The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek Read online

  To my relief, she cast her eyes away from Frazier’s path and moved toward the bank. Today would be busy. My Monday route was a long one. Some days I only had a few folks scheduled for drop-offs, but today I’d been given a new patron on top of the seven homes and mountain school I’d visit.

  Climbing up the brush-tangled bank, we topped the hill, leaving behind the scuttles of squirrel and rabbit. The mule raised her muzzle and nickered, remembering we’d checked out the route last week to prepare for our first day back.

  A train whistle lost itself over the rows of blue hills to the east, slipping rail song into the coves, hollows, and pockets of old Kaintuck. I let the sound fill me with its tune. Soon, my mind turned to the train passengers the big steel cars carried past the woodlands, through these old mountains cut with untold miles of rivers and creeks. What fine places the locomotive toted them to. I’d dreamt once of a train full of Blues journeying. Blues like me. Someone, somewhere who looked like me—

  Junia snorted as if she’d heard my far-fetched thoughts. “It could happen,” I told the mule. “There could be others out there like me.”

  In the distance, the Moffits’ homestead peeked out of the morning light. Eager now, Junia pressed on, breaking into a fast trot when she saw the girl.

  It was my first book drop since my January marriage, but seeing my library patron up here and waiting like that felt like I’d never left.

  Spring had finally come, and I shed the dying winter, the death of my marital bed, and returned briefly to my ten-year-old child of yesteryear. I leaned into the raw spring wind feeling the spirit of books bursting in my saddlebags—the life climbing into my bones. Knocking my heels against the beast, I kissed my teeth in short bursts, urging her into a full gallop. Being able to return to the books was a sanctuary for my heart. And a joy bolted free, lessening my own grievances, forgiving spent youth and dying dreams lost to a hard life, the hard land, and to folks’ hard thoughts and partialities.

  Four

  Sixteen-year-old Angeline Moffit stood barefoot in the mud-carpeted yard, hands on bossy hips, waiting, her tired orchid-pink dress billowing, whipping around long legs to Jesus, the tattered hem snapping a harsh whisper under a thin, holey housecoat, the bother set plain on her mouth.

  “Blu-eeet.” She waved. “’Bout time, Bluet. It’s April already! I missed ya. You got yourself a new mount. What’s its name?”

  “This is Junia.”

  “Oh, Junia’s a fine name. Get over here, Junia. C’mere, you ol’ apostle gal.”

  Angeline, one of my youngest library patrons, remembered me reading to her from Romans 16:7 about Junia, the only female apostle. The same Bible verse Mama’d read to me, and the reason I had given Junia the fitting name. I’d found out quick how clever the animal was, how you couldn’t make her move along if she sensed danger ahead. At sixteen hands tall, a protector, a prophet, Junia’d already saved me from a bobcat attack, another time from a pack of mean dogs, and most recently from a slippery moss slope that was caving in.

  The ol’ girl had made us wait until I saw the bobcat and let it slink away, heard the dogs before any human could, and made me turn back to a spot where the wild dogs dared not enter. And she just refused to go up the mossy slope until I got off and saw the trouble with my own eyes, made a fool of myself testing it and tumbling down, landing hard on my tail. Junia wasn’t skittish like my old horse or stick-legged like the donkey. She wouldn’t dither over a problem none, but she’d defend and battle if it came down to it. Folks said a good trail mule was far better than a horse, that riding a mule was just as good as packing a shotgun across these dangerous hills. But Pa still weren’t convinced of Junia’s worth, nor trusted her cantankerous ways.

  Junia nuzzled the girl’s shoulder, took an instant liking, letting Angeline grab her reins and tie them to a tall, turkey-tail-covered stump. “She’s here. The Book Woman’s here with them books,” Angeline yelled back to the cabin.

  I eased myself off the mule and opened the saddlebag, digging. “Sorry it’s been so long, but the winter was…and…” I let the unspoken words fizzle in the air, not wanting to talk about the marriage.

  Angeline graciously brushed it off. “I heard. And it don’t matter none. You’re here now, and I sure have missed ya.”

