The Ferryman’s Wife

by

Richard Bowes

At 7:40 on the first warm day of April, on a Tuesday, that least remarkable of days, the platform at Grove Hill train station was all but deserted. Cars soon arrived, a Country Squire first, a DeSoto V8 next, then a flood of fins and chrome. Commuters disembarked.

As 7:49 approached, Oldsmobiles jockeyed with Pontiacs; sunlight gleamed on waxed finishes. A few women got out of autos and waited on the platform. But mostly it was husbands who gave good-bye kisses to wives with hair still in curlers and babies with zwieback-stuffed mouths.

For in that year, 1956, the great nation of the West was reinventing itself, changing from a land, part urban and part rural, into something not seen in the world before.

Linda Martin sat behind the wheel of the blue and white Chevy Bel Air and savored her favorite moment of the day. She rolled down her window as Roy slid out of the passenger seat beside her, passed before the car making goo-goo eyes at six-year-old Sally in the back seat.

He doffed his narrow brimmed hat, ducked his head to the open window. His mouth tasted of Pepsodent, coffee, eggs and bacon and a single on-the-way-to-the-train Chesterfield. “Keep Lady Olivia amused,” he murmured.

“She’d be happier if you did that,” Linda whispered in his ear.

“Nab, no aristocrats for me. I’m a damn commissar. Comes the revolution, they all get shot.”

Linda giggled but glanced in the rearview mirror. She could just hear their daughter’s voice, loud and clear, asking in public, “Mommy, why is Daddy a commissar?” But Sally was watching intently for the appearance of the commuter train.

With the ghost of a wink, Roy stuck his hat on at the perfect angle and joined the marching husbands. Linda admired his easy way among the topcoated men. They were joined by old Mrs. Egan who liked to visit her specialists in the city and by Minnie Delahunt who, for reasons much speculated about, had kept her job in the fashion business even after getting married.

The train was out of sight as Linda turned on the radio for news. Driving out of the parking lot, she still felt Roy’s parting touch and holding that memory, was with him as he walked through a rocking car, greeting a man in horn rims whom they both knew through the PTA.

Roy found a seat, opened his briefcase. Unlike the rest of the passengers Roy could see in the dark and differentiate one set of footsteps from the dozens behind him on a crowded city street. And unlike almost anyone else in that time and place, he was aware of his wife’s contact. And he could deflect it, which he did with a little smile.

Linda smiled too as she steered into traffic. An announcer on the car radio said, “A perfect blend.” Maybe he was pitching coffee or a new miracle fabric. But to Linda it described the life Roy and she had made in this time and place.

Because a road crew was repairing the usual route, she detoured down Main Street.

“Mommy?” asked a voice with a keen edge. In the air was that precarious moment when a thought becomes an idea.

And Linda, her attention focused on the back seat, saw in the mirror the slight quiver of a six-year-old’s pigtails, the growing light in the eyes which were Roy’s eyes. “Yes, hon?”

“How long is Auntie Olives going to stay?” The idea took form.

“A little while. Why?”

“Because last week Timothy brought his rabbit to school and nobody else has one and everyone got to touch her.”

“And you wondered?” Linda felt the idea become a plan.

“No one else has an aunt from England. And she could sing.” The plan was broached.

Much of Linda’s concentration was focused on Sally. Most of the rest was devoted to negotiating traffic on the two blocks of shops that constituted downtown Grove Hill. So she only glanced at a delivery truck making a left turn beside Stillwell’s Grocery.

Just a black, closed truck driving down a shadowed alley, but it caught her attention. The driver’s face, seen for a moment in profile, was so ordinary as to escape the memory. The phrase “hard to pick out of a police lineup” occurred to her. Driver and vehicle evoked dark deeds when the whole point of a village like Grove Hill was never to suggest anything even remotely like that.

The voice from the back seat said, “Can she, Mommy? Huh?”

And Linda heard herself say, “You have to ask Auntie Olives, honey.” She realized that she too was calling their guest that.

Driver and vehicle were out of sight and contact. Alone, she would have cut back immediately. As it was, she drove to the Pathfinder Elementary School. Half distracted, she agreed that Sally could ask their house guest to be that week’s Show and Tell.

When Linda returned to Main Street ten minutes later, there was no sign of the delivery truck behind Stillwell’s nor anywhere else. In the gray stone and white clapboard stores of Grove Hill’s Main Street, she made quick purchases of a quart of milk, lightbulbs, a pack of cigarettes. In each place she made casual mention of a truck that she said had cut her off. Her discreet probe produced the information that there had been no deliveries that morning.

Roy, long gone down the tracks to New York City, would not be accessible until evening. She reached for Sally. Right hand on left side. Not like Perry Gibson next to her who had it wrong. Saying the magic words, “…one nation invisible….”

Linda considered the slippery path from proper precaution through solipsism to paranoia as she got back in the Chevy. Still, instead of heading directly home, she drove onto the parkway and off again. East Radley was the town next to Grove Hill. It lacked a commuter station and was considered a bit dusty and decayed.

A place on the comer where she turned was owned by an old Italian couple who had a small vineyard out back, a statue of the Virgin Mary in the front yard. The neighborhood was mostly large, older houses. As she had been taught since she was eleven, Linda did not reach out.

Abruptly, she felt the touch. Like a sudden ripple on the water, swirling leaves, a shooting star seen at the corner of an eye. Dearest? Mrs. Wood was home.

She tried to keep her memories of the truck, the driver, the people she questioned, as clear as they had been when she first saw them. Mrs. Wood accepted her offering.

Linda Martin pulled up in front of a tall shingled Queen Anne house. It had an old-fashioned conservatory attached. No car sat in the driveway and the blinds were drawn. A slide and some see-saws could be seen out back. The voices of children were heard. But the back yard was big and overgrown and the voices sounded far away.

