Adventure Novel Chapter 1
Okay, well, I found out that the contest that I was writing this for does not allow Sci-fi/Fantasy...so I might re-write it to take that part out or writes something else.
Chapter 1: Bayella Returns to Crescentville
Bayella leaned on her elbow as she looked out the window. On the small table before her were a number of papers-her writing-which she had abandoned in favor of watching the scenery fly by.
“Miss, please do not lean so hard on the tray table,” said a passing attendant. “Oh, and ticket please?”
“Of course,” she said, reaching for her bag. She handed him the ticket and leaned back in her chair. The man punched the last space available on her ticket and handed it back to her. Bayella accepted her hole filled ticket and slipped it back into her bag, followed by her neatly stacked papers. She turned back to the scenery, this time her elbow resting on the arm rest.
So, Granddad Barnaby was dead.
Well, at least she knew about it this time. After all, the last time something like this had happened, she had come home to surprise her parents only to find out one of them was dead.
“Where have you been!” her mother snarled. Bayella explained that she had fallen on hard times and had to give a lot of things to keep going. Like the phone and a computer. She explained that she had written it all in a letter and mailed it to her parents, and had written several more after that. Her mother had calmed down a little after that, such that she only frowned at Bayella instead of screaming. “You’re father’s dead,” she reported after Bay had finished her story.
Bayella felt more ridiculous than sad after hearing about her father’s passing. After all, it was a surprise that he made it into his fifties, what with his heart conditions and all the smoking he did and cholesterol he had. Bay felt ridiculous because she had brought him grilling supplies, and she had no idea how to address the new man sitting in her father’s arm chair. It was a fairly short visit after that. She visited her father’s grave, and collected the things her mother no longer wanted, including some of the things Granddad Barnaby had passed on to her dad.
“For the life of me, I don’t know why Kenny kept them all these years,” her mother said. “He did everything to get away from the Barnaby place. That’s why he joined up.” Bayella had heard that story before. Too many times, actually. But she respected Granddad’s stuff. It was because of him that she was still floating in the sea of finances after dropping out of school unable to afford the tuition. The only thing she had been able to keep was the typewriter her grandfather had given her.
She had tried to sell it the first chance she got. Bay had been desperate at the time, and needed rent money after being laid off at her waiting job. But the pawn shop owner had just scratched his head.
“I’m not sure what this is, but it’s probably not going to be worth anything for me to buy it,” he said. “You say your grandfather gave this to you? Must be an eccentric guy. The thing’s an original. He probably built it himself.” Eccentric was right, especially considering the surprise visit came from a letter telling her to go visit her parents, Bay thought. He could have just told her that her father was dead. That he been dead for over six month by the time Bay had managed to plan a trip.
But that typewriter it had saved her. When she walked out of the pawn shop, she saw a sign in the window of a local newspaper. “Reviewer wanted.”
“College dropout, huh?” the man interviewing her asked. Bay had gone right in, and so she still held the typewriter in her lap. “Is that all you’ve got to write on?”
“Money was kind of the reason I dropped out of school,” she replied with a shrug. The man shrugged back,
“It’s better than by hand I suppose. That’s how some of our reporters get their stories. We’re going to have to stop dealing with it in a little while; the bigger paper we’re out of doesn’t like it. Anyway, you’d be reviewing books. It’ll probably be local, and I’ll need to see some writing samples from you. Have you ever done a review?”
“Nothing official,” she replied. “But I did a lot of creative non-fiction in school.” The man shrugged again.
“Well, I’ll be honest with you: we don’t have a lot of people knocking down our door for this job. We’ve had that thing posted for two months and no takers. Get me a writing sample, and if I like it, we’ll go from there.”
She brought him back a review of a film she had done for a class, and he handed her a stack of books to be released soon. “Read them, and write them up. We’ll pay you on a commission basis at first and if you’re good, we can talk about salary later. By the way, do you take that everywhere?” The typewriter, which was small enough to travel with, still hung over her shoulder in its case.
