Part 5: Poppy of the Painted Wagon

Poppy weren’t born into stillness.
She came into this world like lightning — bright, loud, and too magical to hold in your bare hands. A girl who believed in every spark of wonder life ever offered, from dandelion fluff to the way a river answers your thoughts if you sit quiet enough.
She’d give her heart clean away without checkin’ the temperature first. A generosity that could warm a holler through winter… but also a thing that left folks wantin’ to scoop her up and hug her till her ribs squeaked.
Now don’t you do it.
Not unless she says.
Poppy’s the kind that stiffens if you rush her — like somebody tryin’ to stake down a wild bird before she’s ready.
But plants?
Plants settle her.
Dirt under her nails turns her into a stone in the riverbed, steady and sure. She swears one day she’ll build a garden big enough to root her — but her feet got trails left to wander.
And she don’t wander alone.

Cypress, her wolf
Not a pet.
Not even a companion.
He’s her heart’s other half, wrapped in fur and old stories. She saved him as a pup, trembling and orphaned. Since then he’s guarded her like a howl guards the moon.

Ash, her best friend
Honey, he’s got sass enough to split a red oak.
He talks pure holler — sharp, funny, honest — but dresses like he robbed a Broadway wardrobe trunk. He’s the kind of friend who keeps your crown straight, even when the world tries to tilt it. Folks say they’re like siblings forged in a storm.

Together they travel in a rainbow-painted wagon that jingles with charms, beads, bones, and secrets. When Poppy looks into a person’s eyes, their truth rolls out like butter on a hot biscuit, smooth and unavoidable.
But the part she never speaks of — not even to Ash — is her bloodline.
Poppy is the daughter of Pocahontas “Pokey” Hale, the Cherokee woman who ran that infamous State Street brothel in Bristol — the one sittin’ right on the line between Tennessee and Virginia. Pokey was a protector of women and a terror to the wrong kind of man.
When her brothel burned, folks thought everything inside perished…
but they didn’t know that a baby girl had been carried out through the smoke by Cherokee aunties and raised in the mountains.
They didn’t know that child lived.
And they sure didn’t know she grew up wild and wondrous, renamed and hidden from the past.
They didn’t know she became Poppy.
But Sugar Holler did.
The land always knows its own.
So when her wagon rolled into Enna Mae’s clearing under a full moon, even the trees held their breath.
And that’s right when the stranger arrived.

Part 6 : The Stranger Who Knew Her Name
He rode up the ridge quiet as frost.
Dark coat, dusted boots, hat pulled low enough you couldn’t see his eyes. Cypress growled low. Ash put one hand to his hip. Enna Mae didn’t blink — just tapped that washtub drum like she was testin’ the air.
The stranger never looked at nobody but Poppy.
Then he said it —
a name that didn’t belong to the life she’d chosen.
“I’ve come for you, Inola.”
That word cracked the holler open like a thunderclap on a clear night.
Poppy froze.
Inola.
Little Black Fox.
Her mama’s name for her.
The one she’d buried long ago with memories that still tasted like smoke.
Ash whispered, “Pop… who’s he think he is?”
But Poppy didn’t answer — she couldn’t.
Cypress stepped forward, teeth glintin’, growl deep enough to shake pine needles loose.
Enna Mae, calm as a Sunday morning, lifted her chin.
“Son, we don’t call a woman by her buried name ‘less she gives it. Mind yourself.”
But the stranger stood his ground, voice low and steady.
“Inola,” he said again, “your mother wanted you to have this.”
He reached into his coat and laid a small cloth bundle between them, tied with red thread. Didn’t push it on her. Just set it gentle on the earth like it belonged there.
Then he turned his horse and rode off without another word.
When the dust settled, Poppy knelt and unwrapped the cloth.
Inside was a tiny silver fox brooch
— her mother’s.
The very one Pocahontas Hale was said to wear close to her heart the night the brothel burned.
Her voice shook like wind through dead leaves.
“Enna Mae… this was my mama’s.”
The old healer rested a hand on her shoulder.
“Then sit, child. The past ain’t finished speakin’.
And that name you ran from?
It’s comin’ home.”
And that’s where we leave it.
Right there.
On the knife-edge between who Poppy is…
and who Inola might rise to be.