Aware of neighbors and casual curiosity, Linda scribbled a note, an actual one about needing a sitter for that Thursday. She walked up to the front porch as if that was why she had come.

Bending to slip the paper under the door, she caught the images of the truck, the driver, the store-keepers on Main Street. All had been rearranged and examined. Clumsiness too is a strategy. Just that and no more. She had turned to go when Mrs. Wood touched her again. Your guest. Linda caught the image of a woman, wild-haired, naked. It took Linda a moment to realize what the woman was doing. Her passage is in your hands.

Linda remained bending. “Sally is safe?”

She saw another face then, black and white. Beautiful. Mrs. Wood smiled as if that hardly needed asking.

It was well after nine by the time Linda parked the car in her driveway. That was when she heard the voice. A soprano clean as a child’s trilled up the years from a place where being a mined woman was an identity and a full-time occupation.

I leaned my back up against some oak,

Thinking that he was a trusty tree.

But first he bended, then he broke,

And so did my false love to me.

Think of the song as compensation, Linda told herself as she opened the door and saw a petticoat, her petticoat from Bendel’s! draped over the hall table. Slips had been taken out of drawers and dropped on the floor without even being tried on. Linda followed the trail of undergarments down to the rec room. This world did not hold enough chemise and lingerie to satisfy the guest. Linda had come to regard it as like being around a magic animal, one which sang wondrously but shed everywhere.

Olivia Wexford sat in a green silk floor-length robe, her skin like fine porcelain. She brushed her auburn hair with long strokes. It was something she had, with great reluctance, just learned to do for herself. Still, the repeated gesture was elegant each time. She looked up as Linda entered, with an unguarded expression of cold speculation.

She wonders, Linda thought to herself, where I’ve been for the last hour when I should have been here entertaining her. In her slacks, blouse and French-bobbed brunet haircut, Linda was cute and knew it. But here she felt dowdy, almost sexless. The TV was on with the sound off. Captain Kangaroo and Mr. Greenjeans skipped around a table. Mr. Greenjeans, a proper second banana, was poker-faced but the Captain mugged each time he passed the camera.

The guest gave a surpassingly raucous laugh. “Amusing rustics,” she said. Her eyes sparkled, her face was animated. If one could ignore the background of pine paneling, the local florist’s calendar on the wall, she could have stepped out of a painting by Gainsborough or Romney, Lady Olivia Wexford at Her Toilette.

Hated and feared back home, unable to boil water, resentful of having to dress herself, disturbed and aroused that men could see her bare ankles, wherever Olivia was it would always be 1759.

Idly, out of habit, Linda brushed her guest’s mind. And was stopped abruptly by an image of a silk fan in pink and pearl. On the fan, half-dressed and agape, Bacchus and Ariadne encountered each other for the first time. With a slight nod, Linda backed off. Lady Wexford had a powerful protector.

Aware of what had just happened, suddenly reflective, Olivia sipped chocolate out of a doll-size china cup. “HE knew my life up and down, how I had lived it and what I’d do next,” she said. “HE promised me all of Time but little did I guess that I would see it as a fugitive in flight.”

She had fallen hard not for an ordinary lord, goodness help them all, some ass in a powdered wig and silk stockings. No, her particular daemon lover was a power of a kind that made Linda wary. It was not well to know more than a god wanted you to.

“In the last place where the Rangers had me, shock was a favorite word,” said Olivia. “It referred to glassy-eyed ex-soldiers, hysterical young women with skirts above their knees. And to me.”

Fresh from the ruins of her own world, Lady Olivia had stayed in a private nursing home just outside London in a certain 1920. This particular sanitarium was secretly controlled by the organization known, where they were known, as the Time Rangers.

“Scarcely could I concentrate my mind enough to wonder why I was there, much less what was to be done to me. Here, I have begun to unravel various mysteries.”

Linda saw the image of the fan snap shut, replaced by what looked like a Watteau painting. Light shone through trees, moss grew like velvet, a white body reclined, privacy protected by long auburn hair and chains. They were graceful chains but secure all the same. Lady Olivia Wexford was staked out in the woods. “Bait,” she said, “is what I will be, a playing piece in the games of the Rangers and the Gods.”

Linda thought to herself, “After what you and your lover boy did, you’re lucky not to have been burned at the stake.” Aloud she said, “Let’s finish getting you dressed. Makeup first.’

Olivia’s nose wrinkled. “In that last London where I stayed, girls who had not been kissed, much less deflowered, wore whores’ paint.”

“Nonetheless. We must honor local custom.”

“Let us,” Olivia said as she rose, and Linda noted how she barely overcame the instinct to issue orders, “Let us go into the city.”

“Not today. I didn’t arrange for a babysitter.” Linda thought of the black truck. Instinctively, she reached out. Through Sally’s eyes, a mile away, she saw a blackboard and on it the letter H written as big as a six-year-old.

“We’re going to the supermarket,” she said. Lids rolled over the guest’s wide blue eyes. Life with Sally had prepared Linda for these moments, so she added, “And on the way, we can have a driving lesson.”

Lady Wexford’s eyes opened at this and she allowed herself to be guided upstairs. A bit longer afterward than Linda would have thought possible, Olivia had helped to dress herself in a velvet jacket and a pair of Linda’s toreador pants under a flared skirt. She had put on flat pumps and was standing at: the front door.

“Lord Riot was what HE was called and after a summer of HIS rule the city lay in smoldering ruins. All burned, the palaces and churches, the docks and the slums. And the populace, gentry and commoners were gone to whatever place HE had led them. But in that other London where t just stayed, it was 1920 and while all else was changed, the palaces and churches still stood and nobody had ever heard of the summer of Lord Riot.”

