Carry the World

by Susan Fanetti

  Mrs. Pitts had spoken about this at length, but Ada thought she would have done so even without the instruction; it seemed only right, and in keeping with the idea that they librarians brought the world up the mountain.

  “Well, if you wouldn’t mind me setting a spell with you, I can read to you. I’ve got newspapers, too.”

  Mrs. Devlin must have said something from behind her husband then; he twisted his head, looking over his shoulder, and his sharp Adam’s apple bobbed brusquely as he spoke. Ada couldn’t hear what he said, but she felt a quiver of anxiety nonetheless. She remembered the Devlins, and the bruises Mrs. Devlin often sported. This was a world in which women had a place, and it was more or less accepted that, if they stepped out of it, their men would put them back in it with as much force as necessary. Even so, Mrs. Devlin had seemed to wear more bruises, more frequently, than most. Ada worried that she’d provoked marital strife simply by showing up.

  “We don’t need no books here, teacher. You go on and find somebody else.”

  “Alright. Thank you for your time, Mr. Devlin.”

  The man receded into his house and closed the door.

  Ada turned and nudged Henrietta to walk on. The Devlins were part of her route, and she wouldn’t give up, but she’d have to think about how to approach them in the future.

  Though others had been more friendly than Mr. Devlin, only one house, where the Hoopers, an elderly couple on their own, lived, had welcomed her in. Mr. Hooper was bedridden, and Mrs. Hooper had all she could do to keep them alive. They subsisted on the help of their neighbors and what kindnesses came their way. Ada sat in their dim but tidy little room and read to them from the Bible. When she left, Mrs. Hooper took Ada’s face in her bony hands and kissed her on the lips. “Yer a angel, Mizz Ada. Sent straight from our good Lord to give us peace today. We thank you.”

  Ada rode away from that leaning cabin full of the pleasure of a good thing done—and also melancholy. Her parents were elderly, too. Not so old as Mr. and Mrs. Hooper, but her mother had been forty-five when Ada came to them, and her father three years older than that. Both past seventy now, they were too old to scratch out their own living.

  She’d never considered her parents to be old until recently. They’d simply been her parents, older than she, and somehow eternal. Since she’d become a widow and returned home, and since her father had hurt his back, Ada had finally begun to see that her parents were in the last chapter of their lives.

  But they lived well down the mountain and closer to the world than the Hoopers did. They had neighbors to look after them when Ada could not, and hope for help should trouble strike. They’d be safe and sheltered, and not alone, until the book of their lives closed.

  Her old schoolhouse at the back of Bull Holler was easily the best stop of her first day. It came with a melancholy of its own—she’d loved those brief years of teaching—but the joyous clamor of children crowding around Henrietta before Ada could dismount was a wonderful, restoring experience. They’d known what she was as soon as they’d seen her, because their teacher had known. She emptied her packs of slim children’s books—fairy tales and Bible stories, picture books and adventure yarns. One older boy, probably only a year or so from leaving school, took Treasure Island. She took their names and wrote them in her ledger, explaining when she’d be back to change those books for different ones.

  When she and Henrietta walked away, headed this time down the mountain, the children waved and called out their goodbyes as if they were sending off a hero.

  She’d lingered too long, and the sun had already dropped behind the mountain peaks. Her ride home would happen in gloom, and maybe finish in dark, but she didn’t mind.

  It had been a good day.

  This was a good job.

  Chapter Four

  The first day became the first week, and then the second. By then, Ada and Henrietta had traveled her whole route and distributed a goodly portion of her books. There were some who wanted no part of her, neither her company nor her offerings, and she’d been run off a few places on the end of a cocked rifle, but most people were glad to see her, or at least willing to offer her and her horse a drink of water before they sent her on her way.

  As she’d expected, the higher up the mountain she went, the less hospitable the people were. She was a stranger to them, and an agent of the government. Most wanted no part of her.

  That didn’t mean she wouldn’t keep trying. It was those benighted souls, the ones so remote they didn’t even have a schoolhouse for their children, who most needed the service she provided.

