Now & Then Page 7

  “I don’t know where I am,” he blurted out. “What are you all doing here? I mean, why are you dressed like that?”

  Deirdre stopped circling the boy. She had dark hair, spun with a streak of white near her temples. It was pulled back and wrapped intricately around her head, but her skin was smooth and fresh, making Joseph think of a peach.

  “Finn thinks you’re from America. Is that so? But Finn here is a butcher, and they know carcasses better than people. Were you on one of the ships? We’ve had more ships run aground and splinter onto the islands than you can imagine.”

  Joseph suddenly realized that he could play this like a computer game, the fantasy games that his friend Oscar always had running at his house. Oscar always created his characters with a strategy in mind. Joseph needed the advantage here, and he needed to accumulate points. He needed time to think, to figure out what was happening. Was his mind playing some weird kind of trick? But he didn’t want these people to know where he was from, not yet. He didn’t want them calling his father, or the police.

  Anna had told him once that it was sometimes easier to tell people you were from Canada when you were traveling, or at least that she had been tempted to do so. Why did that suddenly pop into his head? Make a move, tell Deirdre where he’s from, but don’t make a mistake.

  “No, not America. Canada,” said Joseph, looking Deirdre dead in the eyes.

  He saw something flicker across her face as if the woman could see something clear into his mind. But he didn’t dare switch from one story to another; now that he had made his choice, he had to stick with it. Deirdre turned and picked up his bowl to refill it.

  This is what Joseph decided in the amount of time that it took for Deirdre to serve him another bowl of soup: he had to run away from home and never go back. It would be better this way. His head cleared more and more as he ate. The soup warmed his entire body. He needed a plan, and this time it had to be a good one, not a half-assed plan like the one he and Oscar had cooked up when Oscar had called and said come on over, I’ve got two hits of X and the keys to my grandmother’s car, let’s drive to fucking New Jersey. That had turned out great. Jail. Oscar’s parents had come and gotten him within hours, and he had cried like a third-grade baby when he’d been released. But not as terrified as Joseph had been when he’d been left alone.

  The people here, wherever he was, only knew his first name, and he was going to keep it that way. He didn’t want to get sent home. He needed time to strategize, that’s what his wrestling coach had always told him; you had to think three moves ahead of your opponent. And you had to make the first move so fast that the opponent didn’t have time to think. And lastly, never, ever give up, even when hopelessly pinned to the mat. But who was his opponent?

  Deirdre left again through a hallway at the far end of the room. He put on the socks and boots that she had given him. The socks didn’t stretch enough; they were more like some kind of wool, which he hated because it made his skin itch. But as soon as he put on the boots, he was glad that he had the cushioning of the socks. Could they possibly have given him less comfortable shoes? The clothing gave more weight to the idea that this could be that old dungeons and dragons game, where everyone dressed up crazy and took on a character.

  Deep, resonant voices from the stairway brought him to his feet. Finn and another man appeared.

  “Joseph, this is Mr. Edwards, the house manager for Colonel Mitford, the lord of the manor that you’re standing in. I’ve told Mr. Edwards that you don’t yet recall how you came to be floating in our dear waters,” said Finn, who turned to Mr. Edwards and stage-whispered, “his mind has had a shock, that’s all, give him time. He’s quite muddled.”

  Mr. Edwards was dressed much finer than either Finn or Deirdre. He wore a vest beneath his jacket and a tie around his neck, wrapped like a scarf. Joseph guessed he was a few steps up the rungs in importance.

  Mr. Edwards stared at the boy, regarding him from head to toe. “Finn tells me that you’re an American. Is that so?”

  “No, I’m from Canada.”

  Finn looked at Deirdre and raised an eyebrow, which Mr. Edwards couldn’t see.

  Mr. Edwards’s face illuminated with interest, and his mouth formed a silent oh. “The colonel has a particular interest in Canada. He has land holdings there. He’ll want to see you. He has no love of the Irish, so if you’d been an Irish lad who washed up on the shore, you’d be no concern of his. Follow me.”

