The Seven Wonders of Sassafras Springs

by Betty G. Birney

  Dedication

  To the many wonderful storytellers in my family, especially my father, Ed Griesbaum, who has preserved the stories of two families and carved a magical village of his own.

  To the memory of my grandmother, Ella Hinson Mohrmann, who enthralled and delighted my sister and me with her stories of growing up in the country.

  To the memory of my mother, Ella Mohrmann Griesbaum, and my grandfather, Herman Mohrmann, who both loved to tell a good story.

  To my editor, Caitlyn Dlouhy, the Eighth Wonder of Sassafras Springs!

  And, finally, to good storytellers everywhere.

  —B. G. B.

  Contents

  How It Started

  Day One: I Go Searching

  Mrs. Pritchard’s Story: Miss Zeldy’s Message

  Day Two: Jeb Joins In

  Cully Pone’s Story: The Rainmaker’s Revenge

  Day Three: Disappointments

  Day Three Continued: Difficulties and Discoveries

  Calvin Smiley’s Story: Amazing Grace

  Day Four: Smells and Spells

  Eulie Rowan’s Story: The Four-Legged Haint

  Day Five: Into the Woods

  Coogie Jackson’s Story: Flight from Georgia

  Rae Ellen’s Story: Dark Seas

  Days Six and Seven: I Start Again

  Mayor Peevey’s Story: Song of the Loom

  Day Eight: A Setback and a Surprise

  Uncle Alf’s Story: Graven Images

  Day Nine: Change of Plans

  The Beginning

  THE SEVEN WONDERS OF SASSAFRAS SPRINGS

  How It Started

  Sometimes extraordinary things begin in ordinary places. A fancy-dancy butterfly starts out in a plain little cocoon. A great big apple tree grows from a tiny brown speck of a seed. And the Wonders started right on our own front porch on a hot summer night I would have forgotten on the spot if it hadn’t been for what got started then and kept on going.

  Who knows, maybe Columbus decided to look for a New World one hot summer night when he got tired of staring at the same old barn. Or maybe one evening after supper, Balboa stood up and said, “Excuse me now, folks. I’m going to search for the Pacific Ocean.”

  There was no chance of seeing an ocean in Sassafras Springs, which is set smack dab in the center of the country. Though a dip in Liberty Creek was welcome on a boiling hot day, to my mind it was a poor excuse for a body of water. Shoot, it wasn’t even a dribble on the big map of the United States that hung on the schoolhouse wall.

  Red Hawk, Coy, and Iron Valley all had dots on the map, but not Sassafras Springs, Missouri. We might as well have been invisible, yet there I was, sitting on the front porch with Pa and Aunt Pretty. The chores were done, our bellies were full, and the mosquitoes hadn’t worked up much of an appetite yet.

  Aunt Pretty sat in her high-back rocker, crocheting some lacy thing as usual, though for the life of me I couldn’t make out what it was meant to be. I hoped it wasn’t intended for me. Pa whittled on a stick and I was staring hard at a drawing in a book. It was a first-rate book with lots of pictures in it. Miss Collins, the schoolteacher, gave it to me on the last day of school for getting the best marks in geography.

  My mind was a million miles away when suddenly my aunt said, “Eben McAllister, you’ve had your nose in that book so long, I forgot what you look like! Wake up and see the world.”

  I gazed out at the familiar white fence, the faded red barn, and the yellow clay road. A pair of fireflies blinked over Aunt Pretty’s peony bed. Our horses, Pat and Murph, were in the barn, Mabel and Myrt were milked, and the chickens had gone to bed long ago. My dog, Sal, thumped her tail, most likely hoping I would stir up some excitement. She should have known better.

  “Nothing to see,” I said and went back to my book. Sal rolled on her side and yawned.

  “You’d think someone would have something interesting to say about something,” Aunt Pretty said. “Living with the two of you is like living alone. I might as well talk to myself.”

  Although I didn’t say it, Aunt Pretty did talk to herself, all day long. It was no picnic taking care of Pa and me. She moved in when Ma died four years ago and did all she could. Still, it was lonely for her because Aunt Pretty could talk your arm off, while Pa and I weren’t ones to waste words.

