by Dana Roquet
I dashed into the mudroom, retrieved a measuring tape from my utility cart, and ran back to the dining room, running the tape out and holding it up to the door where I could envision him standing, and it measured six feet three inches. Not definitive, by any means, but my grandpa had told me once that Norman was one of the tallest of the Wyman men and that both he and his brother John were well over six feet tall.
I looked at my antique dining room set and the eight chairs that I had arranged around the early American style table, realizing that I know now exactly what style and size table I need to find for this room. The table should be Victorian-style and have a fluted top with intricate scrollwork around and down the legs and I know, without doubt, that the chairs should have dark-brown leather seat cushions with dozens of shiny brass rivets. The backs of the chairs should have florets of flowers with scrolling vines and both the table and chairs need to be covered in the same warm dark reddish mahogany stain that the rest of the oak woodwork and floors, throughout the house had been finished in during the restoration.
I also now know, decisively, that mahogany-stained oak wainscot should be added to the three long walls of the dining room although there was no wainscoting on the walls in any of the photographs of the dining room that I have in my collection. Those photos, however, are all from 1910 and later. In 1885, there was definitely wainscoting on the lower half of the dining room walls, with raised battens forming rectangle recesses about every two feet on center and wallpaper with thick, forest-green vertical stripes covering the walls above it. I know all of this as surely as if I had been there and seen it with my own eyes.
Chapter 11
The dreams came again my second night in my new home, and the next night and the next. It was always a different dream, different people, different circumstances, but it soon became obvious to me that these were not your average run of the mill dreams. At first I tried to dismiss them as the likely product of an over-active imagination but the more dreams that I experience, the less I am able to simply dismiss them. So I have had to come to the unreasonable and ridiculous conclusion that everything I am experiencing has to be real because the only other explanation that I am able to come up with, is that I am losing my mind and I don’t seem to be any more deranged in the light of day than I ever have been, but at night…
Whatever it is that I have been experiencing at night doesn’t seem to add up to any of the possible conditions that I’d found by googling mental health issues. Nothing adds up anywhere, well, not to put too fine a point on it but I do think that I might possibly have a touch of neurosis but not related to this issue and, thank God, I haven’t exhibited any of the frightening symptoms associated with schizophrenia, or a full blown psychosis.
Am I preoccupied?—definitely. Obsessed?—okay yes, I am possibly on my way to an unhealthy obsession but I can still function at a high level in spite of this one; albeit rather huge problem, which is that I seem to be time traveling while I sleep at night. Yes it sounds like a crazy person talking but I swear it is real! Most, if not all, of what I am experiencing in my dreams I have been able to find concrete evidence of by researching the occurrences afterward.
So for whatever reason, I truly was having some serious shit going on down at the ol’ Wyman homestead during the overnights and after each travel, I began keeping a detailed log of the occurrences, making notes, changing my facts, and updating biographies for my family and the people of Fremont as I learned all about them, firsthand. And as the days have progressed, I have found that my real world has started changing as well.
I realized early on that I could manipulate things and not big manipulations. I mean I can’t seem to alter the course of history or anything drastic or even alter the course of a single day, come to that. It is just little things, for example, during one time travel or warp, as I have come to refer to them, I happened to be at Rose’s house when a family photo had been snapped in 1914. I had already known all about the photograph that was being created because I have the original in my possession. It is a photo of about twenty-five relatives standing in three rows on the back steps of my house, like standing up on risers. It had been surreal to actually watch the staging of the photograph, as the family had gathered together, with all of the confused hubbub that goes along with arranging such a large group of people into some semblance of a structured pose. A neighbor man who had happened to be visiting that day had been the one who’d done the honors and had snapped the shot for posterity.
I had spent most of that day at the Wyman house with the entire family for one of their many frequent family get-togethers. I had been Sarah, wife of my granduncle Albert Mills and he had presented me with a gentle kiss and a small clump of wildflowers from the garden during a walk about the lawn. I had still been holding those flowers in my hand when the photograph had been taken but the thing is—the flowers were not in the original photograph. However, when I woke up in the present and pulled out my albums of photographs, there was the photo—complete with flowers! The original photograph had been permanently altered. To confirm, I had gone to my computer and brought up my genealogy program and looked at my family tree documents, finding the same photograph—no flowers. The digital image had not been altered, only the original.
Many of the photographs that I gathered from other family members are digital copies that I had taken with my camera when I had met with them, but my own private collection is all original photographs, so after that experience with the flowers, I had used my digital camera to make sure that I have digital photos of every old original photograph and tintype in my possession, and I am keeping them in a file within my family tree program on my computer. That way I am able to compare them side by side with the originals and see any differences that might occur. Really freaky but really interesting!
