The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek Read online

  Today, it was a female who talked on WLOC. I admired the way she pronounced her words so clear and beautiful, dropping the endings just perfect instead of losing them like folks around here did. I listened every chance I got and practiced the announcer’s proper sentences.

  Sometimes on my book route, I’d try them out on Junia. Mrs. Abernathy and I shall meet you at Roderick’s at eight. They prepare a scrumptious roast duck with a divine sherry sauce. There’s not a better dish to be found in the city. Occasionally I’d brave a few with Pa—until he’d raise a confused brow and warn me about putting on foolish airs. My tongue would tangle, and I’d be back to my old language of Me and Mr., smacking the air with my weren’ts and ain’ts.

  I leaned in to the newscaster’s crisp voice and listened to her announce the Kentucky Derby winner named Bold Venture, mouthing her fine words to pocket them for later. When she mentioned a motion picture playing, I smiled, remembering how one of my younger patrons told me about taking the train to see Mutiny on the Bounty with his girl.

  The woman on the radio said H. L. Davis’s Honey in the Horn book had won the big Pulitzer Prize. Excited, I clapped out loud. I’d read the tale about the Oregon pioneers and loved it.

  Harriett shot me a disapproving look, and I quickly turned back to my work.

  A pile of old license plates that had been collected for the library waited under my table. I picked up a rusty plate and bent the end over the edge of the table to make bookends for the Library Center’s table and shelves, making sure to set some bookends aside for my outpost.

  The Pack Horse librarians didn’t have time to come to town and do their daily routes. A special courier, usually a postal volunteer helper, delivered the library books to the outpost stations closer to the hills for us carriers to pick up. My outpost was a tiny, old boarded-up chapel that had seen too many hard rains and floods from a nearby creek. Inside the church, there were a few shelves built by volunteers and a donated table, which would protect the supplies until I fetched them. But on the days we Pack Horse librarians worked at the Center, we were allowed to take home books to help lighten the load of the courier.

  Outside, Junia nickered. I looked up to see Jackson Lovett coming out of the Company store. He munched on an apple while making his way over to the post office. Grinning, he approached Junia and stood a few feet back from the hee-hawing mule until he spied me in the window and held up the apple, a question in his eyes.

  Flustered, I nodded a silent yes, then lowered the brim on my bonnet and sorted through more license plates.

  Harriett sidled up beside me. “Jackson,” she barely whispered to herself, leaning her twenty-five-year-old plump body lazily toward the sill. “Ain’t he something of a man, going all the way out west and building that big dam like that, making himself a rich living? Smart. He invested his hard-earned money too. A right big landowner now, getting top dollar for his timber and minerals. Mmm-hmm.” Harriett smacked her lips. “Such a handsome, smart man needs himself a smart, pretty girl.” She pulled back her shoulders, rapped the top pane for his attention, eager to be that girl. “Only three weeks till Pie Bake. I wonder who the lucky girl will be?”

  The first Friday in June, Troublesome always held its Pie Bake Dance, a pie auction to hitch unmarried folks. Any single girl could attend by baking a pie for the celebration. Pie Bake Dance was a night of festivities on sawdust floors at the old feed store that had since closed, pushed out by the Company like most businesses. Grand fiddle playing, clogging, and flatfoot dancing turned into a chance to get a marriage bed. Each pie would be auctioned off to the men, and the highest bidder won the rest of the evening’s dances with that baker lady.

  I’d never been, wasn’t allowed to cross the threshold where a NO COLOREDS sign hung, but folks talked about it enough that it felt like I had. Eula and Harriett had slipped it into every conversation when I returned to the Center a few weeks ago. Talk of sewing new dresses, favorite recipes. Who was coming and who wasn’t. I listened, snatched up bits of conservation, and fancied the dance for myself. On dance night, I would pretend it was my own in the silent hours inside my cabin.

  Harriett mused, “I’d sure like to serve him a big slice of my peach pie.” She sighed dreamily.

  With a piece of steel wool, I knocked the rust off the corner of a license plate.

  “Why in the world is Jackson fooling with that nasty beast of yours?” she asked and then turned to me, accidentally brushing against my sleeve.

