A Gift of Time

by Jerry Merritt

  One late-summer morning Ell wandered in with the mail. It was one of her favorite times of day. The mail. She said it reminded her of her youth on her real-world home planet when things were slower paced; more thoughtfully done.

  “Here’s a strange, little letter, Cager. No return address and I don’t think there’s anything in the envelope.”

  I leapt up from my morning’s equations to snatch the letter from her. “It’s from Aunt Cealie. I’ve got to go.”

  “Go where?”

  “Home.”

  After a moment of confusion, she asked, “Oh you mean back where …”

  “Yes.”

  “Can I go?”

  I shelved my panic for a moment. “Of course. I’m sorry. It’s just that the little letter here can’t be good news. I’m worried. Pack yourself a bag and I’ll call and make plane reservations out of Monterey for tomorrow morning early.”

  We arrived in Mobile the next day about one o’clock and picked up a rental car for the fifty mile drive up to the Old High Pine Cemetery. Thirty minutes later we crossed the bridge over to Aunt Cealie’s cabin. It was the first time I had ever been there when Aunt Cealie wasn’t on the porch to greet me. She always knew when I was coming. We found her asleep inside. She awoke with a start when Ell bumped into a broom knocking it over. Ell cringed as she turned toward me.

  “Micajah? Is dat you?”

  “Yes, it’s me, Aunt Cealie.”

  She pulled herself upright taking a long moment to straighten all the way to a standing position. Then she saw Ell. The two studied each other for an over-long space of time without moving or saying a word. Finally Aunt Cealie said, “Please excuse me for starin’ so long, but I believe you must be the prettiest thing I ever laid eyes on. You’re not from around here are you?”

  A shiver ran up my spine. Those were almost my exact words to Ell the night we first met.

  “Why thank you, Aunt Cealie, and, no, I’m not from around here.”

  Aunt Cealie nodded and turned back to me. “I called you out here, Micajah, ‘cause I think my chariot might be swingin’ low any day now. Might even be this evenin’. I been wavin’ it off till you got here.”

  I started to tell her she had two more years to go but realized my returning had changed everything. I couldn’t expect the future to accurately reflect my memories of it anymore, and the longer I was here the less the two matched. “Would you like to sit out on the porch like we used to, before your ride gets here?” I asked her.

  She shuffled off toward the door then paused. “Cealie, where is your manners?” She turned to Ell. “Can I offer you a seat on the edge of heaven, young lady? It’s right this way. I don’t think I caught your name.”

  “Lovely Pebble. You can call me Ell.”

  “Well, your name is as pretty as you, Ell. Now have a seat over here by me. Micajah, if you don’t mind, would you fetch us some mint tea. I made a fresh pitcher of it for you just yestiddy.”

  After we all had our first sip of mint, Aunt Cealie cleared her throat and caught my eye. “I ain’t never heared from Arlene. Just wanted you to know that ‘fore I goes.” Ell, momentarily entranced by the cypress trees and the dark water, turned when she heard Arlene’s name. Aunt Cealie continued. “I don’t think she’s still with us, Micajah. I’m sorry. Me and her, we had long discussions ‘bout things in those days she spent out here wid me before you all lit out for Callyfornia. She would of come to see me by now if she was able.”

  “I suspect you’re right, Aunt Cealie. She certainly would have come by now if she could.” I drew in a deep breath and studied the middle distance seeing only a blur. I could think of nothing else worth saying and would have been unable to speak if I had.

  “I told you onc’t when she was Arlie that she would surprise you. And she did didn’t she. She surely did.” Then she turned to Ell and watched her for several moments. Her face shown with a sadness I had not seen before. “An’ pretty as you is, you not like us. Not quite. Almost but not quite.” She held Ell in her gaze. “And you know what I’m talking about don’t you, Lovely Pebble.”

  A flash of surprise lit Ell’s face for a moment then flickered away. “Yes. I know.”

  “But you more like me than anyone else I know. You and me, we both swamp critters. Am I right?”

  Ell glanced at me. “Did you tell her about me?”

