by Ruskin Bond
“She wouldn’t understand,” Jamie said fiercely.
“Ah, and he would?”
Her eyes shot up at him. “No. My stepdad just doesn’t care,” she muttered, “about anyone but himself.”
“Then your mother, she does care, now doesn’t she?”
Jamie shrugged again, pretending not to care herself. “She only cares about the rocket scientist.”
“Your brother? Rockets now instead of rocks?”
“She’s bought him half the hobby store. The house is so full of his junk, they’d never see me if I was there.”
“Ah, and your room? It be empty?” She shrugged again.
Eddy looked back at the box and caressed the wooden lid longingly. “Things do na’ matter in the end,” he whispered. “It’s the memories we keep. They’re all we have. Lass, go home and enjoy your time with your family while ye still have ’em.”
She stood slowly and walked to the door, too shocked and confused to say a word. “Lass.” She stopped and glanced back at him. He looked gravely at her. “Will ye do me one last favor? Will ye come again tomorrow, one more time? For Caesar?”
“Why? You traveling again?” she asked.
“I am,” he said. “Tomorrow I’ll be gone.” Caesar mewed up at her, and she nodded reluctantly and left.
On Sunday Jamie walked across the weedy, overgrown lawn to the tired porch. Even though the old man’s stories disturbed her, they were all she could think about. She was also drawn back, she realized, because he offered her more than stories and teacakes.
“Eddy? Hello? Caesar?” Silence greeted her. She walked through the living room and peeked into the kitchen. “Eddy? Here, kitty. It’s me. Hello?”
The floorboards creaked with each step as she made her way down the hall, peering into the dark rooms. They were empty. Then she looked into the last bedroom.
“Eddy?” Her breath caught in her throat as she saw him lying in bed, pale and gaunt, his eyes sunk deep in their sockets. “Eddy!” She rushed into the room and grabbed his hand, then dropped it in revulsion. It was cold. Caesar lay with his head on Eddy’s chest, as if trying to keep him warm.
“Eddy? Eddy!” Tears burned Jamie’s eyes.
“Lass?” he rasped, his eyes barely slits. “I thought yours be the footsteps of death.”
“What happened to you?”
“I couldn’t stop thinkin’ about her. I had to try again. Missed. Again. So close. So — close.” A tear slid down his wrinkled temple. “I landed next to her grave. No one beside her. She never married. Now I be travelin’ one last time …” It was difficult for him to talk. “… goin’ farther than I have ever gone. Maybe I’ll be with her at last, in a very different place. And I’ll be young and handsome again.” He attempted a wink. The cat rubbed his whiskers over Eddy’s chin. The old man didn’t raise his hand to stroke Caesar, and Jamie knew it was because he didn’t have the strength.
She took Eddy’s hand, even though it scared her to touch it; it was like touching death. She leaned closer. “I believe you. I believe everything you’ve told me.”
“My last … doorway be drawin’ nearer, lass. I have to step through soon.”
She knew what he meant. “I’m calling an ambulance.”
“Na, lass. Nothin’ medicine can —” Suddenly he gasped. “The basement. I forgot. Saints help me — I forgot!”
“What?”
“No one must ever go — never see. No one must —” He struggled for breath. “Me hand. It’s in me hand.” She looked in his other hand, saw a key, and took it. It was a metal key ridged with odd specks of glass. “Throw it in the doorway. Promise me.” She nodded. “And Caesar — take care of the ol’ boy.” The cat arched his sleek back and yowled.
“No,” Jamie protested. “Caesar belongs here with you. You’re going to be all right. I’m calling an ambulance. They’ll know what to do.”
“I’ll be gone … before they … get … here.”
“Traveling?” She pretended, for Eddy and herself.
“Far. Away. I’ll be waitin’ on me porch. A very different porch. You’ll tell me stories ’bout your travels. In the future.”
She kept talking to him, trying to keep his eyes open, but they closed in a strange way. His hand went limp.
