The Legend of Garison Fitch (Book 1): First Time (21 page)

Much of her beauty, though, is only seen by me, I think. Certainly, she would turn the head of any red-blooded man who saw her, but I see more than that. I see the laugh behind her eyes that's always ready to bubble to the surface that someone who didn't know her might not notice. I have learned to recognize the looks on her face that signify everything going on inside her mind from humor, to sadness, to love. She probably knows me just as well, but I am no different from anyone else who thinks they have a great, hidden thought life that no one else knows. I can't hide anything from Sarah and would never try.

Sarah, moreso than most people would ever know, is a woman who loves to think on things. Our eighteenth century society doesn't allow much opportunity for a woman to speak out; but, at home, alone with me, Sarah enjoys speaking about things most people don't even think of. Politics, religion, mathematics, she loves to think about them all and discuss them with me.

Sunday afternoons, especially, as the children are taking their naps after church, she loves to discuss with me what we heard that morning in church. Like the Bereans the writer of Acts mentions, Sarah enjoys going over every word from the preacher's sermons (and even the hymns), to see if they are truly what scripture says. She has a nearly photographic memory for such things and has aided me more than once in a legal case as she remembered word for word what someone said. Maybe it's a skill that comes from all the years she was forced to live quietly in the background and listen only, but I have to believe some of it is natural and inborn as well.

As the menfolks stand around and discuss politics in the town square, the women may be having their discussion only five feet away; but to the men they are a world away. And maybe the women regard the men and their discussions the same way. But Sarah has proven to me more than once that her ear has been turned more to the men's conversation than to the ladies'. Many of the men in town would be shocked to learn that she has a much better grasp of the world and its situations than they do. Again, much of that comes because she thinks, rather than just reacts.

There can't be many like Sarah, in this century or any other. If there are, I never met them. Nor do I care to. Sarah is all I'll ever need.

Garison was up with the sunrise and helping Sarah fix breakfast. The children were still asleep, so the parents tried their best to make no more noise in the kitchen of the big house than they had to. It was a world of difference from their little house on Sycamore Street where every sound was heard no matter how stealthily produced (and which Garison had quickly decided couldn't be upgraded as easily as he had originally thought—not and raise a family at the same time, anyway). So they worked on breakfast in the hopes they could eat in peace, but also knowing the children would be anxious to eat as soon as their eyes popped open.

As they sat down to eat, Garison said, "I think this will be the day."

"Huh?" Sarah asked. She had grown used to Garison speaking off the top of his head as if half a conversation had already passed, but that didn't mean she understood him each time. So she had learned to patiently ask what he was talking about and hope that the second try worked better than the first.

Garison smiled, realizing what he had done, and said, "I'm thinking this will be the day when I finally destroy the machine."

Sarah's eyes lit up as she asked anxiously, "Really?"

"Really," he nodded.

When, after a few more mouthfuls had gone by and it didn't seem as if he were going to elaborate, Sarah asked, "What prompted this decision?"

"The calendar," he replied cryptically.

She thought for a moment, trying to guess if there were some detail she should know but couldn't recall, before asking, "What about the calendar?"

"Don't you know what today is?"

Sarah replied, "March fifteenth, right?"

"Right."

"So?"

"So..." he prompted.

She returned, "So—if you don't tell me what you're talking about I'm going to hit you with that skillet."

"It was five years ago today that we met," he told her.

She looked at him oddly for a moment, then brightened and said, "You're right! How could I forget that? Wait a minute—no it wasn't."

"Huh?" it was his turn to ask.

"We met on the sixteenth. You traveled through time on the fifteenth."

He snapped his fingers and, with a grimace, said, "You're right. Still, I knew there was a reason why this seemed like the perfect day to destroy the machine. Closure, as they say in fiction."

"I'm just glad you're doing it."

"Why is that?"

She picked at her eggs for a bit before saying, "I'll just be glad when it's gone. I know you would never leave me, but—well—I just hate having it there. It's like...I don't know. I guess what I'm saying is that as long as it is there I will always worry about it somehow taking you back to where you came from." She reached out and put her hand on his arm and said, "I'll finally have you all to myself."

He patted her hand and said, "I do know what you mean. I've held onto it because it and the leather jacket and the knife were the only things from my past. It's time to let go, though. I'm never going back—and I don't want to. Time to burn that bridge."

Sarah got up to make the children's breakfast as Garison finished his toast. Checking to make sure the children were still asleep, she came over and, with a coy expression, sat down in his lap. "Has it really been five years?"

"Doesn't seem that long ago does it? Although, sometimes I feel like I've known you forever."

"Remember the skinny girl who talked to you when no one else would?"

"Vaguely," he replied with a look of faked innocence. "What was her name again? Comely young lass. I ought to go look her up."

She slapped him playfully on the cheek, leaving a pattern of flour as she had been making biscuits for their breakfast.

He smiled, still holding her in his lap, and said, "I remember it like it was yesterday. I remember seeing your smile and feeling like my legs were made of butter. I was seeing your shadow—and the sun made a halo of your hair—I thought I was meeting an angel. If I had had the nerve I would have stood right up and kissed you."

"I remember you," she sighed. "You looked so handsome...and so lost. You reminded me of a puppy the way you sat there by the tavern door with that sad look in your eyes. I wanted to take you in my arms right then."

"You did?"

"I fell in love with you almost from the first words you said to me, Garison."

"Really? Maybe I should have just stood right up and kissed you right in front of the tavern. It would have saved us a lot of time."

"If you had tried, I would have hit you so hard you would now be wearing wooden teeth." At his questioning glance, she laughed and explained, "I may have fallen in love with you at first glance, Garison Fitch; but I would kiss no man on the first meeting."

