Terra Mechanica: A Steampunk Anthology

by Jay Barnson

  Lookin’ back, I think Ma must have known what was in the wind. Exactly what. Better than me, for sure. I was just finishin’ hitchin’ up my favorite mule, Big Red, to the wagon, when here she come. She handed me some fresh bread and a hunk of cheese and some bully beef and nice sharp radishes, all wrapped up in an oil cloth, enough for me and the girl both, since we was gonna be too far from the house at dinner time.

  Then she give us both a real stern look. “Now don’t dawdle!” she says. “Get that hay up, turn the water in, and get yourselves back here as soon as you may. Then we’ll all go into town.” There was an Independence Day rodeo at the fairgrounds, and a church supper. There was patriotic songs by the local Women’s Guild, and a big bonfire. ’Course we had all been looking forward to it all summer.

  Ma, when she fixed a stare on you it felt like she was looking right through you to see what you had in your back pocket. And that morning she give me that don’t-you-dare-sass-me stare. “Hurry back!”

  “Yes’m.”

  “And you, girl—you work hard for your pay today.”

  “Yes’m.”

  Anyways, I finished hitching up Big Red, and off we went. Ma stood there and watched us over the rise, real careful.

  Soon as we was out of sight of the house, Sarah—that was the hired girl’s name—Sarah the Rassler is how I think of her all these years later—scooted right over next to me on the wagon bench until her leg was touching mine. It was a nice cool morning, but I thought my britches was gonna catch fire where they touched her gingham dress. I stared straight ahead. But she leaned in close until her breath was right in my ear and says, “I don’t think it’s gonna take us all day to get that hay in, do you?”

  I kinda coughed a little. “Um . . . no . . . not if we hurry.”

  “So no point in hurrying all day, right? Might as well take it easy. Enjoy ourselves.” Then she leaned her head against my arm real gentle-like and went to drawing little circles on my knee with her finger. There ain’t never been a sixteen-year-old boy who could keep his heart from ker-thumpin’ when a curvy little miss goes to drawin’ circles on his leg.

  I was glad to hop down off that wagon when we got to the hay field, almost two miles away. Big Red was as old as me, which was mighty old in mule years, so he knew his business way better than I did. Which was why I liked him so much. Without me telling him nothin’, he walked along that row of hay, nice and slow, while I pitched it up onto the wagon and Sarah the Rassler spread it around. Down one row we went, and back up to the other, and without being told, Big Red pulled up right alongside the haystack we had started the day before.

  I made that hay fly! Tossed it like a man possessed. Felt like there was a jitterbug in my chest. If Sarah the Rassler hadn’t been up top of that stack, trompin’ around with her skirt switchin’ around the top of her boots I mighta just calmed down and got that hay all done. But no. I could hardly breathe. As it turned out, the rest of that field wasn’t gonna get gathered that day.

  The sun was barely up over the mountains when I forked up the last of that load. The stack was almost done, about as high as I could toss it. But I managed to get that load up there, even with Sarah the Rassler spreadin’ and trompin’ and swishin’.

  “Toss me up that water jug,” she says, and then she flops down on top of the hay, clean out of my sight. Now, Ma had sewed up a crockery jug in layers of old quilt and canvas for me, and would always fill it up and put it in the trough over night, so it would stay wet and cold all morning while I worked.

  “You sure you can catch this?” I ask.

  “Hmmm . . . maybe. Maybe you better hadn’t oughta chance it though. If I miss and that crockery gets broke it’s you that’s gonna catch hob.” She rose up high enough to peek at me over the edge of the hay and drop a wink.

  I took a running jump off the wagon seat and scrambled up top of the stack with that jug in my hand.

  Now I gotta tell ya, that day was the first time I had been all alone with Sarah in a rasslin’ mood. First time she kissed me, right out of the blue, was on that very wagon, taking a load of wheat to the mill to get ground. We was ridin’ along in the shade under the cottonwood trees down the bank of the canal, with the cotton floatin’ all fluffy through the hot, still air, when she slides over quick as you please, waited for me to turn around all startled, and planted a big soft, wet kiss right on my mouth. I was so startled I didn’t have the wits to kiss back. Boy did she laugh! She slid right back to her side of the wagon seat and just sat there laughin’.

