Between Times-
Chapter Seven - Part Three...
Between Times, Chapter Seven, Part Three, where Drum meets the invisible man in his garden before flying off to war. To begin at the Beginning, Click here.
BETWEEN TIMES - CHAPTER SEVEN
PART THREE
Talks To Trees was out hunting when he stumbled into the gray man’s garden. Talks To Trees had not always been his name. When the Labyrinth folded him into their time, bereft of all remembrance of who he was or how he came to be there, the People had taken him in, cared for him, given him family and fraternity and purpose. Old Owl, their shaman had used his herbs and trances to guide Talks To Trees back to his memories, bit by bit. It took a long time for him to know again he was the Rider, and to recollect Millicent, his Flyer. He remembered Gates, and though he could no longer pass through them, he could sense their presence, and something of what lay beyond them.
The People lived in a thin stream of being, neither in Laurel nor Shadow, but somewhere between times. Gates abounded in their place, embodied in stones and trees and waterfalls, some opening to Laurel and some into Shadow, and some into realms so alien to the Rider that he could not comprehend what he sensed from them.
He missed Millicent. Hers was among the first memories to reclaim him. He wondered if she were near or far or sooner or later. Without her proximity, he remained incomplete. Millicent could carry him back to wholeness with his life. He was standing before a Gate manifest in an ancient Beech, attempting for the thousandth time to summon her, when one of the People observed him. When the tale spread over the village, the People named him Talks To Trees. Because he was good with a bow, he was elected a hunter. He knew guilt whenever his arrow took a blooded life, but that was better than seeing hungry children when a long winter emptied the village storehouse.
Talks To Trees rarely missed his mark during a hunt, but on this day, he was distracted, released his arrow hastily, wounded when he should have killed. The buck vanished into the laurel thicket across Drowning Man Creek, and Talks To Trees listened until he could no longer hear the wounded animal thrashing through the brush. Then he gathered himself, and followed his arrow. A track here, moss scraped from a stone there, branches broken, blood smeared on leaves or scarlet against the dark wet earth, left an easy trace. Though as he moved after the buck, the feeling that had broken his concentration grew stronger, almost oppressive, the urgent awareness of a Gate, which Talks To Trees could not quite locate. It seemed not to emanate from any particular object but hung in the air like the fog that thickened around him as he went.
The deer outran all expectations, but after an hour, the fresher blood shone brighter. The buck was weakening, slowing. Talks To Trees breathed thanks to the dying buck and to the living Mountain for allowing the mercy of food for his People, in spite of his carelessness.
The fog rolling in off the nearby river became so dense that Talks To Trees had to bend close to the ground to see where the buck had left the creek and followed the river bank upstream. Judging from the sign, the buck must be very near now. He expected to find more laurel and dog-hobble ahead, but instead came out into a cleared space. Somebody had planted a large garden on the sloping ground up from the river’s edge. Faintly through the fog beyond the garden, he saw the shape of a house. It looked like one of the houses in the gray towns. In the garden below the house stood a gray man. He was apparently unaware of Talks to Tree’s approach. The buck was gone, but as he came near to the man, he saw that the gray man held the quartz point from the arrow.
Talks to Trees spoke quietly, so as not to startle the man, who had still not noticed him, “That is mine.”
The gray man didn’t react. He looked right into Talks to Trees’ face as if seeing only the trees and the river behind. Looking at the gray man was like looking at his own reflection in water, like facing himself. He reached out to touch the man’s shoulder and his fingers passed right through him as easily as through the foggy air.
Talks to Trees understood then. The Gate was not in a tree or a stone. The Gate resided within himself. If he could learn now to touch it with his mind, open it, he could travel between times and beyond place. By some power beyond his comprehension, Talks To Trees was becoming like Millicent, the Flyer, in that space between raindrops, neither quite present nor absent but both, and the gray man was undoubtedly the boy with his face, whose staff had sent him down the timeless length of the Labyrinth, now grown and restored to his place of belonging.
As the gray man walked away toward his house, Talks to Trees stood watching for a long time, wondering. If, indeed, he stood in Shadow, and he was almost certain of that, the Flyer must have brought him to himself. Where was she now? What form did she assume here? Would he recognize her if ever he found her?
#
Drum went back to the bathroom and threw up his breakfast. I’m really sick here, he assured himself. Then he crossed the landing again to Annie’s room, lay down on the sofa and fell immediately into a dark and dreamless sleep.
