“Let’s go now, sweet thing, while we still can.”
He slipped out of the truck with me still in his arms and kissed me once again before setting me on my feet. Without the warmth of him holding me close, I shivered in my thin top. Brad shrugged out of his denim jacket, wrapped it over my shoulders and helped me shove my arms through sleeves whose length hid my hands. That gave the distinct impression my nearest relative was a gorilla. No, actually she was a troll, and I still had to find my way up that tangle of giant oak limbs without breaking my neck in the dark.
“Emma, have you dated very many guys?”
“No. Not very many.” Like none. I averted my eyes, suddenly embarrassed.
He turned me toward him, his hands on my shoulders. “The custom is to walk a young lady to her front door after the date.” He grinned in the moonlight and shook his head. “Not happening, my dear. Not tonight. Your great-grandmother would shoot off a part of my anatomy that is near and dear to my heart and then use a hog knife to relieve me of my heart too.”
I grinned up at him. He reached past me into the truck’s cab and withdrew the flashlight.
“So tonight, may I have the pleasure of walking you to your tree, m’lady?”
“If you must, sire.”
“A scurvy pox on the lateness of the hour, my queen, but I fear I must.”
Wrapping one arm around me and holding me tight against his side, he switched on the flashlight and we made our way as slowly as possible up the last half mile of dirt road.
He asked me where my parents were and why they had sent me so far from home. Was it some kind of punishment to make me go live with Miss Ross? I took a deep breath and poured out the story of my parents’ deaths. Until now, I hadn’t wanted to talk to anyone about it. With Brad, I felt safe enough to open up. He listened in silence as the weight of misery I’d been shouldering loosened a little more with each detail. His arm around me squeezed as I fought for control. No more tears. I didn’t want Brad to think every time he was with me I’d go to pieces. We walked beneath the moon shadows of tall evergreens, soaking in the stars, the cool night air, and cricket song.
The mood gradually lightened. We shared our future dreams. He wanted to win a college football scholarship and eventually attend law school. I wanted to survive the rest of my sentence under Her Worship’s wrinkled thumb and go to school to become a Physician’s Assistant. How I was ever going to cough up the money for that was such an impossible puzzle, I could barely think about it. The Troll was unlikely to spring for college if she wasn’t willing to pay for modern heating and air conditioning. I’d have to do the whole student loan thing coupled with working to support myself. If that got me away from Boss Ross, it would be worth it.
It took less time to walk that half mile than I ever would have believed. Much too soon, there stood the oak tree, its glossy leaves gleaming in the moonlight, and the house squatting next to it. No lights lit the windows, no movement could be heard. This really would be the end now, no matter how much I’d give to spend all night talking with Brad, wrapped in his arms.
He must have felt the same way. At the foot of the oak he gathered me into his arms and kissed me until my legs nearly buckled.
“I’ll shine the light on the tree. Don’t want you to fall and break anything that belongs to me,” he said with a grin. “Be really careful, babe, and take your time.”
I returned his warm jacket with a sigh and began the climb with Brad boosting me up to the first big branch. Once safely inside my cell, I turned and stuck my head out the window.
He blew me a kiss and stage-whispered, “Friday, same time, same place?”
“Wait for me if I’m a little late,” I whispered back.
“Count on it. Goodnight, Em.” He stood still, shining the flashlight at me.
“Sweet dreams,” I whispered back. “You’d best get going before we perform some lame remake of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet balcony scene.”
He chuckled softly. “Think I finally get that sap, Romeo, now. Who’d have thought that would ever happen? Bye, darlin.’”
He switched off the light and melted into the dark.
Too keyed up to sleep, I grabbed the diary and began to read.
