The Time Traveller's Almanac

by Ann VanderMeer

  “Good as His word. No one saw when, I rose up and took my Enfield. He led the way all through the night, talking in my ear. About the shrine and the priest that lives here.

  “A runaway slave it always is who kills the old priest and takes over. And I choked at that. Not the killing, but Britains never will be slaves and all.

  “Lord Mars told me enlistment in Her Majesty’s Army came close enough. New thinking, new blood was what was needed. Led me to a hill shrine before dawn. Left me to my own devices.

  “The shrine’s that one through that portal behind your ladyship. A grove with the trees all cut short by the wind and a circle of stone and a deep pool. When I was past the circle and beside the pool, the wind’s sound was cut off and it was dead still.

  “A path led down to the pool and on it was a couple of stones and a twig resting on them. And I knew not to disturb that. So I went to ground. Oiled my Enfield. Waited. Took a day or two. But I was patient. Ate my iron rations and drank water from the pool.

  “When he came, it was at dusk and he knew something was up. A formidable old bugger he was. But...”

  He trailed off. Removed the mask. “You knew him. Since you were a little girl, I hear.”

  Julia’s eyes burned. “He had a wife and children.”

  “I’ve kept them safe. He’d put a sum aside for them from shrine offerings and I saw they had that. Got my own bit of bother and strife tucked away. We know in this job we aren’t the first. And won’t be the last. Living on a loan of time so to speak.”

  He pointed to the ruined shrines. “The gods have gotten wise that things will not always go their way.” The corporal told her about defense works and traps he was building. Like a tenant telling the landlady about improvements he is making, thought Julia. She knew that was the way it would be between them and that she would always miss her noble Alcier.

  Just before she left, Smalley asked, “I wonder if I could see your son, m’lady. Sometime when it’s convenient.”Julia said nothing. She visited her grandmother, eighty and erect, living in Taos in a spare and beautiful house. Her companion was a woman from the Pueblo, small, silent and observant.

  “Timothy is the whole point of our involvement,” said the old woman. She sat at a table covered with breeding charts and photos of colts. “You and I are the precursors.”

  “He’s just a child.”

  “As were you when you were taken to the shrine. Think of how you loved Alcier. He would have wanted you to do this. And you shall have your rewards. Just as I have.”

  “And they are?”

  “At this point in your life, you would despise them if I told you. In time, they will seem more than sufficient.”

  Julia knew that she would do as the Rex had asked. But that summer Robert was stationed in Hawaii. So she went out to be with him instead of going to Mount Airey. The next August, she gave birth to Cecilia, her second daughter. The year after that, Robert was in a naval hospital in California, injured in a crash landing on a carrier flight deck. His shoulder was smashed but healed nicely. A three inch gash ran from his left ear to his jaw. It threw his smile slightly off-kilter.

  He seemed distant, even in bed. Tempered like a knife. And daring. As if he too sensed death and destiny and the will of the gods.When the war was over Robert had a Navy Cross, a trademark smile and a scar worth, as he put it, “Fifty-thousand votes while they still remember.” Over his own father’s objections, the young Macauley ran for Congress from the West Side of Manhattan. The incumbent, one of the old man’s allies, was enmeshed in a corruption scandal.

  Robert won the primary and the election. His lovely wife and three young children were features of his campaign. Julia paid a couple of fast visits to the cabin. On one of them the corporal told her, “I know it’s a kid will be my undoing. But it will be a little girl.” On another he said, “The gods would take it as a great favor, if you let me speak to your son.” Thus it was that one lovely morning the following summer. Julia left her two little daughters in the huge nursery at Joyous Garde and brought Timothy to Stoneham Cabin. As if it was part of a ritual, she had Mrs. Eder pack lunch.

  Julia stuck a carton of the Luckies she knew the Corporal favored into the basket and started up the hill. Her son, age seven and startlingly like the father he rarely saw, darted around, firing a toy gun at imaginary enemies.

  The corporal, tanned and wiry, sat on the back porch, smoking and cleaning his rifle. Tim stared at him wide eyed.