  Harriett screwed up her mouth, jerked her arm back, and jiggled it as if to shake off a bug.

  She was afraid to touch me. The supervisor had reluctantly trained me for my route, but for only one day before abandoning me to go at it alone the very next. “I’ve been training and teaching the thick-headed Blue a full week,” she’d fibbed to Eula Foster.

  I snuck a glance back to Jackson and Junia, then mumbled a sideways apology to her for the contact, moved a step away, inspected another plate, and went to work on bending it.

  “Why, look at you, Bluet!” Harriett cried.

  I glanced up, Harriett’s loud voice startling me.

  Harriett’s eyes flashed, a crawl of anger lit across, and then she spit out, “Your face is ripening into a blueberry. Why, it looks like an inkblot.” She laughed. “Don’t she look like an ugly ol’ inkblot, Eula?”

  Her scorn slashed at me, cutting. Sometimes I thought my embarrassment, my shame was exactly what Harriett wanted to see, trying hard to poke and make it happen. I pressed a hand to my cheek and watched her lace-colored face crinkle and harden.

  Harriett plucked at her sleeves, flicked her fingers down her arms, and then stomped back to her worktable, each step feeling like a kick to my gut. Settling noisily into her seat, she turned up the radio.

  Outside, Junia shrieked and just as quick quieted. Jackson stood in front of her at a safe distance now with the apple, and talked to her. Junia turned her head, sneaking a side-eye, then tossed her nose back and took the apple from his outstretched hand.

  I couldn’t help but laugh softly and then glimpsed over my shoulder at Harriett, busy with her mail. I turned back and gave Jackson Lovett a small appreciative smile.

  Then he walked up to the window. “Cussy Mary, a friend lent me a new book, and I wondered if you’d heard of it?”

  Curious, I leaned out.

  “Fer-de-Lance?” He took it out from his coat pocket.

  I turned and looked at Harriett thumbing through a magazine, loudly humming the tune playing on the radio before answering him. “Yes, sir.” I kept a low voice. “That’s the first in Rex Stout’s Nero Wolfe series. A fine detective novel and mystery.”

  “You don’t say? I do like myself a good mystery.” His eyes were mischievous. “Thank you, Cussy Mary.” He touched a finger to his head, struck off a friendly goodbye, a pat to Junia’s rump, and strolled away.

  Puzzled, I watched him until he rounded a corner.

  When I’d finished with the bookends, I moved over to a stack of boxes filled with reading material that had just come in and pored through the new donations. This was the best part of my job, going through other big town libraries’ castoffs, always surprised by the countless treasures those richer folks thought worthless, to be thrown away.

  I pulled out two books, studied on which one to give Angeline, then set aside The Tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse for her. Then I eyed two baby-care pamphlets and saved those. A Doctor Dolittle book was at the bottom, and I dug it out, inspected, then tucked it away for a dear patron.

  Digging deeper, I spotted an old English grammar textbook from a Chicago school. It was a perfect find, and the pages weren’t torn or missing. I’d study the lesson book and then pass it on to Angeline. Maybe I’d have time to learn all the lessons so I could give her a few.

  To my surprise, I came across a novel that looked new, one that Harriett had been dying to read: The St
ars Look Down.

  I weighed it in my hand, thinking about keeping it to read first. She loved the Scottish author and had been hankering to read his latest about an English mining town. If she found out I hadn’t given it to her, there’d be hell to pay. Maybe the book would turn her sour mood into a more agreeable one. I walked over to her and held it up, hoping it would.

  Suspicious, she looked at the book, then back to me like I’d set a rabbit’s snare.

  “I know’d how much you like Mr. Cronin’s books,” I said, placing it on her table, trying to brave a friendly smile for her.

  She snatched it up, but not before I heard a gravelly “Thank you” and saw the pleasure in her eyes.

  “Brand new. It sure looks like a grand one,” I told her.

  “Why, yes, yes. Oh, Three Loves of Lucy Moore was a grand one, you know? A masterpiece! When he drowned? The way she devoted herself to her son. All for naught. A tragedy…” Harriett flashed a sad smile that softened her.

  I’d read the book too. The character, Lucy, was prideful, a determined pauper who could only have victory and worth through men.

