Wonderland Creek

  I dressed quickly and hurried down to the backyard. “Good morning, Ike.”

  “Hey, Alice. How you doing?” He paused to rest, wiping his brow with the back of his hand.

  “I’m doing fine, thank you. How are you?”

  “Great. Working up a sweat.” He propped his axe against the stump and unbuttoned his flannel shirt. As he shrugged it off, he seemed to choreograph every move in order to display his impressive set of muscles. Ike resembled every hero in every romance novel I had ever read—not that I read those kinds of books on a regular basis, of course.

  He caught me watching him and grinned. I had to say something. “It’s so nice of you to do this for us . . . to help out this way.”

  “That’s what neighbors are for. I saw that your woodpile was getting low.”

  “Yes. Thank you.”

  “How’s Miss Lillie doing? I guess she took Mack’s death pretty hard, huh?”

  “I guess.” I couldn’t say more without sounding sarcastic, so I thanked Ike again and went inside, carrying an armful of freshly split wood.

  Miss Lillie was already awake and sitting up in bed when I brought in her breakfast tray. She looked small and frail and helpless as she leaned against the pillows, but I knew better. She greeted me with a shy smile. “Didn’t mean to scare you with the gun last night, honey.”

  “No? What did you mean to do?”

  She thought for a long moment, then said, “Get you moving.”

  I laid the breakfast tray on her lap. “Do you need anything else?” I backed toward the door.

  “Yes, honey-girl. I need you to sit down and talk to me while I eat.” She patted the edge of the bed and beckoned to me. “Come on, I won’t bite.”

  I did as she said. Reluctantly. And with more than a twinge of fear.

  Lillie picked up her fork and poked at her eggs. I wanted to remind her of all the hard work I had done to get those eggs onto her plate—braving the damp morning air and the pecking, flapping chaos of the henhouse, hauling firewood and coaxing the flames to stay lit long enough to scramble the eggs and bake the biscuits. I had to admit that the biscuits hadn’t turned out very well, and any leftover ones could be used as cobblestones, but at least I had tried.

  “I used to teach school a long, long time ago,” Lillie said, “and I learnt that most youngsters can do what you ask them to do—even if they don’t think so. They just need a little push sometimes to get them moving, that’s all. So over the years I learnt to give a little push in the right direction when I had to.”

  “Did you point a rifle at your students, too?”

  “’Course not,” she said, smiling. “But listen now, honey. You shouldn’t be holding grudges against people. I did what needed to be done last night, and so did you. And it wasn’t so bad, was it? Once I got you moving?”

  “It was horrible.”

  “But you learnt something, right?”

  I held my tongue, resisting the urge to say I had learned not to trust a word that she or Mack said. Six more days, I told myself. Five, after today. I had been here for nine days, and with any luck my aunt and uncle would come to my rescue very soon.

  “So can we be friends again, honey?”

  I sighed. Nodded. Lillie was not someone you’d want for an enemy. I decided to make polite conversation while she nibbled her eggs. “Did you teach school here in town, Miss Lillie?”

  “No. I was teaching a long, long time ago down in Virginia, right after the war ended. That’s where I met my Sam, the man I come to love more than anyone in the whole world—except for Jesus, of course. Mmm hmm he’s a fine man.” Her face beamed. That was the only word for it. But whether she was smiling because of Sam or Jesus, I couldn’t be sure.

  “Was Sam a teacher, too?” I asked.

  Lillie laughed. “No, honey-girl, he was one of my students! Before Mr. Lincoln come along, nobody’s allowed to teach slaves to read and write. So Sam didn’t know how to do either one till the war set us free, even though he’s a grown man. I already learnt how to read back on the plantation—in secret, of course. That’s so I could write down everything Old Granny was teaching me about how to heal folks. Massa would’ve tanned all the skin off my hide if he’d known I could read and write. Had to be real careful, you know.”

  “How did you become a teacher after the war?” I imagined Lillie attending classes at the Normal School like Freddy and I had.

