Now & Then

by Jacqueline Sheehan

  “Don’t.”

  She sounded exactly as he had imagined she would. No, better, one hundred times better, as if her voice formed crystals in the air. He didn’t know where Taleen had come from, but he decided that obedience was the best course of action.

  “Don’t move just yet. They need to smell you and look at you. They want to know what you’re all about.”

  Oh no. He hoped that they couldn’t really tell what he was all about. The three monstrously sized dogs closed in on him, while the puppy, oblivious to the seriousness of the inspection, licked his face. They sniffed at his clothes, his hair. He cautiously held out one flat, upturned palm, which the animals sniffed. It was the eyes that unnerved him, the overly long stare from their amber eyes.

  “Now stand up,” said Taleen.

  With exaggerated slowness, he stood up, trying to calm his twittering nerves. First the male—his gender having been obvious from Joseph’s previous position—then one of the females stuck a businesslike snout into his crotch. Joseph prayed that his dick smelled just right, whatever that was.

  “They’re giving you a special sort of sniff. They’re trying to figure out where you’re from. Give them a bit.”

  Joseph submitted to the extended crotch exam. Suddenly the male stood up on his hind legs and with amazing gentleness, placed his front paws on Joseph’s shoulders. The dog was taller than he was. Joseph got the message loud and clear about who was bigger. He had never seen dogs that were this huge. The male dog dropped back to the ground. Each of the three adult dogs gave a solemn wag of the tail and returned to his or her resting place.

  “This one is Madigan. In old Irish that means ‘little dog.’ Fitting, don’t you think?”

  Joseph nodded. Somehow this was all he could manage with Taleen. His tongue dried up and his brain felt far away. He could not depend on the words that fell from his lips.

  “The colonel and I are going riding today,” he said and immediately regretted it. He sounded stupid.

  “Well then, off with you. Don’t keep him waiting,” she said.

  As he walked away, Taleen stood next to Madigan, her hand resting easily on his head. For such a large dog, Madigan, still a puppy, managed to look remarkably goofy and not at all serious, like the adult dogs. Joseph managed a wave that might have looked as goofy as Madigan.

  Joseph was sixteen, and he had never kissed anyone except his grandmother, his aunt, and his favorite second-grade teacher, Mrs. O’Connor, with whom he’d simply fallen in love. The kisses from female relatives had been cheek pecks, compulsory and embarrassing. He’d mostly hated the moments greeting his grandmother and aunt, though his aunt didn’t seem to want to peck his cheek anymore and so wasn’t much of a problem. She had probably given up on him. But his grandmother was different; he mostly believed that she loved him, and he did like the way she smelled. Besides, she was always there, as she promised she would be.

  Mrs. O’Connor, his teacher from second grade, had sent Joseph into delicious spasms of seven-year-old delight. During the first half of the year, he’d forgotten and called her Mommy when he’d finished his addition so quickly. Two boys in the front row had heard him and teased him at recess, but those same two boys, Alex and Jeremy, had called Mrs. O’Connor Mommy the following week, so the score had quickly evened out.

  His teacher had been more beautiful than anyone else he had ever seen, and he’d imagined that he would marry her someday. On the last day of school, Mrs. O’Connor had knelt down and given each child a hug. Some of the kids had kissed her cheek; Joseph had been one of them. Her cheek had been so soft and her hair had smelled so delicious that he’d wondered why tigers and bears didn’t just eat Mrs. O’Connor. If she ever went camping, bears would surely think she was candy and break into her tent. She’d written a long note on everyone’s progress report for the year, and she’d said that Joseph was a fast learner and good at everything he tried.

  Joseph’s father had never said anything about the progress report, but he’d left it on the kitchen table, as if reading it had been enough. Joseph’s grandma had found it and whooped with delight, reading it in senatorial tones again and again. But it hadn’t been quite the same, for he’d been hoping to hear his father say, “Good boy.”

