Wonderland Creek Part 8

Faye's hands flew to her mouth. "A casket? Oh, Miss Lillie! Don't tell me-"

"I'm afraid so, honey. I done all I can for Mack, but I don't think he's gonna make it."

"No! He can't die!"

"Only a matter of days now," Lillie said, shaking her head. "Maybe hours. I see the life draining outta him bit by bit, and ain't nothing I can do to stop it."

Faye covered her face and wept. I pictured Mack in the next room faking unconsciousness, and I wanted to kick his carca.s.s off the mattress and onto the floor. Lillie mustered a few tears of her own. "Truth is, honey, I may not be too far behind him."

"Lillie, no! I can't bear to lose either one of you!" Faye threw her arms around Lillie, nearly knocking her over, sobbing as she rocked Lillie in her arms. I couldn't bear to watch this scene play out three more times when the other librarians arrived, so I grabbed my sweater and left the house to go for a walk.

I had been slowly exploring the town whenever I needed to get away, first walking up the road to the post office to mail a long letter to my friend Freddy. I had described all of the events that had happened to me so far, and I could imagine Freddy's reaction as she read about them. My story was so unbelievable that she would wonder if I was writing a novel of my own. Or maybe she'd think I really had lost my mind and had gone to the spa with my aunt to take a water cure. Hadn't Gordon accused me of living in a dream world? I would have to write to Freddy again and a.s.sure her that this town and my trials were all very real.

The tiny post office also seemed to serve as the gathering place for Acorn's elderly men. I heard the mumble of voices as I walked up the steps, but the conversation halted abruptly as I opened the door. Half a dozen pairs of eyes glared at me from wrinkled faces as if I had interrupted a conspiracy instead of a poker game. Four of the men seated around a rickety card table clutched their fan of playing cards to their chests, as if worried that I would see how many aces they had.

"Excuse me, but I would like to buy a stamp please. I need to mail a letter." Silence. "You do sell stamps here . . . ?"

One of the men at the card table-the oldest one from the look of him-laid his playing cards facedown and slowly pulled himself to his feet. He grabbed his cane, hobbled over to a chest of drawers that served as the countertop, and pulled out a tattered envelope. His hands trembled as he removed a single stamp and handed it to me. I paid him, licked the stamp, and stuck it on the envelope, then looked around in vain for anything resembling a mail slot.

"Um . . . where's your mailbox?" He took the letter from my hand and dropped it into the same drawer where the stamps had been. He nodded slightly as he closed the drawer.

"Oh . . . well . . . thank you. Good day to you." I had no confidence at all that my letter would ever reach its destination.

The houses in Acorn were pitiful and bedraggled, the library a mansion in comparison-and it was run-down and in need of a good coat of paint. I wondered which houses belonged to Faye and the other packhorse ladies. Laundry sagged on clotheslines, goats and chickens scratched around barren yards, skinny hound dogs howled at me as I walked past. There seemed to be a lot of trash and pieces of rusty metal piled everywhere. I saw a gaunt old man tending a weedy garden patch, attacking clods of earth with a hoe as he prepared for spring planting. I waved, but he returned my greeting with a stare. These people were poor. Dirt poor. There were no other words for it. The town had a defeated look as if it had been beaten and left for dead on the side of the road.

The second time I ventured out I followed the creek behind the library upstream as it wound past boulders and fences and disappeared into the woods. I meant to ask Lillie if the stream had a name, but I kept forgetting. The bank was soggy with spring rain and the mud tugged at my shoes, trying to suck them off my feet. When I grew winded from the steep climb and spooked by all of the vague rustlings in the forest, I turned around and followed the creek back home.

This morning I decided to walk in the opposite direction from the post office, following the road that my uncle had taken as he'd sped away. I reached the place where he had turned around that first day, but I continued walking, pa.s.sing a cemetery on my left, perched on the side of a very steep hill. It was the first cemetery I'd ever seen that wasn't on a flat patch of land. Tombstones climbed all the way up the slope like spectators on bleachers, jockeying for the best view. The corpses must be standing upright in their caskets. I looked away, remembering Mack and Lillie and their dastardly funeral plans.

