Wonderland Creek

by Lynn Austin

  Instead of walking back to the library, I continued up the road and took the turnoff to Ike’s house. A few minutes later I reached the orchard. The blossoms were gone and the orchard looked perfectly ordinary, not at all like the possible burial ground for a hidden treasure.

  Where was the treasure? Was it real? Like the pirates in Treasure Island, I had become obsessed with finding it. Everyone else in Acorn, Kentucky, wanted to find it and get rich, but I wanted to end the long-standing feud between the Arnetts and Larkins, for June Ann’s sake.

  I studied the grove from every angle, searching for a defining landmark. A huge, ancient tree? There were dozens of them in the woods beyond the clearing. An oddly shaped rock? There were plenty of rocks, too. At last I decided it was hopeless. If the Arnetts and Larkins hadn’t been able to find this treasure after sixty years of searching, how could I?

  I returned home, taking the path through the woods and along the creek, and came in through the library’s back door. I had just stepped into the foyer when Ike walked in through the front door. I jumped, startled to see him—and felt a little guilty for searching for the treasure without him. Ike was the one who had figured out that the orchard was the halfway point between the two houses.

  He gripped my arms to steady me. “You okay? I didn’t mean to scare you.”

  “I’m fine. My mind was a million miles away, that’s all. Are you here for a book?” I hoped he wasn’t going to sit down and watch me work again or try to coax me into the kitchen to smooch.

  “You promised to go for a walk with me, remember? And there’s something I want to ask you.”

  “Okay. But it will have to be a short walk. I have work to do.” We went out through the back door, and Ike paused as we passed the garden we had worked on together.

  “It looks pretty dry,” he said. “You been watering it?”

  “No . . . Am I supposed to?”

  “Well, yeah, if you want anything to grow.”

  My shoulders sagged. Here was another wearying job I would have to undertake. “Any chance it might rain?”

  He laughed and patted my arm. “If it doesn’t, I’ll come over and help you haul water.”

  He reached for my hand and led me back to the orchard the way I had just come. We had forgotten to bring a blanket this time, but Ike cleared a spot beneath one of the trees and pulled me down beside him. He sat with his back against the trunk and I leaned against him, comfortable in his arms. A romance novel would describe Ike’s arms as “brawny.” The thought made me smile. All of the words that writers used to describe their heroes—broad-shouldered, manly, ruggedly handsome, brawny—had seemed like clichés to me when I had read them in books. But Ike truly was all of those things. How much longer could we spend time together before we ended up falling in love? I remembered his sister’s veiled threats about toying with him. Was I leading Ike on?

  “I want to ask you something, Alice.” He twirled a strand of my curly hair around his finger as he talked. “My band is playing at a dance over in the next county this weekend. Will you come with me?”

  “Is it just for one day, like before?”

  “No, it’s far. We would have to stay there overnight.”

  “Ike, I can’t. Even if we weren’t . . . together, it wouldn’t look right.”

  He turned my shoulders so I was facing him. “But I want to be with you all the time. I can’t stand even one day apart. I . . . I think I’m falling in love with you.”

  My heart sped up. I had waited in vain for Gordon to confess his love for me, but he never had. Now I was glad he hadn’t. Was I falling in love with Ike? Being with him felt exciting, and I missed him when he wasn’t around, and his kisses made my brain whirl . . . but was that true love? He was waiting for me to return his declaration of love, but I stalled, afraid of getting hurt.

  “I thought you had a girl in every town? You said you weren’t ready to settle down with one girl.”

  “You’re not like any girl I ever met.”

  He leaned forward and kissed me. How was I supposed to think straight with his lips on mine, his hands in my hair?

  When he finally pulled away again, he looked into my eyes. “I know my future is hopeless right now. I don’t have a steady job and no way to support you until the mine opens again, and who knows when that will be.”

  “You shouldn’t go back into the mine, Ike—ever. You could make a living playing your fiddle if you could just catch the right break.”