  She’d made it home every night those first two weeks, but most nights she arrived at the barn in the dark, with her father and mother beset with worry. On three different occasions, her mother had wept with relief when Ada stepped into the house.

  Mrs. Pitts had promised she could be home every night, weather or misadventure notwithstanding, and strictly speaking, it was true. But the days were too long. It was hard on her parents’ nerves, and on Ada and Henrietta’s bodies. She didn’t know whether she was riding too slowly or spending too much time with the people she served, or getting too late a start—though she was on the road with first light.

  Finally, on the Saturday afternoon following the completion of her first full circuit, with the most detailed information she could gather about her route, Ada sat down with her map and drew out a different scheme. No major adjustments, just a more sensible path, one forged by a hand that knew these mountains. Mrs. Pitt wasn’t a mountain woman. She’d made the route without knowing the people up here and how they lived, simply by connecting dots on the map.

  The mountains and their people were more than mere dots.

  Ada had been an obedient child and was a compliant adult, with nary a rebellious bone in her body. She felt a touch discomforted, improving on a plan made by the woman who’d hand her her pay in a couple weeks, but something had to change. Riding down the mountain in the dark scared her a little. Bears and panthers prowled more freely under the moon, and were harder to see coming. Twice, she’d been confronted with eyes glowing in the moonlight and the low rumble of a warning growl. She and Hen had been still and quiet and eventually been left alone, but she wondered how long such fortune would hold out.

  There was no one who’d check in on her and ensure she was following the route that had been set for her, and she hadn’t been told in so many words that that route was sacrosanct. She wasn’t exactly breaking any rules. So on the following Monday, Ada dressed in another set of layers—autumn in the mountains was nearly as crisp as winter down below—packed up her books and things, which now included a few of her own volumes and some recent papers she’d asked the people at church to donate, saddled up Henrietta, and headed up for her first day of second visits. Today, she meant to swap books with those who’d borrowed and try again with those who hadn’t.

  As she rode away from the barn, the kitchen window flashed a pale golden glow. Her father was awake. She’d made up what food she could the night before, but these days, making meals for him and her mother was her father’s job.

  “’I have set the LORD always before me,’” Ada read, “’because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved. There for my heart is glad and my glory rejoiceth: my flesh also shall rest in hope. For thou wilt not leave my soul in hell; neither wilt thou suffer thing Holy One to see corruption. Thou wilt shew me the path of life: in thy presence is fulness of joy; at thy right hand there are pleasures for evermore.’”

  She looked up from the Bible. Mr. Hooper had taken a turn since she’d first visited. He lay on his back, sucking rough breaths in erratic bursts, as if each one took more strength than he had. Ada wasn’t sure he knew she was there.

  Mrs. Hooper sat beside him, a straight-back chair pulled up close to the bedside so she could hold her husband’s hand.

  “I could send for a doctor,” Ada offered, but Mrs. Hooper shook the offer away.

  “Thank you, but no. Don’t
need no doctor. God takes us when He wants us, Mizz Ada. He give me and him a long time together, and I ain’t nothin’ but grateful for it.”

  “Is there anyone to help you?”

  The old lady gave her a smile brittle with coming sorrow, but soft with peace. “Well, sure they is. We got neighbors, and Preacher Lawson comes ‘round. We fine. I’d like it much if you’d read from that pretty Bible s’more, though. Maybe Psalm 23?”

  Ada didn’t need to read to recite that psalm, but she flipped the onion-skin pages forward from Psalm 16 and held the book on her hands like an offering. “’The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.’” Mrs. Hooper picked up the verse with her, and they recited together the assurance that God was with them wherever they were, and always would be.

  She stayed a while with the Hoopers, helping Mrs. Hooper prepare a small meal and sorting out some papers. Helping illiterate neighbors with their paperwork had been a way she’d earned money, or made trades, even while she was married, and she was happy to help people now as part of her job as well. As she saw it, and as Mrs. Pitts had explained to her, the books were simply the tokens she left behind. What she was really bringing the people on her route was companionship—in the form of stories and in her own presence.

