John Denney

The Mill Book 1 John Denney

Chapter One The sky was a bright blue, and there was not a cloud to be seen anywhere. A soft warm southerly breeze was blowing. I paused in my labors to look around. The hills were sprinkled with the bloom of Rhododendrons, pinks, and purple with a scattering of white. There were the deeper pinks mountain Laurel; mixed with an abundance of wild flowers of every variety. It was a fine day! A soft warm southerly breeze brought the aroma of fresh baked bread, blend¬ed with the cherry and hickory from the fire where Paw was clearing stumps for a corn field for next year, and the unmistakable pleasing smell of honeysuckle. I could see a thin trace of smoke from the fire where he was burning brush and logs on top of the stumps. I William Lee Staulworth was a man by some folk's standards, for I was big for my age. I was used to good hard work and it had filled me out all over. I stood five feet and ten inches tall in my bare feet, and weighted around one hundred and sixty pounds. With brown sandy colored hair that hung to my shoulders, and slate blue-green eyes. Paw always said, "I would be a big man and stand well over six feet tall". He said, "six feet and over ran strong in our family". I will be sixteen next spring, on the fifth day of April, 1734. I had been mowing hay with a mowing scythe in the north bottom since just after sun rise this morning. Paw and his older brother Obadiah had cleared this bottom two years ago. Now there was a good stand of grass growing on it, and it would take all the hay we could put up, to winter feed two milk cows and Paw's team of horses. We had moved into this little valley up in the blue hills of Virginia two years ago, after Paw's father had died. We buried him down by the mouth of what some folks called Cherry creek, under a huge oak tree. That's where we had buried Paw's Mother a few years earlier. She died from the Small Pox epidemic in the spring of 1731, which ran rampart from New Orleans to Boston. Some folks had called it, "Th