Caesar prodded the old man’s cheek with his nose, but Eddy lay motionless. The cat stood with his front paws on Eddy’s chest and cried.
“Eddy?” Jamie whispered. He didn’t answer. He didn’t move. He didn’t breathe. He had just passed through another portal, the one that closes time.
Her feet ran; they just ran. Without even thinking, she raced blindly, farther and faster and harder down the street. Suddenly her knees gave way, and she dropped to the pavement, her eyes and lungs burning. Then she heard a cry. It was Caesar. Looking back, she saw the cat on the porch. Somehow she made herself turn around and go back.
She sat with him on the porch, her arms and neck curled around his soft, warm body. “We have to go, ol’ boy. You and me. Nothing left here. I have to call —” Who? 911? Yes, that’s what she had to do. They would come and take care of him.
The cat wriggled from her arms and bolted inside.
“Caesar, no!” Terrified to go back in the house, she froze at the front door. Caesar’s mew sounded hollow and scared, beckoning her. She peered inside. Their eyes met, hers hazel and his sea foam, and then he leaped down the basement steps.
“I’m not following you!” she said.
But she did. She ran through the house before she could see the memories or they could see her. She thumped down the wooden steps to the dark basement, feeling her way along cracked cement walls until she stood on a cement slab. The air smelled musty. Something tapped her forehead. She swatted at it, but it was just a thin metal chain dangling from the ceiling. She yanked it, and a bare light bulb blinked on. In the wall opposite her was a wooden door. Caesar sat before it.
Her heart thudded as she walked over. She slid the key into the lock and turned it. Reaching for the old brass knob, she wrapped her sweaty fingers around it. It turned with a click.
She jerked open the door. As it swung wide she saw someone staring back at her — eyes matching her eyes! She jumped; then, the next instant, she recognized herself in the mirror that filled the entire doorway.
This was it? A mirror! This was his time machine? Caesar mewed, a dull, strange sound. He sniffed at his reflection. Jamie watched as the poor cat, lonely for his master, stood on his hind legs and leaned his plush white forepaws on the glass, as if wanting in. He began clawing at the mirror, and the surface rippled like colored water rolling out from the center to the odd metal frame.
Jamie felt a vibration growing in the concrete under her feet. Oh, so slowly, she raised her hand, palm up, and moved it toward the surface of — whatever it was.
As her hand moved closer, the mirror changed again. She stared transfixed at a misty wave of glowing colors, whipping, swirling, combining, peeling apart.
Caesar’s pupils grew larger and larger until his eyes looked black. His tail whipped back and forth, a predator’s tail just before the pounce.
Slowly, Jamie extended her hand and watched the patterns close like water around her fingers. A burst of white light shot out and filled the metal framework. The mirror became clear as water, and she could see through it, see that her entire hand was gone, just gone. She couldn’t even feel it!
Shrieking, she jerked her hand, arm, entire body back and fell on the cold cement floor. She stared at her wrist. Her hand had been restored to her arm. Frantically, she shook it and opened and closed her fingers to make sure it was really there and it still worked. It did. With a sigh of relief she scrambled to her feet.
“No. I don’t want this. I don’t want to end up like Eddy.” She looked at Caesar. “And you don’t want to end up a hairless old cat in only one day. We’re going home, Caesar. We’re — we’re going home and we’re telling no one about this place.”
Just t
hen Caesar’s back arched, the fur standing up, and he yowled and leaped away as the white light burst inside the frame again. From the doorway through time, Jamie heard the clomping of horses’ hoofs and the babble of voices. Carefully, she peered into the entrance and saw a funnel of iridescent light swirling like the inside of a tornado. The other end widened to reveal a red brick wall with an open door in it. In front of it stood a man wearing baggy pants, suspenders, and a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He twisted around when he saw the light.
He had brown shaggy hair and piercing green eyes. She knew those eyes. He was young and handsome, and he was holding a small brown box. It was Eddy’s music box.
“Edward?” A woman stepped through the alley door. She wore a long brown dress, her hair swirled up in a bun. It was the woman in Eddy’s tintype.
