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The Homesteads
Chapter 1
The truck bounced and rocked its way over the ruts in the road until Lacey’s teeth ached and she felt bruised from head to toe. That morning they had packed everything they owned onto the back of Oliver Perry’s flatbed truck and headed out. Now it was coming on near dark and she was weary to the bone. Carefully she lifted the canvas and peeked out at the bleak landscape. Fallen tree trunks lay strewn about like dead soldiers on the battlefield. The roads had only recently been bulldozed out of the woods and no gravel had been put on them. She had not been accustomed to a lot of beauty in her life, but the sight of such a raw pathway gouged into the forest left her feeling desolate. Dust swirled around so thick it covered every blackberry bush and Queen Anne’s lace by the side of the road until she could hardly tell one from the other. Daniel Lee lay sleeping peacefully in her lap and she pulled the thin blanket up around his face. She searched the horizon for lights from a neighboring house. She could see none. They had left the town of Crossville four miles back.
Lacey could just make out the shape of a barn up ahead. She remembered the day her husband John had come home to say he had found work. They had been living for six months with John’s Uncle Felix in Monterey. Lacey knew they had killed nearly all their chickens and used most of their canned goods to feed them. She hated being a burden to them but you couldn’t turn family away. It was up to them to move on. That was why she was so relieved when John had found work.
Work was hard to come by for most folks nowadays. John sometimes read the newspaper to her after supper and it told of suffering all over America. Folks were without work and some were homeless and starving. Many of these people were like John and had been in unions but now the factories and mines had closed or worked scabs for a fraction of the wages they had once earned.
The government had bought 10,000 acres of woodland near Crossville, Tennessee and they needed men to clear it. They were going to divide it up into farms and then let the men buy the farms. John was to get fifty cents an hour. Two-thirds of that would be credited toward buying one of those farms. John had explained to her that this was a way the government had of putting coal miners and sawmill workers and other folks who were up against hard times to work.
The truck stopped with a jolt and John jumped from the cab to take the baby and help her down. His mother Cora and Lacey’s eleven-year-old brother Ben had moved with them and slowly they worked their way from beneath the canvas. They stood looking around, blinking their eyes and stretching their stiff limbs.
John and Oliver Perry started immediately to unload the truck. It took only a few minutes before their meager possessions were on the ground and the truck with Oliver Perry driving pulled away leaving them there. Lacey waved until the truck was out of sight. She felt like she had been brought to the ends of the earth and dropped off. Finally, she turned to John and smiled bravely. He took her by the hand and led her inside the barn...
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