The Book That Proves Time Travel Happens

by Henry Clark

  “I got the impression you didn’t believe in the I-Ching,” said Frankie.

  “I’ve changed my mind,” I said. After a moment I added, “About a lot of things.”

  Five more coin flips and we had a hexagram that looked like this:

  I dug the I-Ching book out of the apron, slipped it from the Ziploc bag, and looked it up. It turned out to be the forty-eighth hexagram.

  HEXAGRAM 48

  THE WELL.

  RESOURCES. SUSTENANCE. A HOLE IN THE GROUND CAN EITHER TAKE LIFE OR SUSTAIN IT. WATCH YOUR STEP. STAY GROUNDED. YOU CAN SEE STARS FROM THE BOTTOM OF A WELL IN BROAD DAYLIGHT, BUT ONLY IF YOU REMEMBER TO LOOK UP.

  “Is there a well around here?” I asked.

  “Haven’t seen one,” rumbled Ganto. “Odd.”

  “Where would an old-time farm have its well?” I asked Frankie, as if it were the kind of information she might have.

  She shook her head and guessed. “Near the house?”

  “Yeah,” I agreed. “But probably nowhere near the outhouse, right?”

  I pointed. South of the farmhouse was a tiny building with a missing door; a bench with butt-sized holes in it was just visible inside. I remembered Tom once telling me that before the invention of toilet paper, one of the things people used was corncobs. It was the kind of useless but interesting fact he was always coming out with. I suddenly missed him a lot.

  “So maybe on the north side?” said Frankie.

  “But not too far from the barn,” I reasoned. “Cows and horses need water, too. So somewhere there?” I pointed to what I thought was the most likely area, glanced to make sure neither Bert nor Zack was in our line of sight, and headed for it.

  The area was overgrown with weeds. Thistles scratched at my bare legs. Frankie and I fanned out, looking for some trace of a well. Mr. Ganto crouched low behind Frankie, trying to be inconspicuous.

  I stubbed my toe on a low rock wall and almost fell headfirst into a hole in the ground. At one time the wall had circled the hole, but most of the wall had fallen in, leaving an unprotected pit that some safety-minded person had placed wooden planks across. The planks had rotted, and it looked as though someone had recently fallen through.

  “Tom?” I said his name softly, not wanting the slave catchers to hear me. I moved an unbroken plank to one side, allowing more light into the hole. A big hand reached around me and cleared the well’s mouth completely. Mr. Ganto sidled past me to get a better look.

  “Bro?” said the well.

  Tom was at the bottom, knee-deep in water, looking forlornly upward.

  “Are you all right?”

  “I lost my book!”

  “We have it,” I assured him. He didn’t appear to be broken.

  “I can’t climb out—the walls are too slick!”

  “I’ll come down for you,” I said, looking around, trying to figure out how I might do that without getting trapped myself.

  “It’s a good thing you’re dressed as a yo-yo,” said Mr. Ganto.

  “Dressed as a what?” I wasn’t sure I had heard him correctly.

  He picked me up, held me above the well, and dropped me.

  “Yo-yo,” he repeated.

  I fell, spinning, as the rope around my waist uncoiled. Mr. Ganto was gripping the rope’s end, and as I realized what was happening, I hoped he had it tightly. The wall of the well flashed by around me, and I caught the rope before it ran out, lurching, straightening, and dropping the final few feet at a speed that was a little less stomach churning. I wound up dangling about a foot above Tom’s head.

  “I was running, looking behind me to see if they had seen me—” he began.

  “And you fell through the boards,” I finished for him. “I get it. Grab my hands.”

  “I cut myself on the edge of one of the pots I was banging.”

  “Bad?”

  “It took a while to stop bleeding.”

  The rope jiggled impatiently.

  “Give me the hand that didn’t get cut.”

  I used both hands to clutch the arm he extended, grabbing him above the elbow with one and tightly by the wrist with the other. The place on my arm that Dwina had bandaged throbbed painfully.

  “Ready?” I asked him, but before he could answer we were ascending, Mr. Ganto rapidly hauling up the rope. We were over the edge of the well in moments.

  “We are too exposed here,” said Ganto, setting us down on our feet. He turned and loped away, heading for the cover of a grove of trees. Frankie flapped her apron at us, as if we were barnyard geese, and we stumbled after him.

