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  Books. Change. Lives.

  Copyright © 2019 by Kim Michele Richardson

  Cover and internal design © 2019 by Sourcebooks

  Cover design by Christopher Lin

  Cover image © Stephen Mulcahey/Arcangel Images, R.Tsubin/Getty Images

  Internal image © Alvaro_cabrera/Freepik

  Sourcebooks and the colophon are registered trademarks of Sourcebooks, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems—except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews—without permission in writing from its publisher, Sourcebooks.

  Photos in the back matter are used courtesy of the Kentucky Department for Libraries and Archives and Western Kentucky University.

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious or are used fictitiously. Apart from well-known historical figures, any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Published by Sourcebooks Landmark, an imprint of Sourcebooks

  P.O. Box 4410, Naperville, Illinois 60563-4410

  (630) 961-3900

  sourcebooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Richardson, Kim Michele, author.

  Title: The book woman of Troublesome Creek / Kim Michele Richardson.

  Description: Naperville, Illinois : Sourcebooks Landmark, [2019]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018033574 | (trade paperback : alk. paper)

  Classification: LCC PS3618.I34474 B66 2019 | DDC 813/.6--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018033574

  Contents

  Front Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Kentucky, 1936

  One

  Two

  Three

  Four

  Five

  Six

  Seven

  Eight

  Nine

  Ten

  Eleven

  Twelve

  Thirteen

  Fourteen

  Fifteen

  Sixteen

  Seventeen

  Eighteen

  Nineteen

  Twenty

  Twenty-One

  Twenty-Two

  Twenty-Three

  Twenty-Four

  Twenty-Five

  Twenty-Six

  Twenty-Seven

  Twenty-Eight

  Twenty-Nine

  Thirty

  Thirty-One

  Thirty-Two

  Thirty-Three

  Thirty-Four

  Thirty-Five

  Thirty-Six

  Thirty-Seven

  Thirty-Eight

  Thirty-Nine

  Forty

  Forty-One

  Forty-Two

  Forty-Three

  Forty-Four

  Forty-Five

  Forty-Six

  Forty-Seven

  Author’s Note

  Images from the Pack Horse Library Project

  Reading Group Guide

  A Conversation with the Author

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Back Cover

  For Stacy Testa,

  a dear Book Woman

  “The very existence of libraries affords the best evidence that we may yet have hope for the future of man.”

  —T. S. Eliot

  Kentucky, 1936

  The librarian and her mule spotted it at the same time. The creature’s ears shot up, and it came to a stop so sudden its front hooves skidded out, the pannier slipping off, spilling out the librarian’s books. An eddy of dirt and debris lifted, stinging the woman’s eyes. The mule struggled to look upward, backward, anywhere other than at the thing in front of it.

  The book woman couldn’t keep her eyes off the spectacle as she shortened the reins and clamped her legs against the mule’s sides. Again, she prodded her mount. Baring tall, sassing teeth, the beast lifted its muzzle into the balsam-sweetened air, the quavering brays blistering the sleepy mountain.

  The woman stiffened, drawing the reins in tighter. In front of her, a body swayed back and forth below the fat branch from which it hung. A rope, collared tight around the neck, creaked from the strain of its weight. A kettle of turkey buzzards circled above, dipping their ugly, naked heads toward the lifeless form, their tail-chasing shadows riddling the dying grass.

  From the scorched earth rose strange cries, and the librarian pulled her stunned gaze away from the corpse and toward the ground.

  Beside a large toppled can, a baby lay in the dirt, the tiny face pinched, scalded with fury.

  Mountain breezes dipped lazily, shifting, carrying the stench of death and its soiling. The weighted branch crackled, groaning under its burden. A bloodied sock inched down from a limp, cerulean-blue foot. The librarian gawked at the striking blue flesh and cupped a hand over her mouth. The stocking slipped off, landing beside the squalling baby’s head.

  The wind rose higher, then plunged, skittering across the sock as if trying to lift it, but it stayed stubbornly put, rooted to the earth—too heavy to be sent off by a mere summer breeze.

  The book woman looked up, lifted one darkening hand in front of her own blue-colored face as if comparing her color to that of the hanging corpse. She examined her cobalt-blue flesh, then dared to peek back up at the dead body, bound, eternally rooted like the black oak to the hard, everlasting Kentucky land so many tried so hard to escape.

  One

  The new year was barely fifteen hours old in Troublesome Creek, Kentucky, when my pa adjusted the courting candle, setting it to burn for an alarming length of time.

  Satisfied, Pa carried it out of our one-room log house and onto the hand-hewn porch. He was hopeful. Hoping 1936 was the year his only daughter, nineteen-year-old Cussy Mary Carter, would get herself hitched and quit her job with the Pack Horse Library Project. Hoping for her latest suitor’s proposal.