“Now I do,” she replied. Bay read and reviewed a book a day for two weeks. The editor, her boss now, accepted everyone with minor revisions, and gave her five fifty dollar bills for her trouble, and more books. Bayella kept writing, and she kept getting paid. The larger paper picked up her reviews and asked her to expand her section to movies and other entertainment as well.
Granddad had saved her from a potentially bad situation. She had written him to thank him for it, and he wrote back asking what had happened to her stories. That was why he gave her the typewriter.
Bayella thought back to that day. They had just come back from Dad’s assignment overseas, and Granddad had found out, somehow, that Dad would be passing through Crescentville. Dad would not have stayed at Granddad’s for anything, but the car broke down a mile before they could make the turn away from Crescentville to go around it. Dad had scowled and walked the mile to the town to get a tow. A very nice man drove them all the way to Granddad’s house and helped them unload their things before he took the car to the local garage.
Granddad, she remembered, smelled a little funny, but the house was nice. She got her own room, and her own things to play with. She usually had to share with Michaela who hogged everything. Dad tried to keep them away from Granddad as much as he could by taking them places in an old truck where she was squeezed between Michaela and Cole. But one night, she had not been able to sleep, so she got up to fix herself a glass of warm milk, and that’s when she heard him tinkering.
The work shop smelled of oil and sawdust, and like Granddad.
“What are you doing up, Angel?” he asked.
“I was just going to get some milk,” she said, climbing up onto a stool. For some reason, Granddad had not scared her like most old people did. He even scared her less than Dad did. “What’re you making?”
“A word machine,” he said. “You punch the buttons and you can make words.” She was six then, and knew it was called a typewriter, but she liked word machine better.
“I like making stories,” she told him.
“Do you? Well, you’ll need lots of words to do that.” He handed the type writer to her. It was cumbersome in her small, pudgy hands, but not heavy, as she had been expecting. It was a copper color, and the keys were not in an order that she had seen before. “Make sure to use it well, Angel. Now, let’s get you some milk.”
When Bayella got up the next morning, she was sure the whole thing had been a dream, especially as her dad tried to rush them out the door, packing the fixed car. But then she saw it in its case and grabbed it, shoving it into the trunk, under her suitcase before Dad could notice.
She tried to explain to Granddad in a letter that fiction was even harder business to break into than non-fiction. It was a mixture of circumstances. Circumstances she did not have yet, mostly because she had stopped writing stories in high school, and instead chose to get away from her parents’ fights by getting excellent grades and going to a college far, far away. She explained that this way, she could write and get paid for it, and read all of the latest books and see all of the movies. She wrote that she even drafted a short story every now and then that made it into a magazine. She had erased almost all of her debt. She even put that she would be able to go back to school soon and finish her degree with the money she had saved up.
Bayella never mailed that letter, because she somehow felt that her Granddad would have frowned at the thing the entire time he read it. She had still written to him on the lucky typewriter, but in the last few months she had been so absorbed in work, that letters never made it into the mail.
And now he was dead.
“Ladies and Gentlemen, we will now be arriving at the Armyville station. For those of you heading to Armyville, Centerview, Crescentville, or Peak Heights, this is your stop. Please depart the train safely, and have a nice day.
Bayella grabbed her shoulder bag, her carpet bag full of books and her suitcase, and departed the train. She looked around as she walked along the platform, but there was no one there to greet her. When she got into the station there was still no one. Bay did not even look by the time she got outside the station. Instead she looked for a sign that read, “Crescentville 1 mile.” It pointed left onto a dirt road.
“A mile’s not that far,” she muttered, though she began to dread the amount of books she had in her carpet bag.
While her bags did get heavier the farther Bayella walked, the walk was not so bad in and of itself. It was a nice, early summer day, and most of her walk was shaded by tall trees along the sides of the road. Any car that approached honked so she would know they needed to pass and all of them waved as they drove on by. It was peaceful on the old dirt road, and soon enough a large sign read, “Welcome to Crescentville, we hope you enjoy your stay!”
