Tesla's Time Travelers

by Tim Black

  “I’m hungry, our mom has dinner early, Mr. Greene,” Heath whined.

  “Shut up, Heath, you caused more of the mess than anyone did,” Victor chided his classmate.

  “Mr. Greene?” said Minerva, holding up the two ten-dollar bills her mother had given her that morning. “Something’s wrong with the money my mom gave me.”

  “Let me see,” said Victor, taking a ten-dollar bill from Minerva’s hand. He looked at the face on the front of the ten-dollar bill. It wasn’t Hamilton’s visage, it was… “Arnold! Mr. Greene, Benedict Arnold is on the ten-dollar bill!”

  “What! Let me see, Victor,” Greene demanded.

  Victor turned a bill over. There was Benedict Arnold on horseback, charging at Saratoga, the battle in which he became a hero. “The Battle of Saratoga is on the back of the ten-dollar bill!”

  Mr. Greene examined a bill. “Is this a joke on me, kids? Did the Anderson twins put you up to this, Minerva?”

  Victor watched Minerva get angry. She was about to speak when Bette Kromer, scanning the bulletin board of U.S. presidents, discovered something equally unnerving.

  “Mr. Greene?” she called.

  “What?” said the teacher, still puzzled by the currency.

  “Benedict Arnold is the second president of the United States. There is no John Adams!”

  “What the devil?” Mr. Greene said. “Victor, use my computer and Google Benedict Arnold.” He walked over to the bulletin board. “There’s no John Adams? I’ll be darned. No John Quincy Adams. Shippen Jefferson? Who the heck is he? He’s in John Quincy Adams’s spot. Google Shippen Jefferson as well, Victor.”

  “Mr. Greene, I know you don’t like Wikipedia, but here’s what it says. ‘Benedict Arnold, second president of the United States, was George Washington’s most trusted subordinate in the American Revolution. After leading the charge at Saratoga, Arnold went on to assist Washington in the defeat of the British as Yorktown, the last major battle of the American Revolution. When Washington was elected president, he selected Arnold as his first secretary of war. Later, Fort Arnold, the nation’s gold depository in Kentucky, was named for the American hero. In 1796, Arnold defeated John Adams in the presidential election. Adams finished second and served a third term as vice president. In 1800 Arnold won reelection. Thomas Jefferson became vice-president and succeeded Arnold upon his untimely death in 1801.”

  “What in the world did we do?” Mr. Greene said, stunned. “Did we make Benedict Arnold a hero?”

  “It would seem so, dearie,” Mary Beard said, and began to laugh.

  “I didn’t think it was possible,” Charles Beard added. “My my, Mr. Greene, I don’t believe the Adams family will take this very well.”

  “Wasn’t Arnold a hero at Saratoga, Mr. Greene?” Bette asked.

  “Yes, until his wife Peggy Shippen introduced Arnold to the British spy Major Andre,” he said. “Google this Shippen Jefferson character, Victor.”

  “Yes sir,’ Victor replied, and began to read, “‘Shippen Jefferson, sixth president of the United States, was the son of Thomas Jefferson and his wife Peggy, the former Margaret Shippen of Philadelphia. Born in 1784, Shippen Jefferson at age forty was elected to the presidency and became the youngest president in American history. He was the founder of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington…”

  “John Quincy Adams was responsible for the Smithsonian,” Mr. Greene said. “That’s enough, Victor. It looks like the Adams family has been erased from history. David McCullough and HBO will kill me,” Mr. Greene said, shaking his head. Then he added, “But then of course, they won’t have any idea, will they? Google Peggy Shippen.”

  “Yes, sir,” Victor replied, and in a second he began to read, “‘Peggy Shippen, nicknamed Spitting Peggy Shippen, second wife of Thomas Jefferson, married Jefferson in 1783, a year after the death of Jefferson’s first wife, Martha Wayles Skelton. According to the well-known romantic legend, Peggy was a Philadelphia Loyalist who came under the spell of Jefferson on a chance meeting at the Graff House in 1776, when he was working on the last revisions of the Declaration of Independence and Peggy was only sixteen. Jefferson succeeded in turning her into an avid Patriot, and after his wife died in 1782, Jefferson began to court Peggy. During the American Revolution, while the British occupied Philadelphia, Peggy Shippen spat in the face of British General Howe’s mistress, earning the nickname Spitting Peggy. She was incarcerated at the Walnut Street Prison until the British left Philadelphia and the Patriots came back to the capital. Jefferson returned to Philadelphia as a delegate to Congress and he and Peggy became engaged. In 1783, they married. The following year, Peggy gave birth to their only child, a son whom they named Shippen in honor of Peggy’s family. Their son, Shippen Jefferson, would grow up to become the sixth president of the United States.’”

