by Eric Flint
Sunset was a few hours off. Julie would be here then.
***
The florist shop had large windows.
Mary knew such places, with or without windows, simply did not exist in the time when her first family had been alive, when glass had been so much smaller and the ghosts had no place to be seen, to feel safe.
Now, if she could only find some way to stop the owner of the shop from washing this window.
Mary knew the ghost on the glass wasn't bothered by the washing. It simply moved with the sun, from one place on the glass to another. It waited patiently for her.
Mary would follow it.
Ghosts were slow, steady and patient. All she need do was be patient and even if the ghost disappeared completely, it would reappear later.
After all, where could a ghost go that she could not follow now that she was here, in Grantville, with all this glass?
***
The girl didn't reappear that afternoon but Julie hit pay dirt the next afternoon. She chose to stand at the line with the word "five" scrawled almost illegibly beside it before beginning her surveillance. Five what, she wondered.
Perspective and patience. The five didn't mean anything to her but it did to someone else.
"You need be standing here," a voice told her.
Julie turned to see a ten year old, maybe a year or two older, blond female glaring at her. Her arms were crossed across her chest. She was dressed in a handmade dress with what appeared to be food stains smudged across the front where she had obviously wiped her hands. There was a mother somewhere who wouldn't be happy to see that well made dress smudged and stained.
Smudged and stained?
"There?" Julie smiled. Her smile often won over children when nothing else did.
The girl's expression did not change when she nodded.
Julie moved slightly. There was another line. This one had the word "six" beside it.
"Now look," the girl stated firmly.
Julie looked.
There were ghosts on the glass. There was no other way to describe them. The smudges transformed with the slanting, late afternoon light and the slight change in position, five to six, into what could only be seen as ghosts.
Reflections and smudges and light merged into something faint and beautiful, like forms in a mist that is slowly swirling in an unfelt breeze.
"Oh, my God." Julie moved her head slightly and the image was nothing more than smudges on glass. Then she moved her head back to its original position.
They were faint, startling images of faces and places and things. It was like laying down and looking up at the sky and how clouds changed from horses to sailing ships. She had done that with her father how long ago?
"That's her!" Audry stormed out of her store. The words seemed to strike Julie straight across her face to wake her up.
"Stand here, Audry." Julie grabbed Audry as she stamped toward girl with the blond hair, determined eyes and pale arms crossed across her chest.
"There she…"
"Look!" Julie aimed Audry's face at the glass.
"It's those smudges! I tol… my God…"
"You need to see in the light," the girl said. "Can you wait for the day to end to wash them away? Can you wait for the sunset? I can pay. I can't wash window. I do not have the time to do so. I do not like to lie to Momma."
Neither Julie nor Audry saw the youthful hand outstretched with a meager handful of random coins and slips of paper.
No, they weren't smudges at all, Julie thought.
"How…" Audry took a step closer and the image was gone, the light wrong, the smudges had become smudges again. The ghosts had vanished to wherever ghosts go when pursued.
Julie remained standing right where she was. Audry rejoined her.
The occasional pedestrian paused a moment to see what the two women were staring at and, if they were in just the right spot, stopped and started to stare.
"I have to go," the girl said.
"Don't. Move. Stay right there."
"Am I in trouble?"
"No… just… we need to talk. Stay there. Okay?"
"The sun will be setting soon. I will have to home. Maybe tomorrow
… and stop screaming at me. I can pay you for window."
"On the house." Audry moved her head slightly from side to side. "Any time you want… smudge away…"
"The sun will change and I will see another window. Now is the best time for your window. Later… maybe down the street… It doesn't hurt the window. It washes off."
"Uh huh," Audry muttered.
There was a long silence.
"I thought… what would people who used to live here… where Grantville is now… what would they make of this place? How would their spirits see what become of their home? They are ghosts of people who were here before Grantville. Some of the ghosts… are people I was knowing… before…"
"It's… beautiful…" Julie shook her head. "And they're just fingerprints."
"No." Audry sighed. "They are ghosts watching us. They're reflections of us…"
"Can you keep them on the glass until sun sets?"
"Sure… sure. Of course, yes!"
"Good." The girl sighed. "They are beautiful, no?"
"You've turned my window into a work of art." Audry nodded.
"Have you thought of canvas?" Julie asked.
"Canvas? You mean cloth? Cloth is for wearing. Glass is a window to soul. Cloth merely covers soul. I like glass."
"What's everyone looking at?" a voice demanded.
"Stand here!" a chorus of voices said. Hands pulled the speaker. Complaints ceased as the place was found.
The sun did set but not before at least ten people saw the ghostly images smudged carefully onto the plate glass of Audry Yost's flower shop.
The ghost smiled at Mary.
As Julie walked her home, Mary looked up, knowing where the setting sun might expose another ghost.
There it was, high up in a window above her head, three stories up.
Story could mean a floor or a story you read, like a mother would read to a child. English was the perfect language for ghosts. Like ghosts on the glass could change as the sun changed, English could change too and be what it needed to be.
