Against the Tide of Years Read online

  “Let’s go,” she said quietly.

  They padded down the stairs, the wood creaking sometimes, and into the big kitchen at the back of the house, flanked by the sunroom that overlooked the rear garden. For a moment they busied themselves with preparations for tonight’s dinner, seeing that the wood stove was fed and bringing out the suckling pig from the pantry. Alston chuckled at that; two women in Samurai-style steel armor with long swords across their backs, feeding the nineteenth-century wood stove in a house last remodeled by a California investment banker in the dying years of the twentieth century.

  And those girls upstairs were born three thousand years before me, but they’re the future.

  The breakfast oatmeal was bubbling quietly in an iron pot atop the stove, but it wouldn’t be ready for another hour and a half. They cut themselves chunks of bread and washed it down with whole milk from the jug in the icebox, then fastened their boots and took the wooden practice swords in their hands as they let themselves out. Nantucket was cool in the predawn blackness even in late summer, the air damp and smelling of salt, fish, whale oil from the streetlamps, woodsmoke from early risers. The two women crossed over to the north side of Main Street, turned onto Easy Street and then South Beach and began their run, bodies moving with smooth economy to the rattle and clank of the armor, hands pumping in rhythm.

  “Better you than me!” a wagoneer called to them, yawning at the reins.

  Marian recognized him and gave a wave; he’d been with the Expeditionary Force in Alba. Odd. So many got killed, and instead of throwing stuff at me, the survivors like me.

  “Easy day,” she said to her companion. “Only an hour”—running out to Jetties Beach, down the sand cliffs, some kata on the wet sand, then back—“and we’ll have to head in to start dinner.”

  “It is a holiday,” Swindapa answered, then sprinted ahead, laughing in sheer exuberance at the day and at being alive.

  Very much alive, Marian thought. And that makes me feel like livin’ too.

  “I never thought I’d be nostalgic about living in fear of starving to death,” Jared Cofflin said.

  “You aren’t,” his wife replied succinctly. “You’re just feeling hard-done-by.”

  The Chief Executive Officer of the Republic of Nantucket stared down at the papers on his living-room table; the tall sash windows of the Chief’s House were open to the warm evening air and the sounds and smells of summer, and roses bloomed outside in the narrow scrap of garden. It’d been an inn just up from Broad, originally built as a shipowner’s mansion back in the 1840s. Sort of a running joke between them and Marian and Swindapa, the Cofflins on Gay Street and the Alston-Kurlelos on Main.

  “Balance of payments? Balance of payments? The whole damned island is sent back to 1250 B.C.—”

  “That’s 1242 B.C. now, dear.

  “1242 B.C., and I’m supposed to worry about the balance of payments. Christ, I remember when we were all wondering about how we’d get through the winter.”

  “Marian! Get away from that!” Martha called.

  A seven-year-old girl with straw-blond pigtails snatched her hand away from a cut-glass decanter and went back to pulling a wheeled model ship across the floor. Cofflin’s expression relaxed into a smile. If the island had stayed in the twentieth, he’d never have met Martha—not beyond nodding as they passed in the street, at least. No little Marian, then. No Jared Junior or Jennifer or Sam, either. Two of their own, and two adopted from the orphans of the war in Alba. He and his first wife had never been able to have children and never got around to adopting, and then Betty had died back half a decade before the Event. Strenuous, youngsters are, but worth it, he thought. Of course, ending up with four at his age was more than strenuous.

  “And then this bunch want to start a new settlement down in Argentina,” he went on. “As if we weren’t spread out enough already.”

  “Dear, there’s no law against emigrating. We can scarcely send Marian out after them for leaving without permission.”

  “Speaking of which,” he said, tossing down the papers. “There’s young Pete Girenas and his group of let’s-get-ourselves-killed enthusiasts. Christ. Should I have sat on them? They might have given up—”

  “What’s their average age, Jared?”

  “He’s the oldest, and he’s all of twenty-one.”

  “Well, then.”