  “We did something!” Mr. Greene said. “But what the heck did we do? I don’t know how the people of Tennessee decided on Franklin. I mean, if we had to, we could live with that. But Benedict Arnold a national hero and Thomas Jefferson’s son a president and John Adams reduced to another Dan Quayle?”

  “Who’s Dan Quayle?” asked Minerva.

  “Doesn’t matter, Minerva,” Mr. Greene replied.

  “Poor Paul Giamatti,” Bette Kromer said. “He really deserved his Emmy for John Adams. Now there’s probably not even a mini-series. I mean, who wants to watch a mini-series about a vice-president?” Bette made the letter “L” with her left hand.

  Victor gulped. He remembered what he had told Peggy Shippen: they were staying at the Graff House, and to send her carriage there. It was just an off-chance remark because she surprised him by asking where they were staying after they lied to her about the plantation nonsense, and it had been the only building that had come to Victor’s mind, because they had conversed with Jefferson outside the Graff House that morning. So maybe Peggy Shippen met Jefferson the night of July 2nd and he converted her to a Patriot. And why wouldn’t he? His writing convinced the world of the necessity of a revolution for the rights of man, and he was a tall handsome man and she was an impressionable teenager. Then Peggy never married Benedict Arnold and Arnold never became a traitor, Victor realized. Well, one good thing: Maybe Thomas Jefferson didn’t have an affair with Sally Hemings then. Or maybe he still did? Victor hoped no one would remember that he had mentioned the Graff House to Peggy Shippen and he looked sheepishly about the room to see if anyone had put two and two together and come up with “sum” idiot named Victor Bridges.

  Bette Kromer was examining the Dunlap broadside of the Declaration of Independence. “Mr. Greene, the Declaration is now July 5th, not the 4th,” Bette said.

  “What? Oh no,” Mr. Greene said, rushing over to examine the document. “I think I need a ‘fifth,’” a dejected Mr. Greene added.

  Victor wondered if Jefferson’s meeting with Peggy Shippen on July 2nd might have pushed back his writing schedule, and now the holiday was the 5th instead of the 4th. Victor hoped this episode wouldn’t cause Mr. Greene to drink; Mr. Greene was engaging in his typical gallows humor. Mr. Greene never talked about his membership in A.A., but enough court ordered high school kids had seen Mr. Greene in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous to know that he was in recovery. Not that that was a big deal to the kids, as they were pretty savvy to the teachers who came into class hung-over and put on a movie first period on Monday morning. It was a funny name for an organization, Victor thought: Alcoholics Anonymous. All the students knew which teachers had drinking problems; there was nothing very anonymous about it.

  “Hey, Mr. Greene,” Justin said, checking his iPod. “Benjamin Franklin didn’t invent bifocal lenses.”

  “What?”

  “According to the net, the double lens spectacles Benjamin Franklin developed were called ‘Greene glasses’ in ‘honor of the man that Franklin met in Philadelphia at the time of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, a man who first gave him the idea. He developed Greene glasses in Paris in 1777 while s
erving as ambassador to France.’ Looks like you messed up too, Mr. Greene.”

  Victor was worried about Mr. Greene. He seemed distraught. “What have I done? Check out the swivel chair, Justin,” Mr. Greene said.

  Justin’s fingers danced across the keyboard. “Nothing different on that I guess. Still Jefferson, still developed the swivel chair for Monticello.”

  “I guess he was too preoccupied with the Declaration to think of inventions at that point in time,” Mr. Greene said. “Thank heavens for small favors.”

  “So what do we do now, Mr. Greene?” Minerva asked.

  “We come back to school tomorrow,” Mr. Greene said.

  “Saturday School!” Heath whined. “Not Saturday School.”

