by Lynn Austin
We stopped in Lexington, Kentucky, for the night and started driving again early the next day. By now I was so engrossed in my novel that I couldn’t have described what any of my real surroundings looked like. I was nearing the end of the story. The main character was achieving her goals, accomplishing something important, becoming stronger and more courageous. She was about to live happily ever after with the story’s handsome hero when a very loud Bang! suddenly interrupted my reading.
Aunt Lydia screamed. “They’re shooting at us!”
I knew it. The gangsters had caught up with us. Uncle Cecil wrestled with the steering wheel as he tried to bring the swerving car to a halt. He negotiated a curve, and we finally managed to stop alongside a gray weather-beaten barn. He leaned back against his seat, breathing hard. “No one is shooting, Lydia. I had a blowout.”
“What did you do that for? We could have been killed!”
“I didn’t do it on purpose. Tires blow all the time.”
“Well, you must have been doing something wrong for it to explode like that. You weren’t driving correctly.”
He got out, shaking his head, and walked around to the back of the car. I heard the trunk groan open, then heard Uncle Cecil thumping around, moving books and suitcases as he searched for his spare tire. Aunt Lydia rolled down her window. “Are you going to tip the car up in the air? I hate sitting in the car when it’s all tipsy.”
“The only thing tipsy is you,” he mumbled. He dropped the car jack and tire iron on the ground with a clang. “Yes, I’m going to jack it up.” My aunt leaped out of the car as if it was on fire, so I leaped out, too.
We had stopped in a narrow valley surrounded by tree-covered mountains. I didn’t see any houses, just the dilapidated barn. A faded sign painted on the front of it read: Church of the Holy Fire. Sunday Worship 10 a.m. Sinners Welcome. Uncle Cecil put the jack in place and turned the crank, grunting and straining. The heavy car rose and tilted as the rear wheel slowly lifted off the ground.
I heard a low growling sound, and a moment later a huge black dog hurtled toward us from behind the barn, barking and snarling. Before I had time to scream, it reached the end of its chain and choked to a stop. But it continued to lunge and bark at us, straining the rusted chain. Aunt Lydia gripped my hand.
“We have to leave, Cecil. Right now. This place you picked to have your blowout is unacceptable.”
“I didn’t pick this place; it’s where the tire blew.”
“Well, put the car down. Go farther up the road and change it.”
“I’m not driving on a flat tire.” He unscrewed the lug nuts and yanked off the tire. Dirt smudged his forehead and white shirt.
Aunt Lydia huddled close beside me as the dog continued to growl and bark and pace. “If that animal gets loose, he’ll kill all three of us,” she said.
“I told you to stay in the car, but you wouldn’t listen.”
“Well, we can’t get in the car now. It’s up in the air!” My aunt’s fear was contagious, and we huddled beside each other, trembling. It seemed to take forever, but at last Uncle Cecil tightened the last lug nut and pumped the jack handle, lowering the car. The dog sounded hoarse from barking, but his chain had held tight.
“That was a terrifying experience!” Aunt Lydia said as we climbed back into the car.
“What are you talking about? We had a flat tire. That’s life, Lydia. A tire blows, you fix it, you move on.”
Uncle Cecil’s words seemed profound to me. As my racing heart slowed and we continued on our way, I felt ashamed of how I had reacted. No one had been shooting at us. The dog hadn’t been a rabid beast, just an ordinary black dog on a very long chain. I realized that I was as out of touch with the real world as Aunt Lydia was, my imagination out of control from all of the books I had read. Is this what Gordon had meant when he’d said I lived in a dream world?
I didn’t want to end up like my aunt. I made up my mind that from now on, I was going to wake up and pay attention to the world around me. I would put all of my problems behind me—tossing them into the trunk of my car, so to speak, like a worn-out tire. I would move on just as my uncle had done. I would go to Acorn, Kentucky, and be a heroine to all those poor people who needed my books. My life would have meaning and purpose again.
