alabamaauthor
Beach Comber
Hey yall.I am trying to finish up my novel, I have posted here before, no luck. I need a beach shack, no granite, running water okay. Furnished or unfurnished. It's me and my old man, a bottle of red and a bottle of white. We want something under 1,000. We have really good local references. We are quiet, but enjoy stimulating conversation at twlight over a glass of good wine, we do drink, but don't smoke and we are clean. And we love to garden and pull weeds. Someone suggested one time I put a few sentences in the text of my message and it might help me find a place so here is an excerpt. I really need to find a place soon. My agent is expecting the novel by November 1. Thanks.
Excerpt from THE AVE MARIA DIARIES COPYRIGHT 2007
Alabama Jane Brown
THE LONG TRAIN HOME
I do not fly. I do not like to fly, I understand Bernoulli?s principal that makes flight possible, I get all that, I simply don?t like the sensation of being in the sky with the expanse of thirty thousand feet below me and the ground. I also don?t like to sit still. I never have. I never will.
Claude, The Attorney and Sister Mary Louise agreed it would be best if we all returned to Tuskaloosa together, since we had no idea if I would be booked and charged with the murder, even though the body of Glen Smiley could not have possibly been discovered. Nonetheless, Claude especially seemed eager and delirious to escort me back home. The Attorney was retired, technically and he agreed to go pro bono, he was obviously extremely wealthy and Sister Mary Louise had cancelled all her patients for one month. We were set to leave. We were taking the Crescent City Amtrak home. The train left Penn Station at 12 noon and arrived in Tuskaloosa twenty-four hours later, there were an assortment of stops along the way, and we all had our own sleeper car, actually, Sister Mary Louise and I shared a car, because I was already so in debt to Claude I knew I would never be able to pay him back for what he had done for me emotionally or financially. The train ride gave us an extra day to talk about the case and get my story straight. We had all agreed it was better for me tell the truth. The truth. It was still so fresh in my mind even though I had often pushed it to the back of my brain.
We boarded the train and everyone got settled into their sleeper cars. I had a small overnight bag packed with a few of my possessions for I knew I was not going home to stay. I had found a new home and a new purpose in New York with Claude and Sister Mary Louise. They were my family as far as I was concerned. I dreaded seeing my Mother, for I knew she would be grey-haired and have the lines of time drawn onto her face by gravity and pain. The pain of losing a daughter to a madness of her un-choosing is what Momma called it. She knew the truth, well not the entire truth but a measure of it. Just enough of it. She did not know I had committed the murder of Glen Smiley, but she knew I had been raped. It was obvious to her.
Two months after the rape, I noticed I had not had a period in some time, well it was actually Momma who noticed. She came to me and asked if I had been buying my own Kotex.
No, I told her, Why? It started us both wondering.
She drove me the next day to Birmingham to a doctor who would not know us and I registered under the name, Jane Smith. We couldn?t very well use my real name, for Bankhead was still considered notorious in some parts of the state and it always demanded an unwanted conversation regarding Cousin Tallulah.
So the doctor was going to examine my private place and do a urine test, a blood test for syphilis and a test for pregnancy. I knew I was pregnant. I didn?t need a doctor to tell me otherwise.
I inserted my legs into the metal stirrups and felt the kind elderly doctor push his hand into my private place. Momma was standing next to me holding my hand crying. The doctor nodded, pulled off his rubber glove and tossed it into the waste basket, apart of me was clinging to those gloves. No one had entered that place now except the Doctor and Brother Smiley and both times had been painful. I could not for the life of me understand why people enjoyed sex.
The Doctor wrote me a prescription for vitamins and asked me if the ?father? of the baby knew and asked if the father was going to be supportive. Momma answered for me.
She told the Doctor, the ?father? was the high school quarterback back home and he was going to marry me and we were going to put a trailer right beside her house so she could help out with the baby. I lay there with fat tears rolling off my face onto the examining table white paper while Momma lied more than she had ever done in her entire life. By the time she had finished she had named the baby, and had me finishing up high school with honors and going on to be a teacher and possibly having as many as four or five other children. I couldn?t move, although the kind doctor did remove my legs from the stirrups and help me sit up right while Momma went on and on.
We drove home in complete silence. I pretended to be sleeping. Momma had the radio tuned to a gospel station the entire ride home and I had to listen to her sing along with the likes of Elvis and Tammy Wynette.
?What a friend we have in Jesus, all our sins and grief?s to bear, what a privilege to carry everything to God in prayer.?
Rain started to fall on us before we got home and Momma stopped at a market to pickup some groceries for our supper. I moved to the back seat so that I could stretch out my legs and feel and see if my stomach felt any larger. I rubbed my palm against my flat stomach and tried to picture myself growing fat and round like the women I saw pregnant. I closed my eyes and pretended I really was in love with the high school quarterback and pretended we really were going to get married and have a perfect life. I heard a scream and then there was complete darkness.
A drunk driver was coming straight for our car. Momma had walked out of store and had seen the car veering for me. She didn?t see me she said later and thought perhaps I had gotten out of the car to stretch my legs. I of course didn?t feel anything. Daddy had put a bale of hay in the trunk of the car the night before to
take to the school and use for the fall festival.
The doctors later said the bale of hay probably saved my life, but not the life of my baby, although no one knew about the baby except me, Momma and the sweet doctor in Birmingham. I broke my pelvis and fractured my left leg. No head injuries, thank God, or maybe it would have been nice to have amnesia after all. I was in the hospital for three weeks. I emerged a new person. I was free from the burden of caring the spawn of Satan and yet, I felt like I was still a wounded bird in my soul.
I had received a scholarship, unknown to me at the bequest of Brother Smiley before his untimely disappearance, to attend Judson College for Women, a Baptist girls school which called itself the ?Vassar? of the south. I thought it was silly and pretentious, but Momma thought it was the best place for me. Thankfully, I had been smart enough to skip two years of grade school and I had graduated a year before Dale. Before I left for Judson, we made a pact. We would never speak of Brother Smiley again. And we never did until I called her with the news of his car surfacing with Katrina?s wrath. She told me she would see me back home. Home. And the dead body of Brother Smiley down by the creek.
SO OKAY, FIND ME A PLACE AND I WILL THANK YOU IN THE CREDITS.
