“You are a snake! You have been corrupted by Margery O’Hare and now you are trying to corrupt my son!”

“I was trying to be a wife to him! And there’s more to being a wife than arranging dolls and stupid china birds!”

Annie peered around the doorway with the last plate, immobile.

“Don’t you dare criticize my Dolores’s precious things, you ungrateful wretch! You aren’t fit to touch the heel of that woman’s shoes! And tomorrow morning you’re going to go up those mountains and fetch my dolls back.”

“I will not. I’m not taking those dolls away from two motherless children.”

Van Cleve raised a stubby finger and jabbed it at her face. “Then you’re banned from that damned library from now on, you hear me?”

“No.” She didn’t blink.

“What do you mean, no?”

“I told you before. I’m a grown woman. You don’t get to ban me from anything.”

Afterward she remembered thinking distantly that old man Van Cleve’s face had grown so crimson that she feared his heart might give out. But instead he lifted his arm, and before she realized what was happening a white-hot pain exploded at the side of her head, and she collapsed against the table, her knees buckling under her.

Everything went black. Her hands gripped the tablecloth, the plates collapsing toward her as her fingers closed around the white damask, pulling it down until her knees hit the floor.

“Pa!”

“I’m doing what you should have done a long time ago! Knocking some sense into this wife of yours!” Van Cleve roared, his fat fist banging down on the tablecloth so that everything in the room seemed to shudder. Then, before she could gather her thoughts, her hair was pulled back sharply, and another blow, this time her temple, so that her head bounced off the edge of the table, and as the room spun, she was dimly aware of movement, shouting, the clatter of plates hitting the floor. Alice lifted an arm, tried to shield herself, braced for the next. But from the corner of her eye, she glimpsed Bennett in front of his father, an exchange of voices she could barely make out over the ringing in her ears.

She climbed heavily to her feet, pain clouding her thoughts, and staggered. As the room bucked around her she was dimly aware of Annie’s shocked face at the kitchen door. The taste of iron flooded the back of her throat.

She heard distant shouting, Bennett’s “No . . . No, Pa!” Alice realized that her napkin was still balled in her fist. She looked down. It was spattered with blood. She stared at it, blinking, trying to register what she was seeing. She straightened up, took a moment for the room to stop spinning, then placed it neatly on the table.

And then, without stopping to pick up her coat, Alice walked unsteadily past the two men into the hallway, opened the front door, and continued walking all the way up the snow-covered drive.

* * *

• • •

An hour and twenty-five minutes later, Margery opened the door a crack, her eyes narrowed in the dark, and found not McCullough or one of his clan, but the thin figure of Alice Van Cleve, shivering in a pale blue dress, her stockings ripped and her shoes crusted with snow. Her teeth chattered and the side of her head was bloodied, her left eye pursed into a livid purple bruise. Blood leached rust and scarlet into the neckline of her dress, and what looked like gravy spattered her lap. They stared at each other as Bluey barked furiously at the window.

Alice’s voice, when it came, was thick, as though her tongue was swollen.

“You . . . said we were friends?”

Margery un-cocked her rifle and placed it against the doorframe. She opened the door and took her friend’s elbow. “Come on in. You come on in.” She glanced around at the darkened mountainside, then closed and bolted the door behind her.

TWELVE

   The woman of the mountains leads a difficult life, while the man is lord of the household. Whether he works, visits, or roams through the woods with dog and gun is nobody’s business but his own. . . . He is entirely unable to understand any interference in his affairs by society; if he turns his corn into “likker,” he is dealing with what is his.

• WPA, The WPA Guide to Kentucky

There were certain unspoken rules of society in Baileyville, and one lasting tenet was that you didn’t interfere in the private business of a man and his wife. There were many who might have been aware of beatings in their holler, man to woman, and, occasionally, the other way around, but few inhabitants would have dreamed of intervening, unless it directly infringed upon their own lives in lost sleep or disturbed routines. It was just the way things were. Words were shouted, blows were delivered, and occasionally apologies were given, or not, bruises and cuts healed and things returned to normal.

Luckily for Alice, Margery had never paid much heed to how other people did things. She cleaned the blood from Alice’s face and applied a comfrey paste to the bruises. She asked nothing, and Alice volunteered nothing, except to wince and tighten her jaw at the worst of it. Then, when the girl finally went to bed, Margery spoke discreetly to Sven and they agreed to take it in turns to sit downstairs in the small hours before dawn so that should Van Cleve come by he would find that there were circumstances in which a man might not simply drag his wife—or his daughter-in-law—home again, no matter what public embarrassment that might apparently entail for him.

Predictably, for a man used to getting his own way, Van Cleve did come by shortly before dawn, though Alice would never know that, sleeping the sleep of the profoundly shocked in Margery’s spare room. Margery’s cabin was not accessible by road, and he was obliged to walk the last half-mile so that he arrived florid and sweaty despite the snow, a torch held up in front of him.

“O’Hare?” he roared. And then when no answer came: “O’HARE!”

“You going to answer him?” Sven, who was making coffee, lifted his head.

The dog barked furiously at the window, earning a muttered curse from outside. In the stables Charley kicked at his bucket.

“Don’t really see why I should answer a man who won’t give me the courtesy of a title, do you?”

“No, I don’t believe you should,” said Sven, calmly. He had sat playing solitaire for half the night, one eye on the door, a river of dark thoughts running through his head about men who beat women.

“Margery O’Hare!”

“Oh, Lord. You know he’ll wake her if he carries on this loud.”

Wordlessly, Sven handed Margery his gun and she walked to the screen door and opened it, the rifle held loosely in her left hand as she stepped out onto the stoop, making sure Van Cleve could see it. “Can I help you, Mr. Van Cleve?”