Mary liked English and she liked school and her new parents.
And the ghosts didn't frighten her anymore.
Three stories up there was a ghost of a dog lying on its side in the setting sun and Mary smiled. She had known that dog, seen it alive in the yard in front of her first home. Now it was here.
The ghosts were coming here, to their new home.
So was she.
***
Julie couldn't quite figure out how to write her report.
There is no art in a well-done police report. It states the facts, clearly and without bias or emotion. A police report reports a vandalized masterpiece with the same dispassionate words that it reports a gang symbol spray painted on an alley wall.
Signs of abuse or neglect? No.
Julie met the girl's adopted parents. There was no sign of abuse or neglect. Her papa made it clear that little Mary would have to clean the windows she had smudged. Mary wasn't to leave school without permission again.
Damage to property?
Julie closed her eyes and remembered the ghostly images on the plain, cold glass.
No; she wrote firmly.
Firm, bold strokes were the only emotion allowed on police reports.
Chief Richards accepted the report without comment.
To him, the case was closed, the "blond ass" was back in school and Audry wasn't complaining anymore.
Grantville had lots of glass, a growing number of ghosts, and a young artist to smudge them.
To Julie, Grantville felt just a bit less cut off from the past and just a bit more attached to this new future.
Golden Corn-A Tale of Old Joe on the Mountain Top
Written by Terry Howard
"It's the first
of May and there's snow on the ground." Old Joe had talked to himself all of his life. Now with his wife gone he was living alone in a house accustomed to keeping two or three and-on rare, brief occasions-four generations of Jenkins at the same time, so he talked to himself a lot.
He really should have taken in boarders but he didn't want strangers going through things. Besides, he only thought of it when he went to town which was mostly on Sundays and there was no call for talkin' business on Sunday. Come Monday there was always something that needed doing around the place, so he just never got around to finding boarders.
"And it ain't a late snow that fell in the night and will be gone by noon. It's still here from February. I oughta be plantin' the corn shortly. If I don't get it in the ground in the next two or three weeks it won't make, and if I don't get the tomato sets in the ground pretty soon, I might as well put them in pots and leave 'em." It was a repeat of a conversation he had with his wife the first spring after the Ring of Fire.
That first spring he ended up starting his corn in the greenhouse on the southern backside of the barn where the livestock and the sun helped keep it warm. "Mabel, I'm goin' to put some tomato plants and squash plants and some of everything else I started from seed back in January in five gallon buckets or whatever, to leave 'em as potted plants. It looks like it's the only way to guarantee something to can this year."
The big problem was the size of the greenhouse. It had been cobbled together out of castoff windows to get a jump on the garden, because a man like Old Joe wasn't wasn't about to buy sets in town. You couldn't fit a whole garden's worth of pails inside that greenhouse. He would set plants out when he could. But he knew if you wait too long, sets wouldn't transplant well. The corn plants were set out in June just as early as he was sure the freeze was over and the ground was warm enough. Some nights he still had to cover them because he was worried about frost.
"If it weren't for the wheat, I could just up and starve with this here 'Little Ice Age.'" He had heard that mentioned after church one Sunday and tried to look it up in the encyclopedia. He couldn't find it under 'little' or 'ice age.' As for starving, he could eat out of his cellar for well over a year. The habits of growing what you ate, minding your own business and getting by with what was on hand ran deep.
The Ring of Fire cut off his driveway. One of the highest limestone faces in the circle fell away not twenty feet out his front door. Almost all of his woods and nearly three of the six-, four- or five-acre patches his grandfather used to keep in row crops went missing too. The five-acre plot that he had kept in field corn or soy beans for years was now three and a half acres of wheat and rye and oats sown in a mix. It was mostly animal feed for the milk cows and chickens. He ground some of it by hand to make bread. The only corn he planted any more was for canning. What he planted for seed he grew in the green house for fear of losing it to a freeze. The other three pockets of semi-flat land were in pasture, hay and straw. They were too poor, too steep, or too rocky to be worth row cropping.
When the Grantville authorities came poking around right after the event he made it plain he did not want them on his place.
"Mister Jenkins, we are all going to have to pull together to get through the next winter. Everybody is going to have to pitch in and help," one of them had said.
"Well, I understand that. I promise you, anything I grow that the wife and I don't need I'll haul down and sell it in town. Never was much up here an' there's less now," Joe had answered.
"Well, sir, you might need some help, we've got-"
Before the man could make a pitch for him to take in some refugees, Joe cut him off. "Ain't needed no help in eighty years I know of and never heard of having any hired help afore that. We'll take care of ourselves, thank you."
On the way down the hill the younger of the census takers said to the older, "It's sure not easy to get up here. Truth to tell there isn't a whole lot here outside of two old people, two old barns and an even older house. With the old man being difficult, I don't think there's any need to mess with them unless we just make them move into the old folk's home. You know, I think he'd start shooting if we suggested it."
"You got that impression? Well, you're right. Just leave them alone. It's for the best."
"Yeah, but is it safe?"
"They'll take care of themselves."
