Wonderland Creek (5 page)

“I heard that!” my aunt said. “Why do you always exaggerate, Cecil?”

I had forgotten how much they bickered. My parents never bickered; they simply exchanged lists.

Mother kissed me good-bye. Father rested his hand on my shoulder and said, “Remember who you are, Alice.” It was one of his favorite admonitions. The answer he had drummed into me was, “I am a child of God”—and therefore I needed to act like one. But aside from that rote reply, who was I really? I used to be able to say,
I’m Gordon Walters’ girlfriend
and
I’m a librarian at the Blue Island Public Library.
I could no longer say either of those things. I swallowed the lump in my throat and climbed into the car. The door slammed shut behind me, sealing me in like a pickle in a canning jar when the lid sucks shut with a
pop
. I gazed straight ahead so my parents wouldn’t see my tears and I wouldn’t see theirs. Uncle Cecil gunned the engine and headed south.

I had been eager for a change of scene, but unfortunately the scene never changed, mile after mile, hour after hour. We drove through scattered farming communities like Steger and Grant Park and Watseka, Illinois, and they all looked numbingly alike, their brick storefronts lined up like boxers facing each other across Main Street. Identical-looking filling stations and diners and roadside motels seemed to follow us like pushy salesmen, disappearing in the rearview mirror, then popping up again farther down the highway. And in between each town, farmland stretched endlessly as far as the eye could see. As the stench of cow manure filled the air, I nearly begged Uncle Cecil to light one of his cigars.

I couldn’t recall reading any good novels that featured rural Illinois or Indiana as their setting, and no wonder. The book would be much too boring. Interesting plots were inspired by interesting surroundings, and who could be inspired by farmland? This probably explained why my life had been dull and uneventful so far. I lived in a boring state.

Rain spat from the clouds onto Uncle Cecil’s windshield. The dull sky and gray pavement were the color of dingy dish towels. My uncle turned on his head lamps so he could see through the fog, and I feared our overloaded trunk would make the headlights shine up into the sky instead of down onto the road.

The terrain might have looked boring to me, but it became more fanciful and enchanted for Aunt Lydia the farther we drove. She had brought along her tumbler of golden liquid, pasted to her hand even at this early hour, ice cubes rattling like bones until they finally melted just outside of Danville. I saw her sipping from it, but I never saw her refilling it—and yet the glass never emptied. It was magical, like a sorcerer’s trick.

“Look, darlings! A herd of buffalo!” she said, pointing to a dozen dairy cows huddling in the fog. My uncle and I exchanged glances in the rearview mirror. “And doesn’t that castle over there remind you of the ones we saw in Germany, Cecil?”

“For crying out loud, Lydia, that’s a barn!”

At this rate, she would be seeing leprechauns and unicorns before we reached Indianapolis. Uncle Cecil stomped the accelerator and
whooshed
past a slow-moving car as if in a hurry to deliver Aunt Lydia to her water cure as quickly as possible. I pulled a book out of my bag and began to read, praying that we wouldn’t get into a head-on collision in the fog.

We stopped for lunch at a roadside diner, ingesting enough grease to lubricate a locomotive before getting under way again. I hadn’t noticed any gangsters chasing us, but my uncle drove as if carloads of them were speeding after us. I continued to read my book, becoming the main character, living her life. It was so much better than my own.

The storm clouds lifted as the afternoon progressed, and every time I looked up from my book I noticed more and more hills—and more and more signs of the economic depression. Men in tattered clothing stood alongside the highway, thumbing for a ride. Entire families camped in makeshift tents beside the road, their laundry sagging on ropes strung between the trees. Overloaded cars waddled down the Dixie Highway like tortoises, with piles of possessions lashed onto their roofs in tottering bundles. We also passed crews of unemployed men who had been put to work by the president’s Civilian Conservation Corps, laboring on the roads, stringing telephone lines or repairing bridges.

We stopped in Lexington, Kentucky, for the night and started driving again early the next day. By now I was so engrossed in my novel that I couldn’t have described what any of my real surroundings looked like. I was nearing the end of the story. The main character was achieving her goals, accomplishing something important, becoming stronger and more courageous. She was about to live happily ever after with the story’s handsome hero when a very loud
Bang!
suddenly interrupted my reading.