Eventually I came to a side road and a sign that said Jupiter Coal Company-Acorn Mine. I decided to walk down the road toward the mine, and I soon reached a clearing on a narrow strip of level ground. The mining camp looked deserted. One end of the camp had been the business end, with railroad tracks, a tall clapboard structure on stilts, and a lot of mysterious scaffolding. A small sign on the side of a squat one-story building said Mine Office. A tangle of wires connected it to the outside world-my world-but whether the wires were for telephones or electricity, I didn't know. I didn't see anything that looked like a mine entrance and wondered if it was underground somewhere or dug into the side of the mountain.

I turned and walked the opposite way toward a row of shacks where the miners must have lived. Each tiny building had two doors and presumably housed two families, even though the huts were scarcely bigger than the shed where Lillie kept her horse. Several of the windows had been smashed, and shards of gla.s.s glittered in the sunlight beneath the empty window frames. The drab, barren houses reminded me of photographs I had seen of slaves' quarters before the emanc.i.p.ation. I halted when I reached a barrier across the road with a No Trespa.s.sing sign tacked onto it.

Sadness hung over this camp like fog. A closed mine meant men without jobs, families going hungry. But it struck me that this may have been a place of misery even when the mine had been operating. I imagined men in miners' caps plunging into a dangerous, claustrophobic shaft six days a week and emerging, black-faced, twelve hours later. I imagined anxious families scratching out a living in these colorless shacks, worrying about explosions or cave-ins. Sons would have little choice but to follow their fathers into the mines, never getting any further ahead, generation after generation. I finally turned around and walked back to the library, carrying the sadness with me like a hobo with his belongings slung over his shoulder.

The library was quiet again. The packhorse ladies had all ridden off and the crying over Mack's approaching death had finally ended. I peeked into the dining room and saw him sitting up again, reading a book. Lillie had curled up in her chair and fallen asleep, exhausted by her performance, no doubt. Mack beckoned to me when he saw me. "Can I talk to you?"

I shrugged, then folded my arms across my chest as I leaned against the doorframe.

"Listen, it should be pretty clear that someone wants me dead. If you don't help us . . . Well, do you really want my blood on your hands?"

"My hands? It's not my fault that somebody's trying to kill you. For all I know, you deserve it."

"Maybe I do . . . But Lillie can't handle this alone. She needs your help."

"How can you play such a mean trick on those women? You must have heard how grief-stricken Faye was. What a cruel lie to tell!"

Lillie shifted in her chair and stretched as my raised voice awakened her. "Those gals might be sad now," she said with a yawn, "but just think how happy they'll all be when we resurrect Mack from the dead. It'll be just like Easter morning around here."

"This is unbelievable!" I recalled Gordon's angry words to me on the day of Elmer Watson's memorial service-how funerals were a once-in-a-lifetime event and that poor Mr. Watson would never be buried again. Gordon's family should open a funeral parlor in Acorn, Kentucky. They could make twice as much money.

"Won't you at least think about helping us?" Mack pleaded.

I walked away without giving a reply. If I had read about this plot in a novel, I would have slammed the book shut and declared it highly improbable. It strained credibility to think that two intelligent, G.o.d-fearing people would try to fake a man's death and deceive an entire community. But then everything that had happened here during the past week had seemed preposterous. I might be powerless to stop these events, but I didn't have to partic.i.p.ate in them. I vowed to simply stand by and watch them unfold in angry silence.

The only bright spot in my day was when Faye's boys came in with Mamaw for the next installment of their story. By then my temper had cooled and I could greet the little ones with a smile. "Are you here for the next chapter?" I asked. They returned my good cheer with somber faces.

"Mack's gonna die, ain't he?" little Clyde asked.

"Well . . . that's what Miss Lillie is saying." I spoke through clenched teeth.

"Our pa's building him a casket."

"Hmm. I see."

"When Mack's dead and buried, will you finish the story for us?"

"Yeah, will you?"

"We've been real good," Little Lloyd said. His brother elbowed him and he amended it to, "Well, we ain't been too bad."

"I'll be happy to read to you," I said. I would gladly lose myself in Treasure Island, the saga of treachery and betrayal and buried treasure.

"Time to cook up that potion, now," Lillie told me after the boys went home.

"You mean the one that's going to put Mack to sleep?"

"Um hmm. If you'd kindly help me get upstairs to my workroom, I'll mix it up and we can get it cooking on the stove. Now, I know you ain't real happy about helping us, honey. Tell you the truth, I'd rather you didn't see what all goes in it. You understand, right?"