  I wondered just how much she’d heard, and I felt the blue rise on my face as I pulled out The Young Child’s A B C, or First Book and handed it to her. She clutched it to her chest and murmured a soft thank-you.

  Digging some more, I found her a church pamphlet and a magazine. “Mr. Moffit’s Popular Mechanics,” I said.

  “Pop…Pop-a-lur Ma-mechanics,” she read and traced the title with a dirty nail, inspecting the photograph on the cover. “That’s an airship, Bluet.”

  Fearfully, she looked up to the sky and whispered, “Hain’t never seen it, but the mister swears he saw one floating over the hills. That aeroplane passed right over him, and he up and threw hisself to the ground.”

  I’d never seen one either, but I believed her.

  “And”—Angeline shook a telling finger—“I know’d the president’s wife climbed into one too, when she came to Kaintuck.”

  We both stared to the heavens, trying to imagine Eleanor Roosevelt up there in the gray belly of a machine flying across our mountains.

  “Hard to believe folks can reach our hills like that.” Angeline barely breathed and cupped a hand over her eyes, searching the skies. “Pretty soon a fellar hain’t gonna need his mount, or feet even. Them big machines jus’ gonna pluck you up and do it for you.”

  She slipped her hand into mine, and I stiffened. No white ever touched a Blue friendly like that. No one but Angeline. And no matter how many times she’d reached for my hand, it still felt strange, and I’d quietly tuck it back to my side, feeling I’d somehow left a sin on her.

  Still, I liked her soft touch, and it made me yearn for Mama and wish for a sister, maybe even a baby, a little. But there would never be a babe, nor another man for me. If word had reached way up here, I was certain the townsfolk had rumored that my color somehow killed Frazier—gossiped that a Blue devil had murdered a man in his marriage bed. It was a blessing, I reminded myself. No one would have me now, and I’d never be forced to marry again. My breathing slowed, and a small relief anchored that surety.

  “Aeroplanes and trains,” I said to Angeline, shaking a little inside from that thought and those darker ones I’d just tucked away.

  “The world’s a’gettin’ so big, Bluet. Makes a fellar feel too small,” Angeline barely whispered. “It’s growing too fast. Right when you’re looking smack at it, but you hain’t really seeing it neither. Hain’t natural.” She tilted her head down toward the dirt, plugging her toes into the earth as if to root herself from being carried off.

  “Sure is a’changin’, Angeline.” It gave me hope, though—hope that those big, loud machines might one day bring another of my kind. “I best be getting inside to Mr. Moffit.”

  “Oh, Bluet, he’ll be happy to see ya. He’s been in the bed. Done went and got his foot busted the other day.” Her cheeks pinkened.

  Eula Foster told me he’d been shot in the foot for stealing another man’s chicken. “Maybe the new loan will ease his discomfort,” I said.

  She caught my hand again and led me up the stacked stone steps and onto her stick porch, grinning. This time I carried her warmth in my heart, savored a sisterhood I’d never had.

  I ducked past an old hornets’ nest hanging under the sagging eaves. Inside the one-room cabin, a house mouse darted under the black potbelly stove packed with a rotted smoldering stump. Daylight slipped through the curled paper coating the walls, dusting the shadows out of the home’s corners.

  A pan of wild ramps and turnips simmered atop the cast iron, filling the room with stinky steam. Yellowed newsprint lined moldy walls, with a smattering of Angeline’s words dotted
across the peeling pages.

  “Let me get ya a seat,” Angeline said and fetched an old, empty tin of Mother’s Pure Lard from over by the stove’s feet, dragging the big can loudly across buckled pine boards.

  Splitting at the seams, a stained featherbed mattress that had been stuffed partly with straw butted up to a spider-cracked windowpane. Angeline’s husband lay there by the sill dozing, the pain tracked across his face. With no money for a doctor, the wound wouldn’t heal. The thirty-year-old looked scrawnier than the last time I’d seen him. His face had aged like craggy rock, and he had gray patches under his eyes.

  A splintered ax handle poked out from under the bed where Angeline must’ve placed it, hoping there was truth in the old superstition that it would cut a person’s pain.