  “She caught me the first day I came out here after you dropped me off back then. She knew right away I wasn’t the same. I’ve told her a lot, but I never mentioned your name or that you were a swamp creature.”

  “He din have to, Ell. I can see it. I sees how you loves this place where I lives. Only a somebody raised in a swamp looks at it like you and me looks at it. This is as close to home as you been in some time ain’t it?”

  “Yes. It’s the most beautiful thing I’ve seen in the real world since I left it.”

  “Well, let’s just leave it at that. I ain’t the kind to pry. Well, I tries not to anyways. I ain’t always successful, though. Micajah can tell you that.”

  The afternoon slipped by as Aunt Cealie reminisced. Of slavery. Of raising my mother. Of making a life in the swamp. And Ell, who loved stories, sat entranced. The sun had fallen below the porch eaves before Aunt Cealie finally pushed up from her chair.

  “Well, I guess I gots no more stories left in me. I can’t tell you how glad I am that you came, Micajah. And meeting you, Ell, been a treat on top of that. I spent many a evenin’ sittin’ out here ponderin’ about you and what all this time travel business mean. And now that I knows what a kind person you is, it was worth hangin’ on here to get to meet you.” She hobbled over to Ell. “Would you be too put off if I asked you to hug a filthy old swamp lady ‘fore you goes?”

  “I would love to, Aunt Cealie. There aren’t many of us left.”

  As they embraced, Ell’s expression conveyed an air of remembrance, perhaps of a time lost to a distant past. How long had Lovely Pebble spent in her virtual world, I wondered. A thousand years? A million? I had never asked. Then a tear trickled down Ell’s cheek. Did she actually cry? What was she?

  A moment later Aunt Cealie pulled away and turned to me. I hugged her frail body and smoothed her snowy hair as I held her head to my chest. She shuddered and fell slack for an instant before hugging me tighter and looking up. “My time’s done run out, Micajah. Don’t forget what you promised me. Hearts crossed. So you gots to do as I axed even if it don’t seem natural to you. It’s what I wants. Ell will understand. That’s why I’m so glad she’s here.”

  Well, whatever Ell was, she obviously had Aunt Cealie’s approval. “Hearts crossed, Aunt Cealie. I’ll do just as you asked.”

  She rested her head back on my chest and fell still. I carried her into the cabin and laid her on the cot. The crow followed us in and perched on the headboard for a few minutes before cawing several times and fluttering out the door and up into the high cypress at the foot of the bridge. When I checked her, she wasn’t breathing and I could detect no pulse, but I waited for some time to be sure she was really gone. Finally the blood had drained from her face leaving that unmistakable, waxy mask of recent death. A hundred and seven years of knowledge had vanished. I sighed and turned away.

  Ell watched in silence as I gathered up a few of Aunt Cealie’s things not really knowing why. Finally she asked, “What’s ‘hearts crossed’ mean, Cager?”

  I laid the items I had collected back down and turned toward her. “It’s just a silly way to seal a promise. It means ‘cross my heart and hope to die if I break this promise.’ It’s a relic of childhood.”

  “Then what was your promise?”

  “She made her living here in the swamp. Fixed turtle soup and mint tea and fried up the little fish living under the bridge. Said she owed it all back to them. Didn’t want to be drained of her blood and pumped full of chemicals and buried in a steel coffin away from her swamp-mates. She made me promise, if I was the one to find her, I would put her under the bridge
there and lock the cabin door when I left so her cousins would know she was gone when they came out for a visit. She said she had never locked the door when she was alive.”

  So, as the setting sun tinged the western clouds, Ell and I waded out into the black water with Aunt Cealie and slid her under the bridge. The sudden change in temperature and pressure caused her eyes to open. As she sank quietly beneath the dark water, she looked back at me one last time before the darkness accepted her. Ell glanced over. “Don’t you think it strange that you just happened to be here to carry out your promise?”

  “No. She knew her end was near. She mailed that letter then hung on through sheer force of will until I got here.”