  Cofflin sighed. “Let’s get going. I’ll think about that later. Marian’s expecting us for the anniversary party.” His daughter looked up at the sound of her name. “No, sweetling, Aunt Marian.”

  Young Marian’s middle name was Deer Dancer; that was what “Swindapa” meant, in English. Damn, but I’m glad the Eagle was close enough to get caught up in the Event. God knows how I’d have pulled us through without Marian. Or without Martha, or Ian, or Doreen, Angelica Brand, Ron Leaton, or Sam Macy, or . . . well, particularly without Marian.

  He looked at his watch. “Speaking of which, where’s—”

  “Hi, Unc, Martha.” Vicki Cofflin came through the door with a bound and scooped up the child. “How’s it going, midget?”

  Cofflin smiled as his niece tussled with his daughter and Martha rounded up the rest of the offspring. Vicki didn’t have the Cofflin looks, but then, her mother had married someone from away, as Nantucketers said—from Texas, at that. He’d been off-island when the Event happened, a particularly final form of divorce.

  Vicki was stocky rather than lanky, with a snub-nosed freckled face and green-gray eyes. She wasn’t in uniform, this being a family-and-friends evening—he tried to keep some distinctions between that and government work. The jeans were pre-Event, her shirt was Murray’s Mills product, Olmec cotton spun and dyed with wild indigo here on Island, the shoes hand-cobbled from Alban leather.

  Our successors, he thought. Vicki’s generation, who’d come of age after the Event. To them the twentieth was fading memory; to their younger siblings, hardly that. To Cofflin’s own children it would be history learned from books and stories.

  “Evening, Vicki. How’s your mother?”

  “Ummmm, fine, Unc. You know how it is.”

  He nodded; Vicki didn’t get along all that well with her stepfather, and her mother had started a new family—one of her own, plus three Alban adoptees. Well, you pick your friends, but you’re stuck with family, he thought. Though it was natural enough, seeing as how Mary had lost her elder two boys to the Event as well as her husband. Although presumably they were still—the word made no sense, but English grammar wasn’t well adapted to time travel—all right, up in the twentieth.

  He pushed down a crawling horror that they all felt now and then. What if we destroyed the world, by being here? We could have. They could have all gone out like a match in the wind as soon as we changed something back here—all dead or not even that, all of them never existing, a might-have-been. The Arnsteins thought that the Event would produce a branching, two trunks on the tree of time, but nobody could know for sure. Come to that, nobody knew anything about the Event except what it had done.

  He shook his head and kneaded the back of his neck against the sudden chill. Martha touched him briefly on the arm, a firm, warm pressure; the equivalent of a hug to them, and he felt the tension slacken as he smiled back at her.

  It was a warm late-August evening as they stepped out, shepherding the children before them; the big American elms lining the brick sidewalks were still in full leaf, and the whale-oil lamps on their cast-iron stands were being lit by a Town worker with a long pole topped by a torch. The tower of the old Unitarian church stood black against the red sky ahead, still showing a little gold at its top in the long summer twilight.

  “Ummm, Unc,” Vicki dropped back a little to walk beside him, lowering her voice. “I’m a bit nervous. Having dinner with the Commodore.”

  He raised a brow. “Thought you did that as a middie,” he said.

  “Well, yeah, but that was . . . structured. Commodore Alston made a point of inviting groups of offic
er-candidates to dinner now and then.”

  “She doesn’t bite,” Cofflin said. “I read your report on the Emancipator ’s trials, too. Looked good.”

  “We did have that problem with longitudinal stability.”

  “Ayup. That’s why they call it a test flight, girl,” he replied, hiding a smile. “And she’s going to give you good news, next time you see her in her official capacity,” Cofflin went on. “You can take the second off the lieutenant—but you didn’t hear it from me.”

  “Yes!” Vicki whopped, pumping a fist, then self-consciously calming when Martha looked back over her shoulder with a raised brow. Cofflin had noted that the younger generation were a bit more spontaneous than his; probably influence from all the Albans around nowadays.

  “I was a little afraid somebody else would be put in to command the Emancipator when it was finished,” she said, burbling a bit.

