by Sarah Dreher
“You shouldn’t have thought it,” Stoner said in spite of herself.
“Yes, Ma’am. I’m sorry.” The horse puffed and plodded for a few minutes. “Folks just talk like that. Honest, I didn’t mean it.” His voiced cracked, either from emotion or hormones. He twisted the reins tighter around his hands. “Shit.”
Stoner felt sorry for him, touched his arm. “It’s okay, Billy.”
“I’m always saying the wrong damn thing.”
“It’s okay.”
“Sometimes I think maybe I just oughta go back to Illinois.”
Stoner smiled. “Seems like drastic punishment for a slip of the tongue.”
She had forgotten what it was like to be fifteen. Trying to convince yourself you could handle your own life, and all the while feeling like a scared little kid inside. Playing it cool and together in front of your friends, and afraid any second the façade would crack and show you up to be a baby and a fool. She never wanted to be fifteen again, in this life or any other.
They crested a slight rise and saw, where the blackness of the night sky met the blacker blackness of the night earth, a single light burning in the window of a house.
“Ah,” Stoner said. “Civilization.”
“Naw,” Billy said. “Blue Mary’s. Least they ain’t burnt her out yet. Some day I’m gonna come over this hill and find nothin’ but a pile of ashes.”
“Do you think someone’s setting the fires?”
The boy nodded. “Can’t prove it, though.”
“Why would someone do that?”
“That’s what don’t make sense. I been places where folks git burned out for a reason—like they’s Indians or Chinese or talk different from others. Immigrants. But what’s goin’ on here just don’t fit.”
“People must be a little nervous, then.”
“Yeah. Preacher keeps ‘em from gettin’ too spooked, I reckon.”
He fell silent.
“Is something wrong?” Stoner asked after a while.
Billy shook his head. He seemed to have shrunk a little.
“What’s troubling you, Billy?”
“Nothin’,” he said sharply, and lapsed back into stubborn, adolescent silence.
The night seemed huge, a monstrous arch of empty darkness. She felt as if it might suck her into itself, dissolve her skin and let her soul dissipate like campfire smoke into Nothingness.
“Tell me about the people here,” she said.
“Whata you wanta know?”
“Well, what brings them here?”
Billy thought for a moment. “Some of ‘em was looking for the California gold fields,” he said. “Just couldn’t go no further. Some runnin’ from back east. Some gettin’ away from the war, I reckon. The Kwans come out here workin’ on the railroad—it went through north of here—and settled down. Probably run away’s my guess.”
“Aren’t they afraid of being found?”
Billy laughed sharply. “Railroad’s not gonna spend money trackin’ down a couple Coolies. Probably figure wolves or rattlesnakes got ’em.”
She tried to look around through the darkness, but even the horizon was lost. Only the light from Blue Mary’s cottage shone through the night, like a fallen star. She hoped the mule knew what it was doing. “What kind of work do people do? Ranching?”
“No ranches around Tabor. Cattle drives come through now and then, but it’s too late in the year for that. ”
“Farming?”
“Some. Mostly kitchen gardens. Blue Mary has a nice one. Flowers, even. But it’s frost-killed now. Maybe she’ll show you.”
He pulled up in front of a small, compact cottage. Smoke and the odor of burning wood rose briefly, then drifted down to hover near the ground. The air smelled faintly of mint and basil.
“Well,” Stoner said. She draped Billy’s jacket over his shoulders. The boy shuddered at the maternal gesture. “Are you coming in?”
He shook his head. “Gotta get back.”
“I guess I’ll see you around, then,” Stoner said, feeling as if she wanted to say more but not certain what it would be.
“Guess so.”
“Thanks for the ride.”
“Welcome.” He hesitated a moment. “Listen, that weren’t me at the livery stable. I followed you, but it weren’t me that scared you.” He slapped the reins against the mule’s rump and drove off.
Stoner watched until the darkness had swallowed him up.
She turned to the house and raised her hand to knock.
“Come in, Stoner,” said a woman’s bright, welcoming voice. “I’ve been waiting for you.”
Chapter Four
She drew back.