She returned to the stove and asked, "Have you decided what you're going to keep? From your machine, I mean?"

He thought for a moment, then replied, "Not really. I still have that Bowie knife my grandfather gave me. And I still have those clothes I was wearing when I first showed up, though I think the moths may have gotten at the shirt. Still, I think that and the jacket's enough for me to remember my old world by. Especially since that jacket's also what I wore to our wedding. You know, it's funny that the man who invented the most famous knife of all time—then died in the Alamo—has not even been born. Yet, I have a knife patterned after the one he invented. Strange, huh?"

"So much of what you have told me is strange."

"And you believe it? Believe me?" he asked seriously.

"I do. And sometimes I wonder that I do. From the very first time you told me, I have believed you." She was pensive for a moment before adding, "I have often wondered why. Had I heard such from someone else, I would have thought them crazy."

"You don't think I'm crazy?"

"I know you're crazy," she laughed in return. "But I also know you're truthful."

She turned to him and shook her head. "You need to take something off of the machine," she told him suddenly. "After all, you spent your life working on...What was it?"

"Particle physics," he replied. "Inter-dimensional travel. Whatever." It had all seemed less important in recent years, especially after the birth of his children. "I was a failure at whatever I was shooting for."

She laughed and mused, "It must have been terrible to talk to someone in those days. You had such terrible words. Particle physics. Osmosis."

"Well, most people didn't talk that way under normal circumstances. Just us geniuses," he joked, sitting up straight and trying to look proper.

"Genius?" she laughed. "The man who can travel through time but can't fix a water pump or ride a horse?"

"We didn't have those in my time," he excused.

"You didn't have horses?" she chided.

"No, Silly. We didn't have water pumps. Well, we did, but not like the ones here."

"Oh yes," she recalled with just a tad of sarcasm in her voice, "You said you had water right inside your houses. Just turn a knob, and water pours into a sink without you working for it."

"You say that as if you don't believe me," he replied with mock defensiveness.

"Garison," she said with a smile, "You really expect me to believe everything you've told me about life in the future?"

"You've always acted like you believed me before."

She laughed as she put the biscuits on the table and said, "It was either that or admit to myself that I had married a man who was completely insane."

"You really think I'm mad?"

"No more so than most."

He slapped her playfully on the bottom and she threatened him with a wooden spoon. "What will the neighbors think?" she asked with mock distaste.

"Nothing," he smiled, "They know we have three children and they probably know how we got them."

"The things you speak of, you lecherous old man," she laughed. "And here the town thinks of you as a saintly man with nary a thought of the physical pleasures."

"If that's so, they are stupid," Garison smiled. "What sort of fool would marry a woman as beautiful as you and not take full advantage of the physical pleasures? That, my dear, would indeed be a sin."

She licked her lips seductively, then hastened out of the room before he could respond and told the boys to get up for breakfast. Then she went and took Helen from her crib. As she returned to the kitchen, holding a sleepy Helen in her arms, she asked, "How are you going to get rid of the machine?"

He explained, "I have a plan for that. You see, I finally figured out that what got me here was a bolt of energy far greater than I intended—"

"Energy?" she asked. It was a word she had heard, but had never been familiar with. Not in this context, anyway.

"Energy," he said, trying to decide how to explain, "It's like lightning. Lightning is made up of what we call electricity. Actually, it will be called electricity. I don't think it has been discovered yet. A man named Ben Franklin will be doing that sometime soon. That and the cotton gin were the United States' only two contributions to the world. Well, and guerilla fighting, but they got that idea from the Indians. Energy is...how one body reacts to another. Like when I bounce a ball, it's the energy inherent within the ball and the surface it collided with that make it pop back up. That's a bad illustration for the subject at hand but I can't think of a better one at the moment.

"Anyway, I had a machine on my machine that produced electricity—energy. In fact, it produced almost as much power as a bolt of lightning—and you've seen how lightening can set a tree on fire."

"And your machine has that much power?" she asked in amazement. He had never really explained the workings of the machine—other than that it traveled through time—and she had always assumed it would be like now—incomprehensible. She could discuss politics and religion with the best of them, but when Garison got into his experiments he often talked in reference to a foundation she (and the rest of the world) did not yet have.

"Yes," he nodded. "Well, you see, I had not intended to use that much power. Unfortunately—or fortunately, as it turned out, for it led me to you—more power went through my machine than I had ever expected. At least, I'm pretty sure that's what happened. Without recreating the experiment, I can't know for sure—and I'm not about to recreate the experiment. See, it was like I got the full bolt of lightening, instead of just a fraction like I wanted. Instead of taking a short trip into another dimension, I took a trip that went through time." He added, more than a little confused himself, "Somehow."

"You may as well be speaking in a foreign language," she told him with a smile, "But continue. How will this—this energy—rid us of the machine? What was that name you used to call your machine by?"

"Bob. I'd almost forgotten all about that. Well, anyway, I'm going to take off the piece that regulates the power." When he saw her puzzled look, he said, "It's like when one uses a funnel. The funnel channels the water into a small stream so that it can be better controlled, right? I've seen you use a funnel when you pour milk from the bucket into smaller containers. My regulator acted as a funnel for the electricity."

She nodded, but he could tell she was still confused. He said, "Let me explain it this way: I am going to try to set the machine to do exactly opposite of what it did to get me here. I am going to reverse the power and send the machine into the future. The best way to do that is to just take the regulator off. So that's what I'll keep. Whether it will go back to 2005 or beyond is of no concern to me. It will be out of our way forever."

"But won't it take you with it?" she asked hesitantly.