He nodded approvingly . . . and then gave me the same shy smile I’d enjoyed earlier in the day. How very charming: he could only allow himself to ogle me if he was certain to receive no satisfaction for it.
The trip back across the Charles was uneventful, and so too was the long, hot walk back along the road I’d taken the cart ride on this morning. I met not a soul. The sun was starting to lengthen the shadows when I wearily returned to Goody Fitch’s home.
The witch was in the front room of the house, settling an iron pot over some covered coals in the hearth. It smelled mostly of vegetables and slightly of mutton, and not at all of seasonings. There was a girl, perhaps eight years old, sitting by an open window, spinning yarn with a drop-spindle and looking bored. Her eyes lit up when she saw me.
“Mama, is this the woman?” she said.
Goody Fitch looked over her shoulder. “Yes.” And to me: “My daughter is as I am. I told her about you.”
The girl, dressed almost identically to her mother—or rather, identically to me, since she was not yet corseted—put her spinning down and came to me with a wide-eyed unsmiling look of reverence. “Where have you come from?” she asked.
“Somewhere else,” said her mother almost tartly. “Children listen, Elizabeth, they do not speak.”
“Perhaps she would like to listen to me tell you about squaw-vine,” I said, eager to fulfill my part of the bargain so that she might fulfill hers by sending me home.
“Yes. But more than that. If you be willing to tell us more about what you are doing, we want to help you in a greater way than just this day’s work.”
“Really?” I asked, pleased but astonished.
She gestured to the stool, now situated in the center of the room to catch the faint cross-breeze. Gratefully, I sat on it. “I have been meditating on this matter all day,” she said. “I am a settler, a pioneer: I know the importance of planning with a mind to future generations. My daughter is gifted, far more subtle with her skills than I was so young, but she will never be allowed, in this place, to show herself as she is. If you can use her, and the ones that come after her, then our coming here will perhaps have served some purpose, even if not the one I intended.”
The girl plunked herself at my knees and looked up at me with an almost imploring look. “Hello, Elizabeth,” I said. “I am Melisande.”
“I know,” said the girl. “You already told me.” I grimaced in confusion, having no memory of such a thing, and her mother frowned at her. “I did not mean that,” said the girl, but she sounded uncertain, as if she were following a prompt that did not make sense to her. I was very fatigued and could not think about this peculiar moment with any depth.
Given this remarkably happy development, I stayed with them for the next two hours, explaining (in terms that would not bewilder them) the fundamental essence of DODO. Goody Fitch, once again, fell into gales of laughter at the claim that this small-minded enclave of religious extremists could ever blossom into a force that influenced the whole globe—but all the same, she insisted her daughter listen to me. Somewhere inside, she took my descriptions to heart. We pledged mutual benevolence and peace, and as the sun came in at a blinding angle through the southern window, I prepared myself to be Sent home.
Diachronicle
DAY 323
In which we learn quite rudely that nothing is ever simple
I WAS IN THE ODEC. As before, the sudden severing of my connections to the world of 1640 Boston left me disoriented, and obliged me to sit down. As I got my wits about me I had the presence of mind to grab for the oxygen mask, just in case the chamber was full of helium. But I was naked, and soon shivering with cold. Glancing down at myself, I was delighted to see that I had brought back with me none of the dirt and dust and grime of 1640. Even the splinter from the rough-hewn shovel handle had stayed behind, although my skin was still angry-looking. My clothes—T-shirt and jeans—were nowhere in sight.
I slammed a big red button that cycled the door. During the weeks of preparation for this day, the Maxes had come back in force and made a number of improvements. No longer did test subjects have to be released from the ODEC by outside helpers wearing oven mitts. Now the door opened automatically. For a moment my nakedness must have been hidden from view by a cloud of vapor—long enough for me to snatch a blanket from a hook by the door and wrap it around me.
The big room that had formerly contained the ODEC, the control panel, and everything else had been rearranged, tidied up, and cut in half by a wall of glass. The control panel was on the other side of it. Through it I could see Tristan, Erszebet, Rebecca, and Oda applauding and giving me the thumbs-up.
