Wonderland Creek

by Lynn Austin

  Lillie tried to describe what it looked like, and after three trips up to the storeroom and back, I finally found the correct bunch of dried-up leaves among the many bunches hanging from the ceiling. “Now what?” I asked.

  “Now you fix the tea, and we try and get Mack to swallow it.”

  I felt completely inept. I had to admit to Lillie that I didn’t know how to make tansy tea. She explained the process, then dozed in her armchair while I struggled to start a fire in the cookstove and keep it going long enough to boil water. I would have asked her how to build a fire, too, but I didn’t want to disturb her.

  By the time the water boiled and the tea was ready, I smelled like a smoked ham. Lillie told me to lift Mack’s head onto my lap and spoon the liquid into his mouth. He moaned in pain when I moved him. I prayed that I wouldn’t kill him.

  Mack eventually choked down most of the tea. It was past time for the library to open and I longed to do something normal, like sit at the desk and process books, but I seemed to have my hands full with two patients to care for. Lillie lay curled in the armchair like a withered crane on her nest, and Mack lay on the mattress in the middle of the foyer where patrons were certain to trip over him. While the two of them dozed, I returned to the mess in the kitchen. It was going to take hours to swat all the flies, haul firewood, then pump and boil enough water to clean the kitchen and wash the dishes. I rolled up my sleeves and went to work.

  It turned out that preparing the tansy tea was only the beginning as far as Lillie was concerned. After lunch I helped her climb the stairs to her witch’s workroom, and she soon had me grinding and brewing and concocting all sorts of strange things to make poultices. I wished in vain for a clean, sanitary hospital. Sometime during the afternoon, she stopped calling me “girl” and started calling me “honey.” I figured we were now friends. Meanwhile, not a single patron had come into the library for a book.

  Mack was still alive when the packhorse librarians returned in the afternoon, but he was too weak to talk and couldn’t remain awake for more than a few minutes. Cora arrived first. She was the oldest of the ladies, around my mother’s age, I guessed. She reminded me of my mother with her calm, no-nonsense manner and quick, competent hands. But I couldn’t imagine my mother wearing trousers and riding all over these mountains on a horse the way Cora did. As soon as Lillie’s back was turned, Cora grabbed my arm and pulled me into the fiction section, whispering like a schoolgirl with a secret.

  “Listen. When I told my brother Clint about Mack’s accident, he gave me this.” She opened her jacket and pulled out a pint Mason jar filled with liquid.

  “What is it?”

  “Shh! Miss Lillie’s dead set against strong drink, but moonshine is the best painkiller I know of, and Clint makes the best in the county. Don’t tell Miss Lillie I gave it to you or she’ll make you dump it out. Ask Mack if he wants some when Lillie ain’t around, okay? Then add it to one of her potions when she ain’t looking.”

  More secrets. I was now knee-deep in them.

  Marjorie returned to the library next. “You need help with Miss Lillie’s horse?” she asked me. “When I rode in I noticed that Belle wasn’t out in the pasture.”

  “Horse? What horse?”

  “Belle is Miss Lillie’s mare. Mack usually lets her out of the shed during the day.”

  “I don’t know anything about horses. I didn’t even know Mack had a shed.”

  She looked at me with pity. “What’d they say your name was again?”

  “Alice Grace. My friends call me Allie.” And right now, I could use a friend. If only Freddy was here. She had always been the sensible, competent one, taking charge in every crisis. She had taken care of me ever since the day I fell and skinned my knees while roller-skating when we were seven years old. She used to help baby birds when they fell from their nests and rescue lost puppies from the middle of the street. She would know exactly what to do.

  “Are you a city girl, Allie?” Marjorie asked. I nodded. Compared to Acorn, Blue Island qualified as a city. “Well, come on then. I’ll show you what you need to do to keep the farm running.”

  Farm? I hated farms. How had I ended up running one? She linked her arm through mine, and I already felt stronger. “Thanks, Marjorie. I appreciate your help.”

  “You’re welcome. But I’m Faye. Marjorie is my sister.”