  Back in the cabin, I lit the kerosene lantern. The money I had left with her my last visit remained tucked into her Bible. She had never spent any of it. Next to the bills was a lock of blonde hair I recognized as Mom’s. I stuffed that into my shirt pocket then removed the bills and laid them on the table with a note to whoever found them to keep them as a gift for all their efforts with Aunt Cealie. Before I closed the Bible, I removed my address from where she had put it in case Arlene ever came back. There would now be no trace back to me. Ell straightened the room a bit then I damped out the lantern and closed and locked the door behind us before hanging the key on the nearest chair.

  “Can we stay here for a while longer, Cager? I like this place. I liked Aunt Cealie. I’m glad she knew about me…, but I have a question.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Do you humans have some sense I don’t know about? Aunt Cealie seemed to know things she shouldn’t have known.”

  “She was just a keen observer, Ell. That’s all.”

  We sat on the bridge until sunup while I told Ell the entire story of Aunt Cealie and how she knew instantly Arlie was a girl even though she had fooled me, her best friend, and everyone else for years.

  “So, what happened that led to her living out here all alone in the swamp?”

  “It had to do with her old friend Lige who had to give up everything he had to stay free.”

  Ell didn’t push for more.

  As we stood up to leave, I noticed the crow had vanished. I peered over the railing. Small wakes of turbulence propagated out from under the bridge. Turtles paddled in from the surrounding fen. The little fishes living under the bridge flashed darkly in the morning light as they darted through the black water. Aunt Cealie was getting her wish. Ell had just leaned over the rail for a last look when a huge sob rose in her throat. She clung to the rail as her tears added to the commotion in the water. I rubbed her back in sympathy. Finally she dried her eyes and turned to me. “I’m okay now. I’ve never experienced anything quite like that before. I was overcome by a sudden feeling of loss. Of something—something I’d only just found.”

  “You just experienced grief, Ell. You’re becoming more human every day.”

  “It’s a very strange experience.”

  Chapter 45

  We pulled into the drive to our cabin the next day to find a bedraggled, orange cat watching us from the corner of the porch. I slowed the Jeep so as not to scare it. Ell grew quite excited. “What is that thing? Is that a cat?”

  “You’ve never seen a cat before?”

  “Not in real life. Is it tame?”

  “We’ll know in a second.” As I rolled up to the porch, the cat took off for the woods.

  “Oh, no. It ran away.”

  “Maybe not. Let’s get unloaded and we’ll put some food out tonight and see if it comes back. It looked pretty thin. Someone probably dropped it off to get rid of it.”

  “Get rid of it? People do that?”

  “Some, yes.”

  “You would never do that would you?”

  I scowled at her. “No. Why would you even ask such a question?” She seemed unduly chastened so I hugged her and told her about how Arlie had nursed Tripod back after his front leg was shot off.

  “Such good in the mix of so much bad. And I’m sorry I asked you if you would throw away another creature. I didn’t think.”

  Later we drove into town and bought some dried cat food and a small bowl.

  Back at the cabin, I told Ell to take some of the food and hold it in her hand for a while to get her smell on it. “That way the cat will know it was you who put the food out for it.”

  “Really? The cat will know it was me?”

  A twinge of regret caught me off guard. I had just lied to Ell. Again. Not seriously, as when I told her I loved her, but enough to remind me I had. “They have a good sense of smell. Just put a little in the bowl so the cat will hang around for more. We’ll check the bowl in the morning to see if it came back.”

  Ell was up at first light. I heard the front door creak open followed by a small cry of delight. A second later Ell ran back and leaped onto the bed.

  “It’s gone. The food is gone.”

  I threw back the covers. “You went outside like that?”

  “There’s never anyone out there,” she countered. “But the food is gone. What do I do now?”

  “You get some more and go out and drop it in the bowl, then wait to see if the cat shows up.”