The town sprawled out with wide roads and wide buildings. People walked here and there, while some drove and Bayella even spotted a young boy on his bike with groceries in the back. The general store she came upon even had a wraparound porch with rocking chairs occupied by a group of elderly men and a game of checkers.
“Good afternoon,” one of them called.
“Good afternoon,” she replied, dropping her bags to lean up against the railing. “Could someone give me directions to the Barnaby House?”
“Are you Bayella Barnaby?” asked the elderly man.
“Yes, sir,” she replied, holding out her hand for him to shake. He grinned at her and shook it.
“Ahab Smith, and thank goodness. I think Phil might have rolled over in the cooler too many times already on account of your cousins and aunt and uncles.” Bayella frowned. “Not to say anything bad against them-”
“That’s all right,” she replied. “I know how they get.”
“Well, all right then. Would you like some dinner before you get on your walk?” It took Bayella a moment to realize that he meant lunch.
“Sure. What’s being served up today?” He invited her in to the store, which his family owned, taking her bags as she went. Bayella wanted to protest, but the spire old man would hear none of it. He sat her down at one of the tables inside the store’s small restaurant and served up a plate of greens with grilled chicken and mashed potatoes. Next to the plate sat a cup of fruit drink, which was sweeter than anything Bayella had ever tasted. “Do you know when the burial is?” she asked. “The letter I received didn’t say. It only told me about the will reading.”
“Day after next,” Ahab replied. “Phil probably knew when you were coming and wanted to let you get settled in.” Bayella squinted.
“You mean, Granddad knew when he would die, and knew when to postpone his burial to, so that I could be there?”
“Well, when you put it like that, I just sound crazy!” Ahab chuckled. “But Philemon, he always had ways of knowing things. Wouldn’t surprise me if he knew when he was going to die, or maybe he just knew that you were coming. Maybe he just got lucky. Honestly, you could never really tell with Phil. How’s the chicken?”
“Most tender piece I’ve ever had,” she reported. After she finished her meal, Ahab insisted she rest a little bit before he called his granddaughter Maggie out to walk her to the house.
“It’s no bother,” Maggie said. “I’m going home for the day anyway-Pop won’t let me work full days pregnant-and our house is close enough to the old Barnaby family home.” At Maggie’s admittance that she was pregnant, Bay was reluctant to let her carry one of the bags or even go on the walk, but Maggie just waved her off. “The doctor says I need to keep up my exercise, and as long as it isn’t too heavy.” She took the carpet bag from Bayella, and then frowned. “What have you got in here?”
“Books,” Bayella replied. “I think my clothes bag might be a little lighter.” They traded and started out on the walk. Maggie filled Bay in on what to expect while she stayed in town,
“Phil got his groceries delivered every Tuesday. If you want to change the order, just call down or stop by the grocers and they’ll give you whatever you need. Mind you, Phil had a pretty spectacular garden, so you might not need so much produce in the come the end of summer. Do you know how to can?”
“Um, no.”
“Don’t worry, I can show you. Some of my brothers can come up and help you harvest the garden too. We do that for everybody. Anyway, clothing, auto and even the lawyer’s offices are down town. There’s a large pond out by the Barnaby house, and technically it’s on your property, but a lot of people go swimming there. Phil never minded much, so long as you were quiet when you went at night. Mostly so he wouldn’t know what we were getting up to more than it keeping him up. You don’t mind, do you?”
“I don’t,” she said. “It’s got to get hot in the summers here. I can’t speak for my family though, as long as they are here.” That made Maggie frown.
“Now, Bay, I don’t normally speak bad about people. But your relatives are loud and disrespectful. They ordered a couple of cases of beer and when Haemon, his family keeps the liquor store, as why they needed so much of it when there were only so many of them, one of your cousins-”
“Probably Jedidiah,” she replied. “His mother likes the bottle, and I think his Dad’s not exactly clean either.”