  “What’s so interesting about that book, anyway?” Aunt Pretty asked.

  “It’s about the Seven Wonders of the World,” I told her. “They built these amazing things way back in ancient Greece and Egypt and places.”

  Pa blew the shavings off his stick. “What things?” he asked.

  I showed him the book, and he took his time studying the drawings. He read the names out loud, and they sounded fine. The Great Pyramid at Giza. The Colossus of Rhodes. The Statue of Zeus. The giant Lighthouse at Alexandria. The Mausoleum at Halicarnassus. The Temple of Artemis at Ephesus. The Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Big things. Wonderful things.

  “We don’t have anything like that around Sassafras Springs,” I pointed out.

  “We do have the wash hanging on the line every Monday,” Aunt Pretty chuckled. “Call it the Hanging Laundry of Sassafras Springs and put it in a book. There’s your Wonder.”

  I tried to make her understand. “These were important things. In faraway lands.”

  Aunt Pretty sniffed loudly. “Seems to me we have lighthouses right here in the U.S.A.”

  “Not like this one. This light could be seen for thirty miles. Fires burned behind the eyes. See?” I held up the page with a drawing of the Lighthouse at Alexandria, but my aunt barely glanced at it.

  Pa calmly scraped away at his stick of wood. “I guess I could put some eyes up on the side of the barn, but I’m afraid the fires would scare the horses.”

  I didn’t give him the satisfaction of a comeback.

  “I suppose we all have notions that others might find peculiar,” Aunt Pretty said.

  “Everyone except you, Pretty.” Pa’s voice was teasinglike.

  “You hush up, Cole, or I’ll bake up a batch of Aunt Dessy’s biscuits for breakfast.”

  They both chuckled. “What are they?” I asked.

  “Your great-aunt Dessy always got her recipes all mixed-up. She could never remember whether it was a cup of flour and a pinch of salt, or a pinch of flour and a cup of salt. So her biscuits were hard as rocks,” Aunt Pretty explained.

  “No wonder Uncle Jonah didn’t have a tooth left in his head,” Pa said, and they exploded into laughter, though going without teeth didn’t seem too funny to me. “Yep, Dessy’s biscuits were downright Wonders,” Pa added, and he and my aunt laughed even harder.

  “That’s not what I mean!” I was getting seriously annoyed. I’m talking about things so special, folks would travel all around the world to see them!”

  Aunt Pretty put down her crocheting and sighed. “Eben, why do you spend so much time thinking about those foreign places?”

  “Because someday I’m going to see them,” I told her. “I’m going round the world on a tramp steamer, like the fellow who wrote this book.”

  Aunt Pretty huffed and started crocheting with a vengeance. “Wouldn’t that be a scandal! Leaving your pa alone with all this work. Leaving the farm to go to rack and ruin.”

  “Eben’s free to lead his own life, once he’s grown up,” Pa said. “If the farm doesn’t suit him.”

  I stared at the barn for a spell. “Why do all the barns in Sassafras Springs look the same?” To this day, I don’t know why I was in such a complaining frame of mind, but I was. “Why isn’t there a round one? Or a blue one? Or one with a tower?”

  Aunt Pretty’s crochet hook hung in m
idair. “A round blue barn with a tower. Now I’ve heard everything. What would people think?”

  “Maybe they’d think Sassafras Springs is a place worth seeing, instead of just passing us by,” I told her.

  “Sassafras Springs is as good a place to live as any I’ve heard of.” Aunt Pretty’s voice was firm. “We’d look silly with a pyramid out in our cornfield.”

  “Just think, Pretty, we could charge folks to see it,” Pa joked. “You could sell the tourists lemonade and your good apple pie.”

  My aunt laughed. I did not.

  Pa eyeballed his whittling stick again. “That Egypt looks to be a mighty dry place. I wonder how they grow the crops to live on.”

  “They’ve done fine for all these years,” I snapped back.

  A lopsided moon popped up in the dusky sky, but it didn’t shed light on any Wonders.

  “Maybe our buildings are lacking in originality,” Pa admitted. “Still, I can’t believe there aren’t a few Wonders around here somewhere. Maybe a little smaller than that pyramid, so’s you haven’t noticed yet.”