  “The monastery scene in Belgium,” Harriett prattled, “when she—” The assistant supervisor stopped herself and stared up at me.

  I loved the way Harriett loved her books. It changed her into something different, better, and for a minute I forgot who she was—who I wasn’t.

  “Oh, Bluet…Bluet!” She snapped her fingers in front of my face, scattering my thoughts. “Get to work,” Harriett griped, though I could tell she was pleased to get the novel, even more to talk about it as if she were an expert on books.

  I stiffened my silly grin. “Yes, ma’am.”

  I went back to my station and dug into another box for magazines and came up empty. Instead, I found a Vogue pattern for children’s smocks and took it for the scrapbooks. There was some old sheet music that Winnie Parker, the schoolmarm, would love to have. I grabbed a few more health and hygiene pamphlets and put them in my growing pile.

  Pleased, I stacked them neatly and moved on to the next carton, searching for a Farmers’ Almanac for a patron who’d requested one. I dug deeper and broke off a piece of my nail looking for any Steinbeck books.

  I found an old 1935 June magazine with a lady wearing a fairy-tale wedding dress on the glossy cover, and several books for Oren Taft who was on my Friday route. He was the holler dweller who lived over the mountain. I’d travel all day to get reading material to him for his small community. Despite the wearing day and unpredictable paths, it was always worth the journey to see his friendly face.

  Under a pile of old textbooks and Readers Digests, I spied a newspaper and grabbed it for the Smith household. The paper, dated May 5, 1936, was practically new, and not like the ones we usually got, often outdated by a month or more.

  Feeling a rush circle my neck and flush upward, I rubbed my indigo-washed hands, thrilled at my find. Pressing the newsprint to my chest, I buried my nose in the still-fresh ink and inhaled.

  It was the Louisville Times. I scanned the headlines about a gambling place that was raided in the city, read about Italy’s invasion of a strange place called Ethiopia, then searched the pages and saw an even stranger advertisement for a ladies’ swimming costume costing a whole $6.95, what would feed several hill families for a week. It was drab fabric, and not much of it either, but it showed a lot and drew the eye over every inch of the city woman’s body.

  Astonished, I couldn’t take my eyes off the skin-tight dark union suit, the lady’s shapely breasts, thighs, and legs slithering inside it. I came to my senses and guiltily flicked to a new page, fearing I’d witnessed something odd and knowing folks here would find it vulgar.

  I stole a glance at the supervisor. She’d surely censor it, destroying the pages like she did Maugham’s The Painted Veil that had been donated and any other reading materials she said would offend, taint, or tempt the morals of the deeply spiritual mountainfolk.

  After turning more pages, my eyes rested on a flowered dress that cost $12.88. The slick city woman wore a draping flax-blue linen dress with a white scalloped border, matching felt hat, and clean-white gloves. A bolded advertisement above the picture read Next Sunday Is Mother’s Day.

  I ran a finger over the clothing, sifting through my thoughts of her. Mama’d had one good dress, and it was the same color. The very same one that matched mine.

  For months and beyond, I would feel the swish of her cottony sky-blue skirts lingering on my skin as I picked up her duties, tended the daily chores in a home wrecked by aching loss, with Pa the stranger now, toppled in that grief. Occasionally, I’d stop to tilt my face into the ghosted airs of her fabric and fold a prayer into my sorrow.

  How I ached for her, recalling her head bent to candlelight, her slender fingers dipping into beeswax to coat the thread to strengthen tired, old string, her swift, graceful hands working stitches into the fabric, her sharp teeth biting snips of thread, her nimble fingers knotting while I sat at her feet watching her rhythms birth a hymn sweeter than any birdsong.

  “Widow Frazier!” the head librarian, Eula Foster, called out, walking up behind me and snapping the paper out of my hands. “I’ll take that. And, Widow Frazier…oh please tether that bad-tempered beast of yours to the back of the building. Not on the side. She’s causing a ruckus and scaring passersby.”

  At her worktable, Harriett whistled through her teeth over the bookbinding and said, “I don’t know how you put up with such an ornery creature, Bluet. Honestly, I’d done shot it for meat and skint it at the tree you took her from.”

  I nearly jumped out of my skin and bumped into Queenie Johnson, the thirty-two-year-old Negro Pack Horse librarian.