  “Oh, I’m so sorry!” Faye and Marjorie were the youngest of the four women and might have been twins. Like Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum, I thought, remembering Alice in Wonderland again. They both wore navy wool jackets and knitted stocking caps and tall leather boots that laced up the front. They were both very pretty in a simple, unadorned way, like fashionable dresses made from homespun instead of silk.

  “That’s okay,” Faye said. “I can tell that Mack’s accident has you addle-rattled. We’re all pretty shook up, too, to tell you the truth. We’ve been so worried that Miss Lillie might pass away any day, so we never dreamed that anything could happen to Mack.”

  She pulled me into the kitchen—I was disappointed when she didn’t comment on how clean it looked—then led me out through the back door. Sure enough, there was a shed down by the creek with a very annoyed-looking horse penned up inside it. Faye turned the animal loose and told me I should lock it up again at dusk. I was about to ask how I was supposed to catch the horse when she said, “You know you need to lock up the chickens at night too, right?”

  “Chickens? Mack has chickens?”

  She laughed and pointed to a coop and rudely fenced-in yard that I hadn’t noticed, either. “If you don’t lock them up, the foxes will have chicken for dinner and you won’t. I think Mack usually lets them out when he collects the eggs every morning. Some of the hens don’t like to give up their eggs without a fight, but just shove them off their nests and show them who’s boss.”

  The hens would know very well who was boss.

  “Are you going to be cooking for Mack and Miss Lillie until they’re better?”

  “I . . . um . . . I guess so. But there aren’t very many groceries in the house.” Or a refrigerator to keep them in.

  “Did you look in the basement? Most folks store their home-canned tomatoes and vegetables down there.”

  “Oh. And where can I buy more bread? We’re all out.”

  She smiled, and I could see that she was trying not to laugh. “We don’t buy it, we bake it ourselves. You want me to show you the root cellar while we’re out here?”

  I nodded. I had read about root cellars in books but had never seen a real one. We had a Frigidaire back home. “Doesn’t anyone have electricity?”

  “Rich folks do. The post office has it, of course. I don’t see much need for it, myself. Besides, you know what you get along with a bunch of ugly old electric wires dangling all over town?”

  My first reaction was to say, You get light! And modern conveniences like stoves that stay hot and refrigerators that stay cold. But I shook my head and said, “No, what?”

  “You get a bunch of bills that you can’t pay ’cause the mine’s shut down. If you asked most folks, they’d tell you they’d rather sit in the dark with food in their bellies than have their house all lit up and their stomach growling like a wildcat.”

  She walked to a lumpy hill near the shed and opened a pair of cellar doors that led inside it. We went down a short set of stairs into an underground hole—like a grave, I thought with a shiver. We ducked our heads, and as my eyes adjusted to the darkness I saw piles of potatoes, baskets of carrots and beets, a few squashes spotted with mold. And cobwebs everywhere. I clung to Faye’s arm, frantic at the thought of being locked in here.

  “See how cool it is down here?” she asked. “We don’t need an icebox even in August.”

  “Does anyone in Acorn have a telephone?” I asked when we’d climbed out again. From the expression on Faye’s face, I might have asked if anyone owned an ostrich.

  “Why would we need a telephone and more foolish bills to pay? If we want
to talk to somebody, we just walk over to their house. The coal mine offices have telephones. And I think a few people have them over in Pottsville.”

  “Is that a town? How far away is it?” Maybe I could walk there and get help for Mack—and a ride home for myself.

  Faye looked puzzled, as if she didn’t understand the question. “How far? Depends on your horse, I guess. Mine could make it there in about . . . oh . . . three or four hours. Sooner if I pushed her. But if you ride Miss Lillie’s horse, it’s going to take you a lot longer. She lags going uphill.”

  “How many miles is it?”

  Faye answered with a shrug. “Nobody counts miles around here. A place can be a few miles away as the crow flies, but if there’s a hill or a creek in the way, you have to wind your way all around to get there.”

  “Is there a doctor in Pottsville? Or a hospital? I’m really worried about Mack.”

  She huffed. “Miss Lillie knows plenty more than any doctor, let me tell you. If she can’t fix him up, then nobody can.”

