“Do you think—all this business with the floods, all the lifting and pulling and the black water, do you think it will hurt the baby? I had these pains. And I got awful cold. Still don’t feel myself.”

“Any now?”

“Nothing since . . . well, I don’t remember.”

Sven considered his response carefully. “Out of our hands, Marge,” he said. He enfolded her fingers in his. “But she’s part of you. And if she’s part of Margery O’Hare, you can bet she’s made of iron filings. If any baby can make it through a storm like that, it’ll be yours.”

“Ours,” she corrected him. She took his hand then and brought it under the covers so that he could rest his warm palm across her belly, his eyes on hers the whole time. She lay perfectly still for a minute, feeling the deep, deep sense of peace that came with his skin on hers, and then, obligingly, the baby moved again, just the faintest whisper, and their eyes widened in unison, his searching hers for confirmation of what he had just felt.

She nodded.

And Sven Gustavsson, a man not known for high emotion, pulled his free hand down over his face, and had to turn away so that she wouldn’t see the tears in his eyes.

* * *

• • •

The Bradys were not accustomed to using harsh words; while their union could not be described as the perfect meeting of minds, neither enjoyed conflict within the home, and each held for the other such a healthy respect that they rarely allowed themselves an openly cross exchange, and knew each other’s responses well enough after the best part of thirty years to usually avoid it.

So the evening that followed the floods sent something of a seismic shock through the Brady household. Mrs. Brady, having overseen the feeding and watering of the three children in the guest bedroom, seen Izzy off to bed, and having waited till all the servants had retired, had announced her daughter’s intention to rejoin the Packhorse Library project, using a tone that suggested she would accept no further discussion on the matter. Mr. Brady, having asked her to repeat those words twice just to ensure he had heard correctly, responded uncharacteristically robustly—his temper might have been frayed by the loss of a car, and the frequent telephone calls he had received, detailing flooding in various business enterprises in Louisville. Mrs. Brady responded with no less emphasis, informing her husband that she knew their daughter like she knew herself and that she was never prouder of her than she had been that day. He could sit back and let her end up a dissatisfied, unconfident stay-at-home like his sister had been—and they all knew how that had turned out—or encourage this bold, enterprising and hitherto unseen version of the girl they had known these twenty years and let her do the thing she loved. And, she added, at some pitch, that if he listened to that fool Van Cleve over his own daughter then, why, she was not sure who it was she had been married to all these years.

Those were fighting words. Mr. Brady met them with equal force, and although their house was large, their voices echoed through the wide, wood-paneled corridors and on through the night until dawn broke—unheard by the comatose children, or Izzy, who had fallen abruptly off a cliff of sleep—at which point, having reached an uneasy truce, both exhausted by this unexpected turn in their union, Mr. Brady announced wearily that he needed an hour of shut-eye at least, because there was a big day of cleaning up ahead and Lord only knew how he was supposed to get through it now.

Mrs. Brady, deflated a little in victory, felt a sudden tenderness for her husband and, after a moment, reached out a conciliatory hand. And it was like this, as the light broke, that the maid found them an hour and a half later, still fully dressed, and snoring on the huge mahogany bed, their hands entwined between them.

EIGHTEEN

   An enterprising grocer in Oklahoma recently sold two dozen buggy whips in two days. Three customers however said theirs would be used for fishing poles, while one was sold to a mother who wanted to “whale” her son.

• The Furrow, September–October 1937

Margery was washing her hair on Sunday morning, her head low over a bucket of warm water, sluicing and wringing it into a thick glossy rope, when Alice walked in. Alice muttered an apology, half asleep and a little groggy—she hadn’t realized anyone was in there—and began to back out of the little kitchen when she caught sight of Margery’s belly, briefly visible through her thin cotton nightdress, and did a double-take. Margery looked sideways at her, wrapping a cotton sheet around her head, and caught it. She straightened up, placing her palm over her belly button.

“Yes, it is, yes, I am, just over six months, and I know. Not exactly part of the plan.”

Alice’s hand flew to her mouth. She recalled suddenly the sight of Margery and Sven at the Nice ’N’ Quick the night before, how she had sat on his lap all evening, his hands wrapped protectively around her middle. “But—”

“Guess I didn’t pay as much attention to that little blue book as I should have done.”

“But—but what are you going to do?” Alice couldn’t take her eyes off the roundness of it. It seemed so unlikely. Margery’s breasts, she saw now, were almost obscenely full, a hint of blue veins criss-crossing her chest where her robe had slipped to reveal a sliver of pale skin.

“Do? Not much I can do.”

“But you’re not married!”

“Married! That’s what you’re fretting about?” Margery let out a hoot. “Alice, you think I give a fig what people around here think of me? Why, Sven and I are good as married. We’ll bring the child up and we’ll be sweeter to her and to each other than most married people around here. I’ll educate her and teach her right from wrong, and as long as she has her ma and pa to love her, I can’t see as what I’m wearing on my left hand is anyone else’s business.”

Alice couldn’t get her head around the idea that someone could be six months pregnant and not care that her baby might be a bastard, that it might even go to Hell. And yet faced with Margery’s cheerful certainty, her—yes, looking closely at her face, one might even call it radiance—it was hard to maintain that this really was a disaster.

She let out a long breath. “Does . . . anyone . . . know?”

“Aside from Sven?” Margery rubbed at her hair vigorously, then paused to check the dampness of her hair with her fingers. “Well, we haven’t exactly hollered about it. But I can’t keep it quiet for much longer. Poor old Charley will be buckling at the knees if I get much bigger.”

A baby. Alice was filled with a complex mix of emotions—shock, admiration that, yet again, Margery had decided to play life by her own rules—but shot through it all, sadness: that everything had to change, that she might not again have her friend to gallop up mountainsides, to laugh with in the snug confines of the library. Margery would surely stay home now, a mother like everyone else. She wondered what would even happen to the library with Margery gone: she was the heart and backbone of it. And then a more worrying thought occurred. How could she stay here once the baby was born? There would be no room. There was barely enough for the three of them as it was.