  “Well,” she says, “you can close your mouth and stop looking liked a stomped horn toad.”

  “W-what did you do that for?” I finally manage to stammer.

  “Got tired of waitin’ for you to do it.”

  Then a week later we found ourselves all alone in the milk barn, washing up a stack of big milk cans, after the milkin’ was done. I was all hunkered down and she come up behind me and put her arms around me. That was the first time I was ever hot and cold at the same time. Chills runnin’ up and down my spine and face on fire both at once. I stood up so quick I knocked over that stool, and twisted around as I did. My face slid right up the front of her blue and white checked dress. And did she back away? Not a bit! Talk about face on fire! This time I was ready and threw my arms around her and held her up close. And the kiss was warm and soft, just like in my dreams every night since that ride to the mill. But then someone come bangin’ through the milk house door, and we jumped apart like scalded cats and hurried back to scrubbin’ out them cans.

  But that mornin’ on top of the haystack was the very first time we was ever completely alone and—we thought—far from anyone to spy on us.

  Now, you and me, Nick, we’re both men who have seen the world. So I won’t say much, just that we must have been a sight up top of that haystack.

  That’s where we was, laughin’ and gigglin’ and rasslin’, with Sarah lookin’ up into that bright blue mornin’ sky, my eyes full of nothin’ but her, all snuggly and warm in that hay, and all our clothes all tangled around us every which way, and my hands findin’ their way to places they hadn’t oughta. It was first-time magic. Burned into my brain. To this day, every time I smell new hay I think of that girl.

  All of a sudden she lets out a squeal and sits bolt upright, catches me a lick right smack on the nose with her forehead. Bloodies it good. But she don’t even notice. She slides down the side of that haystack all the way to the ground, skirt flyin’ up around her ears, most everything else unbuttoned, and her bloomers showin’ for all the wide world to see, and rolls across the ground right underneath the wagon.

  I’m starin’ down at where she went, wonderin’ if I done something so horrible that she was gonna tell Pa on me, and him being deacon and all, it was gonna be a big scandal, and now was I gonna have to marry Sarah the Rassler, who was so old? I mean, it weren’t like there would be a baby or nothin’, since things just didn’t get that far. Events spoiled her plan, I reckon. Likely woulda worked, too.

  But after a minute she finishes buttonin’ about a hundred little teeny wood buttons that hadn’t oughta got unbuttoned, and peeks out from underneath the wagon and stares back up at me—no—right past me. It wasn’t until I turned around to see what the heck she was starin’ at that I realized somethin’ had blotted out the sun.

  An airship! Wasn’t much as airships go. Not like the behemoths in the dime novels I had hid up in the corn crib. This one wasn’t near that big. Just a little blimp. And not new or well kept up. Matter of fact she was just plain ratty. But she was the first I ever saw with my own eyes, and that mornin’, boy, was she a wonder! Big as the miller’s barn and floatin’ up there in that blue sky with those two little propellers pushin’ her along slantways to the wind, puffs of smoke and steam floatin’ behind from her little boiler.

  Totally blotted out the sun. Wasn’t very far above us—maybe twenty, thirty foot—so it seemed to take forever for her to pass by, makin’ for the fairgrounds in town
, where all the Independence Day celebrations was to be.

  And all painted up every color of the rainbow! Lordy, wasn’t she a grand sight! Long dangly ribbons all ripplin’ in the wind. And painted on the side in red and yellow curlicue letters taller than me, “The Great and Powerful Oz.”

  I’ll never forget my first sight of Ozzie Osmond. He was the pilot, of course. And the fireman.And the landing crew.And the showman.And the huckster of a patent medicine that would peel the paint off a plow. But accordin’ to him would cure the rheumatiz and gallstones and grow hair on a billiard ball. And all sorts of other whatnot.

  But there he hung out the window, hallooin’ and laughin’ and wavin’ at us.

