Book One
Somewhere among the nestled fissures and cradling dark-blue bluffs, between towns such as Hazard, Hell-fer-Sartain, Kingdom Come, and Troublesome, comes the Book Woman.
Steadfast, she rides her mule through the hollers to deliver books. Where shadow-draped days set between the hills before the blue hour dissolves into coal-dust skies and a new dawn welcomes the rare delight of a children’s moon, the Book Woman pushes on.
Along winding paths of marmalade leaves, her faithful beast’s steady clip-clops traverse the miles and years while the mothers of the mountains watch over their daughter, who carries the mantle of courage—loosening the stories from Kentucky’s bound hands that have been rooted like the poplar and pine, forever tied to the old land.
***
Kentucky, 1953
For more than a decade, the dark hills of Thousandsticks, Kentucky, had swaddled the family, protecting them from those who would hunt their kind.
But this morning a fury swept over the small home stitched inside the pine-bathed woods crowned in March’s bitter hoarfrost.
No sooner had the couple seen their daughter safely spirited away into the Cumberland Forest than the lawman descended upon the Book Woman and her husband.
The deputy reached for the woman first, and she raised a hand, trying to shield herself, dropping the pillow she carried.
He grabbed hold of the Book Woman’s wrist, twisting the cobalt-blue arm up behind her back, leaving her wailing.
Her husband cursed, his bellows hulling winter bark off trees, and he snatched the official up by the collar, pulling him off his wife. Whipping out a club, the lawman pushed her aside and battered the man until he staggered and fell to the ground.
The woman cradled her injured arm and cried out for her husband as he curled himself into a ball, wrapping his arms over the pain, rocking.
The Book Woman dropped to the stiff frozen grass, hovering over her husband, pleading to the lawman, “Please, leave us be. Please, sir, spare him.”
Breathless, her husband struggled to rise but slumped over. Finally, he pulled himself to his knees and bowed his head to his wife’s brow. “Don’t you give up on us,” he said hoarsely.
She brushed a kiss across his hand and pressed it to her wet cheek. He clasped it and whispered into a cardinal’s quickening cheer, the cold mist escaping his breaths, “I won’t ever give up.”
The deputy planted a boot against her husband’s shoulder and drove his heel down, breaking them apart. She watched him crumple to the ground, scattering feathers of ice and snow.
Straining, fighting to rise, the man crawled over to his wife.
“Lie still,” the deputy shouted.
From the nearby forest rose the fury of the Book Woman’s beast, and the maddening screams of the mule’s temper blistered the slumbering winter woodland.
Scolding blackbirds flew up from the trees, their blackening bursts splatted against blue skies, strangling her husband’s weakened protests.
In the distance, the sheriff’s automobile appeared, spraying up muddy slush. A moment later, he stepped out and motioned his deputy toward the couple’s home, where the two lawmen huddled on the porch in muted conversation.
The Book Woman’s gaze fell to their dirty boots planted on the worn boards atop the scattered feathers of the bed pillow and its angel crown she had been in the process of burying.
The task still lingered, its prophecy now a riddle.
She turned away to look once more at her husband before the lawman shoved her into his automobile. Swiping a palm across the fogged window, the Book Woman tried to touch it all one last time.
Soon the miles separated and the years passed, the yearning for home smoldering. Spoken of rarer as time went on but always present, the longing would not stay silenced.
Their hungers had been knitted in bone, perennial and as old as the cragged mountains of Kentucky, protected by fierce hearts that could not easily be splintered.
From time to time, amid the deafening pulleys of grinding cities, she’d close her eyes, and together they were pulled back to their wilded hearts inside the tree-thick woods. There, she’d walk alongside him on paths of knotted ivy and spring blooms, the earth’s carpets trumpeting her freedom.