The Seven Wonders of Sassafras Springs

by Betty G. Birney

  He reached into his shirt pocket, pulled out a letter, and held it out for me to take. I guess I didn’t want to know what was in that letter, because my hand wouldn’t take it.

  Pa paused to tell me he’d written to Molly to ask if I could stay with them. Then he carefully unfolded the letter and read it out loud.

  “Dear Cousin Cole,

  Thank you for the letter. Although we’d love to have Eben visit, this is not a good time as the whole town of Silver Peak is down with influenza. Many have died. Eli almost met his Maker but pulled through, for which I am grateful. Maybe next year your boy could come see us. Hello to your sister.

  Sincerely,

  Molly Campbell.”

  “I told you that place was not fit for humans,” Aunt Pretty remarked, plopping down into her rocker. “Influenza!”

  “Now, Pretty, this is a big disappointment to the boy,” Pa told her.

  My heart crashed down to my toes and my eyes got blurry. Disappointment? I’ll say! I’d frittered away the better part of a week and now that dream of a mountain had just crumbled to dust.

  “I guess it doesn’t matter about the seventh Wonder, because I can’t make good on my promise.” Pa sounded as disappointed as I felt.

  Aunt Pretty patted my arm. “Next year will be here soon enough. Then you can go.” Surprisingly, she chuckled. “Say, you certainly got folks worked up about Wonders! I haven’t seen so much excitement around here for years. Since that carnival came, I think.”

  My voice came back. “Maybe they weren’t Wonders after all.” I hadn’t figured out how an applehead doll measured up to a pyramid or how a musical saw stacked up to the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

  “Why not let us be the judge of that?” said Pa.

  So I took out my tablet and read them all my stories, adding a few details here and there as I described all I’d heard and seen.

  Pa and Aunt Pretty and even Sal listened in silence, except for an occasional “My word,” or “I never heard that!” from my aunt, who stopped crocheting entirely by the third Wonder.

  When I was finished, Pa said, “Those were riproaring stories, all right. Say, I met Dutch Hubbell once. He looked like he’d seen a ghost. His hair stood straight up all the time.”

  “And I’d forgotten what a bad boy Buddy Peevey was,” my aunt added.

  I sat there, thinking about the Wonders as the evening shadows settled over the barnyard. A doll. A bookcase. A saw. A table. A ship in a bottle. A woven cloth. They were all as unimpressive and ordinary as Sassafras Springs, yet each in its own way was a one-of-a-kind marvel.

  After the light was gone, Aunt Pretty stood up and gave me a strange look, then abruptly went inside the house without a word. A little while later, she came back out toting a lantern and a big shoe box. “Now, I know these are no Wonders. In fact they’re about as ordinary as can be. But if Mrs. Pritchard can show off some dried-up apple doll and Violet Rowan can brag about a worn-out table, you might as well see these.”

  She took the lid off and turned the box on its side. Out tumbled a whole world of little people, all dressed up and painted and made of clothespins. Someone had painted faces on the round tops, and they were dressed in overalls, or suits, or dresses—even a preacher’s outfit.

  “What are they?” I asked.

  “These are my clothespin people. When I was a girl, my very best friend and I used to make them. That Cally, she had a sense of humor.” Aunt Pretty held up a doll that had a grizzled-fur beard and stuffing around the middle. “Isn’t this the spitting image of old Ev Olson?” she asked Pa. He nodded and chuckled.

  She held up another one, dressed in leather. “I made this Indian, and Cally did the preacher.” She displayed another figure with a flowered dress and a gigantic hat. “Cally and I liked to split our sides laughing at this hat Lessie wore to the church social.”

  “Aunt Pretty, these are wonderful! Look, there’s a pilgrim. And a Santa Claus.”

  “We had a lot of fun, but we stopped when we were grown up. Once Cally moved away, I went back to making them, just so’s I’d never forget. Every wash day while I’m hanging clothes, one clothespin seems to suddenly look just like somebody I know, and there I go again. ’Course they’re no Wonders of the World, but they help me remember Cally.”

  I sure hoped she wasn’t going to start crying. Instead she reached into her pocket and pulled out another clothespin person. It was a boy wearing a tiny shirt, trousers, and suspenders that exactly matched the outfit my aunt had just made me.