“Yep, I think that’s who it was,” Maggie said. “Anyway, he told Haemon to shut up. And that’s the clean version. The other ones are most just aggravating. They answer their phone in public places and two of them-Gershom and the woman, what’s her name-”
“Michaela,” Bayella filled in.
“That was her-they had an argument while they were making a food run into town. Plain as day, right in front of the grocers.”
“My family likes to think they’ve escaped being white trash,” Bay told her. She waved at the town around her. “I don’t see how any of my uncles or aunt or even my dad thought living here meant being white trash.”
“Poor Phil Barnaby,” Maggie agreed, shaking her head. “How his kids ran out is legendary around her. Don’t get me wrong; people leave for school and to get jobs. We’re a small town and we like it that way, so there are only so many people we can support. But everybody comes back in the end. The Weavers? Only two of their sons staid to manage the garage, but the second Scott needed help remodeling the house, his other kids came running. Your family though…”
“They all left in the middle of the night,” Bayella said. “My dad used to say that he didn’t like the way Granddad did things. He would say that Granddad didn’t look after them right and what have you. So when he got old enough he got out and enlisted. My aunts and uncles pretty much did the same. We all landed in different places, some of us are successful enough while Jedidiah is probably a drunk, but…” Bay frowned. “I think we’re all kind of damaged in a way. I think our parents still had a thing or two to learn before they went and had kids.”
“Personally, I think they’re all in it for the money,” Maggie replied.
“What money?” Bayella asked.
“You don’t know?” Maggie asked.
“Maggie, all I ever heard about my granddad growing up was that he was scum. I was so relieved to find out later that it wasn’t true, I didn’t ask questions like that,” Bay said. “Should I’ve?”
“Well, I’ll say so! It was the biggest thing to happen to the town since we were founded. Back in oh…late depression years, I would say, Phil disappeared for almost a month. His parents were frantic, the whole town was, because we were even smaller then. Anyway, he comes back after almost a month of being gone, with the prettiest girl anyone had ever laid eyes on. Said he went for a walk, and lost track of time, and had been some miles into the woods up there. He apparently broke his leg and the girl had nursed him back to health and walked him back. She had been living all alone out there, since her parents died, so the Barnabys invited her to live with them. When they were old enough, Phil married her, and a number of years later they had kids.”
“So Granddad met Gramma in the woods. How does that explain about any money?” Bay asked.
“That’s the thing of it, nobody knows how he got any of it,” Maggie said. “But he never had to work a day after that. Spent his time tinkering and making inventions that helped the town. Still paid all of his bills, made secret trips out of town to visit banks and here’s the kicker. About thirty years ago, a big company tried to buy all of this land for something like a strip mall. We all do well for ourselves, but no one was in any kind of place to do much about it. Phil bought all of the land and told them to get lost. Then he sold it back to everyone for a dollar or two a piece. He still owns a lot of the land that had been the town property back in the day. Well, here we are.” Maggie stopped at the foot of a hill that the road led up to. A sign post had “Barnaby,” cut into old wood, and at the top of the hill there was a grand old house waiting for her.
“If you don’t mind,” Maggie said. “I don’t think I’ll make it up that hill.”
“Of course not!” Bay replied, taking her bag. “Go home and soak your feet. They’ll probably be the first thing to swell.”
“Good luck,” Maggie called, walking down to a path that broke off from the main road. Bayella waved goodbye, before she began up the hill. When she arrived at the top a well-kept house and a yard littered with cars and beer bottles awaited her. No doubt those were the cases ordered not so long ago. Bayella stepped up onto the porch, and then opened the door to the house herself. She stepped inside, calling,
“Hello! I’m here.” Her older sister, Michaela stepped out of a room towards the back of the house frowning, her arms crossed over her chest.
“Where have you been?” she spat.
