CHAPTER ONE
On this day of stifling air, when just a few clouds were hung in the distant sky, in ghostly puffs and spires, the uncontrolled jungles of growth along Beacon Trail Avenue looked beaten and submissive. On the property that once had belonged to a wealthy family named Morris, but now was lived upon by a woman who was named Nicole Pearson, there waited an aging pony. Because of anticipated toil in the blistering sun, it hung its head, weak, and surly, trapped in heavy harness, before a lumbering wagon, with a galvanized water tank in the bed. Unsympathetic Nicole wielded a switch that the diminutive pony knew well. It hunkered down, dreading the whipping it fully expected to endure. For, Nicole sometimes applied the biting lash across its shoulders with unprovoked viciousness. Today, such a beating did not right away come. Those aching legs finally moved when the human took a firm hand to the harness and led it on the path to the river.
For almost the entire quarter-mile, Nicole did most of the pony's work, hauling an arm-wrenching, backbreaking, load up a long grade. At the riverbank, she undid the harness and tethered the pony in some belly-high grass, where it could graze, while she performed the daily tasks of filling the water tank and taking a spell of digging in a pipeline ditch that one day would send the water straight to her property.
As Nicole poured the water into the tank, a gallon at a time, she daydreamed of unlimited quantities of the life-giving liquid, coursing freely through the pipes she planned to lay. When that day came, she would set loose the pony, forever, by way of celebration. From that time forward, it would not bear another burden for the rest of its natural life.
The digging was the tough part, but, once she cleared the high bank, the rest of the pipe would lay above ground. She chopped away at the hard earth with a shovel, because she could not manage the pick lying to the side in the grass. Nicole was aggressive, tromping on the shovel with one, or sometimes both feet, stomping it again and again, and getting rewarded each time with small chunks breaking loose. After thirty minutes of intensive labor, she retired. Exhausted, sweating, she leaned upon the handle and contemplated her overall progress. She estimated it would take another six months to complete the project, from the river to home. Time now to bathe.
Nicole removed her clothing and gingerly stepped down the bank into the cold, refreshing, stream.
Splashing about in the calm backwater, she looked
upriver, never tiring of watching the roiling water burst upon rocks and suddenly become still as a mirror, passing her little backwater. The smooth expanse carried on, perhaps thirty miles, to the sea. This river was her sole connection to the mystic side of living, the only inspiration that stirred her soul, for it was a poetry of God or nature; the one experience that truly put Nicole at peace.
She sometimes spent half the day like this, daydreaming, enjoying the break from a cruel, relentless, sun. Eventually, she slipped out of the water and dried herself with a thick towel. She pulled on her shorts and tee shirt. Ready to go home, she harnessed the petulant pony.
It put up a token resistance but quickly resigned itself to its moment of slavery with the wagon, for its daily labor soon would be over.
Nicole lightly brought her lash across the struggling beast's shoulders for being too slow to suit her, when, by chance, she glanced up the river. To her surprise, there was suddenly a long narrow skiff moving toward her in the swift current. The skiff was a murky colored work, exhibiting years of no maintenance. Two unruly antennae-like arms waved from it and a man's croaking attempt to shout could be heard.
