The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek Read online

  The hard day suddenly landed at my feet, leached out my skin, and swept up into weary eyes. A tremble took hold of my hand, though it should’ve been that of Loretta’s old, weak one. But her touch was warm and firm, and she squeezed and pressed her other palm tightly on top, rubbing my flesh.

  I tilted my head upward, shuttering my eyes, the hurt and loneliness pooling inside, swelling. I tried to pocket my feelings, but today more than ever, I missed Mama. Her love and mostly her gentle touch. As the days passed, I worried I’d forget her and know’d a certainty that because of my skin it would be unlikely I’d feel that kind of touch from another. I was a Blue Ghost, the spook in little boys’ bad dreams.

  My heart pained for Mama and for my ugly color and what Charlie Frazier had taken from me. There was the ugliness of the preacher, the hardness of this land, the shame weighing down my shoulders. It was always there inside. The disgrace had fixed itself to my soul like it had life, the rawness, black and heavy like a lump of Kentucky coal that would find its dirty way into our home.

  A silence fattened and swelled as the candlelight herded shadows from nooks and crannies, tickling the cobwebbed ceilings.

  Loretta gently untangled our hands and said, “Let me get my eye medicine, child.”

  I passed it to her, and she pressed the rag to her eyes, dabbing with the goldenseal wash she’d brewed to help cure them.

  “Anything else I can get you, Miss Loretta?”

  Loretta pulled two tiny eyestones from her dress pocket and pushed them into my hand. “Would you mind rinsing these, child?” I took the flat milky stones that she’d said had come from the innards of a hawk, and dropped them into the pan of goldenseal, swished, then dried them with a clean cloth the way she liked, and carried the rocks back over to her.

  The old woman laid back on the bed and slipped a stone under each eyelid, shutting her bulging eyes, hopeful the hill remedy would be a cure.

  “See you next Monday, Miss Loretta,” I said. Beside the door, I squatted down to a basket stuffed full of ginseng, sassafras, and other herbs, picked out a small root and a big white willow bark, and slipped outside. I’d replace them this summer when the eyebright bloomed—bring her the old herb to nurse her eyes.

  I hated taking from her, knowing she couldn’t hunt the herbs anymore and relied on her nephew for it. But the willow cured pains, calmed swelling, and cooled the hottest fever. Maybe it would take care of Mr. Moffit.

  An umbrella of coming dark and cold greeted me.

  Junia gave a soft wind-down bray, and I mounted and pointed her toward home.

  I looked back once to wave, even though Loretta wouldn’t see. Her cabin was half-swallowed in shadow and rolling fog, haloed by fireflies chewing through the darkness.

  Ahead, the dark forest beckoned. I stopped to search for him, feeling his sneaky eyes on me, his blackness smothering. He was out there hunting. And I know’d it weren’t for supper. Junia shifted, lifted her muzzle, feeling it too. I kneed the old mule, urging her to hurry.

  Eleven

  Junia carried us home through the fog-drenched forest, not breaking until she saw the smoke curling from our chimney.

  “You’re running late again,” Pa said as I came through the door.

  “Sorry, Pa, folks are excited to have the library service back.”

  “You read to ol’ Loretta?”

  “Yes, sir, I read a good twenty minutes, then helped her to bed.” I slipped out of my coat and hooked it on the peg beside the door.

  “Good,” he grunted as he bent over to roll up the socks under his pant legs. Pa know’d Loretta only allowed the Bible, and he had a soft heart for the old woman.

  “I thought it was your night off. Where are you off to? Pa, you going out?”

  “Yup. Last night, Lee Sturgil’s woman took to the bed, and I promised to work his shift for him tonight so he wouldn’t have a rock dropped on his pay.”

  “The sheriff’s daughter is ailing?”

  “Birthing bed,” Pa mumbled, looking away.

  Some of the coal miners had been calling on Pa a lot lately to work their shifts to avoid fines, keep them out of trouble with the Company bosses.

  Remembering Loretta’s tea, I dug out the root from my coat. “Miss Loretta gave us this. Let me brew you a cup of sassafras before you go.”

