Free Wonderland Creek by Lynn Austin Page B

have to figure out how to build a fire in the woodstove before I could cook anything. I gazed around at the empty woodbox, the cold stove, the flies, and the dishes festering in the sink, and I sank down at the kitchen table and sobbed.

I f Mack’s gonna live, he’s gonna need some medicine.” Lillie gave me that piece of news as we ate our breakfast of cold corn bread and strawberry preserves. It was all I could find to eat in the disheveled kitchen, and besides, the stove wouldn’t stay lit for more than two minutes. I didn’t like the way Lillie said “we” every time she decided something needed to be done. Considering how frail she was, “we” probably meant me. But Mack looked as though he might die any minute, and I didn’t want his death on my conscience.
    Yesterday I would have asked Lillie where the nearest pharmacy was. Today I was wise enough to know that if Acorn, Kentucky, didn’t have a hotel, a café, a police department, a doctor, or a hospital, the town probably didn’t have a pharmacy, either. “Where would you like me to go for the medicine?” I asked, dreading her reply.
    “We gonna need some willow bark and some elm bark and maybe some green peach tree leaves, if we can find them this time a year. If Mack’s gonna pull through this, he’ll be needing a poultice to draw out the poison and something to take down his fever.” She seemed to be talking to herself more than to me so I kept quiet. “But the first thing we need to take care of is the pain. Quickest thing is to make do with some tansy. I believe there’s some up in my workroom.”
    “Wait. What’s tansy?”
    Lillie tried to describe what it looked like, and after three trips up to the storeroom and back, I finally found the correct bunch of dried-up leaves among the many bunches hanging from the ceiling. “Now what?” I asked.
    “Now you fix the tea, and we try and get Mack to swallow it.”
    I felt completely inept. I had to admit to Lillie that I didn’t know how to make tansy tea. She explained the process, then dozed in her armchair while I struggled to start a fire in the cookstove and keep it going long enough to boil water. I would have asked her how to build a fire, too, but I didn’t want to disturb her.
    By the time the water boiled and the tea was ready, I smelled like a smoked ham. Lillie told me to lift Mack’s head onto my lap and spoon the liquid into his mouth. He moaned in pain when I moved him. I prayed that I wouldn’t kill him.
    Mack eventually choked down most of the tea. It was past time for the library to open and I longed to do something normal, like sit at the desk and process books, but I seemed to have my hands full with two patients to care for. Lillie lay curled in the armchair like a withered crane on her nest, and Mack lay on the mattress in the middle of the foyer where patrons were certain to trip over him. While the two of them dozed, I returned to the mess in the kitchen. It was going to take hours to swat all the flies, haul firewood, then pump and boil enough water to clean the kitchen and wash the dishes. I rolled up my sleeves and went to work.
    It turned out that preparing the tansy tea was only the beginning as far as Lillie was concerned. After lunch I helped her climb the stairs to her witch’s workroom, and she soon had me grinding and brewing and concocting all sorts of strange things to make poultices. I wished in vain for a clean, sanitary hospital. Sometime during the afternoon, she stopped calling me “girl” and started calling me “honey.” I figured we were now friends. Meanwhile, not a single patron had come into the library for a book.
    Mack was still alive when the packhorse librarians returned in the afternoon, but he was too weak to talk and couldn’t remain awake for more than a few minutes. Cora arrived first. She was the oldest of the ladies, around my mother’s age, I guessed. She reminded me of my mother with her calm, no-nonsense manner and quick,