  “What if that lucky break never comes? You already said you wouldn’t stay here in Acorn unless I bought you all those modern things you want. I don’t know what to do, except find the treasure. You gotta help me find it, Alice. It’s the only way.”

  “I want to find it, too, but—” He started kissing me before I had a chance to explain that I wanted to find it so the feud would end. The feuding had gone on much too long and had torn the town of Acorn in two.

  Ike was so sweet, so wonderful. I wanted to forget common sense and my home in Illinois and tell him that I loved him, too. I wanted to say that we could live happily-ever-after anywhere in the world as long as we were together. But happy endings only happened in books, not in real life.

  Maybe Ike could come home with me to Illinois and we could live there. But where would an uneducated miner from Kentucky find work, especially during the Depression? Ike was talented and smart and he loved to read, but he would be as out of place in Blue Island as I was here in Acorn.

  “I should get back to the library,” I said when the kiss ended. “Lillie has no idea where I disappeared to.”

  “Will you come here with me some night and help me dig up the treasure if I figure out where it’s buried?”

  “But . . . it’s against the law. This is someone else’s property.”

  “Please, Alice?”

  How could I refuse when Ike looked at me with those sad, dark eyes? I had helped Mack do illegal things in the middle of night. Why not help Ike?

  “I’ll help you, but first we have to find out where to dig. We can’t just start making holes all over the place. Listen, Ike. Go play at the dance this Saturday. Have fun. We’ll talk more about it when you return.”

  I was glad to stay home over the weekend and catch up on some of the sleep I had missed. I typed more of Lillie’s folk remedies on Saturday, read a book on Sunday, and waited all day Monday for Ike to return, but he never did. Mamaw and the boys arrived on Monday afternoon, excited about starting a new story. I had chosen Tom Sawyer, which I had found on the nightstand in Mack’s room. The boys were thrilled to read about a character who was as mischievous as they were.

  I hoped Ike would return before I had to leave on my route Tuesday morning, but he didn’t. As I passed Mack’s cabin, I realized that a week had passed since the night we’d searched the mine office together. I decided to avoid Mack for a while. He had asked me to play Mata Hari with Ike and I hadn’t done it.

  When I reached June Ann’s cabin, she was tearful again, and the baby was wailing. “Go take a little walk,” I told her. “I’ll rock Feather for a while.” Thirty minutes later, the baby finally quieted and June Ann returned.

  “Do you want Lillie to fix some more tonic?” I asked. “I see the bottles are nearly empty.”

  “It won’t help.”

  Once again she rejected my suggestions to come into town or to ask her family for help, so I finally said good-bye and moved on. I rode up to see the Sawyers, then Gladys and Clint. And even though it wasn’t my day to visit Maggie, I decided to pay her a visit. I needed to talk to her about my feelings for Ike and I knew she was the only person in Acorn who would understand.

  Maggie was outside, hanging bedsheets on her clothesline. Maybe I shouldn’t bother her. She’d told me that her mother-in-law was bedridden all the time now. But Maggie waved when she spotted me and looked happy to see me. I dismounted and tied Belle to the hitching post, then walked over to help Maggie hang the rest of her laundry.

  “Thi
s isn’t your day to visit me. What brings you here? Is everything all right?”

  “I’m fine. Just confused,” I said with a little laugh.

  “Ah. It must be a matter of the heart. What else besides love can throw us into confusion?”

  “You know my friend Ike, who I told you about?”

  “The fiddle player?”

  “Yes. He said he thinks he’s falling in love with me.”

  “And are you in love with him?”

  “I don’t know. I’ve been holding back deliberately, telling myself not to fall in love with him because he said he had a girl in every town and he wasn’t ready to settle down yet. Besides, I can’t risk falling for him. I know I won’t be staying here in Kentucky forever. I could never live without electricity and telephones and indoor plumbing for the rest of my life. How do you do it?”

