A Captive in Time

by Sarah Dreher

  A gun! She could claim she needed a gun. Maybe she really would need a gun, if they tried to stop her from leaving.

  And who would she be willing to kill?

  Billy? Blue Mary? Cherry or Lolly? Big Formidable Dot, whose accuracy is Legend?

  No way.

  Anyway, guns were expensive. She didn’t have much cash, she probably couldn’t use her VISA card, and she doubted the Emporium would take Traveler’s Checks.

  So it had to be something small and inexpensive. Also something Blue Mary wouldn’t have on hand. Which probably ruled out such useful things as buttons and shoe laces.

  “You don’t need an excuse, dear,” Blue Mary said sweetly. “You can leave any time you really want.”

  Stoner looked up, her face flushing with guilt. “It’s not nice to read people’s minds. Aunt Hermione says it’s rude, and an invasion of privacy, and probably unethical and will do things to your karma.”

  “I wasn’t reading your mind, Stoner. We’ve done so many, many things together through the ages, we know one another as a glove knows the hand it enfolds. Our souls must love each other very deeply.” She puffed on her cigarette. “I do wish you could accept that.”

  “Yes,” Stoner said politely. “So do I.”

  “But I have to be patient, don’t I? I suppose that’s my lesson for this lifetime.” She chuckled a little. “Though why I would want to go on and on, learning patience lifetime after lifetime, is beyond me. Whatever we keep doing together, Stoner, we must be missing some essential element. Or maybe we just enjoy it.”

  Dot had called Blue Mary “peculiar”. Dot would probably call the Hydrogen Bomb a firecracker.

  And yet she had had this same conversation with Aunt Hermione. On more than one occasion.

  That didn’t make her feel any better.

  Nor was it particularly germane to her problem, which was to bust out of this insanity, get her car fixed, and hit the trail for Kansas City. And the sooner she hit the sack, the earlier she could hit the trail.

  She yawned.

  “Sleepy?” Blue Mary asked.

  Stoner nodded. “Too much excitement, I guess.”

  “Well, you go on up. I have a few things I must do down here, but let me know if I disturb you.”

  Disturb me? You already disturb me. Everything that has happened in the past six hours disturbs me. “I’ll be fine,” she said.

  “Would you like one of my nighties?”

  Stoner cringed at the thought. Once, when she had forgotten to do her laundry, she had worn one of Aunt Hermione’s nightgowns. It barely covered her knees, caught her under the armpits, rode up in the night, and made her feel as if she were in the hospital. But it had cured her of forgetting to do her laundry.

  “No, thanks,” she said. “It’s only for one night.”

  Blue Mary patted her hand. “Of course, dear.” Her voice was sweet… but definitely humoring.

  ≈ ≈ ≈

  Morning arrived soft and gentle as mist. The air felt warm, one of those strange spells of warm weather that sometimes happen in November.

  Stoner lay in bed, luxuriating in the silkiness of half-sleep. Even the swish of traffic around Boston Common was muted to silence. She tried to remember if there had been a demonstration planned at the State House for this morning. The police appeared to have roped off the streets. She should probably check it out, see if it was something she wanted to lie down in front of a police cruiser over.

  She could hear Aunt Hermione downstairs puttering with breakfast. She really ought to get up. She wanted to tell her about her odd dream, see what she made of it.

  In a few minutes. Right now, the impulse to be lazy was irresistible. She wondered why her alarm hadn’t gone off.

  It must be Sunday. She tried to remember if she and Gwen had planned anything for today. Probably not. Maybe they’d go to the Aquarium, or to the Science Museum to see the latest film at the Omni. Or maybe take a drive to the North Shore and absorb the eerie off-season atmosphere of Salisbury Beach.

  Or maybe they’d just stay home and continue their love-making tour through Gwen’s apartment.

  The odor of coffee and corn bread drifted up to her. She stretched.

  Corn bread? Aunt Hermione making corn bread? Aunt Hermione never made corn bread.

  She opened her eyes.

  The peaked roof pressed close over her head. The mattress beneath her rustled with the crunch of straw and corn husks. The handmade quilt was smooth beneath her fingers.

  She remembered.