The door opened a crack. A blade of gold light sliced the darkness. “Stoner?”
The voice was familiar.
But it couldn’t…
The crack widened. Lantern light silhouetted the woman’s short, soft body and made a halo of her fine silver hair.
“Aunt Hermione!” She threw herself into the woman’s arms. “I’m so glad to see you.”
“Stoner...”
She pulled back. “I ought to be angry with you,” she said. “What kind of a practical joke is this?”
“Stoner, dear, I’m not… well, I am and I’m not...” The woman pushed the door wide. “You’d better come in.”
It was a one-room cottage with a loft for sleeping. Rough wood panels glowed apple russet. Raw stripped tree trunks served as rafters and held bunches of drying herbs. The hard lines of the stark windows were softened by gingham curtains. Home-spun cloth rugs in bright colors lay on the floor. Waves of heat and the scents of cinnamon and coffee drifted from a wood-burning stove. A table had been set with mugs for two and an arrangement of dried flowers. Bentwood chairs and a sleeping cot of lashed logs and rope springs completed the furniture. Despite its rustic look and uncharacteristic neatness, it was warm and homey, exactly like Aunt Hermione.
“I don’t know what this is all about.” Stoner hung her knapsack over the back of a chair and went to the stove. “I sure hope you can explain it.” The coffee was hot and smelled freshly-made. She picked up the pot. “Is this the real thing? Or fake Jamaica Blue Mountain?” She laughed from relief. “Want some?”
The woman had turned away to hang Stoner’s knapsack on a wall peg. “No, thank you, dear. But you help yourself.”
She filled her cup and returned the pot to the stove. “I can’t tell you how glad I am to see you,” she said, straddling a chair. “That town’s so full of crazy people...”
“Stoner,” the woman said, and turned toward her, “look at me.”
It wasn’t Aunt Hermione.
She looked enough like her to be her sister, but it wasn’t Aunt Hermione.
“Oh, God,” Stoner said, embarrassment driving her to her feet. “I’m sorry. I mean...” She gestured weakly toward the coffee pot, the stove, her cup. “I didn’t mean to be rude. I’d never just...”
The woman smiled. “It’s all right. I know you’ve had a very disturbing day.”
“It’s remarkable,” Stoner said. “You look almost exactly like her.”
“Please,” the woman said. “Sit down.”
She did. “Are you related?”
The woman thought it over. “You might say that. Distantly related.” She came and sat across the table. “They call me Blue Mary.”
“I heard a little about you,” Stoner said.
“None of it too flattering, I imagine,” Blue Mary said. “The local folks call me a witch. I suppose I am, in the technical sense of the word. But what they mean isn’t quite so flattering.” She laughed, a cheery, life-loving laugh, just like Aunt Hermione’s. “The people out here have faced droughts, blizzards, starvation, flood, unfriendly Indians, and wild animals. And do you know the one thing that terrifies them? Herbal healing.”
“Big Dot doesn’t seem…”
“Ah, yes.” She nodded. “Well, Dorothy’s an exceptional person.”
“Look, I really am s
orry.”
Blue Mary held up a hand. “Please. Once you start apologizing, you never stop.”
“How do you know that?”
“I know a great deal about you,” Blue Mary said. “Not everything, of course.” She sighed. “No matter how hard I try, the memory is still spotty.”
“Yeah,” Stoner said. “I know what you mean. Sometimes I get so frustrated.”
The older woman smiled. “And you only try to remember one lifetime.”
So Blue Mary, like Aunt Hermione, believed in multiple lives. “One’s as much as I can handle.”
“Nonsense,” Blue Mary said. “One’s all you want to believe in.”
“Aunt Hermione and I have plowed this field a million times.”
“It’s ridiculous to try to hurry another’s spiritual evolution, isn’t it? But the temptation...” Mary rolled her eyes, eyes that were the brightest blue Stoner had ever seen, eyes that seemed, even in the dim light, to shift from royal to turquoise and back in rhythmic waves.
Stoner felt held by the eyes, mesmerized. “You have beautiful eyes,” “Thank you, dear. I’d forgotten how sweet you are.”
