Wonderland Creek Part 4

"It's on my route for tomorrow."

"Good. Wait until you see what I have for the kids." He pulled out Elmer Watson's atlas with a grin and a flourish.

"Where did you get that?"

"Pretty nice, huh?"

I might have been invisible. It galled me that he was taking all the credit for Mr. Watson's wonderful atlas as if he had printed and bound it himself while they had been out riding their horses.

"I brought it with me," I said loudly. "From Illinois. We had a book drive at the library where I work and one of our patrons donated it."

Mack gestured to the woman with the atlas. "This is Cora. And she's Marjorie."

"It's nice to meet you." I smiled my friendliest smile. The ladies nodded absently.

"Here are the rest of the books," Mack told them. "Look through them and take whatever you want for your routes."

His words horrified me. "Wait! Those books haven't been processed and catalogued yet!" They ignored my protests and knelt down to rummage through the boxes. I heard more horses outside, stomping and sneezing, and two more women came inside to unload their books. Mack introduced them as Alma and Faye, and they weren't any friendlier than the first two women had been. I quickly forgot who was who as they milled around, looking through the boxes of new books, deciding which of their patrons would enjoy them.

"Um . . . I really think you should catalogue the books first," I said again. "They don't even have cards or pockets yet." Everyone ignored me.

Eventually the women made their selections and started to leave. I cleared my throat to get Mr. MacDougal's attention, and he finally recalled my predicament. "Hey, any of you girls know where Miss Ripley can spend the night?" They gazed at me as if I were a stray cat-pitiful but unwanted-then mumbled their excuses.

"Gosh, I don't know, Mack."

"We're full up at my place."

"I don't have a bed to spare now that Lloyd's mamaw is here to stay."

"You know I got a pa.s.sel of kids."

And so on. They said their good-byes and left. Mr. MacDougal wouldn't put me out in the street, would he?

I worked behind the desk until suppertime, valiantly holding back tears. He served scrambled eggs and corn bread for dinner. "I guess you'll have to stay here tonight," he said as we ate our supper in the kitchen. He had gone to the trouble of washing two plates and a cast-iron frying pan to cook the eggs. The kitchen sink had a hand pump and running water, but I learned that the toilet facilities were outside. When it got dark, he lit several kerosene lamps since the house didn't have electricity.

At bedtime, Mr. MacDougal led me up the creaking stairs to what must have been his own bedroom. He kicked a few stray pieces of clothing under the bed, then yanked off the sheets. They looked as though they hadn't been changed in years. I pushed aside thoughts of bedbugs as he rummaged through a closet in the hallway and found a folded pair of limp, gray sheets. He handed them to me.

"These are clean."

"Thank you. I'll make the bed myself, no need to bother."

"Wasn't planning to." He showed me where to find the chamber pot, but I decided that I would allow my insides to burst before I would use it. I had loved reading Willa Cather's trilogy about primitive life on the American prairie but had never imagined that I would have to live that way myself with no electricity or running water. I closed the bedroom door after he left and quietly slid a chair in front of it.

The bedroom was dark and creepy in the dim lamplight. I know what they say about looking gift horses in the mouth, but I couldn't help being critical. The sinister wallpaper was peeling off. The floor seemed to slant downhill. Cobwebs festooned the ceiling, and where there were cobwebs there were certain to be spiders. I put the sheets on the bed, changed into my nightgown, and recited my prayers. I usually prayed after climbing into bed, but that night I felt compelled to kneel beside the bed and beseech the Almighty for help. Perhaps my humble position might prompt Him to reply quickly.

I said "Amen" and gingerly climbed into bed. Earlier that day I had picked out an interesting-looking book from the return pile called Appalachian Folk Tales. I settled back against the pillow to read it by lamplight. Too late I discovered that folks in Appalachia were very fond of ghost stories. I would not recommend reading such dark tales in a strange man's gloomy bedroom, but I didn't think it was wise to leave the relative safety of my room and prowl around in the dark to find another book. I read until I was thoroughly terrified, then blew out the lamp and tried, in vain, to sleep.