"Believe me, I have no intention of stealing your magic formula."

Mack "died" that afternoon. It was too wet and rainy to bury him that night so they scheduled his funeral for the next morning. Once word of Mack's death spread, everyone in town pitched in to help. Faye's husband delivered the casket-a roughhewn box that looked as though it had been made out of old packing crates. Cora tacked a tattered blanket inside for a lining. Several men volunteered to dig a grave for him in the cemetery on the edge of town.

Lillie's knockout potion was so powerful that I feared she really had killed him. Mack fell into such a deep sleep that he never even twitched a muscle as the packhorse ladies lifted him into his coffin. They bawled their eyes out as Alma lowered the lid into place. She wiped her eyes on her sleeve, then picked up a hammer and a handful of ten-penny nails.

"Don't nail him in yet," Lillie said. "I need to say good-bye first. In private." Somehow she produced a few genuine tears, and the ladies quietly slipped away into the night.

"Now what?" I asked, hands on hips. "You aren't going to let them bury Mack alive, are you?"

"'Course not. We need to go out to the shed and gather up a half-dozen empty feed sacks. Then we're gonna fill them up with dirt and rocks so we can put them in the coffin instead of Mack."

She kept saying we, but I knew whom she meant. Lillie didn't have the strength to carry the shovel, much less dig with it-and Mack looked as dead as he was supposed to be. From what I could see, the only person who could shovel dirt and lift rocks was me. I put on Mack's old woolen jacket and went to work down by the creek, digging and loading in the dark of night, carrying each heavy sack up to the house and piling it by the casket.

"Nope, still not heavy enough," Lillie would inform me each time. And back I would go, out into the drenching rain, for another load.

"This is the last thing I'm going to do for these people," I muttered as I worked. "No more potions. No more lies. No more insane schemes in the dead of night. I'm finished! Done! I'll take care of the library books and read stories to the kids, but that's it until my two weeks are up!"

Mack was still dead to the world when Lillie finally decided I had shoveled and hauled enough ballast. My arms and legs trembled with fatigue from the unaccustomed labor. I longed for a hot bath to wash off the filth but had to make do with a kettle of hot water and a sponge bath in the kitchen sink. Since neither Lillie nor I could move Mack, he slept in that awful casket all night, just like a real dead man. It served him right.

Mack was as groggy as Rip Van Winkle the next morning. He could hardly get his legs underneath him to climb out of the box. "Wow! Have I got a headache! Did somebody drop a rock on my head while I was asleep?" he asked as I helped him to his feet.

"I wish I had thought of it," I mumbled. "Do you know how many pounds of dirt and rocks I shoveled for you last night? In the rain?"

He smiled sheepishly. "About a hundred and seventy-five? Maybe one-eighty?" When I didn't smile back, Mack fixed me with his soulful eyes. "I'm indebted to you, Miss Ripley."

"You bet you are! I'm still exhausted." He leaned on me as I helped him stagger up the stairs so he could hide in Lillie's workroom during his funeral. Then I hefted the rocks and bulging feed sacks into the casket and nailed it shut, venting my fury with each whack of the hammer. It took forever. I had never wielded a hammer before and I kept missing the nails.

Faye's husband, Lloyd, and five other men volunteered as pallbearers to carry the coffin to the cemetery on the hillside. At least the rain had stopped. Barefooted children had combed the woods and fields to gather wildflowers while women in feed-sack dresses and knitted shawls had prepared the funeral luncheon. Lillie changed into a long black dress that might have fit her fifty years and a hundred pounds ago but now it billowed around her frail body like a feed sack on a broom handle. She stuck a black hat with a mourning veil on top of her wispy white hair and leaned on my arm as we followed the casket outside. Someone-probably the packhorse ladies-had draped the library porch in black crepe. The entire town, some eighty or ninety people, from babes in arms to gray-haired old-timers, gathered in front of the library for the funeral procession to the cemetery.

"Who's going to conduct the service?" I asked Lillie as I helped her descend the porch steps. "I don't suppose this town has a preacher?"

"I'm gonna do it."

"You're a preacher, too?"

She answered with a grin. I couldn't imagine my father or any other minister telling as many lies as she had or orchestrating this terrible charade.