  “Are you a commando?” he asked after the introductions were made and he’d learned that their guest was English

  “Them’s Navy,” Smalley said. “And I’m a soldier of the Queen. Or King as it is.” Julia stared down at Mirror Lake. Except when Smalley spoke, she could imagine that Alcier was still there. Something even more intense than this must have happened to her grandmother after the death of Ki Mien.

  “Have you killed anybody?”

  “Killing’s never a nice thing, lad. Sometimes a necessity. But never nice,” Smalley said. “Now what do you say that we ask your mother if I can show you around?”

  Later, on their way back to the cottage, Timothy was awestruck. “He showed me traps he had set! In a jungle! He told me I was going to be a great leader!”

  As her grandmother had with her, Julia demanded his silence. Timothy agreed and kept his word. In fact, he rarely mentioned the cabin and the shrine. Julia wondered if Smalley had warned him not to. Then and later, she was struck by how easily her son accepted being the chosen of the gods.

  Fashion had passed Mt. Airey by. That summer, the aging bucks at Bachelor’s Point drawled on about how Dewey was about to thrash Truman. And how the Rockefellers had donated their estate to the National Parks Service.

  “What else now that the Irish have gotten onto the island.”

  “And not even through the back door.” That summer, Helen Stoneham Garde stayed in New Mexico. But Joyous Garde jumped. “Prominent Democrats from the four corners of the nation come to be bedazzled,” as Congressman Macauley murmured to his wife. Labor leaders smoked cigars in the oak and leather splendor of Simon Garde’s study. Glowing young Prairie Populists, drank with entrenched Carolina Dixiecrats. The talk swirled around money and influence, around next year’s national elections and Joe Kennedy’s boy down in Massachusetts.

  Above them, young Macauley with his lovely wife stood on the curve of the pink and marble stairs. Julia had grown interested in this game. It reminded her of her grandmother’s breeding charts and race horses.

  The following summer, Helen Stoneham Garde returned to her estate. Afternoons at Baxter’s were drowsy now and dowager-ridden.

  “Carried in a litter like royalty.”

  “Up the mountain to the cabin.”

  “Returned there to die it seems.”

  “Her daughter and son-in-law will have everything.”

  Shudders ran around the room. On an afternoon of warm August sun and a gentle sea breeze, Julia sat opposite her grandmother on the back porch of Stoneham Cabin. “Only the rich can keep fragments of the past alive,” Helen told her. “To the uneducated eye, great wealth can be mistaken for magic.”

  Below them, a party had picnicked next to Mirror Lake a bit earlier. Hikers had passed though. But at the moment, the shore was deserted, the surface undisturbed. The Rex was not in evidence. Helen’s eye remained penetrating, her speech clear. “A peaceful death,” she said. “Is one of the gifts of the gods.”

  Julia wished she had thought to ask her grandmother more questions about how their lives had been altered by the shrine.

  She realized that her own introduction to it at so young an age had occurred because Helen could not stand dealing with the man who had murdered the one closest to her.

  The two sat in a long silence. Then the old woman said, “My dearest child, I thought these might be of interest,” and indicated a leather folder on the table.

  Julia opened it and found several photos. She stared, amazed at the tree-lined C
ambridge Street and the young couple agape at their first glimpse of each other. She couldn’t take in all the details at once: the deliveryman hopping from his cart, the elderly gent out for a stroll, the boy who walked slightly behind what must have been his parents. Small, perhaps foreign in his sandals, he alone saw the tall, dark-haired young man, the tall blond young woman, stare at each other in wonder.

  “You knew before...” Julia said looking up. She didn’t dare breathe. Her grandmother still smiled slightly. Her eyes were wide. Beside her stood a figure in a silver mask. Tall and graceful. Not Corporal Smalley. Not at all. He wore only a winged helmet and sandals. Hermes, Lord Mercury, touched Helen with the silver caduceus staff he carried.

  Julia caught her breath. Her grandmother slumped slightly. Helen Stoneham Garde’s eyes were blank. Her life was over. The figure was gone.

  5.