  Joseph had a moment of panic at being taken away from the people he’d met. Neither one of them had done anything harmful; in fact, they had fed and clothed him, and now he was being taken somewhere else.

  “Could you tell me first where I am?”

  Mr. Edwards nearly skidded to a stop and twisted his head around at the boy, scowling. “You’re between Waterford and Tramore,” he said.

  “And where is Waterford and Tramore?”

  A plump silence filled the large kitchen, blossoming out until it began to pulse.

  “Boy, this is Ireland.”

  The incongruity of being in Ireland jolted Joseph, and he began to rock, ever so slightly, back and forth. His feet moved into a fighter’s stance, with his weight distributed evenly, knees flexed, body poised, pulsing with boiling energy from head to toe. First one foot, then the other, rocking. He was in Ireland, someone was lying, and he was not going anywhere with this guy who looked like the high-school vice principal. Something was more wrong than anything had ever been wrong before, even when he’d been in jail in New Jersey. He gauged which one of the men he’d have to take down. The one with the tie wouldn’t be ready, even after he ducked his head and brought down Finn. Joseph began to pull his energy into the center of his body.

  Suddenly he felt a hand on his arm and Deirdre was in front of him, filling the space between him and Mr. Edwards. Her hand was small and hot, and it was latched firmly to his wrist. The entire side of her body was pressed against his right side.

  “Should we reconsider this arrangement? The boy has a befuddlement that I’ve seen before with seamen after the ocean has shaken the sense out of them. Let’s get this lad a breath of fresh air, give him the rest of the day to calm his nerves before you present him to Mr. Mitford. I don’t think he’d take kindly to the boy vomiting like a sick dog, or worse yet, sick with the scutters. I’ve got just the thing for him—warm breezes, a bit of hot whiskey to settle his stomach, and a good walk about in town,” said Deirdre.

  Joseph stopped rocking. Mr. Edwards backed up, putting an entire body length between himself and the boy. He cleared his throat.

  “This evening, then. Do whatever it is that you do,” he said with a mocking tilt to his head. He spun around and made for the stairway.

  Deirdre released her grip on Joseph. She turned to Finn.

  “Go get Taleen and the night cooks. Tell them that I need them in the kitchen now. The lad and I are going out. He needs to see where he is,” she said.

  Joseph’s legs relaxed and he let himself be led out the door, following Dierdre as if he’d done so all his life. She spoke to him over her shoulder as she opened a heavy door to the outdoors.

  “Get ready, boy. You have much to see, and I pray to God that your brain cools down. Hotheaded lads do poorly here, whether they are from Canada or Tramore.”

  Brilliant sunlight poured over Joseph, and he automatically shielded his eyes.

  “Come this way,” commanded Deirdre, “and see what’s about.”

  For a small woman, Deirdre moved quickly, dodging clumps of moist horse manure as if she’d been a dancer. Joseph’s muscles felt suddenly limp and disconnected, and he struggled to keep up with her, his legs skidding out from under him on the unpredictable cobblestones. A high garden wall marked their path on the right, blocking his view. Joseph turned around to see where they’d come from, a chance turn of his head. He pressed his backside against the wall, letting his body sink against the tightly fitted rocks.

  “Wait a minute,” he said. �
�Is that where we just came from? It looks like a castle, or almost a castle.” He rubbed his eyes with the backs of his hands. “Tell me again where we are?”

  Deirdre double backed to him and regarded the boy, searching for something in his face.

  “Give me your hands,” she said. She examined his palms, the backs of his hands, and his mostly clean fingernails. She rubbed her thumbs quickly over the palms of his hands before releasing them.

  “This estate is Glenville. Take a good look; it’s one of the finest manors in Waterford County. I’ve worked for this family since I was a child, which is longer than you can guess. Taleen is my youngest child and my final one. You’d not believe how many children I’ve brought forth, so I won’t tell you. How old are you, lad?”

  Joseph normally didn’t like it when women talked about bearing children, leading to horror stories of birth and unmentionable things, but Deirdre’s voice had a musical lilt to it, and he willingly traveled on her words, riding them and eating them up like cotton candy.