“Damn right,” Linda thought. “The Rangers spent a lot of effort making sure your particular London never got heard of again.”

She opened the front door and Olivia stepped out. Linda noticed the other woman’s slight shudder as she entered an alien world.

In the driveway, Lady Wexford touched the hood and roof of the Chevy as if she: were acquainting herself with a new horse. While they drove, she listened intently to Linda’s explanation of the ignition, the steering wheel, the clutch, the gas pedal.

At the supermarket she was at once coy and haughty, dizzy in what seemed to her to be public nudity. Linda was aware of the assistant manager at the meat counter, an Italian kid, appraising them. Olivia noticed also. Linda couldn’t see the glance that was thrown, but the young man took a step back, face flushed, eyes wide open.

“Amusing rustics,” Linda thought. “That’s what we are for her.”

“Duz, Palmolive, Ivory,” Olivia said. “A cornucopia, a soap for every purpose. But every place looks like every other. Your house is the mirror duplicate of one at the comer of your street. The house across the road from yours looks exactly like one three doors down. You tell me this isn’t the same store we were in on Friday last?”

“Not even the same town. That was an A&P in Larchmont, remember? This is a Safeway. In the Leather Stocking Shopping Center in Grove Hill.” Then she repeated something she had said before to other refugees fleeing Upstream or Down. “These suburbs sprang out of nowhere. No one knows anyone else.” She added, “Here you are my English cousin, Olivia Smithfield. A bit odd, a bit exotic. But a recognizable commodity. Here everyone is a bit of an Anglophile. This is where you learn to blend.”

Lady Olivia’s eyes narrowed. Blending in was not why she had been born and raised. In the checkout line, she fumbled with a wallet and bills. The lesson for today was paying for purchases. In her prior life she had never touched so much as a penny. “Foolish colonial monies!” she said but smiled as she did, amusing the cashier and winning an approving nod from Linda.

It was well after noon by the time they had wheeled the cart out to the Chevy, loaded the groceries into the trunk, and sat in a booth at the back of a mostly empty luncheonette.

“You said that you were raised in this time.” Lady Wexford’s expression indicated that she found the idea fascinating and appalling.

The oldest student trick, Linda knew. Get the teachers to talk about their VERY favorite subject. Themselves. Still, her cover story came in layers, so she peeled one off and said, “I’m a Ranger’s wife. We go where he’s assigned. I’m happy that we’re where I can help him.”

“Yet you are not a Ranger.”

“No. My mother was. A station chief like Roy. 1950’s North America was her assignment. More or less the same one he has. Keeping the peace, managing the Time Stream. Jake Stockley was her husband. He was a Ranger field operative, kind of low level. Not a bad guy at all. Lovable. But he wasn’t my father. My dad was dead before I could remember him. My mother had remarried.”

Olivia listened intently. Linda found herself surprised by how much she wanted to talk.

“The first time we hit 1960, I wasn’t even two and didn’t know the difference between that and 1950. All I understood was we were in a new house. Outside Chicago. Mom and Jake were real estate agents. A nice cover. It fooled me.

“By my second 1959, I was eleven. I thought Tony Curtis was dreamy and had a major crush on Danny Larogga in my sixth grade class because I thought he looked like Tony Curtis. I was lobbying for a poodle skirt and training bra in exchange for having to wear braces on my teeth. Couldn’t have been more typical if I’d been trying.

“Mom had been dropping hints for a long while. And the evidence was all around me, the number of strange ‘friends’ who stayed with us, the way Jake traveled on business all the time, the fact that Mom read the papers, watched the news constantly but was never surprised by anything. So I knew, but I didn’t want to find out.” Linda looked inquiringly at Lady Olivia who nodded her understanding.

“At that point, Mom took me aside and explained that she and Ranger Stockley and I were going to move. Bad enough. But, instead of it being to an identical ranch house in another town, we were going where I could get to see them build the ranch houses. Where Tony Curtis was still waiting tables and Danny Larogga was being toilet trained.

“The name of our new home was 1950. The Korean War. Harry Truman. Ancient history. We, it turned out, had reached the end of Mom’s Beat. As Jake put it later, “Weird, huh kid, whores and cops have beats.”

Linda caught Olivia’s took, distant, speculative. She had said too much. “Want to get behind the wheel?” she asked.

As they got in the car, she reached out and was aware of blue. Bouncing in the air. The whole class had been given balloons. Sally’s was blue. The bus was here and she was taking her blue balloon home.

A few minutes later, Linda and Olivia were in the Chevy. Lady Wexford marveled as she headed for the parking lot exit. “As if I had in hand a team of a thousand horses!” In her enthusiasm, she stepped down on the brake. The car bucked and stalled.

A trailer truck with Wonder Bread logos was pulling into the lot. Gears ground, what sounded like a steam whistle blared. From his high seat, the trucker yelled, “Drive it or park it, lady!”

As he did, Linda saw a black delivery van, the same or the twin of the one that morning, speed by on the access road. Instantly, she took a deep breath and said. “Get out of the seat!” The van had already disappeared. It was between her and Pathfinder Elementary School.

Lady Olivia obeyed instantly. Ignoring the horn and the yelling, they changed places. Linda had orders to protect her guest. But she had a higher priority. She drove in the same direction as the truck. Olivia sat silent beside her. As they approached the school, Linda began to circle. She reached out:

Blue bounced beside her. Holding onto blue. Red across the aisle jumped back and forth. Green spun out of control. BANG! Green disappeared. Perry Gibson cried. Other kids laughed.

On a quiet street, Linda caught sight of the yellow bus making its slow, easy way toward a cluster of women and carriages and pre-schoolers. She looked around, saw nothing, and so made no move for the .32 caliber automatic concealed under the driver’s seat.