Eddy saw the woman and turned to leap into the tunnel, but Jamie yelled through it, “No, Eddy, no! Don’t do it!” She heard her words echoing through the passage. Eddy jerked back, startled by the voice within the tunnel.
“Edward?” The woman looked at Eddy, then stepped back, stunned by the gyrating light. Again, he crouched to spring into it, but Jamie shouted even louder. “No! Don’t! Don’t do it, Eddy! You’ll live your life searching for her and never find her again!”
“Edward!” the woman gasped. He looked from her to the tunnel, afraid to leave, afraid not to leave. Just then Jamie remembered the key Eddy had given her.
“Throw it in the doorway,” he had begged her. She yanked it out of the keyhole and hurled it into the tunnel, where it floated, suspended. Then it twisted in half as if melting in on itself. With a burst of mist, the light and colors suddenly collapsed. The vibrations stopped. All that remained was an ordinary mirror.
Jamie held up a shaking palm and tried to push it through the glass. It stopped on the cold surface. She staggered backward and grabbed Caesar, stroking him jerkily while the cat clung to her.
As if seeing herself for the first time, she stared at her reflection. Time seemed suspended again as she realized that she didn’t need a time machine to see into the future. She never had. Her own choices determined her future.
Her feet pounded on the steps as she darted upstairs and slammed the door behind her. Trembling, she entered the living room. She looked around, almost expecting Eddy to be there, laughing at her. But he wasn’t.
And neither was the china cabinet. It was gone! The shepherdess on the table was missing, and only dust covered the marble top.
The couch and chair were faded. No, they weren’t faded. They were thick with dust. The floor was thick with it as well. And there were no footprints, no paw prints, anywhere. No sign anyone had been here for years.
Jamie held Caesar up to her face, coiling her arms around him, as if keeping him safe would also keep her safe. Very slowly she walked down the hall, leaving dusty footprints behind her. She peered into Eddy’s bedroom. The chenille bedspread was pulled taut, without a wrinkle and gray with dust. No one had lain on that bed for a long, long time.
She felt inside her pocket. The Roman coins were gone. Vanished. “This is impossible!” Numbly, she backed out of the room.
She hurried out the front door and sprinted through the weeds. Walking backwards down the street, she stared at the empty, rundown house, and then she turned at the streetlight and ran home, Caesar in her arms.
If it was true, if she had really changed Eddy’s life, then she could change her own. She was a time traveler, into the future, one day at a time, and now she was no longer afraid of the journey.
Ten years later, on a day in late fall, Jamie got out of her car. The old white Persian cat slept contentedly on the seat, basking in the sunlight. Jamie was taller, her hair shorter, and she was dressed like a woman, for that was what she had become.
She walked up the steep hill, her feet crunching over the carpet of gold, red, and orange leaves, leaving an imprint in them as she went. Up she walked, past weathered gray headstones speckled with green moss.
She put her hand on her hat to keep it from lifting off her head as a breeze stirred around her, swirling the leaves. Her eyes continued to scan the chiseled names in the stone slabs of this old cemetery in upstate New York.
Then she saw them. There they were, just as the court records had said. She ran through the leaves, kicking them up behind her, and knelt at the stones.
EDWARD O'FLANNERY
DIED SEPTEMBER 28, 1906
A LIFE BLESSED BY AN ANGEL
Beside his stood another headstone, one for Mary Price O’Flannery. They had both died the same month of the same year. Jamie looked around, and nearby, buried with their spouses, were their four children, Garth O’Flannery, William O’Flannery, Ann-Mary Rollins, and Rebecca Jones.
Jamie smiled and sat down beside Eddy’s headstone. As the leaves spiraled up around her head, up to the sky, she told him stories about her travels and of the choices she had made. And in her mind she could hear him saying, “Ah, lass, I told ye so. Treat time with respect, and she’ll take ye to a grand future!”