***
The weekend with Derek that I’d planned for in the middle of June didn’t come to pass because he was too busy to make it over. I hadn’t seen him for over a month now and I don’t know that much about relationships because, to be honest, Derek is my longest and most successful; but it seems odd to me that we could go for a month with just the occasional phone call. Is that even considered a relationship? I was beginning to wonder about that, but I was so busy with the freaky goings-on in my new house that not needing to deal with Derek or the possible complications that his staying overnight might present did make my life easier.
***
Dave Cameron thought that I was crazy when I called him later in June and asked him to fit me into his schedule for some additional work at my place, to add wainscoting to my dining room and another little special project that I had planned for Rose’s bedroom. He was free right away, which had surprised me because I had assumed that I would be put on some kind of a waiting list because Dave’s skills are always in demand, but he came over the very next day.
I’d already purchased what would be needed for the projects and had everything ready for him when he arrived. The dining room was a pretty cut and dried concept which he had accomplished in just a few hours and he had thought that the finished effect was a great addition to the look of the room, but he had listened quizzically as I had showed him my master bedroom and explained to him that I also wanted him to make me a special closet, below the chair rail and in the wainscoting that I was having him add to the room as well.
It was Grandma Rose’s bedroom, circa 1878 and the small cubby would fit between two wall studs and would be two feet high but use only the four inches of depth between the plaster and lath and the outside sheathing behind the clapboard siding. He didn’t ask me what it was for, but I had a story all ready and went ahead and mentioned that I was thinking about adding a custom made wall safe for valuables and wanted it hidden for that reason. He had shrugged and scratched his head for a few seconds, eyeing me speculatively but in the end he had seemed to buy into the story without any further question.
It is now complete and ready for my use and to anyone looking, it app
ears to be a plain wall, but it is a door with concealed hinges mounted on the inside and a special press point in one of the raised panels in the wainscoting that pops the door open. It had to have a complicated latch because it needs to be both secure and undetectable in 1878 which is 134 years ago, as well as today. To get it open, I have to push at the very lowest right corner and at the same time, push in the center of the door, halfway down and when I perform this maneuver just so, a metal band flexes and releases the secret door and—presto! It opens, just like magic or at least that is my hope. I still haven’t had a warp occurring at Rose’s house, in order to test it and I don’t know for sure if it will really work or if it will have existed back then but I had to try something.
My plan is, to use it to hide things back then and bring them forward and vice versa. It seems to me that it will work because during one travel I had been able to find a little hidden snug spot in a back corner of the cavernous second story hayloft of the barn and I had gathered up a few test items of no consequence; a horse shoe, a twist of hay and a couple of coins, wrapping them in a linen cloth. I had then placed the packet inside a wooden box and the box, in turn, had been placed in the hiding spot, back behind an unfinished part of the loft wall on a horizontal two by four and behind some ship lap, totally hidden from view and I had found the box the next day, in the present, with its undisturbed contents exactly where I had left it, back in 1890.
The main reason for the wall cubby in the bedroom is that I need some other means of hiding things because depending on who I inhabit in my travels, I don’t always have the freedom or opportunity, when at this particular homestead, to go to the barn or other likely hiding place whenever I want to. Plus, I really don’t want to risk someone in the past finding things that I have brought with me from the future, mainly my digital camera, or worse, having a stash of things discovered that I might be borrowing from the past to take temporarily into the future and then find myself accused of stealing or of being a crazy kleptomaniac.
Chapter 12
The closet worked! In fact, it worked so well that my house was beginning to look like a time capsule. A larger twenty-four by sixteen inch digital reproduction of the small tintype, of my great-great-great-grandmother Jane Johnston Simpson and her twelve children, including a younger Grandma Rose is now hanging exactly where it had been on the wall behind Judson and Rose in the tintype of the front room that I’d had professionally restored and analyzed. They had been blurry, unknown people in that picture but now, their faces were crisp and clear, and thanks to my wonderful, funny, and sweetest-ever Great-Great-Grandma Rose, who had pointed out to me on the original tintype, just who was who, I now know exactly who every one of her siblings were and have been able to add digital close-ups of their individual faces to each of their family tree profiles. That tintype had been made shortly before Rose and Judson had left Ohio to immigrate to Iowa.
During one warp, I was my great-grandmother Alice Wyman Mills and my husband Henry and I were heading to the Emporium in Fremont to have a tintype made, and I had managed to convince Henry to hitch up the larger horse and buggy rig so that we could also take his father, stepmother, and their children with us. He’d agreed and we had bought and paid for a small tintype of their family.
I had managed to take that tintype, during subsequent time travels, spirit it away to Grandma Rose’s place where I’d placed it in my secret cubby, brought it into the future and returned it again to Francis Mills’ home after having it copied, with no one the wiser. Not as easy as it might sound considering the sheer logistics of the maneuver, which had involved two separate and random time travels when I had just happened to find myself in the right place and time; spanned two different time warp years and had included, among other things, two different carriage rides, hiding it first inside the restrictive bodice of a nineteenth-century gown and the next time returning it to Francis’ house hidden in a large bag of a spun yarn that Alice had been providing for the knitting of new winter stockings for the family. It had been totally worth it because, I now have in my possession in 2012, an enlarged but otherwise exact replica of the original tintype which had never existed before—of my great-great-grandfather Francis Mills, his second wife Esther and their children. This has been the most significant manipulation of events that I have been responsible for, to date.