  Angeline put a hand on her husband’s shoulder and gently shook him awake. “It’s Monday and she’s finally back, Willie. Right here she is.”

  He grimaced.

  “I brought you a Popular Mechanics,” I told him.

  “Didn’t expect you back, Widow Frazier.” Mr. Moffit squinted up at me.

  “Yes, sir, it’s me, Book Woman, and I’m back now.” I cringed at my new title, having realized as soon as Eula Foster had addressed me that it would stick. A week ago when I returned to the Center, Eula had crossed her unwelcoming arms and called out my new title, a mixture of disappointment and loathing sliding over her snipped greeting. The despair had knotted tight in my gut, leaving me to lower my eyes, afraid to witness the disgust in hers.

  Mr. Moffit tilted his head to the bucket for me to sit as Angeline tucked a threadbare crimson counterpane up closer to his chin.

  Angeline smoothed the covers, tucking him in a bit more. Satisfied, she slipped out the door.

  I pulled the lard can closer to his bed, sat down, and opened the first page, holding the magazine high in front of my face. He turned his head toward the window.

  We did this for our comforts. Mr. Moffit wouldn’t have to stare at my face, and I wouldn’t have to worry about making him uncomfortable. I didn’t fault him, reckoning we both had disfigurements, some that didn’t have a color.

  Mr. Moffit knotted the covers closer to his chin, and I caught something I’d never seen before: odd-colored nails, not odd to me, being a Blue, but odd on a white folk.

  His nails were a light blue, every single one of them.

  I looked at my own, the blueness nearly the same. I snatched a peek at his face and ears, white like new milk teeth, and again glanced back at his nails, scanning the length of him.

  At the foot of the bed a single toe stuck out from under the covers, his toe I’d never seen before. It weren’t white neither. It was like the blue-eyed Mary in the hills, the two-colored bloom that nature painted lavender-blue on one side and white on the other. Blue, I puzzled.

  Long ago, Mama’d said there had been some of us Blues who’d been born blue-eyed Marys like that. And others with the color who’d outgrown it in their youth. Those Blues who only showed their color on their nails easily escaped the affliction by keeping hands and feet hidden inside mitts and socks.

  I wondered if Mr. Moffit had some other condition, or maybe it was because of the ailing from the bullet wound on his foot.

  Mr. Moffit turned partway, his eyes closed. “Ready.”

  “Yessir. This’ll be a fine article, Mr. Moffit.”

  He crooked his head back to the window.

  “‘Understanding Our Airships,’” I began. Mr. Moffit was never taught, and he liked me to read a few pages to him. “An aeroplane’s engine is…”

  I read five minutes more than what I intended, then peeked over the top of the page and saw him asleep. Quietly, I laid the magazine beside him. He’d pore over the pictures, then return it to me on my next visit to exchange for another.

  Out in the yard, Angeline pointed to words she’d scratched into the dirt with a stick. “You learned me good. Look here. Garden. Horse. Home. Angeline,” she said proudly, and then gave me The Little Red Hen book she’d borrowed in December. “Sorry, Bluet. It got busted some when Willie had hisself a fit and threw it outside. I’m glad you’re back ’cause he lit at me good for not being able to read him his own loan. Said a colored shouldn’t be able to read better than me. Real sorry…” She latched on to my hand and laid the apology with a firm grip. I looked down at us bound together like that, tried to draw back, but Angeline squeezed tighter and whispered, “Hain’t no harm. Our hands don’t care they’s different colors. Feels nice jus’ the same, huh?”

  It did. But Mr. Moffit didn’t like folks who weren’t his color. He used to demand that I stay put in the yard. But his longing for the printed word soon weakened his demands, and he eventually allowed Angeline to bring me inside to read at the small wooden table, so desperate was he for the books to help him escape his misery, misery at never having enough to fill his belly, not even enough spare coins to buy himself a couple of bullets to maybe shoot a rabbit, and now the misery at the poison inching its way deeper into him from his gunshot.

  I’d seen it in his face, in his bony slumping shoulders, that he’d given up long ago, wishing every night that there wouldn’t be a next. There weren’t nothing sweet Angeline could ever do to help him that wouldn’t bring on a bigger anger.