  If his mother had lived, everything would have been different. She would have loved him totally. He was never sure if he remembered her, or if he just remembered the stories that his grandmother and aunt had told him. He could recite all the details of her death. She had broken her leg when she’d fallen off a horse on a simple trail ride, something that should have healed in six weeks. Riding horses had been her pleasure from childhood, and Patrick had surprised her with a trail ride on her birthday. A clot tossed off by the broken femur had raced to her brain. Not a common injury, everyone said. Not common, just life-changing for Joseph.

  Even so, he had not hesitated when the colonel had invited him to go riding. This was where he had meant to be all along.

  Chapter 12

  Here are things that Anna could have used in 1844. Duct tape. Why couldn’t she have been transported with a fat, gray roll of duct tape? She could have wrapped it around her shoes, which were now split wide open. She could have mended a hem or fixed a splintery gate on the fence. Anna had no duct tape, aspirin, antibiotics, tampons, lemon juice to pump a bit of vitamin C into her diet, and no dental floss, although she had already tried sliding thread between her teeth. She’d puzzled her hosts by brushing her teeth with a well-chewed stick. She had no fleece. What she would give for a lightweight fleece jacket, and zippers and deodorant. For everyone.

  All that remained of the twenty-first century were two odd and useless pieces of clothing—the shredded waistband of her ex-husband’s boxing shorts and the neck and one shoulder of his T-shirt. These were the things Anna had been wearing when she’d fallen through time and had emerged puking salt water.

  Glenis had kept the shreds of cloth, but she did not reveal them to Anna until the fourth day that Anna could walk without passing out from the shattering pain of her still oozing leg. Anna could now get out of bed by herself to limp around the cottage and barn. That was when Glenis slid the boxer-shorts remnant out of her pocket and said, “Tell me, dear, just what is Man Silk?”

  Anna saw the stamped tag still attached to the waistband. Her hand shot out to grab the cloth, a sudden connection to who she was, where she wanted to be. She pulled the cloth to her face.

  “You’re missing your family, I daresay. And no wonder. I don’t know how I would fare if I’d been hoisted up naked and half drowned from the sea. We’ll get you back where you belong,” said Glenis.

  “Not until I find Joseph. That’s the most important thing. He must be terrified, wherever he is.” She slid the shredded fabric into her pocket.

  “Right. Tom and I are going to send word out to be on the lookout for him. A lad, you say? American, like you of course? And tell me again about the ship you were on.”

  “Joseph is just sixteen, and he’s never traveled before. He won’t know how to make his way. And he’s very worried about his father, my brother, who had been in a terrible accident…” Anna paused; she wanted the story to make sense, to fit with the time of no radio, no telegraph. Why would the two of them have traveled to Ireland if Patrick had been injured? She had to remember to slow down; the world was much slower, no instantaneous messages. She rubbed her lower leg to give herself more time to think.

  “How’s the leg coming along?”

  “Better, but I had a sharp pain just now, and I think I’ll sit for a moment.” Anna leaned her backside against the fence rail. “Our destination was France. We were coming to get my brother after we had received word of his terrible accident. He’s a lawyer and has lived in France for two years. We got a letter saying that he had fallen, I don’t know how and they didn’t say, but he was in and out of consciousness. We booked passage immediately to be with him and bring him home,” said Anna. She put both her hands over her face in startl
ed embarrassment; she was crying. Not over the fabricated story that she was telling Glenis but at the sudden image of Patrick, ghastly, swollen, bruised beyond recognition, attached to plastic tubing and electrical impulses. Was he still alive?

  “Stop now, you don’t need to tell me the whole bit. Pull yourself together. You can’t help your brother or the young fellow until you get stronger,” said Glenis. She reached over and rubbed Anna’s hand with her rasping, callused palm.

  Anna took in the first tender touch that had been offered to her in the face of Patrick’s calamity, despite the lie and despite the truth that Patrick did not yet exist.

  Anna took stealthy expeditions each day to get the lay of the land. And she pumped Glenis about geography.

  “What is east of us? How far is it to Dublin? Where is the largest port? Have you heard about any other survivors of shipwrecks?”