January 6, 1969
Dear Diary:
It may be a new year according to the calendar, but as far as I’m concerned it will be no different from all the years before. My life pretty much consists of boring barn chores, being frozen out at school like I have the Bubonic Plague, and attending church with Mother where we’re treated like some inconvenient embarrassment. Besides the barn chores, my role as slave includes helping Cook fix the meals and tidying up after, scrubbing the laundry in a metal tub on the kitchen floor, and hanging all the clothes to dry on a line stretched across the parlor near the fire, before ironing all the long dresses with their stupid ruffles and pleats. If I hung them outside on the line, they’d be frozen stiff as wood planks inside an hour. My jobs include bringing in armfuls of wood and cleaning the ashes out of the stove’s wood box and the parlor’s fireplace. When I was seven or eight, I tried to pretend I was Cinderella and a handsome prince would ride here and save me. I don’t pretend anything anymore.
I still pray each night that God will lead me to a friend, though my hope is dwindling. Maybe it’s my faith that’s dwindling. Maybe there is no such thing as God, though I feel instant fear and guilt at even entertaining such a blasphemous thought.
Just as I resigned myself to let it go and accept that Life holds no surprises, no real meaning, nothing new or amazing, a truly astonishing thing happened today. I’ve told nobody, mainly because nobody would believe me, but I will tell you, Dear Diary. It happened this way.
Mother sent me on a new chore this afternoon, as if I didn’t already have enough to do. Most of the snow hereabouts has melted in this temporary thaw, even in the forest. She gave me a burlap sack and said to go fill it with pinecones. That, she said, would not only stretch the winter wood supply, it would add a nice fragrance to the parlor. I tried to tell her that the squirrels and birds go after the pine nuts in the fall and scatter the cones every which way. Did she listen to me? Yeah, right. That’ll happen along about the time robins lay their eggs in December. After all these years, Diary, you’d think I’d have the good sense to give up trying to talk to her at all. She gave me that warning look that said there would be a high price to pay if I didn’t mind her. I don’t think most other kids have a mother like her. I guess I’ll never know for sure. I have nothing to compare her to except what I read in books. Old books.
The temperatures have stayed above freezing for the last four days, and it was actually a pleasant day for a walk in the woods under a mostly sunny sky. I walked beyond the ruins of the old sawmill that my several-times great-grandfather Solomon Ross and his father, Ransom, built in 1865. Mother told me the mill operated until 1955 when I was a baby, but she didn’t have the heart for it after my father died in that logging accident and it was old and out-of-date anyway. Now it looks decayed and crumbly. More than a little spooky. It’s missing the engines that ran the saws and the old pieces of rusting equipment lying around make it even more depressing.
Beyond the mill used to be a logging camp, and past that the forest stretches in all directions, spreading along the foothills of the Cascade Mountains and east up into the high county. I turned north so the climb would be gradual, picking up old pinecones as I went, their empty scales spread wide, their nuts long gone.
By the time I had filled half the sack, I had walked more than two miles and was in need of a rest. Ahead of me in a small winter-brown meadow I noticed a tumble of volcanic boulders the size of VW camper vans. There were four or five of them in a jumbled pile right beside a huge ponderosa pine. Well, it used to be huge, judging from the circumference of its trunk. Now all that’s left of it is a se
ven or eight-foot tall burned-out trunk with the branches missing. Funny thing was, as I glanced around, nothing else seemed to have burned. An ancient lightning strike? That’s what must have happened.
I clutched my burlap sack in my lap as I sat down at the base of the boulders among leafless bushes and dead grasses, sucking in the serenity all around me. The forest is always hushed and peaceful, but never more than in winter. It’s not hard to imagine why people used to believe ghosts drifted through the forest. It’s hard to absorb that trees that so dwarf humans could be deadly quiet except for the occasional breeze moving through their branches or a woodpecker hammering in the distance.
In this silence, my ears always strain to hear the tiniest of sounds. By holding my breath I heard the softest trace of a trickling sound, muffled and close to my feet. I glanced down and parted the bushes and grass, and sure enough, a small spring burbled out from beneath the boulders. Somebody, a long time ago, had scooped the earth away below the trickling water, making a miniature catch basin to collect it. Springs are not uncommon around here. Most have been dug out and enlarged for cattle to drink from. This one looked undiscovered.