We drove for another hour or so, up and down a road that snaked into the mountains, following greenish rivers and rocky creeks. Trees surrounded us on all sides, and we plunged deeper and deeper into the woods as if entering the land of fairy tales. Not the nice, happily-ever-after kind, but the lost-in-the-woods-among-wolves kind. My newfound courage began to drain away.
“Where is this town, anyway?” Aunt Lydia asked at one point. “And why did they put it in the middle of nowhere?”
“There’s lumber and coal up in here,” Uncle Cecil replied.
“At least the roads are paved,” I said, trying to sound positive. “There must be a town around here somewhere.”
“These roads weren’t built for the towns,” Uncle Cecil said. “They were built to get the coal out.”
In spite of my resolve to be heroic, the woods frightened me. What if we got lost and wandered in these woods forever? I decided to escape to the safer world of make-believe, and I hunched down in the backseat to finish reading my book.
Around midday, Uncle Cecil announced that we were coming to a town. I looked up from reading and saw a handful of houses wedged into a narrow valley between two mountains. Wherever there was a flat strip of land on either mountainside, someone had built a house or a building. If people came out of their front doors too fast, it looked as though they would tumble right down the hill.
“Is this the place we’re looking for?” Aunt Lydia asked. I searched for a sign and spotted one on the side of a flat-roofed hut: U.S. Post Office, Acorn, Kentucky.
“Yes! There’s the post office! This is it!” I assumed we were entering the outskirts of Acorn and that we’d eventually see a larger cluster of buildings when we reached the center of town, but Uncle Cecil drove straight through the village and out the other side before any of us could blink. He had to make a U-turn and go back, driving slower this time. I had thought Blue Island was small, but Acorn didn’t deserve to be called a town.
On our second ride-through, I spotted a hand-painted sign in front of a shabby two-story house: Acorn Public Library. A smaller red, white, and blue sign identified the library as a project of the WPA, President Roosevelt’s Works Project Administration.
We parked in front and I climbed out. The library sat very close to the street with no sidewalk and only a narrow patch of dirt for a lawn. According to the hours posted on the sign, the library was supposed to be open now, but when I tried the door it was locked. I knocked, then peeked through the front window. There were no lights, no signs of life, no response to my knock. I pounded harder, rattling the ancient door on its hinges.
The third time I used my fist.
An upstairs window slid open above my head and a wooly-looking man whom I nearly mistook for a bear peered out. “Hey! You trying to break the door down? What do you want?” His growl resembled a bear’s, as well.
I shaded my eyes and looked up at him. “Do you know where I might find the librarian, Leslie MacDougal?”
“Who are you?”
“Alice Grace Ripley from Blue Island, Illinois. I have some books that I’d like to donate to her library.”
“Just a minute.” The window slammed shut.
“Well!” Aunt Lydia huffed. “The people aren’t very friendly around here. Are you sure you don’t want to come to the spa with us, darling?”
I had to admit that I was having second thoughts. This poky village and run-down library weren’t at all what I had expected. But given the choice between spending a week in a library or taking a water cure—whatever that was—I would choose a library every time, no matter how tiny it was. I could be useful here. More important, there were books here.
“I’ll be fine, Aunt Lydia. I
’ve been corresponding with the librarian, and she sounded very kind in her letters. She was very enthused about the donated books and I told her in my last letter that I would stay and help her catalogue them.” I didn’t mention the fact that the librarian had never answered my last letter, nor had she officially invited me to stay. “This looks like a nice little town, doesn’t it?” I added.
“What town, dear? I don’t see a town. Where are the hat shops and the shoe stores?”
“They have a library,” I said.
Meanwhile, Uncle Cecil had opened the trunk and was unloading the books, piling the boxes beside the library steps. “That’s the last one,” he said, patting the top of it. He was in a hurry to be on his way, and I didn’t blame him. Aunt Lydia had insisted she’d seen a dead monkey in the road a few miles back, so I understood his urgency to get her to the spa. I pulled my suitcase from the trunk and set it down beside the car. “Thanks for bringing me. See you in about two weeks?”
