Carry the World Read online

  a novel

  by

  Susan Fanetti

  THE FREAK CIRCLE PRESS

  Carry the World © 2018 Susan Fanetti

  All rights reserved

  Cover Design © 2018 Susan Fanetti

  with images licensed from DepositPhotos

  Susan Fanetti has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this book under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales are entirely coincidental.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  ALSO BY SUSAN FANETTI

  DEDICATION:

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Epilogue

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ALSO BY SUSAN FANETTI

  Historical Standalone:

  Nothing on Earth & Nothing in Heaven

  Sawtooth Mountains Stories:

  Somewhere

  Someday

  The Northwomen Sagas:

  (Complete Series)

  God’s Eye

  Heart’s Ease

  Soul’s Fire

  Father’s Sun

  The Pagano Family:

  (Complete Series)

  Footsteps, Book 1

  Touch, Book 2

  Rooted, Book 3

  Deep, Book 4

  Prayer, Book 5

  Miracle, Book 6

  The Pagano Brothers:

  Simple Faith, Book 1

  Hidden Worthiness, Book 2

  The Brazen Bulls MC:

  (Complete Series)

  Crash, Book 1

  Twist, Book 2

  Slam, Book 3

  Blaze, Book 4

  Honor, Book 5

  Fight, Book 6

  Stand, Book 7

  Light, Book 7.5

  Lead, Book 8

  THE NIGHT HORDE MC SAGA

  The Signal Bend Series:

  (The First Complete Series)

  Move the Sun, Book 1

  Behold the Stars, Book 2

  Into the Storm, Book 3

  Alone on Earth, Book 4

  In Dark Woods, Book 4.5

  All the Sky, Book 5

  Show the Fire, Book 6

  Leave a Trail, Book 7

  The Night Horde SoCal:

  (The Second Complete Series)

  Strength & Courage, Book 1

  Shadow & Soul, Book 2

  Today & Tomorrow, Book 2.5

  Fire & Dark, Book 3

  Dream & Dare, Book 3.5

  Knife & Flesh, Book 4

  Rest & Trust, Book 5

  Calm & Storm, Book 6

  Final Books in the Night Horde MC Saga:

  Nolan: Return to Signal Bend

  Love & Friendship

  As S.E. Fanetti:

  Aurora Terminus

  DEDICATION:

  To all the women who carry the world, in all the ways they do it.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

  Special thanks to my precious friends and priceless beta readers, TeriLyn Smitsky and Jess Brooks, for their keen insights and patient support.

  And to the Pack Horse Librarians of the Works Progress Administration, who inspired this story, and who carried light and hope to remote places in dark times.

  If you’d like to learn more about the Pack Horse Librarian Project:

  “Horse-Riding Librarians Were the Great Depression’s Bookmobiles” (Smithsonian)

  “The Pack Horse Librarians of Eastern Kentucky” (NPR)

  Prologue

  Present Day

  It was so hot in this attic, not even the dust motes moved. They hung perfectly still in air as thick as soup, in the stripes of desultory sun that pushed through the tatters in the decaying calico curtains over windows opaque with decades of grime.

  A hank of hair had escaped Lizzie’s ponytail and hung before her eyes. A drop of sweat ran down the path of its strands and plopped onto the rough plank floor. She pushed it behind her ear with the back of her wrist and then swiped her forearm across her face.

  “Damn, it’s hot. We should’ve got an earlier start today, Momma.”

  Her mother set a dusty box on the stack near the stairs and cast a glance around the attic. “Well, we couldn’t hardly send Miss Grady on without settin’ with her awhile. It’ll be fine. The hard part’s done. Got all the furniture down. All’s we need now is goin’ through these boxes. So let’s get crackin’.”

  Lizzie turned away so her mother wouldn’t see her smile. They lived in Chicago, Lizzie had always lived in Chicago, not counting college, but her mother, Lindy Ann Calhoun-Harris, had grown up right here, in Callwood, Kentucky, smack in the heart of Appalachia. Back home, her mother had no accent at all. She’d worked hard to lose it, insisting that nobody in Chicago would trust a cardiothoracic surgeon who sounded like a backwoods bumpkin.

  But every time they came to Kentucky for a visit, Momma’s voice picked up a strong hillbilly flavor, as if the taste of it sank into her the minute her feet touched Kentucky dirt. Or maybe it was that Kentucky stripped off the varnish of the big city and let the real Lindy show through again.

  Lizzie liked it. When she was younger, she’d tried to emulate it, but Momma had thought she was poking fun, and she’d gotten mad enough not to talk to her for days. But she hadn’t been poking fun at all. She simply wanted to have an interesting voice like that, not the Midwest, Gold Coast, prep school blandness she’d grown up with.

  When she thought of Nannie, her grandmother, that was the first thing she thought of—her homey, homespun drawl that made every word more interesting, like each one was part of a story that deserved to be told.