“I had to take the train to get here,” Bayella replied, setting her bags down. Home, sweet home, she thought. Though, she had a feeling that the home was not the problem.
Chapter 1: Bayella Returns to Crescentville
Bayella leaned on her elbow as she looked out the window. On the small table before her were a number of papers-her writing-which she had abandoned in favor of watching the scenery fly by.
“Miss, please do not lean so hard on the tray table,” said a passing attendant. “Oh, and ticket please?”
“Of course,” she said, reaching for her bag. She handed him the ticket and leaned back in her chair. The man punched the last space available on her ticket and handed it back to her. Bayella accepted her hole filled ticket and slipped it back into her bag, followed by her neatly stacked papers. She turned back to the scenery, this time her elbow resting on the arm rest.
So, Granddad Barnaby was dead.
Well, at least she knew about it this time. After all, the last time something like this had happened, she had come home to surprise her parents only to find out one of them was dead.
“Where have you been!” her mother snarled. Bayella explained that she had fallen on hard times and had to give a lot of things to keep going. Like the phone and a computer. She explained that she had written it all in a letter and mailed it to her parents, and had written several more after that. Her mother had calmed down a little after that, such that she only frowned at Bayella instead of screaming. “You’re father’s dead,” she reported after Bay had finished her story.
Bayella felt more ridiculous than sad after hearing about her father’s passing. After all, it was a surprise that he made it into his fifties, what with his heart conditions and all the smoking he did and cholesterol he had. Bay felt ridiculous because she had brought him grilling supplies, and she had no idea how to address the new man sitting in her father’s arm chair. It was a fairly short visit after that. She visited her father’s grave, and collected the things her mother no longer wanted, including some of the things Granddad Barnaby had passed on to her dad.
“For the life of me, I don’t know why Kenny kept them all these years,” her mother said. “He did everything to get away from the Barnaby place. That’s why he joined up.” Bayella had heard that story before. Too many times, actually. But she respected Granddad’s stuff. It was because of him that she was still floating in the sea of finances after dropping out of school unable to afford the tuition. The only thing she had been able to keep was the typewriter her grandfather had given her.
She had tried to sell it the first chance she got. Bay had been desperate at the time, and needed rent money after being laid off at her waiting job. But the pawn shop owner had just scratched his head.
“I’m not sure what this is, but it’s probably not going to be worth anything for me to buy it,” he said. “You say your grandfather gave this to you? Must be an eccentric guy. The thing’s an original. He probably built it himself.” Eccentric was right, especially considering the surprise visit came from a letter telling her to go visit her parents, Bay thought. He could have just told her that her father was dead. That he been dead for over six month by the time Bay had managed to plan a trip.
But that typewriter it had saved her. When she walked out of the pawn shop, she saw a sign in the window of a local newspaper. “Reviewer wanted.”
“College dropout, huh?” the man interviewing her asked. Bay had gone right in, and so she still held the typewriter in her lap. “Is that all you’ve got to write on?”
“Money was kind of the reason I dropped out of school,” she replied with a shrug. The man shrugged back,
“It’s better than by hand I suppose. That’s how some of our reporters get their stories. We’re going to have to stop dealing with it in a little while; the bigger paper we’re out of doesn’t like it. Anyway, you’d be reviewing books. It’ll probably be local, and I’ll need to see some writing samples from you. Have you ever done a review?”
“Nothing official,” she replied. “But I did a lot of creative non-fiction in school.” The man shrugged again.
“Well, I’ll be honest with you: we don’t have a lot of people knocking down our door for this job. We’ve had that thing posted for two months and no takers. Get me a writing sample, and if I like it, we’ll go from there.”
She brought him back a review of a film she had done for a class, and he handed her a stack of books to be released soon. “Read them, and write them up. We’ll pay you on a commission basis at first and if you’re good, we can talk about salary later. By the way, do you take that everywhere?” The typewriter, which was small enough to travel with, still hung over her shoulder in its case.
