Yes, rewrite #4.
And no, I still don’t want to talk about it.
Except to offer what’s happening is probably going to end up in An Experiment in Writing about getting the voice correct (which I’ve done before in experiments 15–18), so perhaps not so much about getting the voice correct as letting the characters do the work.
Yeah, that’s it. Let the characters do the work. Or Arguing With Your Characters. Or Arguable Characters.
Whatever I decide to call it, it’ll be up sometime this month.
Vincent Quarrals watched Monique Modine exit Martin’s store from deep in the shadows of the Kristoffersen’s barn. Stacey Knox headed south a few minutes earlier.
He considered walking over when he saw Knox pull in, decided no. She seemed okay enough. He read up on her at the state capital using what little Monique knew as a starting point, and felt there was more, something beyond her litigation histories, but had no idea what.
She bought the Campbell’s farm. He never noticed her in town before. What, did she come into town on a lark, saw a broken down farm badly in need of repair with a for-sale sign on it, and decided hot damn, that’s for me? One of the top lawyers in New York City decides to go country?
Bullshit. Only a flake would do that and she didn’t seem the flake type.
Did she even know the Campbell farm’s history?
Sad place if ever there was one.
The Stocktons owned the farm since dirt was young. A Stockton niece, Maddy, married big, strapping Al Campbell, whom she met while she nursed and he MPed in Korea. They moved back to his hometown, Manchester, NH, and he joined the police force there.
The Campbells had two children, twins, Al Junior and Blanche, and the whole family’d come out for two weeks each year when Al Senior took his vacation. Once school started, Al Junior and Blanche came out for entire summers and loved it.
That’s when tragedy struck. The first of many. ‘Nam claimed whole lines of the Stockton family, accident and disease claimed most of the other. The Stockton’s entered their golden years with only Al Junior and Blanche to help them, and even then only in the summers.
Tragedy struck again. One hot August night Maddy called long distance. Al Senior’d been shot. He wasn’t expected to last the week. Al Junior and Blanche had to come home immediately.
But they hesitated, said they didn’t want to go home. It wasn’t until the Stocktons threw them out that they got on a bus.
And when Blanche got off the bus, Maddy Campbell saw why she didn’t want to come home.
Vince had no idea who got Blanche pregnant. He wasn’t even sure if it was somebody in Acra or somebody back home. She didn’t come here that way, but Vince was young at the time and probably wouldn’t have noticed if she was.
Maddy took a second-shift job in one of the mills to keep the family going.
Five months later Blanche delivered a still-born babe and never told her mother who the father was.
End of her sophomore year she started to swell again, and Maddy Campbell wants to know what she did to raise such a harlot. People she’d known for years stopped talking to her, Al Junior and Blanche stopped going to high school games and gatherings. One night Al Junior steals a car, and he and Blanche are apprehended coming out of a New York City abortion clinic.
Then one night Maddy Campbell comes home early, walks into her house, and starts screaming. She gets her husband’s revolver and starts shooting up the house. She almost hits Blanche, wings Al Junior, and turns the last shell on herself.
Mrs. Stockton got a call, got on a bus, and did what had to be done. Stayed with them until they graduated – Vince couldn’t imagine what those last years of high school must’ve been like for them – got the house in order, put it on the market, and had Mr. Stockton come out with the pickup to bring them home.
The Stocktons were never the same after that. Mrs Stockton turned bitter and snappy, and Mr. Stockton looked like he was hoping for the grave, which he was granted just a few months later.
Al and Blanche bought the farm with their inheritance. Turned out Al had quite the head for business. He stayed for two years, grew the farm, hired two hands, left Blanche to care for Mrs. Stockton and went off to U of Wisconsin Racine on a scholarship. Got his MBA in Finance in three with honors, came back, converted one of the backrooms into an office, and put a sign out front, Brunswick Investments.
He’d go up to RPI, SUNY-Albany, down to Marist, listen to students give their dissertations, and always picked which dissertations could turn into profitable businesses. He mortgaged the farm, financed winners, used that to buy back the farm, finance more winners, and bought up more and more land surrounding his farm.
Things went well until Mrs. Stockton wandered off one day and where to nobody knew. No body, no clothes, it was like she left the planet.
It only got worse when kids went out drinking in the Campbell’s woods and said they could hear some old woman calling them.
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