  She caught the concern in my eyes and said, “Sometimes he gets so riled it scares me something bad. Has a meanness. Hain’t no reason to always grumble like an ornery bear.”

  I loosened Angeline’s hold and examined the spine on her old loan.

  “Hope it don’t rile Miss Harriett and Miss Eula too much, Bluet.”

  I stuffed her book into my bags. “Reckon it’s nothing I can’t get bound.” I know’d Harriett Hardin, the bookbinder and assistant librarian supervisor, would preach a sinner’s funeral, rile a’might indeed. And head librarian Eula Foster would pinch her mouth in dismay.

  But it was too precious not to fix, what with the demand for books so high and the reading material so scarce.

  The last time I brought in one of Angeline’s busted loans, Harriett had wrinkled her nose and warned, “You tell Mrs. Moffit the government pays the Pack Horse librarians’ salary. And only that. We don’t have enough books nor the money to be replacing them. If she can’t see fit to care for a library book in her possession, I will deduct the cost from your pay and suspend her from the route!”

  The government men didn’t supply books and printed materials to the Pack Horse service. They were donated by bigger libraries, in bigger towns and richer cities—from the women’s clubs, and the Parent-Teacher Association, and Boy Scout troops even, their members spreading across Kentucky and Ohio.

  Most books sent in were damaged, tattered, and castoffs. The government didn’t give us a proper place to hold them neither. Troublesome Creek’s post office offered its back room to the Pack Horse Library Project to use for housing, sorting, and repairing the materials.

  “Hope it can be fixed,” Angeline whispered worriedly.

  “I’ll take it home and bind it myself.” I smiled.

  “It won’t happen again.” Hesitant, Angeline held up the new book I’d brought her. “Read it to me ’fore you leave?”

  We went over her new book, and she read the words without trouble. Angeline had a strong hankering to read and write. When she was done, she pulled a shriveled half carrot from her pocket and looked at me for permission. “For Junia.”

  Junia shot up her ears.

  The country’s despair had dug its roots into Kentucky and spread like ugly knotweed, choking spirits, strangling life. I didn’t want to take from Angeline, what with the small scraps they lived off. But I also didn’t want to offend her gracious offer.

  In the side yard, toppled rows of dead cornstalks from the last season were scattered where the young girl tried her best to coax a decent crop from the tired clay and thin air. Beside it, a postag
e-stamped garden of spring carrots, beets, and turnips scratched for survival against weed, briar, and wild onions. Beyond, a mustard patch grew thick.

  “Thank you, Angeline. Junia is much obliged.” She fed it to her, knowing the twenty-year-old gray mule was smart and would eagerly keep toting me back to her. Greedy, Junia nosed inside the girl’s pockets for another carrot.

  Angeline pulled out something else, grabbed my palm, and pushed a tiny cloth package into it. “Can you get these to the doc for me? There’s twelve of my granny’s Bloody Butcher seed for him to come tend to Willie.” She rolled my fingers over them.

  I doubted the doc would come for corn. Wouldn’t pay a visit for less than four dollars since he lived a good three-hour ride away from here by horse or mule.

  “His foot’s getting a bad sickness now, an’ the nails a’turning blue. I don’t want to bury him, not with a babe coming,” she said.

  “A baby?”

  “In the summer.”

  “That soon?” I ran my eyes quickly over her scrawny body, tight cheekbones, and the bluish cast circling her pale eyes, wondering how she could possibly bear the punishment of pregnancy. The greedy land had dulled her youthful looks.

  She seemed soft and more suited for the fancy living in the cities I’d read about, what with her delicate heart-shaped face and long flaxen hair. Though I know’d Angeline worked harder than two stout mountain women and was tough as a pine knot, despite appearances. Still, I worried the young girl wouldn’t be strong enough for child birthing, that the old mountains would steal more from her.

  Angeline said, “July 18 it’ll come. I’ve been counting.”

  “That’s…uh…” The goodwill died on my tongue. “I’ll get these seeds to him.”