  Her mouth tasted of sleep and anxiety. She crawled from the bed and pulled on her jeans and sweat shirt. Stuffing her socks in her pocket, carrying her boots, she eased her way down the ladder.

  “Good morning,” said Blue Mary brightly. “You seem to have slept well.”

  She put her shoes down and tried to force her hair into a semblance of order. “Thank you. I did.”

  “If you’re going to the outhouse, be careful. There’s a porcupine that seems to think it’s the place to spend the winter.”

  “Yeah, okay.”

  Blue Mary held out a wooden bucket of water. “Take this out with you. You’ll find a basin for washing up in the shed. Just look around, you can’t miss it. I’m afraid I have to ask you to be parsimonious with the water. The fall rains are late this year, and we have to save as much as we can.”

  “No problem,” Stoner said as she laced up her boots. “We ran into the same trouble last summer in Boston. We had a short dry spring, and the pipes from the Quabbin are leaking something fierce. They’re talking about diverting the Connecticut River but the Watershed Council...” She realized she was probably making no sense whatsoever. “I’m sorry. I don’t usually chatter like a magpie before breakfast.”

  Blue Mary smiled. “It’s all right, dear. I expect you’re a little nervous.” She settled herself at the table and looked at Stoner expectantly. “Are you going to try to get away right after breakfast, or wait until later in the day?”

  She didn’t know what to say. Blue Mary looked at her with a non-blaming smile. “I would like to get home,” she admitted.

  The older woman nodded sympathetically. “I’m sure you miss your friends. Especially your business partner and that ‘certain someone’. And I’ll bet she misses you.”

  “Probably,” Stoner agreed. Blue Mary and Aunt Hermione must spend hours every week talking on the phone, the woman was so well informed.

  On the phone. The phone. Where did Blue Mary hide the phone?

  “But think how entertained she’ll be, hearing of your adventures.”

  “Entertained. Yes.”

  “And envious, in her way. Imagine what it would mean to a history teacher to take little field trips like this.” Blue Mary sighed in a very Aunt Hermione-like fashion. “Living history.”

  “Yeah,” Stoner said, shuffling her feet nervously. “I’ll be sure to tell her all about it.” She edged toward the door. “I’d better… you know... I won’t be a minute.”

  “You take your time, dear,” said Blue Mary. “Neither of us really has anywhere to go this morning.”

  The cold water from the tin wash basin woke her senses with a shock but didn’t change much else. She stood in the doorway to the shed and looked around, at the brilliant blue sky, the waves of dried prairie grass rolling away to the horizon on all sides. In the distance, to the west, she thought she could make out a thin column of smoke. She squinted and stared, but there didn’t seem to be any house attached to it.

  Like everything else out here, it was probably an illusion.

  She rubbed her face with a coarse linen towel, and searched until she found a potted plant to feed with the wash water. A small, grayish-green shrub with tightly-rolled leaves. She didn’t know much about herbs, only what she had learned trying (unsuccessfully) to help Aunt Hermione remember what was what and what it did. But she made a guess that this was a dormant rosemary.

  If Blue Mary knew so much about her, she wonde
red as she ran a comb through her hair, using her reflection in a pane of glass as a mirror, why hadn’t she heard about this distant relative from Aunt Hermione? She had to admit she felt a little hurt. Her aunt talked to her about everything, openly and in great detail. Except for her clients, of course, the people for whom she read palms, Tarot cards, personal objects, auras, and sometimes just the air. She’d never talk about a client. Not in any identifiable way. That was unethical, and would come back on her three-fold.

  She draped the towel over a peg and wandered back to the front door. Why would Aunt Hermione keep Blue Mary a secret, then? Because she was “peculiar”? Hardly. On any random day, Stoner could count on walking through the door of their shared Beacon Hill Brownstone to find Aunt Hermione serving tea to a collection of street people, punk rockers, and deprogrammed Jesus freaks. Blue Mary was right up her alley.

  Breakfast was on the table. Steaming corn bread, home churned butter in a little terra cotta bowl, coffee—this time smelling of vanilla bean—and a platter of eggs. Blue Mary gestured to her to help herself, and dug in.

  “Tell me,” Stoner said as she tore off a chunk of corn bread. “You know so much about me. Do you know Aunt Hermione well?”

