Riding Shotgun

by Rita Mae Brown

  “Pryor.” Margaret called from the back door to wave her in. “Stew’s ready.”

  Pryor wiped off her boots and stepped inside.

  Margaret placed a bowl of lamb stew in front of her sister-in-law. “That money you showed me, the paper. I’ve been thinking, how much would that be in pounds?”

  “Oh—twenty-five pounds,” Cig guessed.

  Margaret gasped, “Why would you carry so much money on your person?”

  Cig laughed. “That’s not enough to buy a good meal.”

  Scandalized, Margaret jabbed at her stew with a spoon. “Twenty-five pounds could buy you a strong man’s labor for a year or one of the finest mares in the New World.”

  “Uh—I don’t know how to explain what’s happened to money. Inflation.” This met with a blank stare. “Okay, think of it this way. One pound buys less and less because the price of things and labor keeps going up. Governments print more money and it isn’t tied to anything—gold, for instance—it’s just paper.”

  Margaret laughed. “No government that foolish could stay in power. The king would be toppled. Parliament would be swept away. You can’t just print money.”

  “Ah, but they do—in my time, they do.” Cig held up her hands in a gesture of supplication. “I don’t have anything to do with it. I have no political power.”

  “What woman does unless she’s the queen or mistress to the king?” Margaret continued poking at her stew. “But I cannot believe that men would be so foolish.”

  “Inflation is the least of it. We have something called the federal deficit. It’s like running this farm on debt, literally. You are fueled by the debt and you work to service the debt so you never advance. That’s how my government works. They don’t have any money but they pretend that they do.”

  “Why would people allow this to happen?”

  “I don’t know. Lack of will?”

  “That much hasn’t changed.” Margaret smiled for a moment. “Pryor, these things you tell me, they are so—so—”

  “Outrageous?”

  Margaret nodded her head. “—that they must be true.”

  “They’re true all right. But for all the messes we’ve made, we’ve done a few things right. Just give me a minute to think of them.” She reached for a warm apple crisp.

  Margaret’s fresh features underscored her natural openness. She probed a bit more. “The morning you rode away, you left us a note—with numbers.”

  “My phone number. In my time we have an instrument so we can talk over miles… continents even.”

  “Ah.” Margaret sipped some tea. “Can you order supplies?”

  “Sure. I was frantic for a telephone to call my children so they’d know I was all right. I couldn’t believe you didn’t have one but when Tom saw the dead Indian and said he’d ride over to Shirley to tell them, I think at that moment I knew this was 1699. Even if you all were reenactors you’d call—that’s short for using a phone—in an emergency and you’d have let me call.”

  “Yes, I can see that. What’s a reenactor? I hate to ask so many questions but I’m curious, and you use such strange words.”

  “I suppose I do sound funny—but our accents are surprisingly close. That’s a comfort.” She smiled sadly. “Much of what you know or do has been, maybe forgotten is the wrong word, superseded, replaced by something better and faster like the telephone.” Margaret nodded that she comprehended and Cig continued, “Reenactors are people who—gee, how do I explain this?—people who become captivated by some era before they were born. They study everything and then try to live that way—almost like a living museum.”

  “Why, that’s a lovely idea.”

  “It is, actually.”

  “I could be like Cleopatra.” Margaret struck a pose.

  “Watch out for snakes.” Margaret laughed as Cig continued, “I’m the one that needs to ask questions—like why did Pryor go to London?”

  “Your father wanted you to see civilization before you became a broodmare, as he put it.”

  “Why didn’t he send Tom? I thought men were more valuable than women in this time.”

  Margaret refilled her teacup. “Value depends on what you want and need, does it not? Tom had no inclination to visit the Old World. You did, and you were the apple of your father’s eye.”

  “What happened to him?”

  Margaret cast down her eyes. “No memory?”

  “None.”

