The Seven Wonders of Sassafras Springs Read online

  Well, Upton prepared to git. The sheriff’s deputies had already dropped the bookcase onto the wagon along with a trunk full of clothes. The fancy furniture and crystal lamps got left behind. Uppity hopped onto the wagon, gave the reins a slap, and galloped toward the Garner county Line.

  Halfway across the Garner River the bridge collapsed, sending Uppity, his wagon, and his horse straight down into the churning waters. The wagon sank like a brick and the horse was swept away. The bookcase landed upside down, and all the books and powders and whatnot were lost. But that old bookcase floated, and Uppity hung on for dear life as the water carried him downstream. He was moving so fast he never noticed when he passed the county line. After a while the rain stopped.

  Next morning, as things started to dry up, the sheriff saw those books and bottles floating in the river and figured Upton was floating there too. His body was never found. Leastwise not by anybody in Garner County.

  I found his body, but it was a living, breathing body. I was just a boy doing some fishing down where the Garner meets Liberty Creek River. I’d never seen the river swelled up so, and I was young enough to think all that rain would bring the fish right to the surface.

  My eyes about bugged out of my head when I saw the floating bookcase. As it reached that fork where the rivers meet, the bookcase got caught up on some rocks. Henry Upton sat up and rubbed his eyes. Somewhere in the night he’d flipped the bookcase over and floated the rest of the way lying inside, dozing safe as a chick in its nest. He was a muddy chick, though. Mighty bedraggled.

  “Help pull me over, boy. Quick!” Uppity yelled at me. I threw him a big stick, which he used to pull the bookcase closer. He jumped out and waded to shore, dragging the bookcase behind him. When I asked him what’d happened, he said he’d tell me the whole story if I’d find him dry clothes and a hot meal and get him to the nearest train station. Seems Uppity was smart enough to sew his money into his coat. And he had plenty of it too, ’cause he’d earned money all over the U.S.A. making rain for folks in trouble. Folks who paid him plenty, unlike the folks in Garner.

  Ma cooked him dinner and Pa gave him some clothes. The man said his rainmaking days were over and he was going to some island where it never rains a drop. He left the bookcase with us, and Pa took him to the train station. And that’s the last I ever heard of one Henry Upton. Hee-haw! How’s that for a Wonder, boy?

  I couldn’t tell if the story was over, because Cully kept on chuckling and slapping his knee. When I thought he was finished, I asked him, “Did Upton tell you how he did that rainmaking? You’d make a fortune if you could do it.”

  “I never even asked,” Cully said. “If you’d seen that poor half-drowned critter peering up out of that bookcase, you wouldn’t have asked either. I believe in leaving well enough alone, my boy.”

  Just as I glanced up at his sagging ceiling, it gave out a loud creak. Even calm old Sal jumped up, startled-like. But Cully didn’t blink an eye.

  “Still, that there’s a Wonder, ain’t it? A Wonder of the World.” Cully stared up at his bookcase as if he was seeing it for the first time. “Held the secrets of the universe, saved a man’s life … and it’s holding up my house today.”

  “A Wonder,” I said. After all, even the Great Pyramid never held up a man’s house. I jotted the story down fast, as rain began beating against the windows of the sagging shack.

  Poor Jeb was hunkered down under a piece of canvas that covered the woodpile when Sal and I finally came outside.

  “Did you get any chocolates?” he called out.

  “Something better—a Wonder,” I shouted back. “Come on, lets run!”

  With Sal in the lead, we raced between the raindrops, back down to Yellow Dog Road.

  “Its a wonder you’re still alive,” Jeb told me along the way.

  “You don’t know the half of it,” I agreed.

  Day Three Disappointments

  In two days I had two Wonders. It might have just been beginner’s luck, but it looked like this wasn’t going to be so hard after all.

  I’d be on a train soon—my first train ever—chugging away from Sassafras Springs. Or chugging away from St. Clair, since Sassafras Springs didn’t have a train station. St. Clair was where folks went for doctoring or banking or big deliveries, like a new wagon or a stove, that could only come by train.

  I’d been to St. Clair and it was a fine town, but it just made me hunger to see more. The next town and the next town. If the schoolhouse had been open, I could find the route to Colorado on a map. There’d be St. Clair, Pine Gap, Garvey City. I couldn’t remember what came next.

