Read Online Wonderland Creek by Lynn Austin - Free Book Online Page A

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 knob and went inside.
    “Lillie?”
    A brass 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 balls.
    “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 unbutton 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 unbuttoned 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