  “Another night, Daughter. I can’t be late. Get yourself some supper and rest up. Doc came by and left one of his baskets.” He crammed a foot into his work boot.

  The old doc was the only one who did call beside the courters Pa had sent. More than once, the doctor had dropped off small gifts of apples, a jar of jam, or biscuits, all the while with whittling pleas to draw our blood, scrape our skin, or let him take us to the medical clinic in Lexington. Pa never answered the door and made him leave any gifts on the porch.

  Appreciative, I plucked up an apple and lightly bounced it from one hand to the other. “Pa, I heard some stirring out there a while back.” I pulled back the curtain and stared out the window into the fog, seeing nothing.

  “I’ve seen a bobcat on the trail, and I thought I saw it over by the thorny locust when I came in this morning.” He gestured to the door.

  “Bobcat? I’m not sure it’s creatures, Pa. I—”

  “I need to get going so the sheriff’s daughter can be taken care of. I’ll have a look in the morning. Keep your eyes peeled.”

  “Yes, sir.” I sighed that I had to, that there was one more thing out there hunting me. Maybe if I told Pa about the preacher, he’d stay home and we would both be safe.

  I dropped the curtain and turned. “Pa, a few weeks back, the preach—”

  But he was out the door before I could finish. I stepped onto the porch and watched his ghostly lamp slash into mists until I could no longer see him.

  Frowning, I went back inside and rooted through Doc’s basket. I found jam and bread and spread the preserves on several slices for my supper.

  In the lantern light, I hurried and did my chores, stopping to build another fire in the stove with some birch bark and pine kindling from the porch. Carefully, I placed a tinder of curling birch on the stove’s cast-iron floor, lit the nest, and stacked the pine splits atop the small flames. Fragrances of woods and resin filled the cabin.

  Hours later, I fetched Henry’s present from my coat and climbed the loft ladder. I dropped the Life Saver onto the table beside the cotton mattress Pa insisted on getting me when he brought me home from Charlie Frazier’s. I’d always slept just fine on a pallet of quilts, but Pa believed the mattress advertisement that promised to soothe hurt bones and give better rest would help me heal faster. Pa had credit to spend at the Company store that he used for the purchase, saying he’d had a little extra that month.

  But Pa didn’t have as much as two nickels to rub together, and I know’d he worked eighteen-hour days for two weeks straight for that little extra. The Company didn’t like for the Kentucky man to feel a dollar in his pocket, and they’d pay the miners mostly in Company scrip—credit that could only be used at the Company store—to make sure of just that. If a fellar balked at having to spend his pay there, he’d be dismissed right quick. The Company also let workers draw on their earnings before payday, happy to give out scrip as loans with interest to keep the families good ’n’ indebted to them, insisting to any who might raise a brow, It serves to smarten the miners, gives the coal man a vicissitude from improper business standards, and educates them on sound business practices, on acquiring sound credit.

  I changed into my nightgown, turned back the covers, and snuggled under the quilt. My thoughts pulled back to Henry’s precious gift, the hunger he suffered.

  Pa and I had seen our share of hunger. We only had the berries, morels, squirrels, rabbits, and other life we’d pinched from the forest. Sometimes Pa’d trade miners his kills for other foods we couldn’t get, like eggs, corn,
and fruit. Rarely could we afford the expensive staples at the Company store. The Company scrip and my paycheck helped us to stay afloat a little, despite Pa using most of it to buy up the store medicines rather than a doctor’s stronger ones to fight his lung illness. Still, he stayed in debt purchasing newfangled medicines, the next sure-fix potion that the store would bring in. Like a small bandage, the store-bought medicine would hide his sickness for a little bit, so that he could go back down into the mine and make more money for newer cures the Company kept stocking and pushing on the miners.

  Weren’t but two of us to fend for. The three hundred or so scattered folks who populated our area lived in the woodlands and alongside creek beds, up slopes, and the few in town and out in the mine camp were mostly large families with many children.

  That there was a medicine for Henry and all the Henrys out there, for the hunger and hungry, didn’t seem right. Not much of the pox or influenza sickness in Kentucky as much as there was the hunger disease right now. That there were stores full of the cure for hunger kept me awake with that special kind of anger that comes from helplessness.

