Written in Time

by Jerry Ahern

  “Daddy?”

  “Help your mom with organizing what we can’t travel without and what we’ll leave behind. The guns won’t be in the cases, so we can use the rifle and pistol case for additional storage of anything that might be easily damaged when left behind.”

  “If we’re not in the nineteenth century, Jack, being visibly armed won’t be a good idea,” Ellen supplied.

  “Agreed. It might not be such a good idea even if we are, coming up on some little ranch house or something. David and I’ll each carry a rifle. It’s not going to look odd with two guys carrying lever action rifles. Each of you ladies carries one of the little guns in a pocket or something—the Seecamp and the derringer. Everything else gets thrown into a suitcase. And, remember, when you guys pack and separate, we can’t carry too much ammo because it’s too heavy, but we’ll want just about fifty rounds of .45 Colt and twenty rounds of .45-70, plus what’ll be in the guns.”

  “You want to bury the stuff or just cover it from view?” David asked, picking up the axe.

  ***

  Their trek toward some outpost of civilization wasn’t anywhere near as long a one as she had supposed that it might be. And Elizabeth couldn’t deny that the scenery was gorgeous. The farther down the mountain they went, the more abundant and luxurious were the trees, pine trees of astounding height, many as tall as or taller than those in their neighbor’s back lot in Georgia, and those were taller than three-or four-story buildings. She recognized spruce trees, but that was the limit of her knowledge of evergreens (except for magnolias, which, unlike in the climate outside her bedroom window back home, would not grow here.)

  The conifers, on the other hand, were either suffering some sort of blight or it was not only the year that had changed (if it had), but also the season. Leaves were everywhere, except in the trees.

  Elizabeth had been hoping against hope for some sign of late-twentieth-century civilization, and her heart raced then sank with her first glimpse of the small house, lean-tos and two horse corrals still perhaps four city blocks distant. She had a case with a pair of her father’s binoculars slung from her shoulder. She took out the binoculars, raised them to her eyes and adjusted the focus as she studied the landscape below. Beneath the shelter of one of the lean-tos was a wagon, what her father called a “buckboard” whenever he referenced one on those occasions when she could not escape watching a western movie. It looked not quite new, but not like an antique, either.

  “If no one mentions hearing an explosion or seeing a fire, remember, don’t mention it, either. Okay?” Elizabeth’s mother told them.

  “Gotchya,” David agreed.

  “And if somebody does mention it, let your father do the talking, and all of us will back him up. He’s the wordsmith, remember, so he tells lies for a living.”

  David laughed.

  Elizabeth’s father murmured, “Thanks a lot.” Then he looked over his shoulder at David. “Hold that rifle with your hand over the receiver and keep the muzzle pointed toward the ground. That’s the least threatening way.”

  “Right.”

  Elizabeth couldn’t take her eyes off the ranch ahead.

  Maybe half again the distance beyond the ranch house from where they were there were a few cattle, just grazing, with no fences that Elizabeth could see. A dozen or so chickens wandered aimlessly in the front yard, pecking at the ground. There was a windmill—she didn’t know why she hadn’t noticed that earlier—and it was mounted high on something that looked like a wooden version of one of the big metal-framed utility poles that connected one town’s power grid to another. From what she had read of the period, knowing this time transfer was going to happen, Elizabeth imagined that the windmill’s sole purpose had nothing to do with running electrical conveniences but was for pumping water instead. No wires of any type led into the house. There was no satellite dish.

  They would be meeting people from the past for the first time, people who were dead before she had ever been born. Meeting people meant making first impressions. Elizabeth put away the binoculars and instinctively took stock of her clothes. The bib-front overalls that she wore were a little dirty and a lot wrinkled. Her jacket—”Daddy!”

  “What is it, sweetheart?”

  “We all have zippers on our jackets, and they didn’t have zippers in the old days, did they?”

  “Whitcomb L. Judson displayed a primitive zipper at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, and the modern zipper was in use by World War I. Zippers weren’t in general circulation until the 1930s.”

  David was laughing. “Aren’t you glad you asked, Liz?”

  “Point is,” Elizabeth’s father continued, “if the zippers get noticed, all we say is something like, ‘Yeah, this guy named Judson invented them. They’re really popular where we come from.’ And we leave it at that, which isn’t telling a lie at all.”