  A sad sigh escaped her chest as she thought of Nannie, up here in her attic. Nannie’s funeral had been the week before. Now, Lizzie and her mom were packing up a long, fascinating life and selling it off or giving it away.

  She closed the flaps on a box of old fabric, the third box full of striped and floral cottons which she’d learned were flour sacks, saved by her ever-frugal grandmother in case they might be made into quilts and dresses. When she set that box aside, she caught a glimpse of something shiny in the shadows under the eave. Rolling onto her knees, Lizzie crawled forward and pushed another couple of boxes—one an old hatbox she made a mental note to be interested in later—out of the way. Tucked right up against the low side of the peaked attic was an old wooden chest with thick leather straps, obviously handmade. The faint gleam she’d caught was one of
the thick brass buckle latches.

  Lizzie tried to unfasten a buckle, but the leather had hardened too much, after years of neglect. She found a leather handle at the side and tugged the chest to draw it closer—oh, it was heavy. The brittle leather of the handle broke after the chest had scraped closer by only a couple inches.

  “Dammit,” she muttered and crawled closer to get ahold of the chest itself.

  “What you find?” her mother drawled like a girl from up the mountain.

  “I don’t know. An old chest. It’s heavy as hell.” With a determined pull, she drew the chest away from the eave, into a dusty stripe of sunlight. A thick layer of cobwebby dust covered its top. She managed to work the rock-hard leather and release the first buckle, and then with the same effort, the second came open.

  “Huh. I never seen that chest, I don’t think. Be careful openin’ it. Who knows what kinda critters crawled up in there.”

  Lizzie tensed, ready to jump back if some kind of ‘critter’ crawled over her hand—or if the smell of its death wafted up. She pushed the lid up, and it creaked open.

  The smell was of decay, but not unpleasant. Musty and rich, like paper, and a faint woodsy scent as well. At the top of the chest was some kind of leather bag, the leather cracked and stained dark in places, the pouch deep and wide. She picked it up—no, it was two bags, connected with a wide strap of stained leather. Lizzie thought she should know what this was, but she couldn’t quite get there. She held the contraption up, so the two big bags dangled over her arms, and got there at the same time her mother said:

  “Mercy, I know what that is.”

  “Saddlebags?” Lizzie guessed.

  “Yeah.” Her mother lowered the lid and brushed the thick layer of dust off the top, showing three letters carved into the top: ALW. Then she pushed the lid back open. “That’s Mamaw’s chest. Oh, Lizzie!”

  Mamaw was Lizzie’s great-grandmother. She’d died at age ninety-nine, when Lizzie was in middle school. Living so far away, seeing her only a couple times a year for a few days at a time, Lizzie hadn’t ever built much of a relationship with her great-grandmother. Mamaw’s mind hadn’t been so sharp anymore, so mainly she’d just been the sweet old lady who sat in a rocker and watched her stories on the TV.

  Lizzie hadn’t even been particularly close to Nannie until high school, when her parents’ marriage had imploded at the precise time her adolescence was exploding, and she’d spent a couple summers hiding in Kentucky so she and Momma wouldn’t kill each other in Chicago. Then, she’d gotten to know her grandmother very well and love her as hard as she’d ever loved anyone. She was the reason Lizzie and her mother found their way back to each other.

  Here in this hot attic, on this sad day, Lizzie’s mother got down on her knees beside her and peered into the chest. She lifted out a roughly woven blanket with a strong musky smell and set it aside. Beneath it were books and papers.

  Her mother lifted out a book like a homemade binder, covered in faded burlap and laced at the side with a leather thong. “Did Nannie ever tell you about Mamaw—I mean, the way she was when she was young?”

  Lizzie nodded. Mamaw had been a true hill woman, living up the mountain in a place called Cable’s Holler, and nurturing a huge, boisterous family. Nannie had been the sixth of eight children growing up on a small subsistence farm, what Nannie always called a ‘dirt farm,’ in a cabin without real plumbing or electricity. It could not have been an easy life, but all her stories of her childhood were joyful ones. She looked on her mother like an angel.

  “Mamaw was a book woman,” Lizzie’s mother said softly. “That’s how she an’ Papaw met. Oh, they had a love for the ages, they did.”

  Her mother opened the old binder to a yellowed page where a piece of aged paper was glued. The paper was full of typeface, as from an old manual typewriter, with a line in all caps across the top, like a title: STORIES, HOMEMAKING IDEAS, AND RECIPES, it read. In parentheses beneath the title, a line read: Compiled by Mrs. Ada Lee Donovan, Callwood Pack Horse Library, Callwood, Kentucky, January 1937. The rest of the page was filled with a description of how the contents of the book were compiled: from magazines and old books, and from ideas and recipes Mrs. Ada Lee Donovan—Mamaw, though she’d been Mrs. Ada Lee Walker most of her life—had gathered from friends and family, and from the people she served on the mountain.