  “Cussy,” he called over his shoulder, “before your mama passed, I promised her I’d see to it you got yourself respectability, but I’ve nearly gone busted buying candles to get you some. Let this stick hold the fire, Daughter.” He hoisted the old wrought-iron candleholder higher by its iron-forged rattail and once more played with the wooden slide, moving the taper up and down inside the spiral coil.

  “I’ve got a respectable life,” I said quietly, following him out to the porch, taking a seat on the wooden chair, and huddling under the patchwork eiderdown I’d dragged along. The first day of January had brought a skift of snow to our home in the cove. Pa set the candle down and struck a match to light a lantern hanging from the porch.

  Two winter moths chased the light, circling, landing nearby. A clean wetting mingled into woodsmoke and umbrella’d the tiny cabin. Shivering, I buried my nose into the coverlet
as a cutting wind scraped down mountains, dragging soft whistles through piney boughs and across bare black branches.

  In a minute, Pa picked back up the courting candle, raised a finger above the wick, and jutted his chin, the approval cinched in his brow.

  “Pa, I have me a good job making us twenty-eight dollars a month delivering books to folks who’s needing the book learning in these hills.”

  “I’m back to work now that the mine is running full time.” Pa pinched the wick.

  “They still need me—”

  “I need you safe. You could catch your death in this cold, same as your mama. You’re all I have, Cussy, all that’s left of our kind. The very last one, Daughter.”

  “Pa, please.”

  He reached down and brushed a lock of hair away from my eyes. “I won’t see you riding that ol’ mount up and down them dangerous passes and into dark hollers and cold creeks just because the government wants to push their foolish book airs into our hills here.”

  “It’s safe.”

  “You could be struck ill. Just look what happened to that book woman and her mount. Foolhardy, and the poor steed was punished for her temerity.”

  Snow gusted, swirled, eddying across the leaf-quilted yard.

  “It was along in years, Pa. My rented mount is spry and sure-footed enough. And I’m fine and fit as any.” I glanced down at my darkening hands, a silent blue betrayal. Quickly, I slipped them under the folds of fabric, forcing myself to stay calm. “Sound. Please. It’s decent money—”

  “Where’s your decency? Some of the womenfolk are complaining you’re carrying dirty books up them rocks.”

  “Weren’t true. It’s called literature, and proper enough,” I tried to explain like so many times before. “Robinson Crusoe, and Dickens, and the likes, and lots of Popular Mechanics and Woman’s Home Companion even. Pamphlets with tips on fixing things busted. Patterns for sewing. Cooking and cleaning. Making a dollar stretch. Important things, Pa. Respectable—”

  “Airish. It ain’t respectable for a female to be riding these rough hills, behaving like a man,” he said, a harshness rumbling his voice.

  “It helps educate folks and their young’uns.” I pointed to a small sack in the corner filled with magazines I’d be delivering in the next days. “Remember the National Geographic article about Great-Grandpa’s birthplace over in Cussy, France, the one I’m named for? You liked it—”

  “Dammit, you have earned your name and driven me to nothing but cussing with your willful mind. I don’t need a damn book to tell me about our kin’s birthplace or your given name. Me and your mama know’d it just fine.” He raised a brow, worrying some more with the flame on the courting candle, resting the height of the taper to where he wanted. And as always and depending on the man who came calling, how long he wanted the old timekeeper to stay lit.

  Pa looked off toward the creek, then back at the candle, and set his sights once more over to the banks, studying. He fought between raising the timekeeping candle and lowering it, mumbling a curse, and setting it somewhere in the middle. A taper would be cranked up tall to burn for a lengthy visit, or tamped down short for any beau Elijah Carter didn’t favor as a good suitor.

  “Pa, people want the books. It’s my job to tend to the folks who are hungry for the learning.”

  He lifted the courting candle. “A woman ought to be near the home fires tending that.”

  “But if I marry, the WPA will fire me. Please, I’m a librarian now. Why, even Eleanor Roosevelt approves—”

  “The First Lady ain’t doing a man’s job—ain’t my unwed daughter—and ain’t riding an ornery ass up a crooked mountain.”

  “People are learning up there.” Again, I glimpsed my hands and rubbed them under the quilt. “Books are the best way to do that—”

  “The best thing they need is food on their tables. Folks here are hungry, Daughter. The babies are starving and sickly, the old folks are dying. We’re gnawing on nothing but bone teeth here. Not two weeks ago, widow Caroline Barnes walked nine miles for naught to save her babies up there.”

  I had heard the poor woman staggered into town with the pellagra rash and died in the street. Many times I’d glimpsed the rash set in from starvation. And last month a woman up in a holler lost five of her twelve children from it, and farther up in the hills, a whole family had died the month before.

  “But folks tell me the books eases their burdens, it’s the best thing that could happen to them,” I argued.

  “They can’t live off the chicken scratch in them books,” Pa said, flicking the wick and hushing me. “And this”—he rapped the candleholder with a knuckle—“is what’s best for you.”

  Jutted up high like that, the candle’s nakedness seemed desperate, embarrassing. I caught the unsettling in Pa’s gray eyes too.

