Many of you may have read my blog posts of excerpts from THE MOONSHINE THICKET. After two rejections, I was just notified by an agent who has read the first 50 pages. She said, “Dear Carolyn, I hope you’re having a great week so far. I enjoyed the first 50 pages of THE MOONSHINE THICKET, and I’d love to keep reading. Would you please send me the full manuscript? Thanks in advance! My best…”
Cross your fingers for me, please!
Madame Fannie Porter’s “soiled doves” give Meta, the bordello’s piano player, a gift.
“Meta,” Lillie said, her voice soft, as usual. “We have something for you, too.” She nudged Sassy Sarah.
“Sorry it’s not wrapped.” Sassy pulled the item from her lap and presented Meta with a comb carved with ivory roses.
“Kinda my idea,” Greta said, and ignored Sassy’s frown.
My girls. Their thoughtfulness overwhelmed me. They remained dry-eyed. Maybe too leather-skinned from hard lives to soften now. Some day, perhaps.
Meta shook her head as she placed the hair ornament inside the box. “Thank you,” she whispered.
“Well, missy.” Reba shook her head. “You sure picked a fine time to come to the big city.”
Meta chuckled. “A doozy.”
“I seen doozies of trouble in my day. Most is harder to pull off than ticks. Best thing? Meeting Fannie Porter. Worst? All them days before.” Reba draped a handmade amulet necklace around Meta’s neck. “For good luck.”
Meta didn’t ask what concoction Reba had put inside the amulet. Instead, she curled her fingers around the necklace then stood to hug Reba.
Reba and I had been worried about Meta after the shooting. Unlike my girls, Meta came from a simple, pleasant life. When she came to San Antone, she had seen the hardscrabble side and had proven herself a survivor.
Meta sat quietly, skimming her fingertips across the tabletop.
“What you thinking, girlie?” Reba said.
Meta let loose a wide grin and glanced at each of us. “So many secrets engrained in this wood. If only it could talk.”
“H’yaw, now.” Greta thumped Meta on the wrist. “Cain’t tell everything.”
We all cackled like a bunch of old women at a quilting bee and that image made me shiver.
excerpt from The Last Bordello
It had started off on a bad note or rather a bad sore throat. I guess I’d lived there long enough to pick up Temple germs from the Junior High. My throat hurt something awful and I thought I’d surely come down with Scarlet Fever like Delma had that time.
A kid in one of my classes told me about a doctor within walking distance from my house that I should go see. He also gave me a bible. “What’s this?”
“It’s a Bible.”
“I can see that. Why’re ye handin’ it to me?”
“Just thought you’d like ta have it, you know to read.”
“I don’t wanna take yer Bible.”
“Well, it’s not really mine. I work at the Baptist Church and I can get them anytime I want.”
“Okay then,” I said, taking the Bible he’d stolen from his church.
“I’ll pray for your throat, Cono.”
“OK,” I hoarsed out of my throat, thinking, “Yeah and praise the Lord too.”
I took him up on his advice and right after school I went straight to that doctor’s office. He told me to come back tomorrow morning and not to eat anything. So that’s what I did.
The next morning the doctor handed me two little Yellow pills and said, “Here’s your breakfast.” Then he left me in a chair that leaned back. I waited there until my head started to feel fuzzy, like I was sitting at the bottom of a well looking up towards the light of the sky.
“Cono, are you ready?” I stared up through the well and saw the long-nosed face of the man talking to me, the man in the white coat who made a little loop out of some kind of wire and pulled one, then two tonsils from the back of my throat. And, if that wasn’t bad enough, he decided that my adenoids weren’t doing me any good, so he yanked them out too. Fuzzy or not, I felt every damn bit of it.
He laid a pack of ice on my neck for a while and told me to go home and get some rest. I did. I rested for a whole week because I got sicker than a dog and not because I forgot to cover up my hiney. I got a bad fever and thought for sure I was gonna die. That’s when I picked up that Bible. I remembered Ma saying, “Cono, thar ain’t nothin’ wrong with readin’ the Bible.” Plus, I thought that if I was about to die, I might as well find out who was going to open up the Pearly Gates to let me in.
Once I got through all that “beggetting” stuff, it wasn’t a bad read. I didn’t understand much of it since there were so many people to keep up with. I got the gist of most of it though. But I was still trying to figure out why it said “an eye for an eye” one minute and “turn the other cheek” the next.
During that week, Delma came in once with a pot on her head and stared at me sober as a judge.
“Delma, ye need te get yerself a better lookin’ hat.” She laughed and left the room probably thinking she made me feel better. I guess in a way she did.
Excerpt from No Hill for a Stepper
I don’t know why, but it makes me kinda proud that Clyde’s best weapon came from the town where I was born. Bonnie and Clyde entered my life several times one way or the other before the Texas Rangers finally gunned them down.
In February 1934, right after we moved to Rotan, Bonnie and Clyde robbed the National Guard Armory in Ranger. The armory was where Clyde got his favorite weapon, an Automatic rifle. He cut off part of the barrel, got three ammo clips and welded them together so it would shoot fifty-six times without reloading. That’s why Clyde called it his scatter-gun.
Amelia Earhart was another celebrity who came through Ranger. She landed her Autogyro at the Ranger airfield in 1931. It’s a shame that she went missing just six years later and that we still can’t find her.
But for me, the real celebrities from Ranger are Ma and Pa.