  “You were in a well,” muttered Frankie a few minutes later as she bandaged Tom’s hand with a strip of cloth she had ripped from the bottom of my dress, “but you couldn’t take a moment to wash your cut?”

  “I didn’t know how clean the water was,” answered Tom. Quite reasonably, I thought.

  We were safely away from the barn and Killbreath’s gang, concealed amid pines with low-hanging branches. Mr. Ganto sat cross-legged on a bed of pine needles, the Shagbolt case open on his lap, as though he fully expected the Time Trombone to be used at any moment.

  “Yo-yo?” I said to him. “Was that supposed to be a joke?”

  “Yes.” He grinned at me with teeth the size of tombstones.

  “Mr. Ganto,” explained Frankie, “being from the Pleistocene, has a primitive sense of humor. He likes slapstick. Clever wordplay doesn’t amuse him, and he always looks grave at a pun.”

  “I felt my apron fall off as I ran,” said Tom. “I was so afraid I had lost the I-Ching book. But you found it! And my quarter!”

  “We used the I-Ching to find you,” Frankie informed him, tying off her bandage and letting his arm drop.

  “You did? Which hexagram?”

  “The Well,” I said. “Apparently, there isn’t a hexagram called Clumsy Idiot.”

  “The Well,” Tom repeated, thumbing through his book. “Did you do the Morse?”

  “I don’t know Morse,” I reminded him. “And hiding from slave catchers seemed more important.”

  “Here it is,” said Tom, finding the page and studying it, moving his lips silently as he worked to decode it. Then he went, “Ha!”

  “‘Ha’? What, ‘ha’?”

  “This time it’s a message for you.”

  “Me? Like, me, personally? What?”

  “Two dots, followed by a dash and a dot, then a dot and a dash, followed by another dash and dot, ending with a single dot.”

  “Spelling?”

  “Inane.”

  “Inane?”

  “That’s one of the two words you asked for, isn’t it? I can’t remember what the other one was.”

  “It was stupid.”

  “That’s probably why I can’t remember it.”

  “How is that possible?” My voice went up an octave. “How could this three-thousand-year-old I-Ching thing contain, in Morse code, a word I specifically asked for?”

  “Apparently it takes requests.”

  “Are you saying it’s watching us?”

  “What’re you, crazy?”

  “Then how—”

  “It’s listening to us.” Tom gave me a look as if that explained everything.

  “Are you going to spend the rest of the day in your underwear?” Frankie asked. She handed my clothes back to me. I gave Tom an exasperated look, then wiggled into my jeans and sweatshirt.

  “And the dress,” Frankie reminded me.

  “You ripped it,” I said accusingly, showing her the ragged place where she had gotten Tom’s bandage.

  “So?”

  “I don’t want to go around in tatters. What will people think?”

  “You have changed.” Frankie nodded approval, as if she thought I was serious. But I put on the dress and jammed the bonnet back on my head.

  “Time to go,” said Mr. Ganto, lifting the Shagbolt from its case and extending it toward Frankie. “It would be best if we arrived at the carnival shortly after you borrowe
d the golf cart.”

  “We can’t go back yet,” responded Frankie, putting one hand gently on the trombone but not taking it. “We have to go to the town docks and check out a boat called the Buckeye Beauty. There’s a chance it may explode, killing one of Rose’s ancestors, meaning Rose would cease to exist.”

  I got a sudden warm feeling, realizing Frankie was concerned about me.

  “But he is standing right there,” murmured Mr. Ganto. “Obviously, whatever you fear did not happen.”

  “It may not have happened because we are about to prevent it,” Frankie explained, and I felt the start of a headache. I had trouble following the ins and outs of time travel. “If we leave now, it won’t be prevented, and Rose may silently vanish away. Or maybe pop like a soap bubble.”

  “Excuse me?” The idea was scary.

  “If Dwina dies before her time,” Frankie continued, “it could cause other changes to the future, even more serious than the loss of Rose. We might return to a future just as bleak as the one in which the Killbreaths are in control. Rose had a powerful premonition. Romani don’t ignore premonitions! We might have to save Dwina to make sure there’s still a future for us to go back to.”

