Josh

2014

BRIDEY’S HOUSE WAS NOTHING but a ruin. The walls had fallen outward and the roof had fallen inward and her garden had blown, seed by seed, through its fence and taken root where her kitchen used to be. Pumpkins had snaked through the plumbing and spread their leaves in her sink. Carrots had sprouted among the soles of decaying shoes in what was left of her closet. Pea vines had washed over her back porch like a green tide.

Visiting was Margaret’s idea. I wasn’t so sure. I knew the place would be a wreck, and maybe a little sad. But Margaret said, “I’m sure Aunt Bridey would be delighted to have us.”

I thought back to the very strange day when Bridey had told me that friendship stands the test of time, and I figured I owed her a chance to say, “I told you so,” so I agreed to go.

Up the mountain we hiked, two happy families: My grandson Charlie and his mom and dad and brothers and sister. And Margaret and her mother and her newly freed father. The kids swarmed all over everything, looking for treasure—a rotted wooden drawer full of silverware, the spoons still shiny under the tarnish. The translucent golden knobs of an antique radio. A small safe that nobody would ever open, though I somehow knew that inside it lay, safe and dry, an ancient picture of a Confederate Army lieutenant. Margaret had been right. Bridey, wherever she happened to be, was surely thrilled at this spectacle.

I gazed over my shoulder at the peak of Mount Hosta. Two days before, I’d visited it with Lucas Biggs. Not a bad day’s hike for two old men. We didn’t talk about old times, because they were too far gone. But he did tell me that since he’d vacated John O’Malley’s sentence and overturned the guilty verdict, he’d decided to go ahead and finish the job. He’d called the governor and alerted him to the piles of evidence that’d gone unexamined in that trial.

Which meant that Victory Fuels was on the run. Their crimes would come to light. Their hydrofracking plans were wrecked. And to top it all off, Judge Biggs’s granddaughter Charlotte, the environmentalist, was busy starting her own company, which, among other things, might build a few windmills to catch that wind blowing off the mountain all day and night. As long as she could figure out how to do it without clonking too many birds on the head.

I had a thousand things to say to Luke, too, but when we got to the top of Mount Hosta and saw the world spread out below us, looking not much different than it had when we were thirteen, the thought of all the things we’d done and all the things we’d left undone was too much. I couldn’t speak.

“Our grandchildren will do better than we did,” declared Luke, and I heard something in his voice I hadn’t heard in seventy-six years: hope. I felt it, too, and I remembered everything I ever loved about Luke Agrippa.

I found my voice and said, “I never stopped being your friend.”

“Thank you,” said Luke. “Thank you so much, Josh.”

We stood quietly for a bit, and I gave him his father’s old fountain pen. “I thought you’d like to have it,” I said.

“I would, very much,” he’d replied with a faint smile on his face, and tucked it into his pocket as we turned for home.

“John!” I called to Margaret’s father, who was standing near the edge of Aunt Bridey’s old orchard gazing at the horizon, wondering how he would put his life back together. Even if he was worried, I wasn’t. I knew he’d think of something. He was an O’Malley. “Let me show you something,” I said. “A little secret of your aunt Bridey’s.”

“She had a lot of them, didn’t she?” asked John, his green eyes twinkling behind his glasses.

“This one you’re going to like,” I replied, rummaging through the vines on the face of the cliff for the entrance to her old dugout pantry. Inside, sure enough, on a wooden shelf that hadn’t crumbled yet, there was one bottle. Aunt Bridey’s Honey Brook Nectar. I brought it out into the sunlight, offered John O’Malley a seat on the nearest boulder, uncorked the bottle (the cork was a little stiff, but I had all the time in the world), and took a nip. “Here’s to the past,” I said, offering him the bottle. He took it.

After a thoughtful silence, I worked up the nerve to ask, “Margaret told you the whole story?”

“That she did,” John O’Malley replied softly.

“And?” I prodded.

“I wasn’t a bit happy,” he declared, “although I was very proud.”

“You know,” I ventured after another silence, “it’s true that history resists, and it’s true that the present is the best place to make things happen. And maybe, if Margaret hadn’t traveled to 1938, she somehow would’ve ended up with the Quaker star anyway, and we’d all be right here just the way we are. But . . .”

“Maybe not?” said John O’Malley. “Are you saying that maybe history has a lot to keep track of, a lot bigger things than a little, faded scrap of cloth? Are you saying that maybe sometimes, when history’s not paying attention, things slip through? Are you saying the time travel worked?”

“I’m not saying it,” I said, with a grin, “and I’m not not saying it. But if I were saying it, I sure wouldn’t say it to Margaret or Charlie.”

John laughed, took another swig of the Honey Brook Nectar, and said, “I think not saying it is an excellent idea.”

Scrambling through Bridey’s spectacular, fallen-down old life, laughing like kids, just kids, kids who hadn’t been through more of history than many old men nearing ninety, my tall grandson and his friend Margaret O’Malley made their way toward us.

Margaret’s hair was as red and her eyes were as green as they’d been on the day I first met her, back when I was thirteen and she was, too. But she’d been to the optometrist since her dad had been freed, so now she wore glasses. Not too thick, not yet, though I knew they would look like the windows of an armored car before many years passed. That was how it was bound to play out. Those glorious eyes were changing, becoming weaker. Soon they’d be no more special than anybody else’s, and in some ways, Margaret herself was becoming just like anybody else, though not completely, because the knowledge living inside her of time and history was a secret only a handful of humans has ever possessed.

Crossing the ruins of the garden, Charlie tripped on a cucumber vine and crashed into Margaret, and as soon as he got himself steady again, she shoved him down in a patch of brand-new tomatoes, laughing, laughing, laughing, laughing.

“Not to dispute the importance of your family quirk,” I told John O’Malley, with a nod toward the two of them, “but sometimes you don’t need to be a time traveler to see the future.”