I close my eyes again but it’s no use. My seat companion says, “You ain’t done yet, Cono.” Again, I give in to the nudge and open up that old cigar box of things I don’t care to see. I picture that tiny little girl sock, the one that used to be in the box of specials, the one that belonged to my kidnapped little sister.
Excerpt from No Hill for a Stepper, a story about my father
After my first attempt at sending out my latest novel, the agent’s letter came back: 
So, how many agents should I send my MS to? Am I Capable of receiving more rejection letters?
Hell, yeah, I am.
Kathryn Stockett’s book, The Help, was rejected 60 times.
Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell was rejected 38 times before it was published.
Carrie by Stephen King was rejected 30 times before it was published.
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle was rejected 26 times before it was published.
Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone was rejected 12 times and J. K. Rowling was told “not to quit her day job.”
Lord of the Flies by William Golding was rejected 20 times before it was published.
Not giving up, nope, not giving up.
‘Cause I got High Hopes (excerpt)
-music by Jimmy Van Heusen and lyrics by Sammy Cahn.
I tried to ignore the crash from upstairs—the third one now. Reba shook her head, her smile fading. “She still up there caterwauling and hurling things ’cross her room. Poor chil’ don’t never seem to get a leg back up ’fore it drops back down again.”
But Sadie Dubois was damn good at spreading them. Employed at the bordello longer than any of my other girls, Sadie brought in the most money. But last night, she had morphed into a puddle of anguish when her best friend left with Harry Longabaugh. Better known from the wanted posters as “the Sundance Kid,” he had hefted giggling Etta on the back of his mare and trotted away. “Other girls still sleeping?”
“Don’t know ’bout now, but when I went upstairs to check on things, three of them bedrooms was quiet. But that first one on the left? Phew! What a racket.”
“She’ll be fine, Reba.”
“And a hen’s gonna grow teeth. Her waters run deep. ’Sides, you knows well as me that after Sadie’s done with her conniption fit, she gonna keep spewing a pout.”
“She’ll buck up when she needs to.” Even with a sordid past, Sadie could pull a charade better than most.
Three years ago, when Sadie was seventeen, she arrived dressed as a boy during a ferocious storm, her aquamarine eyes pleading for entry. I knew then that Sadie could wear a flour sack and still be a looker—curves in all the right places, blond hair that Reba called “thick as good gravy.”
Excerpt from The Last Bordello
The virtuous Meta, misled to the wrong “boarding house,” has been offered a job. A the bordello!
Smiles, genuine and kind, surrounded me. Never in my life had I met others who so easily accepted a bookworm like myself and appreciated my talent as a pianist. I was a grown woman capable of making independent decisions. Besides, I came here to Discover a world full of new possibilities.
I swallowed my apprehension, hoping I wasn’t about to make a grave mistake. The brothel madam continued smiling, her expression framed with hope.
I unhinged the teeth biting my tongue. “Do you think we could have the piano tuned?”
From The Last Bordello.
“A cigar box alone may have no meaning, but the Treasures inside tell a story.”
I go to bed real happy. It had been a real good honest day’s work. We’d sold three dollars and twenty cents worth of those little seed packets and after tomorrow’s sell day I know I’m just one step closer to having me a brand new geetar.
I wrap my money in a dish towel and stuff, tie it up with a string and put it in my box of specials hidden under my bed. Nothing like an honest day’s work to make a feller wore out. I put my head on my pillow and go straight to sleep, out like Lottie’s eye.
The first thing I do next morning after waking up is pull out my cigar box. My other specials are in there; my Devils Claw, toothbrush, Tiger, my pocket knife, my piece of boxing glove lace, my penny from Uncle Will. But my dishtowel of money isn’t there. I leave my room and find Aunt Nolie sitting at the kitchen table eating a biscuit.
“It’s gone!” I say.
“What’s gone, Cono?”
“All my money’s gone. It ain’t where I put it!”
Excerpt from No Hill for a Stepper
Madam Fannie Porter stares at fear. (From The Last Bordello)
I reminded my fingers to turn the knob slowly, quietly. I crept through the kitchen’s side door and held my breath.
A voice in the parlor. Not one of my girls. I tiptoed into my bedroom and made my way to the far wall. Wiped my sweaty, shaky hands on my dress. Removed the painting.
Only Reba and I knew about the coin-sized peephole Constructed long ago for keeping an eye on questionable customers. Exactly my eye level, as intended.
The voices would be clearer now. I inched the cork from the hole. Fighting for breath, I peered through the hole and into the parlor.
From The Last Bordello: In Madam Fannie’s voice, she and her “girls,”and Meta – who was misled to the bordello – must wait out a storm in the crawl space under the stairs.
I shifted my knees, trying to get comfortable. “Girls, if this is the worst that’s ever happened to you, I’d say you’ve lived a fine and easy life.” I knew better, of course.
“Etta’s leaving is much worse,” Sadie said, her hands shaking.
“Horsefeathers.” Lillie tucked her head between her knees and mumbled, “Worse is saying good-bye to your betrothed.”
“Carver will be back,” Sadie retorted. “Etta won’t.”
True. I couldn’t see Etta returning, which made it worse for Sadie. She and Etta had been as close as silk on a corncob.
I made note to speak privately to Sadie and the others. Under no circumstances were any of my fallen angels allowed to mention the names of the Wild Bunch or Etta’s connection with the gang.
Meta had Faded into the wall, her owl stare flickering in the lantern’s light. No doubt, she didn’t expect to spend her first night in San Antonio stuck in a bordello’s crawl space.
Carolyn Dennis-Willingham 