Wonderland Creek

by Lynn Austin

  “But—”

  “He won’t hurt you none. Get some sleep, honey. We got a lot to do tomorrow.”

  I crept back upstairs with the pillow over my head. I lifted the covers and checked every inch of my bed thoroughly before climbing in. As I lay there trying in vain to sleep, I wasn’t sure if it would be better to actually see the bat flying around again and know for certain where it was, or not to see it and wonder.

  I didn’t want to cry. Tears wouldn’t accomplish anything and would only make my pillow soggy. I decided to recite the Lord’s Prayer and any other Bible verses I could remember. I drifted off to sleep somewhere in the middle of the Twenty-third Psalm and the valley of the shadow of death.

  The room was still dark when the rooster woke me up in the morning. He probably needed to be fed or let out of his coop or something, but I didn’t want to move from beneath the warm covers. I had worked harder yesterday than I’d ever worked in my life, cooking all the meals, washing the blood out of our clothes, cleaning the kitchen, feeding the chickens, taking care of the dumb horse—not to mention cooking up crazy teas and potions for Lillie and tending the library for Mack. Books went in and out at a steady rate with four packhorse librarians making deliveries every day, but not a soul in Acorn, Kentucky, seemed capable of walking into the library and checking out a book for himself.

  I could tell that Lillie was much weaker than she let on and probably needed my help as much as Mack did. She’d had an initial burst of strength right after Mack had been shot, but had barely moved from her chair since then. She didn’t eat enough to keep a chicken alive. I hoped it wasn’t my cooking. She had poured what little energy she did have into saving Mack’s life. All day yesterday, she had told me which herbs and roots to gather or boil or grind, then she had fallen asleep in her chair while I tried to follow her instructions. What if I went downstairs this morning and found both of them dead in the middle of the library floor?

  I lay in bed a while longer, considering my options and fighting the need to use the outhouse. I finally came to the unhappy conclusion that all three of us would die of hunger if I didn’t get my sorry self out of bed and make breakfast. I put on my clothes—shaking them vigorously to make sure that the bat hadn’t made a nest inside them—then crept downstairs.

  I peeked into the library first. Both Mack and Lillie were alive and asleep. Good. I went outside through the back door to use the outhouse and remembered to let the horse out of the shed. The spring morning was misty and cold, the surrounding hills sleeping beneath a gray blanket of clouds. The creek sounded louder than it had yesterday as it rushed through the backyard and into the woods on the edge of the property. I wondered what the name of it was. By the time I had faced down the chickens and managed to gather a few eggs, my shoes and socks were soaked from walking through the wet grass. The eggs weren’t nearly as clean as the ones Mother bought in the store.

  Back in the kitchen, I consulted Faye’s list of instructions on how to build a fire in the stove and I managed to keep it hot enough to scramble a frying pan full of eggs. By the time they were cooked, my two patients had awakened and we ate the eggs and the last of the bread for our breakfast. I dreaded the thought of having to bake more. The only thing I knew about bread was that it came from a bakery. Sliced.

  Before long, the packhorse librarians trooped in. Marjorie handed me a loaf of bread wrapped in a dish towel. It was still warm. “This is for Mack and Miss Lillie. I heard theirs got all eaten up and that you didn’t know how to make more.” Her tone was filled with wonder, as if I had two perfectly good legs but didn’t know how to walk on them. I accepted gratefully, not caring if I had been insulted.

  The women commiserated with Lillie over Mack’s condition, then decided to drag Mack and his mattress out of the foyer and into the non-fiction section—formerly the dining room—to get him out of the way. “Now he’ll have a nice, quiet place to either die or get well,” Cora whispered to me. They visited with Mack for a while, then filled their sacks and saddlebags with books and rode off, following the creek up into the misty hills.

  “We got some hard work to do,” Lillie informed me after they were gone. And for the rest of the morning she had me collecting pine knots out of the woodpile so we could extract the pitch, then boiling the sticky sap with water in the black iron cauldron. My blond hair frizzed and curled in the steamy kitchen until I looked like a character from a silent horror movie. The kitchen smelled like Christmas trees.