  I’d know soon enough, with just five more Wonders to find. Then I’d be on my way to Colorado.

  I hoped the engineer wouldn’t be stingy with the whistle.

  My aunt had other ideas about the trip, which she made clear that night on the porch. The rain hadn’t amounted to more than a few drops, and it was as steamy as the jungles of Borneo—or at least I thought so.

  “Cole McAllister, you are encouraging your son to risk his life,” Aunt Pretty declared as I finished writing down Cully’s story. I’d told her and Pa that Jeb and I had gone to see him, but I didn’t let on about Cully’s Wonder. “He could have been buried by a collapsing house.”

  “But he wasn’t,” said Pa, unperturbed as usual.

  “And when do you think Cully Pone last had a bath?” she asked. “Poor dog could have gotten fleas from that man.”

  Sal cocked her head.

  “Aw, and I was thinking of hiring him to do some work around here.” Pa acted serious but I could tell he was teasing.

  “You can just think of someone else,” my aunt replied. Her crochet hook was racing like greased lightning by then. That woman could crochet anything from a lowly dishcloth to a baby sweater that was soft as a cloud. If a person could crochet a Wonder, she’d be the one to do it. In fact, it wouldn’t surprise me at all to find a great pyramid sitting in her lap some day, crocheted in her favorite shades of pink and blue.

  That Friday was a scorcher from the minute the sun came up.

  “I would pick the hottest day of the year to put up fruit.” Aunt Pretty said the same thing every year. Sweet-smelling peaches simmered on the stove in one huge pot while canning jars bubbled away in another pot. The kitchen was hot as an oven, and it was just as hot outside.

  Pa was already perspiring at seven A.M.

  “Do you think it might rain?” I asked, though the cloudless sky didn’t give much encouragement.

  “Not today,” said Pa.

  Aunt Pretty brought Pa and me lunch in the field that noon, but she didn’t stay to eat with us. “Still putting up peaches,” she said. “They probably don’t even grow those in Colorado. Not that Molly was ever much of a cook.”

  As I watched her march back to the house, I took a giant gulp of iced tea from the old stone jug.

  “Pa, does Aunt Pretty have something against Aunt Molly?” I asked. “She never says anything good about her.”

  “Molly and Eli are good people, Eben.” Pa took a swig of iced tea. “Don’t pay any mind to what Pretty says. It’s just that she’s had her share of sorrows, and she never got a husband of her own.”

  “How come?” Plenty of women in Sassafras Springs who didn’t have good looks or her good qualities had husbands.

  “She had admirers, but she fancied Holt Nickerson,” Pa recalled. “He bought her apple pie at the church social after competing with two rivals for her attention.”

  I’d never heard of this Holt Nickerson before. “What happened?”

  “Well, sir, Holt was raised by his aunt and uncle, the Culpeppers. His cousin Ned said Holt had quite a habit of sleepwalking. Said they never knew where he’d end up in the morning. Once they found him all curled up in the corn crib and he had no idea how he’d gotten there. Another time they found him leaning against the milk cow, sound asleep, both of them.

  “One night Ned heard somebody stirring outside. He hurrie
d downstairs and got to the door just in time to see Holt jump on his horse and ride off in the moonlight, dressed in his long Johns, boots, and hat. Ned ran after him, and when he got a glimpse of Holt, he could tell he was asleep with his eyes wide open.”

  “Didn’t he ride after him?” “’Course he did. Ned rounded up the whole family. They searched high and low, but no one in Sassafras Springs ever saw hide nor hair of Holt again.”

  I had to sit and think about the story for a bit. “He rode off in his long Johns and never came back?” I asked.

  “It was a scandal. Your Aunt Pretty pretended not to care, but I could tell she took it hard. I think she was sony one of those other fellows didn’t get her apple pie at the social.” Pa paused to chew on some biscuit.

  “And her best girlhood friend, Cally, she got herself married and moved to Oregon. Pretty hasn’t seen her in years. She has a pack of children and hardly has time to even write anymore.”

  I suddenly thought of how I’d feel if something happened to Jeb. “What happened to those other fellows that liked Aunt Pretty?” I wondered.