  “How old am I?” he repeated, blinking in the brilliant daylight. “I’m sixteen.”

  There should be no harm in telling her his age; indeed, there was no point in trying, since she was someone’s mother and they could always figure out how old kids were. But he must remember that he was from Canada. He had to stick to that story. Montreal, Canada. He’d been to Montreal once.

  “Sixteen years old,” hummed Deirdre, as if she was ready to burst into song. “You don’t work, you’re not a stable hand, no shoveling, pitching, chinking, chopping, none of that for you. Your hands are without a whisper of callus.”

  “No. I’m in school, that’s why. In Montreal.”

  Three men walked by them, dressed in pants that ended oddly, several inches above their shoes. Their leather vests were deeply stained in dark splotches. One carried a tight bundle of splintered wood; one carried a cloth bag brimming with tools, a handsaw and other things that Joseph couldn’t recognize. The third man carried an empty wooden bucket.

  Deirdre nodded at them. “Stop at the kitchen door and tell them I said you all need to have some of the soup I made. Tell them so.”

  The more he looked around, the more he thought of Oscar and his computer game, which had looked just like this place. Oscar was addicted to The World of War Craft. Joseph had tried it, and he’d liked it, but it hadn’t grabbed him by the throat the way it had with Oscar, who’d dove into the game for days and weeks and had had to be hauled out of his room by his father for both food and showering. Oscar had created his own avatar, a character on a quest who had helpful powers like restoration and the ability to freeze people into statues. Perhaps the people he was seeing here could be so crazy about the game that they all dressed up like their characters and talked in accents.

  And then a sharp needle of memory pierced his skull and he remembered the water and being pulled with a fearful velocity through it and having to breathe, feeling his body turn inside out with gut-spinning certainty. And Anna, he’d gone somewhere with Anna and they’d been ripped apart when the loud sucking sound had tried to crush his eardrums.

  He looked back at the manor, now about a football field length behind them. The walls of the building glowed golden, illuminated by the late-day sun. The manor seemed to go on forever, four stories in some places.

  “So this isn’t like a hotel, is it? This is one family’s home?”

  “Yes, one family swimming in wealth,” said Deirdre. “Can you walk more, or are you going to swoon on me? If we walk down into Tramore, it may settle you and give a notice of your bearings, which you have clearly left in the ocean.”

  Joseph rubbed his fingers along the stone wall. The rough grit of stone felt real along the pads of his fingers; Deirdre’s hands had been real; the smell from the horse manure had been real.

  “I’ll follow you,” he said.

  And they walked and walked, and it was not until they emerged onto a rutted lane about thirty minutes later that Deirdre let them pause.

  “We’ve just left the boundary of Mitford’s estate. Now, let’s step lighter, with the weight of labor lifted from us, and bring you to the village.”

  Joseph smelled the salted air that rushed up to meet them. He wanted to call Anna, just to let her know that he was alive. He wanted to ask Deirdre if there was a cybercafe, if he could borrow a cell phone, but already the words felt wrong and he chewed them before they could leave his lips. He looked up at the sky and already knew that there would be no contrails, no jets overhead. It was the silence from the sky that most alarmed him.

  Only once, when he’d been just a kid in third grade, had he ever seen the sky go quiet. It had been his father who’d pointed it out. For the three days after the World Trade Towers and all the rest of that stuff, no planes had been allowed in the sky.

  “Joey, come out here,” his father had yelled from their blacktopped driveway. “Remember this. Remember how screwed up everything is when the skies go silent.”

  And that is just what a sky was to him without the distant hum of engines propelling planes in steady arcs overhead. There were no planes, jets, none of that. He followed Deirdre, letting her stay a few steps ahead of him, until she stopped, hands on her hips, and said firmly, “Keep up with me. I don’t like someone walking behind me. Come on now.”