“It’s Sally, isn’t it?” Linda had forgotten about Olivia. “You have sensed a threat.” Linda nodded, circled the block. Found nothing. Pulled into a wider arc around the bus. “I would aid you however I can.”

The air was full of balloons and she was holding onto the blue balloon. All around were yellow balloons and red. But only one blue balloon. Perry, sticky with tears, grabbed for it and her elbow went out and stopped him.

Linda approached her house cautiously. She drove up the next street, looked at the back of her place and saw nothing. She pulled into her driveway as the yellow bus turned the comer. While it pulled to the curb, she checked the house and garage doors. No sign of forced entry.

“How long have you had the ability you just showed?” Olivia asked.

Linda knew this woman had studied her all the while her attention had been focused on her daughter. She cut the truth to fit the moment. “Before Sally? Randomly. And only with those I could actually see. With her? As you observed.”

She and Olivia walked out to the sidewalk. The balloon came toward them. “Mommy, I told them that Auntie Olives was from England and she’d sing.” Linda saw Olivia blink and realized that she too had caught Sally’s memory of standing before her class announcing what she was bringing to Show and Tell.

“Honey.” Linda pretended this hadn’t happened. “I said you had to ask her first. What if she doesn’t want to?”

Linda turned and found the Lady looking at Sally with a mixture of tenderness and regret. Olivia had a daughter. A child born and taken from her. Two hundred years ago. A few months before.

“I will, my dear Sally,” said Olivia. “I’ll sing and I’ll tell a story.” A thought seemed to amuse her. “I’ll tell you all about the Ferryman and the Wolf.”

ROY, LINDA, and Olivia had been invited to a dinner party that evening at the Stanleys’. George and Alice Stanley were celebrating their wedding anniversary. They lived two doors down on the block behind Roy and Linda Martin. Cindy, a rare teenager in this neighborhood of young couples and small children, had agreed to babysit with Sally.

When Roy got home, Linda told him about the truck. They agreed not to change their plans. But, as if on a whim, Roy went out the back door carrying a bottle of champagne. No fence or hedge separated their yard from the Hackers who lived directly behind them. He let the women go first, hung back. Scouting the ground, Linda knew, on the off-chance he had to come back from the party in a big hurry.

In her black party sheath, she watched Olivia sweep before her in a full skirt. Frank and Marge Hacker, on their way to the party, paused and awaited them. “How do you like America?” Frank asked Olivia.

“Your driving is exhilarating!”

“Different side of the road than in England.”

“Your provincial rules are an endless plague!’

Frank was dazzled; Marge was plainly annoyed. Linda caught a glimpse through their eyes of Olivia and herself. And of Roy behind them. He scuffed at something with his shoe.

Alice and George Stanley had gotten married shortly before he was sent over to England with the Army Air Corps. Wartime now seemed to them distant and romantic.

At dinner, Linda’s attention rode on a dream taking place in Sally’s bedroom a few hundred feet away. It involved a class of bad dogs who would not listen to their teacher.

Then she heard George Stanley ask Olivia, “Were you in London during the Blitz?”

Lady Wexford paused. Conversation stopped. Olivia said, with just a slight tremor. “Awful. Terrible. The city destroyed. Nothing but rubble.” Everyone made consoling noises.

After dinner, Marge Hacker remarked to Linda Martin, “You seem so far away.” She followed Linda’s gaze and saw Roy amid a group of men who were discussing the old Joe DiMaggio and the new Willie Mays. Roy was silent. Fie looked at Olivia, who was looking back. Several of the women, in phone conversations the next day, pinned Linda’s distance to the fine rapport that had sprung up between her English relative and her handsome husband.

“But you picked up nothing from the driver,” Roy said that night when he and Linda were in bed. Slightly drunk and needing sleep, he was reviewing her account of the delivery truck driver. “Clumsy,” he said. “Our Upstream friends use their human agents a lot more adroitly.”

“Unless they want them to be seen.” Linda lowered her voice, though Olivia was asleep down the hall. “Any word on how much longer our guest will be with us?”

“Another week, possibly two. Then she gets moved up closer to the Front. I don’t know what the game is.” He sounded wistful. In the Time Wars, 1956 was a rear area, far away from the action. “I thought you found her interesting.”

“Mrs. Wood showed me something today.” Linda felt him tense at the mention of Mrs. Wood. But she said, “Olivia was a wild-haired, pregnant Bacchae. She sat on a pile of rubble, naked except for a silk wristlet. She carried a head. Its mouth was open. Like it was still indignant at having been separated from its body.

“We in the Main Stream know the head’s former owner as King George III,” Linda said. “In that particular 1759, Lady Olivia Wexford helped tear it off his shoulders, impetuous minx that she is.”

“I say, no Boston tea party for Georgie that time around,” Roy murmured in a silly-ass voice and sank under deep waters. Even in sleep, Linda was deflected from his thoughts. What she felt when trying to touch them reminded her of the static between stations on the radio dial.

She remained awake in the midst of the quiet streets, the slumbering neighborhood. Then she saw a face, round and flushed, youthful but with deep, ancient eyes under white powdered hair. Olivia dreamed of her former lover. Linch automatically looked away.

Lord Riot was what the London mobs called him. He had an abundance of names along the Time Stream. Linch thought of ham as Dionysius. But Riot was as good as anything else.

Lord Riot had swept up a large part of the population of Olivia’s England, joined it to hordes from a dozen similar places, hurled the frenzied mass Upstream and pushed the frontier back a few years. The Gods were going down hard.

They have ruled the backs of our minds, the willing places in our hearts for a thousand generations. But their reign will last only as long as human thought and emotion. A couple of centuries Upstream is a Frontier. On the other side, beings move and communicate. But we would call them machines and they will call us meat.