The Maxes had also installed a shower stall in the corner of the ODEC chamber, and plumbed it with a system that would inject a sterilant into the hot water. I went in there and warmed up with a long shower, scrubbing myself all over with some manner of liquid soap that was supposed to kill all bacteria and viruses. I emerged from that to find more pills awaiting me on a stainless steel tray, and swallowed those. Meanwhile the ODEC and the chamber surrounding it had been sprayed down with more disinfectant and irradiated with germ-killing purple light.
I stepped out into a small dressing room where my clothes were awaiting me, and put them on. Then out through another door into the control room, where I was received as a conquering hero.
“So you have survived,” said Erszebet proudly. “I knew you would. You are not like General Schneider.”
Rebecca looked at me with wide eyes, shaking her head. “I . . . I don’t even know what to ask you.”
“That’s good,” I said, “because I don’t even know what to say. Let’s go check the site and see if it’s there. I can describe the rest later.”
But: “Stokes!” came an exuberant voice from the hallway, and of course when I exited I was briefly embraced by Tristan—who’d been on the phone to his higher-ups in DC, giving them the good news. It was almost exactly like being grabbed by the cooper, but without the erection or the general sense of ickiness. I realized how tense I had truly been. There was nothing more I needed in that moment than to feel that comforting clutch.
I did not say such a thing, of course; I just nodded, clapped his shoulder, and waited for him to release me. “Tell us,” he said. “Tell us all of it.”
“On our way to the boulder,” I said.
His face lit up. “You did it! You buried it!”
I tried not to preen. “Sure. But I want to go there while I still have a very clear sense of exactly where I buried it.”
“She did it!” he shouted to the world at large. “Good work ethic, Stokes. The professor’s car is behind the building.”
I could not believe how immediately overwhelmed I was, by the air pollution and ambient city noises, by the seams in my blue jeans, by the squishiness of the car seat. I felt strangely bereft of something. As we drove through Central Square and up Mass Ave, I gave the four of them—Oda was driving—the clearest depiction I could of my day. Erszebet was gleeful to hear that she lived in a better time period than the poor miserable Puritan witches. “It heartens me to hear somebody else suffered even more than I did for being in the wrong place at the wrong time,” she informed us.
We were learning to ignore her when she got like this.
Finally we arrived at the Odas’ house and the professor pulled into his driveway. An eager cluster of five, we all went through the gate into the garden and straight through to the back of the property.
There was the boulder, looking more worn and slightly shorter than it had four hundred years ago, but not by much, and mostly because it was now surrounded by landscaped gardens. It was almost impossible to imagine where the stream had been, but it was this near side of the rock I wanted anyhow. I recognized a particular bulge in the stone and oriented myself around it, lay on the ground, and reached toward the stone, then tapped the earth below my shoulder.
“It is right under here,” I said. “In a sealed wooden bucket.”
They already had the tools for digging handy. We all dug. Even Erszebet took a mostly symbolic turn at it.
An hour later, there was a hole five feet deep and twice that wide, obliterating Rebecca’s vegetable garden. The back of the property resembled an archaeological excavation. And indeed it was: we found a rusty toy truck that looked to be from the 1950s and some bones that looked to have been buried by a dog. Below that, the rust-skeletal remains of a nineteenth-century lantern. Below that—as my heart beat more quickly—the broken-up oyster and clam shells I’d held in my hands four hundred years ago, a few hours earlier . . .
And that was all.
There was no bucket.
Journal Entry of
Rebecca East-Oda
JUNE 16
Temperature today about 75F, bright and sunny, no breeze. Barometer steady.
All vegetables: deceased. Flowers: largely trampled. South-side peonies (blooming), flame azalea (blooming), and most rose bushes still in good form. South-facing herb bed generally doing well.