  “You know what they say, ‘In the land of the blind, the man with one eye is king.’ Since I’m the only one who can read, they made me the teacher at the new colored folks’ school. My Sam, he was real smart, though. He learnt how to read in no time. And along the way we fell in love.”

  “Did you marry him?”

  “Couldn’t marry him, honey, much as I wanted to. I was already married. I jumped the broom with a field hand named Charley when I was still on the plantation. Big handsome fellow with skin like a moonless night. We had us a little baby boy named Buster.” Lillie smiled, remembering. “Trouble is, Massa sold Charley down South, and I didn’t know what become of him.”

  Her story horrified me. I had read about such atrocities in Frederick Douglass’s slave narrative and in novels like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but I had never met a real live slave before. “Why did your master sell him?”

  “Massa didn’t need no reason. He sold my son, too, right after the war started and Buster was still a boy. So when the war was over, I was hanging around close to Massa’s old place and teaching school, waiting to find out if I still had a husband and a son. Ain’t nothing Sam and me could do but wait.”

  I was intrigued now by Lillie’s tragic story. “What happened?”

  Instead of replying, Lillie sat up straight in bed, her head tilted to one side, listening. “Did you unlock the door downstairs, honey? Ain’t it about time for the other gals to get here?”

  “I’ll go unlock it.” I hurried downstairs, intending to come right back and hear the rest of Lillie’s story, but I saw Marjorie outside, tying her horse to the porch railing. She carried the burlap sacks she used to tote books and also an old, worn-out pair of tall lace-up boots, the kind that all of the women wore on their delivery routes. I held the door open for her.

  “Here’s the boots you asked me about, Miss Lillie.”

  I whirled around and sure enough, there was Lillie, standing at the bottom of the steps, grinning. “Thanks, honey.”

  Marjorie handed the boots to me, not to Lillie. “Try them on, Alice. See if they fit you.”

  “Me? . . . Thanks, but I already have shoes.”

  “Yes you do, honey,” Lillie said, “and they’re real nice ones, too. Ain’t much good for riding horses, though.” She took my arm as she spoke and guided me over to the stairs, then motioned for me to sit down. “Go ahead and try them on now, seeing as Marjorie was nice enough to bring them.”

  I felt the hair rise on the back of my neck as I sat down and did as I was told. I already had one boot on when the front door opened and the other three women came in. They gathered in front of the stairs, watching me pull on the second boot and lace it up as if they’d never seen such a sight before.

  “Looks like they’re gonna fit her real good,” Alma said with a smile. The others nodded. Any minute they might applaud. I didn’t know what was going on, but I had a bad feeling about it. After all, Lillie was capable of staging a person’s funeral and convincing everyone he was dead.

  I gulped as Lillie laid her hands on my shoulders like a queen about to bestow her blessing. “Now, we know you come down here outta the goodness of your heart, honey, to help us out. Right, gals? So we was discussing it at Mack’s funeral, and we decided that the best way you can help—and honor Mack’s memory—is if we was to give you a library route like all the other gals have.”

  My heart began to pound. I wondered what they would do if I pushed them aside and ran out the front door. “You mean . . . on a horse?”

  “Them books get pretty heavy otherwise, especia
lly when you’re walking uphill. And there’s an awful lot of hills around here.”

  “I-I don’t know how to ride a horse, Miss Lillie.”

  “Cora will teach you, won’t you, honey?”

  “Sure. I’d be glad to.”

  “We’ll all help,” Faye added. This was a lynch mob, leading me to the hanging tree.

  “Cora says she’ll take you out on her route today and show you the way. Hers is the easiest one. She’s been wanting to start a new route further up where some folks are living on Potter’s Creek. Ain’t that right, Cora? Remember how Mack used to talk about that? Them folks on Potter’s Creek ain’t hardly ever seen a book.”

  The women were all smiling and nodding. Alma had tears in her eyes. “Mack was always thinking of other people instead of himself,” she said.

  “We wouldn’t even have jobs if it weren’t for Mack,” Marjorie added. Everyone agreed.