I rose and followed the slender rivulet down through the weeds where it disappeared back into the earth about nine feet from the boulders. Not a very satisfactory spring, even if somebody should happen to repair the catch basin which was no larger than a turkey platter. It could hardly slake the thirst of one steer, but it could satisfy mine. I knelt by the boulders with the sack of pinecones in my lap and cupped my hands beneath the flow. Lifting the icy water to my lips, I swallowed.
This, Dear Diary, is where things became strange. Within a minute or two of drinking the spring water, I began to feel dizzy. My heart thumped inside my chest like a fist and my stomach grew nauseated. I sat down hard in the weeds and put my aching head down on the sack of pinecones in my lap, fearing I had just drunk poisoned water and might not be able to get home. In a few minutes the dizziness passed and my stomach settled. I looked up to make sure the woozy feeling wouldn’t return. It didn’t, much to my relief. Concentrated on my well-being as I was, it took several minutes before I noticed my surroundings had changed.
I still sat by the volcanic boulders and the tiny spring with the sack of pinecones clutched in my lap, but around me nothing was quite right. For one thing, the snow, which had been mostly melted five minutes ago, was now over a foot deep and soaking through my coat and dress. I stood up to get out of the snow. For another thing, the seven feet of burned pine trunk near the spring was still burned, but now the tree stood forty feet tall, split halfway down the length from the lightning. A burned log, likely the old top to the tree, lay beside it and burned branches had fallen helter-skelter around the foot of the pine. The chill moving down my back had nothing to do with the winter temperature, though I could feel the air had dropped about twenty degrees and the sky now held those deep overcast clouds that heralded snow. I held my breath and gazed around me. The forest itself had even changed. The tree trunks were thicker, the trees taller, more densely placed. The old silvered logs common in the forest were missing except for a few which were brown and fully barked. The mammoth stumps of harvested trees, cracked and brittled by time, were strangely absent. The path I’d walked on to the meadow had disappeared. I stuffed down my rising panic. What on earth had happened?
Inside my everyday shoes, my feet were freezing and my toes grew numb and stiff. My shoes were buried in snow. What if I got frostbite and couldn’t walk? I’d freeze here in the woods the minute darkness fell. With the snow this deep, finding pinecones was impossible. I needed to get home before frostbite set in. Home? Would I still have a home? What if everything had changed enough that I was lost out in the forest without a trail or road and without shelter? I started back the way I’d come, clutching the sack of pinecones and picking my way around the deeper drifts. Without a trail to follow, how would I avoid getting lost?
Snow began to fall, feathery at first, then thicker and thicker, building up around my shoulders and melting into my hair. I couldn’t see more than six feet ahead. The forest trees on each side appeared wrapped in thick gauze by the snowfall. All color had been sucked from the earth as though I trudged through a black and white charcoal rendering of the forest.
Within an hour I’d found my way back to the old sawmill. Through the curtain of snow it looked somehow swollen, inflated, until I made my way closer and discovered why. The entire mill was intact and operational. Piled under the snow at the back end of the mill, an enormous stack of peeled logs waited to be sawn. Forty feet from the front of the mill, fat stacks of newly-sawn lumber waited beneath the snowfall for transport. Three empty lumber wagons stood nearby, their tongues and chains disappearing under the snow. The only things missing were men and horses. Maybe this was a Sunday in my new reality. Coincidentally, it was also a Sunday in my old reality.