  “Your father sent me after you,” Mr. Ganto reminded Frankie. “I am supposed to return you to him as soon as possible. He is my boss, and my friend. We should go.”

  “You didn’t, by any chance, talk to my mother about it?”

  “She was unavailable.”

  “Of course she was. But you’re my friend, too, you know. That should count for something!”

  Mr. Ganto scowled a scowl the size of a punch bowl. “All right, then. Let the book decide,” he said.

  “What book?” I asked, even though I knew full well. The I-Ching was beginning to creep me out big-time.

  Mr. Ganto waved his hand at If You Have an I-Ching—Scratch!, which was still open in Tom’s hands. “Toss your coin. Ask if we should continue here or go home. I will abide by the answer.”

  Tom nodded agreement. Six tosses later we were looking at yet another hexagram. I recognized it as the one Tom had on his sweatshirt.

  HEXAGRAM 32

  PERSEVERANCE.

  STAY THE COURSE. RIDE IT OUT.

  ENDURE. CONSTANCY IS A VIRTUE.

  PRAYERS ARE ANSWERED IN THE ORDER IN WHICH THEY ARE RECEIVED (YOU CAN IMAGINE THE BACKLOG).

  “Sounds to me like we stay,” said Frankie.

  “It’s three dots, followed by a dot and a dash,” said Tom, “followed by two dashes and a dot, ending in a final dot. That would be an S, and an A… it spells the word sage.”

  “What?” I asked. “Those smelly green flakes my mother sprinkles in her turkey stuffing?”

  “It also means ‘wise,’” said Frankie, “as in ‘sage advice.’ The I-Ching is saying we would be wise to persevere.”

  We all looked to Mr. Ganto. He slipped the trombone back in its case, snapped the latches, and stood.

  “Let’s go find your riverboat,” he said.

  CHAPTER 19

  Coffins and Hogsheads

  FINEST BOAT ON THE GUSTIMUCK!

  DOUBLE BOILERS! QUICK PASSAGE!

  THE BUCKEYE BEAUTY

  DEPARTS FREEDOM FALLS

  MCCOY DOCK

  FORTNIGHTLY THURSDAYS

  5:00 O’CLOCK IN THE AFTERNOON

  ARRIVES JORDAN 7:30

  “Is that supposed to be Fort Nightly?” I asked. “Like Fort Shawnee? Is it a town?”

  “‘Fortnightly’ means ‘every fourteen days,’” said Tom. “It takes the boat two weeks to go down the Gustimuck to the Ohio and then on to Louisville and come back again, stopping at two dozen towns along the way. Freedom Falls is its other turnaround point. It keeps shuttling back and forth between Freedom Falls and Louisville. This is so cool! Look at all the old-time fonts!”

  He was scrunched down, reading the faded print on the poster’s bottom. The poster—Tom called it a broadside—was plastered to a wall on a shed near the docks, surrounded by other broadsides advertising local merchants.

  “That must be McCoy Dock over there,” said Frankie, pointing to a remote pier where bales of cotton were being unloaded from the only steamboat in sight. The boat had the layered wedding-cake look of the traditional river steamer, with a paddle wheel on its end and a wheelhouse set behind twin smokestacks on its top deck. It matched the exploding boat in my vision perfectly.

  The hours following Tom’s rescue from the well had been uneventful. At the first house we had come to, pies had been cooling on the sill of an open window and, seeing no one around, we had snuck under the window and pretended the pies were trying to escape from a burning building and our aprons were firemen’s nets. The pies jumped (or, the more suspicious might guess, were pushed) and we saved them from the hard, cruel ground.

  Later, sitting on the far side of a hedge, licking the plates clean, we had heard a woman with a strong German accent shout, “Hans! Fritz! Vot has you done mit za pies?” Her question was followed by what sounded like two small boys being spanked simultaneously. We had guiltily left the plates under the hedge and tiptoed out the gate, past a post bearing the name KATZENJAMMER.

  Sometime after that, looking for the best road to take into town, we had seen ourselves go by in the hay wagon. It had come around the bend unexpectedly and, with no time to hide, we had thrown ourselves against the rails of a fence and struck nonchalant poses as though we had been there for hours. I caught myself looking at me through a gap in the hay and started to wave to myself, but Frankie slapped my hand down and held it to my side.