Jake Stockley, Linda’s stepfather, had tried to explain to her the alliances of the Rangers and the Gods. She was twelve and first asking questions. “Politics makes strange bedfellows, kid,” he said. “Somewhere up the chain of command this game makes sense.” But even he didn’t seem convinced.

In that game, Olivia was a prize. It seemed to Linch that using Riot was like trying to harness a cyclone or ride a tidal wave, that Lady Wexford was dangerous to be near. On the night air, she heard a cry, saw an image sharp as a blade: an infant, swaddled, wrapped in rabbit fur, seen one last time. Lady Olivia dreamed of her baby being taken away from her. Ancient eyes stared out at Linda. Lord Riot claimed his child.

Nice towns like Grove Hill exist outside every city in the nation. Pass through there on the train today and you’ll find that the stores on Main Street have become antique shops and boutiques. The trees that survive are bigger. The parking lot is larger. ATV’s have replaced the station wagons and many women await the 7:49.

But much looks the same as on a Thursday morning almost fifty years ago when Linch drove the Chevy to the station. Olivia and Sally rode in the back seat. Today was Show and Tell.

Roy sat beside her smoking his fifth cigarette of the morning. The day before, he and Linda had argued at any moment when they were alone. In the morning it had been about how Sally was being brought up. “I don’t want you leaving her with the Goddamn witch.” When he was that angry, tiny cracks appeared in his twentieth-century American accent. “Mrs. Wood!” He managed to say the name as if it was a euphemism for shit.

Wednesday evening, the argument had been about Ranger procedures. “How much longer will we be saddled with her Ladyship?” Linda snapped.

At home, in front of Sally and their guest, small domestic difficulties produced monumental silences. By Thursday, they hardly spoke. Silent tension seemed almost natural to Linda, raised in a household with a secret mission in the heyday of the Cold War. Roy, used to active combat, found it maddening.

“Can I see you sing tonight?” Sally asked Olivia.

That evening, a concert version of Handel’s Acis and Galatea was being given at Carnegie Hall. Olivia had seen it two hundred and five years before and had her heart set on seeing it again. They were, she, Roy and Linda, going into the city.

“Foolish girl,” Olivia said. “Professional singers,” a slight disdain in her tone, “will entertain us.”

A day or two before, Linda would have made a note to explain to their guest that in this brave new world, professional singers were the aristocracy. That, as they spoke, a new king swiveled toward Memphis waiting to be crowned.

But this was no innocent herded upstream, dazed by all she saw around her. Lady Wexford needed no help from anybody.

“And you will get to stay with Dorrie whom you love,” said Olivia. “And with Mrs. Wood,” she added and suddenly asked, “What is your Mrs. Wood like?”

Before Linda could interrupt, Sally frowned and replied, “She’s a TV.”

As they parked, Roy said, “Train’s here,” jumped out of the car like he was escaping and came around for his kisses and hugs. Perfunctory for Linda, fervent in the case of his daughter. “See you ladies this evening,” he said. Sally had eyes only for him as he bounded onto the platform, mingled with the crowd and boarded the 7:49.

Linch felt Roy on the train. He nodded to a pair of vets who were comparing Ike and MacArthur, slid into the seat behind them and buried himself in work. More than that she couldn’t know.

His fellow commuters had learned all that men needed to find out about Roy from chance remarks exchanged in line at the hardware store, or leaning against a fence at a backyard barbecue. He was from the West Coast, had flown with the Air Force in Korea, had his own small import/ export company and traveled a lot.

They rode the train together. But once in the city, all went their separate ways. They joked with Roy about how much time he spent out of his office. When Frank Hacker or George Stanley remembered that they were supposed to invite him to play golf that weekend, or solicit a contribution to the Fresh Air Fund, they would get his secretary, a formidable lady with a slight and unplaceable accent. Roy usually wouldn’t return their calls until the end of the day.

Even catching him as they left the train at Grand Central wasn’t possible. They might notice him, attache case in hand, newspaper under his arm, walking through a now-crowded car as they pulled out of Pelham Manor. Asked, he’d mentioned getting off at 125th Street to see a man at Columbia University who translated his business correspondence with Iran.

Because he was so adept, but mainly because none of them could envision such a thing, no one ever saw Roy walk into time. That usually happened in the confusion of their imminent arrival in the city.

With a brisk step or two and the help of the train’s motion, he would stride away from ii 956. Sometimes he went up toward ‘59 for liaison with a neighboring Station Chief. Or back toward ‘50, a recurrent trouble spot where tensions were always near a boiling point.

That morning while Olivia, unaccompanied, sang Froggy Went A-courting to an audience of enraptured six-year-olds and their teacher, Linda wondered if she knew any more about her husband than did the men on the train.

When Olivia began the story of the Ferryman and the Wolf, Linda half-listened.

Once there was a ferryman who lived with his wife in a little house on a riverbank. When his son was born, the father asked the river to be the boy’s godfather. In answer, a stout tree branch floated ashore. The father carved it into a pole for his son.

Linda began to pay attention. Rangers were recruited as children. She recognized a tale of the Stream, worn smooth by passage up and down the human ages.

The boy grew up to be a ferryman also. He carried passengers from one side of the river to the other. The river was very wide and each day he could only make three trips one way and three trips the other. His boat was small and on each trip he could carry only one load beside himself.

The story was a riddle, a challenge. As she listened, Linda wondered if Lady Wexford told this more out of boredom than contempt, or the other way around.

One day a farmer asked him to carry a prize cabbage as big as a small child across the river where the king’s own cook would give him a silver coin for it. The ferryman agreed. But before he could start out, a shepherd appeared with a hungry lamb and asked the ferryman to take her across the river to a field of clover. As payment the ferryman could have her wool which was soft as silk.