  I picked up the Life Saver and pressed it to my lips, inhaling the tempting scent of the sugary hard candy. “And don’t you open it none until you’re good an’ hungry,” he’d warned.

  I reached over, slipped Henry’s gift into my tin box of keepsakes on the night table. “I’m not good an’ hungry yet.” I blew out the candle and said a prayer for Pa’s safety, then Henry, and all the other Henrys in this land, though it wouldn’t help any more than casting a wish on a shooting star.

  Still, I stacked more prayers atop, begging the Lord to keep us and the young’uns safe, and cast a fevered one for a merciful Heavenly home for Caroline Barnes who’d walked the nine deadly miles to feed her starving babies—nine miles in the cold, harsh-driven Kaintuck hills. Nine miles of dying each lonely step in her own cold embrace.

  I balled the anguish in my fist, and a gut-wrenching sound whisked passed my teeth. A whip-poor-will answered back, and I buried my face into the soft blue pillow and swallowed the sadness knocking against my throat, the horrors I felt coming.

  Twelve

  The May morning unfolded slowly in Kentucky’s old hand, and soon a children’s moon climbed into a bright new sky. For a young’un in the hills, the daytime moon was something to behold. The slow way of life and meager existence in these old, grandmother mountains meant that mamas put babes to bed long before dark, before the burning hunger set in.

  I made my way toward a mountain in the distance, humming to pass the time, lifting my voice to the blue hills and pine warblers, content with the time we’d made so far. It had been two days since I’d seen Frazier up here, and I relaxed, hoping I’d seen the last of him.

  Though there were only three stops on my Wednesday route, the first drop-off was my trickiest. It didn’t help none that I had to walk it mostly, slowing guiding Junia some three thousand feet up Hogtail Mountain’s twisty, narrow, mud-packed path. Sure-footed enough for the mule, but I couldn’t chance it with me atop her. I’d nearly fainted from fright the first time she staggered the steep climb and turned a hairpin curve, her rump swaying just inches from the ledge, me only a split hair from the bottomless drop. One misstep and I’d be falling till summer, and they wouldn’t find me until the land shed her thick canopy of green. I’d walked most of the climb ever since that scare. And today it was welcomed. I might see Queenie, and that gave me cheer. Most Wednesdays we would crisscross the paths on our routes and sit a spell.

  I stopped halfway up the pass on a wide bend and told Junia, “Time to carry me, ol’ girl.” The mule took several switchbacks with ease until the path forked and she tried to take the spur trail and head back downward. I got off and walked again, leading her, hugging rock face and the scraggly treed banks the rest of the way up.

  Rounding the last pass, we finally saw the fire tower.

  Seventeen-year-old R.C. Cole peeked over his fire lookout, the wind lifting his copper-penny hair. Dressed in a holey T-shirt and frayed brown pants, R.C. lived sixty feet up in the Hogtail tower built by the Civilian Conservation Corps. I could see the eagerness in his waving arms, hear the urgency in his thundering feet on the steel platform.

  He was waiting for my books that would take him even higher, he’d said. The boy wanted to study news clippings about the weather and forests, and he’d always beg me to bring him up a Farmers’ Almanac or a National Geographic—anything that would help him work his way up to fire watch dispatcher, so he could get more pay for schooling to land a bigger job as a forest ranger.

  The CCC had been his logical choice to start his career, he told me. They’d been building the fire towers with the home cabs atop the mountains of Kentucky ever since President Roosevelt formed the workforce. And the minute R.C. turned sixteen, he’d fibbed to the Forestry Service, telling them he was seventeen. He’d applied for the job to follow in his pa’s—and now his mama’s—footsteps.

  His mama, Hallie Cole, was the first female fire watcher in Kentucky. When R.C.’s pa died from a lightning strike, Hallie’d taken over and manned the tower at Pearl Knob lookout some twenty miles east of here, and the Corps let her. The Pearl tower had been the Coles’ home ever since it’d been built and long before the CCC took over.

  R.C. had been living in the Hogtail steel cab over a year now, keeping a bird’s eye on any fires in the mountains, weather watching for them too, alerting the Forestry with the special hand-crank radio at the first wispy tail of smoke or dark storm clouds.

