Wonderland Creek

by Lynn Austin

  “That’s just a garter snake, honey. He won’t hurt you.”

  “How do you know what kind of snake I saw?”

  “Because I seen a whole lot of them here in my yard.”

  A whole lot? Her assurances failed to comfort me. I poked at the tall weeds with a stick, just to be sure, then knelt down on the damp grass with Lillie’s basket. Up close, I could see borders of stones around each smaller section of plants, as well as around the entire perimeter. The garden must have been very pretty at one time.

  “That there is catnip.” Lillie pointed with the tip of her cane. “We need a few leaves of that. Next to it is peppermint. Pick a few leaves and smell them.”

  The fragrant aroma made my mouth water. “Mmm. Like mint candy.”

  “If I were stronger, I’d take you into the woods to pick wild ginger and ginseng—but I ain’t young anymore. We’ll have to make do with dried roots for now. I still got some dried chickweed and yarrow, too, but fresh is always better.”

  “Maybe Mack can show me where to find what you need. He found some wild mushrooms up there in the woods.”

  “Um. Maybe. He has his hands full right now.” She showed me a few more things to pick and then explained which plants were good and which were the weeds. “Them weeds should all be pulled up or they’ll choke out the good plants. Weeds are just like hatred and greed, you know. If you ain’t careful, they’ll choke all the love and compassion out of a person.”

  “I’ll come back and weed the garden for you, if I have time,” I promised.

  Before we went inside, Lillie pointed to a large square of earth dotted with dead leaves and more sprouting weeds. “That’s supposed to be our vegetable garden, but Mack never did get around to it before he got shot. Guess we’ll have to plant it ourselves if we want to keep eating.”

  My shoulders sagged beneath the weight of imaginary shovels and clumps of earth. I had seen Wayne Larkin and the Howard and Sawyer families plowing and planting and sweating to carve out their gardens and it had looked like backbreaking work to me. What had I gotten myself into by agreeing to stay?

  When we’d picked enough herbs, I helped Lillie hobble inside again to mix up the brew in her black iron cauldron. I felt like one of the witches in Macbeth—“Double, double, toil and trouble; Fire burn and cauldron bubble”—as I stirred the finished concoction on the kitchen stove. While it cooled, Lillie gave me a mortar and pestle and instructed me to crush a handful of dried seed pods to extract the reddish-purple liquid from them.

  “That juice is for June Ann,” Lillie told me. “Some folks call that plant ‘chase-devil’ because it helps chase the sad spirits away. Others call it St. John’s Wort because you’re supposed to pick it on June twenty-fourth—St. John’s Day. I’m just about out of it, but maybe we can pick some more this June if I’m up to it.”

  I couldn’t imagine Miss Lillie ever being hearty enough to roam through the woods again, the way she once had. The thought made me very sad.

  We finished preparing both elixirs, and I was helping Lillie tidy up her workroom when I came upon a pile of neatly typed pages. “What’s all this?” I asked, sifting through them.

  “Something Mack and me was working on.”

  “They look like recipes.”

  “They are. He was helping me type up all my remedies, like the ones we made today. He said I need to pass on all the things I know about healing people. Him and me was gonna write a big book full of folk medicine and such. He even had some fancy college professor interested in it. But then Mack got shot. I been too weary to work on it by myself.”

  I paged through the stack of papers. Lillie was one hundred years old. When she died, all of this valuable knowledge would be lost. “I’ll help you,” I said. “I know how to type. I’ll be glad to type these for you if you want me to.”

  She smiled her broad gap-toothed grin. “Honey, you don’t know what a relief that would be to me.”

  After lunch, Lillie lay down to take a nap. I would have loved a nap, too, but I put on my oldest clothes and went outside to survey the garden patch. I knew a tiny bit about gardens, because my parents had started one behind our parsonage. For the past two summers they had grown vegetables to give away to the poor people in Blue Island, and to make soup for the hoboes who stopped by our house for something to eat as if we were running a restaurant. But now, if I wanted to eat, I would have to become a gardener along with everything else.