  “True love changes people, Allie. When you’re in love, you want to do things to please the other person and make them happy. It wasn’t hard at all to make sacrifices to marry Hank and live here, at first.” We had hung the last sheet, and Maggie bent to pick up the laundry basket. “Do you have time to come inside and talk? I baked scones this morning.”

  “Sure. I’m not in a hurry.” I watched her pump water and prepare tea in her rustic kitchen, completely at home with its limitations, as if she had never lived in a city with electricity and hot running water. Could true love really change people that much? Could I live this way for Ike Arnett?

  “No matter how much you love someone, Allie, don’t expect marriage to be easy. Hank and I loved each other, but it was still very hard. After all the changes I made for him, I wanted him to change, too. I kept pressuring him to leave Acorn and get an education. Hank was smart, no question about it. But the more I nagged him, the more convinced he was that I looked down on him for never finishing school. Maybe I did feel that way a little. After everything I had given up for him, it made me angry when he decided to stay here and work at the mine instead of going to college. I couldn’t understand why he wouldn’t do this one thing for me. Hank said, ‘I am what I am. I was born a miner and I’ll probably die a miner.’ ”

  I winced at the prophetic words.

  “We loved each other, Allie. But even true love doesn’t always make things easy. When we got married, I never considered how little we had in common. The way we were raised, family expectations, goals and dreams. Those are all part of who we are.”

  “I know Ike and I don’t have much in common. But we certainly are attracted to each other.”

  “How would your parents react if you told them you’d fallen in love with this man and have decided to marry him? And that you’re going to stay here and live in a log cabin?”

  “They’ll think I’ve lost my mind. My mother will sign me up for a water cure. My father will give me a list a mile long of all the reasons not to do it.”

  “My family begged me not to marry Hank. They offered me everything from a new roadster to a trip to France if I came to my senses and returned home at once. And when I didn’t listen to them, we became estranged.”

  “I would miss home. These woods and hills are beautiful, but they aren’t home.”

  “The best advice I can offer is this: Don’t go into any relationship thinking you can change the other person. Accept him the way he is right now, for the rest of his life. And he needs to accept you, too. If you can’t live without hot running water, then he can’t expect you to change your mind.”

  “Thanks, Maggie. I appreciate your honesty.”

  But I was still hopelessly confused when I got on my horse again and rode home.

  Maggie’s words rolled around in my mind like marbles that evening as I fixed dinner for Lillie and me—potatoes fried with onions and a little bacon, a recipe Lillie had taught me. I was so distracted that the fire in the stove died out and I didn’t even notice.

  “What’s the matter with you tonight?” Lillie asked when she came out to the kitchen to see what was taking so long. She stood with her arms folded, a sure sign that she was annoyed.

  “Lillie, how do you know if you’re really in love?”

  “You talking about that Ike fella?” Lillie didn’t miss much. I might as well confide in her the way I had with Maggie.

  “Ike said he was falling in love with me, and I didn’t know what to say. I’ve never been in love before, even though I’ve read about it in books. I think it might be love because I feel all the same symptoms as in the books, so I guess it’s the real thing, but—”

  “It ain’t love.”

  Her blunt certainty irritated me. “How can you be so sure?”

  “Because I gave that boy some of my special love potion, that’s why.”

  I dropped the wooden spoon into the pan of potatoes. “What? Love potion! I don’t believe it. There’s no such thing as love potion.”

  “Believe whatever you want, honey. But don’t make the mistake of getting serious with him or you’ll get your heart broken when that potion wears off.”

  “That’s ridiculous!”

  She gave me one of her knowing shrugs. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Now, you better put some wood on that fire or we won’t be eating dinner until midnight.” She started to walk away.

  “Wait! Prove it to me, Lillie. Prove that you really know how to cook up some sort of magic potion.”

  She turned in the doorway to face me. “You see how Belle acts around Mack? I slipped her a little bit of that potion, too, so she would behave for him and do whatever he says. Mack’s no good with horses. He got used to driving cars, up north.”