  I thought about the dried herbs and gooey poultices Lillie had cooked up, and I feared for Mack’s life. But did I dare walk to the next town and fetch a doctor? And I would have to walk. I had never been on a horse in my life and that wasn’t about to change. The mere thought of catching Lillie’s horse later tonight and leading it back to the shed put me in a panic.

  Faye gave my arm a comforting squeeze, then let go as we walked toward the house. “Anything else I can show you?”

  I glanced at the wood piled neatly against the side of the house. “Well . . . I feel stupid for asking, but . . . can you show me how to keep a fire going in the stove? Lillie seems to need a lot of boiling water and the fire keeps going out after a minute or two.”

  Faye laughed again. “Sure. But if you don’t mind me being nosy, do you have a pile of servants back home to do all this work for you?”

  “No, but things are easier in the city. We have an electric refrigerator and a coal furnace and a stove that runs on gas. You just light a match to it and the oven stays hot until you turn it off again.”

  “I seen those things in magazines.”

  Faye showed me how to light and stoke the fire, adding coal from the bin to keep it burning longer. I grabbed a piece of paper and wrote down everything. “Okay?” she asked when she finished. “I got to get on home, Allie. My kids will be wanting their dinner.”

  “You have children?” She didn’t look any older than I was.

  “Yep, four little rascals. All boys.”

  “Four! How old are you?” I knew it was a nosy question but I couldn’t help asking.

  “Twenty-three. How old are you?”

  “I’m twenty-two.”

  “And you ain’t even married yet? Gosh, folks would call you an old maid around here. I married Lloyd when I was sixteen and we had Lloyd Junior ten months later. Then Bobby, Clyde, and little Roger, all in a row.”

  “It must be hard to leave them every day to go to work.”

  “Their mamaw watches them. She lives with us. I thank the Good Lord every day that Mack set up this library and got the WPA to hire us. Otherwise, I don’t know how we would get by. Lloyd ain’t had work since the mine shut down . . . Poor Mack. We need him around here. He and Miss Lillie hold this whole town together.”

  “Did Mack grow up here?”

  “The Good Lord sent him back to us just in time, and I sure hope He don’t take him away yet.”

  “Sent him from where?”

  Faye didn’t reply. I had noticed that people around here ignored any question they didn’t want to answer.

  “I got to go. See you tomorrow, Allie.”

  When a curtain of shadows settled over the valley, I knew it was time to put the horse back into the shed for the night. But Lillie’s horse hated me, I could tell. Every time I got close to the animal, it rolled its eyes and snorted like a dragon as it sidled away from me. I admit that I was scared to death of it. It was so big! My head barely reached its back. We danced around the yard for a while as I tried to get behind it and shoo it inside, but I finally gave up and decided to try my luck with the chickens.

  Feathers everywhere! I never knew that chickens would shed feathers like a snowstorm when they were upset. You would think from the way they squawked and flapped around their yard that I was trying to catch one of them for the stewpot, not put them to bed. Every time I got three of them inside the coop, one would fly out again. And the rooster was as mean as a buzzard, flapping his wings at me as if he wanted to peck out my eyes. I was about to give up. If the foxes wanted to eat these ornery birds, they were welcome to them. Then I heard a shout.

  “Hey there!”

  I turned around. Lillie stood in the kitchen doorway with her hands on her hips. How she had managed to walk that far by herself was a mystery, but I left the chickens to fend for themselves and ran up to the house, praying that Mack hadn’t died.

  “What’s wrong? What happened?” I asked breathlessly.

  “That’s what I want to know. I hear my hens cackling and carrying on like there’s a fox in the coop. Turns out it’s you.”

  “I’m trying to get them inside for the night.”

  “You’re gonna scramble them eggs before they’re laid, that’s what you’re gonna do.”

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t know anything about chickens.”

  “Leave them alone, for heaven’s sake. They go inside on their own when it gets dark.”

  That was a relief. “What about the horse? I can’t get him to go back inside, either.”

  “Belle’s a mare, not a ‘him.’ Can’t you see the difference?” I shook my head. My cheeks felt as warm as the fire Faye had helped me kindle. “Well, just pour a little feed in her bucket and give it a shake. Should be a bag of feed in the shed.”