  Blue Mary seemed to find that amusing. “Oh, yes. Very well.”

  “I see. Did you ever meet her sister? My mother?”

  “Not really,” said Blue Mary. “We’re not contemporaries, you see.”

  She didn’t see. “I’ve often wondered,” she said idly and for no good reason except to try to extend the parameters of the conversation and maybe snare some useful information, “how she and Aunt Hermione can come from the same family, and be so different.”

  Blue Mary chuckled kindly. “Oh, my dear, it has nothing to do with family. When we get ready to manifest, we simply hop on board the next available bus, so to speak. We take our chances on our fellow passengers. Unless, of course, we have things to do together.”

  “Of course.”

  “Look at yourself,” Blue Mary went on. “Do you really believe it served any purpose, earthly or Divine, for you to be born to your parents?”

  “Not much,” Stoner admitted. “But I did get to meet Aunt Hermione.”

  “Which you would have done anyway.”

  “Do you really believe that?”

  “Of course,” Blue Mary said in a tone that implied she found it amazing that it wasn’t an everyday truth like sunrise. “Your souls would have searched high and low for one another, while your ego would have been extremely restless and wondered what was wrong with you. That worry—since you worry so much about being normal, Heaven knows why—would have brought you, sooner or later, to Dr. Edith Kesselbaum, who would have recalled Hermione from the Boston Horticultural Society and found some excuse to bring you together.”

  “I’m relieved to hear my soul’s working so hard,” Stoner said with a wryness she hoped fell short of rudeness. This woman apparently knew everything that had passed between her and Aunt Hermione from Day One. It really was disturbing. It made her feel cut off, like a stranger, like crying.

  “How are the Blue Runners, by the way?” Blue Mary asked.

  “What?”

  “The McTavish Blue Runner Stringless Hybrid Snap Beans,” the older woman said.

  “They’re fine,” Stoner said. “You even know about the Blue Runners?”

  “Of course.”

  The existence of the Blue Runners wasn’t exactly common knowledge, except among urban organic gardeners. The Blue Runners had first been bred by Stoner’s grandfather on her father’s side, whose hobby in his retirement years was vegetable genetic engineering. He had created the Blue Runners as a container-grown plant that thrived on automobile exhaust and was ideal for city gardens. In his will he had left the beans to Aunt Hermione, who had caught his fancy at a family reunion. She had continued the strain, experimenting from time to time (sometimes with terrifying results, like the year she produced beans the size of cucumbers which smelled like catnip and attracted every cat in downtown Boston until their pocket garden resembled a feline version of Cujo). She also kept a list of selected gardeners to whom she sold the seeds under the table, thereby ensuring herself a comfortable unreported income. By and large, the whole enterprise was a well-kept secret.

  “That surprises you,” Blue Mary said with a little sigh. “I suppose not much of what I’ve been telling you has gotten through.”

  “I’m sorry,” Stoner said. “I have a hard time with things like that.”

  Blue Mary nodded and said, “Capricorn,” in exactly the same tone of voice Aunt Hermione would have used.

  “It’s uncanny,” Stoner said, “how much you resemble her.”

  Blue Mary shrugged, hands open and palms upward in an Oh- God-give-me-strength gesture. She picked off a crumb of corn bread. “Have you decided what method to use to try to get out of here?”

  Stoner glanced at the woman, to see if she were offended or angry. But Blue Mary appeared quite calm, as though Stoner were doing exactly what she’d expect any reasonably sane person to do. “Not really. I thought I’d go into town and play it by ear.”

  “Probably your best bet,” Blue Mary said with a thoughtful nod. “But remember, a part of you believes the right thing would be to stay here. It won’t be easy to leave.” She pulled a scrap of paper from her apron pocket. “I’ve drawn up a small list of items you might bring me from the store.” She gave Stoner a friendly wink. “If you decide to come back, of course.”

  ≈ ≈ ≈

  Getting into Tabor was difficult in itself. She hadn’t realized Blue Mary’s cottage was so far from town. By the time the one dirt street came into view, she had walked away a sizable chunk of the morning. She stood on a hill overlooking the town and took off her parka and stuffed it through the straps of her knapsack.