  She sighed. “Charles Deyhle filled up a room. He’d argue with the governor or he’d tease James Blair, an important man and not a Toady to the Crown, although he can often be too serious. He’d take issue with Lionel and few men would dare. He had a way about him that even if you disagreed with him you liked him.”

  “He sounds wonderful.”

  “He was.”

  “But what happened?”

  “After your mother died, which happened shortly after you left—”

  Cig interrupted. “Had she been sick? What I’m trying to get at is, would I have left if I’d known she was ill?”

  Margaret’s left hand fluttered tip as she set down her teacup with the right. “Oh, no. Elizabeth was robust. She walked to the springhouse and fell over dead. Bobby ran over to her, he was fixing the fence, but she was gone.”

  “At least she didn’t suffer.”

  “God is merciful.”

  “But what happened to my fa—to Charles Deyhle?”

  “Oh,” Margaret stalled, “he was despondent as you would expect, yet he continued to work and conduct his business. He missed you but refused to write to you. He felt the news of your mother’s unexpected death was dolorous enough and as you’d recently arrived in England he thought it foolish to call you back because of his own low spirits.”

  “So—” Cig pressed.

  Margaret’s face grew flushed, “He was found hanging from the willow tree that used to be by the bend in the river.”

  Cig was distressed. “I didn’t mean to upset you, Margaret. I’m sorry I brought it up.”

  Margaret’s voice rose, “You see, Pryor, he wouldn’t have taken his own life. I don’t believe it for a moment. Although he mourned your mother he wouldn’t spurn life. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away.’ Charles Deyhle would never hang himself.”

  “What does Tom think?”

  “The same. He cut down the willow.” Margaret added that fact.

  “Who would want to murder—”

  Margaret jumped in. “No one! Oh, he had his spats. What strong-willed man does not, but those disagreements evaporated in time. I can’t think of anyone angry with him.”

  Cig, curiosity flooding now, said, “When was he last seen alive?”

  “Sunset.”

  “When was he found?”

  “Around nine. When he didn’t come in for supper we searched for him. It was December, dark very early, and that compounded our difficulties.” She stared out the window. “Tom found him when he went down to the river to hail John MacKinder.” She added, “He’s the ferryman and he happened to be coming up this way. When Tom saw his lantern he ran to shore to hail him and when John came closer they both saw your father.”

  “How awful.” Cig imagined a swinging corpse on a cold December night. “You all have had your share of sorrow.”

  “Everyone does,” Margaret stated.

  “Forgive me for pressuring you.”

  The turn of phrase was unusual to Margaret but she understood. “You had to know sooner or later.”

  “Did you write—me?”

  “Tom wrote that your father had been carried away by grief. He didn’t mention the hanging. He instructed you to stay out the year as that had been your father’s wish.”

  “And I’ve returned, in a manner of speaking,” Cig ruefully said, “with no memory, wild stories, or so they must seem to you, and peculiar ways.” She stood up to clear the table. “How did Charles Deyhle dispose of his property?”

  Margaret picked up a wooden bowl. “You and T
om own everything in common. Should you marry, the two of you will divide the land in half as well as tools, livestock, furniture, if you wish. Or, if your husband can work with Tom, we will keep the land intact.”

  Cig halted. “Isn’t that unusual?”

  “No, not for your father. Your father hated lawyers and this way he ensured you and Tom would cooperate. You see, he was a lawyer.” A wry smile played over her lips.

  “I can’t imagine marrying.”

  She paused for she didn’t want to offend Pryor. “Your father swore you would never marry—he didn’t mean that as an insult…” she paused, “he meant—”

  Cig interrupted. “That I was too independent.”

  Margaret nodded.

  “Lionel and Tom seem to think I’m going to marry.”

  “Lionel courts you vigorously. You respond yet slip from his grasp. He could have any woman in the colonies, you know.”

  “Then why’ does he want me?”

  Margaret shrugged. “Because you’re elusive—and because marriage would greatly increase his land holdings. If he marries you, he would own more land than anyone in Virginia.”