  “That mule’s a nuisance,” Eula grumbled.

  It weren’t like Junia to fuss in this familiar place. “I’ll take care of her.” I whispered a pardon to Queenie. As I turned to go outside, I noticed Queenie was wounded. Alarmed, I asked, “What happened?”

  “Just a nip.” Queenie held up a scraped hand tracked with tiny specks of blood. “Only a scratch, honey. Old Junia got the devil inside her when the pastor happened by. He hit her with his stick, and she tramped around, tried for a piece of him, and done tore his coat sleeve almost off.” Queenie choked back a giggle, pressing her knuckles to her mouth.

  Harriett nailed Queenie with a stony glare and said, “Pastor Frazier baptized both my nieces. A fine God-fearing man that shouldn’t be bothered by filthy beasts.” She struck the last word and batted it to us.

  Queenie ignored her, pursed her lips, and quieted. “The pastor whacked her three more times. So I figured I would help him out and calm her some, but Junia… Well, that old girl went for him again with those big, ugly, green-stained teeth. She missed once and plumb nabbed me instead.”

  “Oh, Queenie—” I said.

  “She didn’t mean it, though, and I could tell by her sorrowful eyes that she felt bad.” Queenie grinned.

  I looked past her. Through the screen door I spotted Vester Frazier across the street under the concrete lip of the Company store, dragging a stick along the sunbaked bricks, cutting a mean eye my way. A cold fear struck and had me reaching for the door to steady.

  “Bluet, back to work,” Harriett warned. I turned to reply Yes, ma’am and then I saw it, saw what I hadn’t seen before. And I suddenly know’d her fat hands had been under those cold baptizing creek waters with the preacher’s and his followers when they’d drowned the Goodwin babies and the others. Looking at Harriett’s open hatred set hot on her face, and then back outside to Frazier, I felt ill. Hunted. The preacher shot me a hard grin, sending me backward, stumbling into Queenie again.

  Harriett grumbled to Eula, “I see Birdie’s late again. I’m gonna make that girl come in next week, and she ain’t leaving for her routes until she’s inventoried all our holdings and given us a full day in them stacks.”
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br />   Queenie placed a hand on my shoulder. “You okay, honey? Honey?”

  “Yes…yes.” I looked back out and saw he was gone. “I’m so sorry she bit you. Does it hurt? Let me clean it for you.” I glanced back to the street once more. Empty. Relieved, I nudged my chin to the tiny alcove, meaning to lead Queenie into the new ladies’ powder room and wash the wound, maybe freshen my face with cold water, but Eula stepped in front of us. She jabbed a finger up to the new NO COLOREDS sign above the ladies’ door.

  Queenie stared down at the tops of her shoes. Before she became a Pack Horse librarian, Queenie had applied to the program five times and had always been turned down. I’d seen her applications, and they looked better than most. Each time, Queenie’d write her name perfect and correct and give her age and all the proper information. And each time, she was denied.

  Last summer, Queenie had visited the Center and asked for another application, but Harriett refused to give her one. The next month Queenie came back. I was in the headquarters sorting when she barged in and dropped a letter onto Eula’s desk and announced, “Says I have a job. Says so right here from the Women’s Professional Project in Louisville, Kentucky.”

  Eula’d bent over and read out loud the WPA’s order instructing her to give Queenie Johnson a Pack Horse librarian route, her voice souring to the ending.

  The supervisor’s face paled to a wedding-dress white, and she crumpled the letter, single-fisted, ordering Queenie to wait outside. Harriett turned as blue-faced as me, scattered her neatly stacked piles of church pamphlets, and threw two books across the room, one striking my arm.

  In the end, Queenie was called back in and given a book to read out loud. It was the only requirement of the Pack Horse project for the job, and usually the read was a children’s storybook at that. Queenie breezed through it, then pulled out a dictionary from her bag, and read two pages, and better than any of us.

  Eula gave her a long and treacherous route, second to mine. And when Harriett refused to train her, Eula left it to me. Queenie was suspicious of me at first, but by midweek she’d warmed into her route and shyly offered me half of her fat biscuit. We’d stopped by the creek to break, and I shared my apple and she talked about her family.