  “What about my deck shoes?” David asked, as if daring his father.

  “It’s like an Indian moccasin, but with a harder sole.”

  “Lizzie and I are wearing pants and bras,” Elizabeth’s mother threw in.

  “Women were more physically modest—at least openly—in these days than in the time we come from. So nobody’ll see your underwear. As for pants, after the accident with the wagon, with God only knew how long a walk over rugged terrain ahead of us, wearing pants like a man seemed like the only sensible choice for you guys. Try me on another one,” her father dared.

  “Ohh, ohh!” Elizabeth’s mother exclaimed in an artificial sounding high voice. “How do men just ever stand wearing these terrible trousers?”

  “That was a good one, Mom,” Elizabeth proclaimed.

  “Thank you, Lizzie.”

  “Okay, Dad,” David volunteered, shifting his burdens and removing his wristwatch. “These things didn’t come around until World War I, either.”

  “Good point, David. Make sure to keep your sleeves down so the paler skin where the watchband covers isn’t visible.” As he spoke, Elizabeth’s father opened the bracelet of his Rolex and hid the watch in a pocket of his bomber jacket.

  “I’m Tom, and this here’s my wife, Mary. We’re the Bledsoe’s.” The man was holding a rifle, but had a pleasant enough look about him.

  “Pleased to meet y’all,” Mary Bledsoe seconded, a shy smile crossing her pale lips, her hands bunched on the edges of a long white cotton apron.

  A girl about Elizabeth’s age approached hesitantly.

  “Come on, girl. Come on up here and meet these folks.” Tom Bledsoe waved the girl forward.

  “Hey,” Lizzie said, smiling.

  No one could resist Lizzie’s beautiful smile, and Jack Naile had that confirmed when the Bledsoe girl sort of half curtsied and said softly, “A pleasure to meet y’all folks. I’m Helen.”

  Jack Naile deduced that it was his turn. “I’m Jack Naile, and this is my wife, Ellen, our daughter, Elizabeth, and our son, David. We were on our way to California, crossing the mountains, when there was a terrible accident with our wagon.”

  “You poor things!” Mary Bledsoe blurted out, wringing her hands around her apron and then smoothing it as she went on. “Helen!”

  “Yes, ma’am?”

  “Go start puttin’ food on the table while I find Mrs. Naile and her daughter something decent to wear. Scoot, child!” As Helen ran off—she had a good stride, skirts raised in order to accomplish it—Mary Bledsoe started gathering Ellen and Elizabeth to her, like a mother bird folding her wings about the babies. “It’s terrible for you poor things.”

  Despite the fact that Mary Bledsoe seemed positively outraged that females—even strangers—were forced by circumstance to wear trousers, it was easy to see who wore the pants in the Bledsoe household. Jack Naile looked over at Tom Bledsoe. “David and I didn’t know what we might bump into. Didn’t want to put you folks off by walking up here with these.” He gestured with the 1895 Marlin lever action that was in his right hand.

  “Man’d be a fool for sure not goin�
�� armed in these parts, critters with four legs and critters with two, and of ’em, the two-legged kind is the worse.”

  David asked, “Crooks—I mean outlaws?”

  “Reckon y’all didn’t pass through Atlas, didchya?”

  Jack answered, “We were in kind of a hurry to get over the mountains into California, and we had all the supplies we needed, until the wreck, anyway.”

  Tom Bledsoe had long since lowered his rifle—a Winchester 1873—from a casual port arms to rest against his leg, the fingers of his left hand barely touching the muzzle to support it. “You’ll need a hand fetching anything else from the wreck?”

  “There’s nothing left worth salvaging.”

  “That’s a shame. You folks don’t have much left.”

  “How far is it into town, into Atlas?”

  “About two hours by wagon. My wife, Mrs. Bledsoe, her sister Margaret keeps school in Atlas, and young Bobby Lorkin rode out not more’n an hour back tellin’ us Margaret was feelin’ poorly and wanted Mary to look in on her. We reckon to set out early ‘morrow mornin’. Y’all got people in Atlas? Well, reckon not if’n y’all didn’t go a-stoppin’ there. You can stay with us a spell.”