  “It’s me, Aunt Pretty. Doesn’t that beat all!”

  “I thought it might bring you luck on your trip.”

  Without another word, my aunt whisked her entire clothespin population back into the box and went into the house.

  “That Pretty, she’s the one who’s a Wonder,” Pa said admiringly. I had no trouble agreeing with that.

  When Pa finally rose to go into the house, I had a question for him. “Think I could have an hour off tomorrow, if I start an hour early?”

  “Have to get your own breakfast. Have to coax Mabel and Myrt into giving up some milk an hour early,” said Pa.

  “I’ll do it.” The cows might be cranky, but they were never in that good a mood anyway.

  “Are you going to look for that seventh Wonder?” he asked.

  “Yessir, I believe I will.”

  You’d think after a week of searching for Wonders, Sal would be getting a mite bored. But she didn’t mind a bit as we made our way down the winding, rocky trail that led to Alf Dee’s mule farm. I found it slow going, though. You’d have to be a mule—or mule-headed—to make it, but we did.

  Strangely enough, Uncle Alf was standing on his tidy white porch when I got there, like he’d been waiting for me.

  “Hurry on in here now, son,” he called to me as I hurried up his garden path. I speeded up as Sal dashed ahead, squeezing through the screen door before me.

  “’Bout time you got here,” Uncle Alf greeted me.

  “You were expecting me?”

  “Word gets around Sassafras Springs, Eben. I know you need a seventh Wonder and I might have one for you. Only you can be the judge of that,” Uncle Alf answered.

  “Dog, you lay down there.” He pointed to a rug by the front door. Sal did just what he said. Everybody listened to Uncle Alf. He was nobody’s uncle that anybody knew of, but folks respected him.

  Alfred Dee stood as straight as a fence post, and he wore the Sassafras Springs uniform: a rough blue shirt and worn overalls with a red bandanna sticking out of the back pocket. He was stick thin, with cheekbones like rocky mountain peaks that rose above a droopy brown mustache.

  Folks had been calling him Uncle Alf for years, even though he was barely older than Pa. He’d been married once but his wife died young, before they had a chance to have a family. That’s when he became “Uncle Alf” to everyone else’s children.

  Inside, his house was neat and clean. The only unusual thing was what was sitting on the dining-room table—and believe me, it wasn’t dinner! The sight of it purely took my breath away because spread out before me was all of Sassafras Springs—every inch of it—in miniature.

  “It’s—it’s Sassafras Springs!” I exclaimed. “How’d you do it?”

  “Carved it all with my own two hands. It’s only taken most of my life so far. And it’s not finished yet. Not by a long shot.”

  I bent down for a closer look. It was all there—all carved and nailed, all glued and painted. All the houses and the farms, with Yellow Dog Road pointing the way through the middle of town and cut again.

  I saw our house—small and white and neat, and its big white porch with the floor painted dark green. A miniature Aunt Pretty sat in her chair, holding a toothpick-size crochet hook.

  A tiny Pa sat on the steps with a boy reading a thick book.

  “That’s my Seven Wonders book,” I burst out. That scene had taken place only a few nights ago!

  “You don’t say,” murmu
red Uncle Alf.

  I followed the whole layout up Yellow Dog Road to the ridge and the Pritchard cottage. Mrs. Pritchard, dead-on perfect to the flowers blooming on her dress, was hanging laundry. Farther up the road, Cully Pone’s shack had a familiar slant to its roof. A three-inch Cully stood poised over an old stump, ready to lower the blade of his ax.

  The church was surrounded by trees and tombstones. Through colored cellophane panels on the church windows, I could see Calvin Smiley holding a bow over his musical saw.

  “This all just happened!” I could hardly breathe.

  Eulie and Violet Rowan tended their garden; Rae Ellen stood outside our barn, holding a burlap sack that glowed eerily. I pulled back.

  The rest of Sassafras Springs was just as real. Lessie Mull in her yellow sunbonnet. Grandma Mayer had put up a jar of pickles. Mayor Peevey hoed potatoes while the First Lady slopped toy hogs. Lily Saylor stood on her porch, clutching a red satin box close to her heart.

