My novella set among the isolated people of the Taconic Hills a century ago has been published in Kindle and paperback editions:
Running Wild Novella Anthology, Volume 4 Book 1: Wright, Peter: 9781947041820: Amazon.com: Books
The story is narrated by Tom Ryan, a young man radicalized by the 1912 textile strike in Little Falls who comes to New York City in flight from World War I conscription. Falling in with the anarchist firebrand Carlo Tresca and the future Communist Party leader Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, he is recruited to organize workers in upstate Stottville. Fleeing a bogus murder charge only days after he arrives, Tom finds refuge in the long isolated community known to local historians as the Taghanic Basketmakers or Pondshiners.
The story takes a turn when Tom meets a daughter of that community, only recently ravaged by the misnamed Spanish Flu pandemic of 1917-19. An excerpt from that encounter follows:
I hardly remember
stumbling into a lake and then climbing up a hillside full of trees and after
that I must have passed out. I saw a girl with a bow and arrow, and thought I
was dreaming.
I have no clear
recollection until the next day. I was under a rough blanket and could hear the
sound of birds. Opening my eyes, I saw that I was in a room with walls that
looked to be made of mud and sticks. The iron pots hanging from the walls
looked about a hundred years old. Then I noticed a little girl, no more than
seven or eight, in a raggedy dress. She jumped up in a fright when she saw I
was awake and ran out through the canvas flap that served as a door. A minute
the later the older girl, who might have been sixteen, the one I had seen in
the forest, poked her head into the room and said something in a blurry sort of
voice. “I'm sorry,” I said. “What did you say?”
She came a few feet
farther into the hut. I could see that the smaller girl held her hand and was
trying to pull her back out of sight.
“Are you still feelin' peaked?” she repeated.
“No, I'm all right, thank
you.”
The two girls so closely
resembled each other that I was sure they were sisters, although the older was
dark as a Sicilian and the younger light as a Dutch girl. With her long,
straight black hair, the older one reminded me of a picture of Pocahontas I'd seen in a schoolbook.
When she didn't reply, I added, “Thank you
for taking care of me. I guess I was pretty sick when you found me.”
The older girl nodded. “You hungry now?”
“Sure,” I told her, and she vanished. A few
minutes later she came back and handed me a wooden bowl. I tried a mouthful of
a kind of stew, which was about the gamiest stuff I'd ever tasted, but I was so
hungry I took another spoonful. “Pretty good,” I lied. “What's in it?”
“That there's some fine squirrel meat and
healing roots I gathered special.” She relaxed enough to sit down on a wooden
stool. “That'll bring ye back to yourself.”
“Well, I thank you for it,” I said, forcing
myself to keep eating. “You've been very kind.”
She blushed at that, and put her face down.
Wanting to keep her talking, I asked her, “Did I really see you with a bow and
arrow or was I dreaming?”
That brought a shy smile to her face, but
she quickly looked away. “I'm the best hand at a bow of any woman on the hill,”
she said in a very serious voice. “I took down that squirrel you're eatin' this
very morn.”
“Of any woman? Are there other women who use
a bow and arrow?”
I was wondering if I had
stumbled into Sherwood Forest and she was Maid Marian.
“Them's our ways up here, not that I 'spect
you to know that. We gals are the only ones 'lowed to touch a bow and it's on
us to catch squirrels for the pot. Or bunnies if we see one. A'course, it's
only the men 'lowed to take down deers 'cause they have their guns but there's
never any deers, not for years, anyways.”
As I was trying to figure this all out, she
asked me “How come you's meandering on the hill, anyways? You from the hotel?”
“Hotel?”
“From the hotel down on Lake Charlotte.
Lots of city folk been comin' there of late and it'd not be strange if you'd
got yourself lost in the woods.”
“No, I don't know about any hotel. I was
just...”
“Then there's no place you got to be goin'
in a hurry?”
“No, for a fact, there isn't.”
“Good, that's good.” She stood up. “Ye
needs to rest now. If ye need a thing, call out and my lil sis'll get it for
ye. Her name's Mary.”
To read the entire story and those of my fellow novella writers, order the book by clicking on the link at the top of this page.
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