A Certain Twist in Time

by Anita K Grimm

  I felt an odd black weight lift from my shoulders hearing that. I am growing weaker, completely exhausted by work and chores. What little time I have left for my son is not what the experts call “quality time.” I fear I may end up doing him more harm than good in the long run, and the desperate emptiness I have felt for nearly two years now without Q’s love and support is becoming darker and less bearable each day. I feel like a failure as a daughter, as a mother, as a lover, and as a human being. My prayer is that my son will grow up proud and confident, happy and fulfilled, and will know life’s joy and love even without his mother. I know my plans are considered damnable by the Church and will bring yet more scandal into my mother’s life. I will have to make my own peace with God. As for my mother, I stopped being capable of caring long ago. I will hide you, Dear Diary, in the safest place I know and pray that if someone one day may come upon you, it will be long after I’m gone and they will have the wisdom to let alone the parts that defy logic and belief. Perhaps, if God is indeed merciful and forgiving, I will find my Q in the afterlife and discover my long overdue happiness there. Until then, Dear Diary, I must leave you and hope that you, too, will rest in peace.

  A suicide note, found forty-five years after the fact. I felt infinitely better knowing Charlotte didn’t just unfeelingly abandon my father. Though he didn’t find the happiness and fulfillment she wished for him until he met and married my mother, his life was still much better than poor Charlotte’s. My grandfather, Charley, had been a strong man, and he’d passed that trait on to my father. Suddenly, I wanted to see Charley again. I had to see him one last time . . . for me, for Charlotte, for my beloved father who would never meet him at all.

  ~ ~ ~

  The following morning I blew through my chores and barely swallowed breakfast. Great-grandmother had not risen for breakfast. I decided that meant I didn’t need to ask permission to go for a walk. I slipped out without Cook knowing and avoided Simon who was bent over and buried up to his shirttails in the entrails of the tractor. Once out of sight, I bolted toward the spring.

  Brownish-gold grasses now filled the meadow. Yet another reminder summer was gasping for breath. The only green grass visible grew around the spring. Fall was loosening summer’s grip, and though it could be sensed more than felt, it was obvious even to a city girl from the Land of No Seasons that summer was dying and winter had one eye open. Sitting by the spring, I cupped a handful of water to my mouth. I’d almost forgotten the faintly sweet flavor it had, as though pieces of cut apple floated in it.

  Impatient to be on my way, I endured the dizzy sickness as 2016 shimmied and vibrated back through the decades to 1882. The meadow felt colder here even though the 1882 day was clear and sunny. Maybe the dense old-growth forest blocked more of the sun’s warmth.

  As I expected, the clearing was deserted on this second day of September. Only seven days had passed since I had visited, yet it felt more like seven weeks. I began the hike east toward the Perkins’s cabin, not sure what I would say to Charley, not sure how I would feel coming face-to-face with my sixteen-year-old grandfather whose place in history should have made him my great-great-great-grandfather.

  But it wasn’t Charley I ran into. It was Joey. Before I had cleared half the meadow, Joey came running out of the eastern woods carrying an empty sack. His face looked drawn and half sick until he spotted me.

  “Emma!” he cried, running to greet me. “Thank God I found you! Ma sent me down here to hunt for bistort and gather what I could find just before she and Pa left in the buckboard for Eugene. They’re gonna fetch a real doctor because the only man in Sweet Creek who’s read any medical books says he can’t do nothin’ more and death will come soon.”

  My heart pumped into high gear at the word “death.”

  “Slow down, Joey. You’re not making any sense.”

  “Bistort sometimes takes the fever down. It’s past its prime this late in the season and the only hope of findin’ any is at the spring.”

  He rushed past me and fell on his knees at the spring, spreading the grasses and water weeds apart, hunting for the bistort, whatever that was. I followed him down to the water.

  “Joey, tell me what’s going on. I’ve never seen you this stressed.”

