by Rodney Jones
“Ah, the instrument panel. Tells you how fast you’re going and a bunch of other stuff you don’t really need. So let’s get on the road, okay?”
The car began moving again. She pulled the wheel to the left, and the car moved in that direction. I felt I was being pressed into my seat. I did my best to relax, but then glanced through the glass to my right and tensed at the blur of trees going by. I turned to Tess. She could’ve just as well been sitting in a rocking chair on the front porch. I looked at the instrument panel. Rows and rows of glowing marks, numbers, and crazy symbols—a little red bar moving along a series of glowing blue digits.
I pointed. “What’s that mean?”
“Our speed. Fifty.”
“Fifty?”
“Miles per hour.”
I gave that a few moments. “This car can go fifty miles in an hour?” I again glanced out the window to my right.
“I can double that if I pushed the pedal down.” She pointed toward her feet.
“You can make it stop, right?”
I threw my hands against the panel in front of me as I was suddenly flung forward, and then seconds later, back into my seat. The car didn’t quite stop, not completely, but I got the idea. She had also demonstrated why we needed the seatbelts. “Lord.” I let out a lungful.
She laughed. “It doesn’t happen often, but occasionally, some small animal will run out onto the road. And once, I had a bear dart out in front of me. Only time I’d ever seen one in the wild, and I nearly ran the poor thing over.”
“I feel better knowing that.”
She brought the car back up to speed. Another car was approaching from the opposite direction.
“My Lord, no one will ever believe this.” The other car swished by in a blur. It must have been traveling at a hundred. I twisted around in my seat and watched it disappear up the mountain behind us, flying up as though it were nothing. “My Lord.” I turned back. “You can go from here to Burlington in… an hour?”
She moved a lever sticking out from behind the steering wheel. A green light flashed steadily on the instrument panel. The car began slowing. “You could if you didn’t have to stop or slow down.”
The car stopped. I noticed the sign by the road, a red octagon with white letters: Stop. A car flew by from the left. I was pushed back into my seat as Tess’s car lunged forward and swung hard around the corner. I found myself leaning into the door, Tess leaning toward me, a massive machine barreling toward us—bigger than a train engine with gangs of big fat black wheels. It rushed past just a few feet away, like a house shooting by, giving the car a fitful shake. Again, I turned in my seat and stared out the back window.
“You’ll see a lot of those on this road. Semis—shipping crap to the malls.”
“Crap?”
“I don’t really mean crap. It’s just a habit, saying that.”
We’d come to a village. Tess gave that lever by the wheel a downward nudge. A tiny green light blinked on and off on the panel before her. The car was again slowing.
“This Wallingford?”
“Yeah.”
We stopped in the middle of an intersection. Cars were approaching from ahead, another had stopped just a few feet behind us, and yet another was stopping on the road to our left.
“There’s so many,” I whispered. I was pushed to the seat as the car took off for the road at our left. In no more than a minute, Wallingford was behind us.
“Eighteen seventy-five. It doesn’t…” She shook her head.
I turned to Tess; her eyes were on the road ahead. I wondered if she was talking to me or herself.
“But time travel? I have someone from the nineteenth century show up on my doorstep. I’m sorry, but that just doesn’t happen. Really.”
My mind was running in a dozen different directions at once. I was watching Tess as she spoke, my eyes moving from her profile to her hands as they pulled the steering wheel down one way then the other—all while trying to pay attention to what she was saying. I understood the quandary. Eighteen seventy-five? Two thousand nine? To believe it or not. It was clear enough to me—all I had to do was open my eyes—whereas all Tess had was my word.
“It’s all right,” I said. “True, no one likes being thought a liar, but this, I mean, your doubting me, ain’t quite the same thing. It doesn’t really matter, I reckon.”
She glanced my way and then back to the road.
“It doesn’t matter because you’re too kind for it to matter,” I said, “and I appreciate that.”
Her eyes stayed with a curve in the road, while a smile dimpled her cheek. “Some people are easy to be kind to.”
Another two cars, one just behind the other, swished by.
“Look,” she said.
I peered up ahead, wondering what it was she wanted me to look at.
“I’m going to risk giving you the benefit of a doubt.”
I turned to her. “You believe me?”
“Well…” She glanced at me. “Maybe it’s more like… like trusting that you’re sincere, and, well, allowing it to be possible.”
Trusting. It wasn’t the same as believing, but it was close. “All right,” I said.
I watched her driving. It looked like all she was doing was moving the steering wheel, which didn’t seem to take any effort, yet the machine appeared so much more complicated than that.
“Does all this do something?” I waved a finger at the confusion of knobs, dials, gauges, levers, and who knows what at the center of the dashboard.
“Yeah. The heating and AC, and these are for the radio and CD player, and that’s the emergency flashers, and the—”
“Tess, you lost me at the heating. Heating what?”
She explained the purpose of the heater and the AC, giving me an incredulous demonstration of each. I asked about driving in winter. The subject turned to snowplows, and she described large machines that went around pushing snow from the roads. “Faster than it can fall from the sky,” she claimed.
“I’d like to see that,” I said.