  I stared at her. Ike and Belle had been acting suspiciously alike, nuzzling necks, following Mack and me around like puppy dogs. But a love potion? My life had drifted into yet another genre of story—a fairy tale.

  “Wait. Why would you give this so-called love potion to Ike in the first place—not that I believe it’s true.”

  “That’s my little secret, honey.”

  “Well, since it involves me, I think I have a right to know! And what will happen if you stop giving it to him? Or if it wears off?”

  “Oh, it’ll wear off one of these days. I’m just warning you ahead of time so you don’t get your heart broke.”

  This was unbelievable. She had to be joking. Then I had another disturbing thought. “Did you give me any of this so-called potion?”

  “Now, why would I do that?”

  “I don’t know! You won’t even tell me why you gave it to Ike!” I was yelling. I wanted to shake her.

  Lillie gave me her gap-toothed smile and said, “I never did see a person get as worked up as you do, honey. You worry too much about all sorts of silly things. See how upset it’s making you? You need to sit back and enjoy your life.”

  “How can I possibly enjoy my life when you keep interfering with it?”

  She turned away from me again, shaking her head. “You let me know when that food is cooked, honey,” she said before hobbling away.

  The stove may not have been red-hot, but I was.

  After we finished eating, I went upstairs to Lillie’s workroom. I sat down on the floor and leafed through her notebooks by lamplight, page after page of blurred, wispy writing. I found recipes for curing everything from warts to whooping cough but not a single entry was labeled Love Potion. By the time I finished struggling through the third notebook, I couldn’t read anymore. Love potion? Lillie had to be making that up.

  Didn’t she?

  Ike finally returned from his weekend travels on Wednesday morning. He burst into the library and picked me up by my waist and swung me around in circles. I’d seen couples do that in movies, but never in real life. I couldn’t tell if I was dizzy from the spin or because I was happy to see him. “Where have you been?” I asked when he set me down again. “I was getting worried about you.”

  “I would have been here sooner, but my truck broke down on the way home. Hey, I got wonderful news!”

  “Tell me.”

&
nbsp; “Someone heard me fiddling on Saturday night and asked me to play with his band on a road trip. They need a new fiddle player. It’s a very popular group, and they travel a lot and play in more places than our little band does. They make good money, too.”

  “Oh, Ike! I’m so happy for you!” I couldn’t help hugging him. “What a wonderful opportunity.”

  “It’ll be sort of a trial run for me, to see how it works out. And one of the places we’ll be playing is close to Nashville. Who knows? Maybe I’ll get there yet.”

  “You can do it, Ike. I know you can.” I remained in his arms, and he rested his cheek on top of my head. I closed my eyes, imagining us moving to Nashville. We would live in a real house, not a log cabin, and Ike would play his fiddle for the Grand Ole Opry every week. He would be famous! We would both have to make a lot of changes, like Maggie said, but Tennessee would be middle ground for us, a compromise between Kentucky and Illinois. It could work.

  “The tour starts this weekend and that means I’ll be leaving again in a day or so. I’ll be gone for at least two weeks, and boy, am I going to miss you, Alice.”

  “I’ll miss you, too.”

  Would Lillie’s love potion wear off while Ike was gone? Assuming that her ridiculous story was even true, of course. I was confused about being in love in the first place—why did Lillie have to confuse me even more by talking about a love potion?

  Ike released me from his arms and sighed. “I guess we won’t be able to look for the treasure until I get back. But I’ll save every penny I make, and I’ll come back. Promise you’ll still be here?”

  “I’ll be here.” I couldn’t go anywhere until Mack finished his investigation at the mine and could be resurrected from the dead. Which reminded me, I was supposed to ask Ike about the mine.

  “May I ask you a question, Ike? It has nothing to do with your good news; it has to do with Maggie Coots.”

  “What about her?”

  “We’ve become friends, and we were talking the other day about Hank. I don’t think she’ll ever get over his death. You said you didn’t think it was an accident. Why is that?”