was ripped from their hands almost as soon as they could pull it from their saddlebags. The comic books, wildly popular among the county’s children, suffered most, being thumbed to death or their fragile pages ripped as siblings fought over them. Magazines would occasionally be returned with a favorite page quietly removed. And still the demand came: Miss, have you got new books for us?

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 toward 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 gray 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 toward her as she rode up, his hand shielding his eyes from the sun.