“Now I do,” she replied. Bay read and reviewed a book a day for two weeks. The editor, her boss now, accepted everyone with minor revisions, and gave her five fifty dollar bills for her trouble, and more books. Bayella kept writing, and she kept getting paid. The larger paper picked up her reviews and asked her to expand her section to movies and other entertainment as well.
Granddad had saved her from a potentially bad situation. She had written him to thank him for it, and he wrote back asking what had happened to her stories. That was why he gave her the typewriter.
Bayella thought back to that day. They had just come back from Dad’s assignment overseas, and Granddad had found out, somehow, that Dad would be passing through Crescentville. Dad would not have stayed at Granddad’s for anything, but the car broke down a mile before they could make the turn away from Crescentville to go around it. Dad had scowled and walked the mile to the town to get a tow. A very nice man drove them all the way to Granddad’s house and helped them unload their things before he took the car to the local garage.
Granddad, she remembered, smelled a little funny, but the house was nice. She got her own room, and her own things to play with. She usually had to share with Michaela who hogged everything. Dad tried to keep them away from Granddad as much as he could by taking them places in an old truck where she was squeezed between Michaela and Cole. But one night, she had not been able to sleep, so she got up to fix herself a glass of warm milk, and that’s when she heard him tinkering.
The work shop smelled of oil and sawdust, and like Granddad.
“What are you doing up, Angel?” he asked.
“I was just going to get some milk,” she said, climbing up onto a stool. For some reason, Granddad had not scared her like most old people did. He even scared her less than Dad did. “What’re you making?”
“A word machine,” he said. “You punch the buttons and you can make words.” She was six then, and knew it was called a typewriter, but she liked word machine better.
“I like making stories,” she told him.
“Do you? Well, you’ll need lots of words to do that.” He handed the type writer to her. It was cumbersome in her small, pudgy hands, but not heavy, as she had been expecting. It was a copper color, and the keys were not in an order that she had seen before. “Make sure to use it well, Angel. Now, let’s get you some milk.”
When Bayella got up the next morning, she was sure the whole thing had been a dream, especially as her dad tried to rush them out the door, packing the fixed car. But then she saw it in its case and grabbed it, shoving it into the trunk, under her suitcase before Dad could notice.
She tried to explain to Granddad in a letter that fiction was even harder business to break into than non-fiction. It was a mixture of circumstances. Circumstances she did not have yet, mostly because she had stopped writing stories in high school, and instead chose to get away from her parents’ fights by getting excellent grades and going to a college far, far away. She explained that this way, she could write and get paid for it, and read all of the latest books and see all of the movies. She wrote that she even drafted a short story every now and then that made it into a magazine. She had erased almost all of her debt. She even put that she would be able to go back to school soon and finish her degree with the money she had saved up.
Bayella never mailed that letter, because she somehow felt that her Granddad would have frowned at the thing the entire time he read it. She had still written to him on the lucky typewriter, but in the last few months she had been so absorbed in work, that letters never made it into the mail.
And now he was dead.
“Ladies and Gentlemen, we will now be arriving at the Armyville station. For those of you heading to Armyville, Centerview, Crescentville, or Peak Heights, this is your stop. Please depart the train safely, and have a nice day.
Bayella grabbed her shoulder bag, her carpet bag full of books and her suitcase, and departed the train. She looked around as she walked along the platform, but there was no one there to greet her. When she got into the station there was still no one. Bay did not even look by the time she got outside the station. Instead she looked for a sign that read, “Crescentville 1 mile.” It pointed left onto a dirt road.
“A mile’s not that far,” she muttered, though she began to dread the amount of books she had in her carpet bag.
While her bags did get heavier the farther Bayella walked, the walk was not so bad in and of itself. It was a nice, early summer day, and most of her walk was shaded by tall trees along the sides of the road. Any car that approached honked so she would know they needed to pass and all of them waved as they drove on by. It was peaceful on the old dirt road, and soon enough a large sign read, “Welcome to Crescentville, we hope you enjoy your stay!”