Aunt Lydia screamed. “They’re shooting at us!”

I knew it. The gangsters had caught up with us. Uncle Cecil wrestled with the steering wheel as he tried to bring the swerving car to a halt. He negotiated a curve, and we finally managed to stop alongside a gray weather-beaten barn. He leaned back against his seat, breathing hard. “No one is shooting, Lydia. I had a blowout.”

“What did you do that for? We could have been killed!”

“I didn’t do it on purpose. Tires blow all the time.”

“Well, you must have been doing something wrong for it to explode like that. You weren’t driving correctly.”

He got out, shaking his head, and walked around to the back of the car. I heard the trunk groan open, then heard Uncle Cecil thumping around, moving books and suitcases as he searched for his spare tire. Aunt Lydia rolled down her window. “Are you going to tip the car up in the air? I hate sitting in the car when it’s all tipsy.”

“The only thing tipsy is you,” he mumbled. He dropped the car jack and tire iron on the ground with a clang. “Yes, I’m going to jack it up.” My aunt leaped out of the car as if it was on fire, so I leaped out, too.

We had stopped in a narrow valley surrounded by tree-covered mountains. I didn’t see any houses, just the dilapidated barn. A faded sign painted on the front of it read:
Church of the Holy Fire. Sunday Worship 10 a.m. Sinners Welcome.
Uncle Cecil put the jack in place and turned the crank, grunting and straining. The heavy car rose and tilted as the rear wheel slowly lifted off the ground.

I heard a low growling sound, and a moment later a huge black dog hurtled toward us from behind the barn, barking and snarling. Before I had time to scream, it reached the end of its chain and choked to a stop. But it continued to lunge and bark at us, straining the rusted chain. Aunt Lydia gripped my hand.

“We have to leave, Cecil. Right now. This place you picked to have your blowout is unacceptable.”

“I didn’t pick this place; it’s where the tire blew.”

“Well, put the car down. Go farther up the road and change it.”

“I’m not driving on a flat tire.” He unscrewed the lug nuts and yanked off the tire. Dirt smudged his forehead and white shirt.

Aunt Lydia huddled close beside me as the dog continued to growl and bark and pace. “If that animal gets loose, he’ll kill all three of us,” she said.

“I told you to stay in the car, but you wouldn’t listen.”

“Well, we can’t get in the car now. It’s up in the air!” My aunt’s fear was contagious, and we huddled beside each other, trembling. It seemed to take forever, but at last Uncle Cecil tightened the last lug nut and pumped the jack handle, lowering the car. The dog sounded hoarse from barking, but his chain had held tight.

“That was a terrifying experience!” Aunt Lydia said as we climbed back into the car.

“What are you talking about? We had a flat tire. That’s life, Lydia. A tire blows, you fix it, you move on.”

Uncle Cecil’s words seemed profound to me. As my racing heart slowed and we continued on our way, I felt ashamed of how I had reacted. No one had been shooting at us. The dog hadn’t been a rabid beast, just an ordinary black dog on a very long chain. I realized that I was as out of touch with the real world as Aunt Lydia was, my imagination out of control from all of the books I had read. Is this what Gordon had meant when he’d said I lived in a dream world?

I didn’t want to end up like my aunt. I made up my mind that from now on, I was going to wake up and pay attention to the world around me. I would put all of my problems behind me—tossing them into the trunk of my car, so to speak, like a worn-out tire. I would move on just as my uncle had done. I would go to Acorn, Kentucky, and be a heroine to all those poor people who needed my books. My life would have meaning and purpose again.

We drove for another hour or so, up and down a road that snaked into the mountains, following greenish rivers and rocky creeks. Trees surrounded us on all sides, and we plunged deeper and deeper into the woods as if entering the land of fairy tales. Not the nice, happily-ever-after kind, but the lost-in-the-woods-among-wolves kind. My newfound courage began to drain away.

“Where is this town, anyway?” Aunt Lydia asked at one point. “And why did they put it in the middle of nowhere?”

“There’s lumber and coal up in here,” Uncle Cecil replied.

“At least the roads are paved,” I said, trying to sound positive. “There must be a town around here somewhere.”

“These roads weren’t built for the towns,” Uncle Cecil said. “They were built to get the coal out.”