  She was careful to avoid references to the twenty-first century, but it was very hard. It was easy not to use words like email, webpage, computer, car, cell phone, jets, because there were constant visual clues about the nonexistence of electricity and internal combustion engines. But she slipped now and then when words of her time fell out of her mouth, like when she announced to Tom that she was off to the bathroom.

  “Excuse me, but where might that be?” he asked.

  Anna stopped breathing for a moment. “Oh, that’s an American saying; it’s what we call the outhouse, er—the privy.”

  Glenis chimed in from the doorway, “Well, it’s the last place I’d care to bathe.”

  She didn’t know what would happen if she told them about the future. Did the Irish believe in witches? Did they stone people who were aberrant? Or would they think she was mad? And what was the fate of someone who was mad? So far she had covered all of her mistakes and oddities by coming from America.

  The last time Anna had washed her hair, it had been in a shower with hot water and shampoo that had smelled like lemon and tea tree oil, and bubbles had flowed down her breasts, over her hips, tangled in her pubic hair. She had shaved her legs; it had been summer, and Anna had liked the smooth gleam of her legs after shaving them. She had turned off the shower and dried herself in a fresh towel, slightly scented from some form of chemical from the dryer. She had oiled and lotioned her legs and arms, smudged deodorant along her armpits, put sunscreen SPF 15 on her face, and scrunched a bit of styling gel into her brown hair. She didn’t know how long it had been since she had skidded to a stop on the beach of Kinsale, Ireland. Glenis had said she had been delirious for five days. Anna had been keeping track of time since she’d started walking again; that was another eight days. So Anna had not washed her hair in two weeks. She knew that there were more pressing issues at hand, lots more, like the whereabouts or the very life of her nephew, but washing her hair suddenly became the most important thing on her mind.

  Tom and Glenis’s house did not have water indoors, but it had a well outside. Anna felt her hair; she realized that somehow they had rinsed out the salt, but she truly needed to wash it now. Her tresses had sectioned off into oiled clumps, so she desperately pulled her hair back as tightly as she could. She asked Tom for two pencil-sized pieces of wood, which she scraped and scraped with a knife until they looked like chopsticks. She then wound her hair up into an oily bun and used the sticks to contain it.

  Glenis watched her and said, “Why, that’s such a simple thing you’ve done. Is that a fashion in the colonies now, or in France, do you think? I’ve never given one thought to holding my hair with sticks.”

  “Here,” said Anna. “I’ll show you how to do it.” Anna untied Glenis’s hair, which had been held with yarn, then wound it into a tight mound at the back of her head, placing the two sticks so they marked an X.

  “Lovely,” said Anna, admiring her work. “And now could you give me some idea of how to wash my hair? I mean, do you have a type of soap or something that I could use? I’ll haul the water and heat it by myself.”

  Glenis looked stunned. “Why would you be wanting to do that? Did you spill something on your head? I told you that we got the salt out of your hair. Sea salt will eat right through anything, cloth or hair, if you leave it.”

  Anna had grown up washing her hair every other day. During a particularly fastidious period in high school, when she’d been shocked at the smells that her very own body had been able to produce, she’d washed her hair every day. And then there had been the hair products. Conditioners applied immediately after shampooing, with a citrus scent, grapefruit, organic, overpriced. And in her bathroom at home were several plastic bottles of hair gels, crèmes, and pastes containing clay, alcohol, glycol, paraffin, dyes, scents, inducements, and hopeful promises.

  Anna thought about what she could use. “Could you spare some ashes and the smallest bit of cider or vinegar? I think I can mix up something with that.”

  “And you won’t mind me watching you, because I’ve never seen the likes of this.”

  Anna hauled a bucket of water from the well, took it inside, and heated half of it over the peat fire. She carried the kettle of hot water and the wooden bucket of cold water outside. She had a handful of ashes and a small bit of vinegar. At the last moment, she looked around and scooped up a handful of gravel, then placed that near the ashes. She dunked her long hair into the bucket, getting it as wet as possible. Next she rubbed a bit of water into the ashes and rubbed this into her hair, scrubbing the long tresses from end to scalp. Anna used the small, sandy pebbles to rub even more vigorously, hopeful that the sand could scour off the accumulated body oils and dirt. She had fretted terribly about lice at first, but no one in Tom and Glenis’s family had lice, and Glenis had been rather put out when Anna had revealed her concern. “We’ve had bedbugs, but never lice,” Glenis had said with a twinge of irritation.