  They walked side by side, staying to the rutted land, crossing a field along a well-worn footpath, coming out into a grove of trees, following a path through the woods that felt to him like a tunnel. Deirdre was small; the top of her head came to his shoulder. Like her daughter Taleen (who had already come to his mind twenty times on their walk) her hair was very dark, not brown, but a deep color, like old furniture. Deirdre must have been old, as old as his father, but she didn’t move the way old people did, hauling their bulk around like weary cows.

  Once they were through the woods, they had to cross a stone wall. Deirdre startled him by trotting up to it and jumping over it, lifting her long skirt just enough so that Joseph could see the tops of her boots. She jumped like a deer or a cat, as if gravity didn’t affect her and she could leap straight up. She seemed to have forgotten his presence for a moment, but after her gazelle leap, she turned to him with a shy smile.

  “Ah, the small pleasures are the most satisfying. Come on, the village is not but another mile.”

  And then they were on tiny streets, some curved, some with cobblestones. Joseph heard the buzz of the place, as if someone had turned up the volume: babies crying, horses clipping along, a man sharpening an axe head on a circular grinding stone, which he moved by a foot pedal. Someone tossed a bowl of water out a side window. Suddenly they were in the heart of it, and below the town, he saw the port, crammed tight with ships of all sizes. He looked as far as he could to the left at the massively long beach, then to the right, then back where they had come from, and he let his gaze run out past the ships again.

  Joseph didn’t want to ask Deirdre the date, although he could think of little else. He wanted to see it written down. Something had happened when he’d been with Anna, somehow they had been sucked into water and then they’d been pulled apart. But he knew exactly where he was; a boy in a shitload of trouble, arrested, caught with a stupid hit of Ecstasy in the car, thank you very much Oscar, and Anna, he remembered reaching for her, grasping at her as she’d turned into something like air.

  “Is there a newspaper I can read?” he asked.

  Deirdre tilted her head and considered. “We do love the word, and we’ve newspapers. But there are newspapers and then there’s trouble. Which do you want?”

  Joseph did a quick tally of everything he knew so far. Given his evaluation of the situation and the silent skies, he said, “I’ll take trouble.”

  “I thought as much.”

  She led him along a smaller street and came to a door above which hung a sign that read Book Bindery: Thomas Fitzgerald.

  Deirdre opened the door and stepped inside. She greeted a man who was hunched over a tabl
e, his arm pressing down hard with a stamp. Deirdre spoke to him in another language, the sound of which jolted Joseph. Was it German, Dutch? What was it? All he could tell was that the man stared at Joseph and shook his head no. Then Deirdre spoke in a smooth persuasive manner, leaning over the table and laughing and talking more until the man stopped bristling. He unlocked a drawer, pulled out a newspaper, and handed it to Joseph.

  “Read it here, lad,” he said angrily, then quickly reconsidered. “Excuse me manners. If you are here with Deirdre, that should be good enough for any of us. But you must read the newspaper here in my shop. It’s the Nation, and as such some British look upon it as near to treason.”

  Joseph had almost no idea what the man had said. He’d never heard of a newspaper called the Nation, not that he read newspapers very much unless forced to or unless his high school wrestling team was mentioned. But he was impatient with the long lead-in; he wanted the front page, the date. He took the newspaper, and Tom Fitzgerald pointed with his head to a plank bench along the far wall.

  “Keep in mind it’s over a month old. Takes that long to get here, and the print is all but dragged off the page by so many eyes by now.”

  Deirdre glanced over at the boy, then said to Tom, “Come outside with me, man; there’s sunshine, and you look as moldy as the dark side of a tree.”

  Tom’s chair scraped along the floor and the two of them stepped through the small door to the street. Joseph peeked from a window and saw that they were hovering near the door. He unfolded the paper with a snap and looked immediately at the top of the border. The Nation. August 12, 1844. Published in Dublin. So this must be about September 12, 1844 if what the man had said was true.

  A brittle reality rattled into place, clinking like tin in his gut. Only a small bit of him had latched on to his first theory, that this was a computer game or a reality TV show prank or anything but this. The part of him who’d reached for those beliefs was a child, and in an instant, the child vanished. If Anna had been here, she could have figured all this out, but there was no sign of her.