"Well, I know there's not much up here but it might be needed."
"Kid, that old couple will get more out of this pile of rocks than anyone else. She's a regular down at the Baptist church, he's a member of the Legion, the Masons, and the Historical Society. Pays his dues and turns up once in a blue moon. You can be sure nothing up there will go to waste and he'd give you his second-best shirt if he thought you needed it-as long as you didn't ask for it. Just cross it off the list and move on. They'll do more than their share."
Joe had heard it all and snorted. Why did the young automatically think their elders were deaf?
***
When the garden came in that first summer, Mabel had him load three bushels of mixed veggies in the trunk of the car every Sunday. Joe grumbled about it. Mabel knew it was just for form's sake. "Joseph, we ain't gonna eat all that."
"I could haul it into the market."
"You could but you won't, 'cause it ain't worth the time. Besides, there's folks having a hard time of it in town." The last line settled it. Mabel didn't mention the full milk can in the trunk next to the veggies. On Saturday and Sunday the pigs didn't get the extra milk.
They'd leave it all in the church kitchen and every Sunday there would be four empties waiting for him to take home. The pastor and pensioners in the church ate well; what was left of the food went to the refugee center.
Come fall, Joe sold three pigs down to the slaughter house. He dressed and smoked the other two from that litter. One ended up in the cellar. The other one ended up in the church kitchen shortly before Christmas, along with eleven large, soft balls of cheese, a bushel of Mabel's herb tea mix, and paper grocery bags of dried chives, oregano and several other spice herbs. The three pigs paid his property taxes.
He could have sold the steer he got off of one of the milk cows but he didn't need to and he thought he should look ahead. The tractor would break down beyond repair eventually, so he figured he should start working up an ox. The other milk cow dropped a female calf, so she was a keeper too. With the litter of pigs gone, Pastor Green helped them find a family in town willing to look after one of the milk cows. That family had five kids. Milk doesn't have a long shelf life and it wasn't enough to make a daily trip into town worthwhile, but they couldn't abide it going to waste. So the cow went to town.
Two cars were pushed out of a garage and Joseph trucked enough straw, hay, and corn into town to see the milk cow through the winter. The family would keep enough milk for their table, the rest went to the grocery store and the cash went to Jenkins. When Joe arrived with several sacks of shelled corn, the man of the house helped unload them.
"It's too bad the corn's hybrid. We won't be seeing yields like this anymore."
"Joe shook his head. "It ain't hybrid. It's open-pollinated heirloom corn. Same stock of Hickory Cane corn we've been planting for years. I could of got a better yield out of hybrid, I guess, but I'd of had to buy it and this did fine. Besides, if the spring comes as late as the fall came early, this is the last corn crop we're going to make."
The fellow stopped and put the bag down half way between the pickup. "This is heirloom corn and you're feeding it to cows?"
"What else am I going to do with it? I could sell it and they could grind it, but then we'd have to buy grain. So why bother?"
"Sir, I don't think you've thought it through. What's your yield?"
Joe told him.
"Which is easily better than twice what they're getting these days. We ought to be shipping this down to Spain as seed."
"Well, Rapunzel-" Joe always named his cows, but after an unfortunate experience years ago, he never again wanted to use a
name some little girl might have. "-needs about half a gallon of grain a day, on top of hay. If you can sell this for enough to buy oats, go ahead and do it."
Two weeks later, Joe's cow-sitter made the cold walk up to the farm. When Joe came in from the barn, the man was sitting at the kitchen table drinking tea made from herbs out of Mabel's flower garden.
"Mister Jenkins, I've got a buyer for your seed corn. It will cover the purchase of oats and then some. I told him what yield he could expect, but he didn't see it in the field so he doesn't quite believe me. He was impressed with the yield on a stand he saw in a field and wanted it for seed, but was told it was hybrid and wouldn't make if planted. He's afraid this won't make, either.
"Anyway, I cut a deal. He buys it at the agreed corn price. If the yield is half as high as I told him it would be, he'll match the price when he comes back next year after the harvest. If it hits the mark I told him it would, he'll double it. But he wants all he can get."
"Well, I don't mind feedin' oats I guess," Joe said.
***
The next spring when Joe started his sweet corn to transplant to the garden, he started a dozen stalks of field corn to raise in a twelve inch patch in the greenhouse next to his tobacco plant. He wasn't quite sure why, but the idea of not having any Hickory Cane corn seed for next year, after all of these years, just didn't sit right.
Perhaps the oddest part of the tale came about in the winter of '35.
Joe heard a noise and looked up from milking the cow. "Mr. Abrabanel, what brings you to a barn on a wind-blown mountain top?" The man couldn't be lost or passing through. This was the end of the road, if you could call the trace up his neighbor's back wood a road.
"You know who I am." It was not a question, just a surprise. The younger Abrabanel associate had the impression Joseph Jenkins was a hermit.
"I saw you when the synagogue had the open house."
"I'm sorry I missed you." The man was a bit taken aback. He considered himself a trained observer and gatherer of information.