  She took a deep breath. The sky went on forever today, thin and clear and warm. The sun was like a white spotlight. Grass stubble and yellow clay earth glowed in crystalline light. Farms, barns and rough houses and windmills, were scattered across the prairie in a hap-hazard way. Beneath the little rise she stood on, Tabor lay spread out like the setting for a toy train. Someone was unloading a wagon behind the Emporium. A lone male figure sauntered up to the door of the Saloon, pushed, waited, pushed again, then ambled on toward the Livery stable. Apparently, the day began and ended late at Dot’s.

  The town seemed nearly deserted. Windows, shades drawn, reflected the sun in silver sheets. Somewhere in the distance a horse whinnied and stamped its feet, the sound traveling easily on the thin air.

  She still had a long way to go. If, somehow, the road and car weren’t there (impossible!), it would be dark by the time she got back to town. Too dark to trek all the way back to Blue Mary’s. Well, that would be inconvenient, but not a tragedy. Maybe she could find a bed for the night at Dot’s. Assuming Dot was open for a little hotel business.

  Despite the warmth of the day, the ground was frozen as hard as concrete beneath a layer of mud thin as cake icing. Grass stubble cracked underfoot. She descended into the shadow of the first building on the edge of town. Despite the faded “Jail” painted over the door, it looked like a deserted storage barn of some kind. Through a dusty, cobweb-etched window she could see a jumble of old barrels, crates spilling excelsior onto the hard dirt floor, a broken pitchfork. Mouse droppings covered the window sill. She shuddered. If these people had to stay in Tabor through the winter, if they were being paid (a small fortune, she hoped) to maintain authenticity or keep vandals out or whatever, no wonder they slipped over the fine line between sanity and delusion. One way to bear the cold and isolation and inconvenience would be to pretend you didn’t have a choice. Maybe the only way.

  Whatever, she reminded herself, it wasn’t her place to judge. They were only trying to survive, like everyone else. The way they went about it might be a little odd, but that was their business. She probably did things they thought were odd. If she walked a mile in their moccasins, s
he might be convinced it really was 1871, too.

  She felt better.

  Talking to herself always made her feel better.

  Is that odd, or what?

  She glanced over at the Emporium. The light behind the window was dim, but she could see there were people moving around.

  It might be nice to have something to nibble on, for the road. Probably not a candy bar, though. These folks had most likely never heard of Snickers or Whoppers or Necco Wafers. But she bet they had some kind of portable food. Especially in 1871.

  Come on, she told herself with a little laugh. You could be half-way to Chicago in the time you waste rationalizing. You’re curious. So just scurry on over there and check the place out.

  She pushed open the door, and set a leather strip of sleigh bells to jingling. The sudden dimness after the white sunlight left her momentarily blind. As she waited for her eyesight to clear, she let the smells of the place speak to her. Dust. Wood. Kerosene. Coffee. Cinnamon. And, weaving through it all, an earthy, musky odor like stale swamp water and rotting leaves.

  Objects began to take shape. There was a long wooden counter, tables containing articles for sale, shelves ringing the walls. On the counter stood jars of candies—licorice whips and peppermint sticks, mostly. Crockery jars of butter—Grade A at fifteen cents a pound, Grade B at thirteen cents. Bricks of maple sugar lay in a glass case. Barrels of soda crackers and pickles in brine. Rolls of dry goods. Kegs of nails. A pot-bellied stove pumping out heat. Axes and shovels and picks and hoes. Harnesses hanging from wooden pegs. Pots and pans and lanterns and heavy white dishes. A box of assorted cutlery. Ropes in a variety of sizes. Wooden tubs. Tobacco, loose and in chewing plugs. Plump, colorful cotton bags containing grain. More barrels—flour, graded “high white” and “middling”, and buckwheat meal as coarse as fieldstone gravel. There were seasonal vegetables—potatoes, turnips, cabbage, pumpkins, just like at home. Fish hung from the rafters by their tails and were labeled “salted cod”, next to cured hams and slabs of bacon. Behind the counter on a shelf were crocks of honey and boxes of soda crackers. Tins of tea—black and Japan—and coffee called Mocha and green Rio. And eggs in wire baskets, three dozen for thirty-five cents.