Margery’s voice lifted. She lurched forward and gripped his hand, stopping him. “Sven, I have nothing left. I have no freedom, no dignity, no future. The only damn thing I have is hope that for this girl, my heart, the thing I love most in the whole world, it might work out different. So if you love me, like you say you do, give me what I’m asking. I don’t want my baby’s childhood marked out in visits to the jail. I will not have you both watch me waste away week by week, year by year in the state prison, with lice in my hair and the stink of the slop buckets, beat down by the bigots that run this town and going slowly stir crazy. I will not have her seeing it. You’ll make her happy, I know you can, and when you talk of me, you tell her not of this, but of me riding out on Charley, in the mountains, doing what I loved to do.”

His hand closed around hers. His voice broke, and he kept shaking his head, in a way that suggested he wasn’t even sure he was doing it. “I can’t leave you, Marge.”

She withdrew her hand. She took the sleeping baby and placed her gently in his arms. Then Margery leaned forward, and placed a kiss on the baby’s head. She kept her lips there for a moment, her eyes closed tight. She opened them, drinking her in as if she were imprinting some part of her deep within. “Bye-bye, sweetheart. Mama loves you very much.”

She touched the back of his knuckles lightly with her fingertips, an instruction. And then, as Sven sat in shock, Margery O’Hare stood upright, her hand braced on the table, and shouted for the jailer to walk her to her cell.

She didn’t look back.

* * *

• • •

True to her word, he was the last visitor she saw. Alice arrived that afternoon with a pound cake and Deputy Dulles said regretfully (for he did love Alice’s cakes) that he was real sorry but Miss O’Hare was adamant she didn’t want to see anyone that day.

“Is there a problem with the baby?”

“Baby ain’t there no more. She left with her daddy this morning.”

He was real sorry but rules was rules and he couldn’t force Miss O’Hare to see Alice. He did, however, agree to take the cake with the promise he’d carry it down to her later. When Kathleen Bligh went two days later she would receive the same response, and Sophia and Mrs. Brady after her.

Alice rode home, her mind spinning, and found Sven on the porch with the baby resting on his shoulder, her button eyes wide at the unfamiliar sunlight and the moving shadows of the trees. “Sven?”

Alice dismounted, hooked Spirit’s reins over the post. “Sven? What on earth is going on?”

He couldn’t look at her. His eyes were red-rimmed, and he kept his face turned away.

“Sven?”

“She’s the stubbornest damn woman in Kentucky.”

On cue the baby started to cry, the raw, ragged cries of a child who has had to cope with too many changes in a single day and is suddenly, catastrophically, overwhelmed. Sven patted her back ineffectually and, after a moment, Alice stepped forward and took the baby from him. His face sank into his broad, scarred hands. The baby nuzzled into Alice’s shoulder, then pulled her head back, her tiny mouth an O of dismay, as if appalled by the discovery that this was not her mother.

“We’ll fix it, Sven. We’ll make her see sense.”

He shook his head. “Why would we?” His voice emerged muffled through his rough hands. “She’s right. That’s the worst of it, Alice. She’s right.”

* * *

• • •

Through Kathleen, who knew everything and everyone, Alice found a woman in the next town who would wet-nurse the baby, her own having recently weaned, for a small sum. Every morning Sven would drive the baby over to the white clapboard farmhouse and little Virginia would be handed over for food and care. It made all of them a little uneasy to see it—the child belonged with her mother—and Virginia herself had swiftly become withdrawn, her eyes watchful, her thumb plugged warily into her mouth, as if she no longer trusted the world to be a benign and reliable place. But what else could they do? The child was fed; Sven was free to find work. Alice and the girls were able to get by as best they could, and if their hearts were sick and their stomachs tight with nerves, well, that was the way it was.

TWENTY-THREE

   I don’t ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there’ll always be the person I am to-night.

• F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, Tender Is the Night

A near circus atmosphere descended on Baileyville, the kind of commotion that made Tex Lafayette’s appearance look like a Sunday School reunion. As news of the start date had broken across the town the mood seemed to shift, and not necessarily in Margery’s favor. The extended McCullough clan began to arrive from out of town—distant cousins from Tennessee, from Michigan and North Carolina, some of whom had barely seen McCullough in decades but who now found themselves highly invested in the idea of retribution for their beloved relative, and swiftly took to congregating outside either the jailhouse or the library, to shout abuse and threaten vengeance.

Fred had come down twice from his house to try to calm things, and when that failed, to reveal his gun and announce that the women must be allowed to get on with their work. The town seemed split in two with their arrival, dividing between those who were disposed to see all the wrong in Margery’s family as evidence of her own bad blood, and those who preferred to go on their own experience, and thanked her for bringing books and a little pleasantry into their lives.

Twice Beth got into fist-fights on the back of Margery’s reputation, once in the store and once on the steps outside the library, and had taken to walking around with her hands bunched, as if permanently braced to throw a punch. Izzy wept frequently and silently, and would shake her head mutely if anyone spoke to her of it, as if the act of talking were too much. Kathleen and Sophia said little, but their somber faces told of which way they thought this would go. Alice could no longer visit the jail, in accordance with Margery’s wishes, but felt her presence in the little concrete building as if they were connected by threads. She was eating a little, Deputy Dulles said, when she stopped by. Didn’t speak much, though. Seemed to spend a lot of time sleeping.

Sven left town. He bought a small wagon and a young horse, packed up what remained of his belongings and moved out of Fred’s to a one-room cabin a short distance from the wet-nurse on the eastern side of the Cumberland Gap. He could not stay in Baileyville, not with people saying what they were. Not with the prospect of seeing the woman he loved brought even lower, and the crying baby in earshot of her mother. His eyes were red with exhaustion, and new deep grooves ran down each side of his mouth that had nothing to do with the baby. Fred promised him at the first word of anything he would drive right over.