  I knew that the first thing I had to do was turn over the soil and uproot the weeds to get the ground ready to plant. I found a spade in the shed. Like everything else in Acorn, the work would have to be done the old-fashioned way. I had labored for twenty minutes or so, breaking up a section about four feet square—and had collected a nice set of blisters on my hands—when I heard a man’s voice behind me. “Need help?”

  Ike Arnett strode across the yard toward me. I leaned against the shovel with a sigh. “Yes, I think I do. This work is harder than I thought it would be.”

  “Didn’t I tell you to just ask me if you needed help? Stand still a minute—you got some dirt on your face.” He swiped his thumb across my cheek. “There. Got it.”

  “Yes, you did say you would help, and it’s very kind of you. But in this case, it seems like it would be asking a lot.”

  “I ain’t gonna do it with a spade, that’s for sure. But I’ll be glad to plow it up for you. Mack had a push plow that he used every year.” Ike bounced over to the shed as if he had coil springs in his shoes. He came back with a little hand plow like the one my father used, and a wide-toothed rake. He handed the rake to me. “Here. You can make it all nice and smooth after I plow it up.”

  “Thank you. I can’t tell you how relieved I am to have help. The truth is, I don’t know much about gardens. But I do know that if I don’t plant one, Miss Lillie and I won’t have anything to eat.”

  “Well, lucky for you, I’ve been planting gardens since I was old enough to stand up in one.”

  We worked side by side for the rest of the afternoon, talking and laughing about all kinds of things. Ike showed me an earthworm he’d plowed up and explained why worms were good for the garden. He knew the names of all the birds singing in the treetops along the creek, and he whistled in imitation of each one of them. He was one of the most cheerful people I had ever met, which made me realize how gloomy Gordon had always been. His family’s funeral business may have been partially to blame, but Ike was as lighthearted and happy as the fiddle music he played.

  Together we got the garden plowed and raked and ready to plant, but my body ached in a thousand places by suppertime. “Ask Miss Lillie to show you where her seed potatoes are,” he said as we stood back to survey our work. “We can get them planted next week. She probably has some other seeds saved up, too. Alma has a bunch of tomato and pepper seedlings she started. I’ll bet she’ll trade you for some eggs.”

  “Should we plant corn? It seems like everybody on my book route was planting corn.”

  He lifted his hand to his mouth, and I could see that he was hiding a smile. “We could . . .” he said slowly. “But the corn they’re planting ain’t for eating. It’s for making moonshine.” He laughed, and I couldn’t help laughing with him.

  By quitting time, we had made a solid start on the garden. And I had made a good friend. “See you tomorrow at two?” he asked after putting our tools back in the shed.

  “I’m looking forward to it. And thanks again for all your help.”

  I went inside with a tired smile on my face and began pumping water for my wonderful, glorious, long-overdue bath.

  On Saturday afternoon I was dressing for my date with Ike Arnett when I heard a terrible roar out in front of the library. It sounded as if a dragon had crawled out of the woods and was threatening to devour the entire town. I ran to the front window in Lillie’s workroom and peered out. Ike had arrived in a rickety, rusty, flatbed pickup truck. It lacked a muffler, and every time he pumped the gas pedal to rev the engin
e, the vehicle quaked and roared. I couldn’t determine the truck’s original color beneath all the rust, nor could I tell the model, but it looked old enough to be the first truck off Henry Ford’s assembly line thirty years ago.

  He couldn’t possibly expect me to ride in that wreck, could he? Maybe I should plead illness. But that hardly seemed fair after all the hard work Ike had done in Lillie’s garden yesterday. I hurried into my bedroom to put on my stockings and shoes, wondering what I had gotten myself into.

  “Woo-ee! Don’t you look beautiful!” Ike said as I descended the library stairs.

  “Thank you. You look pretty nice yourself.” His handsome face was scrubbed and clean-shaven, his straw-colored hair slicked back with pomade. He wore a neatly pressed white shirt, string tie, and clean blue jeans. Ike offered me his arm as we walked out to his truck.