My great-great-grandfather Francis had come to this country with the name of Franz Millar and with his first wife Greta and sons Peter and Heinrich had emigrated directly from Germany in 1850 and had settled first, in Indiana. My great-great-grandmother Greta died in Indiana shortly after their arrival, leaving Francis alone in a strange country where he didn’t understand the language and with two boys to raise. He had married Esther, who had been thirty years younger than himself, shortly after Greta’s death and soon thereafter, the newly formed family had joined a wagon train in 1852 and had headed out for what they’d hoped would be a better life in Iowa.
Although their names had been altered and Americanized, and children Henry Mills and brother Peter had quickly learned to become fluent in English, Francis Mills had never learned more of the language than was absolutely necessary to get by and perhaps consequently, had never done more than scrape out a meager existence at the original tiny log cabin homestead where he had continued to live with his wife and children, after Henry and Peter had filed a homestead claim of their own and moved out. Francis had been employed, in his later years, by the railroad as a switchman at the Oskaloosa Station, which had moved tons of coal by rail taken from mines all over Mahaska County. This required Francis to be gone during the week, coming home only on weekend’s right up until the time of his death.
Second wife Esther and their children, four girls who were my great-grandaunts and half-sisters to Great-Grandpa Henry, had been a near total mystery to me. I’d been unable to find any photos of them and no real proof of their existence except for their dates of birth and names, Katie, Mary, Susanna and Lizzie, (and all, often misspelled), on old U.S. Census documents and the nameless derisive references to them in the family history written by my grandpa and composed of stories that he had heard directly from his father Henry Mills.
I had always envisioned Henry’s stepmother Esther and the girls, as being like the evil women in the story of Cinderella because the history stated that Esther had no interest in Francis’s two sons and I had formed a flawed opinion of them as likely hideous, nasty creatures. In truth, Esther, a mousey plain woman with a face as sallow as old cream and no more than a half dozen teeth in her head, poor thing, had simply been illiterate, and the girls, although very poor, had managed to attend some school and had made the most of their lot in life—at least that has been my impression of them. Thanks to my travels, I was getting brief glimpses of the people that they had been and honestly I was enjoying getting to know them.
My great-grandfather Henry truly did not like his stepmother Esther and he treated her and his half-sisters as if strangers. Not in any of my time travels with Henry did he ever have a kind word for them. He did love his father very much, that was obvious to me and he appeared to have helped the family while his father was still alive but after Francis’ death in 1892, Esther and the girls had ended up living at the Keokuk County Poor Farm until at least 1915, which would have been a desperate last resort to simply try to survive. During my genealogy research, years ago, I’d lost track of them there, in 1915. They had all simply disappeared from the census documents and from history and I still have no idea what ever became of the five women. Henry, although very prosperous, had apparently never lifted a finger to assist them and I haven’t experienced any warps regarding that situation and have no way of knowing if I ever will.
***
The hard truth regarding my time travels is the fact that there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason for them, at all. To begin with, I never get back to the exact same time or place again. I might be in 1872 one night and the next night be in 1920 but as I have kept my log of e
ach occurrence, I have begun to see certain truths or possible rules regarding the travels, if something as fluid as water through a sieve can ever be ruled.
First, I never have more than one experience in an overnight cycle of sleep and most often the scenarios are long and elaborate, but sometimes short and sweet and I will wake up early in the morning. However those short time travels are rare. Most are long and last, at least, a full eight hours.
Second, I am always a female when I warp, varying in age from small girls to very old women. I am often a relative of some sort to the Mills or Wyman families—but there are times when I am a completely unrelated woman with no apparent family tie. Sometimes I can determine what the common link might be though, usually a family member of an in-law or along those lines.
Then there is the third rule about these experiences which seems to be that I never stray very far outside of Fremont’s borders but the travels can take me literally anywhere within the vicinity and about 150 years into the past—at least so far. My total knowledge of Fremont and of every single person buried in the old Cedar Township Cemetery is helping me tremendously as far as being able to navigate through the centuries of time and space, but to further strengthen my skills, I have started using my time in the real world to research even deeper into Fremont’s past so that I can feel comfortable in nearly anyone’s skin. I have spent quite a few days kicking around the Keo-Mah Genealogical Society with John and his wife Margaret, who is the society’s librarian as well as one of the editors of the quarterly newsletter, just hanging out with them and reading the Fremont Gazette on microfilm for hours on end.
Time traveling is very quickly becoming my obsession and a game in a weird way. It’s a challenge to figure it all out and succeed in the warps by fitting in—like being an actor and having a new part to play each night. It is totally addictive and has become a wonderful, amazing escape.