  Jack responded, “You and your family are very kind. If it’s no trouble, we would very much like to spend the night tonight and take you up on that ride into Atlas. But I heard tell, I think, that there was a hotel in Atlas, or maybe we could rent a cottage.”

  “I never been inside no hotel, but it’s a fact there is one. Ain’t no cottages I heard ‘bout. Lemme take some of y’all’s possibles and let’s go on up to the house.” And with that, Tom Bledsoe grabbed up one of the suitcases in his right hand. “Never seen no thing like this afore. Travellin’ bag?”

  “That’s what it is,” David agreed.

  “Leather, huh?”

  “Special kind of leather called expanded polyvinyl,” David told Tom Bledsoe, smiling.

  Mary Bledsoe was Elizabeth’s height, a little over five foot three. Mary had three dresses besides the one that she wore, four extra aprons (one with a bib front and lace trim all around it) and a solitary skirt.

  Holding one of the dresses in front of her, Ellen realized that it was four inches too short, about the length that a young girl might wear. She opted to borrow the dark gray circular skirt and wear it with her own sleeveless top, but took the shawl Mary Bledsoe offered to cover the unseemly sight of bare arms. Elizabeth fared better, one of Mary’s dresses—a lighter gray—was a perfect fit except for the bustline, which was tight. Young Helen provided Lizzie with a shawl.

  “Don’t have me much in underthings,” Mary had confided to them.

  “We’ll be just fine, Mary,” Ellen had told her, grateful not to have to wrestle with weird and uncomfortable underwear. By forcing the skirt down closer to her hips than her waist, it wound up at a respectable length.

  Ellen and Elizabeth helped Helen set the table with very pretty plain white china, likely Mary’s best. Mary finished the cooking. There was a potbellied stove at the center of the solitary large room, but the hearth was what was used for cooking. When it was cold, bricks would be heated on the hearth and placed in the beds in the two other rooms of the house. By comparison to frontier homes about which Ellen had read, the Bledsoe place was a condo on Chicago’s Gold Coast, even boasting a well-fitted board floor.

  When Lizzie volunteered to assist Helen with fetching water, the mere mention made Ellen Naile realize that she hadn’t peed since a few minutes before boarding the helicopter.

  Ellen Naile almost asked, “Where’s the john?” Instead, she asked, “The outhouse?”

  Mary Bledsoe’s face flushed at the mention of something so intimate, so personal. “‘Hind the house, o’ course.”

  “Of course. Thank you.”

  The outhouse—complete with crescent moon cutout on the door, also handy for letting flies in during the right season—would have defied even Jack’s powers of description. Pulling the skirt’s waistband up to her natural waist, her face twisting into a grimace designed to limit oxygen intake through the nose, Ellen Naile stepped inside, for once in her life wishing that she were a man.

  David had laughed at both of them when he saw them, and Jack had merely smiled, asking, “Having fun, darling?”

  “Oh, peachy, Jack.” Ellen was wearing an apron. After she had volunteered to help Mary finish preparing dinner, Mary had run to fetch one for her. Ellen, despite her sex, had worn an apron voluntarily perhaps half a dozen times in her adult life. “What have you guys been doing, Jack?”

  “Tell her, David.”

  David sat down on the crate he’d brought in, evidently bidden to do so by Tom Bledsoe. There were seven for dinner and only six chairs in the entire house, including the rocking chair and one of those little fireplace chairs with a spatulate-shaped back, a heart-shaped cutout at its center.

  “Well,” David began, “Mr. Bledsoe kindly showed us his tack, let us see the horses and showed us the field he’s going to plant next spring. He’s got one fine manure pile, let me tell you.”

  “Gosh, menfolk have all the fun, don’t they, Helen?” Lizzie lamented, wiping her hands on her apron.

  Helen didn’t say a word, only smiled enigmatically.

  Dinner was a surprisingly tasty rabbit stew with a number of overcooked and hard-to-identify vegetables, great-tasting dumplings and fresh wheat bread. David had always looked older than he was and was solicited by Tom Bledsoe to join him and Jack for a “snort from the jug and a chaw on the settin’ porch” while the women saw to “clearin’ and all.”