  “Lord musta known Mack and me would need some help,” Lillie told me when she came out to the kitchen to check my progress. “That’s why He sent you to us.”

  I was skeptical. I had come to Kentucky to deliver books and help catalogue them, not to boil pitch and grind leaves like a sorcerer’s apprentice. Besides, I didn’t believe the Almighty moved people around like pieces on a chessboard. “If God could make people do whatever He wanted them to,” I asked her, “why didn’t He warn Mack not to go outside yesterday? Then he never would have gotten shot in the first place.”

  Lillie took the wooden spoon from my hand, shaking her head, and stirred the mixture herself, watching the liquid stream off the spoon. “The Good Lord works in mysterious ways, honey.”

  I had heard this platitude all my life, so I decided to change the subject. “Is it ready yet? Can we stop boiling it?”

  “Not quite. It needs to get thicker and glassy-looking.”

  I shoved more coal into the fire and took back the spoon, continuing to stir. “What are we going to do with this goo when it’s done?”

  “We gonna mix it with some lard to make a poultice.”

  “And put it on an open wound?” The thought made me cringe.

  While we were waiting for the mixture to finish cooking, Lillie told me to take out another pot and pour in a couple of canning jars of tomatoes and green beans from the basement, along with carrots, potatoes, and onions from the root cellar. “What are we making this time?” I asked as I pared the vegetables and collected the peelings in a pan for the chickens.

  Lillie grinned at me as if I was the village idiot. “Lunch, honey. This here’s gonna be our lunch.”

  The sticky concoction of pine pitch and lard was still warm when Lillie removed Mack’s bandages and laid the first poultice on his chest wound. Mack cried out in agony. “Arghh! What are you doing, Lillie? Trying to kill me? That burns like hellfire!”

  “Shh . . . shh . . . don’t rile yourself, honey. Only make things worse.”

  “They can’t possibly get any worse!”

  I tried to back quietly out of the room as she got ready to put another wad of goop on his shoulder, but she motioned me forward. “Go ahead and give him some of that moonshine, honey.” I stared at her. “Come on, I know you have it and I know you been sneaking him some. This old body of mine might be breaking down, but my nose still works good as new.”

  I sat down beside the mattress and held the cup to Mack’s lips. He guzzled it greedily. It made him cough and sputter, but eventually his breathing slowed and he drifted to sleep. “Do you think Mack’s going to live?” I asked Lillie again. If it wasn’t for the slow rising and falling of his chest, I would have thought he was already dead.

  “Hard to say. It’s up to the Good Lord.” I wished she would stop telling me that. She sank back in her chair with a sigh. Her brown skin looked pale, like coffee with a lot of cream in it. Her lined face sagged with exhaustion.

  “What about you, Lillie? Are you feeling okay? Is there something we can cook up to give you more strength?”

  “Honey, if I knew a secret to give a hundred-year-old woman more strength, I’d be the richest woman in Kentucky.”

  “You’re one hundred years old?”

  She smiled her gap-toothed grin. “I’ll be a hundred and one this Fourth of July.”

  That meant she must have been born in 1835. Had she been a slave? She would have been a grown woman in 1865 when the War Between the States ended and the slaves were emancipated.
I had read the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which told about the horrors of slavery. I wondered if Lillie had lived through some of those horrors. I wasn’t supposed to ask nosy questions, but I wanted to know what her long life had been like.

  “Were you born here in Kentucky, Lillie?”

  “Nope, across the state line in Virginia.”

  “Were you ever a slave?”

  “I’ve been many, many things in this sorry life of mine, and a slave is just one of them.”

  “It must have been a terrible life.”

  “Lord knows it was.”

  “Did you live on a plantation?”

  She nodded slowly. “My mama and me were field hands. Don’t know anything about my daddy. But there was an old granny on the plantation who delivered all the babies and knew all kinds of tonics and potions to help people. She decided one day that she’s gonna pass her knowing on to me. That’s how I learnt. Pretty soon we was in big demand all over the county. Anybody got a sick slave or a baby doesn’t want to be born, they send for us. Massa make a lot of money off us.”

