~ ~ ~
By exchanging notes in our secret mailbox, Brad and I worked out a plan to meet during the day. Tashunka had recovered completely, and I had asked Simon if I could ride her into town and check out some books at the library. When he asked if I had cleared this with the Troll, I told him she didn’t care. That wasn’t strictly a lie. She hadn’t said I couldn’t go. Of course, I hadn’t exactly asked her either.
The library wasn’t part of my plan. Brad had promised to take me fishing. He would meet me on his bay gelding at the log where he’d leave two of his own books I could take home later to support the library story. Instead, we rode for an hour to his second-favorite fishing hole along the banks of Sweet Creek.
“You know,” he said as we tied our horses to a willow tree, “one of these days your little lies will catch up to you.”
Threading through tall grasses and baby willows, we picked our way down the bank to the water, fishing poles in hand. “I can’t help it,” I replied. “I hate to lie like this, but there is no other way to see you. I’m more worried about Simon finding out than the Troll.”
Brad tied flies to our hooks. “Why is that?”
I glanced sideways at him and grinned. “Because I can outrun the Troll. No, really it’s because I would hate to lose Simon’s trust or to disappoint him. I sort of promised him not to see you anymore.” I cast my fly out into the river and watched the slow current tow my line downstream.
“You only sort of promised not to let him catch you with me,” Brad said, chuckling.
“Maybe I only agreed not to let him catch you with me in the woods behind the house. It wouldn’t count if he caught me here by the river or in town at the movies or something.”
Brad cast his fly about twice as far out into the river. He watched it floating downstream, reeled in a section of line and cast further upstream. I did the same, wondering how long it would take before our lines tangled.
Brad threw a sideways glance at me. “Maybe you should change your career plans. Go for being a lawyer, Em. You’re showing a real talent for it.
I rolled my eyes, feeling the weight of the line and current bending my pole as I pulled on it a little.
Tashunka whinnied. We turned to see a dark-complected Native American pass the horses as he made his way down to the water’s edge.
“Hey, Lucas, what’s up?” Brad asked. In the same breath he added, “Lucas, meet my girlfriend, Emma Ross. Emma, meet my best friend, Lucas Long Bear”
Brad had mentioned Lucas Long Bear a lot. His people belonged to the ancient Kalapuya tribe and he played on the football team with Brad. I stared at the handsome, perfectly built senior. He was tall and muscular with bronzed skin, an aquiline nose, and high cheekbones.
“Hi,” I said.
Lucas didn’t even glance my way. “I was hoping to catch you alone. I came to warn you, but I can do it later.”
“No. Anything you have to say to me can be said in front of Emma.”
Lucas glanced at me for the first time. Instead of a smile, he wore a scowl. He quickly turned back to Brad. “Remember, dude, this was your call. I came to warn you that rumors are flying about you and this new girlfriend of yours. They say she is nothing but trouble and is descended from a people who consort with Gods and demons. You would drop her like a hot rock, man, if you had any idea of her demon powers.”
Brad burst into belly laughter. I didn’t see anything funny here at all.
“Lucas, you’ve been listening to people who are nuts, superstitious, or jealous,” Brad said between bursts of laughter. “I bet Melinda started most of the rumors. She’s good at stuff like that.”
“They’re true,” Lucas assured him between clenched teeth. “They said you’d react this way because this devil-girl has already woven an evil spell over you.”
“Seems to me,” Brad said, all humor gone now, “that you come from a long line of people who also consort with Gods and evil spirits. Don’t believe me? Check out your old Kalapuya stories and legends.”
Lucas’s face grew hard. “Those legends have been handed down for hundreds of years by my people. They are traditional. The stories about this girl are modern.”
Brad rolled his eyes. “But no more true. I expected you to stand with me, Lucas. I’ve covered your butt more than once.”
Lucas studied the wet rocks near the river’s edge. “You’re my brother. If any of these people come after you, I will fight beside you no matter what the odds. Do yourself a big favor. Drop this chick before she contaminates you with her spells and charms. Nobody will be able to save you then. Move on, brother. She’s no good for you.”
He turned on his heel, his shoulder-length black hair glistening in the sun and hiked back up the bank.
Tears stung my eyes. With enough peer pressure of this kind, Brad’s life would be made too miserable for him to stay with me. I couldn’t blame him if he chose to say goodbye.
He turned toward me and tilted my chin up. “Don’t pay any attention to them, Em. There are some stupid adults in this town, but the kids aren’t that dumb. It’s Melinda and her snotty girlfriends who are spreading this garbage around to get back at me for dumping her. If we stay cool, it’ll all blow over.”
He took my face gently in his hands and kissed me.
I dreaded September.
~ ~ ~
Saturday I’d planned on visiting the spring and looking for Charley Perkins. The Troll found endless chores for me to do around the house and garden, and I couldn’t shake myself clear until the afternoon.
The spring was deserted as always when I arrived there out of breath. My thirst on this warm afternoon was great enough that I had to restrict myself to less water than I wanted. Otherwise it would be nightfall before the effects wore off. I lay back in the grass and waited for the discomfort to begin.
