Vanessa

by David Howells

Chapter 18 – DAY 3

  Mad Annie was troubled. Things seemed different today, though she was hard to put a finger on as to why. The children weren’t up yet.

  “Maybe they should be,” she thought. “After all, this is a farm. Farm children are supposed to help with the chores, aren’t they?” She looked over at the barn, where there should be horses and cows ready for riding or buggy pulling and milking, respectively. The barn doors were closed, with the morning dew visible. The sun was warming the moisture on the roof and there was a ghostly vapor that rose over the peak from it. “Ghosts! Brrr ” She was always afraid of ghost stories. Her oldest brother, Bartholomew, liked to tell them. She and her sister would love/hate to hear them, holding on to each other’s hands. Annie stopped her train of thought. Why did that notion bother her just now? She felt sensations of familiarity of love, fear, and ghost stories. “What was that phrase I learned in Paris? Oh yes, deja vu. That was it, yes.”

  A cup of coffee would fit the mood right now. It sure would. No one was up but her to fix it, though. She could do it. Just mosey right into the kitchen, fire up the stove and throw on the coffee pot. Even as a girl, she had loved the smell of coffee and bacon in the morning, though she only liked the taste of the bacon. Instead, her mother would put on a pot of hot cider with a stick of cinnamon in it. That was just the thing on a cool morning to make getting up early a good thing. Fresh cider squeezed from just-picked apples. Apples were fruit, like, peaches. Annie looked over at the orchard where the well-tended trees were laden with fruit. The trees were different than the ones she once knew. Those had died. These had been planted since. She remembered people bringing them in. How long did it take for trees to grow to the size they were now? Something (someone?) told her to stop such prattle. That woman yesterday who came to pay respects, the one her children so enjoyed playing with, had asked for something from the kitchen and later for some of her fruit.

  Annie licked her lips and looked at the trees, then back at her home’s closed front door. That feeling was coming back again. Shouldn’t someone be starting breakfast?

  Marianne and Rachel woke in surprise. They looked at each other and realized both had conked out without so much as taking off a sock. They giggled like girls that had finagled a sleepover despite parental restrictions, then their mother hen genes kicked in. Duty called and children needed breakfast. Rachel padded back into her own room (after Marianne checked to see if the coast was clear) and, in fifteen minutes, both women were showered and bath-robed, trying to get the knots out of their hair before showing themselves to the general public.

  Gustav, Ryan, and Allen slept, and dreamt.

  Gustav was trying to protect a litter of puppies from a big nasty cat, shielding them at the cost of being clawed. His clothes were torn and his mother was going to scold him for ruining his good Sunday outfit, but the puppies needed his protection. Mamma would understand, wouldn’t she?

  Ryan was floating on a raft in the ocean, but the colors were wrong. The water was black and there was danger nearby. But it wasn’t the water. No whales or sharks to be seen anywhere. The threat was in the air. It was charged with malevolence that wanted to nibble away at him like rabid rats. He considered diving into the water to get away from it, but no amount of walking got him to the raft’s edge. Yet, he felt no fear, for soon there was a soothing presence that made things all better. It filled and shared his body and gave him a peace of mind in spite of the bad air. He stuck his tongue out, lay back on the raft and made funny pictures out of the clouds in the air. There was a train engine, an airplane, a car, a church, and there was a dark cloud, in the west. Danger? He looked to the east, and saw a red sky. Sailors take warning. The dark cloud came closer, but he was not the target. It was another cloud, the one that looked like a church. He watched as the cloud enveloped the church. Ryan was saddened, but there wasn’t anything he could do about it.