  After Glenis watched Anna go through the sand scouring part of the hair washing, she offered to help.

  “This is a job for two women. You’ll never get all that sand out by yourself,” she said, rolling up her sleeves.

  Anna could not remember when someone else had washed her hair, except when she’d paid at a salon, back in her other life—or ahead in her life, where a beacon of longing pulled at her ribs.

  Glenis poured the cold water over Anna’s hair, scrubbing and fluffing as she went along. The last rinse was a watered-down mix of vinegar and more water.

  “Where did you come up with this concoction for your hair?”

  Anna paused. Where had she come up with it? Chemistry class in college, an assignment that had required her to know the pH levels of everyday substances—the one really useful piece of knowledge from a semester of suffering. The young professor had tried to make the class relevant to the students by asking them to invent their own body and bath products using what they knew about pH levels. Anna and her roommate had created a makeshift version of shampoo that had somehow made its way into her long-term memory.

  “In school, I learned about this in school,” Anna replied as Glenis doused her with one last blast of cold water.

  Later in the evening, when all three of the children were as satiated as they could be on a supper of roasted potatoes and buttermilk and the parents were putting their feet up at long last, Glenis told a rousing story of washing Anna’s hair that made the children laugh.

  “And then, when I’d blasted her with a bucket of cold water, she was as happy as a sky lark, tossing her wet hair about,” concluded Glenis. Anna shrugged her shoulders in a helpless gesture.

  “We are very peculiar in America,” said Anna. She hoped that foreign peculiarity would continue to provide a cover for her.

  Tom made a walking stick for her that was dotted with small burls, giving it a human look, as if the stick had been a long arthritic finger. He smoothed the top knot for her so that her palm fit it perfectly; he cleverly carved an indentation so that she could comfortably wrap her hand around the shaft. The oldest boy, Michael, had helped by initially scraping off the bark. All in all
, the walking stick had taken four days to make. On the last day, Tom carved the letter A into the side of the stick.

  He presented the stick to her and said, “This should keep you from falling down until your leg gets better. And after your leg is properly healed, you can use this stick to cross the moors and the mountains. It’s that good, if I do say so.”

  There was something different about the passage of time when there were no wristwatches, no minute-by-minute schedule to maintain. No meetings at 10:00 a.m. sharp, no deadlines at precisely 4:00 p.m. Instead, Anna gauged time by watching her leg heal, limping from house to dirt lane to field, then coming back again, exhausted, allowing her brain to mull over the preposterous situation that she was in. Yanked into the past where she could be of no help to her family, she fought to see a purpose, some logic to what was happening. She was not a believer in random chaos; Anna looked for the strands of connectivity that could provide an explanation for time travel. Law school had taught her to look for the issue in any given situation, and then the rule. So far, she could find neither. What was the issue when one was transported to the past? Was it random, or was it specific to Anna and Joseph?

  She checked with Tom and Glenis each day about any word of an American boy who had been found in similar circumstances. They had said that they would send out word to neighbors and let the question pass from village to village.

  “Surely someone would have noticed a boy who was clearly not from here. Have you heard anything today?” she asked again after returning to the neat cottage with thick thatched roofing. Late fall flowers still erupted along the rutted lane that ran into Kinsale.

  “And surely we would tell you if we had heard,” said Tom. He still had on his thick leather apron that protected him from the white-hot embers needed in his blacksmith shop. She heard the irritation in his voice, the weariness from forcing stubborn metal into convenient shapes: door hinges, horseshoes, wheels. She caught Glenis glancing at him, tilting her head to one side in a silent language between husband and wife. Anna was sure that it meant, Hey, lighten up; she’s just worried and you’re tired and hungry. But then again, nothing that Anna was sure of was holding up too well.