The town sprawled out with wide roads and wide buildings. People walked here and there, while some drove and Bayella even spotted a young boy on his bike with groceries in the back. The general store she came upon even had a wraparound porch with rocking chairs occupied by a group of elderly men and a game of checkers.
“Good afternoon,” one of them called.
“Good afternoon,” she replied, dropping her bags to lean up against the railing. “Could someone give me directions to the Barnaby House?”
“Are you Bayella Barnaby?” asked the elderly man.
“Yes, sir,” she replied, holding out her hand for him to shake. He grinned at her and shook it.
“Ahab Smith, and thank goodness. I think Phil might have rolled over in the cooler too many times already on account of your cousins and aunt and uncles.” Bayella frowned. “Not to say anything bad against them-”
“That’s all right,” she replied. “I know how they get.”
“Well, all right then. Would you like some dinner before you get on your walk?” It took Bayella a moment to realize that he meant lunch.
“Sure. What’s being served up today?” He invited her in to the store, which his family owned, taking her bags as she went. Bayella wanted to protest, but the spire old man would hear none of it. He sat her down at one of the tables inside the store’s small restaurant and served up a plate of greens with grilled chicken and mashed potatoes. Next to the plate sat a cup of fruit drink, which was sweeter than anything Bayella had ever tasted. “Do you know when the burial is?” she asked. “The letter I received didn’t say. It only told me about the will reading.”
“Day after next,” Ahab replied. “Phil probably knew when you were coming and wanted to let you get settled in.” Bayella squinted.
“You mean, Granddad knew when he would die, and knew when to postpone his burial to, so that I could be there?”
“Well, when you put it like that, I just sound crazy!” Ahab chuckled. “But Philemon, he always had ways of knowing things. Wouldn’t surprise me if he knew when he was going to die, or maybe he just knew that you were coming. Maybe he just got lucky. Honestly, you could never really tell with Phil. How’s the chicken?”
“Most tender piece I’ve ever had,” she reported. After she finished her meal, Ahab insisted she rest a little bit before he called his granddaughter Maggie out to walk her to the house.
“It’s no bother,” Maggie said. “I’m going home for the day anyway-Pop won’t let me work full days pregnant-and our house is close enough to the old Barnaby family home.” At Maggie’s admittance that she was pregnant, Bay was reluctant to let her carry one of the bags or even go on the walk, but Maggie just waved her off. “The doctor says I need to keep up my exercise, and as long as it isn’t too heavy.” She took the carpet bag from Bayella, and then frowned. “What have you got in here?”
“Books,” Bayella replied. “I think my clothes bag might be a little lighter.” They traded and started out on the walk. Maggie filled Bay in on what to expect while she stayed in town,
“Phil got his groceries delivered every Tuesday. If you want to change the order, just call down or stop by the grocers and they’ll give you whatever you need. Mind you, Phil had a pretty spectacular garden, so you might not need so much produce in the come the end of summer. Do you know how to can?”
“Um, no.”
“Don’t worry, I can show you. Some of my brothers can come up and help you harvest the garden too. We do that for everybody. Anyway, clothing, auto and even the lawyer’s offices are down town. There’s a large pond out by the Barnaby house, and technically it’s on your property, but a lot of people go swimming there. Phil never minded much, so long as you were quiet when you went at night. Mostly so he wouldn’t know what we were getting up to more than it keeping him up. You don’t mind, do you?”
“I don’t,” she said. “It’s got to get hot in the summers here. I can’t speak for my family though, as long as they are here.” That made Maggie frown.
“Now, Bay, I don’t normally speak bad about people. But your relatives are loud and disrespectful. They ordered a couple of cases of beer and when Haemon, his family keeps the liquor store, as why they needed so much of it when there were only so many of them, one of your cousins-”
“Probably Jedidiah,” she replied. “His mother likes the bottle, and I think his Dad’s not exactly clean either.”
