Wonderland Creek Part 5

"Let them think they killed me, Lillie . . . Safer that way."

Lillie pondered his words for a moment before saying, "You might be right. If they come back to finish you off, you're a sitting duck. Or a laying-down duck, I should say." She gave a cackling laugh, then looked up at me. I held the bedsheets in my shaking, b.l.o.o.d.y hands. "You know how to rip bandages, girl?" I shook my head. I had trained to be a schoolteacher and a librarian, not a nurse. "Take over this job, then, and I'll rip." I knelt down and pressed the blood-soaked underwear against Mack's wounds while Lillie tore up the sheets.

"Listen, Lillie . . ." Mack breathed. "Have my funeral. Let them think they killed me."

"How am I gonna fake a funeral all by myself, honey? I'll be needing a casket and everything."

He tilted his chin, gesturing to me. "She can help us."

"That girl? She ain't much use to n.o.body, far as I can tell."

Mack's eyes met mine. "Will you help me?"

I couldn't reply. I felt like I'd been pushed onto the stage in the middle of a very bad play and didn't know any of my lines. I would have run for the hills if I knew which hill to run to. And if someone out there wasn't shooting at people.

"Please, Miss Ripley?" I was surprised that Mack remembered my name. All I could do was stammer.

"But I-I-I . . ."

"Killer could come back and shoot all three of us," Lillie said matter-of-factly. "You want that?"

I shook my head. I had to be dreaming. I had eaten a baked bean sandwich yesterday. I had indigestion. This was a nightmare, that's all. I looked around and tried to draw comfort from my surroundings. I was in a library, for heaven's sake, my familiar world of books and overdue notices and card catalogues. People didn't get shot in libraries. Who would want to kill a librarian? We were nice people. Harmless people. This was a dream. A very bad dream. But until I woke up, I would be wise to play along with these crazy people and do whatever they said.

"W-what do you want me to do?"

Lillie and Mack exchanged looks. "Go upstairs and fetch Mack's rifle," she said.

"I don't know how to shoot a gun!"

"n.o.body's asking you to shoot it, girl, just go get it." I knew where the rifle was. I had stared at the gun rack hanging on the bedroom wall all night, hoping I wouldn't need to use it myself.

Lillie and I traded places again, and I went upstairs while she began wrapping up Mack like a mummy. My hands trembled so badly I could barely lift down the heavy rifle. I had never held one in my life. I carried it downstairs as if it might go off in my hands. If Lillie told me to point it at somebody, I would faint dead away.

"Here it is," I told her, "but I-"

"Listen to me, girl." She took it from me and laid it by Mack's side. "Cora and the others will be coming to work soon. We gonna tell them Mack went out hunting this morning and had a accident."

"You want me to lie?"

"No, I want you to keep your trap shut and don't say a word. Understand?"

I nodded vigorously. Lillie might be twig-thin, but she looked as though she knew how to use the rifle. In fact, I nodded so hard it's a wonder my head didn't come loose.

"In the meantime, we're keeping the gun handy in case the shooter comes back to finish the job."

I continued to nod, but she may as well have been talking gibberish.

I was still sitting in a daze beside Mack and Lillie when the other librarians arrived. They halted in shock at the sight of Mack lying in the foyer, a bloodied mess.

"What happened, Miss Lillie?"

"Hunting accident."

"Oh, Mack!"

"Is he going to be all right?"

"Don't know yet. He lost a lot a blood. He might of got home too late."

The women wept, prayed, held Mack's hands. Three of them went upstairs and hauled down the mattress from his bed-my bed-and gently lifted him onto it. The shock and pain from being moved made Mack moan, then pa.s.s out again.

"What can we do, Miss Lillie?" they all asked. "Give us something to do."

"Not much you can do. He's in the Lord's hands now. You all just go about your work like you always do. People waiting for their books, ain't they? Tell the believing ones to be praying for Mack. Then we just have to wait and see."

"Isn't there some way we can help?"

Lillie gestured to me. "New girl says she'll help out."

All four of them eyed me dubiously. Cora spoke for the group. "Are you sure you don't want us to stay with you, Miss Lillie?"

"President Roosevelt's paying you to work, ain't he?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Then you best get working."

Everyone hugged Lillie, consoling her. I heard one of them say, "Poor Lillie. You've lived through so much already, and now this?"

By the time the librarians loaded the books on their horses and rode away, Lillie looked exhausted. I remembered that she had been sick. "Are you all right?" I asked her. "Do you want me to help you upstairs to bed?"

"No, I need to stay here beside Mack. You can get me a chair to set on, though." I dragged over an armchair from the non-fiction section, and Lillie sank onto it with a sigh. "He ain't outta the woods, you know. Next few days are the most important."

I nodded. I had no idea what to say. Lillie studied me as if she still wasn't quite sure who I was and what I was doing here. I wasn't entirely certain myself.

"You know how to cook?" she finally asked.

I started to say yes, then recalled how Mother had banished me from the kitchen after setting fire to it. "Not very well, I'm afraid."

"Well, I ain't strong enough to wait on all of us, so you better get on out there and do the best you can."

"Yes, ma'am." First I would have to wash all the blood off my hands. If the stains on my clothes didn't come out, I would have to throw them away. Mother would scold me for my wastefulness: Don't you know this country is in an economic depression? And how could I reply? I'm sorry, but someone tried to kill the librarian, and he bled all over me. No one would believe it.

I walked out to the tacked-on kitchen to clean up and make breakfast. I would have to figure out how to build a fire in the woodstove before I could cook anything. I gazed around at the empty woodbox, the cold stove, the flies, and the dishes festering in the sink, and I sank down at the kitchen table and sobbed.

If Mack's gonna live, he's gonna need some medicine." Lillie gave me that piece of news as we ate our breakfast of cold corn bread and strawberry preserves. It was all I could find to eat in the disheveled kitchen, and besides, the stove wouldn't stay lit for more than two minutes. I didn't like the way Lillie said "we" every time she decided something needed to be done. Considering how frail she was, "we" probably meant me. But Mack looked as though he might die any minute, and I didn't want his death on my conscience.

Yesterday I would have asked Lillie where the nearest pharmacy was. Today I was wise enough to know that if Acorn, Kentucky, didn't have a hotel, a cafe, a police department, a doctor, or a hospital, the town probably didn't have a pharmacy, either. "Where would you like me to go for the medicine?" I asked, dreading her reply.

"We gonna need some willow bark and some elm bark and maybe some green peach tree leaves, if we can find them this time a year. If Mack's gonna pull through this, he'll be needing a poultice to draw out the poison and something to take down his fever." She seemed to be talking to herself more than to me so I kept quiet. "But the first thing we need to take care of is the pain. Quickest thing is to make do with some tansy. I believe there's some up in my workroom."

"Wait. What's tansy?"

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 moons.h.i.+ne 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 fas.h.i.+onable 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 pa.s.s 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 bas.e.m.e.nt? 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 s.h.i.+ver. 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. "n.o.body 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 n.o.body 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."