During the stomach cramps and headache, it occurred to me that there might actually be something poisonous in the water. Something dissolved in the water from the volcanic rocks or leached from the lightning-scorched earth. Something that might build up in my system more and more with each passing trip to the spring until it reached the point where I’d get lost in some other century or get stomach cancer or my brain turned to mush from all the headaches.
When I opened my eyes in 1882, the spring was still deserted. I waited fifteen minutes and when Charley didn’t appear, I went looking for him.
After trudging east through the forest for nearly forty minutes, fearing I was hopelessly lost by now, I sat down on a rock to rest. What if I really was lost? Worst that could happen is the spring water would eventually lose its power and I’d find myself still lost, back in 2016. I must be close to Charley’s cabin by now, but because there was no trail to follow, it was also possible I’d missed it altogether. Maybe I should try to find my way back to the spring.
A loud crack and boom made me jump so hard I nearly fell off my rock. In the same instant, a heavy thump of tawny fur fell at my feet. I tried to scream, but when I opened my mouth, not a sound came out. The tawny fur lying crumpled at my feet was a mountain lion.
I heard twigs and bushes snapping as someone came running through the underbrush.
“Emma! Are you all right?”
Charley’s voice. He’d found me. He rounded the rock where I sat and poked the dead cat with the barrel of his rifle. “For Pete’s sake, Emma, you can’t just go traipsin’ ‘round the woods all alone and unarmed. That cat was crouched on a big limb right above you, ready to spring.”
I stood up, trembling all over, still unable to speak. Charley leaned the rifle up against a tree trunk and held me. “Oh God, Emma. If I hadn’t chanced to come along right then and spied him up there . . . if I’d lost you, I don’t know what I’d do. Please tell me you’re all right.”
“I-I’m fine, C
harley. Thanks. Guess I owe you my life.”
Charley stepped back and eyed the mountain lion. “I was after a deer. Guess this fellow will make a right nice floor covering after I skin him out and cure the hide. Ma will like that.”
“Would you mind walking me back to the spring?” I asked, anxious to be out of the forest.
“Sure, though you’re in no danger with me around. Pa says I’m a crack shot.” He held my hand and began leading me back the way I had come, rather full of himself now that he had played the hero and saved my life.
Wow. What if I had died in 1882? That would mean Mom and Dad would have been childless or had some other kid. Penelope Ross and I would never have met. Of course I’d never have met Brad Rylan either.
But how did that work? It seemed to me that 1882 and 2016 somehow existed at the same time. I just sort of “jumped tracks” by swallowing the spring water. If I died in 1882, would I have ever been born in 2000?
Of course, I had been born then and was going back and forth in time. If the 1882 me died here in 1882, would the 2016 me just suddenly cease to exist? The more I puzzled on this, the more I believed it to be true. You always heard stories about people who simply disappeared and were never seen or heard from again. There had to be other reasons for that, but could this be one answer?
I had thought more than once that my grandfather, whoever he was, had probably served in Vietnam. He would have been the right age for that. If he had been killed over there, Charlotte would have never met him, never become pregnant with my father, and I would never have been born at all. Right?
I hiked down out of the woods into the meadow, deciding traveling back through time was more dangerous than I thought.
“You’re bein’ pretty quiet,” Charley said. “Maybe you’re in shock. You sure you’re all right?”
“I’m fine. Just thinking.”
Charley squinted at the horizon. “I’ve been thinkin’, too. Been debatin’ with myself if I should even tell you. If I told you, you’d probably think me crazy. Then you’d run off and I’d never see you again. It’s somethin’ I’ve never told anyone for that reason and it wells up in me so powerful and tight that I just gotta tell somebody. If I don’t, think I’ll burst at the seams.”
“Tell me, Charley. I’ve done enough talking with you that I know you’re not crazy. And if it’s a secret, I promise never to tell anyone.”
“No, reckon it’d be best for me not to tell anyone. I could get myself into such deep trouble I might never figure a way out of it.”
“Charley, I thought you were my friend. I thought you trusted me.”
He looked down at me, still warring with himself about whether or not to say anything. “You are my friend. Don’t know why, but you’re right easy to talk to. It’s not that I don’t trust you.”
“Then tell me.”
“You promise, no matter what, that you’ll still be my friend?”
“No,” I replied honestly, after a moment’s thought. “If you tell me you do cruel things to animals or children, kill people, rob banks, or set fire to people’s houses, I won’t be your friend. Other than that, I don’t see a problem.”
We had reached the spring and sat together by it.
“Well?” I prompted.
“What if I told you this here is a magical spring?” he said in a low voice.
His words stirred butterflies in my stomach. “Magical how?”
“Never mind. You won’t believe me nohow.”
“You’d be surprised. Go on, coward. Tell me.”
Charley ran a nervous hand back through his tousled hair. “Suppose I tell you if I drink this water. . . I can go back in time?”
I smiled and said nothing.