  “First day of Autumn,” Martha Eder said when Julia came down the Old Cottage stairs the morning after her return. A picnic basket had been packed. Julia had not brought cigarettes for Smalley, had reason to think they weren’t necessary. The air was crisp but the sun was warm enough that all Julia needed was a light jacket. As she set out, Henry Eder, interrupted his repair of a window frame. “I can go with you, see if anything needs doing.” When she declined, he nodded and went back to his work.

  Grief was a private matter to Mainers. Besides, even after three quarters of a century, Julia’s family were still “summer folk” and thus unfathomable. The walk up Mount Airey was magnificent. Julia had rarely seen it this late in the year. Red and gold leaves framed green pine. Activity in the trees and undergrowth was almost frantic. A fox, intent on the hunt, crossed her path.After her grandmother’s death, she had returned to the cabin only on the occasions when she brought Tim. In the last few years, she hadn’t been back at all.

  She remembered a day when she and Robert sat in the study of their Georgetown mansion and Timothy knocked on the door. Just shy of twelve, he wore his Saint Anthony’s Priory uniform of blazer and short pants. In 1951, the American upper class kept its boys in shorts for as long as possible. A subtle means of segregating them from the masses.

  Representative Robert Macauley (D-NY) was maneuvering for a Senate nomination in what promised to be a tough year for Democrats. He looked up from the speech he was reviewing. Julia, busy with a guest list, watched them both. Timothy said, “What I would like for my birthday this year is a crewcut. Lots of the kids have them. And I want long pants when I’m not in this stupid monkey suit. And this summer I want to be allowed to go up to the cabin on Mount Airey by myself.”

  Julia caught the amusement and look of calculation in her husband’s eyes. Did his kid in short pants gain him more votes from women who thought it was adorable than he lost from men who thought it was snooty?

  “In matters like this, we defer to the upper chamber,” he said with a quick, lopsided smile and nodded to Julia.

  She felt all the pangs of a mother whose child is growing up. But she negotiated briskly. The first demand was a throwaway as she and her son both knew.

  “No crewcut. None of the boys at your school have them. The brothers don’t approve.” The brothers made her Protestant skin crawl. But they were most useful at times like this.

  “Long pants outside school? Please!” he asked. “Billy Chervot and his brothers all get to wear blue jeans!” Next year would be Timothy’s last with the brothers. Then he’d be at Grafton and out in the world.

  “Perhaps. For informal occasions.”

  “Jeans!”

  “We shall see.” He would be wearing them, she knew, obviously beloved, worn ones. On a drizzly morning in Maine. His hair would be short. He’d have spent that summer in a crewcut.

  Julia had studied every detail of a certain photo. She estimated Tim’s age at around fifteen. The shot showed him as he approached Stoneham Cabin. He wore his father’s old naval flight jacket, still too big for him, though he had already gotten tall.

  “Mount Airey?” the eleven-year-old Tim had asked. She heard herself saying. “Yes. That should be fine. Check in with Mrs. Eder when you’re going. And tell her when you come back. Be sure to let me know if anything up there needs to be done.” Her son left the room smiling. “What’s the big deal about that damned cabin?” her husband asked.

  Julia shrugged. “THE WASPS OF THE EASTERN UNITED STATES,” she said and they both laughed. The title of her grandfather’s tome was a joke between them. It referred to things no outsider could ever understand or would want to. Julia returned to her list. She had memorized every detail of the photo of their son. He had tears in his eyes. The sight made her afraid for them all.

  Her husband held out a page of notes. “Take a look. I’m extending an olive branch to Mrs. Roosevelt. Her husband and my dad disagreed.” He grinned. Franklin Roosevelt, patrician reformer and Timothy Macauley, machine politician, had famously loathed each other.

  Julia stared at her husband’s handwriting. Whatever the words said would work. The third photo in the leather folder her grandmother had given her showed FDR’s widow on a platform with Robert. Julia recognized a victory night.

  She could trace a kind of tale with the photos. She met her husband. He triumphed. Their son went for comfort to the Rex. A story was told. Or, as in the Iliad, part of one.

  That day in the study in Georgetown, she looked at Robert Macauley, in the reading glasses he never wore publicly, and felt overwhelming tenderness. Julia could call up every detail of the photo of their meeting.

