by Lynn Austin
“Get Lillie,” he murmured. Then his eyes closed and he slumped sideways to the floor like a pile of rags.
Get Lillie? The only thing I knew about Lillie was that she had been upstairs yesterday when I arrived. Mack had brought her a baked bean sandwich. Lillie could be his wife or his dog or his maiden aunt, for all I knew.
I sprinted up the creaking stairs, taking them two at a time. Three doors opened off the narrow hallway; one led to the room where I had slept, one stood partially open, and the third was closed. I peeked inside the open door and found a witch’s workroom, tiny and dark. It smelled like rotten eggs and dead grass. Bunches of dried herbs and flowers hung from the slanted ceiling, and various-sized jars and bottles and baskets lay scattered everywhere, filled with witchy-looking things. There was even a black iron cauldron and a wooden mortar and pestle. Mack’s pillow and bedsheets lay heaped on the floor, where he must have slept.
I backed out and knocked on the closed door. “Lillie . . . ?”
No reply. I waited and knocked again—then came to my senses. What in the world was I waiting for? This was no time to be polite! I turned the knob and went inside.
“Lillie?”
A brass bed stood against one wall in the darkened room, covered with a patchwork quilt. A small lump in the middle of the bed shifted and rolled over, and an elderly Negro woman squinted at me in the dark. She was so tiny that I would have thought she was a child, but her coffee brown face was as furrowed as a relief map of the Rocky Mountains. Feathery white hair stuck out in tufts around her head.
“Are you Lillie?”
“Yes . . . Who in the blazes are you?”
“Alice Grace Ripley from Illinois. I’m sorry to bother you, but Mack has been shot and I don’t know what to do!”
“Shot?”
“Yes! He’s downstairs and . . . and he’s bleeding!” The woman unwound the covers and slowly swung her heron-like legs over the edge of the bed.
“You’ll have to help me, girl,” she said. “I been feeling poorly these past few weeks and ain’t been outta bed in a while.” Her voice sounded faint and rusty, like a radio program with too much static. I helped her to her feet and we shuffled to the door. She was as thin as a stalk of wheat in a long white nightgown, as weightless as a bag of cotton balls.
“You’re shaking, girl,” she said as I helped her slowly descend the stairs.
“I can’t help it! Somebody shot Mack!” I could barely think, let alone speak. Shock had scared all of the thoughts right out of my head. Watching blood pour from a real wounded man was quite different from imagining it in a book.
It took a hundred years to help Lillie hobble downstairs and over to where Mack lay, but at last she knelt down and gently patted his furry cheek. “Can you hear me, Mack, honey?” Apparently not. He lay stone still. “Help me lay him down flat,” Lillie said. She seemed very calm, as if people arrived wounded and bleeding at the library door every day. I watched her carefully unbutton his overall straps and shirt with her tiny wrinkled fingers. Why didn’t she work faster? But my own fingers trembled so badly I couldn’t have unbuttoned anything.
“Should I call a doctor?” I asked.
“Ain’t one for miles. Go out in the kitchen and fetch me some clean dish towels.”
Clean? Had she seen the kitchen lately? I ransacked every drawer and cupboard but found no dish towels, clean or otherwise. Two pairs of woolen long johns still hung on the clothesline behind the stove, so I yanked them down, figuring they were clean, and ran to Lillie with them. She had bared Mack’s chest, which was as wooly as the rest of him.
“Them ain’t dish towels,” she said when she saw what I had brought her.
“I couldn’t find anything else.”
“I guess they’ll have to do, then,” she said with a sigh. “Let’s see what we got here.” She used one leg of the long johns to mop up the blood, and I saw a bluish hole just below Mack’s collarbone. When a spurt of blood pulsed from it, I closed my eyes for a moment to keep from fainting.
Lillie wadded up the other leg and used it to press hard against the bullet hole to stop the bleeding, using both hands and all of her sparrow-like weight. Before long, Mack’s blood had soaked the cloth and Lillie’s hands and stained her white nightgown. What I could see of his face beneath his hair and beard was whiter than the gown.