  “It’s Charley. He’s got some sort of pestilence from a big splinter in his arm and nothin’ is makin’ him better. Not poultices, not carbolic acid. A real doctor in Eugene may know more if my folks can get him back here in time. It takes three days hard travelin’ to get to Eugene and three days back. Not much chance Charley will last that long. Still, they had to try.”

  His eyes swam with tears. “It’s my fault, Emma. I’ve killed my big brother!”

  Chapter 22

  My brain froze at the mention of Charley’s name. “Why is it your fault?”

  “He was teasin’ me about somethin’. I didn’t cotton to it. Laughin’ fit to bust a gut, he was, and to me it wasn’t funny. I pushed him hard from behind. He fell forward and landed on a split rail lyin’ on the ground. A huge splinter five inches long drove itself up into his arm lengthwise, but too deep to pull out. Now he’s gone all sick and is gonna die and I did this to him.”

  “Hurry, Joey. Take me to him. I have to see him.”

  I struggled to keep up with Joey and was panting and staggering a bit by the time we reached the cabin. Inside, I stumbled toward Charley’s homemade pine bed, calling his name.

  He didn’t answer. He lay still as a corpse on his back, quilts drawn up to his chin. A sheen of moisture covered his splotchy face, reddened by fever. Even shaking his shoulder didn’t rouse him. Though I’m no doctor, an unconscious patient didn’t look promising.

  “Here,” Joey whispered, as if speaking out loud might wake his brother, “take a gander at his arm.” He pulled back the quilts and sheet to reveal a shockingly discolored and swollen arm with a bandaged cut. Red streaks trailed up the arm and it felt unnaturally hot to the touch.

  “The local doc operated and took the splinter out. We thought that would cure him, but he’s only gotten worse.”

  Most likely the “doc” hadn’t bothered to wash his hands let alone sterilize the knife he used. He probably just added his own brand of dirt to the infection and caused it to rage out of control.

  Charley groaned faintly. I studied the tray beside his bed. It held a collection of unfamiliar medical supplies. Chlorodyne, nitrate of silver, carbolic acid, Boracic and Laudanum. The last one I’d heard of. It was a pain killer. Obviously Charley’s infection had gone way past the stage where any of that stuff could help. What he needed were antibiotics, and in 1882, that discovery was decades away. Might as well wish an MRI machine into existence.

  I bit my lip in frustration. Charley was dying and there was nothing anyone could do to save him. A sense of utter helplessness sickened my stomach. My fists clenched. Think! I had to think of something. Even if he lasted six more days, which seemed highly doubtful, a better-trained doctor from Eugene would have nothing in his little black bag to pull Charley back from certain death. Even with modern antibiotics, Charlie might be too far gone by now to respond to them.

  And then it hit me. This horrible accident would never have happened if I had not saved Joey. As a result of my saving Joey, Charlie was going to die. If Charley died in 1882, he would never meet Charlotte in 1886. She would never become pregnant with my father who would never be born or fall in love with my mother. I would never be born either. In the same instant Charley died, I would wink out of existence, no matter where I was, and to all who had ever known me it would be as if I’d never existed. Their realities would instantly reshuffle without a trace of me in them. And Joey would die too, because I’d never have been born, never would have been alive to travel back in time and save him.

  I felt cold all over. My life, Joey’s life, Charlie’s life, my father’s life, and the live
s of all the generations of Rosses and their kin who came after Charlotte, were dependent on what happened now with my great-great-great-grandfather. There was no way to kill the infection that was killing him. Inside a day, possibly two, we’d all be dead, and reality up through the generations would reshuffle as if we’d never existed. Even my future children would never be born, nor would theirs.

  “Can you help my brother, Emma?” Joey’s hopeful wet eyes tore my heart to pieces. He had no clue he would be dead in a couple of days or that he had caused my death as well as Charley’s. Or that his folks would arrive home in six days to find both their sons dead. He had no way of knowing a chain of death would travel up through the decades, wiping from the record descendants of his and Charley’s, rearranging whole families and their futures. That fact would also touch and change the many people who would have known us and the many people Joey would have saved as a doctor if he had lived. The damage would be beyond calculation.

