Marjorie Driggs’

blood red peonies
Marjorie Driggs was a Jenkins. Where she got them red peonies, no one knows. Seemed like she never spent enough time home to raise no flowers. But these red peonies, so red, mm-mm.
Just down the hill from her house, the big sandstone blocks of the bridge ends was there and then the county didn’t put up no bridge. Mr. Driggs was a drinker so he rigged up a dutchman’s bucket, that washtub contraption you stand in and pulley yourself across Federal Creek. That was his shortcut.
But being a drunk, people figure he beats on her. Story goes that she arranges with her brother to come for her and her things. The brother leaves the buckboard down the road and makes his way through the corn Mr. Driggs grows almost up to the house.
The moment he steps into sight, Mr. Driggs shoots him dead in the chest with a shotgun.
Marjorie runs to the dutchman’s bucket and starts to pull herself across. She’s hit. In the buttocks. Blood drips through the cracks in the tub. She never came back.
Then other people say she didn’t have no flowers except those red peonies because she was running around. You just never know.