  How long had Lillie been plotting this little scheme of hers? Was Mack in on it, too? I wanted to dig in my heels, throw a temper tantrum, and refuse to do a single thing Lillie said. But I still got chills when I remembered how she had stood in the kitchen doorway last night, cocking Mack’s gun. She knew how to make potions, too. She might be a frail little thing, but I was scared to death of her. And she was pairing me up with Cora, the tallest and heftiest of the four women, with shoulders as broad as Mack’s. Cora could probably pick me up by the scruff of the neck and plop me onto the horse’s back without breaking into a sweat.

  “Now, I know you gals want to get on your way,” Lillie said. “Go on down and get Belle saddled up for her, would you, Cora? I’ll help honey-girl pack her lunch.”

  After the others left, I confronted Lillie. “Why are you making me do this? I can’t deliver books like they do. I don’t know anything about horses.”

  “Oh, that don’t matter. You can learn. Little kids ride horses around here all the time. Bareback, no less. Them women are paying you a big honor, honey, accepting you like one a their own and letting you ride with them.” Lillie took my arm and started pulling me toward the kitchen as she spoke. I dragged my feet like a condemned woman.

  “But . . . but I don’t want the honor.” Memories of last night’s ride were still much too fresh—and so were the bruises on my backside. I had long since given up hope that this was a nightmare and that I might wake up. This was too unbelievable to be a nightmare. I wanted to go home. “Please tell the ladies thank-you for me, but I don’t know how to ride—and I don’t think I can learn.”

  “Listen, honey.” She lowered her voice to a whisper. “We got to bring food and things up to Mack without people getting suspicious. If you ride a route like all them other gals, you can check on him every day or so.”

  “Please don’t make me get on a horse again. Please!” My tears did no good.

  “You’re the one who helped Mack get up there, so why do you want to leave him up there all alone to starve to death?”

  “But I helped him pack some food—”

  “Besides, while you’re out on your route, you can do some poking around for us.”

  “Poking around?”

  “Um hmm. Try to figure out who shot Mack and why.”

  “I thought you knew who shot him.”

  “Well, it turns out there are several folks who mighta done it, and we got to figure out which one it was for sure.”

  “How could there be more than one suspect? What did Mack do to make people want to murder him?” Although I could have cheerfully murdered him myself.

  “It happens, honey. People get riled up, start feuding . . .”

  “But what if the killer finds out that I’m helping Mack and decides to shoot me, too?”

  “That’s why it’s best if you pretend to be one of the library gals, taking books to people. Folks around here get real suspicious of flatlanders riding around in the hills and hollows, especially when she comes outta nowhere like you done. Those boots fit you all right, honey?”

  Would this ever end?

  I leaned my head against the kitchen doorframe, wishing I had never gotten out of bed this morning. Or out of Uncle Cecil’s car nine days ago. “Isn’t there any other way?”

  “Not that I can think of. Listen, I know you’re feeling mighty peeved with me, but can’t you find it in your heart to help out these poor gals and their families? Fact is, between the four of them, they’re supporting nearly every family in Acorn. Everybody is kin to everybody else up in these hills, and we’re falling on some real hard times around here. Sure would be a shame if something happened to bring out the truth about Mack and these gals had to lose their livelihood, wouldn’t it?”

  I closed my eyes, at a loss as to how to answer.

  “Here’s your lunch, honey.” She handed me a small bundle wrapped in a dish towel and tied with string.

  “When did you make this?”

  “Last night. While you was out. Go on now. Cora probably has Belle all saddled up and waiting for you.”

  “Are you going to threaten me with the rifle again if I don’t go?”

  She smiled. “Don’t you worry none about that. Just have yourself a real nice ride.”

  I was about to become a packhorse librarian whether I wanted to or not.

  The horse didn’t seem any happier about going for a ride this morning than she had last night. Belle snorted and stomped her feet like a petulant child as Cora led her up to the back door where her own horse was waiting. I knew exactly how Belle felt.

  “I don’t think Mack has ridden her in a while,” Cora said. “Seems like she’s not used to being bossed around.”

  “Maybe I shouldn’t ride her, then. I don’t know anything about horses. I’ve never even been on one before.” Except for last night, of course, but I couldn’t tell Cora about that ride.