“Stick around.”
“Do what?”
“Uh…” She brought her hands to her cheeks and shook her head.
I stared ahead, concerned the car would go flying off the road with no one holding the steering wheel. “Tess.”
She took hold of the wheel, then moved the lever near the steering wheel. Again, the little green light in front of her blinked.
I pointed at the light. “What is that?”
She turned and made a goofy face. The car was slowing again for the big red sign ahead.
“You move that lever, and the light blinks. Why?” I asked.
“It calms the machine down.”
“Does what?”
“It gets confused, starts thinking about running into a tree, anything to avoid another question. I flip that lever up or down, it doesn’t matter which, but it calms the machine down.”
Confused? I should’ve figured it sooner. I still had a thousand more questions, but it seemed she was taking me for a fool. Confused? Why not call it what it was? Annoyed.
We’d just entered a small village. I wasn’t sure which one as I didn’t recognize any part of it, but I wasn’t going to ask. The car swung around a right-hand curve and passed under a high railroad trestle. Another question was ready to hop off my tongue; I caught it, though. I turned and looked back. I was pretty sure the village was East Wallingford and that the railroad above was a part of the line that ran through Ludlow and into Rutland, which sparked yet another question, but I answered it myself. The tracks were there, so the trains must be, as well. There was something I would’ve liked seeing about then.
I looked over at Tess, but couldn’t tell what her mood might be. I thought maybe I should apologize for talking too much and asking an endless stream of questions, but then I’d have to be talking to say that much. As I quietly watched the mountainsides go by, a feeling came over me like way back when I was a child, shortly after my pa di
ed, the feeling of being cut off from some part of myself. It seemed as though I was in the wrong place and wasn’t sure where the right place was or if there even was a right place anymore.
I looked up the road, everything coming and going at an unimaginable speed. I glanced at the instrument panel. The little red bar was near the seventy mark. Nothing in my world went anywhere near that fast. And there I was, going up a mountain—pert near a full day trip from East Wallingford to Greendale—faster than the wind. I estimated the distance to Greendale from where we were—ten miles at best. Nine minutes away? Nine minutes.
I recognized the terrain as we came up over the top of the mountain. The pond that used to be there had become two, split by the road. A pair of beaver lodges stood at the far side of the pond on the right. There were no beaver there in my time. My uncle once took me to a lake somewhere near Chester. He’d told me it was the only one left in the whole state, and maybe the whole world, that still had beaver. I remember sitting along the shore into the evening, watching the beaver swim out along the surface to feed on the lily pads. I’ll always remember that. I was fascinated by them critters, the only beaver I’d ever seen. I reckon a part of my pleasure came from having my uncle sharing it with me. I wanted to tell Tess about that, but I didn’t.
From the top of the mountain, it was four miles to Greendale Road and, sure enough, there at the bottom of the mountain was a bright green sign, neatly lettered in white, saying so.
We sped up a bumpy gravel road, leaving a substantial cloud of dust behind us. On the right was the river by the same name, winding in and out from the road as we followed it up the mountain. Nothing was as it should’ve been. The road was crowded to either side by woods, most of which should have been cleared for farming, but all I saw was a tunnel of pine, maple, birch, and beech the whole way up.
We followed the road to the end, where someone had erected a barricade out of thick steel piping. We were close. The terrain was familiar, but there wasn’t a thing there I could call a town or a village—not so much as a shed. I wasn’t savvy to the finer points of Tess’s plan. Was she thinking she’d just leave me there? Where else could I go? The car crept to a stop. I turned to Tess.
She looked at me, her brow lifted. She shrugged. “Well?”
I turned to the window at my right. “I’d like to look around, but I don’t want to be left here.”
“Oh, no. I’ll go with you, if you don’t mind.”
We left the car and walked up a road of sorts until I caught sight of the river.
“I know this place,” I said.
From the overgrown road, we walked down to the river’s edge. I looked upstream, half expecting to see the mill. I was nearly certain we were in the right place, but I saw no buildings at all, just empty woods. We continued following the river a little farther.
Tess nearly tripped over the rusted rim of an old bucket. “What’s that?” She pointed toward a large block of stone with two rusted bolts sticking up and a rusty ring of steel leaning against it.
I moved closer. I was pretty sure it was one of the foundation blocks that had supported my uncle’s waterwheel. Several rusted pieces of steel lay nearby on a large rock. It appeared that someone had gathered and laid them there in a group. “That’s a wheel strap from a wagon.”
“Really?”
I walked toward the old road, stopping halfway there before a large depression in the ground enclosed by the collapsed remains of a stone foundation. On one of the rocks was a small collection of glass and pottery fragments.
Tess said, “This must have been pretty.” She handed me a large fragment of a blue and white china plate that looked like one of my Aunt Lil’s.
I took it in, that broken plate and everything else, the whole broken world. It was as if I could hardly support the weight of my heart. I stood there, wobbly, staring down into the cellar of my long-gone home. Aside from being partly sunken, the area appeared no different from the surrounding forest floor. “I lived here, Tess. This was my uncle’s house.”
Her eyes were on mine, her lips parted, but she didn’t speak.