  “How do you see it? You weren’t there. How’d you know what happened?” I asked.

  Uncle Alf shrugged his bony shoulders. “Can’t rightly say, Eben. When I get to carving, I start seeing how things are, that’s all. I guess my grandmother Emma was the same way with that loom of hers. I can tell you about the carving, if you want to hear it.”

  I wanted to hear it. I knew when I was face-to-face with a genuine Wonder. And even if it wasn’t, I still wanted to know the secret of Uncle Alf’s carvings.

  Uncle Alf’s Story

  Graven Images

  When I was your age, I wanted to carve wood but I didn’t know how. Most men whittled toys and whistles, but nobody I knew could carve a real figure. I had me a knife that I kept real sharp, and in my spare time I’d practice. Nothing ever came out quite right.

  One day a traveling artist came through Sassafras Springs. His name was LaFlame and from the way he talked, he was a genuine Frenchman. He’d paint your portrait for five dollars. Everybody wanted one; only a few could afford it. One family had him paint a colored copy of a photo of their little girl who had died. He made her look like an angel. The town board got together five dollars to paint the picture of the mayor … Hobart was his name. Everybody was kind of puzzled because he came out looking more like a devil, and it turned out he was. Ran off with some funds, I recall. Anyway, the church hired LaFlame to paint some angels on the ceiling. He had angels flying all over that place—beautiful ones. They’ve been painted over since then. Seems some committee decided they were too fanciful for an ordinary country church.

  One night he stopped by to see if my ma would buy a picture. She didn’t have five dollars, but she gave him a glass of cool water. He was resting on the porch when he saw me with the knife and wood. He asked what I was trying to do with it.

  When I told him, LaFlame laughed at me and said I was going about it all wrong. He said you can’t just start in carving. You’ve got to get to know the wood, let it get to know you. You’ve got to hold the wood, warm to it, feel the beat of its pulse.

  He took that wood and he rolled it around in his hands, like he was kneading bread dough. After a while, he took my knife and showed me how to make deep cuts, not just hack away at it. I watched him real careful-like for a while.

  All of a sudden he stood up and handed the wood to me. “You’re ready for it now,” he told me. And with that, LaFlame walked off the porch and right out of Sassafras Springs forever.

  I kept on carving anyway, without knowing what I was doing. When I was finished, I laughed out loud, because I’d carved myself an angel without even knowing it! All because that angel artist had worked the wood for me. Pretty angel it was, but I never carved another angel again.

  Some years later I was at a dance and met a pretty gal from Blue River. I felt for certain that I’d seen her before. When I got home, I rushed upstairs and got that wooden angel out of a drawer and there she was. The face was the spitting image of that gal like a photograph.

  Of course, I married her. And I’ve been carving ever since.

  Now, I won’t try to explain what I just said, because I don’t understand it. I don’t have to understand it. I just have to do the carving. The wood does the rest. It was far-fetched, but looking at that miniature version of my home town, I’d have believed anything.

  A worry was growing somewhere in my head as I studied the layout again. Sassafras Springs was there in every up-to-the-moment detail. There were odd things too. A woman with a dog and a lantern approached a man sitting at a table in the graveyard. A cottony cloud of locusts hovered over a farm where a tiny family raised brooms in the fields. On the far edge was an outcropping of rocks, high above a creek, where a man in a top hat tended a fire. And out in a shed behind a farmhouse, an old woman sat before a loom.

  “You’ve got the past and the present all mixed up,” I told Uncle Alf.

  “The older you get, the more the past and the present are all mixed up in your brain,” Uncle Alf patiently explained. “Future too, I guess.”

  I pointed to the end of Yellow Dog Road, where I noticed a funny figure, kind of like me, though older somehow. He was on the edge of Sassafras Springs, walking away from town. He had a small suitcase in one hand and a scruffy old dog following him.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Who does it look like?”

  “It’s … me.” I could barely whisper what I was thinking. “It looks like I’m leaving. Is that it?”

  “Kind of looks that way to me, too.”

