Lucky Red by Claudia Cravens EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Authors: Claudia Cravens
- Language: English
- Genre: Women’s Historical Fiction
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
Some years ago, in Dodge, I was a sporting woman. This was before I
took up my current trade, back when the prairie ran with cattle like a
river runs with fish. It’s different now, of course, but then, so am I. I didn’t
mind whoring—it can be good work in the right house—but it demands a
great deal of keeping still, and I’m one of those itchy, fidgety sorts who’s
always looking out the window or glancing toward the door, so it was only a
matter of time until I had to move on. Most rambling types like to act as if
they just woke up one morning and lit out, turning their backs to all and
sundry, but this is just good storytelling. The truth is that making your own
way happens piecemeal, like a baby who scoots, then crawls, then eventually
toddles her way right out the cabin door where she’s as likely to be snatched
up by coyotes as she is to seek her fortune; either way, once she gets loose,
there’ll be no getting her back. All of which is to say that though I ended up a
pretty girl in boy’s clothes, mounted like a woman and armed like a man, I
started much smaller and simpler, and mostly alone.
Before I was a whore in Kansas, I was a poor drunkard’s daughter in
Arkansas. My pa wasn’t a bad man, but it was far too easy for circumstances
to get the upper hand on him. He called himself unlucky, but the losing hands
dealt him were too frequent and too numerous to be mere turns of fate. I will
admit that at times, events truly were beyond his control: first Ma died having
me, then came the Brothers War, then he was on the losing side, and then he
lost what was left of the farm to nursing his broken heart. But there were
other misadventures that showed me, if not him, that there’s more to this life
than luck, even bad luck.
First there were the mustangs, which he bought cheap and wild but lacked
the will to break and was forced to sell off cheaper and wilder. Then the
sheep flock, whose feed he let rot so they all went mad when they ate it.
When we finally had to slaughter them, the screaming clatter of blood and
terror seemed to thrust him back to some Virginian hellscape, for halfway
through he threw aside his knife and shot the rest as fast as he could. In
between, there were crates of plow-blades that wouldn’t hold an edge, barrels
of discarded horseshoes, bales of kinked wire, all manner of flotsam that
somehow always cost more than it made. He told himself he was getting by
on his wits, when most of the time it was my willingness to scrub linens, tote
water, and muck out horse barns that kept our souls inside of our bodies.
For More Read Download This Book
EPUB