  She flew to the kitchen for a moment then back out the front door. I stood in the entrance watching as she clattered a handful of pellets into the bowl. Then she gasped. The cat jumped up on the porch and sat, head inclined, studying her. It had rained that night, so I figured the cat had been under the porch most of the time. Ell tapped the bowl and stepped back. As if following in a dance, the cat moved forward, looked up at her, then padded over to the bowl, crouched, and began crunching the food. It had obviously been a family pet at some point. As I watched, the sun broke through the clouds throwing a morning rainbow across the hills. The cat finished its breakfast and stood looking up expectantly at Ell.

  “It’s okay to pick it up now.”

  Ell lifted the cat by the armpits and held it out against the rainbow.

  “You have to give it a name before you put it down.” Another lie to preserve the enchantment so obviously taking place between a cat and a creature from across the galaxy.

  “I name you Magnificent Rainbow for you have stripes like the rainbow and you are magnificent.” Then she cradled the now purring cat to her breast and carried it inside.

  Had I known the role the abandoned cat would play in humanity’s fate, I might have been more circumspect in my statements to her.

  But we had a cat now, and Ell was endlessly entertained by Magnificent Rainbow. After hearing its name a couple dozen times, I said, “Why don’t we shorten the name to Mag or Maggie. Then we’ll take it in to the vet for a checkup and some shots and get it fixed.”

  “Fixed?” Ell recoiled in horror. “Did I break him when I picked him up? Is that why he makes that noise? You told me I could pick him up.”

  “No, you didn’t break anything. Fix is just a term.” Better left unexplained, I figured. “And that noise is normal. It’s called a purr. Oh, and it’s not a him. It’s a her.”

  “Like me? Hey, Maggie, we’re both girls. We’ll get you fixed today then we can get to know each other better.”

  ***

  So as the days slipped by, I gave no further thought to cats. I picked up that trail of numbers leading down the rabbit hole of time travel while continuing to procure stocks of future corporate giants. My biggest investments were in the microchip industries at their initial public offerings in the early seventies. I was sure I could use my position as a major stockholder to leverage software deals in the late seventies.

  Yet, busy as we were, we still found time to enjoy ourselves. Most weekends we sailed. Ell put a litter box in the forward berth, and Maggie enjoyed the run of Lovely Pebble. She usually slept below decks when we were underway, but, after we moored, she explored from the bowsprit to the aft davits. Life had regained a certain normalcy. A proper cat can have that effect.

  Chapter 46

  By 1979 I had devised a method to purify tita
nium for the glider’s control rod. I would use a modified ion sputter gun to spew a minute but steady stream of 30,000 degree titanium plasma through a magnetic field. The field would deflect the particles in the stream onto different paths depending on their atomic masses. The titanium ions would follow a specific trajectory to a catch area. Any impurities in the injected stream would miss the target to be caught and sequestered. It was apparent the process could produce absolutely pure titanium if operated in a vacuum. The setup would be complex and, therefore, expensive, so wasn’t something I could start on right away. I discussed the issue with Ell and we agreed it would take a fortune to set up a battery of sputter guns to produce even a miniscule quantity of pure titanium each day.

  “How are we going to fund such a project, Cager?”

  “We’ll wait until we have the infrastructure to begin developing time travel components, then we’ll purify the titanium in the same facility. In a few years, we’ll leverage our microchip holdings to begin buying up network and operating software development efforts. I know what mistakes to avoid. We’ll produce safe and secure code from the very beginning and take over the market. Eventually you and I will control the world’s computing systems.”

  Meanwhile, our various holding companies had grown to tens of millions of dollars. But it was going to take a lot more than that to do what we needed.

  ***

  In the late eighties, we began buying land in what would become Silicon Valley and managed to acquire several square miles of hilly terrain just west of the valley. It was right after the Loma Prieta quake of 1989 and land anywhere near was at bargain-basement prices. But I knew there wasn’t another major quake in the area for decades. I put architects to work on plans for a corporate building and major microchip production plant to go there.

  Two years later we leveled off a hilltop at the two thousand foot elevation and began digging the foundation down another hundred feet. Then we stopped construction and brought in tunneling equipment. In the end we had a warren of passageways and elevator shafts interconnecting large caverns where our work on purifying titanium and developing time travel would take place.