An elderly man, whom I recognized as the village postmaster, hobbled up to us. "Too far for you to walk, Miss Lillie, so we fetched you a ride." The crowd parted to reveal a two-wheeled cart, pulled by a goat! The animal wore a black bandana around his neck-presumably to convey his grief-and someone had wound black mourning crepe around the spokes of the cart's wheels.

"You're kidding!" I blurted. It was such a ludicrous sight that I had to put my hand over my mouth to keep from laughing. I tried to imagine Gordon and his father escorting grieving mourners to the Blue Island Cemetery in goat carts.

The postmaster helped Lillie climb aboard, then she turned to me, patting the seat beside her. "You wanna ride with me, honey?"

"No, thanks. I'll walk." I might be exhausted from shoveling dirt for half the night, but I still clung to my dignity. A goat cart, indeed! The postmaster scowled at me, clearly insulted. The goat added a rude bleah to my refusal. The man turned away and proudly herded his goat up the road, leading the funeral procession.

They buried Mack near the bottom of the cemetery out of respect for Lillie. She couldn't climb the steep hill, and I don't think the goat could have made it up the slope either, even though Miss Lillie didn't weigh much more than a bag of feathers. The mourners began to sing "Safe in the Arms of Jesus" as everyone gathered around the gravesite, but there was such an odd a.s.sortment of musical instruments-guitar, banjo, harmonica, and fiddle-that it sounded more like a square dance than a funeral. Children tossed spring flowers onto the lowered coffin. The packhorse ladies cried and wailed. Mamaw and the boys were sniffling, too, leaving tear tracks down their dirty faces. This was cruel. Just plain cruel.

The sheriff's car pulled up as we were partway through the second hymn, "He Hideth My Soul in the Cleft of the Rock." I wondered if he was going to pry open the casket and view Mack's corpse for himself. Was it against the law to help fake someone's death? Could I be arrested as an accomplice? My heart began to gallop with guilt when the sheriff climbed out of his car, but he simply removed his hat in respect and stood watching from the edge of the road, away from the knot of mourners.

Lillie pulled a black-edged handkerchief from her sleeve and wiped her tears as she prepared to deliver her sermon. "Our friend Mack was a good man, and we're sure gonna miss him. He brought books and stories to this town and set up the library for us. I know we'll always remember and be grateful for what he done. There's so many things in this life we just don't understand-why we have hard times and trials, why we gotta lose people we love. But G.o.d has a plan. Yessir, He always has a plan. It's up to us to decide every day if we're gonna be part of it or not. Are we gonna do His will and build His kingdom? Or are we too busy making our own plans?"

I looked down at my shoes as she talked, scuffing the dirt with my toe. I wasn't following any plan at all, G.o.d's or my own. What was wrong with me? Maybe I should start making a list like my father always did. But what would I put on it? Did G.o.d write lists for us? Would He give me a peek at mine if I asked Him?

I didn't pay much attention to the rest of Lillie's sermon as I thought about the sorry state of my life. She finished with a prayer and everyone sang "Pa.s.s Me Not, O Gentle Savior," which seemed more appropriate for a revival than a funeral. Then everyone drifted back to the library. A couple of the men carried the mattress back upstairs to make room as the entire town crowded inside the house. I saw people roaming through the library, pulling books off of the shelves and gazing at them in wonder as if Mack had written each and every word himself. I would have to straighten the shelves after everyone left.

The musicians gathered on the front porch to play a medley of lively gospel songs as if we were at a barn dance. I saw some of the men from the post office pa.s.sing around jars of what looked like moonshine. The women loaded down the library table with food, simple dishes like beans and corn bread, homemade pickles and deviled eggs. I knew it was a sacrificial offering since these people didn't have much to eat themselves, and it made me angry all over again.

I waited until all of the guests were fed before filling a plate for myself. After looking around for a vacant place to sit down, I ended up sitting behind the library desk. I had just taken a bite of hard-boiled egg when the fiddle player sauntered over with his instrument in one hand and a plate of food in the other. He was about my age and had the unusual combination of dark brown eyes and straw-colored hair, a good-looking man in shabby clothes and worn-out shoes. They were probably his Sunday best.