  “This is no time to flirt,” she had hissed under her breath.

  “Did you see the way I was looking at me?” I replied, indignant. “I was checking me out! I should be ashamed of myself!”

  “You are very weird,” Frankie informed me.

  From a safe distance, we watched Zack stop the wagon and begin the events that would end with the collapse of the pier and my saving Dwina from drowning. We had watched until the horses had bolted and Zack had gotten the better of Mr. Collins, finally regaining his shotgun and knocking Collins into some brambles—and then we had eased on past them and followed the road into town.

  Mr. Ganto kept to the trees, and when we had gotten to the outskirts of town he had leaned out from a low-hanging limb and said, “I must keep out of sight. I will stay within earshot. Here”—he handed Frankie the trombone case—“do your best to save your friend. Should anything go wrong, play the Shagbolt. Get us out of here.” A branch had snapped back into place and Mr. Ganto had vanished.

  “So what do we do?” asked Tom. “Wait at the gangplank and make sure Dwina and Seth don’t get on the boat?”

  “That’s not the worst idea,” said Frankie.

  We walked along the waterfront, passing storage buildings and taverns. The sign at a shipyard declared they built everything, FROM FRIVOLOUS YACHTS TO STERN-WHEELERS. We reached McCoy Dock and strolled out to the Buckeye Beauty’s gangplank. We stood self-consciously, trying to look as though we had some sort of business there.

  I could see the town clock tower from where we were. It said four fifteen. If Dwina and Seth were going to board the Beauty, they had forty-five minutes to get there. I was hoping they wouldn’t show and my vision would turn out to be a meaningless dream.

  As we watched, the riverboat hands finished off-loading the cotton and began taking on new cargo. They used dollies and skids to move bulky crates from the dock, until most of the boat’s main deck was full. A crane lifted coarse nets full of kegs and wooden boxes to a spot on the middle deck.

  “It’s hard to say good-bye to a friend,” said a man in a green coat as he walked alongside a cart with a coffin on it. He patted the coffin, and the man pushing the cart brought it to a halt opposite the gangplank. The three of us stepped respectfully out of the way. Before we did, I saw a brass plate on the coffin lid engraved with the name ISHMAEL DINKLEHOOPER.

  “‘Call me Ishmael,’ he said,
the first day he walked into my pawnshop,” Green Coat continued. “What a one he was for telling the stories!”

  “He owed me money,” grumbled a man in a battered top hat, who had been walking to the left of Green Coat.

  “He was a whaling man,” replied Coat.

  “Cried a lot, did he?” asked the cart man.

  Coat ignored him. “His last voyage ended badly. The entire ship was lost. He wrote a book about it, published last year, but it sank quicker than the ship did. It made him nothing. Otherwise, you’d have your money. Now he’s headed downriver to the family burial plot. Sad.”

  “Bah!” The man in the top hat spat into the river, turned, and stomped away.

  Coat looked around for more audience, spotted us, and said, “Considering the harrowing events of his final whale hunt, it was rather ironic the way he died.”

  “Ironic?” asked Tom, taking the bait.

  “He choked to death on a shrimp.”

  Coat shook his head. “Foresaw it, too,” he added. “Always was one for prophetic dreams, was old Ishmael. Yet it didn’t stop him from ordering the scampi.”

  We watched the coffin get loaded aboard the Beauty.

  “Shouldn’t we warn the captain that his boat is going to explode?” I said, feeling just a little bit guilty to be worried only about my ancestors and no one else.

  “You’d probably want to warn the captain of the Titanic his ship was going to hit an iceberg, too,” Frankie said disgustedly.

  “Well, yeah, duh,” I replied.

  “If you’re a time traveler, you can’t go running up and down the Titanic’s decks shouting ‘Iceberg!’ the moment the ship leaves the dock,” said Frankie, shaking her head sadly. “You can’t take the bullet for Abraham Lincoln, and you can’t strangle Hitler in his crib.”

  “You could wait until he was five,” suggested Tom, and Frankie glared at him.

  “Some events are too major to change,” she continued. “The alterations to the future would be too drastic. You’d return to a place you would never recognize.”

  “Maybe it would be better,” I suggested.