  I swallowed hard. I’d said often enough that I’d get out of Sassafras Springs some day. Seeing myself walking down that road with no one stopping me made me feel kind of funny inside. Glad and sad and kind of lonely.

  I remembered what Aunt Pretty said. “I hope the farm doesn’t go to rack and ruin,” I repeated.

  “Not likely. And it doesn’t mean you’ll never come back,” Uncle Alf said softly. “Seems as if you’re off to see the world. ’Course, up to now, I had my doubts.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Eben, there are two kinds of folks: those who are satisfied right where they are and those with an itch to see the rest of the world. If you’re the kind who’s got to go, then get going. Even if you don’t, now that you’ve found seven Wonders, I’ll bet you’ll be noticing new ones every day.”

  Uncle Alf held out his fist and opened his fingers to reveal an unfinished carving of a baby.

  “Who’s that?” I asked.

  “Don’t know yet. Don’t know whether it’s a boy or girl. We’ll all know in due time,” Uncle Alf said.

  I looked down at that tiny Sassafras Springs and I thought about Junior’s egg and Lessie Mull’s log cabin quilt, Mrs. Saylor’s jade bracelet and Aunt Pretty’s green glass beads, Eulie Rowan’s worn table and Calvin Smiley’s ordinary saw. “I was only looking for big things,” I told him. “But a small thing can be a prize too.”

  “You have something there, boy.” I straightened up and pulled out my tablet. “Well, I’ve found the seventh Wonder. Maybe not of the whole world … but it’s the Seventh Wonder of Sassafras Springs for sure.”

  “Could be,” answered Uncle Alf. “And Eben …”

  Uncle Alf glanced down at that tiny baby-to-be in his hand. “Please say hello to your Aunt Pretty for me. I would be pleased if she stopped by some day.”

  “Yes, sir.” Something else was bothering me. “Uncle Alf? Do you still have your grandma’s loom?”

  “Not exactly, Eben.” Uncle Alf spoke softly. “After Grandmother died, that loom sat silent in the shed until one day a big wind came along and smashed the shed and the loom into a pile of sticks. I stacked it all up and I’ve been carving on it for years. Most of the carvings you see here came out of that loom. I think Grandmother would have like it that way.”

  Old Emma definitely would have liked it, I decided as I walked home, full of questions and confusion and, well, full of wonder.

  Day Nine Change of Plans

  Aunt Pretty was so
anxious to hear what I was up to, she pestered me all through dinner to tell her the story.

  When I finally told her and Pa about Uncle Alf, she was even more interested. Especially after I said he’d asked about her.

  “I never knew Alfred carved that little village. That would be something to see.” Aunt Pretty sat on the edge of her rocker. Her hands were still for once.

  “Alfred? You call him Alfred?” I was amazed.

  “Goodness, I’ve known him my whole life,” Aunt Pretty said. “I never saw that little village, though.”

  “Why don’t you call on him, Pretty? I recall you two were friendly at one time,” Pa suggested with a sly grin.

  “I think I’ll do that,” Aunt Pretty declared. I’ll bake him an apple pie. I’ll bet it’s been years since Alfred had a homemade apple pie.”

  “It’s a rough road to his house,” I warned her. “You’d have to be a mule to make it.”

  Aunt Pretty laughed. “I’ve been down plenty of rough roads, Eben. And I’m as stubborn as a mule—you know that.”

  I could see she was determined. “Wear your blue dress when you go,” I suggested. “I like that dress.”

  My aunt’s face turned pink. “I’m just going to see the carvings. But maybe I’ll see if that dress is clean.”

  She started to go inside, then came right back. “Lord, I got so caught up in hearing about Alfred, I forgot I had something important to tell you, Eben.”

  “What?”

  “I went down and made a long-distance telephone call today,” she announced proudly. That got my attention, since we didn’t have a phone. The locals all went to Yount’s General to make their calls. Hiram charged them a pretty penny to do so. But long distance!

  “I called Cousin Lottie in St. Louis. She’s our second cousin on my mother’s side. She worked for some rich folks there, till she got married. Now she’s got a house in the city and a couple of kids, younger than you, Eben. Anyway, she said she’d be plain delighted to have you visit her week after next. Says she misses having kinfolk around.”