The Willow Tree

Chapter 1

My face hits the hard ground after being shoved from behind. My mouth is filled with the metallic taste of mud. I turn, but I know who pushed me. Dylan Scott stares down at me, snarling. I feel weak and helpless, the same way I feel about so many things, unprepared and uneducated, about the depression, the death of my parents.

"Hey, sweetheart?" Dylan speaks, his voice dripping with sarcasm.

"What?" I spit back with as much force as I can muster.

"You've got a bit of mud on your face..."

I wish I could do something to get revenge, but as always, I have to sit there, ignoring the taunts.

"Get out of here, Dylan"

I see someone come out of the corner of my eye.

"Oh, so Sawyer thinks he is so tough now, do you?" Dylan says snidely.

"Really Dylan? You're picking on a tiny 13-year-old, you think you're tough?"

Sawyer is my older brother. He has dark swirly hair and small doe eyes, two traits that once belonged to our mother. I got my father's dirty blond hair and large brown eyes, but both our parents both died when Sawyer was nine and I was was a mere six. My father died working in the coal mines, and my mother died of grief two weeks later.

Now we live alone on the small farm my parents rented when they got married, way back in 1917 when things were good and the great depression hadn't started yet. Now it is 1933 and we have no food and no money. Just a small wood house next to a simple farm that we sold long ago.

Sawyer is clearly not happy with me. "What were you doing having a pushing match with Dylan Scott?" 

"H-he started it" I stammer.

 "Now you sound like a whining seven-year-old. Willow! You have to control yourself."

 I wince at the harsh sound of his anger. I know he is feeling pressure to sell the house just like we sold the farm, the cow, and the pigs. If we sell the house we will have nothing but the little money they pay, money that will only buy a month or two of food.

I live in a small town in the poor as the mud I ate for breakfast. Small wooden cottages are scattered in between small clusters of trees, with one church in the center. We have never gone to that church, we went that day my parents died, and they bring us food once a week, but we aren't very religious. I have never felt lonely but I don't have a single friend, I guess it's hard to be lonely when you are fighting for your life.

I only have bits of my parents, as a small collage of happy memories, I remember her smile. My mother's smile like a tiny ray of sunshine, the whole room seemed to stand a little bit taller, a little bit straighter, a little bit braver. I can recall my father's laugh, a bright one that always made you laugh too. I keep those thoughts close when I start to feel like nothing will ever be right.

The only way Sawyer and I can live is from our 'jobs' Sawyer helps rich people tend farms clearing trees and plowing land. I spend all my free time doing embroidery on old tablecloths cut into handkerchiefs that I sell at the market for a few pennies each. I'm working on one right now with small purple violets and my mark a small willow tree. I finish my last tiny stitch and place it in a small sack with 12 others. Slowly I trek to the market, not the market where I would ever buy anything but the rich market where people aren't hurting and working for that night's dinner.

I lay out a 3 by 3-foot square tarp and neatly organize my art in a spiral pattern. After about hour with very little business, an elderly woman with a light blue paisley dress walks over to me. I can tell she will be a customer. When she reaches my tarp she slowly examins my work, I hold my breath.

"These are beautiful, you make these?" she speaks in a heavy accent dripping sweet with sugar-not sarcasm.

"Yes ma'am, do you enjoy looking at them?"

I speak most politely as to not scare away my sales.

"I will buy all of them," she says fingering a yellow pansy, she presses seven cool coins into the palm of my hand. I scramble to make the change she needs until she stops me with her hand and says,

"Keep the extra, please. But will you be here next week? I want to show my daughter."

I clutch all the coins I had earned close to my chest. We will eat better tonight than we have in months, as I expected sawyer is not home when I get back I walk to the local store and use my money to buy cornmeal, a roll of embroidery floss, some carrots, and as a treat a bag of six small potatoes. I get home and start to boil some water and I go outside to pull up a few onions from a garden in our front yard.

Sawyer gets home tired hungry and not expecting any food, he is surprised but happy to see a warm stew.

We both go to bed in our small rooms, not full but not hungry.