  Book woman. That was how Nannie had described it, too. As a young woman—a widow—during the Great Depression, Mamaw had been a Pack Horse Librarian. As part of a WPA program of the New Deal, she’d ridden way up in the Kentucky hills, bringing books and magazines to people too far removed from civilization to reach libraries, or sometimes even schools, on their own. They lived so far from the world that only pack horses and mules could reach them, so the librarians had ridden routes up and down and all around the Appalachian mountains, in any kind of weather, lugging books and supplies, bringing entertainment and news and company.

  In college, Lizzie had taken some weird English course as an elective: The Literacy Narrative. She’d had no idea what that was, but she’d needed three more units to fulfill her Humanities requirements, and that one had fit her schedule, so whatever. She’d ended up kind of liking the class. For the final project, they’d had to write their own literacy narrative, tracing the history of and influences on their relationship with reading and writing, and Lizzie had done some research on ‘book women’ and on her own personal connection to them. She’d talked with Nannie on the phone several times and had gotten her to spin stories about her mother.

  Lizzie had traced her history from Mamaw forward and made some lame conclusion suggesting that her own ‘journey’ to reading and writing had been guided by her ancestor, and she’d gotten an A on the assignment and in the course. She’d figured it was all teacher-pleasing bullshit, at which she’d always excelled, but the research actually had been pretty cool, and since she’d written that paper, she’d maybe thought of her family’s ‘legacy of literacy’ differently. Her hillbilly great-grandma had loved books so much she’d risked her life to pass them around. Maybe coming up in the family that woman had made had shaped Lizzie truly. But she’d still never felt a personal connection to Mamaw, who remained, in her mind, the dotty old lady she barely remembered. The book woman Nannie had told her about was more like learning about an ancestor in a museum.

  “It’s like she made a book all herself,” her mother said, flipping carefully through pages of handwritten and typed recipes, and pages from books, clippings from magazines and newspapers, hand-drawn pictures and clipped photographs. A few recipe pages had little crusty dots, as if a spoon had dripped sauce onto the paper.

  Sitting cross-legged beside her, Lizzie studied the pages of the homemade book. “She did. It’s a scrapbook—like, literally, made from scraps of things, like books that had worn out. When I wrote that paper, I read about these. Their books got read so much they wore out. They didn’t have money to replace them, so they salvaged the pages they could and made them into new books. There’s not many of these around anymore, I don’t think. It’s pretty amazing to find this. You didn’t know about this chest?”

  Her mother shook her head. “I heard stories all my life, but they was always just stories. I’d no idea all this was right here to see.”

  They’d come to a page with a handwritten recipe for sugar-crusted cornbread. Though there were several different kinds of handwriting on the pages, this one, a nearly picture-perfect facsimile of the Palmer method, seemed most prevalent. Lizzie brushed light fingertips over the page. “Do you think this is her cursive?”

  “Oh yeah. I’d know that hand anywhere. That’s Mamaw. Y’know, she was a schoolteacher for a spell, before she married Mr. Donovan. That’was her first husband.”

  Her mother’s accent had suddenly grown so deep that she’d nearly said ‘twas. She nearly sounded like Nannie herself.

  “Back in them days, schoolteachers couldn’t work once they got married. But she was widowed after ju
s’ a few years. Mr. Donovan died by a fever, and then she lost the farm and hadta move on home with her kin, but they wasn’t doin’ much better. That’s why she signed on with the library.”

  As Momma rolled into her story, Lizzie sat back and closed her eyes, forgot all about the heat and dust, and the sorrow of loss, and listened to her mother spin a story in the voice of eastern Kentucky.

  Chapter One

  1937

  Ada crouched down and squinted under the truck as Chancey checked the axle.

  “I ain’t know what to say, Mizz Ada. It can’t take no more fixin’. It’s jus’ busted.”

  “How much for a whole new axle? Just replace it outright?” The question was entirely rhetorical; unless she could get a new axle in a trade for a bushel of corn, there was no price she could afford.

  Chancey scooted through the dusty dirt until he was clear of the disabled truck and stood up. His head swung to and fro as he swiped the dust from his backside and then brushed his hands clean. “There’s rust near straight through under there. Puttin’ a new axle on this old heap’d be burnin’ good money, ma’am. I’m sorry to say it, but I think your daddy’s truck done rolled its last mile.”

  Turning a scowl that she’d once used on obstreperous pupils on the ancient Ford pickup, Ada sighed. “I don’t know what to do, Chancey, if I can’t get to town.”

  “I could fix up that old cart rig in the barn for you, get that in some shape. Then Henrietta could pull you into town. She’s trained to harness, ain’t she? Wouldn’t need no payment—I owe you for helpin’ me with them gov’ment papers.”

  Like many people in her community, Chancey was illiterate. Since her George’s death and the hard times brought on by this terrible national economy, Ada had tried to earn some money, or at least barter for some food and services, by reading and writing for her neighbors. It wasn’t nearly enough, but it was something. She and her father were trying to keep this old farm going, too, but it was just the two of them working, and four hands, with the occasional extra set from a vagrant come their way, weren’t nearly enough to seed a good field or pull in a good harvest.