Novella: 'The Bayberry Years' (same universe as the short stories I just posted)

The Bayberry Years

By Nathan Turowsky

Prologue

It was a cold morning at the beginning of December, before the snows but undoubtedly after the fall was through, and the narrow streets of the city were full of fog. Through the streets from the dreary banlieues of South Boston all the way up to the ancient brick mansions of Beacon Hill came a young man with a bag of groceries on his shoulder and a packet full of several pill-bottles in the pocket of his coat. He walked along the cobbles, not navigable by automobile traffic, and through the fog under the out-of-date streetlights til before him was the apparition of a thick dark wooden door.

            The house that he now looked upon was not one of the oldest ones in the neighbourhood but it was old enough to impress one who had grown up in a borderline tenement, last of the seven children of a very traditional Irish Catholic family. It was built of brick brilliantly red even in this sort of weather, with shaped and somehow reinforced stucco cornices and one granite gargoyle. The roof of the house was steeply pitched on many levels, so that looking at it from below was almost like looking at the jagged Western mountains that the young man had seen in his geography textbooks in high school. The roof—or roofs, rather; the roofs were slatted in black-tarred wood, which the mistresses of the house every spring had to hire a new contractor to repair.

            There was not much in the way of a front garden—most of that sort of thing was in the back. There was just a short walk between two lines of burgeoning boxwood shrubs up to the front stoop and the door. Other than the shrubs the only thing there to break the solid line from pavement to stoop was a mailbox, green plastic with the Boston Globe logo stamped on it in white, with its red flag now up as they apparently were awake and had put the mail out already.

            ‘Already…’ The young man laughed. They were ridiculously early risers for their age. It was rather endearing in some way.

            The mailbox had two names on it, other than that of the newspaper, affixed to it in durable black vinyl tape with white lettering upon it: I. Crowninshield and F. Greenleaf. Crowninshield and Greenleaf were names with true old-Boston pedigrees. John Caspar Crowninshield had come to Massachusetts in 1688 from Germany and founded a long and storied seafaring family; the Greenleafs were not so old or well-established as the Crowninshields but they were quite rich and had been for some time. There were not many living people with those names alive these days, though; the old hold of the Brahmins of the city had been weakened in the time of Honey Fitz and finally destroyed by the 1960s or thereabouts. The families still existed in name, most of them; but even some of those names were dying out.

            The young man did not think of this as he opened the door and went into the wood-walled front hall with its hanging sea-paintings and impossible and imperishable smell of cod. He, David Lenihan, was paid thirty-one thousand five hundred dollars a year plus some personal medical coverage out of some weird and wicked rich-people plan to make sure that the two old ladies who lived here were doing all right in their daily lives. It was a job that he liked a lot, mostly. The old ladies were gay but David had no real problem with this. It was actually kind of sweet, since early on they probably hadn’t had an easy time and they’d stayed together anyway. Isabel Crowninshield had been a high-ranking customs inspector at the Port of Boston until retiring about eight or nine years ago. Flora Greenleaf had been involved in patronage of the arts and had been involved in printing and publishing for a while, but apparently this career had eventually gone belly-up somehow.

            ‘David?’ came a soft, high, quavering, croaking voice from up the big dark-wooden staircase with the motorised chair on a rail affixed to the banister. ‘Is that you, David?’

            ‘Yes, Miz C,’ David called back. ‘Putting some vegetables an’ stuff away. Gonna refill your med trays too.’

            ‘Ah,’ the voice came again. ‘Good, good. After that, David, please come up here. Flora and I want to discuss a few things with you.’

All three Mattie and Ellie short stories so far

Red Leaf Travelling Blues

By Nathan Turowsky

Allowed by the conductor to get on the Pioneer Valley Transit Authority bus despite not having enough money and being at the very edge of the PVTA service area at best, they settled down into two isolated seats at the very back, their heads resting against the cold metal behind them as they listened to the power train’s almost maternal hum. They went through the fields south of Bernardston and down the old streets of Greenfield. Past there, they crossed the big river at Turners Falls, where it fell over the power-dam in triple cataracts. South of Sunderland they got off and looked down past Amherst to the distant humps of the Holyoke Range. The hills north of the Quabbin were blazing with foliage to the east beneath the morning sun.

            ‘So what’s new with you?’ asked one of them casually, clapping her hand down on her friend’s shoulder.

            Her friend cleared her throat and said ‘Not much. Not much.’

            ‘Oh, come on. I haven’t seen you in quite a while, you know, Mattie.’

Nathan's Journey

The ground is not slippery; therefore it is.

So this morning, I went to church.

This was a usual undertaking unusually performed, in several senses. First, I did it earlier than I normally do, specifically at eight o' clock am. This was practical necessity, my usual schedule being a casualty of the impending finals. Since I stayed up all night last night (and am indeed going to bed after I post this, only to awaken for food and friends in the mid-to-late evening), my feeling was that my normal approach--go to the ten-thirty service, stay for tea and chitchat afterwards--was useless here. And indeed, right now I'd certainly be too tired to go, going by my current feeling. And I had tea.