  I didn’t mean to sigh as giant a sigh as I did right then. The light was fading fast, and Aunt Pretty’s crochet hook was flying like fury.

  Pa stared out at the farm with a faraway look in his eyes. “Annie May always wanted to go up to Silver Peak, Colorado, to see Cousin Molly and her husband, Eli. She wanted to see a real, honest-to-goodness tall mountain, the kind with snow on top. I sure wish I’d have taken her.”

  I swallowed the lump of sorrow I felt whenever Ma’s name came up. Sal got up and pressed her chin on my knee.

  We all sat silent, even Aunt Pretty, until Pa asked, “Does that book tell what a Wonder really is?”

  I thumbed through the pages, back to the introduction. “Here it is. It says, ‘a marvel; that which arouses awe, astonishment, surprise, or admiration.’”

  Pa scratched his cheek with the dull side of his knife. “I’ve seen one or two things to admire around here. Maybe if you put out a little effort, you would too.”

  I closed the book and leaned back on both elbows. “But what’s the point?”

  “I just think there’s no use searching the world for Wonders when you can’t see the marvels right under your own nose.”

  “Amen,” said Aunt Pretty.

  It wasn’t enough to satisfy me, not in the mood I was in. “Just what marvels are you talking about?”

  Pa stood up and started pacing around, rubbing the back of his neck the way he always did when he was pondering something important.

  “Eben, I have a deal for you,” he finally announced. “You find yourself Seven Wonders right here in Sassafras Springs, and I’ll buy you a ticket to go see Molly and Eli and that mountain!”

  I almost fell off the porch. So did Aunt Pretty.

  “All by himself?” she asked, rolling her eyes. “An eleven-year-old boy staying with folks who are practically strangers out there in the wilderness?”

  Pa ignored her. “Of course, like you say, you probably can’t find seven amazing things in all of Sassafras Springs, but you could try.”

  My mind was racing. “A train ticket? When?”

  “Reckon there’s time right before harvest.”

  “Can I enter this contest?” Aunt Pretty asked.

  “The deal’s between me and the boy.” Pa rose from his chair and disappeared into the house.

  “Colorado.” Aunt Pretty shook her head. “Why, I would have been tickled pink just to go over to St. Clair when I was a girl.”

  I’ve never been able to picture my aunt as a girl. Her real name, Purity, got shortened to “Pretty” years ago. The name stuck, though she’d added a few pounds over the years. Pleasingly plump, as she said. Pa always told her she was still in her prime. “You’re a fine figure of a woman, little sister,” he’d say. That made Aunt Pretty blush every time.

  The door squealed as Pa came back outside and handed me a pad of paper. “You can keep track of your Wonders here.”

  “How long do I have?”

  “Seven days seems fair,” said Pa, settling back down. “Long as it took for God to create this world and take a day off.”

  “A Wonder a day? I don’t know.” At that moment, seven of anything sounded like a lot. Especially since if Sassafras Springs had Wonders, they hadn’t showed up so far.

  Still, I could already hear that train whistle calling, could already see those tracks pointing toward the white-capped mountains of Colorado.

  “I’ll start tomorrow.”

  I guess Columbus said something like that once, only he said it in Italian.

  Day One I Go Searching

  The next morning didn’t seem that different from any other Wednesday in July. Up at first light, I stepped out on the porch and stared across the yard, out at the fields, the orchard, and beyond. I didn’t see a thing that would impress an Egyptian.

  I fed Murph and Pat while Pa milked Mabel and Myrt. Then we harnessed the horses and headed straight to the fields. By that year, which was 1923, a few farmers had tractors, but Pa said the problem with machines was when you said whoa, they kept on going. Unlike Murph and Pat.

  I knew it’d be foolish to look for Wonders on our own land. I’d been up and down the rows of corn and beans so often, I knew every clump of dirt. While I weeded, I did come up with a plan of how to start my search. When you’re plowing or mowing, you start at the beginning of one row and go all the way to the end. Then you move up the next row to the end, and so on. That’s how I’d go looking for Wonders: up one country lane and down the next, until I’d covered all of Sassafras Springs. Seven days should be enough time.