  * * *

  It didn’t matter that for a long time I’d shared Pa’s fears about what might become of his only daughter, until the day I’d heard about Roosevelt creating his relief program called the New Deal to help folks around here during the Depression. We’d been depressed as long as I could remember, but now, all of the sudden, the government said we needed help and aimed to do just that. The president had added the Works Progress Administration last year to put females to work and bring literature and art into the Kaintuck man’s life. For many mountainfolk, all of us around here, it was our first taste of what a library could give, a taste to be savored—one that left behind a craving for more.

  I’d seen the flyers in town asking for womenfolk to apply for the job to tote books around these hills on a mount. I snuck an application and filled it out without Pa knowing, applying to be a Pack Horse librarian a month after Mama died.

  “They gave you the job?” Pa had puzzled when I got it last summer.

  I didn’t tell him I’d bypassed the supervisors here by picking up my application at the post office. The job application said you could turn it in to the head librarian in your town or send it to the Pack Horse libraries’ manager directly by mailing it to Frankfort. It didn’t say anything about color, and certainly not mine. But I’d taken my chances with city folks I’d never meet instead of trusting it to the bosses here in Troublesome.

  “Did no one else apply?” Pa had questioned me. “You can’t work,” he’d added just as quick.

  “Pa, we need the money, and it’s honorable work and—”

  “A workin’ woman will never knot.”

  “Who would marry a Blue? Who would want me?”

  I was positive no one would wed one of the Blue People of Kentucky. Wouldn’t hitch with a quiet woman whose lips and nails were blue-jay blue, with skin the color of the bluet patches growing around our woods.

  I could barely meet someone’s eyes for fear my color would betray my sensibilities. A mere blush, a burst of joy or anger, or sudden startle, would crawl across my skin, deepening, changing my softer appearance to a ripened blueberry hue, sending the other person scurrying. There didn’t seem to be much marriage prospect for the last female of blue mountainfolk who had befuddled the rest of the Commonwealth—folks around the country and doctors even. A fit girl who could turn as blue as the familiar bluet damselfly skimming Kentucky creek beds, the old mountain doctor had once puzzled and then promptly nicknamed me Bluet. As soon as the word fell out of his mouth, it stuck to me.

  Whenever we’d talk about it, Pa would say, “Cussy, you have a chance to marry someone that’s not the same as you, someone who can get you out of here. That’s why I dig coal. Why I work for scratch.”

  And the disgrace would linger in the dead air to gnaw at me. Folks thought our clan was inbreeds, nothing but. Weren’t true. My great-grandpa, a Blue from France, settled in these hills and wedded himself a full-blooded white Kentuckian. Despite that, they’d had several blue children among their regular white-looking ones. And a few of them married stranger
s, but the rest had to hitch with kin because they couldn’t travel far, same as other mountain clans around all these parts.

  Soon, we Blues pushed ourselves deeper into the hills to escape the ridicule. Into the blackest part of the land. Pa liked that just fine, saying it was best, safer for me, the last of our kind, the last one. But I’d read about those kinds in the magazines. The eastern elk, the passenger pigeon. The extinctions. Why, most of the critters had been hunted to extinction. The thought of being hunted, becoming extinct, being the last Blue, the very last of my kind on earth, left me so terror-struck and winded that I would race to the looking glass, claw at my throat, and knock my chest to steal the breath back.

  A lot of people were leery of our looks. Though with Pa working the coal, his mostly pale-blue skin didn’t bother folks much when all miners came out of the hole looking the same.

  But I didn’t have coal to disguise me in black or white Kentucky. Didn’t have myself an escape until I’d gotten the precious book route. In those old dark-treed pockets, my young patrons would glimpse me riding my packhorse, toting a pannier full of books, and they’d light a smile and call out “Yonder comes Book Woman… Book Woman’s here!” And I’d forget all about my peculiarity, and why I had it, and what it meant for me.

  Just recently, Eula Foster, the head librarian of the Pack Horse project, remarked about my smarts, saying the book job had given me an education as fine as any school could.

  I was delighted to hear her words. Proud, I’d turned practically purple, despite the fact that she had said it to the other Pack Horse librarians in an air of astonishment: “If a Blue can get that much learning from our books, imagine what the program can do for our normal folk… A light in these dark times, for sure…”

  And I’d basked in the warm light that had left me feeling like a book-read woman.

  But when Pa heard about Agnes’s frightening journey, how her packhorse up and quit her in the snow last month, his resolve to get me hitched deepened. And soon after, he’d shone a blinding light back on my color and offered up a generous five-dollar dowry plus ten acres of our woodland. Men, both long in the tooth and schooling young, sought my courtship, ignoring I was one of them Blue people when the prospect of land ownership presented itself. A few would boldly ask about my baby-making as if discussing a farm animal—seeking a surety that their Kentucky sons and daughters wouldn’t have the blueness too.