In spite of my resolve to be heroic, the woods frightened me. What if we got lost and wandered in these woods forever? I decided to escape to the safer world of make-believe, and I hunched down in the backseat to finish reading my book.

Around midday, Uncle Cecil announced that we were coming to a town. I looked up from reading and saw a handful of houses wedged into a narrow valley between two mountains. Wherever there was a flat strip of land on either mountainside, someone had built a house or a building. If people came out of their front doors too fast, it looked as though they would tumble right down the hill.

“Is this the place we’re looking for?” Aunt Lydia asked. I searched for a sign and spotted one on the side of a flat-roofed hut:
U.S. Post Office, Acorn, Kentucky.

“Yes! There’s the post office! This is it!” I assumed we were entering the outskirts of Acorn and that we’d eventually see a larger cluster of buildings when we reached the center of town, but Uncle Cecil drove straight through the village and out the other side before any of us could blink. He had to make a U-turn and go back, driving slower this time. I had thought Blue Island was small, but Acorn didn’t deserve to be called a town.

On our second ride-through, I spotted a hand-painted sign in front of a shabby two-story house:
Acorn Public Library.
A smaller red, white, and blue sign identified the library as a project of the WPA, President Roosevelt’s Works Project Administration.

We parked in front and I climbed out. The library sat very close to the street with no sidewalk and only a narrow patch of dirt for a lawn. According to the hours posted on the sign, the library was supposed to be open now, but when I tried the door it was locked. I knocked, then peeked through the front window. There were no lights, no signs of life, no response to my knock. I pounded harder, rattling the ancient door on its hinges.

The third time I used my fist.

An upstairs window slid open above my head and a wooly-looking man whom I nearly mistook for a bear peered out. “Hey! You trying to break the door down? What do you want?” His growl resembled a bear’s, as well.

I shaded my eyes and looked up at him. “Do you know where I might find the librarian, Leslie MacDougal?”

“Who are you?”

“Alice Grace Ripley from Blue Island, Illinois. I have some books that I’d like to donate to her library.”

“Just a minute.” The window slammed shut.

“Well!” Aunt Lydia huffed. “The people aren’t very friendly around here. Are you sure you don’t want to come to the spa with us, darling?”

I had to admit that I was having second thoughts. This poky village and run-down library weren’t at all what I had expected. But given the choice between spending a week in a library or taking a water cure—whatever that was—I would choose a library every time, no matter how tiny it was. I could be useful here. More important, there were books here.

“I’ll be fine, Aunt Lydia. I’ve been corresponding with the librarian, and she sounded very kind in her letters. She was very enthused about the donated books and I told her in my last letter that I would stay and help her catalogue them.” I didn’t mention the fact that the librarian had never answered my last letter, nor had she officially invited me to stay. “This looks like a nice little town, doesn’t it?” I added.

“What town, dear? I don’t see a town. Where are the hat shops and the shoe stores?”

“They have a library,” I said.

Meanwhile, Uncle Cecil had opened the trunk and was unloading the books, piling the boxes beside the library steps. “That’s the last one,” he said, patting the top of it. He was in a hurry to be on his way, and I didn’t blame him. Aunt Lydia had insisted she’d seen a dead monkey in the road a few miles back, so I understood his urgency to get her to the spa. I pulled my suitcase from the trunk and set it down beside the car. “Thanks for bringing me. See you in about two weeks?”

“Right.” He slammed the trunk just as the shaggy man emerged through the front door, blinking in the sunlight like a bear that had awakened too early from hibernation. He had buttoned his shirt crookedly and fastened only one strap of his bib overalls. And he was barefooted. I approached him as cautiously as I would a genuine bear.

“I’m sorry to bother you, but I’m looking for Leslie MacDougal. I’ve been corresponding with her about these books that I’ve collected for her library.” He gave a curt nod, lifted the first box, and carried it inside. I picked up a bag of magazines and followed him. “She’s expecting me. I told her that I would be delivering them sometime this week.”

He nodded again, dropped the box on the floor in the foyer where the library patrons would surely trip over it, and returned for another one. I followed him in and out, carrying the magazines and chattering away about our library in Illinois and how much I looked forward to meeting Acorn’s librarian. Why wouldn’t he answer my question and tell me where she was? Was he deaf, dim-witted, or simply ill-mannered?