The house creaked and groaned. I heard mysterious scratching sounds in the walls and the pattering of feet above my head. Not only did the house moan as though it were haunted, but I heard a continuous rushing of water outside that should have been soothing but wasn't. Then an army of frogs began to belch and bellow and gronk until I wanted to scream.

I slept a scant hour or two. A maniacal rooster awakened me at dawn, and I dressed and went downstairs to use the outhouse. It was morning, but deep purple shadows blanketed the backyard. Unlike the flat Midwest where the sun pops above the horizon within a matter of minutes, Acorn, Kentucky, wasn't going to see the sun until it climbed above the mountaintops several hours from now. I finished my business and walked down to the creek-the source of the rushing water I'd been listening to all night-as I pondered what to do.

My life had no plot. The main character in every novel I'd ever read always knew what she wanted, and in spite of numerous obstacles she would move forward toward that goal. The action would reach a climax as she struggled to succeed and then the story would resolve-sometimes tragically if she had a fatal flaw, but usually happily ever after. The murder would be solved, the romance would end in marriage, victory would be won, and the main characters would have a brand-new start. I knew that real life wasn't exactly like a book, but why did everyone else's life seem to hum along with a sensible plot and realistic goals, and mine didn't?

What did I want in life?

I would like my library job back. I wasn't sure if I wanted Gordon back. Aside from that, I had no other goals. Running away to Kentucky had offered a diversion, but sooner or later-hopefully sooner-I would return to Illinois, and then what? Should I become a farmer's wife like my two sisters?

I tossed a pebble into the stream-it was what people in books always did for mysterious, symbolic reasons. I sighed and turned to go back inside. It was too chilly and too early in the morning to stand by a creek and feel sorry for myself. Halfway to the back door, I heard a loud bang, like a gunshot. It startled me as well as a flock of birds that rose up in flight from a nearby tree. Two more booms sounded in quick succession, speeding me the rest of the way to the back door. I fled inside and leaned against the door to catch my breath, my heart fluttering and flapping like the birds' wings. I had been wishing that something would happen, but I hadn't expected gunfire!

Then I noticed the deer antlers mounted above the door in the library, and I felt very foolish. Of course. People around here went hunting. Someone must be shooting his breakfast or dinner. That's what poor people did for food, right? Hopefully no one had noticed my undignified sprint.

I was gazing at the pile of dishes in the sink, thinking that a courteous guest would wash them for her host, when the front door slammed shut, rattling the windows. I tiptoed cautiously into the library and peeked around the corner into the shadowy foyer. Mr. MacDougal was leaning against the front door. He held his right hand above his heart as if he was about to say the Pledge of Allegiance. He wore a dark glove and beneath his hand was a stain that hadn't been on his bib overalls yesterday. He looked up and saw me in the doorway.

"Help . . ." he breathed. His eyes looked round and wide and very scared. "Help me . . ." His knees buckled, and he slid down the wall to the floor. I ran to him.

"Mr. MacDougal! What's wrong? What happened?"

He was breathing hard, gasping. "I've been shot . . ." He lifted his hand, and he wasn't wearing a glove after all. His palm was dark with blood.

"W-what should I do? I don't know what to do!"

He stared at me, and the skin visible around his eyes and lips drained from pink to white. He slowly blinked his eyes as if he was falling asleep.

"Should I call a doctor? An ambulance? Where's the hospital?" Stupid questions. There was nothing in this ridiculous town.

"Get Lillie," he murmured. Then his eyes closed and he slumped sideways to the floor like a pile of rags.

Get Lillie? The only thing I knew about Lillie was that she had been upstairs yesterday when I arrived. Mack had brought her a baked bean sandwich. Lillie could be his wife or his dog or his maiden aunt, for all I knew.

I sprinted up the creaking stairs, taking them two at a time. Three doors opened off the narrow hallway; one led to the room where I had slept, one stood partially open, and the third was closed. I peeked inside the open door and found a witch's workroom, tiny and dark. It smelled like rotten eggs and dead gra.s.s. Bunches of dried herbs and flowers hung from the slanted ceiling, and various-sized jars and bottles and baskets lay scattered everywhere, filled with witchy-looking things. There was even a black iron cauldron and a wooden mortar and pestle. Mack's pillow and bedsheets lay heaped on the floor, where he must have slept.