  “Really? No kidding?” Cora stared at me as if I’d told her I usually rode dragons instead of horses. “Well, I’ll give you a quick lesson. First, you always mount on the horse’s left side.”

  “You do? Why?” I was stalling for time.

  “Just put your left foot in that left stirrup there, and swing your right leg up and over.” But before I could even get close to Belle, she backed away from me, shaking her head as if trying to shake off her bridle.

  “I don’t think the horse likes me very much,” I said. And the feeling was mutual.

  “She doesn’t know you, that’s all. You gotta win her trust. Horses are basically afraid of people. See how her eyes are on the sides of her head and yours and mine are in front? That’s so she can look all around and see her enemies coming. She’s the kind of animal that gets hunted by other animals. And we’re the kind of animal that does the hunting. You gotta convince her that you ain’t a threat to her.”

  “Oh, believe me, I’m not a threat. I’m terrified of her!”

  “But you can’t let her know that. Show her who’s in control.”

  “How do I do that?”

  Cora gave me a quick riding lesson, explaining how to use my legs and which way to tug the reins when I wanted the horse to turn or stop. She may as well have been speaking another language. I was so frightened that her words of advice fell all around me without sinking in, as forgotten as raindrops in the creek.

  “Okay, climb on,” she said when she was finished. I had to drag the bench over from beside the back door, and even then Cora had to give me a boost before I made it up into the saddle. “You sure are a little bit of a thing, ain’t you?” she said. I knew it was impossible to ever do this on my own the way Lillie expected me to.

  Cora mounted her own horse and motioned toward the creek, leading the way. “Okay, turn her this way . . . no, not that way, this way . . .”

  “I’m trying to go that way, but she won’t do it!” I flapped the reins and managed to turn us around in a complete circle before Belle gave up trying to obey me and headed back toward her shed.

  “Make her stop, Alice. Pull back on the reins a little.”


  “Whoa!” I begged. “Whoa!” My efforts did no good. Belle refused to cooperate and nothing would change her mind. Cora finally trotted her horse down to the shed behind us and grabbed Belle’s bridle. It took some tugging, but she managed to get us turned around and headed in the right direction. We rode side by side up the path beside the stream.

  “Now, the creek is your main road,” Cora said. She sounded weary and the day had just begun. “All you gotta do is ride up Wonderland Creek on the way out in the morning and follow it back home at night. There are a few turnoffs along the way, so you’ll have to learn to watch for the landmarks. There ain’t any signposts up this way. But your route always comes back to Wonderland Creek. You can’t get lost.”

  Want to bet?

  When the path we were following narrowed and started to climb up the hill, Cora pulled in front and led the way. Thirty minutes later we reached the cabin where Mack was hiding. The trip had seemed to take much longer last night. Once I was on my own, I would have to stop here and deliver things to him. I’d like to deliver him a punch in the nose. The cabin looked even more weather-beaten in daylight, as if the forest was doing its best to squash the ramshackle structure and reclaim that patch of land for itself. Knee-high weeds sprouted through cracks in the porch floor. A sapling peeked out of the front window through the broken pane of glass. A thick layer of fuzzy moss claimed the cabin’s roof.

  “See that cabin?” Cora pointed to it and my heart began to thump.

  “Um . . . yes?” Had I given Mack away by staring at it? Had Belle left hoofprints in the mud last night? My traitorous horse suddenly turned toward the incline as if ready to climb up to the cabin again and pay Mack a visit. I tugged desperately on the reins. “Whoa, horsey! Whoa!”

  “When you get here,” Cora said, “start watching for the trail to the Larkin place. The turnoff will be on your left, across the creek. It’s just a little ways up.”

  Cora turned her horse toward the creek again and got it moving as effortlessly as Uncle Cecil steered his huge car. I jiggled Belle’s reins, but she didn’t budge. “Come on, horsey . . . Giddyup . . . please . . . ?” Belle finally started to move, but she turned the opposite way and headed downhill toward home. “Whoa! Whoa!” I begged. She ignored me. “Cora! Help!”