  On her revised route, she stopped at the Devlins’ later in the day and approached warily, ready to face Mr. Devlin’s rifle again. The dog wasn’t on the porch, and Ada breathed easier. That probably meant Devlin was away, maybe hunting. She nudged Henrietta and came closer to the house. Two youngsters, one wearing a sagging diaper under a ragged sweater, and the other dressed in what had to be his father’s undershirt, knotted up so it wouldn’t drag, played in the dirt near the woods. The temperature was low for them to be so scantily dressed, but they didn’t seem to mind the chill.

  The Devlins had had five children when she’d taught four of them. These two were younger than the years since she’d taught, so they’d increased their brood by at least two.

  Seven children. A family of nine living off nothing but this harsh land, with a man like Tobias Devlin at the head of their table. The thought made Ada’s heart sore.

  Mrs. Devlin came around the front, carrying a tattered reed basket mounded with wash just off the line. She stopped when she saw Ada and cast her eyes guiltily about.

  “Hello, Mrs. Devlin! How are you?”

  Jezebel Devlin had the looks of a once-pretty woman worn down by life and time. She was thin at the shoulder and thick at the hips. Her greying, mousy brown hair was captured in a few pins. Her flour-sack dress was so oft-washed the color and pattern had nearly worn away to a dull grey. She had a bruise on her cheek that looked to be a week or so old.

  Maybe two weeks. Maybe the last time she was here, that sharp swivel of Mr. Devlin’s head, that bouncing Adam’s apple that Ada had thought meant harshly spoken words, had meant a blow as well. Maybe that bruise had been her fault.

  “What you want?” Mrs. Devlin asked, her voice higher than her husband’s but her tone the same.

  “I’ve brought books and magazines again. I thought I’d see if you might have changed your mind.”

  “Like Tobias tol’ you before, we ain’t got no use for books here.”

  “How about for the children? I have books to help them with their studies, and others just for fun. Picture books for the little ones.” She flipped a pack open and slid out a pretty picture book—a story told with only pictures, with no confusing words to make an illiterate adult feel stupid. Ada thought of it as an entry ticket: if they enjoyed the magic of a story like this, they might want more.

  The exhausted mother looked across her yard to the little boys playing with rocks and dirt and sticks. She gnawed on her lip, and Ada understood: Mrs. Devlin didn’t want to say no, but she would. Because Mr. Devlin had laid down the law. The way so many men did.

  Ada had been blessed to have been raised by her father, who could be hard in his way, and stubborn, but was gentle in love. He treated his wife and daughter with devotion and care. Maybe if Ada had been a naturally rebellious child, or if she hadn’t been her parents’ only surviving child, come so late in their lives that her mother had thought the change had come on her and hadn’t realized she was carrying until far into the pregnancy—maybe she would have known what it was like to have the law laid down, but that hadn’t been the case in her home.

  Nor had it been the case with George. He, too, had been gentle, and treated Ada as a partner in their marriage. She didn’t think she could have fallen in love with any other kind of man.

  She hadn’t gotten to keep him long, but nevertheless, she’d been blessed.

  “We can’t have no books here. You gotta git,” Mrs. Devlin finally said, casting another worried look around.

  Just then, the older boy hit the younger with a stick, and the baby began to shriek. Ada and Mrs. Devlin turned in tandem. The baby was bleeding.

  “Benny! What you do?!” Mrs. Devlin dropped the basket and ran to her boys. The basket fell to its side, spilling clean laundry onto the dirt.

  Ada swung off Henrietta’s back and hurried to pick up the laundry. As she set the basket right and pulled the top sheet, now dirty again, away from the still-clean wash, she heard the crack of Mrs. Devlin’s hand on young flesh. She didn’t look, but heard several sharp strikes. She draped the dirty sheet over one arm and picked up the basket.

  “You git inside, boy!” Mrs. Devlin demanded, and the older boy—Benny—hurried red-faced into the house, holding both hands on his bottom.