  Still, I wasn’t convinced I’d find anything awe-inspiring.

  In the late afternoon, Pa gave me a break from chores—that alone would count as a Wonder in my book, though I didn’t say it out loud. He might have called off the deal altogether, and I wasn’t about to let that happen.

  I stuffed the tablet in my back pocket, and Sal and I walked out to Yellow Dog Road. That’s what they call the wide strip of dirt that goes straight down the middle of Sassafras Springs. In winter it’s as slick as glass. In spring and fall it turns to mush. In summer it’s plain yellow dirt, so dusty I could taste it.

  “I’ve got a plan, Sal,” I announced. Sal wasn’t much interested in plans. She let her nose lead her where it would—usually toward the nearest squirrel or rabbit.

  Across the road I could see a group of farms up on a rocky ridge midway up Redhead Hill. There were a couple more in the valley below. On our side of the road was our place, three other farms, and the Community Church.

  If you went all the way down Yellow Dog Road, you’d connect with the County Road, a two-lane highway that brought the occasional traveler or salesman to town. My best friend Jeb and I used to sit at that crossroads when we were younger, waiting for something interesting to come along, like an automobile or a circus wagon.

  Once, when we were eight, a city fellow in a straw hat and red suspenders stopped and asked us directions. He was traveling downstate to attend the College of Mines and Metallurgy. Didn’t that sound like a fine place—folks sitting around studying gold and silver all day! Jeb and I talked about it all summer, rolling that name around: College of Mines and Metallurgy.

  At the crossroads of the County Road and Yellow Dog lay a scattering of stores and houses. It wasn’t much of a town, though there was talk of building a community hall. Just talk, Pa said.

  On the other side of the County Road ran Liberty Creek. It was a good place to swim, skip stones, fish, or float a small boat—if you watched out for rocks and didn’t mind the occasional snake. Wild sassafras grew along the banks, and upstream a spring fed the creek. It’s not too hard to figure out how our town got its name.

  Standing there in the middle of Yellow Dog Road, I could see plenty of land but nothing more wonderful than barns and silos.

  “Maybe we need some company,” I told Sal. “No use doing this all alone.”
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br />   We walked down to the Austins’ to see if Jeb wanted to come along. Even though his family’s farm was next door to ours, it was still a hike to get there. Dusty, their big brown dog, ran up to greet Sal and me and led us to the vegetable patch, where Jeb was riding herd on a whole pack of Austins.

  He had four younger sisters and four younger brothers. The babies were inside with their ma and the oldest girl, Maggie, but the rest of them hung all over Jeb, as usual. You hardly ever saw him without a brother clinging to his leg, a sister riding piggyback, and another one tugging at his back pocket. Fortunately, Jeb was good-natured.

  “Want to come searching with me?” I asked him.

  “Looking for trouble? I got some here,” said Jeb, ruffling Flo’s hair.

  “Hi, Eben,” she said with a giggle. “Got any candy?”

  Before I could answer, Charlie lunged for Sal, yelling “Doggie!” She escaped his grasp in the nick of time.

  Don’t get me wrong—I like Jeb’s brothers and sisters. But whenever I tried to tell Jeb he was lucky, he’d say, “Take as many of ’em as you want.”

  “I was hoping you and me could go searching for Wonders. Like the Seven Wonders of the World. Remember? In geography?”

  Jeb grabbed Fred’s overalls just in time to keep him from mowing down a tomato plant.

  “Nothing like that around here,” he said. “You got your work cut out for you.”

  “If I can find Seven Wonders in Sassafras Springs, I’ll get to go to Colorado on the train.”

  Jeb let out a low whistle. “By yourself?”

  I nodded, just as Bessie burst into tears because Joey was dangling a fat worm in her face.

  “Maybe tomorrow,” said Jeb, picking up Bessie. “I kind of have my hands full today.”

  I trudged back toward the road with Sal at my heels.

  “Looks like we’re on our own,” I told her. She wagged her tail, grateful-like.

  We took the side road off Yellow Dog and headed up the hill, past fields tall with corn, aiming toward the farthest side of the ridge. “I guess this is the beginning, girl,” I told Sal.