Unfortunately, as superficially good an idea as this was, there were two problems with it. First, I live a little over a mile from my church. Getting there entails passing the Baptist church, the woodcutter with the dog who lives near the Baptist church, the Korean community centre, Kendrick Park, the high-end clothing store with worryingly sexless underwear models in the windows, the workers'-run socialist book collective, the Bank of America, and about half of the green. So usually I take the bus.

The Sunday buses don't start until ten. The service was at eight. I finished getting dressed at seven-forty-nine.

The second problem, which compounded the first, was one of the weather. Those of you who don't live in Massachusetts may not be aware of the phenomenon of freezing rain. This differs from frozEN rain (hail) in that it falls in perfectly normal, if cold, liquid form and hits the ground and splashes like any other rain. But then, because the ground is colder than the air in these conditions, it freezes, which results in a thin patina of ice that covers basically all open land area, often invisibly and thus dangerously. I had to walk through this for a mile in fancy shoes if I was to go to church. And I'm a good little Episcopalian (for whatever that's worth), so not going to church during Advent was NOT an option that I was willing to entertain.

So I embarked.

Upon reaching the home of the woodcutter with the dog who lives near the Baptist church, I found the first significant patch of mud of my journey. Mud was good because it is relatively immune to the slippy slidey ice world treatment but bad because it got on the fancy shoes. Also the woodcutter's dog doesn't like me and started woofing and wouldn't stop until I had passed.

Upon reaching Kendrick Park I gave some change to a bum so he could catch a bus to Northampton in two hours' time. I'm still scratching my head on that one, but he was obviously sober and he needed it more than I did.

Upon reaching the workers'-run socialist book collective, I encountered an enormous patch of ice that was impassible except for literally skating across it. The good news is that this cleaned the fancy shoes pretty well. The bad news is that I fell down two times.

Finally, I got to church and took my seat, already halfway through the Nicene Creed. I joined in somewhere around 'was crucified, dead, and buried'. It was at this time that I realised that I had the profound need to record my morning for posterity, for the good of the Church and the World.

Prepare the way, O Zion! Your actual snow is drawing near.

Red Leaf Travelling Blues

Red Leaf Travelling Blues

By Nathan Turowsky

Allowed by the conductor to get on the Pioneer Valley Transit Authority bus despite not having enough money and being at the very edge of the PVTA service area at best, they settled down into two isolated seats at the very back, their heads resting against the cold metal behind them as they listened to the power train’s almost maternal hum. They went through the fields south of Bernardston and down the old streets of Greenfield. Past there, they crossed the big river at Turners Falls, where it fell over the power-dam in triple cataracts. South of Sunderland they got off and looked down past Amherst to the distant humps of the Holyoke Range. The hills north of the Quabbin were blazing with foliage to the east beneath the morning sun.

            ‘So what’s new with you?’ asked one of them casually, clapping her hand down on her friend’s shoulder.

            Her friend cleared her throat and said ‘Not much. Not much.’

            ‘Oh, come on. I haven’t seen you in quite a while, you know, Mattie.’

            Mattie nodded and blushed and looked shyly down at her girly little black shoes. ‘Well…’ she said, and seized up. She looked up a little—only a little. Ellie was short enough that Mattie needed only to change her gaze a tick upwards for her face to come into the top edge of her vision. It was a pretty face, firmly round with heavily-lidded grey eyes and unevenly cut auburn hair falling down to either side. Ellie had a big forehead, which years ago she had self-consciously covered with bangs. She didn’t do this any more. She looked better with the forehead visible, Mattie thought.

The Vermont national character

I am from Vermont. Vermont is not a place that many people are from and most people have some pretty strange conceptions about what it is like. So in this essay I shall explain the national character of Vermont. I say ‘national’ because, while I am very proud of my state, like so much of New England, Vermont barely counts as America any more (I view this as a good thing in some ways).

            Most Vermonters are hippies. But we aren’t your typical hippies. No, we’re the sorts of hippies who climb mountains, stand on the summit in a snowstorm, and let out the great, half-deranged Vermont ‘YEEEEEAAAAARRRRRGH!!!!!’ as if to say ‘we’re here, we’re Vermonters, come and get us.’ This is why we were the first state to legalise civil unions for gays, why we fought just as hard against New York and New Hampshire as we did against Britain, and why we retained our independence until 1791 as the Vermont Republic. Our governor during this time was Thomas Chittenden, who only had one working eye because of an incident with a catamount.

            This seeming paradox is due to Vermont’s history. For most of our history we were peopled by proud and hardy mountaineers and farmers—first Algonquin and Abenaki Indians, then the French, then settlers from Connecticut. Then in the 1960s Vermont started to attract hippies because of the forests and mountains (the state’s name comes from the French for ‘green mountain’). In true New England fashion, instead of clashing, these groups merged. Hence proud and hardy hippies who don’t take shit from anybody.