“Right.” He slammed the trunk just as the shaggy man emerged through the front door, blinking in the sunlight like a bear that had awakened too early from hibernation. He had buttoned his shirt crookedly and fastened only one strap of his bib overalls. And he was barefooted. I approached him as cautiously as I would a genuine bear.
“I’m sorry to bother you, but I’m looking for Leslie MacDougal. I’ve been corresponding with her about these books that I’ve collected for her library.” He gave a curt nod, lifted the first box, and carried it inside. I picked up a bag of magazines and followed him. “She’s expecting me. I told her that I would be delivering them sometime this week.”
He nodded again, dropped the box on the floor in the foyer where the library patrons would surely trip over it, and returned for another one. I followed him in and out, carrying the magazines and chattering away about our library in Illinois and how much I looked forward to meeting Acorn’s librarian. Why wouldn’t he answer my question and tell me where she was? Was he deaf, dim-witted, or simply ill-mannered?
When we’d hauled the last box and bag inside, I cleared my throat and spoke loudly and clearly, covering all three possibilities. “Would you kindly tell me where I might find the librarian, Leslie MacDougal?”
“That’s me.”
“You can’t be her. You’re a man!”
“What gave it away, lady? The beard?”
“But . . . but I’ve come to help her. I planned to stay here and—”
“Stay? You can’t stay!” At that moment, we both heard the accelerating engine, the crunch of loose gravel beneath the huge car’s tires. We looked out the open door in time to see Uncle Cecil’s car driving away. “Hey! Where’s he going? He can’t leave you here!”
The bear-man raced out of the door, nearly tripping over my suitcase, and sprinted up the road behind the car, shouting and waving his arms. “Wait! Stop!” He ran quite fast considering that he was barefooted. With his wild-looking hair and angry shouts, he appeared to be chasing the car away, rather than trying to stop it. I hurried after him, panicked at the thought of being marooned with this wooly lunatic. But my uncle’s huge automobile, as soundproof as a casket, disappeared around a curve and vanished in a cloud of dust.
As the dust from Uncle Cecil’s car swirled and settled, Leslie MacDougal turned and walked toward me, looking as sinister as a vaudeville villain. He held one hand against his side, panting from his useless sprint. “When is he coming back for you?”
“In two weeks.”
“Two weeks!”
I knew it might be longer, considering my aunt’s fragile condition, but why make matters worse? I lifted my chin to look up at him, since he was at least a foot taller than me. “I wrote to you and mentioned that I planned to stay and volunteer—”
“And I wrote to you and told you not to come.”
“I never received your letter.”
“But you came anyway? Without an invitation?”
“I thought you were . . . I mean, your name is Leslie . . . and most librarians are women.” And much friendlier and better groomed, I wanted to add as he strode past me, heading toward the house.
“I’m not a woman,” he hollered over his shoulder. “That’s why I told you to stay home and just ship the books to me.”
I cleared my throat and tried to summon a measure of dignity as I followed him back to the library. “I apologize for the misunderstanding, Mr. MacDougal, even though it wasn’t entirely my fault.” If anyone was to blame, it was this man’s parents for giving him a woman’s name. I took a deep breath and exhaled. “If you will kindly direct me to the nearest hotel, I’ll gladly get out of your . . . hair.” He halted on the front porch and turned to face me.
“A hotel?—Ha! Where do you think you are, lady? Back in Chicago?” He shook his head and went inside, leaving the library door wide open.
It seemed that I had baked myself into a jam tart, as Mother would say. What in the world was I going to do? If I had been reading about this disastrous misunderstanding in a book, I would have flipped to the last chapter to see how everything turned out. But it wasn’t a story, it was my life—and I had no idea what to do. After gazing down the road for several minutes, praying in vain that my uncle’s car would miraculously reappear, I picked up my suitcase and followed Leslie MacDougal into the foyer.