  Allen was late for class, but it was OK. He knew it was a dream and checked out the other classrooms. The first was full of children. They were all black, and they were singing. The second had no one in it, but the walls and desks were charred black from a fire. The children were gone. That was good. The third had soldiers in it, all dressed in uniforms of various conflicts, all uncomfortable looking. They were squished into little children’s desks and they couldn’t get out of them. Someone had put glue on the seats. They looked funny and Allen laughed. One of the soldiers heard him and aimed a revolver at Allen. He closed that door real fast. The last room had a teacher in it. No one else was there. It was an old-fashioned room. She had an old-fashioned blue dress on and was quite attractive. The teacher was a bit too old for him, but not that old. The woman waved him to the one desk that seemed right for him, right in front of her. He smiled and walked over to it, but sat on the desk rather than in the chair. That was for children and he was much too old for that. The teacher seemed pleased, then turned around to write something on the blackboard. She wrote the first word: ‘LEAD’. He looked at the word and wondered if she meant ‘lead, as in the metal’ or ‘lead someone’.

  The second word was ‘LOVE’. “Lead, love, laugh and be happy.” Wasn’t that a song that granddad used to sing when Allen was really little? Lead and love. This was a dream, so he was in control. If he was in control, what was this lady doing writing words on the blackboard? Was he making her do it? She began to write a third and, he knew, final word. Allen felt sure it would be ‘LAUGH’, like in that stupid song, but it wasn’t. The letters were wrong. It was hard to read, to make out. He squinted his eyes and the letters began to take form, F, O, R, but there wasn’t time because it was school lunchtime and the cafeteria was serving coffee. But since when did a grade school cafeteria ever serve coffee? He was waking up. The last impression he recalled on waking was a look of major annoyance on the teacher’s face who was scrambling to finish the word. The room grew hazy, but he could make out two more letters: ‘G’ and ‘I’. “Forgi?” he said when his eyes opened. “Porgi? Porgi and Bess? Porky Pig?”

  “Oh, farts!”

  The ladies had ordered room service, which was prompt in delivering a nice spread. In the interim, they had also gotten dressed and looked annoyingly refreshed as the men-folk grumped out of their rooms, scratching, yawning and blinking, dressed in their slippers and hotel robes. Ryan looked up at Rachel and Marianne, his head bent forward, raised one eyebrow and asked, “What, did you sleep in your clothes?” Neither woman answered directly, but both smirked. “I’ll never figure them out, dead or alive.”

  Everyone grabbed coffee (or tea), loaded plates (family style) and shuffled (or stepped lively, which irritated the shufflers) to couches and coffee tables of the suite’s common room. The sounds were homey: fork scrapes, cup clinks and various sounds of appreciation that weren’t found in the dictionary, unless under the general umbrella of ‘grunt’. Gustav had to be filled in on everything and apologized more than once for being absent the previous night. The Mother Hens had directed him to sit on the big couch and each took up stations on either side of him, which pleased him immensely. They knew who needed their support the most. There was a comforting feeling when he griped and one or both of them would reach over and squeeze his hand, rub his neck, or even tousle his hair. He could get used to this real fast, and alternated between finding things to grump about and smiling.

  Ryan smiled and shook his head. “Snow on the roof.”

  Allen finished the old saying: “Fire in the furnace.” With that, battle plans for the day were bandied about in an atmosphere of friendship and full stomachs. Allen and Ryan would ride with the men to raise morale and make inroads with Jed Patterson, if possible. Rachel and Marianne would coordinate with the re-enactors, the Edwards Homestead staffers and its board of directors for all the last minute details a project of this size would entail. Gustav had defrayed a lot of the costs involved in this project by bartering
with two television stations, in his capacity as a board member for the Edwards Historical Site, for exclusive filming rights. One was to focus on roaming around and getting footage of individuals and small groups. The other would be set up strategically to capture the main arena spectacles. Gustav had to manage some last minute quagmires on liability, contracts with vendors, and such. Vanessa would...Ryan looked around. Where was she? Gone already? That wasn’t like her. He then announced Vanessa’s arrival, followed by a question directed at her absence. No answer. He finally said that the Lady Vanessa was not in a mood to do anything but smirk and God help the person she was directing her attentions to.