Right. Stoner sipped her coffee. It was hot and strong, and tasted faintly of spices. “I’ve had car trouble,” she said at last.
“Yes, I know.”
“How do you know that?”
Blue Mary looked at her innocently and enigmatically. “It’s my business to know.”
The Tabor equivalent of a Chamber of Commerce Information Booth. “Then you know where I can find a mechanic?”
“I’m afraid we won’t have a mechanic in Tabor for at least another forty years. Assuming Tabor makes it into the next century.”
“Okay, then, a telephone.”
“Twenty years. They’ll try Western Union in the next year or two, but it won’t last. Not enough people to make it worth while, don’t you know?”
She was beginning to feel uneasy again. “I suppose Triple-A is out of the question.”
The woman shook her head slowly, sadly. “It’s a shame. Such a nice place. But entirely too remote. They made some serious errors when they put the town here.” She smiled a little. “But how could they know? Like all the rest, they put it where they happened to be.”
“There seems to be a lot of wheat around,” Stoner said, sipping her coffee, making small talk.
“Not wheat, prairie grass. It won’t last, either. It’ll go the way of the buffalo. And the town itself—bypassed by the railroad, bypassed by the major trails...”
Bypassed by time.
“I’m afraid Tabor is doomed.”
“Aren’t we all?” Stoner muttered. Blue Mary wasn’t going to help. Blue Mary was as whacked-out as Big Dot. Maybe, if she could get Cherry or Lolly alone, one of them would admit they were living in the Twentieth Century.
She doubted it.
“I know you’re discouraged, Stoner,” Blue Mary said. “But you will get out of here. I promise.”
Stoner looked up. “How?”
“By doing what you came to do.”
“I came to find a mechanic,” Stoner said firmly.
“No, dear. You came for an entirely different reason.”
Humor her. “What did I come for?”
Blue Mary cogitated. “I’m not sure. Spirit says you answered a call. They’re reluctant to amplify. None of my business, I suppose.”
“I suppose.”
“Not that we’re lacking for problems, understand. There’s always some sort of need in a town like this, cut off from civilization as we are.”
“Yeah,” Stoner said with a nod. “Dot mentioned the fires.”
“Yes, the fires. Very mysterious. No discernible pattern, you see.”
Stoner took a swallow of her coffee. “Billy seems to think you’re in danger.”
“That’s what’s so strange about it. Ordinarily, in a situation like this, I’d be one of the first victims. In times of anxiety, the first victims are always the women with special healing powers—the witches, as they call us. Or the foreigners. But so far no one has bothered the Kwans. If there is a motive behind this, it isn’t simple prejudice.”
Blue Mary was smiling at her, as if she sensed and understood her frustration. “I believe I’ll have some of that coffee, after all. I never could resist the smell of good coffee.” The woman got up to get it. “They say it keeps you awake, but one sleepless night seems like so little when you’ve slept through as many as I have. I made up a bed for you in the loft, by the way. Not what you’re accustomed to, I’m afraid. But you’ve slept in worse.”
Stoner looked around the little cottage. It was friendly and comforting. And if there was one thing she needed at this particular moment, it was comforting.
She was tired.
Face it, there wasn’t anything she could do tonight.
First thing in the morning, she promised herself, she’d start walking. And she wouldn’t stop until she got out of this mess.
That made her feel a little better. What the heck, Blue Mary seemed harmless enough. Probably related to Aunt Hermione. And at least she hadn’t pulled a gun. Yet.
Blue Mary looked at her with a smile that crinkled the corners of her eyes. “You find this all quite bewildering, don’t you, dear?”
“A little.”
“You’ve always been such a linear thinker. B has to follow A and come before C. You’re not accustomed to time’s eddies and currents.”
This is true. “Time’s eddies and currents” sounded suspiciously like Gwen’s “The Universe is an M & M” theory. Charming, in an abstract way. But common sense rejected the notion of a Universe folding back on itself. Common sense required the “Universe With a Snow Fence Around It” theory. She hadn’t quite worked out the details of what lay beyond the snow fence, but Gwen didn’t have any good answers to “What lies outside the candy shell of the M & M”, either. Personally, the idea of a Universe that melts in your mouth, not in your hand...