"Hey there. Mind if I sit here?" he asked. I did mind, but without waiting for my reply, he laid his fiddle and bow in front of me and sat down on a corner of my desk. "I'm Ike Arnett," he said, extending his hand. "You must be our visitor from up north."

I quickly finished chewing and swallowed as I shook his hand. "Yes, I'm Alice Ripley from Illinois."

"I knew you was the flatlander everyone's talking about 'cause you're so pretty. Girls from up north are a whole lot prettier than the ones down here. And you're just about the prettiest gal I ever did see."

The last thing I needed was the flirtatious attention of a hillbilly fiddle player. I looked down at my plate, not at him, pushing beans around with my fork. Then I realized that I was being rude. I looked up again and said, "Thank you." With a decent haircut and fashionable clothes, Ike Arnett could be handsome. His c.o.c.ky grin told me that he already knew it, so I didn't return his compliment.

"The music you've been playing out on the porch is very interesting," I told him. "I've never heard hymns played quite like that before-especially at a funeral."

"Ever been to Kentucky before?"

"No, this is my first time."

"Well, that explains it." He smiled and there wasn't a girl in the world who could have resisted smiling back.

I continued to eat and he continued to stare at me until the silence became uncomfortable. "Um . . . does your little band play together very often?"

"We're not really a band. Just some folks from town who got together to pay our respects to Mack."

"Oh. Well, you sounded very good."

"Thanks. I have a lot of time to practice now that the mine is closed and most of the dance halls have shut down. But I been getting by, doing a little of this and that. And every so often I get work playing my fiddle." He raked his fingers through his hair, but it flopped back onto his forehead just like before, hanging into one of his eyes. "When times were good, I played in a band every weekend. We traveled all over the place, even up to Ohio and West Virginia. I had a girl in every town."

"I a.s.sume you aren't married, then?"

"Why settle down when you can have a good time?" He winked at me. I couldn't believe it! Oh yes, Ike Arnett knew he was good-looking.

"Life on the road's no good for a family man," he continued. "I guess I could settle down now that I ain't traveling as much, but I haven't found the right girl." He waited for me to look up at him, then added, "Yet."

I remained deadpan, refusing to swallow the bait. "Where did you learn how to play the fiddle like that?"

He shrugged. "Fiddling's been pa.s.sed down in our family for years and years. I been sitting on our porch, listening to my granddaddy and uncles play for as long as I can remember. So one day I took the fiddle off the mantel when my ch.o.r.es was done and started fiddling around with it myself. I took a real shine to it."

"That's very interesting." And it was. How could anyone play as skillfully and artistically as Ike did without ever studying music or taking lessons from a teacher?

He changed the subject and began to talk about Mack while he ate, chattering on and on about what a great friend Mack had been and how much he would miss him. I confess that I tuned out Ike's words as if changing radio stations. His affection for Mack seemed genuine, which made me feel even guiltier for playing a part in this huge deception. I was beginning to wonder how I would ever get Ike Arnett off my desk again when the banjo player sauntered over.

"Quit your flirting, Ike. We got work to do."

Ike shoveled the last few bites of food into his mouth and stood. He picked up his violin and winked at me again. "See you around, Alice."

The day's events took all the starch out of Lillie, and late in the afternoon, Faye and Marjorie helped her up to bed. When the last mourner left and the packhorse ladies had finished helping me clean up, I went upstairs to see if she was all right. She had a lamp burning, and I took a good look at her room for the first time. It was very neat and tidy, considering that she had been sick in bed before I arrived. Frilly white curtains hung on the windows and a beautiful patchwork quilt covered her bed. Framed pictures decorated the walls, and an embroidered sampler hung at the head of her bed. I moved closer to read it: "There is a friend who sticketh closer than a brother." Proverbs 18:24.

Mack limped into the bedroom to see her, too, and sat on the edge of her bed. I glared at him, making sure he knew exactly how I felt about him.

"It was a very nice funeral, honey," Lillie told him. "You should've been there to see how well-liked you were."

"Did the sheriff come?"

"Yessir, he was there, making sure you was dead and buried. I think you're safe for now, honey."

"Maybe. But I'm worried that someone will see me. I'll have to go outside to . . . you know . . ."

"You could move up to the cabin until your work is finished."

"What work?" I asked. They ignored my question.

"I can't leave you, Lillie. Who'll take care of you if I'm not here?"