I backed out and knocked on the closed door. "Lillie . . . ?"

No reply. I waited and knocked again-then came to my senses. What in the world was I waiting for? This was no time to be polite! I turned the k.n.o.b and went inside.

"Lillie?"

A bra.s.s bed stood against one wall in the darkened room, covered with a patchwork quilt. A small lump in the middle of the bed shifted and rolled over, and an elderly Negro woman squinted at me in the dark. She was so tiny that I would have thought she was a child, but her coffee brown face was as furrowed as a relief map of the Rocky Mountains. Feathery white hair stuck out in tufts around her head.

"Are you Lillie?"

"Yes . . . Who in the blazes are you?"

"Alice Grace Ripley from Illinois. I'm sorry to bother you, but Mack has been shot and I don't know what to do!"

"Shot?"

"Yes! He's downstairs and . . . and he's bleeding!" The woman unwound the covers and slowly swung her heron-like legs over the edge of the bed.

"You'll have to help me, girl," she said. "I been feeling poorly these past few weeks and ain't been outta bed in a while." Her voice sounded faint and rusty, like a radio program with too much static. I helped her to her feet and we shuffled to the door. She was as thin as a stalk of wheat in a long white nightgown, as weightless as a bag of cotton b.a.l.l.s.

"You're shaking, girl," she said as I helped her slowly descend the stairs.

"I can't help it! Somebody shot Mack!" I could barely think, let alone speak. Shock had scared all of the thoughts right out of my head. Watching blood pour from a real wounded man was quite different from imagining it in a book.

It took a hundred years to help Lillie hobble downstairs and over to where Mack lay, but at last she knelt down and gently patted his furry cheek. "Can you hear me, Mack, honey?" Apparently not. He lay stone still. "Help me lay him down flat," Lillie said. She seemed very calm, as if people arrived wounded and bleeding at the library door every day. I watched her carefully unb.u.t.ton his overall straps and shirt with her tiny wrinkled fingers. Why didn't she work faster? But my own fingers trembled so badly I couldn't have unb.u.t.toned anything.

"Should I call a doctor?" I asked.

"Ain't one for miles. Go out in the kitchen and fetch me some clean dish towels."

Clean? Had she seen the kitchen lately? I ransacked every drawer and cupboard but found no dish towels, clean or otherwise. Two pairs of woolen long johns still hung on the clothesline behind the stove, so I yanked them down, figuring they were clean, and ran to Lillie with them. She had bared Mack's chest, which was as wooly as the rest of him.

"Them ain't dish towels," she said when she saw what I had brought her.

"I couldn't find anything else."

"I guess they'll have to do, then," she said with a sigh. "Let's see what we got here." She used one leg of the long johns to mop up the blood, and I saw a bluish hole just below Mack's collarbone. When a spurt of blood pulsed from it, I closed my eyes for a moment to keep from fainting.

Lillie wadded up the other leg and used it to press hard against the bullet hole to stop the bleeding, using both hands and all of her sparrow-like weight. Before long, Mack's blood had soaked the cloth and Lillie's hands and stained her white nightgown. What I could see of his face beneath his hair and beard was whiter than the gown.

"Help me roll him over on his side," Lillie said. I knelt to help her, then watched as she pulled down his shirt and mopped the blood off his back. I saw another hole, larger than the one in front, and nearly pa.s.sed out again. Lillie didn't seem fazed. "Least there's no bullet left inside him," she said. "Here, you press this against his back and I'll keep on pressing the front."

"I-I'm going to faint. . . ."

"Oh, no you ain't. Come on-whoever you are-I ain't strong enough to stop the bleeding on both sides."

"I-I-I . . ."

"Take deep breaths, girl. Get some air into your brain. You want him to die on us?"

"No, ma'am."

"Then push hard. We got to stop the bleeding."

I did as I was told. When I pushed the cloth against his back, Mack moaned.

"Stay with us, Mack," Lillie coaxed. Her voice was soothing and calm. "Don't you dare go a-dying on me now, you hear?"

I held the cloth tightly against Mack's shoulder. The blood felt warm, like something alive on my hand. I closed my eyes.

