Willie: Book One in the Defeated Creek Series by Franklin Horton

Author:Franklin Horton [Horton, Franklin]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-11-27T00:00:00+00:00

23

Willie

Willie and the girls didn’t get back home from the Shoot & Sip until the wee hours of the morning. They were tired but had to empty the truck before they could turn in. Willie parked as close to the cabin as she could, then she and Violet unloaded the truck and placed the items on the porch. April and Juanita moved the boxes from the porch to wherever they could find floorspace in the house. Willie said they could worry about storing everything later.

Once they were unloaded, everyone crawled to their beds and sacked out. They slept hard until around lunchtime the next day when the oppressive summer heat awakened them. Willie was in good physical condition from hauling scrap metal several days a week, so she wasn’t sore from all the lifting the previous night, but she was still tired from the late hours. She didn’t feel up to making coffee just yet since it required several more steps than it used to. She grabbed one of the fancy canned coffee drinks that Greg had sent home with her last night.

Greg said he didn’t like them and gladly sent every last one home with her. She’d never tried one, but the price was right since they were free. When she opened it and took a sip, she understood why he didn’t like them. It was absolutely nasty. The taste reminded her of dishwater with a little cream and sugar added.

Still, times being what they were, Willie was too frugal to dump it out. She stepped onto the porch and sat down in a green plastic chair. She put the nasty drink on a metal patio table beside her ashtray and lit up a cigarette. She felt more relaxed now that she didn’t have to ration her smokes as tightly. It’d been very kind of Greg and Peggy to send her and the girls home with all that stuff. She’d have to find some way to thank them when she could.

Those moments that Willie spent on the porch with her first cigarette of the day were heaven. It was when her body, her mind, and the world surrounding her were at their stillest. On a normal day, this was her only quiet moment before hauling the girls somewhere, running errands, or going to appointments. When school was open, that added another layer of activities to their schedule. Between all that, if she didn’t have to work at the store, she was usually out on one of her side hustles.

Lately, collecting scrap metal had been paying most of their bills. Sometimes she supplemented that by collecting herbs. She had certain spots that she knew to hold ginseng year after year. The same was true for blue cohosh, witch hazel, sassafras, Solomon’s seal, and wild yam. Hunting herbs had become a lost art. Willie had learned it from her grandmother when she was a child. It still paid well for the sharp-eyed person willing to roam the steep hillsides for hours. People these days were apparently too soft and fainthearted for that type of work.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.