  “OK, children, Daddy says clean up your plates, finish your drinks and let’s roll. Allen, that sheepskin saddle pad will be waiting. Sorry about the sores. Gustav, you take it easy. That’s an order, so shut that open mouth of yours. There’s egg yolk between your teeth. Ladies, you have both proven to be invaluable, so I propose we all take them out to a nice dinner tonight. All in favor say ‘aye’. All opposed and willing to personally cook dinner themselves and do the dishes? So carried. So, let’s make like a cowgirl brassier.”

  There was a general look of ‘huh? Ryan was getting more unpredictable to his old friends lately, and he never was predictable to his new ones. He just smiled and said “Round’em up, head’em out.” A volley of crumpled and greasy napkins was launched. Most found their laughing target.

  Melissa came back to her room right about then, toweling her hair and getting ready for class. What she saw on her desk was immediately suspicious. The space in front of her PC was cleared of her math papers. No one could have gotten in, other than the RA (resident advisor), and she wasn’t up yet judging from the snoring from her room. There was a picture leaning against the front of the PC screen that caught her eye. It was the one of Allen she just recently had put away. Had he been there? The mystery made her resolution to pay closer attention in class that day far more difficult to stick to. There were too many guys sitting next to her, trying to be friendly in class and the cafeteria (especially the cafeteria), adding to the general silliness.

  “Thank you, I can carry my own books.”

  “Thank you, I already have an exercise partner.”

  “Thank you, but pep rallies make me hurl.”

  She was wearing sweats today, for God’s sake! You couldn’t even see the panty lines. “What’s wrong with these guys? I wish Allen was back.”

  Jed Patterson sat waiting for the column to form up. His horse, Coaljack, was an Andelusian. He’d heard from the trader that sold him the horse that Coaljack had the bloodline of the old medieval warhorses. Jed knew horses and felt it was probably true. From what he had read (though he had dropped out of school, Daddy made sure he could read well enough to get by), this breed was mated to the big Percherons to make the fearsome war stallion. Had he lived, that would have been one of his life’s fondest dreams. As it was though, Coaljack had put the fear of God into many a Johnny. He got the best Jed could give him, which wasn’t always sufficient, but it was the best he could do. Kind of like how his Daddy gave his limited best to Jed. Coaljack was the closest thing to a son he would ever know. That used to make him blind mad but, for the moment, he was just grateful that he had even that. Some of the other men looked at Jed and began to murmur.

  The grove where they appeared each morning was peaceful. “Looked to belong to some rich folk in that big house tip there,” Jed told his horse. He’d seen the house in its stages of construction, how long ago, ninety years? It was so hard to keep track of the days. It was a day like any other, from the look of it, though this one promised to be a pleasant one. There were birds singing and hardly a cloud in the sky. He supposed that even Hell could sometimes be ‘right purty’. Had he been able to have paper and pen, he might have kept an interesting journal. All the changes he had noticed over time, all the times he tried to avenge himself and the other soldiers on that woman. For the most part, the entries wouldn’t change much faster than a tree would if you stood there and watched it grow. But something was different today, or at least seemed so. It was a vague feeling of unrest, a hint of a desire to question himself. He’d not had that before and felt he must be getting soft in his ‘old age’. With that, Private Patterson laughed at himself, which gave the willies to his (former?) comrades. No one liked being near a mad man who was laughing, for what a mad man found funny was often not pleasant.

  Allen and Ryan had taken their horses, Maribelle and Cumquat (Allen had groused yesterday about spending the afternoon sitting on a southern fruit, and what idiot would name a horse Cumquat, anyway?) for a leisurely walk. It was Thursday, September 29th and the leaves were turning color beautifully. Only a few had dropped, enough to make the effect pleasing to the eye as daubs of color highlighted the green carpet of grass. Adding to the sweetness of the morning was the breeze that made those daubs of red, yellow and brown dance in lines and circles with gentle, scratchy, whisper songs. The whole effect was intoxicating and Allen began to softly hum the first thing that came to mind. On the second go round, Ryan added his voice to the music; “Oh I wish I was down in the land of cotton. Old times there are not forgotten, look away, look away, look away, Dixie land.” Not knowing many more words, both men hummed along in a pleasant base and tenor harmony. As time nudged along, Ryan stopped humming and commented, “Aye, there’s the rub. ‘Old times there are not forgotten’. Kind of sums it all up, doesn’t it?”