The garden has been completely destroyed in the interest of digging up the book Melisande says she buried four hundred years ago. No sign of it. I have never seen her so distraught or confused. We stood about a large hole that had been my vegetable bed. Tristan offering condolence that “at least the soil is getting aerated.” Mel circling the hole, shaking her head, climbing into it, searching on her hands and knees, trying to dig even deeper with her fingers.
Erszebet, retro-chic handbag clutched to her side as usual, watching all of us with superior amusement. “Obviously not here,” she said. “We have to try again on another Strand. This is quite normal.”
Mel looked up from the hole, gave Tristan a questioning look. Tristan and Frank also swapped glances. “What do you mean by ‘another Strand’?” asked Frank.
She shrugged. “I mean another Strand. Of time,” she clarified, seeing their confusion. “You have your fancy technical language to explain it. I have only what it really is. There are many possibilities and you cannot completely control which Strand you are on when you are summoning. It is not up to you. Magic does not make you omnipotent. So Melisande went back on just one Strand, and that one Strand did not change things to your liking. Maybe she will go back on another Strand, and then another, and when enough Strands have been shifted a little by this, then maybe it will help here and now.”
“That makes my brain hurt,” Mel said, sounding tired. “Do you mean I have to go back and redo everything I just did? Relive the entire day?”
“Of course,” said Erszebet. “Several times, most likely.”
Melisande groaned and threw herself onto the earth at the bottom of the hole, a dry-dock Ophelia. “I’d almost rather go back to working for Blevins.”
Erszebet (scolding): “You have a simplistic notion of how complicated things work. It is like when the euro came into being.” (Uncomprehending looks from all of us.) “If somebody had made up a new coin and called it the euro and walked in someplace to use it, it is not suddenly money. But because many people all agreed to make up a new coin, and then use these new coins over and over, now the euro is used and the old coins are not.”
Tristan (irritated): “Bad metaphor. That was an economic policy move on the part of governmental bodies, it wasn’t—”
“It may have been decided by governmental bodies, but it did not happen, it was not real, until many people stopped doing things one way and started doing them another, consciously and deliberately. Now, of course one uses the euro. One does not think about it.”
Mel stood up and brushed the moist dark soil from her jeans. Erszebet is appalled that Mel “dresses like a man,” and not even a proper gentleman but a farmhand. She keeps trying to get Mel to wear dresses and lipstick. Some of her advice is not without merit, for she has tastes that are highly refined, albeit stuck in the 1950s. But today jeans were the right attire.
“How many times must I redo it before it takes?” Mel asked, sounding exhausted.
“I cannot say for certain, but I will try to determine, because I like you,” said Erszebet. Reached into her bag, pulled out the frazzled-mop-looking thing.
“What is that?” Tristan demanded, in such a tone I realized he hadn’t seen it before.
“My számológép,” she said, haughty. She began to pick through the strings—the strands—of it. Tristan turned to Melisande with a questioning expression.
“Calculator,” Mel translated. “Not like a desk calculator, more like an accounting device.”
We all watched Erszebet as she selected a strand, examined it, muttered to herself, pulled it away from the mass. It was entangled with another strand near the bottom. “Yes,” she said, shoving the whole thing back into her bag. “You have to go back. We will see a difference next time.”
“You mean the book will be here next time?”
“Almost certainly not!” Erszebet scoffed. “But we will be closer to the book being here next time.”
“Excuse me,” said Frank with his gentle smile, “would you show me how that object works?”
Erszebet looked almost shocked, and squeezed her arm tighter over the bag. “I cannot give you my számológép,” she said. “I made it myself with my mother. It took years. I would sooner cut my hair off and give it to you.”
“I don’t want to keep it, I just want to look at it.”
“It will mean nothing to you. And if you start to fiddle with it you might change it. So, no.”
“May I ask, at least, what you use it for?” he said. Mel, with a hand up from Tristan, climbed out of the hole and reached for the sweatshirt I handed her. It was early evening and the air was beginning to cool.
Erszebet looked at the object in her hand as if Frank’s question put it into an entirely new light. “What do I use it for? It is . . . a kind of cheating.” She laughed a short, harsh, scold-me-if-you-dare laugh.