  “Doubt keeps you on your toes,” Jared said, and then, “Evening, Ian, Doreen,” when they met the Arnsteins outside the John Cofflin House.

  “Evening all—hi, Vicki. Got the whole tribe with you, I see,” Ian said. David was waving to the Cofflins’ four from his father’s shoulders, prompting a chorus of “Give me a ride, Daddy!”

  “Ayup,” Cofflin said. Then, “all right, Jenny, up you go.”

  He hoisted his adopted daughter to his shoulders; she wrapped her arms around his forehead and crowed gleefully. Cofflin gripped her feet, partly for stability and partly to keep her sharp little heels from drumming on his ribs. Marian went up on Vicki’s shoulders, and Jared Junior on Doreen’s; somehow, it didn’t occur to anyone to ask Martha. She took a small hand in each of hers instead, smiling at the children’s giggling and the mock horse noises coming from the other adults.

  The bank and some of the shops were closing down, but the restaurants and bars on Main were full, spilling cheerful lantern light and noise and cooking smells onto the cobbles. He could see right through the Cappuccino Cafe to its little garden plaza beyond, hear the fiddle and guitar and flute from the trio performing there and the voices of the customers singing along, clapping and tapping their boots to the tune.

  “That’s a new one,” he said.

  We just lost sight of the Brandt Point light

  Down lies the bay before us

  And the wind has blown some cold today

  With just a wee touch of snow.

  Along the shore from Eel Point Head, hard a-beam Muskeget

  Tonight we let the anchors go, down in Fogarty’s Cove!

  It had a nice swinging lilt to it. “Sounds different now, that sort of song,” he said.

  One of the many small compensations of the Event was that with electricity a strictly rationed rarity, most of the types of music he hated with a passion were impossible. He wasn’t alone in that, either. Marian had told him once that to get rid of gangsta rap she’d have been willing to be stranded in the Jurassic with a pack of velociraptors in white sheets.

  My Sal has hair like a raven’s wing,

  But her tongue is like her mother’s

  With hands that make quick work of a chore

  And eyes like the top of a stove

  Come suppertime she’ll walk the beach,

  Wrapped in my old duffle

  With her eyes upon the masthead reach

  Down in Fogarty’s Cove!

  A girl was up on a table, dancing to the tune, but he’d give odds she wasn’t American-born. Fiernan, from the wild, patterned grace of the movements—dancing was a big thing in their religion and they got a lot of practice.

  She will walk the sandy shores so plain,

  Watch the combers roll in

  ’Till I come to Wild Rose Chance again

  Down in Fogarty’s Cove!

  “Certainly does have a different ring,” Martha replied. “For one thing, half the people singing it really do make their living at sea.”

  Jared nodded a little wistfully. His job kept him ashore and pinned to his desk much of the time—although he did insist on getting away at this time of year, usually to harpoon bluefin tuna. He could easily afford to pay the Town tax straight up in money, but there was a satisfaction to doing something useful with your hands. Not to mention doing a hard, dangerous job well enough to gain the respect of youngsters.

  He worked his big fisherman’s hands. It got harder every year, and sometime he’d have to let nature take its course. There was always the Boojum, his little twenty-footer. Someday he’d teach his kids how to single-hand a ketch.

  “Folkie stuff was always popular here,” Ian said. “Like you said, it has more of a, hmmm, resonance now. I understood a lot more about Homer once I’d seen a real battle with chariots and spears . . . although that’s something I could have lived with not knowing.”

  “Let ’em sing,” Cofflin sighed. “Got a difficult couple of years coming, unless I miss my guess. They’ve all worked hard, they deserve a party.”

  It was the last evening of what some bureaucrat at the Town Building had named, with stunning originality, the Civic Harvest Festival. They still celebrated Thanksgiving in November, of course, but this marked that first harvest of rye and wheat and barley, the year of the Event.

  The Councilors nodded and waved to friends and acquaintances as they turned south up Main; Jared returned a mounted policewoman’s salute as she rode by with her double-barreled flintlock shotgun on one hip; the horseshoes beat a slow iron clangor on the stones with an occasional bright spark.