  “I see.” Cig had hoped Lionel’s ardor was only about her, foolish as that may have been. “Margaret, we have an expression in my time. The more things change, the more they stay the same.”

  14

  The wind howled that night as Cig curled up in a ball under the covers. The fire helped keep the room warm but the wind found its way through every crack. Now and then she could feel a little puff emanating from a crack under the window. Insulation was yet to come. She could bear that but she’d find herself craving Coca-Cola or a candy bar—especially Snickers. And potato chips. Indoor plumbing joined her list of lamented luxuries, but somehow that was easier to forego than Coke or the radio. Classical music helped her muck stalls.

  If she set aside the niggling problem of nearly three hundred years, then everything appeared normal.

  Whoever Pryor Deyhle was, she must be a good person. People genuinely cared for her.

  Whenever she felt madness brushing her cheek, Cig told herself to hang on for Hunter and Laura. If there was a way back, she’d find it. Lately she told herself to hang on for Tom and Margaret.

  Perhaps in the end it didn’t matter how she got to this place. Perhaps she could do some good in this life. And reflect on that life she knew in 1995.

  When crushed by loneliness, she could call up Hunter’s face, Laura’s smile, Woodrow’s enormous bushy tail, Harleyetta’s penciled eyebrows, and Binky’s inept leer. She could recall Grace’s lovely alto voice and had to fight the tears for as much as she hated her, she missed her.

  The sound of their voices, the cadence of their footfalls, those tiny triumphs of individuality, how vivid they were in her memory. Margaret and Tom could never imagine these unborn people whom they would produce.

  The future used to seem like a distant point, an X or Y coordinate on the graph of life, yet the future was all around her. It must have been all around her in 1995, but she couldn’t taste it.

  The past always seemed clear enough and now she knew that wasn’t true either. She realized that when a generation passes they take with it their breath, their laughter, the colors of their lives like a flag of being. Reduced to dates, battles, economic forces, or even to the more personal, a birth date, a death date on a tombstone, their experiences flattened until half or totally forgotten.

  The past was not at all what she had been taught: a chain of seemingly inevitable events. No, it was a multitudinous, simultaneous chaos of choices made or not made by each human being alive. Sometimes those choices were made for you and some you made for yourself. The exercise of will, compassion, intelligence, complacent brutality, the stench of fear, and the struggle for beauty: choices. Even the choices you didn’t know you were making, like Tom’s acceptance of a sovereign, would set the future. Or Margaret’s choice to reach for whatever was good in any human being she happened to meet.

  Cig wondered about her choice to accept surfaces, to go along, to ignore what she felt powerless to change… until she blocked it completely. What was she accepting that she didn’t even know could be questioned, just as Tom accepted the idea of a king and queen? Choices. Brutus stabs Julius Caesar. Genghis Khan sweeps out of the East. Leonardo starts projects and rarely finishes. Elizabeth I beats back Philip II. The Germans, the English, the Russians, the Americans, all said they didn’t know about Auschwitz until after the fact. Choices. Not just in knowing; in not knowing. Ignorance demands constant effort.

  At the cusp of the eighteenth century, what incredible choices. And for her, on the cusp of the twenty-first, what choices.

  Perhaps time wasn’t linear at all but elliptical, and she truly had fallen through the loop. Perhaps everything was occurring at the same instant and the human mind needed to organize it into discrete cubes of time. The centuries were like railroad cars hitched to one another, pulled by the engine of fate or God.

  Time as a lie. The thought intrigued and terrified her. Not just an illusion but an outright lie. Too many choices are too frightening. Perhaps we had to limit them or blow apart from sensory overload. Yes, she did come from another time, a cacophony of facts and little truth, an orgy of comfort yet no peace, a glut of pleasure yet no joy. What dreadful choices had people made since 1699? Or not made?

  If nothing else, this fissure in her life, this slipping of a tectonic plate in the brain if not in time, helped her to know there was no golden age.