“Help me roll him over on his side,” Lillie said. I knelt to help her, then watched as she pulled down his shirt and mopped the blood off his back. I saw another hole, larger than the one in front, and nearly passed out again. Lillie didn’t seem fazed. “Least there’s no bullet left inside him,” she said. “Here, you press this against his back and I’ll keep on pressing the front.”
“I-I’m going to faint. . . .”
“Oh, no you ain’t. Come on—whoever you are—I ain’t strong enough to stop the bleeding on both sides.”
“I-I-I . . .”
“Take deep breaths, girl. Get some air into your brain. You want him to die on us?”
“No, ma’am.”
“Then push hard. We got to stop the bleeding.”
I did as I was told. When I pushed the cloth against his back, Mack moaned.
“Stay with us, Mack,” Lillie coaxed. Her voice was soothing and calm. “Don’t you dare go a-dying on me now, you hear?”
I held the cloth tightly against Mack’s shoulder. The blood felt warm, like something alive on my hand. I closed my eyes.
Maybe I was dreaming. This was the sort of dream people had when they read frightening stories before bed. Any minute now I would wake up and the morning would start all over again, only this time no one would get shot. I opened my eyes when the dizziness passed, but I was still in the Acorn Public Library, holding a bloody towel to the librarian’s gunshot wound.
I averted my gaze and focused on a shelf of books nearby, reading the titles and silently alphabetizing them by the authors’ last names to get my mind off all the blood. And the dying man. And the ancient woman with the wispy white hair. Why couldn’t I be as calm as she was? Why couldn’t I think of something practical to do?
“I-if there’s no doctor in town, w-what do people do when they’re hurt or sick?” I asked.
“They come and see me. I’m known as a healer round here. . . . You know how to pray, girl?”
“My father is a minister.”
“Well, unless he’s hiding out in the next room, he ain’t gonna be any help to us, is he? We best get praying.” She closed her eyes and lifted her chin in the air, yelling out a prayer as if the Almighty was stone-deaf. “O Lord, you see this boy laying here. You see he’s bleeding hard. He has no help but you, Lord. You know how we all depend on Mack, and so I’m begging you to stop the bleeding and spare his life.” She went on that way for several minutes before ending with, “In Jesus’ precious name. Amen.”
She opened her eyes and gazed at me, waiting. I glanced down at Mack, and he was so deathly pale and there was so much blood that the only thing I could think of to say was, “Oh, dear God . . . please . . . please . . . please . . .” I had never watched anyone die before and it looked as though I was about to. Tears choked off my words.
“Ain’t much of a prayer,” Lillie grumbled.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry . . . I-I could say the Lord’s Prayer . . .”
“No thanks. I’m thinking the Good Lord has that one about memorized by now. He don’t need to hear it again.”
“Should we call the police?”
“Ain’t no police way out here. County sheriff might show up if Mack dies on us, but we don’t want that.”
I wondered if she meant we didn’t want the sheriff to show up or we didn’t want Mack to die. “Who would want to shoot him?” I asked.
“Oh, I can name a couple people who mighta shot him. Mack is—” She stopped and glared sharply at me as if suddenly realizing she was about to tell a secret to a stranger. “I think you better tell me who you are again, and what you’re doing in my ho
use.”
“I’m Alice Grace Ripley. I came yesterday with five boxes of books to donate to the library.” Yesterday. It seemed like a million years ago. “Didn’t Mr. MacDougal—Mack—tell you?”
“No, ma’am, he certainly did not. Where’d you say you was from?”
“Illinois—Blue Island, Illinois.”
“I never heard of no islands in Illinois. And I sure ain’t never heard of a blue one.”
“Well, the town isn’t really blue . . . and it isn’t an island, either. I think it was the waving grass or the hazy sky or—” I stopped, unable to remember the story our third grade teacher had told us about how the town got its name. But why in the world did she need an explanation at a time like this? Why were we even having this conversation? Mack could be dying. What kind of a town had no doctor and no policemen—especially if people were in the habit of shooting each other first thing in the morning?