“I guess...” She chose her words carefully. “I guess, as far as you’re concerned, it’s...uh...1871?”
“November 13, 1871. I think you’ll find we’re all agreed on that.”
Stoner sighed. “I figured.” She took a sip of her coffee. “It’s all very strange.”
“I suppose it is,” said Blue Mary gently. “I do wish it didn’t disturb you so.”
“All I know,” she said, “is that I was driving down I-70 when the car died, and now I’m here and everyone seems to think it’s 1871.”
“Yes,” said Blue Mary, “that’s an accurate way of putting it. Sparse and rather dry, if you don’t mind my saying so, but accurate.”
“Sorry,” Stoner said. “I don’t feel very poetic.”
Blue Mary reached for a dainty leather draw-string pouch in the middle of the table. She pulled out a stack of small papers and a palm-full of dried and shredded leaves. “Lobelia,” she said, rolling herself a cigarette and offering the pouch to Stoner. “Indian tobacco. Rather calming and harmless.”
Stoner shook her head. “No, thank you. I don’t smoke.”
“I forgot, you never did.” The woman went to the stove, lit a splinter from the dying fire, and touched it to the tip of her cigarette. “Imagine,” she said as the fragrant smoke drifted about her head, “you’re walking down the street, on your way somewhere— not somewhere terribly important but somewhere you had to be sooner or later.” She took a puff on her cigarette. “Now, across the road, you see something going on, or an object in a store window. Something that attracts your attention. You want to take a closer look, so you leave your side of the street and drift over, drawn by this curious thing. You plan to continue on as soon as your curiosity is satisfied. You haven’t really interrupted your journey, just taken a little side trip along the way. Do you understand?”
“I understand,” Stoner said, “but what has that to do with...”
“That’s what you’ve done here. Except that you haven’t been traveling
on an actual physical street, but a street of Time.”
“But nothing attracted my attention, and I didn’t cross this street voluntarily.”
“Of course you did,” said Blue Mary. “You just don’t remember it.”
Well, that certainly made her feel better, knowing she had merely Stepped-out-of-Time-for-a-minute-back-soon. Made everything perfectly all right. Just normal, mundane stuff going on here, yes siree.
She wanted to scream.
“It’s just, assuming you’re right and I’ve been whisked back in time... Well, it’s a little hard to see the point.”
“Point?” Blue Mary considered. “I suppose there’s a point, if there’s a point to life. Flowers unfolding in the sun have a point, which is to unfold in the sun. It’s how they express their flower-ness.”
Right. And ending up in towns full of lunatics in the middle of the night in the middle of the prairie is how I express my Stoner-ness.
Which, come to think of it, was probably the truth.
Well, first thing in the morning she’d express her Stoner-ness by making a bee-line for her car. Assuming she could find the car. But surely she could find the Interstate. If she could get to the town of Tabor, she could find the dirt track Billy had driven her down, and that should lead her to the hill with the sign, and from the hill the road was visible...
“Of course, there’s something you came to do, no doubt. Something you have to set right.” Blue Mary was looking at her with an amused smile. “It’s really quite ordinary, Stoner. And quite wonderful.”
Stoner nodded politely. “I’m sure it is.”
“People from your time don’t accept it, of course. Except for a few of the more brilliant physicists. But by—oh, say the middle of the 21st Century—time hopping will seem almost mundane.”
She could ask Blue Mary the way to town, claiming she wanted to talk with Dot or buy something at the Emporium. Some small non-Twentieth Century item, of course. Nothing like batteries or mouth wash or Band Aids or detergent or sugarless gum, or... Tooth paste. She was willing to bet they sold tooth paste at the Emporium. Or did they? Maybe tooth paste was a later invention.
She wished Gwen were here. Among other things, Gwen would know about the little details of Nineteenth Century American life. That’s what history teachers were paid to do. Know these things. Travel agents were not paid to know about Nineteenth Century American life. Travel agents were paid to know about Now and about Next Season. Period.