Old Cricket Says…
Israel is called the “land of milk and honey” in the Bible. According to my friend Allison Ofanansky, the “honey” came, not from bees, but from the fruit of the Judean date palm.
In Biblical times, forests of date palms flourished in the Jordan River valley between the Sea of Galilee and the Dead Sea in Israel. The palm’s dark, nutritious fruit was often made into a sweet syrup, or “honey.” The dates were also used in medicines. Unripe, green dates were smashed into a paste to put on wounds. But war with the Romans led to the destruction of the date palm plantations. Eventually, the Judean date palm became extinct.
In the 1970s, archaeologists excavating the ruins of Masada, a mountaintop fortress that was destroyed by the Romans in A.D. 73, discovered a few Judean date palm seeds in a storage jar. Preserved for centuries by the dry desert climate, the precious seeds were kept in a drawer at a university nearly forty years longer. Then, in 2005, scientists Sarah Sallon and Elaine Solowey, experts in ancient plants and medicines, decided to see if the extinct Biblical palms might grow again from the 2000-year-old seeds.
They soaked the seeds in a bath of special nutrients, then carefully planted them. Two months later, one of the ancient seeds sprouted! It has since grown into a tree almost six feet tall, the oldest seed ever to grow into a healthy plant. “Just that one still had a spark of life,” says Dr. Solowey. The joyful scientists named the tree Methuselah, after the oldest man in the Bible.
“Actually we are hoping the tree will turn out to be Mrs. Methuselah,” said Dr. Solowey. Only female trees can produce fruit, which the scientists hope to study for its medicinal qualities.
Imagine! From a single seed protecting the secret life within it for thousands of years, a Judean date palm grows again in Israel. It makes this Old Cricket wonder. What marvelous possibilities lie inside each one of us, waiting for the right moment to awaken?
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Acknowledgments
“Cowgirl Morning” from CRICKET magazine, October 2010, text © 2010 by Carus Publishing Company, art © 2010 by Ned Gannon
“Time of Proving” from CRICKET magazine, November 2006, text © 2006 by Tamora Pierce, art © 2006 by Jada Rowland
”Boarding School” from CRICKET magazine, September 2010, text © 2010
by Timothy Tocher, art © 2010 by Adam Larkum
“Old Cricket Says: Mongolian Mobile Library” from CRICKET magazine, February 2009, text and photos © 2009 by Carus Publishing Company
“The Herdboys of Lesotho” from CRICKET magazine, February 2009, text © 2009 by Carus Publishing Company; photos courtesy Susan Drake
“Tara” from CRICKET magazine, April 2011, text © 2011 by Carus Publishing Company, art © 2011 by Adam Gustavson
“White Mice” from CRICKET magazine, April 2009, text © 2009 by Ruskin Bond, art © 2009 by Michael Chesworth
“Old Cricket Says: Porcupines and Salt” from CRICKET magazine, July/August 2010, text © 2010 by Carus Publishing Company
“Boo” from CRICKET magazine, September 2004, text © 2004 by Carus Publishing Company, art © 2004 by Alan Fore
“Ahimsa” from CRICKET magazine, June 2007, text © 2007 by Carus Publishing Company, art © 2007 by Michael Chesworth
“The Pride” from CRICKET magazine, August 2006, text © 2006 by Carus Publishing Company, art © 2006 by Elizabeth Biesiot
“Mantrap” from CRICKET magazine, February 2003, text © 2003 by P. M. Farrell, art © 2003 by Carus Publishing Company
“Winning” from CRICKET magazine, January 2006, text © 1996 by Joseph Yenkavitch, art © 2005 by Andrew Standeven
“The Eighteenth Camel” from CRICKET magazine November 2002, text © 2002 by Thelma Schmidhauser, art © 2002 by Carus Publishing Company
“The Camel and Hassan Djiwa” from CRICKET magazine, September 2007, text and art © 2007 by Carus Publishing Company
“Old Cricket Says: Inside a Beaver Lodge” from CRICKET magazine, March 2010, text © 2010 by Carus Publishing Company