  “What happened when the war started? Were you near any of the battles?”

  “Talk about battles—I seen more suffering than I ever hope to see again. Too much for one lifetime. They send me out after the fighting’s over to help patch those poor boys up again. They didn’t use nice little bullets either, like the one that went through Mack. No sir. They had great big balls of metal that tear up your arm or leg when they hit you. Umm, umm, them’s bad times. But even worse than them broken bodies were the broken hearts.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Folks get set on having their own way, and they end up with their hearts broken when it don’t happen. God’s the one who’s deciding what’s going to be and what ain’t. He knows what’s best even if we’re too stubborn to realize it sometimes. We’re like little kids fighting over the wishbone, squabbling about who’s gonna get his wish. Bible says that even though we make lots of plans, it’s the Lord who’s gonna have His way.”

  She closed her eyes, and I thought she might be falling asleep. But then she opened them again and said, “What’s your story, honey?”

  “My story? I don’t have one.”

  “Mmm, mmm. No story? That’s the saddest thing I ever heard.”

  Her reaction made me mad. “Of course I have a story—everyone does. Just not a very exciting one. I grew up in Illinois. I worked as a librarian . . .” I paused so I could maintain my composure. “I love books, so when I heard that your library needed some, I held a book drive in our town. Then I came down here to deliver them and help out.”

  She studied me as if my skin were transparent and she could see what was going on inside me, watching my heart beat and the blood whoosh through my veins. Her scrutiny made me uneasy.

  “You ever been in love?” she asked. The abruptness of her question startled me.

  “Me? I had a boyfriend, but we broke up. That’s one of the reasons I came here. I needed to get away for a while.”

  “I ain’t asking if you had a boyfriend. I ask if you ever been in love.”

  “It’s the same thing.”

  “Oh no, it ain’t.” She laughed out loud, and it made me angry. I wanted to justify myself but something stopped me. I thought of all the love stories I’d read over the years, and the way the lovers in those books thought about each other day and night; the way they confided in each other, doted on each other. Was true love really the way authors portrayed it in books?

  I was sitting on the floor beside the mattress, and when I didn’t reply, Lillie gently laid her hand on my head, a mother soothing her child. “What’d you like about this boyfriend a yours?”

  The first thing that came to mind was that Gordon was a good catch. He was even-tempered and reliable and had a good job. Until he’d broken up with me, he had been as logical and predictable as the Dewey decimal system. I opened my mouth to say those things, then quickly closed it again. Lovers in romance stories never mentioned the Dewey decimal system when describing their beloved.

  “Ah ha! See, honey?”

  “See what? I haven’t answered your question yet.”

  “No, but your face says it all. When a person’s in love, all you gotta do is mention her lover and her face starts glowing like a harvest moon.”

  I shrugged, wanting to avoid the subject, but Lillie wouldn’t let me. “This boyfriend got a name?”

  “Gordon. Gordon Walters.”

  “See? Most people smile when they speak the name of the man they love. And you ain’t smiling.”

  “Well, I’m very angry with him. I told you, he broke up with me. He isn’t my boyfriend anymore.”

  “You want him back?”

  I thought for a minute, then shrugged again. “I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

  “Now, why ain’t you heartbroken, honey-girl? You ain’t shedding a single tear when I’m asking about him.”

  “I don’t cry very easily, that’s all.”

  “No? And why’s that?”

  Again I opened my mouth to reply but nothing came out. I could cry buckets of tears when reading books with sad endings—and sometimes I cried over happy endings, too. Why didn’t I feel those emotions in real life? I gaped at Lillie, speechless, as she nodded her head. “Um hmm, um hmm. See now?”

  “No. I don’t see anything.” Why was she asking me all these questions? What business was it of hers? I thought people in Appalachia didn’t ask nosy questions. I decided to turn the tables on her.

  “Have you ever been in love, Lillie?”