“Yep, I think that’s who it was,” Maggie said. “Anyway, he told Haemon to shut up. And that’s the clean version. The other ones are most just aggravating. They answer their phone in public places and two of them-Gershom and the woman, what’s her name-”
“Michaela,” Bayella filled in.
“That was her-they had an argument while they were making a food run into town. Plain as day, right in front of the grocers.”
“My family likes to think they’ve escaped being white trash,” Bay told her. She waved at the town around her. “I don’t see how any of my uncles or aunt or even my dad thought living here meant being white trash.”
“Poor Phil Barnaby,” Maggie agreed, shaking her head. “How his kids ran out is legendary around her. Don’t get me wrong; people leave for school and to get jobs. We’re a small town and we like it that way, so there are only so many people we can support. But everybody comes back in the end. The Weavers? Only two of their sons staid to manage the garage, but the second Scott needed help remodeling the house, his other kids came running. Your family though…”
“They all left in the middle of the night,” Bayella said. “My dad used to say that he didn’t like the way Granddad did things. He would say that Granddad didn’t look after them right and what have you. So when he got old enough he got out and enlisted. My aunts and uncles pretty much did the same. We all landed in different places, some of us are successful enough while Jedidiah is probably a drunk, but…” Bay frowned. “I think we’re all kind of damaged in a way. I think our parents still had a thing or two to learn before they went and had kids.”
“Personally, I think they’re all in it for the money,” Maggie replied.
“What money?” Bayella asked.
“You don’t know?” Maggie asked.
“Maggie, all I ever heard about my granddad growing up was that he was scum. I was so relieved to find out later that it wasn’t true, I didn’t ask questions like that,” Bay said. “Should I’ve?”
“Well, I’ll say so! It was the biggest thing to happen to the town since we were founded. Back in oh…late depression years, I would say, Phil disappeared for almost a month. His parents were frantic, the whole town was, because we were even smaller then. Anyway, he comes back after almost a month of being gone, with the prettiest girl anyone had ever laid eyes on. Said he went for a walk, and lost track of time, and had been some miles into the woods up there. He apparently broke his leg and the girl had nursed him back to health and walked him back. She had been living all alone out there, since her parents died, so the Barnabys invited her to live with them. When they were old enough, Phil married her, and a number of years later they had kids.”
“So Granddad met Gramma in the woods. How does that explain about any money?” Bay asked.
“That’s the thing of it, nobody knows how he got any of it,” Maggie said. “But he never had to work a day after that. Spent his time tinkering and making inventions that helped the town. Still paid all of his bills, made secret trips out of town to visit banks and here’s the kicker. About thirty years ago, a big company tried to buy all of this land for something like a strip mall. We all do well for ourselves, but no one was in any kind of place to do much about it. Phil bought all of the land and told them to get lost. Then he sold it back to everyone for a dollar or two a piece. He still owns a lot of the land that had been the town property back in the day. Well, here we are.” Maggie stopped at the foot of a hill that the road led up to. A sign post had “Barnaby,” cut into old wood, and at the top of the hill there was a grand old house waiting for her.
“If you don’t mind,” Maggie said. “I don’t think I’ll make it up that hill.”
“Of course not!” Bay replied, taking her bag. “Go home and soak your feet. They’ll probably be the first thing to swell.”
“Good luck,” Maggie called, walking down to a path that broke off from the main road. Bayella waved goodbye, before she began up the hill. When she arrived at the top a well-kept house and a yard littered with cars and beer bottles awaited her. No doubt those were the cases ordered not so long ago. Bayella stepped up onto the porch, and then opened the door to the house herself. She stepped inside, calling,
“Hello! I’m here.” Her older sister, Michaela stepped out of a room towards the back of the house frowning, her arms crossed over her chest.
“Where have you been?” she spat.
“I had to take the train to get here,” Bayella replied, setting her bags down. Home, sweet home, she thought. Though, she had a feeling that the home was not the problem.