Bookshelves filled the rooms to my right and my left, confirming that what looked like a house from the outside was indeed a library—the tiniest library I had ever seen. I felt like Alice in Wonderland after she had grown to a very large size. The rooms lacked the wonderful bookish aroma of our library back home. Instead, they smelled like fried chicken.
Mr. MacDougal sat cross-legged on the hall floor and was busily unpacking the first box of books. “Wow!” he said when he came to the nearly new World Atlas.
“Isn’t it wonderful?” I said. “That atlas came from the collection of a very kind gentleman named Elmer Watson, who used to patronize our library back home. He passed away recently, so I took the liberty of speaking with his widow and she very kindly agreed to donate it to your library.”
Mr. MacDougal didn’t reply. He didn’t even nod his head.
The memory of Mr. Watson’s funeral and how it had led to my breakup with Gordon made me teary-eyed. When I’d lost my job the following day, I had wanted to get as far away as possible from a town where I was no longer needed or wanted. Instead, I had simply relocated to another town where I wasn’t needed or wanted. “Out of the chicken coop and into the stewpot,” my mother would say. I did feel as though I’d been wrung, plucked, and scalded.
Mr. MacDougal continued to unpack the books, perusing their contents, piling them haphazardly all around him. He was so absorbed that he seemed to have forgotten me. I watched his face and saw the appreciation in his eyes—what little I could see of his eyes beneath his shaggy hair. He ran his hand over the covers the way a man in love might caress his beloved’s face, and he even opened one or two of the newer books to inhale their scent before piling them on the floor with the others. I felt justified for the trouble I’d taken to deliver them, even if my arrival had been unexpected and unwelcome.
It was hard to tell how old Mr. MacDougal was, but his hands weren’t wrinkled and his brown hair and beard didn’t have any gray in them. He had lifted the heavy boxes effortlessly and had run pretty fast as he’d chased Uncle Cecil’s car, so I judged him to be around thirty. He might be good-looking with a shave and a haircut. And a bath. And a decent suit of clothes. As it was, he looked like one of the raggedy, down-on-their-luck men we had seen along the way, except that Mr. MacDougal had no excuse since he was gainfully employed. I cleared my throat. He looked up, frowning as if annoyed by the interruption.
“I think you’ll agree that there are some very nice books in those boxes.”
“Very nice. Thanks.” He sighed as if I had broken a magic spell and began repacking the books.
“Look, I’m sorry about your name, Mr. MacDougal.”
“
I’ve been sorry all my life, but I was too young to object to the name when my parents saddled me with it.”
I felt a breeze behind me. We had left the door wide open. “Why was the library closed when it’s supposed to be open?” I asked as I turned to shut the door. “The hours on the sign say—”
“I know what the sign says. I’m the one who painted it.”
“But it wasn’t open when I arrived. The door was locked.”
“I got busy.”
“But suppose one of your patrons had wanted a book or—”
“You the library police, lady?”
“No . . . and my name is Alice Grace Ripley.”
“You see any people lining up out there waiting for books, Alice Grace Ripley?”
“Well, no . . .” He stood and carried one of the boxes into the parlor. I followed him. “Oh, my!” I said when I saw the main desk. At least I assumed there was a main desk buried beneath all of the books and papers. What in the world did this man do all day? He certainly wasn’t keeping the library in order.
“Looks like you could use some help,” I said.
“Looks like.”
He carried in the rest of the boxes, glancing up the stairs each time he passed them as if eager to return to whatever he had been doing up there. When he finished, he stared at me, hands on his hips. From his expression, he might have been waiting for me to say, Well, I’ll be going now. But of course I had no place to go. He had already made it clear that the town didn’t have a hotel.
“I believe it’s lunchtime,” I finally said. “If you would be kind enough to direct me to a café or a diner, I’ll leave you alone.”
He attempted a smile, but it was closer to a smirk. “Sure. There’s a four-star restaurant down the street, right next door to our swanky four-star hotel. You can buy a four-course gourmet meal. Will that suit you?”