  Actually, it wasn’t Joey’s fault. It was mine. I should have never gone back in time at all. I had no business tinkering with the past, changing outcomes, creating others, wiping out any chance Charlie and my dad had to live. When the dominos tumbled as a result of my interference, I wondered what I would find in Charlotte’s diary if I could manage to get back home with enough time to read it. Would it even exist?

  In the midst of that black despair, a minuscule beam of hope flickered. What did they call it in basketball? A Hail Mary Pass? The one where a player standing near his opponent’s net makes a wild and desperate throw all the way across the court to his team’s basket just as the buzzer sounds to end the game. And bucking all odds, the ball goes in, winning the game. That’s what this would be, and the chance this ball would “go in” were sadly infinitesimal.

  “Go out to the barn, Joey. Saddle the sorrel and bring him to the house.”

  “What are you going to do, Emma?”

  “Just go. We haven’t a second to lose.”

  He bolted out the door and streaked toward the barn. I wished there was some way to get some cool water into Charley, but my CPR class had taught me that if a victim isn’t conscious they could choke on liquid. I pulled one of the quilts off Charley so he wouldn’t roast and bathed his face and chest with cool water until I heard horse’s hooves outside the door. I kissed my sixteen-year-old great-great-great-grandfather on the forehead and hurried out of the house.

  Joey held the sorrel while I mounted.

  “I want you to stay with your brother. Keep applying a cool wet cloth to his face and chest. If the water in the basin grows warm, replace it. That won’t kill his fever, but it may bring it down a little. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

  Without waiting for his questions, I wheeled the horse about, urging him into a full gallop, dodging trees, jumping logs, ducking tree branches that could have swept me off the horse and, once back in the meadow, raising a fine dust even through the pasture grass as I pulled him to a sliding stop at the spring. There I tied him to a bush I hoped would be strong enough to hold him for an hour and took off running the shortcut to the Ross house.

  The spring water still hadn’t worn off by the time I reached the clearing near the barn. In this case, it was the 1882 Ross barn. It was hellishly inconvenient to be unable to control how long the effects of the spring water lasted. I wandered down to the barn, slipped inside, and picked a stall with no bedding, no animal manure, and no water container. That meant it was unused and would make a good hiding place.

  The barn smelled different in 1882. It was only about three years old and still smelled faintly of freshly cut lumber and new paint. Saddles of an old style straddled stall doors and a bin in one corner that hadn’t survived until my time held dried ears of corn. While I sat hidden in the empty stall, a couple of men entered the barn talking about moving the largest cattle herd down to the west pasture where Sweet Creek broadened and the current wouldn’t carry off any early fall calves. I couldn’t think of what to say to them if they found me. Maybe I’d just pull Mr. Forsythe’s act and say nothing.

  Twenty minutes later they had left and the popping in my head began. The barn shimmied and vibrated, giving me a sick headache. I could make out a shuddering and creaking sound as the barn settled over the swiftly passing decades and the paint became cracked and started to peel. The smell of rotting wood and old hay took over from the smells of new lumber and fresh paint. I became too sick to watch and closed my eyes as I leaned against the stall door.

  When it stopped and I felt steady enough to stand, I discovered I was now sharing the stall with a half-grown bull calf. I couldn’t afford the time to panic. He was a yearling, and of a size powerful enough to make mashed human out of me if he took the notion to charge. Right now he stood in the far corner, facing me, chewing wisps of hay in that sideways grinding motion bovines have. I slipped silently from the stall, sucking in a big breath of relief, and got to work.

  In the tack room refrigerator, I hauled out four plastic gallon jugs that held Simon’s stash of hard apple cider. I needed the jugs, not the cider. I emptied them into the pigs’ wallow and rinsed them out. Simon would be furious. I’d have to deal with that later. Next I threaded some heavy twine through their handles to make carrying them easier and rummaged in the tack box that held brushes, currycombs, hoof picks and assorted mismatched pieces of tack, searching for the half-used tube of three-way antibiotic ointment. Simon had said that was as good for doctoring animal wounds as it was for people. Last of all I found packages of sterile gauze, wound pads, and bandaging material (the kind that sticks to itself), a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, and a plastic bottle of alcohol. Into a clean piece of toweling I dumped two handfuls of syringes in their plastic wrappers, a double handful of needles in their cases and the bottle of Combiotic from the refrigerator. All of it, except the jugs, I stuffed into Tashunka’s saddlebags.