  The vehicle looked even worse up close, the fenders missing, the front bumper attached to the frame with baling wire. Ike walked me around to the passenger side and opened the door for me, taking my hand to help me up onto the seat. It lacked upholstery and padding, and was composed of pillows covered with a patchwork quilt like the one on Lillie’s bed. I thought I saw a couple of springs poking between the pillows and wished I hadn’t worn my good stockings.

  “It ain’t too pretty, but it’ll get us there,” Ike said. I wasn’t so sure. Even if it did make it up the mountain and out of this hollow, I would be stone-deaf by the time we arrived. There was no glass in the window between the cab and the truck bed.

  Ike ran around the truck and jumped in, restarting the engine with a roar. The vehicle coughed and choked as if it had swallowed a mule on the way here and the animal was stuck in its throat.

  “I’m sorry it’s running so rough,” Ike shouted above the racket. “We don’t drive it very often because we can’t afford the gasoline unless I get a fiddling job.” It would be impossible to talk while we drove, so I sat back to enjoy the scenery. We rode past the abandoned mine and through the town where the sheriff’s office was, then continued on to a smaller town a few miles away from it.

  The event turned out to be a wedding, held at a pretty little church nestled in a hollow. Ike and the pianist played “Here Comes the Bride” as she walked down the aisle. Afterward, the guests brought out casserole dishes and spread them on a table in the churchyard. It was a beautiful afternoon, and tables and chairs had been set up in the grass. The mountains made a stunning backdrop all around us.

  Ike joined the other musicians who were tuning their instruments on a newly built stage, set up outside on the lawn. It smelled gloriously of fresh lumber. “How old do you think the bride and groom are?” I asked as he plucked a few strings. “They look like teenagers.”

  “Teenaged is about right. Folks around here usually marry before they’re twenty.”

  “What about you, Ike? You look older than twenty.”

  “I’m twenty-four. But marrying would interfere with my fiddling.” He gave me a wink.

  “Faye told me I’d be considered an old maid if I lived here. I’m twenty-two.”

  He shook his head in mock dismay. “I don’t know what’s wrong with those flatlanders up where you come from, but if you lived in Kentucky, someone would have snapped you up a long time ago.”

  “Hey, let’s go,” the banjo player called. “We’re getting paid to make music, you know.”

  “See you later.” Ike winked again. I was growing accustomed to his winks and thought they had a certain charm.

  The band began to play, and their glorious music made the event. I watched everyone dancing and clapping and tapping their toes, and I couldn’t stop smiling all afternoon. Every time the band took a break, Ike sat beside me and we talked. As evening approached, Ike took a dinner break, and we ate fried chicken and sipped cider together.

  “You’re so talented,” I told him. “Can’t you get out of Acorn and go someplace where you can really get paid to play?”

  “Mack always talked about helping me get up to Nashville. Said he knew people up there, but I had to turn him down.”

  “Why?”

  “Turns out Mack’s mama was a Larkin.”

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake. You’d let a stupid thing like that stand in the way of a better life? Making music? Doing what you love?”

  “You’ve seen how folks treat June Ann for marrying a Larkin. It would have been a one-way trip if I’d ever gone up north with Mack. The Arnetts would never let me come back. They’re so sure the Larkins already found the treasure that they’d figure I was stealing part of it, too. ’Course, now that Mack’s dead I guess it don’t matter no more. I don’t know anybody in Nashville, and I don’t have the money to get there on my own.”

  “I guess you regret saying no to Mack’s offer?”

  “I guess.” I had never seen Ike look so somber. He took a few gulps of his cider and said, “He was looking for the treasure map, you know.”

  “The treasure map? Who was?”

  “Mack. He told me once that if he found it, he was gonna divide the money up between the two families and make peace around here. That would have been my ticket to Nashville for sure . . . but then he died.”

  “Who do you think—” I stopped short. I had almost asked him who he thought had shot Mack. I forgot it was supposed to be a hunting accident.

  “Who do I think . . . what?” Ike asked.

  I had to think fast. “Who do you think will take care of Lillie now that Mack is gone? I can’t stay in Acorn forever, you know.”