  “Married other girls, sad to say. Now, Eben, if you ever mention a word of this to your aunt, there’ll be trouble for you.”

  I promised I wouldn’t. But it took a lot of weeding for me to get the picture of Holt Nickerson riding off in his long Johns out of my mind.

  That afternoon Pa told me I could leave a while, as long as I came back with a sack of sugar for Aunt Pretty by suppertime. And two dozen clothespins, too. That woman really went through clothespins in a hurry. Sometimes I thought she must chew them, like lollipops. My first stop, though, was to drop by Jeb’s place to see if he wanted to go searching for Wonders again.

  “I’ve got to work.” Jeb plopped down on the ground next to the potatoes. Charlie and Bessie were doing somersaults, while Joey squashed tomato worms as fast as Flo and Fred could pick them off the vines.

  “You’re a lucky dog to get so much time off,” Jeb told me.

  “Time off! I just worked so fast I finished early!” Sometimes that Jeb could get under my skin. “Pa said I looked like a cyclone tearing through the fields. And Aunt Pretty said I must have swallowed my lunch whole so I could get out of there.”

  “I don’t see why you’re so fired up about this Wonder thing,” Jeb said. “You’re never really going to see those faraway places.”

  “Sure I am! Remember that book by Hardy T. Lang that Miss Collins brought in from the lending library in St. Clair? He’s that fellow who traveled to all those far-off places, living in jungles with the natives and finding lost temples and sailing on junks and such.”

  “Junks?”

  “Chinese boats,” I explained. “Remember the pictures in his book?”

  Sometimes I wondered if Jeb paid a lick of attention to the teacher.

  Jeb sat back and stuck a long blade of grass between his teeth. “That’s okay for somebody in a book, but real folks don’t do things like that.”

  “Hardy T. Lang is a real person. I saw his picture. You did too.”

  “I’m tired,” whined Bess, trying to climb on Jeb’s back.

  “You got any candy, Eben?” asked Flo.

  “Leave us alone, you little beggar.” Jeb shooed his sister away, then chewed on his piece of grass awhile before he said, “Must be kind of lonely out there in the world, not knowing anybody. And if you do meet somebody, they don’t speak the same language.”

  “If you and I went together, we’d speak the same language.”

  Jeb lay back in the grass and stared up at the sky. “I don’t know, Eben. My folks are counting on me to take over the farm some day. It doesn’t matter so much for you—you don’t have any brothers or sisters. Maybe your pa wants to sell the farm, so he won’t need you anyway.” He turned on his side, facing toward me. “Maybe I’ll go on an adventure with you sometime, but if I do, I’m coming back here.”

  I know Jeb never meant any harm, but his words stung me like a bee. It wasn’t my fault I didn’t have brothers and sisters, and Pa never mentioned he wanted to sell the farm. He needed me plenty. Hadn’t I worked my tail off for him all morning?

  “I’ve already had enough weeding and plowing to last a lifetime, haven’t you?” I asked.

  All Jeb said was, “Those natives, they can be dangerous. They have poison darts.”

  I guess he remembered the book after all.

  “I’ve dealt with Orville Payne and Cully Pone,” I told him. “I don’t think a few natives will bother me any more than them.”

  I stood up. To tell the truth, I was disappointed with Jeb. It would have been fun to see the world with him. But if I was going to find Wonders, it appeared I was going to find them alone. In Greece or Africa or even Sassafras Springs.

  “See you later?” asked Jeb.

  “Yep,” I said. “Come on, Sal,” I told the dog. “Let’s go searching.”

  Day Three Continued Difficulties and Discoveries

  Sal and I searched, but we didn’t find much. On their farm up on the ridge, Piggy Ellis and his sisters stuck their tongues out at me when I asked about a Wonder. Their ma was canning beans and didn’t have time to talk.

  “Why ain’t you home helping your pa?” she scolded. Like all the mowing and weeding and milking and feeding Fd been doing since five A.M. didn’t count at all.

  Next door at the Mayer place I got a friendlier welcome. I even got to sample Grandma Mayer’s bread-and-butter pickles. They were tasty but not enough to amount to a Wonder.

  The Culpepper place was below the Mayers’, but I didn’t spend much time there.