  Only the boy in the background looked directly at the couple who stared into each other’s eyes. He smiled. His hand was raised. Something gold caught the sun. A ring? A tiny bow?

  Had Robert and she been hit with Eros’ arrow? All she knew was that the love she felt was very real.

  How clever they were, the gods, to give mortals just enough of a glimpse of their workings to fascinate. But never to let them know everything.

  That summer, her son went up Mount Airey alone. It bothered Julia as one more sign he was passing out of her control. “The gods won’t want to lose this one m’lady,” Smalley had told her.

  Over the next few years, Timothy entered puberty, went away to school, had secrets. His distance increased. When the family spent time at Joyous Garde, Tim would go to the Cabin often and report to her in privacy. Mundane matters like “Smalley says the back eaves need to be reshingled.” Or vast, disturbing ones like, “That jungle portal is impassable now. Smalley says soon ours will be the only one left.”

  Then came a lovely day in late August 1954. Sun streamed through the windows of Joyous Garde, sailboats bounced on the water. In the ballroom, staff moved furniture. A distant phone rang. A reception was to be held that evening. Senator Macauley would be flying in from Buffalo that afternoon. Julia’s secretary, her face frozen and wide-eyed held out a telephone and couldn’t speak. Against all advice, trusting in the good fortune which had carried him so far, her husband had taken off in the face of a sudden Great Lakes storm. Thunder, lightning and hail had swept the region. Radio contact with Robert Macauley’s one-engine plane had been lost.

  The crash site wasn’t found until late that night. The death wasn’t confirmed until the next morning. When Julia looked for him, Timothy was gone. The day was cloudy with a chill drizzle. She stood on the porch of Old Cottage a bit later when he returned. His eyes red. Dressed as he was in the photo.

  As they fell into each others’ arms, Julia caught a glimpse that was gone in an instant. Her son, as in the photo she had studied so often, approached Stoneham Cabin. This time, she saw his grief turn to surprise and a look of stunned betrayal. Timothy didn’t notice. The two hugged and sobbed in private sorrow before they turned toward Joyous Garde and the round of public mourning.

  As they did, he said, “You go up there from now on. I never want to go back.”

  FINALE

  Julia approached the grove and Cabin on that first morning of Fall. She was aware that it lay w
ithin her power to destroy this place. Julia had left a sealed letter to be shown to Timothy if she failed to return. Though she knew that was most unlikely to happen.

  A young woman, casual in slacks and a blouse, stood on the porch. In one hand she held the silver mask. “I’m Linda Martin,” she said. “Here by the will of the gods.”

  Julia recognized Linda as contemporary and smart. “An escaped slave?” she asked.

  “In a modern sense, perhaps.” The other woman shrugged and smiled. “A slave of circumstances.”

  “I’ve had what seem to be visions.” Julia said as she stepped onto the porch. “About my son and about this property.”

  “Those are my daughter’s doing, I’m afraid. Sally is nine,” Linda was apologetic yet proud. “I’ve asked her not to. They aren’t prophecy. More like possibility.”

  “They felt like a promise. And a threat.”

  “Please forgive her. She has a major crush on your son. Knows everything he has done. Or might ever do. He was very disappointed last month when he was in pain and wanted to talk to the corporal. And found us.”

  “Please forgive Tim. One’s first Rex makes a lasting impression.” Julia was surprised at how much she sounded like her grandmother.

  The living room of Stoneham Cabin still smelled of pine. The scent reminded Julia of Alcier and her first visit. As before, a door opened where no door had been. She and Linda passed through an invisible veil and the light from the twelve portals mingled and blended in the Still Room.

  “Sally, this is Julia Garde Macauley. Timothy’s mother.” The child who sat beyond the flame was beautiful. She wore a blue tunic adorned with a silver boy riding a dolphin. She bowed slightly. “Hello Mrs. Macauley. Please explain to Timothy that the corporal knew what happened was Fate and not me.”

  Julia remembered Smalley saying, “It’s a child will be my undoing.” She smiled and nodded. Linda held out the mask which found its way to Sally’s face.