  “Hey, boy!” he hollers. “Hay boy! Haystack boy!” He was so tickled with his own joke he like to bust a gut laughin’ like a dad-blame jackass. Thought he was gonna fall right out that window.

  Ozzie Osmond’s little blimp turned straight for the fairgrounds and had the wind behind her a little. And Big Red pulling the hay wagon never ever went at anything but a walk, no matter how much I clucked and shook the reins and cussed him. So by the time Sarah and me made the four miles from the hay field to the fairgrounds, most all the folks in town, and for miles around, were all gathered up to see the flyin’ machine.

  When I rolled up with that empty hay wagon and Sarah sitting by me, Osmond spotted me over the crowd and waved me over.

  “Hay Boy!” he hollers, pointin’ at me over the crowd. I must have gone all sorts of red, because he just laughed and laughed, head throwed back, big old belly laugh. Of course, everybody else thought he was just sayin’ “Hey boy!” and didn’t get the joke. But that’s just the kind of guy he was. From then on, until we parted company, he called me Hay Boy. What a comedian.

  “Hay Boy!” he says, “I’ll give you a silver quarter if you’ll take that wagon over to the train depot and fetch me a ton of their best boiler coal. Tell the station master to bring the account over and we’ll settle up.”

  Now twenty-five cents was more money than I had ever had in my pocket in all my born days. Sure I wanted to go, but I was already scared what would happen if Pa found out I took the mule and wagon to town. But right that very moment I look over the crowd and there sits Pa in his best buggy with the matched grays. He and Ma beat us to town by a good stretch.

  So I was all worried about nothin’—pretty much everybody from a couple of miles around was at the fair grounds that day, millin’ around, gogglin’ at Ozzie's blimp and tellin’ everyone who would listen all sorts of stuff they didn't know.

  So no worries about gettin’ a dressin’ down from Pa. Before he even caught my eye he was yellin’, “Go! Go!” You can bet I lit out of there like a cat with its tail on fire. Made record time to the train depot and back.

  Anyways, I was climbin’ out of the blimp’s coal bunker, just finishin’ up from shoveling that ton of coal all by myself, when here come Mr. Peterson.

  I yelled up to Ozzie, “Here’s the station master to collect for the coal.” He never said a word, but before I knew it, a ton of water ballast dumps on the ground, and that blimp jumps into the air like a pheasant out of a ditch bank, with me hangin’ off the bottom, half in and half out.

  You can bet I scrambled up into that coal bin quick as I could, and sat there with my mouth hangin’ open like a frog, watchin’ all the folks shrinkin’ to the size of mice. They was all drenched and muddy from the ballast water and yellin’ up at Ozzie to get his fancy butt back down here and yellin’ at me to jump, for glory’s sake!

  But I was frozen like a deer on the railroad tracks, just hangin’ on for dear life. Didn’t take long before we was up so high that jumpin’ would have busted every bone in my body.

  Then that good strong hot west wind that nearly always blows over that valley got hold of us, and the people and houses and trees and foothills got shootin’ past us faster and faster, all without a sound, and all the time us climbin’ higher and higher.

  The higher we climbed the faster we was travelin’. The ground was risin’ nearly as fast as we was, which meant it was rippin’ by at a terrible clip, rocks and trees and more rocks, and we was climbin’ better than a thousand feet per minute. But silently, because in a blimp without the propellers turnin’, the wind doesn’t rush past: it washes you along. You ride it.

  Then I got my breath, and the first thing that came out of my mouth was a squeal like a scalded hog. Startled Ozzie so bad he squealed too, me echoin’ in the half-full coal bin, him in the pilot car.

  The inside door to the coal bin slams open and there’s Ozzie’s face. Quick as a flash he reaches in there and grabs me by the collar and hauls me out to where I’m standing up in the little space between the bunker and the boiler. In his other hand he’s got this big ol' coal shovel, worn down to a nubbin, but plenty left to brain me with. He sees it’s me, throws down that shovel with a clang, and stomps off.