  Mrs. Devlin came back to the basket, the younger boy on her hip. Blood trickled down his face in a thin stream, cutting through a smear on his cheek where his mother must have wiped it.

  She studied the wash in Ada’s arms, fixing on the sheet that had fallen into the dirt, and her face collapsed into a mask of weary fear. “Oh no.”

  “What can I do to help?” Ada asked, not knowing what else to say or do.

  But Mrs. Devlin shook her head. She set the baby on his bare feet and took the basket and sheet from Ada. “Please go ‘way. Please. He’ll be back soon. Yer gonna make it all worse.”

  It broke Ada’s heart, but she knew it was true. “Alright, Mrs. Devlin. I’ll go. I’ll try again another time. You take care now.”

  Mrs. Devlin stood where she was and watched her go, her expression perfectly empty.

  Good weather had held for most of Ada’s first three weeks of riding. There had been a few sprinkles and some overnight showers, but for the most part, the days had been bright and the ripening autumn chill hadn’t bothered her in her careful layers.

  That changed at the end of her third week, on the day she rode farthest from home, high on the mountain, deep into the most isolated world of the hills. Cable’s Holler.

  Many hollers—most maps called them ‘Hollows,’ but in Ada’s experience, no one who’d even met someone from this part of the world pronounced it that way—were almost like villages, tiny communities with a place for worship and schooling, maybe even a simple kind of store. If they didn’t have a preacher or teacher living with them, they at least got a fairly regular visit from the itinerant variety. People lived in close enough proximity to each other to be neighborly and helpful—and to squabble, too, of course. To be a community.

  But if you went up high enough, or dug in deep enough, that cohesion began to falter. The people who lived so far from the busy world wanted no part of community, either because they’d never known it and didn’t understand it, or because they did know it and rejected it.

  Nobody in the hills was what Ada would call outgoing—they were all suspicious of the world below and people who came from it. They kept themselves to themselves, as it was said. But the family that lived in Cable’s Holler were hardly more than ghosts, as far as Ada had been able to tell thus far.

  Cable’s Holler was a dot on her map, and it was a discernable place on the mountain—a sudden valley, narrow and steep, carved into its craggy side—but it wasn’t a community, not
any longer. Not for a generation, at least.

  It had no worship place or schoolhouse, nothing like a tiny store. Maybe once they had, but Ada saw no signs. There were four homesteads, but three had gone derelict; the families that had tenanted them had either finally died out or simply abandoned them. Only one home remained occupied, at the farthest reach of the holler, and showed signs that life was trying to live.

  As cabins went, it was roomy, with a rare second story, and suggested that at some distant point in the past, the family had known comparative prosperity. It looked like it might even have been whitewashed once. But it had nearly gone back to nature now and looked only slightly more stable than its caving-in neighbors toward the head of the holler.

  She didn’t even know the family’s name, or how many people lived there. On her first attempt to visit, no one had come out of the cabin, and she’d nearly decided that it, too, was abandoned, until she’d heard a child’s voice inside, and then the soft rumble of a man’s answer.

  No amount of cajoling on her part had induced the occupants to come to the door, and Ada had eventually given up and gone on with her route.

  Today, her second visit, she’d very nearly cut Cable’s Holler from her path. Rain had fallen steadily on her head all day. The temperature seemed barely high enough to keep it from turning to ice. She was in her first foul temper of her librarian experience, and, seeing as she’d not yet received her wages, the allure of the work had washed away with the frosty rain dripping down her back. She wanted to go home, and Cable’s Holler was a two-hour trek from her stop just before it. To what purpose? So she could pound on a door and peer through the tatters in decomposing curtains for fifteen minutes before giving up again and turning back?

  Only one thing had her turning Henrietta toward Cable’s Holler on this unpleasant, demoralizing day: it was her job. She simply didn’t have it in her not to meet her obligations.

  So she slogged over the muddy, rocky terrain, trusting Henrietta to know where to put her hooves down, and they made their way to the remotest part of her route.