The ferryman agreed, but he noticed how the lamb looked at the cabbage and knew he must never leave them alone together. He was about to take the cabbage across when a wolf appeared with a sack on its shoulder and said, “Kind sir, I must cross the river. Carry me and I will give you what is inside this sack.’

In this story of choice and chance, Linda noticed, only the wolf and the ferryman spoke. Only they were acting on their own behalf. Cabbage and lamb were just baggage.

The wolf looked longingly at the lamb, anxious to be left alone with her. The ferryman did not think long, but he did think hard. He put the lamb in the boat. Since he knew the wolf would never eat a cabbage, he left those two together. He carried the lamb across the river and on the way he sang:

Oh river deep and river wide

Bring me swift to the other side

The ferryman left the lamb. Returned. Picked up the cabbage and carried it across. As he did, he sang:

Oh, river wide and river deep

I pray you safe my cargo keep

The Iamb was happy to see the cabbage. But the ferryman picked her up and took her back with him. When he got to the other bank, it was growing late. The wolf was overjoyed to see the lamb, But the ferryman told him to get :in the boat. The wolf was very hungry, but he obeyed. As they went, the ferryman sang:

Oh river brave and river swift

Please send a tide my hopes to lift

The ferryman carried the wolf across and told him to guard the cabbage. The wolf agreed, thinking that when the ferryman returned with the lamb it would be dark and he would snatch his prey,

By the time the ferryman reached the lamb it was almost night and too late to make another rap. But he put the little beast aboard his boat and as he poled his way across he sang:

Oh river swift and river brave

Grant me now a favoring wave

And in the last moments of light, Godfather River reached up and bore the tiny craft from one side to the other faster than the eye can blink. The wolf was pacing back and forth on the other side,

As the sun fell and the boat put in to shore, the wolf leaped, But the ferryman took his stout pole and whacked him over the head so hard that the wolf dropped his sack and ran away.

The king’s cook was so delighted with the giant cabbage that he gave the ferryman a bag of coins. And the lamb when he brought her to pasture yielded wool as soft as silk.

Over the heads of the children, Linda watched Lady Olivia look at Sally. The wolf and the lamb, she thought to herself. And the cabbage, she added, including herself.

So the ferryman brought home the coins and the wool and the sack to his wife and daughter. His wife opened the sack. And what was inside? Oh, wine and sweets and a jeweled hen who laid a gold egg every morning and could tell your fortune. But The Ferryman’s Wife is a tale for another time.

A story of desire, distortion of time, and even the hint of an oracle. With a happy ending. Real life would not be so nice. Linda was certain of one thing. Olivia and Sally would never be left alone together.

Dinner that evening was under the perpetual Christmas ornaments of the Russian Tea Room. The waiters, old and disdainful, each with an account of aristocratic privileges lost along with the Czar, were deferential around Roy. As if they instinctively detected a greater, scarier fraud than their own.

Over blini, caviar and vodka, Linda watched her husband lean forward and tell Olivia, “This place is a sentimental favorite of mine because of how my wife and I met.”

The Englishwoman wore black and silver. A cameo at her throat showed an ivory profile set against rich blue. The blue caught the color of her eyes. “You mean to say you met in Russia. Two…Americans.” She still hesitated on the word. She was amused, curious. Linda watched her.

“Not quite. In Budyatichi,” said Roy. “A miserable town of shacks and mud, far enough into Poland for the population to be surprised when the Red Cavalry Army showed up.” Roy’s eyes grew somewhat misty. He had already put away two double martinis.

“Vladimir Khelemskya was my cover, a junior officer on General Budyonny’s staff. A glorified dispatch rider. But I was twenty and this was my first independent Ranger assignment.”

Linda shook her head. He refused to see this.

“A dashing young subaltern!” Olivia’s expression was the same as that of the children hearing the story that morning, “When was this?”

“On a September day in a 1920,” he said. “Always a dangerous passage in Eastern Europe. Things go badly that year but can get worse. The Russian Revolution must succeed but not triumph. In Budyatichi was an International Nursing Station where I had been told there would be allies with information of use to a Ranger. And who did I find?”

Linda looked at him furiously. He never hesitated.

“You were there?” Olivia, all surprise, asked Linda. “So far from home.”

“A summer job, after sophomore year in college,’ Linda tried to sound bored. “Other kids were camp counselors, bummed around France. Because of my family connections, I ended up in a hot, dusty hellhole. People lived in filth and terror. No TV. No car. No shampoo. My supervisor was away that afternoon.”

“So much for a Ranger undercover to do,” Roy said. “False orders to deliver. Supplies to misdirect. Seeds of doubt to sow. Downstream college girls to seduce. Especially ones who thought they were going to give me orders.” He laughed.

A man talks nostalgically about his youth, Linda knew, when his current life has hit a wall She remembered that morning they met: the scent of wood smoke and the first hint of Autumn, the jingle of spur and slap of holster as he slung himself off his home, his white teeth and blond mustache.

Once, when she was very young, Linda had been promised that she would know every mind but one. That first morning, she had reached out to touch his and almost jumped when she found she couldn’t.

They had told her that far Upstream there was an implant that blocked telepathy. Just as they had warned her about Upstream boys supplemented in all kinds of ways that Mother Nature never intended. They had, in fact, told her just enough so that she had to see for herself.

“I was there,’” said Lady Olivia brightly, interjecting herself into a sudden silence. “In that very year you two were in Poland. At Hendom House outside London,” she said. “I remembered the place from my childhood. My mother’s sister, the Duchess of Dorset, lived there. I’d seen it bum. But in that 1920, it still stood and had become a kind of hospital.”

Hendom House in 1920 on the Main Stream was a private hospital. The Rangers found it convenient to stash various casualties of their own among the trauma victims of the First World War. Linda knew that while recovering from her time with Lord Riot, Olivia Wexford had precipitated several fights and an actual duel between inmates.