“Please . . . can’t we do something for him?” I begged. “He’s bleeding!”
“Don’t I know it,” she said, holding up her bloody hand. “Hole goes clear through him. But I suppose that’s better than having to dig around inside him and try and find the bullet.”
I felt faint again. I closed my eyes. My heart had never pounded this hard in my life, even when I’d set our kitchen on fire.
“Deep breaths, girl. Take deep breaths.” How could she be so calm?
When the dizziness passed, I opened my eyes in time to see Lillie lift the bloodied cloth and look at the hole on her side of him.
“Blood’s starting to clot,” she said. “Better keep holding tight, though, just to be sure.” I quickly closed my eyes again.
Eventually, Lillie told me I could let go and she would hold the compresses on both wounds for a moment. “Run upstairs and pull a sheet off my bed to use for bandages.”
I did as I was told, except that I gave her a sheet from my bed, figuring it was cleaner. I was relieved to see that Mack had regained consciousness and was talking to Lillie in a breathy voice when I returned.
“Some crazy fool tried to kill me . . .”
“They just might get their wish, honey. You ain’t outta the woods yet.”
“Let them think they killed me, Lillie . . . Safer that way.”
Lillie pondered his words for a moment before saying, “You might be right. If they come back to finish you off, you’re a sitting duck. Or a laying-down duck, I should say.” She gave a cackling laugh, then looked up at me. I held the bedsheets in my shaking, bloody hands. “You know how to rip bandages, girl?” I shook my head. I had trained to be a schoolteacher and a librarian, not a nurse. “Take over this job, then, and I’ll rip.” I knelt down and pressed the blood-soaked underwear against Mack’s wounds while Lillie tore up the sheets.
“Listen, Lillie . . .” Mack breathed. “Have my funeral. Let them think they killed me.”
“How am I gonna fake a funeral all by myself, honey? I’ll be needing a casket and everything.”
He tilted his chin, gesturing to me. “She can help us.”
“That girl? She ain’t much use to nobody, far as I can tell.”
Mack’s eyes met mine. “Will you help me?”
I couldn’t reply. I felt like I’d been pushed onto the stage in the middle of a very bad play and didn’t know any of my lines. I would have run for the hills if I knew which hill to run to. And if someone out there wasn’t shooting at people.
“Please, Miss Ripley?” I was surprised that Mack remembered my name. All I could do was stammer.
“But I-I-I . . .”
“Killer could come back and shoot all three of us,” Lillie said matter-of-factly. “You want that?”
I shook my head. I had to be dreaming. I had eaten a baked bean sandwich yesterday. I had indigestion. This was a nightmare, that’s all. I looked around and tried to draw comfort from my surroundings. I was in a library, for heaven’s sake, my familiar world of books and overdue notices and card catalogues. People didn’t get shot in libraries. Who would want to kill a librarian? We were nice people. Harmless people. This was a dream. A very bad dream. But until I woke up, I would be wise to play along with these crazy people and do whatever they said.
“W-what do you want me to do?”
Lillie and Mack exchanged looks. “Go upstairs and fetch Mack’s rifle,” she said.
“I don’t know how to shoot a gun!”
“Nobody’s asking you to shoot it, girl, just go get it.” I knew where the rifle was. I had stared at the gun rack hanging on the bedroom wall all night, hoping I wouldn’t need to use it myself.
Lillie and I traded places again, and I went upstairs while she began wrapping up Mack like a mummy. My hands trembled so badly I could barely lift down the heavy rifle. I had never held one in my life. I carried it downstairs as if it might go off in my hands. If Lillie told me to point it at somebody, I would faint dead away.
“Here it is,” I told her, “but I—”
“Listen to me, girl.” She took it from me and laid it by Mack’s side. “Cora and the others will be coming to work soon. We gonna tell them Mack went out hunting this morning and had a accident.”
“You want me to lie?”
“No, I want you to keep your trap shut and don’t say a word. Understand?”
I nodded vigorously. Lillie might be twig-thin, but she looked as though she knew how to use the rifle. In fact, I nodded so hard it’s a wonder my head didn’t come loose.