“Cheating?”
“Every action has reactions which have reactions. So, many consequences. You must keep track of all the possible consequences or bad things maybe happen. Nobody has the capacity to hold that much information in her mind at once. The számológép helps me to track the possible consequences.”
“And how does it work, exactly?” asked Frank, his face now glowing with anticipation at getting his Physics Itch scratched.
“It will be easier to show you after Melisande has done it a few times.”
“A few times,” said Mel under her breath, sounding like she had the flu. “All right. But I need a decent meal first.”
“I’ll get you home,” said Tristan, tossing her one of my clean gardening rags to wipe the dirt off her face. “Good work, soldier, we’ll try again tomorrow. Erszebet, let’s go. Eh . . .” He looked at the hole, then at me. “Sorry about the garden, ma’am. I’ll call some men to come in tomorrow morning and tamp all the soil back down in there.”
“Won’t save the tomatoes,” I said.
“Well, we need it intact so we can dig it up again,” he said, almost sheepish.
When they were gone (Erszebet now bunking with Mel, who has moved to a larger apartment), Frank and I gazed at each other through the deepening twilight, over what had been the best of my cucumber patch. “Such an interesting thing, that . . . számológép,” he said, pronouncing it wrong. “I wonder if I could figure out how it works, what she’s doing with it.” (I should have known that would be his takeaway from the entire day: not the failure, not the future, not the ruined garden, but the interesting gadget.)
I thought about what was in the attic. I wished it were not in the attic, and that being unavoidable, I wished I did not know that it was in the attic. But that glowing, boyish eagerness on his face . . . for more than fifty years now I have been charmed by it.
“I know where to find one,” I said. “Stay here. I’ll be right back.”
Diachronicle
DAY 324 (COLONIAL BOSTON DTAP, 1640)
In which, having not succeeded, I try, try
again
THE SECOND TIME, THE ARROW struck me before I fell out of its way.
I cried out, too dizzy and disoriented to keep quiet, and found myself remembering what Goody Fitch had said the first time: “It would hit you another time.” What she’d meant was, it does hit me another time. She knew. She knew I arrived here more than once. What else did she know?
In a dreamlike state, I heard her shouting out to Samuel, heard her tell me not to move, waited until she came back with the blanket—and this time, a small roll of linen that she used to bandage my calf. The wound was only a superficial graze, really, enough to require tending but not enough to lame me. Enough, however, that it would make the slog of the day even more of a slog.
What followed was a six-hour stretch of déjà vu, ameliorated by the benefit of hindsight-as-foresight. The witch and I had almost the same conversation we’d had before. I declined the maize, knowing what it would do to my innards. When she offered me the musket ball and piece of wampum, I begged her for a second wampum bead, and she gave it to me. I asked her if I might wear her corset, since I was going out into the world and she was not, but she declined, as she expected Goody Griggs to be by to quilt midday and did not want to appear slovenly to a neighbor.
“Always feel free to ask me, though,” she added. “Sometime it might be available.”
That was the closest she came to telling me she knew that I was visiting her multiple times. Now the daughter’s comment when I’d given her my name—“You already told me”—made sense too. Once I’d returned from my tasks in Cambridge, I was determined to interview Goody Fitch, to ask her to explain her understanding of the Strands, as Erszebet called them. Perhaps if various witches described it, we could, between all their descriptions, come to grasp it.
The déjà vu returned as Goodman Griggs gave me his furtive, grumbling look and drove me to the ferry. The ferryman once again ogled me and the boys once again splashed water at each other across the Charles. With a slight limp, trudging, shovel in hand, I again strode up Water Street, into the shop where Usher and Day were arguing about the quality of the printing. The same trick worked to steal the book again—remarkable, how at ease I felt, now that I knew I would accomplish it—and finally I approached the cooperage. I felt my pace slow. Even if I offered this unsettling fellow both of the wampum beads (one was intended for the ferry back to Muddy River), I suspected he would claim that it did not cover the fee. My real trouble was my want of a corset.