He woke to blackness as deep and featureless as his sleep, closed his eyes, uncertain if he were really awake, or if this still knowing was itself a dreaming. When nothing happened to confirm his state one way or another, he opened his eyes again, and as they adjusted to the dark, he could barely perceive a gray rectangle of window, the outline of a chair before it, and the contour of head and shoulders belonging to a figure sitting in the chair.
“Annie?” Drum inquired of the dark.
He sensed the figure watching him before she spoke, “Not your Annie, Drum. I knew you before Annie, and now you know me when she is gone.”
A familiar presence flooded the room, but Drum could not identify this soul whose proximity comforted him, even while his unknowing made him afraid. “I know you, but I don’t know who you are,” thinking as he spoke that he sounded childish and nonsensical.
The light from the window fluttered as if wings had passed before it, then brightened slightly. In the silence after, Drum thought he was alone, until the voice spoke one more time, very quietly, almost a whisper, intimate and familiar, “You will have plenty of time to find out who I am, dear Drum, but you have love to lose before you find mine.”
Drum could see the rocker clearly now against the dawning. It was empty and still. Then all was dark again and he slept like the dead. When Drum woke, it was morning and the sun was shining and he felt full of light and health, also hungry. He went downstairs and put on a pot of water, made some tea, scrambled two of Ronan’s eggs for breakfast, ate them from the pan. Before Drum left the house, he found flour, yeast and salt, and kneaded a clutch of bread dough. He left it in a blue bowl with a chipped rim, covered by a towel, to rise until his return.
Then he went out to find the new day. It never occurred to him to lock Annie’s door behind him.
#
Days became weeks and weeks accumulated into a month and Drum still lodged in the house by the river. Eric fumed in Washington, but when Drum complained that he had never taken a vacation in all his years with the magazine, the editor relented and gave him the summer. Eric ended the conversation quietly but firmly, “But you do have a contract with us, you know. Come September, we’ll expect you to honor it.” Drum promised that he would.
So Drum was in the audience when Ben Coggins and Ronan Darner graduated from high school. Ronan went off to the army and Ben went to the state university to study forestry. Drum was there to comfort when Judy learned she had cancer, and Drum sat with James in the hospital during her surgery. James helped Drum find an old pickup to buy, in which he rattled around the cove, often with Lizbet as his passenger and accomplice, making photographs of rocks and clouds and trees and animals and people. Drum gardened and cleared brush. He drove up the creek to cook for the family while Judy was recuperating. James sent one of his young employees, a carpenter’s helper, Caleb Two Trees, who agreed to look after Annie’s homestead when Drum returned to his job in the fall.
In September, it was a changed Drum who dawdled over his breakfast on a train to Washington, as the mountains slid past the windows and the sun crested the hills to east. For the first time in his life he had friends it pained him to leave, people in his life he thought of as family, a place in his heart that he meant to return to as soon and as often as he could manage.
When he shook hands with Caleb the day before he left, Drum said, “I’ll be back to see what you’ve done with this old place.”
Caleb smiled, and in the soft musical speech unique to the boy’s family as far as Drum knew, “Sure then you will be. The cove has rooted in you deep now. You’ll have to come back to it.”
Drum smiled to himself, as he remembered the conversation, savored the truth of it, and he held out his cup gratefully when the waiter in the dining car gestured with his carafe. The waiter made Drum set his cup on the table before he poured. Watching the man move on to the next table, Drum tasted from his coffee, thinking he’d never been served bad coffee on a train. Then he went back to the newspaper left by the young soldier who shared his table earlier. He felt very far from home as he read the headline, Nazis Invade Poland.
#
The next year passed in a blur. First Drum was in Newfoundland freezing his fingers making photographs of rocky shores and grizzled fishermen. By the time word got to him there that Annie and Ruth Coggins had drowned along with one other student when their chartered bus slid off an icy road and toppled into Beaver Lake, the funeral was done and the girls buried. Lizbet had the flu and missed the trip. Before Drum could mourn for his friends or think about going home, Eric sent him off to the northwest freezing his fingers making pictures for a National Parks issue. Drum photographed mountains and rivers and large, potentially dangerous wildlife. The landscape there thrilled and awed him, but he felt like a tourist the whole time. The sharp towering mountains and raging rivers did not inspire any sense of belonging in him, and Drum rode the train back to Washington homesick for Annie’s little house by the river where the land was greener and gentler, and the mountains were tall and rough enough to make him feel small, but not so stark and fierce as to make him feel diminished.