“In the meantime, we’re keeping the gun handy in case the shooter comes back to finish the job.”
I continued to nod, but she may as well have been talking gibberish.
I was still sitting in a daze beside Mack and Lillie when the other librarians arrived. They halted in shock at the sight of Mack lying in the foyer, a bloodied mess.
“What happened, Miss Lillie?”
“Hunting accident.”
“Oh, Mack!”
“Is he going to be all right?”
“Don’t know yet. He lost a lot a blood. He might of got home too late.”
The women wept, prayed, held Mack’s hands. Three of them went upstairs and hauled down the mattress from his bed—my bed—and gently lifted him onto it. The shock and pain from being moved made Mack moan, then pass out again.
“What can we do, Miss Lillie?” they all asked. “Give us something to do.”
“Not much you can do. He’s in the Lord’s hands now. You all just go about your work like you always do. People waiting for their books, ain’t they? Tell the believing ones to be praying for Mack. Then we just have to wait and see.”
“Isn’t there some way we can help?”
Lillie gestured to me. “New girl says she’ll help out.”
All four of them eyed me dubiously. Cora spoke for the group. “Are you sure you don’t want us to stay with you, Miss Lillie?”
“President Roosevelt’s paying you to work, ain’t he?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Then you best get working.”
Everyone hugged Lillie, consoling her. I heard one of them say, “Poor Lillie. You’ve lived through so much already, and now this?”
By the time the librarians loaded the books on their horses and rode away, Lillie looked exhausted. I remembered that she had been sick. “Are you all right?” I asked her. “Do you want me to help you upstairs to bed?”
“No, I need to stay here beside Mack. You can get me a chair to set on, though.” I dragged over an armchair from the non-fiction section, and Lillie sank onto it with a sigh. “He ain’t outta the woods, you know. Next few days are the most important.”
I nodded. I had no idea what to say. Lillie studied me as if she still wasn’t quite sure who I was and what I was doing here. I wasn’t entirely certain myself.
“You know how to cook?” she finally asked.
I started to say yes, then recalled how Mother had banished me from the kitchen after setting fire to it. “Not very well, I’m afraid.”
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br /> “Well, I ain’t strong enough to wait on all of us, so you better get on out there and do the best you can.”
“Yes, ma’am.” First I would have to wash all the blood off my hands. If the stains on my clothes didn’t come out, I would have to throw them away. Mother would scold me for my wastefulness: Don’t you know this country is in an economic depression? And how could I reply? I’m sorry, but someone tried to kill the librarian, and he bled all over me. No one would believe it.
I walked out to the tacked-on kitchen to clean up and make breakfast. I would have to figure out how to build a fire in the woodstove before I could cook anything. I gazed around at the empty woodbox, the cold stove, the flies, and the dishes festering in the sink, and I sank down at the kitchen table and sobbed.
If Mack’s gonna live, he’s gonna need some medicine.” Lillie gave me that piece of news as we ate our breakfast of cold corn bread and strawberry preserves. It was all I could find to eat in the disheveled kitchen, and besides, the stove wouldn’t stay lit for more than two minutes. I didn’t like the way Lillie said “we” every time she decided something needed to be done. Considering how frail she was, “we” probably meant me. But Mack looked as though he might die any minute, and I didn’t want his death on my conscience.
Yesterday I would have asked Lillie where the nearest pharmacy was. Today I was wise enough to know that if Acorn, Kentucky, didn’t have a hotel, a café, a police department, a doctor, or a hospital, the town probably didn’t have a pharmacy, either. “Where would you like me to go for the medicine?” I asked, dreading her reply.
“We gonna need some willow bark and some elm bark and maybe some green peach tree leaves, if we can find them this time a year. If Mack’s gonna pull through this, he’ll be needing a poultice to draw out the poison and something to take down his fever.” She seemed to be talking to herself more than to me so I kept quiet. “But the first thing we need to take care of is the pain. Quickest thing is to make do with some tansy. I believe there’s some up in my workroom.”
“Wait. What’s tansy?”