  Allen thought about it. “Yeah. You know, there are drugs called amnesiacs. Shame we can’t use them on Annie or Jed. Versed was one such drug used for a long time. Keeps the person undergoing anesthesia from remembering what was said and done during surgery. Learned that from Jeremy, a pre-med roomie I used to have.”

  “Oh? How can you forget what happened when you are unconscious? Unconscious is unconscious. You don’t hear or see anything. I don’t remember anything I hear in my sleep, do you?”

  “Do you really want a lecture from the little whelp?”

  Ouch. “Sorry about that, son. Yes, I would very much like a lecture from the not-so-little whelp.”

  “Fair enough. First of all, you do hear in your sleep. How many times did you wake up from a dream that included a real sound going on, and you had just made creative use of it in that dream?”

  Ryan nodded. “OK, I’ll grant you that one. Good point! Can you top it?”

  “I’ll try, Gramps. Drug sedation is different from sleep. Your subconscious is alert and still tuned into the world. I’ve read where people wake up after a surgery and throw bedpans at the surgeon when he or she walked in if they had said uncomplimentary things directed at the patient during the procedure. It’s been shown that positive conversation content during surgery has a direct link to recovery success. The subconscious also is not subject to cultural mores when speaking its mind. Dreams can get pretty sexual, or violent, or just plain rude. It’s not good or bad, just what is. When a person is under, Jeremy told me, they have a habit of saying some pretty explicit stuff. They will know down deep that things that shouldn’t have been said had been and will feel violated.”

  “Is your memory photographic, Allen? You have a command of information on a lot of fields.”

  “I like to read, download, and play Trivial Pursuit. There are a hundred versions, depending on what your main interests are. At RPI, I was in with a group that liked to play. You pick up a lot that way. Also, Mom was someone that insisted I learn something new every day when I was growing up. Learning became fun in the process. Probably why I like college so much. Learning is a high for me.”

  “I’ve noticed.”

  “I was wondering, Ryan. Ghosts don’t sleep, do they?”

  “Can’t prove they don’t, but I’ve never found one napping. Sleeping is time programmed in to allow the body to regenerate from damage done the day before. Entities don’t seem to have that ne
ed...no bodies to damage. Still, their level of consciousness and awareness varies greatly. Some of them appear to have their full personality, while others display only a fragment of the whole they used to be.”

  Allen yawned. “Speaking of sleeping, this pace, the sun, the whole scene here is a living lullaby. Any coffee on this route?”

  “You know, Allen, you’re becoming far too addicted to that stuff. Why not give it a break?”

  “I’ll buy.”

  “Check and roger. It’s a quarter mile that way for a shortcut.” Ryan pointed 45 degrees to the left of yesterday’s path and off they went, with Allen now convinced that there was more Scottish than Irish blood in Ryan’s background. Going over rough ground was more interesting, since more attention had to be paid to branches both on the trees and on the ground. That made the ride more authentic and less like an amusement park attraction. They came out near County Route 17 and waited for a hole in the traffic. Hybrid cars and trucks whizzed by, seeming to be in a great hurry to get somewhere. People who had learned how to travel slowly and be one with nature felt sorry for the hustling masses. The hustling masses who saw the two blue-jeaned riders would vent their envy with words.

  “How quaint,” one mother said.

  “Look at the old-time cowboys!” said a child.

  A businessman using an earplug to feed him his supervisor’s instructions for the upcoming contract goals just muttered, “Hicks.”