  Have to think about putting down asphalt here, some note-taking mechanism in the back of his mind prompted. The tourists had liked authentic Ye Olde cobblestones, but they were as inconvenient as hell now, unlike the other features—lots of fireplaces, for instance—of Nantucket’s mainly early-nineteenth-century downtown. The noise when a lot of iron-shod wagon wheels hit them had to be heard to be believed, for starters.

  “I’ll be damned,” Ian said suddenly, craning his neck around so fast that his son whooped and buried his hands in the hair over Arnstein’s ears.

  “What?” Doreen said.

  “I saw—”

  “Saw what? Your jaw’s dropping, Ian.”

  “I saw a tattooed Indian with a harpoon walking down toward the docks.”

  “Why not?” Cofflin asked. “There are a few of them working the tuna boats, they’re good hands with a—”

  Then he wheeled about himself. A barbed steel point glittered for a moment in the light from the streetlamp beside the Hub, but the bearer was quickly lost in the crowd.

  “Gave me a bit of a chill,” Ian said. Doreen nodded, and Martha gave a slight dry chuckle.

  “Problem is,” she said, “we’ve all had our sense of the impossible wrenched about, badly.”

  Cofflin nodded. He still woke up some days with that sense of dislocation, a feeling that the solid, tangible world he saw and smelled and tasted around him was just a veneer over chaos. Something that might spin away, dissolve like a mist at sea and leave . . . nothing? Or another exile beyond the world he knew. If once, why not again?

  “What’s wrong, Daddy?” Jenny said anxiously, feeling the moment of shivering tension in his shoulders.

  “Nothing’s wrong, Jenny,” he said, reaching up with a reassuring pat and putting the same into his voice. Jenny’ll grow up with that, he thought. The Event would seem quite reasonable, if you grew up with it. In a couple of generations they’d probably think of it as a myth, and ’way down the road some professorial pain in the ass would “prove” that it was a metaphor and hadn’t happened at all.

  They quieted the children and walked further up Main, past the Pacific Bank. Coast Guard House had been known as the East Brick back before the Event. A whaling skipper had built it and the two others beside it in the 1830s, red foursquare four-story mansions in the sober Federal style that rich Quakers had favored back then. All three and the Two Greeks, their neoclassical rivals across the street, had been owned by coofs, rich mainlanders who were not on the Islan
d at the time of the Event.

  Vicki swallowed and ran her hands over her hair—probably had memories of being called on the carpet here, since it was Guard HQ.

  Jared Cofflin grinned; he’d turned the East Brick over to Marian Alston for residence and headquarters when the Eagle returned from its first trading voyage to Alba, that spring right after the Event, and he’d done it with glee.

  Part of his pleasure in that was the thought of the California financier who’d paid three-point-seven million dollars for it just six months before and God knew how much in renovations and furnishings. One very irate moneyman, wandering through the primeval Indian-haunted oak woods of the Bronze Age island that the twentieth century had presumably gotten in exchange, looking for his missing investment. Maybe Jesus could love an investment broker, but Jared Cofflin didn’t intend to even try.

  He gave another spare chuckle as they walked up the brick sidewalk, careful of the roots of the elms that bulged the surface.

  “What’s the joke?” Ian asked.

  “Thinking of the fuss back up in the twentieth, when they woke up and found us gone and nothing but trees and Indians on the Nantucket they got,” he said. “Christ, can you imagine what the National Enquirer crowd must have done?”

  It was an old joke, but they were all laughing when Cridzywelfa opened the door.

  “The ladies are in the kitchen, Chief, working all day after the morning,” she said with a quick, choppy Sun People tang to her English. “They said to park yourself, and I’ll take the children on to the back yard through.”

  Cofflin nodded, chuckling again at the way New England vowels went with the Bronze Ager’s accent. Paak the caa in Haav’d yaad ’n go to the paaty. With no TV or recorded sound to sustain General American, it sounded like the native Nantucketers’ clipped nasal twang as gradually coming out on top in the Island’s linguistic stew.

  Revenge of the Yankees.