My new reality? My heart began to pound. I prayed the Ross house still stood a mile down the snowy track to the west. I turned right at the sawmill and walked west down through the forest. A throbbing headache set in as I walked, making my stomach queasy. I refused to give in to the waves of dizziness breaking over me. My shivering had stopped and that could be a bad sign that I was starting to freeze. I had to get home. Or to whatever my home had become. The snow wasn’t as deep here. Abruptly, the huge trees around me appeared to shimmer and vibrate as if the whole forest had been sent into violent trembling through the falling flakes. After a few miserable moments, the throbbing in my head subsided and the nausea in my stomach melted away. Flakes, falling like goose down, thinned considerably, and finally stopped. The air gradually warmed and I began to shiver again. By the time the house came into view the sick sensations had disappeared. I felt completely well and only a shallow patch of snow here and there clung to the ground. The house hadn’t changed a bit. The porch was still beginning to sag on one end and the new kitchen addition still had not been painted. The sky was again patchy blue and colors had returned to my world. Sun glistened on old patches of snow in the pasture just as it had when I’d left to collect pinecones.
Mother met me at the front door.
“Where the dickens have you been, child? You’ve been gone near four hours, and I see you only filled half the sack. Been sittin’ on a sun-warmed rock day-dreaming, have you?”
“No, Mother.” It would do little good to try and explain the unexplainable.
“Don’t lie to me you worthless lazy slut. Were you meeting some boy up in the forest?” Her face scrunched up in her usual accusatory expression.
Boys. It was always boys with her. If you listened to Mother, you’d think I had boys stashed everywhere and that I was constantly having secret rendezvous with them. Boys stayed as far from me as they could get and everyone in town knew it. Why didn’t Mother? Probably because she was borderline paranoid. I’d read about that condition in a book from the library.
“How come your hair is wet, and the hems of your coat and dress are soaked? What have you been playing at, Charlotte?”
I was sent to stand before the fire and dry out. The only answer to this puzzle I could find was the spring water. Everything had changed after I’d swallowed that water. Whatever effect the water had created had worn off by the time I arrived home. I can hardly wait to return to my secret spring.
I felt strangely protective of this lonely ostracized girl whose strongest wish was to have one friend. It made me even more obsessed with discovering how she became pregnant and who my father’s daddy had been. Was my grandfather living somewhere near Sweet Creek? If I could only find him, maybe I could go live with him. What a relief that would be. My greatest of all wishes was to have a normal family and to live a normal life where I could wear my own clothes, date Brad out in the open, and if I was really lucky, maybe even have a family who could someday come to genuinely love me. I stared up at the blackness of my ceiling until dawn l
ightened the room.
“Emma?” a voice shouted from the second story. “You still up there in bed?” Ah. The Troll’s special rendition of reveille. I couldn’t feel the usual irritation that scratchy voice produced this early in the morning. I was still in a state of bliss over my date with Brad, and now . . . I couldn’t wait to go into the forest and find Charlotte’s spring.
Chapter 8
The Troll wasn’t feeling well. The first time this had happened, she’d held court under a pink comforter in the parlor, barking orders and demanding things. She’d cawed like an old crow for her ladies magazines, her book of recipes for arranging the next week’s menus for Cook, a glass of lemonade, and the daily pills her doctor had prescribed for her. She only took those pills on days she didn’t feel well, claiming they were an unnecessary expense otherwise. Today, however, the attack must have been worse than last time. She took to her bed and Cook fretted over her, trying to get her to see reason and allow her to call the doctor. Penelope? See reason? Dream on.
Today, Queen Penelope also demanded her mail from town. Simon was tied up on some project with the foreman and Cook had never learned how to drive. That’s how I finally got permission to saddle Tashunka and ride her into town.
I followed Simon’s suggestion that I put on jeans and a shirt under my pioneer girl’s dress and take off the dress down the road. I hid it inside the hollow log where I had met Brad last Friday night to go to the movies.
The movie wasn’t starting until later. To kill time, he’d driven me all over Sweet Creek which ate up only fifteen minutes. Then he drove me past his house. He lived at the end of a road on the outskirts of Sweet Creek. One neighbor lived to the left of his property. To the right sat a weedy vacant lot followed by land that spread into the farms and ranch country surrounding the little town.
A Certain Twist in Time Page 7