  “Well, now that’s too bad. We sure could use a smart, pretty gal like you to brighten up our town. What would we have to do to get you to stay longer?” He reached to take my hand, and I was glad that my long soak in the bathtub had gotten rid of the dirt beneath my fingernails. A little shiver slid through me as he gently massaged my palm. Ike was flirting with me again. I decided to cool him off by being practical.

  “Well, for starters, you would have to modernize the town of Acorn. You know, put electricity and indoor plumbing in all the houses. A refrigerator and a wringer washing machine would help, too. And a real stove, the kind that doesn’t need wood every five minutes to keep the food cooking. And a telephone.” I would have added a real bathtub with hot water faucets, but that seemed too personal.

  “Boy, that’s quite a list.”

  “You must think I’m very spoiled for wanting all those things.”

  “You’re being honest. Folks around here would probably like to have all them things too, but you don’t miss what you never had.”

  “I’ve had to adjust to a lot of things since coming here. I miss listening to the radio, too.”

  “One of my uncles used to have a radio back when the mine was open, and I used to go over to his place and listen to it. Every Saturday night when I wasn’t playing in a band somewhere, we’d listen to The Grand Ole Opry program out of Nashville. I remember hearing some red-hot fiddle playing by a group called the Fruit Jar Drinkers.”

  “You’re making that up. That’s not a real name.”

  “No, ma’am, I ain’t making it up. It’s the gospel truth. Another favorite of mine was The Possum Hunters.”

  I couldn’t help laughing and Ike joined me. “What’s your band called?”

  “We’ve changed it a couple of times as players joined and quit. Right now we’re called The Wonderland Creek Boys.”

  “That’s a fine name. What other events do you play for?”

  “Everything you can think of that needs music. If you’re still here this summer, there’ll be some tent revivals and baptisms and such. Barn dances, too. You’ll get to hear us play a lot.”

  “Tent revivals? That sounds interesting.” I had only read about revivals in books. My father’s church was too dignified for one—although every time I saw people dozing during the Sunday services, I wondered if our church could do with a little old-fashioned reviving.

  “I hope you stay, Alice. I’d love to take you along everywhere I go.�
� I simply smiled in return, wise enough not to make any rash promises this time.

  The stars were shining in the clear night sky the next time Ike took a break. He sat cross-legged on the grass in front of me and took both of my hands in his. He knew exactly how to look into a girl’s eyes to make her heart forget how to beat right.

  “I wish I wasn’t playing so I could dance with you,” he said.

  What would it feel like to dance with Ike Arnett? He was so tall and strong. Just the thought of his muscular arms around me made my heart flop helplessly. I couldn’t remember having heart problems when I dated Gordon, but hearts fluttered and skipped and thudded like drums all the time in the romance stories I’d read. Everything about this evening seemed to come straight out of a novel—the warm breeze, the stars winking in the sky, the silvery moon, the blissful bride and groom. Love was in the air and it made me reckless.

  “Can’t you ask for one song off? So we can dance?”

  His smile outshone the moon. “For you, pretty lady, I’d quit the group for good!”

  “No, don’t do that,” I laughed.

  “Let me talk to Sam.” He scrambled to his feet and I watched him walk over to the bearded banjo player. I could tell by the way the man grinned when he looked over at me that he was saying yes. “We’re gonna play a couple of songs first,” Ike told me when he returned, “then I’ll come back for you. Don’t dance with anybody else in the meantime. Promise?”

  “I promise. I’ll be waiting for you.” A couple of young men had asked me to dance already, but I had pointed to Ike and said that I was with him.

  I listened to the band play a few more songs, my anticipation building. Then, as they played the introduction to Stephen Foster’s song, “I Dream of Jeannie with the Light Brown Hair,” Ike laid down his fiddle, jumped off the platform, and swept me into his arms.

  My heart forgot every normal rhythm it had ever known. I had danced with Gordon, of course, but it had never felt like this. Ike pulled me very close. My cheek rested against his chest. His warm hand gripped mine tightly. He was an excellent dancer, feeling the music in every pore of his body, and I followed him the way Belle had trotted behind Mack. There was enough electricity between us to light up Acorn and power a hundred washing machines. The crowd noticed and paused to watch us. They applauded when the song ended.