  Now at this point I should tell you this about Ozzie Osmond: that man was one powerful cusser. He could cuss a cuss that would turn the air blue six feet around his head in every direction. He could cuss a cuss in rhythm and rhyme for a good ten minutes, whenever he was powerful worked up. Or whenever he wanted folks to think he was powerful worked up. He even had a version for when he was in polite society, or with religious folks, or just with folks that wanted other folks to think they were polite or religious. You can bet lots of it stuck in my head forever. Some things you can’t just unhear. I’ll give you the start of the polite society version. Goes like this:

  “Log jam! Log jam!

  Brother trucking log jam!

  Horse clopping, runt bucking,

  Brother trucking log jam!”

  So he stomps around the cabin log jammin’ for a couple of minutes, then he turns to me all of a sudden with a pondering look on his face. “Well, Hay Boy,” he says, “this may work out good after all, since you’re stuck with me and me with you.”

  I finally manage to choke out, which was the first words I managed to speak since the blimp left the ground, “W-w-w-what do you mean? I’ll just get off when you go back to settle up. Folks will be mad about the water and the mud and whatnot, but it was an accident. They’ll get over it.”

  He looks at me all open-mouthed like I sprouted a second head. Finally he says, all wonderin’-like, “Well! Ain’t you just about as simple as you look? No, Hay Boy, I ain’t going back there to Podunk.”

  “It ain’t Podunk,” I say.

  “Wake up, rube! You’re Hay Boy, from Podunk, Nowhere County, God-forsaken Territory,”he says. “Listen up: I didn’t dump ballast on accident.”

  Then it dawns on me, how the whole time he was on the ground he never once set foot more than two or three steps away from the blimp. How the whole time he was showing one pretty girl after another the controls, putting his arms around her from behind to show her where to put her hands on the wheel, leanin’ this way and that, hollerin’, “Port! Now stabberd!” his eyes never once left the crowd. How he particularly watched fresh wagons pull up with folks from further out from town. Of course he was watchin’ for Mr. Peterson, the station master, or for Mr. Kessler, the general store owner, to come with their accounts.

  “Oh,” I says.

  “Yeah,” he says. “I see you’re startin’ to figger out what’s what.”

  Then I really started puttin’ things together. “You dumped ballast for a quick getaway! You had no intention of payin’ for your coal or groceries!”

  He didn’t even bother to answer, just shook his head at me like I was a simpleton. Which I guess I was. Finally I blurted out, “And if I wasn’t stuck on board I wouldn’t have got my silver quarter, either, would I?” He just looked at me and shook his head all exasperated.

  I thought about all this for a minute, includin’ how we were thousands of feet off the ground. Which got me to wonderin’, “How high will we go? How far will the wind blow us before we get to the ground again?”

  “Blamed if I know,”
he says, as casual as good morning, and went to huntin’ in his pockets for sulfur matches to light his pipe. “I don’t generally fly this thing. It come with a man to pilot it when I won it at stud poker over to Calaveras County. But he was off getting’ his ashes hauled in Chinatown when I was obliged to leave San Francisco in a hurry. Didn’t exactly settle up accounts there either. Dumped so much ballast to get over the Sierra Nevada Mountains that I used up all my coal and boiler water drivin’ her back down to the ground again.”

  I was pretty glum by now. “That’s five hundred miles! Why didn’t you just vent some of the gas to come down?”

  “And be stranded devil knows where? You think I could get a hydrogen gas refill in the middle of nowhere? Not by a damned sight! Counted myself lucky to get coal and water and groceries. And now looks like I got me a first mate, too.”

  “Sure,” I say to myself, “until my feet hit the ground and I get running for home.” But then right there on the spot he offers to teach me airship piloting—what he knew about it, which wasn’t much. He offered a way to learn me a trade, plus bed and board, five dollars every single week, and see the sights all around the world. Not that I ever saw a dime of those wages. But he could see he had me.

  Of course I jumped on it. What boy wouldn’t, especially one like me who would rather be curled up in the loft with a penny dreadful than shovelin’ pig manure or pitchin’ hay? A boy who slept at night with Jules Verne under his pillow?

  We shook on it. And of course, the way I was brought up, the handshake made it as binding as an oath. Yep, he had me all right.