  “We’ve got to go back and fix it,” Mr. Greene said. “So everyone report back here at 7:30 A.M. dressed in colonial costume again. We all have Saturday School, including me,” Mr. Greene said.

  Chapter 16

  Minerva couldn’t believe she’d blown off the Fighting Phantoms’ Homecoming Friday night football game against the Jensen Beach Falcons to sit on the rattan couch in her Florida room watching Jeopardy! with Victor Bridges, but she figured that Junior Bridges was probably preoccupied with touchdowns and so forth and wouldn’t know she was missing from the stands. Which was why, as a contestant started to run the “Cities that Start with ‘C’” category on the TV game show, Minerva was surprised by a plaintive text message from the Phantoms quarterback: “Game on. Where r u?”

  “What is Casablanca, Alex?” Victor questioned the $400 answer. He smiled when the young woman said the same answer a second after he imaginarily buzzed in.

  She showed Victor the text message.

  He laughed. “Helmet head is steamed.”

  Minerva frowned. It wasn’t funny. Junior assumed Minerva would be in the stands watching Cassadaga’s answer to Tim Tebow toss touchdown after touchdown. But there she was on the couch watching an intellectual show instead of parked in the stands fatuously fawning over a football hero who could complete a long pass but not a compound sentence. The problem was, she realized, she wasn’t just ditching Junior for another guy—she was ditching him for his younger brother. Not only that, but Victor wasn’t an athlete, he was a nerd—although he did have a good set of muscles. Still, they were brothers: Junior and Victor. She tried to remember her Bible. Was that why Cain killed Abel—over a woman? Probably, she thought. She should have paid more attention in Sunday School. He might have killed his brother over a cow.

  “What should I say, Victor?” Minerva asked as Victor questioned the TV screen: “What is Cincinnati, Alex?”

  “Victor,” she repeated. “What should I say?”

  Minerva found it annoying that boys couldn’t multi-task, and that they could only focus on one thing at a time. She knew it had to do with evolution and wooly mammoth hunts or something, as Mrs. Neanderthal was back in the cave, multi-tasking, cooking dinner and taking care of a dozen kids, but boys could be exasperating. Bette Kromer agreed with Minerva on boys, and even said she had to slow her speech down when talking with most of them.

  “What is Calcutta, Alex?” Victor asked, for a $1000.

  Bette, she thought. She’d text Bette Kromer. She’d said she was going to the game. She had been good enough to drive all of them home after they returned, and she and Bette had exchanged numbers. She typed: ? r u.

  “Game, U”

  “w/V”

  “Jeop?”

  “Y”

  “Losin’ game.”

  “?”

  “Jr. fumbles.”

  “Oops. Later.”

  “Ta ta,” Bette texted, ending the exchange.

  Quite an amazing day, Minerva thought. She was sitting next to the most famous printer in America at lunch and texting a girlfriend in the evening. Benjamin Franklin would be truly shocked at the communication she had just conducted with Bette Kromer. When Jeopardy! went to commercial, Victor turned to Minerva and asked:

  “Was that Bette?”

  “Yes, she’s at the game.”

  “Bette Kromer at the game, that’s different.”

  “Uh huh. She’s says we’re losing and Junior is fumbling.”

  Victor smiled. “There goes the D-1 scholarship,” he said.

  “D-1?”

  “Division One, a football scholarship to a big school like Notre Dame or Florida. Junior just calls it a ‘D-1.’”

  “Oh… I don’t care about all of that, Victor,” Minerva said. “What should I text back to Junior?”

  “Tell him you have Saturday School,” Victor advised.

  “Really?”

  “It’s the truth.

  “Think I should?”

  “And your dad grounded you.”

  “That might work,” Minerva admitted.

  “It’s not a lie. You do have Saturday School. Let’s see, oh yes, you are grounded for the weekend,” Victor said, looking straight into her baby blue eyes.

  Victor Bridges, she thought, you “get” me and you’re not afraid to call me on my bovine defecation. Minerva hated the more vulgar term and couldn’t even think of using the common meaning for B.S.

  She smiled at Victor and admitted he was right. She tapped out a mendacious message to Junior. Minerva felt incredibly relieved after she sent it. She hoped Victor wasn’t in a huddle when he received it, but that would be silly—he wouldn’t be texting if his team was on the field. He wasn’t that stupid. Was he?