Olivia arose. How well she knew the moment to leave a couple to talk about her. And to quarrel. Roy watched her elegant passage, a patron struck numb by the sight of her.

Linda tried to decide when these two had first rutted. Recently. That she knew. Tuesday morning, she decided. Roy had doubled back in time, returned shortly after they had left for the train. He and Olivia then screwed amid the petticoats. Evidence of that, a stray footprint perhaps, was what he had compulsively scuffed away on Tuesday evening.

Roy took out his silver cigarette case, opened it and offered it to her. She shook her head. “You’re talking too much,” she said. “Upstream they can and will tell her whatever they want. Here we will maintain security.”

“My impression was….” He drew on his Chesterfield, looked at her from under his lids, suddenly not from this place or time. “My impression was that you two exchanged girlish confidences.”

“How much longer is she supposed to be here?”

“Current plans are that I’m to take her Upstream sometime next week.”

“I want it sooner. I want it immediately.”

“Yes, ma’am. I will do my best, ma’am. A Ranger always obeys. Okay?” He stared at her. Right through her.

So, Linda thought, the ferryman was bored with his job and wife. When the wolf turned out to be a vibrant creature with whom he shared a lot in common, nature took its course. They both felt tenderness for the lamb. Cried, perhaps, as they ate the stew. But both found it easy to ignore the cabbage. Only the lamb loved the cabbage.

She had made the classic mistake of anthropologists and time travelers, Linda realized, gotten too close to the locals and fallen into their pattern. She had become the numb suburban housewife.

Olivia, on her return, tried one of Roy’s Chesterfields. “As a girl I’d half-imagined having my secret snuff box when I was old and double-chinned,” she said. “Then, in that London where I stayed, everyone had these and thought them wonderful and wicked. I thought them disgusting.” She inhaled, coughed, but inhaled again.

“I smoke a few a day,” Roy told her. “Otherwise, I’d be remembered as the guy who doesn’t smoke.”

“And honor could not countenance that,” said Lady Olivia.

They had been together again that afternoon, Linda knew. While she drove Sally over to stay with Dorrie. Roy could easily return to the house unnoticed. Rangers had their ways.

The only question was, which of the two had thought of sending the black truck to distract her.

“Can Auntie Olives come and see Mrs. Wood and Dorrie?” Sally had asked on the car ride that afternoon.

“I don’t think she’ll have time, honey,” was Linda’s answer.

On Saturdays there was no 7:49. The nearest thing to it was an 8:03. No other trains stopped at Grove Hill for half an hour before or after. So it wasn’t strange that a small knot of people had accumulated on the station platform. Most were locals with early appointments in the city. A few were strangers.

The man who sat in the Buick sedan reading the Herald Tribune, his tennis racket cases beside him, had doubtless driven over from another town to catch this particular train. The black woman plainly was returning to Harlem after serving at a party and sleeping oven The man in overalls carrying a tool case was somehow connected to the railway.

Today, Lady Wexford was being taken Upstream. Closer to the front. Closer to the point in time where humanity, of which she was so astounding and complicated an example, ceased to exist.

Pulling up at the station, Linda took in the Ranger deployment. She also spotted George and Alice Stanley standing beside a couple of suitcases. Alice, she remembered, was going up to Rhode Island to be with a sister who had just had a baby girl.

Roy saw them at the same moment and cursed under his breath. A jump in the Stream would already be difficult with a novice like Olivia. George and Alice: would want to talk. The other Rangers would have to act as a buffer.

A few days before, Linda would have felt a pang of sympathy. Even now, shared memories and a child, an immense secret and a common assignment, had a hold. She was about to say something.

Then Olivia, in the back seat, sang almost under her breath:

When lovely woman stoops to folly

And finds too late that men betray

What charm can soothe her melancholy

What care can wash her guilt away?

It’s not her fall that she’s been singing about, Linda realized. It’s mine. She drove the Chevy right up to the station. They all got out and Roy went to the trunk for Olivia’s luggage. The man in the Buick gathered up his tennis rackets.

The train came into view. The Stanleys and the other passengers looked that way while the maid and the railway man watched them and everything else.

Linda and Olivia kissed. “It saddens my heart not to see Sally again,” the Englishwoman said. “Please give her this from me.”

The wristlet was a beautiful thing, silk roses and tiny pearls. And familiar. Linda remembered seeing Olivia Wexford wearing nothing else. She noticed that the design was a bit off kilter. Was that spot, perhaps, royal blood?

Linda took the memento and stuck it in a pocket of her slacks. “I’ll save it for when she’s old enough to understand.”

For the last couple of days Linda had not brought Sally back from Dome’s. Not even to say good-bye.

Roy had the suitcases. He and Olivia had fucked in the rec room earlier that morning while Linda was out on errands. They hardly bothered to hide it.

“We caught the truck driver,” Linda said. “This morning.” She had both of their attention. “He was waiting when I left the house. I let him follow me. Mrs. Wood and I took what he knew.”

She watched their reactions. “It wasn’t much. He thought he was the look-out man in a kidnapping. That a rich grandfather would give a million dollars to ransom Sally.”

Roy’s eyes flashed with fury. Because Sally had been threatened. Because someone had tried to do this to HIS daughter. Because Linda was always right.

“The driver?” he asked.

“Done,” Linda said and he nodded. She’d wanted this to be none of his doing. But she’d had to make sure.

She couldn’t read Olivia’s face. Brushing the other’s mind, she caught a glimpse of a silk screen. On it, in the softest of colors, a nymph, covered by a flimsy drapery, glanced back at a pursuing Bacchus. And Linda, even in anger, could not violate what was reserved to a god.