“Over there”—I nodded toward the river—“was the mill. I’m sure of it. Just yesterday morning, I had biscuits and eggs sitting right about there.” I pointed toward what would’ve been the back of the house. “The Tabors’ place should be over here.” I stepped through a patch of trilliums. Sure enough, there was another large, rectangular depression. “Over there, Will Snyder’s place. And on the other side of the road, about where that beech is—the Jacksons’.” I pointed to the right. “And the Hemings’.”
Tess walked off toward the road. I just stood there. And then it hit me. I had never felt as though I needed anyone before, but standing there among the ruins of my world, I realized that everyone I’d ever known—my family, my friends, all the folks I could recall—were gone. I realized I might never see any of them again. They’d all been gone long before that moment, but to me, they had all died, right then and there. They were dead, their children were dead, and possibly their grandchildren, too.
I sat down at what was once the back entrance to my uncle’s house, facing in toward the kitchen. I was close to calling out to Tess, begging her not to go, but I didn’t want to be her problem. She crossed the road, her eyes on the ground as she kicked around with the toes of her shoes. She stooped, picked up a stick, then squatted and began digging.
I wasn’t going to say anything; I owed her that much. I sat there and watched, not even thinking about it anymore, as if I’d been hollowed out and made empty. Tess, digging in the dirt. And me, numb and dumb.
“John!”
I stood.
“How were these houses heated?”
It surprised me that she’d ask something I assumed was obvious, but I answered, “Fire.”
Tess stood and walked back toward me. “You had wood stoves?”
“Some folks do—box stoves. Some just have… had regular fireplaces.”
“The house you said was over there—the Tabors’?”
“Yeah, it should’ve been right about where you were.”
“Do you know what they had?”
“They had a stove, if that’s what you mean. They’d brought it up from Albany—a Grainger. Just got it a few years back. I remember everyone going over to see the thing being lit the first time.”
A stunned expression fell across her face. I quickly glanced over my shoulder, as though the cause of her behavior might be behind me. I thought she was going to say something, but she just gave me a lost, blind stare. “Tess?”
Her voice was nearly a whisper. “You lived here?” She turned and looked all around as though she’d just arrived and was yet trying to get her bearings. “My God.” She turned toward me, and then her eyes drifted downward. Silence clung as she stood staring into the hole that was once my home. “I’m sorry.” She slowly shook her head. “John, I’m sorry for the way I treated you earlier. I really am.”
“Tess—”
“It’s awful.” Her eyes were moist. She stepped up close and put her arms around me.
I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t. It seemed all I could do was be there.
chapter seven
A SIZABLE CHUNK OF RUSTED CAST iron with Grainger Sto in raised letters running off to a broken edge: that crusty section of stove and the fact I had nothing to do with Tess’s finding it was what finally convinced her, but gradually, in starts and stops. What happened there? How long had the piece of metal been lying there, buried on the mountainside? Fifty years? A hundred? I had so many questions. As quick as one got answered, three more popped up.
At one point, as we were returning to her car, she stopped. She stood two yards back, her face a wiped slate of impossibly vague questions and answers. I suspected she was sorting through all the notions she’d so far accumulated about me, rearranging them, perhaps throwing a good part of them out. I was a different person all of a sudden.
“You all right, Tess?”
She blinked, then nodded, but her eyes left me in doubt.
Sitting as quiet as a prayer in her car, I gazed toward a patch of grass a ways beyond the windshield.
“I didn’t believe you, John.”
I turned to her.
“You already knew that, though,” she added.
Maybe it was because of that confession, just seemingly coming out of the blue, that I didn’t say anything, but instead just looked at her. I peered into her eyes, and a curious feeling came over me—as though I knew her, almost as though we were, for one long indescribable moment, two halves of the same person. She reached over and laid a hand on mine. I didn’t know as I’d ever looked at a gal’s hands before, other than noticing they had them, but looking down at Tess’s seemed to draw me again into that place and hold me there. She had the hands of a little girl, baby’s skin on slender fingers. I’d guess, judging from the looks of them, they’d never been dirty. It was just a hand, but the prettiest one I’d ever seen. I rolled my callused hands over so our palms were touching.
“John.”
I glanced up into her eyes.
“I’m really sorry.”
I pulled my hand out and patted the back of her hand. “It’s all right. It’s different now, ain’t it?”
A moment slid by, then she said, “Jesus.” Her left hand flew up and covered her mouth. “Sorry, I… it’s just that…” She shook her head and produced a deep sigh. “My God, John, really! This is…” She blinked three times. “Oh…” She brought her hand up to either side of her head, as if they were holding out a big thought. “What are you going to do?”
“I don’t know, Tess.”
We sat there a while longer, each with our own thoughts—mine mulling over her question and not arriving at anything.
“I wish you could stay at my house while we figure things out. But my mom… she’d have like a zillion questions, and I don’t think it’d be a good idea telling her where you’re from. You just can’t be telling people.”
I nodded.
“I’ve got to think of something.” She ran a finger slowly back and forth across her lower lip while her eyes followed her thoughts, back and forth.