  I tied Junia to the steep metal staircase, dug out the loan for R.C., and pulled out the two letters the head librarian had given me to deliver.

  R.C. bent over the steel wraparound deck above, a bigger itch of anticipation and excitement under him. “Miss Bluet,” he hollered down, motioning for me. “Can you bring it up, please? I got myself a smoker, I think. And I have to keep watch!” He disappeared inside.

  I walked up the eighty-four steps, winding around until I stopped at the trapdoor, gave the underside a sharp rap, and stepped aside. R.C. pulled back the wooden trap, and I climbed the four rungs up into his quarters.

  R.C. said, “Book Woman! Hurry, come see.”

  He plopped down in a chair in front of his Osborne Firefinder, studied the circular topographical map, and then stood up to search out the four walled windows that wrapped his tiny cabin.

  “What do you think, ma’am?” Lightly, he knocked on the Firefinder and pointed. “Right here. Think I got myself a smoker?” He peered out the window again and into the blue Kentucky sky, the vast woodlands and creeks and rivers, and glanced back down to the Osborne perched on the wood table.

  R.C. offered me his chair. “Here, take a gander.” He scooted a dirty shirt off the seat onto the floor and dusted it off for me with his forearm.

  I handed him an old edition of Forest & Stream and letters from home and sat down, still catching my breath from the flight of stairs. R.C. fanned the pages of the magazine. I scooted the chair closer to the Osborne, but the leg caught on R.C.’s shirt, and when I tried to lift the chair up and move it, it stuck.

  “Oh, sorry, ma’am.” R.C. blushed. “Let me fix it. I can’t have my insulators getting busted. They can save a man’s life, you know.”

  Last summer there’d been a bad storm up here with lightning clashing all around the tiny cab. He told me lightning scrawled writings across the sky, and there was an explosion like nothing he’d ever heard. Then something hit the big lightning rod on top, and a large, blinding fireball rolled off the roof, down the side of the tower, crashing to the ground, charring the earth.

  After R.C. got over the fright, he walked out onto his deck. The railing and staircase were lit, glowing a hot orange, chasing him back inside.

  He called the forestry office, and they sent two rangers up Hogtail Mountain that very next day. The men put glass insulators under the
legs of his chair, instructing R.C. to sit and lift both feet off the wooden floor when a storm approached, even if it was miles away. Now one of those insulators, little glass boxes fastened to the bottom of each chair leg, had snagged a corner of his shirt.

  R.C. righted the chair and stepped back. I took my seat. Peeking through the sighting hole of the Firefinder, I slowly moved the sights around until the crosshairs were aligned with the fire.

  “That’s over near Jewel Creek,” I said, proud that he’d taught me how to use the Osborne, even more, trusted my word. “Could be fog rising, R.C., but I can’t be sure.” I stood.

  “Could be.” He studied some more and said, “I’ll need to keep an eye on it and be ready to dispatch it to the Forestry.” R.C. held up his magazine, frowning.

  “Sorry, R.C., the Farmers’ Almanac is still on loan. I thought this magazine might do till I get ahold of it.”

  “It’s fine, ma’am. Much obliged.” He hid his disappointment behind a sweet grin and studied on the Forest & Stream. “Looks interesting enough.” He dropped it onto his narrow rope bed and opened one of his letters, scanning it with an appetite for news back home.

  He was too polite to let me know I’d brought the magazine to him three times last year. I was hoping to get him a few lesson books in science and geography, a Farmers’ Almanac, but so far there hadn’t been any donated.

  “Miss Bluet.” He stuffed the letter into his back pocket and snatched two envelopes off his cold wood stovetop. “Can you post these two for me?”

  “I’ll drop them off tomorrow at my outpost for the courier, and he’ll pick them up next week—”

  “Any way to get it posted sooner? One’s to Mama, and this one”—he tapped—“is to Mr. Beck. That’s my girl Ruth’s pa… But I need to get it to him quick as possible.” His eyes pleaded. “It’s an important letter, ma’am.” He shifted his lanky frame onto one leg, then the other and back again, anxious for an answer.