“I found it out one October when I was twelve. Pa said I could take his prized black mare to town, you know, to see about any letters and buy some sugar and coffee for Ma. He’d never let me ride his mare near that far before. I was feelin’ big for my britches, kind of like a man, even though I was only twelve. I hadn’t been back to this here meadow except once since the day my brother, Joey, died more than two years before. I took the mare this way comin’ home because I thought maybe I could stand to see it again. It was warm for October and I’d forgotten to take a canteen. I slipped down off the mare and let her graze while I stepped down to the spring for a drink.”
He paused there like maybe he didn’t feel safe to go ahead with the story. Then I guess he made up his mind he’d already said too much and might as well tell me the rest.
“I drunk me some water and remember lookin’ up at the rocks, picturin’ Joey up there just before he fell, feelin’ sad and guilty and wishin’ I’d just kept on ridin’ and hadn’t stopped here.
“I’d just stood up to collect the mare and ride home when this awful sickness came over me. My stomach felt like it did once when I ate bear meat what had gone rancid, and my head went all dizzy. I dropped to my knees, unable to get to the horse. And sudden-like, my pa’s prized mare shivered and wavered some and just disappeared right in front of me. Vanished into thin air like she’d never been there. Boy, was I gonna get the worst whippin’ of my life for losin’ pa’s horse. Didn’t know if I’d even live through it.
“I fell over then and sort of blacked out for a few seconds. When I opened my eyes I found myself not where I’d fallen over near the spring, but searchin’ in the tall grass behind the big boulders. I all a-sudden knew I was lookin’ for the knife Pa had gave me for my tenth birthday. I could hear him saying to me, ‘Charley boy, you’re ten now. You’re old enough to own a man’s knife, and this is a good one. You must promise to be very careful with it. Above all, don’t lose it.’ And here I’d gone and lost it. Didn’t even enter my mind at that moment that I was actually twelve, not a kid of ten, or that I had different clothes on than I’d worn ten minutes ago, or I should be worried more about losin’ Pa’s horse than losin’ a knife. None of them things even entered my head. All I knowed was I was ten years old, and I was lookin’ to get a whippin’ if I came home without that knife.
“I stood up to move to another search area and shivered in the cold. It still looked to be October where I was, but a much colder October than the one I’d left ten minutes ago. I never even took note I was a good four inches shorter now.
“At last I caught sight of my knife’s blade winkin’ under the flow of the spring, and realized now I’d be late gettin’ home for the milkin’ and Pa wouldn’t listen to any excuses I had for that neither. I grabbed the knife on the run and made it almost into the thick of the forest before that same sickness came over me again all sudden-like. I stumbled over a log in the undergrowth and fell inside the cold shadow of a giant cedar with that knife clutched in my hand. When the sickness passed and I opened my eyes, I wasn’t even near the trees. I was still at the spring, now dressed in my twelve-year-old clothes watchin’ Pa’s saddle horse grazin’ like nothin’ ever happened.
“Thought I’d lost my wits for a stretch. In the next couple years I went back to try the water a few more times, always goin’ back to 1876 when I was ten. Funny, though, it only worked during the months of late August, September, October, November and December. If I tried it in the dead of winter or spring or even early summer, nothing happened. I stayed in the present. I could only go back to 1876 during late summer, fall and early winter and always to the exact day, month, and time I’d left in the present. It didn’t matter that I got to be thirteen and fourteen. When it worked, I always went back to my tenth year. My tenth year was miserable because the pain of Joey’s death had dug into my soul, bone-deep. I never took another sip of that water.”
Another revelation. If a person went back in time to a year they had actually lived in, they would go back to a younger version of themselves, the age they were in that prior year, without being aware there was an older version of
themselves that already existed in the near future. Because I was completely jumping tracks to a time way before my birth, I stayed my present age and retained my awareness.
“You don’t believe me, do you?” Charley said morosely. “I knew you wouldn’t.”
I smiled. “Yes, I do believe you. Mostly because I’ve done it myself.”
His eyes rounded. “What?”
“I’m doing it now, Charley. I travel back here to 1882 from way in the future. I’ve been coming here from the year 2016, one hundred and thirty-four years from now.”
His mouth fell open. He stared with bugged eyes. “How is that possible?”
“The spring still exists in my time, and still works its magic. I think the reason you can only go back to certain months in the year 1876 is because the spring didn’t exist until that storm opened it up in August of that year. Why I come back only to 1882 is a mystery to me. It’s almost as if the spring picks a year at random and that’s what you’re stuck with.”
Charley shook his head a little and grinned. “You don’t know what a relief it is that I ain’t crazy.”
“Well, I wouldn’t go telling anyone else. They’ll think you’ve completely gone around the bend. It’ll be our secret.”
“Do others in your time come here to mine?”
I thought about Charlotte and decided it was wisest not to mention her. “No. If I told people in 2016, they’d lock me up in the looney bin. Or, and this would be worse, they’d flock to the spring to try it themselves. No telling what year they’d go back to, but someone would be bound to create problems in the past. That’s why I won’t be telling anyone about this spring.”
A Certain Twist in Time Page 12