  “Victor, how did Junior text me during the game?” she asked.

  “He only plays offense. When the defense is on the field, he’s a regular Tweety Bird,” Victor explained. “He tweets his fans in the stands. Junior is dumb as dirt, but he can tweet. What the heck, he’s a birdbrain,” Victor said.

  As Victor was explaining this to Minerva, she received a text message from Junior laced with a number of four-letter words. Minerva was mortified and tried to hide the message from Victor, but she was too late: he saw it.

  “That’s my brother; he can spell ‘cat’ and the ‘F’ word, and use the ‘F’ word as a noun, verb, adverb, adjective or gerund. Don’t let it upset you, Minerva,” Victor said. “They must be really losing badly?”

  As if to confirm Victor’s prediction, Bette Kromer texted, “dwn 20 pts.”

  “That’s why he’s ticked, Minerva. It has nothing to do with you. I know Junior. He doesn’t care what a girl thinks, he’s only using you as trophy for the dance…or was.”

  She was just as bad as Junior. She’d wanted to strut into the Homecoming Dance arm-in-arm with the B.M.O.C., the fabled quarterback of the football team. She didn’t care about Junior either, she admitted to herself. She needed to admit that to Junior, she realized. She needed to come clean.

  “I was doing the same thing to him, Victor,” Minerva confessed. “I was using Junior as arm candy.”

  Victor smiled. “Well, that’s a relief,” he said. “I thought you might actually like the lug. Hey look, it’s time for Final Jeopardy!.”

  The emcee announced: “In the category, presidential romances,” and then the screen filled with the Final Jeopardy! answer.

  Peggy Shippen first met her future husband Thomas Jefferson in this Philadelphia building.

  “Oh no, it was bad enough to change history, but I can’t believe I messed up Final Jeopardy! too,” Victor whined.

  “Da da da da da da da…” The Final Jeopardy! music played in the background as the contestants wrote their answers with their Sharpies®.

  “What did you do, Victor?” Minerva said. She tried to recall all the events of the day in Philadelphia, but whatever Victor was referring to escaped her.

  “Don’t you remember, Minerva? I told Peggy Shippen we were staying at the Graff House. I bet she was in the carriage and it came around to pick us up, but she met Jefferson instead.”

  “Oh,” Minerva replied. She remembered now. How odd that a chance remark like that could change history. She thought Victor was being a b
it hard on himself. Didn’t Jefferson have to convert her from a Loyalist to a Patriot? Wasn’t that the crucial part of the story?

  On television the emcee was reading the responses of the contestants. “’What is Carpenter’s Hall?’ No, I’m sorry, Michael, that is incorrect. And you wagered…$5000. John has ‘What is City Tavern?’ No, that is not correct. John bet $1200. And now to our champion, Linda Coddling… ‘What is the Graff House?’ Yes, the building where Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence and had a chance meeting with Peggy Shippen…and Linda bet $8,000, and is still the champion with a three-day total of $57,000.” The audience began to applaud.

  Minerva said nothing. She assumed Victor wanted to vent. If it was any consolation, Victor, she wanted to say, two of the contestants didn’t know the question, although it was a Final Jeopardy! answer.

  “You are being hard on yourself, Victor,” Minerva said and took his hand in hers. He seemed so distraught. She wanted to give him a consolation kiss, but her mom was in the next room and she might walk in at any moment, embarrassing her beyond belief. Minerva was thankful her dad was on call and was at the hospital checking on a patient. Boys felt uncomfortable around her father, Minerva realized. Except for Junior. Junior thought everyone loved him; he was, after all, the football star. What the heck, she thought, looking at Victor. It was the only way to shut him up. She kissed him firmly on the lips and he stopped talking about Peggy Shippen. It was bad enough for Minerva to think of competing for Victor’s attention with another girl, but a sixteen-year-old Loyalist from the 18th century was a bit more competition than most girls might expect.

  Minerva smiled at Victor. “I wish I could tell my mom what really happened today, Victor. She would have loved the Beards. I don’t think the ghosts she sees at the Cassadaga Hotel are anyway near as fun as the Beards.”

  “Mary’s a hoot.” Victor agreed. “But Charles…”

  “Charles is a prune,” Minerva said. “Serious prune face.”

  “How did you parents take Saturday School?” Victor asked.