The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek by Kim Michele Richardson

Author:Kim Michele Richardson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sourcebooks
Published: 2019-03-28T16:00:00+00:00

Twenty-Two

After we left the schoolyard, I stopped on the path and double-checked my bags. I didn’t have a newsmagazine for Mr. Prine so I headed straight to Martha Hannah’s, looking forward to having an extra moment to chat with her and the young’uns.

I sang lightly as Junia rode us around a covey of oaks, trampled over squawroot and showy jewelweed, until she stopped and sounded an alarm.

I’d been thinking about the medical tests, the food. How much I could get from the doc in exchange for giving him more blood. I wondered just how much blood a person could lose, then remembered the article I’d read about Marie Antoinette’s bloodletting she’d gotten while giving birth. How it didn’t hurt her none to lose the blood.

Then I turned my mind to the book Jackson Lovett loaned me and became so riddled in thoughts of him that I hadn’t kept a keen eye on the paths. I’d been speculating about his life, his kin. Jackson Lovett had burrowed into me like a tune I couldn’t turn off, like the popular Benny Goodman song “Blue Moon” that played on Harriett’s radio from time to time. I scolded myself and vowed not to pry into my patron’s affairs, to keep a quiet tongue around the man next time. I’d been too bold and risked my job as well.

Junia blew hard as if shaming me, and I snapped my head up and pressed a hand to my galloping heart, half expecting to see Frazier lurking in the woods, still stalking me.

I cupped my eyes against the sun, relieved to see Martha Hannah’s husband, Devil John, and not another Frazier. But his stance offered no relief, but something more, something disquieting and unbending, and I feared troublesome for me.

“Book Woman,” he called out, standing there in his thin britches and faded shirt, a long rifle strapped over his shoulder. Devil John Smith was a moonshiner and, folks whispered, one of the best. He wore a black floppy hat with a raccoon dick fastened above the brim, what the bootleggers placed in a still’s copper worm to direct the flow into the catch jug so there wouldn’t be any loss of shine, and a handy way to alert a thirsty fellar he was in the business.

“Mr. Smith.” I chanced a wobbly smile, stiffened atop the saddle.

“Ma’am.” He tipped his hat. “I’ve come to tell you there’s a problem with them books,” he said soberly.

I felt my smile slip downward.

Junia blew a hot breath, and I wrapped the reins tighter around my sweating hands.

Devil John went on. “The young’uns won’t do their chores, and yesterday, Martha Hannah was nearly an hour late with my supper. An hour! Them books are doing that—surely making them lazy. The girls are letting the laundry an’ sewing pile up around their ears, and the boys are reading at the creek when they ought to be fishing and working the garden. Plumb can’t get ’em to work ’cause they’s so busy sitting and reading them foolish books you’re bent on bringing.

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