Maybe I was dreaming. This was the sort of dream people had when they read frightening stories before bed. Any minute now I would wake up and the morning would start all over again, only this time no one would get shot. I opened my eyes when the dizziness pa.s.sed, but I was still in the Acorn Public Library, holding a b.l.o.o.d.y towel to the librarian's gunshot wound.

I averted my gaze and focused on a shelf of books nearby, reading the t.i.tles and silently alphabetizing them by the authors' last names to get my mind off all the blood. And the dying man. And the ancient woman with the wispy white hair. Why couldn't I be as calm as she was? Why couldn't I think of something practical to do?

"I-if there's no doctor in town, w-what do people do when they're hurt or sick?" I asked.

"They come and see me. I'm known as a healer round here. . . . You know how to pray, girl?"

"My father is a minister."

"Well, unless he's hiding out in the next room, he ain't gonna be any help to us, is he? We best get praying." She closed her eyes and lifted her chin in the air, yelling out a prayer as if the Almighty was stone-deaf. "O Lord, you see this boy laying here. You see he's bleeding hard. He has no help but you, Lord. You know how we all depend on Mack, and so I'm begging you to stop the bleeding and spare his life." She went on that way for several minutes before ending with, "In Jesus' precious name. Amen."

She opened her eyes and gazed at me, waiting. I glanced down at Mack, and he was so deathly pale and there was so much blood that the only thing I could think of to say was, "Oh, dear G.o.d . . . please . . . please . . . please . . ." I had never watched anyone die before and it looked as though I was about to. Tears choked off my words.

"Ain't much of a prayer," Lillie grumbled.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry . . . I-I could say the Lord's Prayer . . ."

"No thanks. I'm thinking the Good Lord has that one about memorized by now. He don't need to hear it again."

"Should we call the police?"

"Ain't no police way out here. County sheriff might show up if Mack dies on us, but we don't want that."

I wondered if she meant we didn't want the sheriff to show up or we didn't want Mack to die. "Who would want to shoot him?" I asked.

"Oh, I can name a couple people who mighta shot him. Mack is-" She stopped and glared sharply at me as if suddenly realizing she was about to tell a secret to a stranger. "I think you better tell me who you are again, and what you're doing in my house."

"I'm Alice Grace Ripley. I came yesterday with five boxes of books to donate to the library." Yesterday. It seemed like a million years ago. "Didn't Mr. MacDougal-Mack-tell you?"

"No, ma'am, he certainly did not. Where'd you say you was from?"

"Illinois-Blue Island, Illinois."

"I never heard of no islands in Illinois. And I sure ain't never heard of a blue one."

"Well, the town isn't really blue . . . and it isn't an island, either. I think it was the waving gra.s.s or the hazy sky or-" I stopped, unable to remember the story our third grade teacher had told us about how the town got its name. But why in the world did she need an explanation at a time like this? Why were we even having this conversation? Mack could be dying. What kind of a town had no doctor and no policemen-especially if people were in the habit of shooting each other first thing in the morning?

"Please . . . can't we do something for him?" I begged. "He's bleeding!"

"Don't I know it," she said, holding up her b.l.o.o.d.y hand. "Hole goes clear through him. But I suppose that's better than having to dig around inside him and try and find the bullet."

I felt faint again. I closed my eyes. My heart had never pounded this hard in my life, even when I'd set our kitchen on fire.

"Deep breaths, girl. Take deep breaths." How could she be so calm?

When the dizziness pa.s.sed, I opened my eyes in time to see Lillie lift the bloodied cloth and look at the hole on her side of him.

"Blood's starting to clot," she said. "Better keep holding tight, though, just to be sure." I quickly closed my eyes again.

Eventually, Lillie told me I could let go and she would hold the compresses on both wounds for a moment. "Run upstairs and pull a sheet off my bed to use for bandages."

I did as I was told, except that I gave her a sheet from my bed, figuring it was cleaner. I was relieved to see that Mack had regained consciousness and was talking to Lillie in a breathy voice when I returned.

"Some crazy fool tried to kill me . . ."

"They just might get their wish, honey. You ain't outta the woods yet."