  “You’re Cole’s crazy boy?” Ned Culpepper yelled as I approached. Orville Payne told me to be on the lookout for you. He said I’d better bar the chicken-house door with you around.”

  I skedaddled out of there before I had a chance to ask him about Wonders or about his cousin Holt. At least I was learning when to keep my mouth shut.

  I headed back to Yellow Dog Road. I had to get that sugar for my aunt, and maybe I’d have better luck in town. Halfway there, Sal doubled back, wagging her tail. I spun around to find out who she was so all-fired happy to see.

  I wasn’t happy to see that it was Rae Ellen Hubbell. “Hubbell” rhymes with “trouble.”

  “Are you following me?” I asked.

  She stuck her nose up in the air. “It’s a public road. Anybody can walk it.”

  “Well, you don’t have to walk it so close to me.”

  “I was just about to say the same thing to you.”

  I looked down at Rae Ellen’s dirty feet, her yellow braids as straight as two pencils, her scrawny self drowning in a huge pair of overalls. My pals and I avoided Rae Ellen. We all knew she stole pie out of our lunch buckets at school.

  “I thought you were looking for Wonderfuls,” she said.

  Leave it to Rae Ellen to get it all wrong. “Who told you that?”

  “None of your business, but it was Maggie Austin.”

  I’d have to remind Jeb not to tell his sister my personal business again.

  “Well, I’ve got a Wonderful,” Rae Ellen announced.

  This girl could give a fellow a pain in the neck. “Not Wonderfuls,” I told her. “Wonders.”

  “I got one.”

  I knew there was no point talking to Rae Ellen, who didn’t even have a lunch bucket of her own, much less a Wonder. She brought her lunch all rolled up in a blue bandanna that got limp and smelly by lunchtime.

  “I’m busy now, Rae Ellen.” I walked away, taking extra-big steps so she couldn’t keep up with me. That didn’t stop her from following me, so I tried to shut out the sound of her bare feet plopping along in the dust.

  Closer to the general store, I saw Albert Bowie and his brother, Vern, walking toward me. They were carrying a heavy-looking barrel between them.

  “What is that coming this way, Brother? Is it a circus parade?” asked Vern. He was older than Albert or Jeb or me—taller, stronger, and a lot more ornery. �
��Here comes a giraffe followed by a monkey.”

  I glanced behind me at Rae Ellen. “Are you still following me?”

  “It’s a free country,” she answered.

  I tried to ignore her. “What have you got in there?” I asked the Bowie brothers.

  “Nails,” said Albert. “Pa’s gonna build a new hog pen.”

  The Bowies’ hogs were the pride of the county, but I was glad we didn’t live downwind of their farm.

  Vern grinned. “So where are you and your girlfriend going?”

  “Aw, you know Rae Ellen,” I said. “She’s a pest.”

  “I thought he was following me,” said Rae Ellen. “I’m going to the store for my mother.” With that, she flicked her braids and walked around me, right past the Bowie brothers, down Yellow Dog Road, straight toward the general store.

  Vern and Albert hooted at her, but she never looked back once.

  Like I said, “Hubbell” rhymes with “trouble,” and to my mind, Rae Ellen was anything but wonderful.

  I would have liked to avoid the general store—and seeing Rae Ellen again—but there was that sugar and those clothespins I’d promised to get. So I ended up in town whether I wanted to go there or not. On one side of the street there was Yount’s General—a combination general store and post office. Next door was Saylor’s Feed and Supply Store, and next to that was the Rite-Time, a six-stool luncheonette run by Minnie Raymond. I would have liked a root beer along about then, but I didn’t have a nickel to buy one.

  Across from the stores was a row of houses where the Saylors, Miss Raymond, the Younts, and the preacher’s family lived.

  I didn’t want to face Rae Ellen inside the store, so I waited outside on the sagging bench near the gas pumps. Next to me on the wall was a faded notice that read HANDYMAN: CULLY PONE, RIDGE ROAD. NO JOB TOO BIG NOR SMALL.

  No job at all, that’s what Cully had. Just a doggone bookcase.

  The screen door swung wide open with its usual squeal and out came Rae Ellen. She wasn’t carrying anything.