Toolbox Tales Issue 2: Boilers and Hounds

By E Ailemar

In a different 1914, in a different American South Maggie Irving is learning what it means to be a mechanic, to fix things. She’s staying for a spell at the hotel where her uncle works and starting to learn about herself.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Jun 17, 2014
• ISBN: 9781312306042

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Toolbox Tales Issue 2: Boilers and Hounds

Issue 2: Boilers and Hounds

Toolbox Tales

By: E. Ailemar

© 2014 Ellie Ailemar

Illustration © 2014 by Anna Rosenfeld.

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-312--30604-2

Lulu.com

Issue 2: Boilers and Hounds

Maggie had been walking three days and two nights and had nothing to eat but kudzu and collected dew on the leaves.  The first day had been alright, the second her stomach started to pinch.  Now, she had started toward real hunger.  The box only getting progressively heavier in her arms, and her feet beginning to ache from all the running, until she reckoned she could feel her heel bone complaining at her with every step.  She’d stuck to the woods, afraid if she was on the road some overly helpful town folk would bring her in, or someone would mention seeing her and do more harm than they meant to, but harm none the less.  She had lived in the shadow of the Haversends’ plantation her whole life, the way the Haversends had always been in charge of everything.  Grew up with the good folks there and she wasn’t going to drag a single one of them into the mess her family had stumbled into.  It was rotten luck she and her Daddy had discovered the mechanical Crows the Haversends had made dangerous, but they had discovered it.  And it was too late to un-discover it now.  But she wasn’t a fool.  Who was going to listen to a little colored girl over some big white plantation owner? No, she’d have to be smart about who she told if she wanted to accomplish anything with the information.  What she could accomplish she didn’t know, but it didn’t seem right to sit on what she’d seen inside that Crow.  The way the mechanisms had been changed to make them attack people.

She knew Daddy had to go home, even knowing that Mr. Haversend’s boys were there already. That Daddy couldn’t go with her after seeing that big fancy car hidden around the back, or maybe because of it.  Because Mama was his one and only and he couldn’t leave his very best love.  Maggie had liked that Daddy wouldn’t leave Mama, but just as much she hated that they were far off and she didn’t know what had happened to them.  All she knew she had to do was keep moving, she wasn’t sure how long and Virginia wouldn’t get any closer by her wishing for it.  Her only advantage was her own head start and that their focus would likely stay on Haversend land for the first while.  It was clear enough Virginia was too far to run toward, she was going to have to get to her Uncle Joshua another way.  Daddy was sure Uncle Joshua would take her in, and she couldn’t doubt it, couldn’t let herself doubt for a second.

There were four ways to get to Virginia.  She lined each way up in her mind, easy as you please to consider.  First, she could walk, she had two feet still, same as she had before, she could put them on the ground and just push right along.  But, it would near take her a year to walk it with mountains to cross.  She hadn’t any money and nothing real reliable to eat until the mulberries came in and even then.  Second, she could find a way to hitch a ride, ride on the back of wagons all the way to the hotel where Uncle Joshua worked.  But she’d end up with Daddy’s tools stolen and her dead in a ditch somewhere like as anything.  Or she might could try finding a train car to jump up into, only problem with that were the bums that might have already had the