  She uncurled in her bed. The last log in the fireplace glowed incandescent scarlet edged in gold. Dislocated and disoriented, she felt a gratitude welling in her. Perhaps she was lucky to be in this place with these people.

  Perhaps God—or the gods—was wiser than she could know. Submission to a higher god’s or goddess’s will was freedom. Cig smiled. What would Margaret think of the notion of a female god? Was it twentieth-century feminism that produced the notion or was it an intimation from an even earlier time when goddesses made the world tremble and sing?

  It didn’t matter. What mattered was that she found sanctuary in the human heart. She’d found her family.

  A thought did flash through her mind. Why couldn’t this have happened to Grace? She fell asleep laughing and crying.

  15

  The temperature plunged during the night, a stiff wind kicking up a fuss. The wind had slowed little by daybreak and it swept over the James, dumping on Buckingham its cargo of moisture.

  “I’ll ride with you this morning.” Tom walked into the barn. “Do us both good.” He smiled. His upper teeth were strong and straight, the lower ones were a little crooked. Tom was lucky, because he had no recourse to an orthodontist.

  They quickly tacked up and Tom swung into the saddle, his coordination and timing a double of Cig’s way of moving. “Monkey!” He laughed, pointing to her legs, her forward position in the saddle. Tom sat farther back on the horse’s back, legs nearly straight and out in front of him and hands held high although the line to the bit was soft, much like the modern saddle seat.

  “You ride your way and I’ll ride mine but you’ll be surprised at what I can do.”

  “All right,” he said with no conviction.

  “I love this time of year,” Cig remarked as they rode west along the river.

  “Taquitock.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Taquitock. The Powhatans call the harvest and fall of the leaf taquitock. They celebrate five seasons. You remember—don’t you? Winter is cohonk. They count their years by winters so you and I are coming into our twenty-eighth winter.” His voice rose as if waiting for her to recall.

  “It will come back to me.”

  “When we were little we had an old Indian friend and—” he broke off for a moment. “Well, I guess there are more important things to remember. You recognized Lionel. I didn’t tell him everything, only that you’d been exhausted by your journey and weren’t quite yourself.”

  “Th
ank you for protecting me.”

  He nodded, then pointed across the river, wide at this point. “See there where the Appomattox River flows into the James? Across from Eppington there?”

  “Yes, but I thought the house was called Appomattox Manor, not Eppington.”

  “Francis Eppes likes to name things after himself, but I’m happy you remember him even if you’ve mixed up the name. Well, Sister, right across there you can see how they’ve cleared more land. Francis is going to build another mansion as his daughter’s wedding gift.”

  “Weston Manor. Of course, that’s what I was searching for when I rode in but the mist was so thick.” Then she stopped herself. There was no Weston Manor. Not yet.

  “Weston Manor?”

  “That’s what Eppes will call it.” Then seeing how this affected him she softly said, “I’ll bet you a pound sterling.”

  The Deyhle sense of humor was in evidence. “Pryor, I don’t have a pound to spare but if Francis Eppes names that Weston Manor I’ll build you four new bee boxes.”

  “Better get out your saw, Tom.” She felt in her breeches pocket for her money. She wanted to show Tom her money but then she put aside the idea. The concept of a person from another time would overwhelm his linear, logical mind. It overwhelmed hers.

  They rode on. One lone poplar, straight as an arrow, lay by the side of the road up ahead.

  “Now you’ll see why this forward seat is special.” She took Full Throttle at a slow canter toward the tree trunk and jumped over.

  “Ha.” Tom rode right after her and jumped the old way, leaning back, legs far forward. He had good hands and didn’t interfere with Helen’s mouth.

  “All right.” Her competitive blood warmed. She dismounted. “You hold my boy here. I’ll show you.”

  She dragged some branches and placed them at the bottom of the poplar trunk to fill out the jump. Horses don’t like airy jumps. Then she found some branches with fewer leaves on them. It took some doing as she had no axe but she managed to make a scruffy three-foot-nine jump, which usually was big enough to get most foxhunters’ attention.