  Could it be that easy? Sure enough, I filled the bucket and rattled it, and the stupid horse walked right into the shed all by itself.

  We done all we can for Mack,” Lillie told me later that night. “You go on to bed now, honey. I’ll keep the death watch tonight.”

  “Is he . . . do you think he’s going to die?” I whispered the question even though Mack was asleep and probably couldn’t hear me. It seemed like tempting fate to ask out loud. Considering all of the ridiculous things we had poured in him and on him today, I didn’t see how he could possibly live. The man had a bullet hole that went straight in one side of him and out the other! I shuddered at the memory of all that blood gushing out.

  Lillie patted my arm as if to comfort me. “Only the Good Lord knows if he’s gonna live or die.”

  What worried me the most were the secret gulps of moonshine I had given Mack to drink. I had shown him Cora’s Mason jar when Lillie wasn’t around and asked if he wanted some.

  “Depends . . . Who made it?” he’d breathed.

  “Who made it? I don’t remember . . . One of the packhorse ladies, the tall one with the broad shoulders, told me that her brother made it. What difference does it make?”

  “Cora’s brother, Clint?”

  “I think so.”

  “Okay, give me some.” The liquor had made Mack cough and choke, and his face turned very red. Then he’d fallen into a deep sleep. He still hadn’t awakened. Guilt plagued me for interfering with Lillie’s crazy remedies.

  “Run up and get me a blanket from off my bed,” Lillie said, interrupting my thoughts. “And you better get me some extra bullets for this gun. Mack keeps them in his dresser drawer.”

  I didn’t want to ask why she needed a loaded gun. I did as I was told, then went upstairs to sleep in Mack’s room for the second night. Was it really only yesterday that my aunt and uncle had dropped me off? They planned to be at the spa for two weeks—fourteen long, excruciating days. If someone had tried to murder the town librarian on my first full day here, what might I expect tomorrow?

  My shoulders ached from pumping water and hauling coal and firewood. This rustic life left me so exhausted that I expect
ed to fall asleep as soon as I lay down on top of the box springs in Mack’s bedroom—he was using the mattress downstairs. For the first time in my life I didn’t feel like reading a book before bedtime. How could I concentrate on a made-up story after plunging into such an unbelievable real-life drama?

  I tried to get comfortable without being poked by an errant bedspring and listened to the rush of the creek outside and the incessant croak of frogs. They were singing a round like a choir of hoarse old men, taking up the refrain where the first frog left off, echoing back and forth. Instead of counting sheep, I decided to compile a mental list of all the comforts and conveniences that I took for granted back home. If that didn’t work, I would try to come up with a plan for what I would do with my life after I returned to Blue Island.

  I had my eyes closed, imagining Mrs. Beasley’s retirement and being named head librarian in her place when something whirred past my face. I opened my eyes and saw a dark shape fluttering around my room. Was it a bird? How had a bird gotten into the house? It flew past again, swooping and dipping erratically as if it had been sipping from Mack’s jar of moonshine. Wait! It wasn’t a drunken bird, it was a bat! I grabbed my pillow to shield my head and ran downstairs, whimpering as I tried very hard not to scream. Lillie sat bolt upright in her chair when I stumbled into the foyer, her eyes wide.

  “Who’s there?” She reached for Mack’s gun.

  “It’s me, Lillie. Alice Ripley. Th-there’s a bat flying around my room!”

  She sighed and leaned back, closing her eyes. “Goodness’ sakes, girl, I thought you were the angel of death, coming for Mack and me.”

  “Sorry . . . sorry . . . but there’s a bat in my room!”

  “They’re creatures of the night, honey. They always come out after dark.”

  “Yes. Yes, I know they do.”

  “Well then . . . ?” She wrapped the blanket around herself and curled up in her armchair as if no further explanation was needed.

  “Lillie, how am I supposed to sleep with a bat flying around the room all night?”

  “Same way he sleeps during the day with you flying all around the room. Just tuck your head under your wing and close your eyes.”