  Crossing over the road was a snap as traffic at this hour hadn’t reached the peak numbers yet. It would, by the time they needed to get back, but that wasn’t a problem, according to Ryan. They would follow the road for a few hundred yards, duck under CR17 at a stream overpass and be back in plenty of time. Both got off their horses at an authentic-looking general store, complete with hitching post.

  “I love this place. I’ve been drawn here quite a few times in the past. The smell is always the same: candies, candles, and notions-lotions-potions. There are soaps and craftsy things enough to make any souvenir hunter salivate. They make a damn good cup of coffee, too. How about you pick up a couple of mediums while I hit the head.”

  “Got it, Boss.” While Ryan sought out the sign that said ‘Pointers (the ladies room: ‘Setters’), Allen stepped up to the counter and paid for two blacks, one with two sugars, one straight. His Mom had made sure that his sweet tooth had been kept in check ever since he first found something other than her to chow down on. She was one of those people who felt that sugar was one of the evils of the world, pointing to many studies on aberrant behavior that demonstrated how ‘special needs’ children improved with a diet mostly devoid of sugar. Improvements were noted in grades and social skills, and there was a drop in episodes of aggressive behavior. Not content to let it go at that, she added the insight that sugar had been responsible for more slavery in the world’s history than tobacco and cotton combined. He learned to appreciate the virtues of honey, produced, he was happy to point out to his dear mother, by thousands of drone bees enslaved to a lazy queen. She didn’t laugh.

  There was a flyer on the counter about the upcoming event at the Edwards Homestead. Nice one. Someone had known how to use color and design to attract the eye. He took one and the cashier noticed. “Ought to be a real sight, that one. I plan on going myself. Owners had to call ManPower to staff the store on Saturday. No one wants to miss the battle. Can you believe over three thousand re-enactors will be there? My uncle is a blacksmith and he’ll be there, making horseshoes and fireplace pokers to sell. Here’s his card, friend. Tell him his nephew, Frank, said ‘Hi’.”

  “Will do, Frank. Name’s Allen. Maybe I’ll see you there.”

  “Maybe not. I hear there’s going to be upwards of sixty-thousand visitors. Every hotel for fifty miles has been booked for months and I hear ones further out have raised their rates.”

  “I’m with some friends in a suite over at the Milledgeville Marriott. Thanks for the heads up, anyway.”

  Frank’s eyebrows went up at that. This kid either was a pathological liar or someone with big time bucks to burn. Ryan came up to claim his coffee and stuck out his hand. “Hi Frank! I see you met Allen. How’s Uncle Blacksmith, Gary, isn’t it?”

  “Allen’s your friend, Ryan? Well, that explains it. If anyone can pull strings to get Marriott rooms this weekend, you can. Uncle Gary’s fine. Hey, thanks again for getting me the nod from Georgia Tech. I start next spring. Nate will be old enough to take over the store for Dad, then. I’m taking astrophysics as a major and astronavigation as a second.”

  “Well, guess I’ll have Gustav give Carrie Handers over at NASA the word that their next fair haired boy is being groomed. You’ll go far, Frank, my boy. Just stay away from the babes long enough to get your cume up. You can attest to that one, can’t you, Allen my lad?”

  “I’ll get you for that,” Allen muttered, but smiled when he said it.

  “Sure thing, Ryan, and thanks again. Mom said to say ‘Hi’ when I saw you. Nice to meet you, Allen.”

  They went to the porch and sipped enough from their cups to make them safer in the saddle. Allen visited ‘Pointers’, then they both climbed aboard and started on their rendezvous with the Union soldiers.

  “Ryan, I think you know half the locals of Milledgeville.”

  “I’m working on the other half.”

  “Any of them know your last name?”

  “No.”

  Gustav went to his room and picked up the hotel phone. He asked to be connected with local information. A minute later, he inserted his MFD card and confirmed his identity by pressing his thumb against the ID square.