Eric grumbled when Drum took time off and spent Christmas and New Year’s in the Cove with the Coggins clan. All present tried to set aside their mourning for Drum’s visit, and made a valiant attempt at good spirits, though Judy obviously didn’t feel well, and when he boarded the train north on his way to photograph Adirondack waterfalls frozen in the snow, Drum had no doubts about the location of home.
Through the summer, Drum was continually on the road, photographing tall buildings in big cities, and herds of humans milling about without any of the purpose and intention of wild creatures. Drum considered cities as a truly barren sort of wilderness, lacking any of the spiritual comforts of unregulated nature.
Back in Washington, he sat listening to Ed Murrow on the radio describing the German bombs falling on London when the phone rang. Drum chewed a bite of his ham sandwich, swallowed, and picked up the receiver on the third ring, “Hello, this is Drum.”
“Drum, it’s James Coggins. Afraid I have some more bad news.”
“How bad, James? Is everybody all right down there?”
“Judy’s back in the hospital. They’re running more tests, but the doctor isn’t encouraging us any.”
“James, I just got back from an assignment, Give me a few days to get grounded here, and I’ll head home if you need me.”
“There’s nothing you can do, Drum. Wait and pray is all any of us can do, but Judy would like to see you.”
“Keep me posted, James. I’ll let you know as soon as I can get away from here.”
“I’ll do that. Take care of yourself.”
“I’m just fine, James. All of you take care of one another. I’ll see you soon.”
“Soon, then,” James said and hung up.
Drum had barely finished his sandwich when the phone rang again, “Drum, this is Eric. Have you unpacked yet?”
“I’m afraid to ask why you’re asking, Eric.”
“We have you on a flight with an AFO ferry pilot out of Gander tomorrow night. You’re going to London to photograph the bombing. Richard Holford is already there.”
“How long?”
“Two weeks at most. We need to get this along quick.”
“As soon as I’m back, Eric, We need to sit down and talk.”
“I’ll buy you a steak, Drum. Our driver will pick you up in an hour.”
Drum hung up the phone without waiting to hear if Eric had more to tell him. “Shit,” he shouted to the indifferent air.
#
Horace thought if he had to be stranded out of his life and time he could not have landed in a better place. The Laurel would do nicely until Heaven came along. He looked into his basket more than half full of tomatoes from Li’s garden and decided he had enough room left to cut some basil. The Laurel summer was already slipping away into a golden autumn and this would likely be their last cutting for the season. When Horace came through the kitchen door with his aromatic burden, Li was sitting at the table stirring her tea. He could tell by her dress she was about to be away on a mission.
She looked up as Horace set the brimming basket in a chair opposite her at the table. Li rewarded his labors with the smile that always made him peacefully content to remain in his present state for a little while longer, “And what have you brought me, kind Horace? Is that basil I smell?”
“Some tomatoes for ketchup, and basil, yes. I thought I would make some pesto for you.”
“You know the way to a woman’s heart, my friend.”
“Your heart is open to every lost soul you meet, Li. You have on your gray dress. Are you going any place I remember?”
“Only to a bombing. They’re having another war over there.”
“Do you enjoy getting blown up?”
“I won’t get blown up. Whatever happens, I’ll hurry right back here where I can savor your pesto.”
“You’ll be back soon, in any case, I hope.”
“We always come back. That’s the rule. It will be like I never left. While I’m yonder, Ernest wants to take you out toward Poplar Spring where he’s found a place you might like for your own. It has good water, and the river at hand, and enough bottomland to do a little farming. If you like it, he’ll take you down to Beaverdam to work out a trade. He wants to introduce you to his people in the Guilds. They’re looking for somebody to take things in hand and he told them about how you saved your place from the grays.”
“I didn’t save anything, Li. My friends and I just raised enough ruckus to worry some people in power into doing the right thing.”
“You were there to make a difference, Horace, and in spite of yourself, you did. Go with Ernest while I’m gone. It may be that you can make some difference here. I didn’t sing you over just for the fun of it.”
“No?”
“In your case, Horace, it was also fun.”
To be continued-
Next week, in the conclusion of Chapter Seven, London is falling down just as Drum arrives.
Walk in hope-
-henry