  Whether it was an act or not, I didn’t know, but her face did seem to glow as she broke into a wide gap-toothed smile. Even as she smiled, tears pooled in the creases around her eyes. “Oh my, yes, honey-girl. I sure was in love once. I reckon we only get one great love in a lifetime, and Sam was mine.”

  “How did you meet him?”

  “That story’s gonna take a long time to tell.”

  “I don’t mind. We have plenty of time.” I loved stories. I could get lost in a good story and easily forget everything else. And right now I had a lot I wanted to forget. “Please tell me, Lillie.”

  “Maybe another day, honey. I’m real tired right now. I think I need a little rest.”

  Lillie closed her eyes and fell asleep as quick as a cat. I pulled the blanket around her shoulders and tiptoed over to the library desk to card books. I couldn’t stop thinking about Gordon and me, until at last I came to the conclusion that if true love really was the way people described it in books, then no, I never had been in love with Gordon or he with me. But why hadn’t I ever realized it before?

  I was shelving books after lunch when I heard voices outside and footsteps clattering up the porch steps. Were patrons finally paying a visit to the library? I hurried to the door and swung it open to find a middle-aged woman and four little boys. “We come to hear the story,” the oldest boy said. The three younger ones ducked under my arm and squeezed through the door before I could stop them. Their faces were white, but their bare feet were as brown as Lillie’s.

  “Wait! Mr. MacDougal is sleeping and—”

  “Mamaw wouldn’t let us come yesterday ’cause we didn’t behave,” the oldest boy told me somberly. He pointed to the woman who I assumed was Mamaw. She was barefooted, too. “But she said we could come today.”

  “Never did see kids get into as much trouble as these young ones,” Mamaw said, shaking her head. “But like Little Lloyd says, they been minding themselves all morning so I brung them here for the story.” She moved past me to follow the boys inside. I closed the door and hurried after them, afraid they would disturb Mack and Lillie. I found the group gathered around the mattress, gazing down at Mack in his bloody overalls as if looking at an exotic animal in the Lincoln Park Zoo.

  “All that blood come from him?” one of them asked. His brother nudged him.

  “’Course it did, stupid. He got shot with a gun, remember? Ma said so.”<
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  “Is he going to die, Miss Lillie?”

  “He might,” she said matter-of-factly. “Too soon to tell.”

  “Who’s going to read the story to us if he dies? Mamaw can’t read.”

  I glanced at Mamaw and she lifted her palms, sadly shaking her head. I heard a moan as Mack shifted positions and opened one eye. He closed it again and said, “Hey, boys. Missed you yesterday. You fellas been acting up again?”

  “It was Bobby’s fault. He’s the one who caught the cat.”

  “Yeah, but Clyde dared me.”

  “Did not! Lloyd did!”

  I recognized the names—these must be Faye’s boys. They were raggedy little urchins scarcely old enough for school, but they looked as wise and battle worn as old men. The youngest one, about three years old, already mimicked the swagger and toughness of his older brothers.

  “We don’t need to know the gory details,” Lillie told them. “Just as well you didn’t come yesterday. Mack here has been under the weather.”

  “He shot himself, didn’t he?”

  “Let that be a lesson to you,” Lillie said, shaking her withered finger. “Don’t you go fooling with your daddy’s rifle again—you hear me, Clyde?”

  “What about the story?”

  “And the pirates?”

  “Maybe Miss Ripley will read to you today.”

  “That yellow-haired lady?” Little Lloyd pointed to me. “Can she read?”

  “Yes, of course I can—” Before I could say more, they plopped down in a tidy row on the floor in front of me, oldest to youngest, and gazed up at me expectantly.

  “Treasure Island,” Mack murmured. “The book’s in my top desk drawer.” He smiled at me, and for the first time since I’d met him, I felt like smiling back. Mamaw pulled up two chairs from the library table, one for each of us, while I fetched the book.

  My audience sat completely spellbound as I read, the way kids back home would sit in front of the radio for hours listening to Buck Rogers or The Lone Ranger. When I finished the chapter, Mamaw poked my arm with her elbow and smiled. She didn’t have any teeth. “Then what happened?” she asked.