  Ellen Naile would have loved to be able to turn herself invisible and watch and listen in; but since she could not, she helped Mary, Lizzie and Helen make quick work of the dishes (in a way that made her shudder to think that she’d just eaten off of these same dishes). There was no mention of joining the men on the porch or having an adult beverage for themselves, but Mary put on the kettle for tea and showed off her latest needlepoint, confiding that there was always so much mending to do that she had little time for such frivolous activity.

  Despite the unspeakable outhouse, clean as such things went, she imagined, and the awkward clothing and social status, Ellen Naile realized that she wasn’t really having such a bad time. It had been years since they had dined in the home of friends.

  Ellen and Lizzie were washing the breakfast dishes, helping Mary while she fed the chickens and collected the eggs and milked the cow. It was already late, according to something she’d overheard Tom Bledsoe saying. By Ellen’s own reckoning, the time was about six in the morning. Jack and David were assisting Tom with hitching up the team and feeding and watering the rest of the stock.

  “I think I felt a mouse near my foot last night,” Lizzie confided, edging closer to Ellen at the wash basin.

  “It was probably Helen’s toe,” Ellen reassured her daughter, thinking all the while that Lizzie was probably right. Lizzie and Helen had, at least, had a bed—Helen’s. Ellen’s own sleeping accommodations had been to share the bed with Mary Bledsoe that Mary normally shared with Tom. The bed had seemed clean enough, the mattress too soft, too uncomfortable, the bed’s framework easily felt every time Ellen rolled over. Mary had only one nightgown, and it wouldn’t do to sleep in twentieth-century underwear, so Ellen had slept in her clothes. In the morning, the once-unwrinkled skirt was no longer that way.

  Lizzie was lamenting, “And that outhouse! Yuck! I just won’t go, Momma!”

  “A couple of hours riding along a dirt road in the back of a wagon with no springs will make you feel differently. Go potty!”

  “They don’t wash or anything!”

  “You’ll hurt their feelings. Think of it this way. Would you really want to use a bathtub set up in front of the fireplace? I don’t think so.”

  “My hair’s all greasy, Momma!”

  “So’s mine, so’s your father’s and so’s your brother’s. We’ll find a way of getting clean once we get to town.” Ellen N
aile wished that she felt as certain about that as she hoped she sounded.

  Ellen had spoken precious little with her husband since their arrival at the Bledsoe place, the way of things between men and women in this time. But in a brief moment Jack had told her, “Bledsoe says that things are a little wild in town, advised us to carry pistols if we had them. Make sure Lizzie’s up on using a Seecamp, and you know how to use that derringer. Each of you carries once we start for town.”

  She’d given Jack a snotty “Yes, sir, Jack, sir,” but realized that he was only looking out for them.

  With the dishes through, she told Lizzie, “Hey! How’s about this? We go out to the outhouse, and I’ll use it first, then you’ll be using it after me? Okay?”

  “Yeah, dammit,” Lizzie moaned.

  “Ladies don’t talk that way, now or anytime.”

  When they stepped together onto the front porch, the potential lethality of all of the unknown factors into which they were about to insert themselves hit her with the force of a rock. Jack was dressed in the same gray long-sleeved shirt and dirt-stained black Levis he’d worn the previous day. The item of apparel that was different was the gun belt, the black Hollywood rig that Sam Andrews had made for him, the gleaming, long-barreled Colt revolver sitting almost jauntily in its silver concho-trimmed holster.

  When she noticed David, helping Bledsoe with hitching the team, the rock that had hit her struck again; but this time it had grown to boulder proportions. Her seventeenyear-old son had Jack’s second Colt, the old blued one that someone had cut the barrel back on to an “unofficial” five inches. He wore it in the old brown-leather Arvo Ojala gunfighter rig his father had so proudly traded for years ago, which David had never worn, never even wanted to try on without being forced.

  David had fired a gun under his father’s tutelage for the very first time when he was only five. In this time and place, seventeen was a grown man’s age and, if others were armed, it would be incumbent upon David to be armed as well. Dumb clothes and outhouses were an inconvenience; Jack and David facing an armed encounter every time they stepped outside into a street was frightening.