A Bride For The Asking -- (on hold)

Chapter 3--The Letter

Chapter 3--The Letter

"Here’s the last sack, Rose," grunted Aunt Mary, dragging the sack across the porch one-handed.

Their mule, His Highness—as Aunt Mary called him—stood patiently for once. Rose took a chance, and dropped his reins, and ran to help her aunt.

"I told you I’d get that, Aunt Mary. Mr. Johnson’s told you not to be jostling that arm. At her feet, Shadow danced excitedly. The dog loved to ride in the wagon. The plethora of strange scents along with the change of scenery kept the dog’s nose sniffing and his tail wagging the entire trip.

"You reckon we ought to take those spools of thread, too?" Aunt Mary questioned from the porch, holding her broken left arm protectively with her right. Tugging the heavy sack of laundry had set it to aching again, but was determined to help Rose as much as she could.

It had been such a stupid accident, and couldn’t have come at a worse time, with a wagon-load of sheets from the hotel in the back of the wagon to do. Her shoes caked with red Georgia clay, she’d slipped on the edge of the mud-coated wagon wheel trying to step up on the wagon and fell backwards in the middle of the muddy street, a quagmire of late February-soaked clay.

Thank goodness, Ben Johnson, the blacksmith, had seen her fall and came to the rescue, setting her arm for free. That was five weeks ago. Thank goodness for Rose, too. She had single-handedly hauled the water, for all the mountains of sheets, and this latest load was ready to take back.

The laundry should have been delivered two days ago, but March had not gone out like the traditional lamb, but instead, went kicking and screaming, dragging soaking rains they didn’t need down upon their heads along with it‘s stormy exit. The wagon track was bad enough in the best weather. Mary silently prayed it hadn’t eroded more since those rains and made it nearly impassable.

"Well, winter’s almost gone." Rose wrinkled her freckled forehead in thought a moment while she pondered whether it was worth it or not to take the bag of homespun thread they had been working on for the last week with them to trade or sell.

" I don’t know if anybody’d be wanting any more. Everybody’s running out of everything. I don’t know if they’ll have anything to even trade us for it, but I don’t reckon it’d hurt to take it along. Lucy Bridgers said women have been using it to make crocheted lace to sell in Savannah. Ain‘t many women can afford silk anymore."

Rose picked up the heavy sack of laundry, and staggered to the wagon with it, rolling it over the side of the buckboard. Truth to tell, she’d be glad to see the last of that thread. It made her back ache every time she even thought of the heart-breaking work of walking those destroyed fields picking cotton that had came up volunteer last year, where once her father’d had cotton planted as far as the eye could see.

How anything had survived Sherman’s March to the Sea, had been a miracle she and Aunt Mary had been grateful for when they’d seen those cotton bolls open last fall amidst the ravaged fields of waist-high weeds.

Working like the slaves her parents had once owned, they had gathered those bolls. They had picked it. Carded it. Spun it into thread. They peddled it while either picking up laundry or delivering it. The few pennies they got for the thread, or traded for food, candle stubs they could melt down to make more, lard to make soap, or other items people had to trade helped get meager scraps of meat, or soup bones from Isaac Snodgrass, the kind old Jew who had bought Griffin‘s General store and added a butcher shop onto the side of his store.

He had traded them the meat scraps for their home-spun thread, which his wife Esther hand-dyed, and used to make beautiful embroidered shawls and baby bonnets to sell to those fortunate few who could afford them. Between selling their thread, and doing the laundry of those better off than themselves, they had survived the winter.