  Checking for any sign of Simon, I shouldered the string of plastic jugs with one hand and the bulging saddlebags with the other and started on foot for the spring.

  How much time did Charley have left? There was no way of telling. I only knew he hadn’t died yet because I was still here. The items I carried with me were a shot in the dark. The Combiotic might kill him outright. It was intended for livestock, not for people. Or if it didn’t kill him it might be too little too late. He was pretty far gone. Maybe animal drugs just didn’t work on humans, but what else could I do? Break into a pharmacy tonight and steal human antibiotics? We didn’t have that much time to waste and I’d probably be caught and thrown into jail. This livestock antibiotic hadn’t much chance of working, yet if I did nothing at all, Charley would certainly die. Joey and I would too. Anything was worth a try, right?

  I struggled to run toward the spring, but the saddlebags were too heavy and I was already tired. Every minute felt like ten. Time was running out.

  It was afternoon by the time the spring came into sight. The sorrel horse was not there. I had left him tied to a flimsy bush back in 1882 and there wasn’t even a flimsy bush here now. I sat by the spring and gulped handfuls of spring water. While I waited for the water to take effect, I held first one than another plastic jug beneath the spring’s flow and capped all four when they were full. Four gallons of spring water might provide the time I needed to stay in 1882.

  I had no sooner capped the last jug than the popping and dizziness began. I maneuvered all four jugs and the saddlebags into my lap and held tight to them, praying they would complete the journey back through time with me. My stomach became violently sick. I laid back in the grass feeling like a pitching cork riding a stormy sea. A headache of migraine intensity pounded inside my skull and the roaring I sometimes heard in my ears would have dwarfed the sound of Niagara Falls. Still, I concentrated on holding onto the items I’d brought with me from the modern world.

  It seemed an eternity before the sensations faded and stopped
. I must have rolled a bit because I opened my eyes to find myself nose-to-nose with Charley’s horse, grazing near my face. He was still tied to the scrawny bush and other than a snort, seemed unbothered by my rather sudden appearance.

  I slung the water jugs by their twine over the saddle horn and fastened my saddlebags behind Charley’s saddle. Mounting in record time, I wheeled the sorrel east toward Charley’s home and dug my heels into his sides, breaking him into a gallop with the water jugs sloshing hard against his neck and shoulders.

  Joey was sitting by Charley’s side when I banged back through the cabin door with all my stuff. He rose and gave me the chair, dragging the damp cloth from his brother’s forehead. I felt Charley’s cheeks, then his forehead. He seemed a bit cooler.

  Unbuckling the saddlebags, I removed the contents, setting them on the table beside his bed. “Uncover him, Joey, and roll him away from me, onto his side,” I instructed.

  Joey’s face pinkened when I tugged Charley’s long underwear down slightly and swabbed a bit of his hip with alcohol. Next I ripped open a syringe wrapper and fitted a sterile needle to it. Just as Simon had showed me weeks ago, I drew back the plunger, filling the syringe with air as Joey watched this process with wide-eyed fascination. Holding the bottle of Combiotic upside down, I stuck the needle through its rubber seal and slowly pushed the plunger in to shoot the air into the bottle’s contents. My hands were trembling a little. Charley might have just minutes left to live if this all went badly. I figured Joey and I would die half a second later. My jaw set like steel as I pulled down the syringe’s plunger slowly as the white liquid filled the syringe. Wait! I couldn’t give Charley 10 ccs like I gave to Tashunka. She weighed just under 1,000 pounds and Charley probably weighed under 200 pounds. The math was simple. Two ccs would be enough for Charley. I was guessing about more factors than the proportion of body weight to ccs of Combiotic, but it was the best I could do.