Chapter 1: Hazel Valley

 

     "Morning rounds, Pop?" queries James Reed from the top of the stairs as his father shuffles for the door of their log house nestled into a cool hollow on the southern slope of the Boston Mountains. 

"You know what they say about the early bird," Benjamin calls back in the orange glow from the hearth where he had just stoked the fire against the chill of an autumn morning.

"You got that worm long ago," the son laughs as he tosses a walking stick to the old man. 

     The Reeds had settled onto an ideal eighty acres four years ago upon emerging from the Ozarks on the Old Southwest Trail. The lower acreage of short-grass prairie along a clear creek lined by cottonwoods would grow the corn they needed for animals and food, with a little left over for the family recipe. The sloped back forty were graced by an oak and hickory forest that would feed the fires for James's smithy and Benjamin's still. 

     The father was now seventy-seven years old with a stoop to his walk from the anterior head carriage of his youthful winters of near starvation in Virginia's Tazewell settlement. Benny's gait, though, was still vigorous after his middle years of plenty on the Licking River in Kentucky. 

     The only remnants of his red-headedness were a small patch in his otherwise gray beard and a hazel eye that only he thought of as the namesake for the valley below their Arkansas land. Like the old dog he was, Benjamin was up and out at dawn to see what the nighttime brought down from the hills above Hazel Valley.

     "Stop moving and start dying," Benny cautions as he reaches for the brass handle of the newfangled metal latch they had just gotten from the trading post at Cane Hill.

"Sure do appreciate you firing up the smithy, Pop, but we've enough of the clear and the char to last the winter so no need to stir that pot."

"Never you mind, Jim. I'm heading up to see old man Whitaker today."