The train pulled into the station. Linda caught Olivia in an embrace, turned her away from Roy and whispered, “You mentioned The Tale of the Ferryman’s Wife. Well we’re in that story now and she is a bitch with a long memory. If anything happens to Sally, no matter what, no matter when, I’ll find you and tear out your breath.”

“The wolf loves only the lamb,” Lady Wexford murmured, took a step backward, turned and went up to the platform between the man with the tennis rackets and Roy who carried her bags. Neither she nor Roy looked back.

Linda drove away from the station and watched the train depart in her rearview mirror. From then on, whenever she thought of Roy on the September morning when they met, she would also remember him hauling Lady Wexford’s luggage Upstream.

Roy would be back this evening and Sally would be there. He and Linda would wind up this operation quickly and go their separate ways. If he’d given even a hint of having sent that truck and driver to distract her, he would never have been allowed near their daughter again.

She drove not home but over to East Radley. On the way, she passed the spot where the crumpled black truck had run full speed into a concrete and steel overpass support. The body had been removed. The county police were waving traffic around the accident scene.

A few hours before, the man at the wheel, following Linda intently, had reached the outer fringe of Mrs. Wood’s awareness. The goddess revealed herself to him as he sped off the exit. Stunned and agape, he spiraled out of control. As he did, Linda laid open the vicious, stupid mind. He knew very little. Still, it was too much. The truck crumpled, but he was already dead. Linda drove home to her husband and her guest.

On her second trip, she noticed flowers and spring greenery adorning the statue of the Virgin in the Italians’ yard on the comer. She parked before the tall gray house with the swings and slide in the back yard.

“He always wanted action. He hated it here,” Linda said a while later. She sat in the kitchen drinking tea. The house was quiet. The other children, the ordinary children, were at home that day. Sally was back in the conservatory with Mrs. Wood. Dorrie listened, endlessly patient and kind.

“He once told me that riding herd on the Cold War, making sure that Ike gets two full terms and Khrushchev comes to power, is like near beer when you’re used to iced vodka. It could be a tabloid headline: ‘Time Wars Break up Marriage!’” Linda started to laugh, but instead began to cry.

Dorrie was the perfect avatar. She was like a well. Linda wondered if she could ever learn to be like her. “My mother didn’t bring me to the Goddess until I was almost twelve,” Linda said. “Mrs. Wood looked to me like the most amazing black and silver movie publicity shot ever made. A face beautiful but impossible to pin down. Tony Curtis and Debbie Reynolds and everyone else all rolled into one. She touched me and I was hers. It was that simple.”

That’s how it went for a while, Dorrie refilling the tea cup, nodding at a familiar tale, Linda alternating giggles and tears.

“That first day I met Roy. After we got intimately acquainted, I asked Mrs. Wood how long he’d be faithful. She said, ‘As long as he can be. And to no one as faithful as you.’ Because I was young that sounded like more than enough.”

Eventually, Linda breathed more calmly and all was silent in the kitchen. Then the door to the conservatory slammed open and Sally called, “Mommy! Mrs. Wood told my fortune!”

As her daughter came tripping down the hall, Linda caught the image. Gray and magic as TV, it showed Sally older. Seven at least. Wearing a robe of stars. Perhaps a school play. Maybe something more. The question was, where and when?

“Can I have my cookie now?” Sally burst into the room, hugged Linda, then remembered and asked Dorrie, “Please?”

Dorrie smiled and drew the cloth off a still-warm figure with a frosting dress and raisin eyes. She and Linda exchanged glances. The older woman nodded. Linda rose and went down the hall.

She remembered that her mother had waited too long to tell her the truth. About the Rangers. About the Time Stream. Linda had cried. Threatened to run away. Her mother had also delayed bringing her to Mrs. Wood until then.

Until today Linda had been able to see no reason for that. With puberty, her gift was apparent. The alliance of necessity between Rangers and Oracle was a long standing one. Shrines of the Goddess were within easy reach of any Ranger operative.

Now she knew more than she wanted to about alliances made Upstream. She had learned that the Gods could give the Rangers Lady Olivia. And, in return, the Rangers could give Lady Olivia Roy. She understood too her own mother’s reluctance. Mrs. Wood had opened Linda’s mind that first day and it had never again been entirely her own.

On that first occasion, Mrs. Wood had promised, You will know every mind but one. Ah, but the Oracle was deep. Or just slippery. Seven years after that, almost to the day, Linda had encountered Roy and imagined that his mind was that one. In the seven years that followed, Linda encountered others whose thoughts she could not catch. Only now, thinking about it, did she realize that the one mind was her own.

At the conservatory door, Linda bowed slightly before the Presence, then stepped forward into the warmth and sunlight. Here, where Chance and the Seasons merged, she would learn the nature of her new assignment.

They talked for a time in Grove Hill about Roy and Linda Martin. Even in a nation founded on rootlessness, the speed with which they disappeared was remarkable. The Stanleys, George and Alice, often described their Saturday morning train trip with Roy and the exotic house guest.

“I knew,” she would say, “just by the way they avoided us.”

“At Grand Central,” he would add. “No sign of them.”

Olivia was never seen again. Roy returned but not for long. He was busy winding up his affairs. When pressed, he talked about taking over an uncle’s business in Seattle. Linda said something about going to stay with her family.

Divorce would, in a few years, be as common as babies were right then. But Roy and Linda Martin’s marriage was the first this circle had seen collapse. Marge Hacker, who lived right in back of them, described the distance she observed. “Not a smile. Not a touch. They talk to each other through the kid.”

Time passed and neighbors moved away from Grove Hill. But when Marge Hacker and Alice Stanley met by chance at a church rummage sale in Rye ten years later, it was the Martins they talked about. Rather than discuss their own marital woes, they recalled how quickly the house had been sold, how abruptly little Sally was taken out of school.

A decade farther Upstream, as the protean nation of the West continued to change and transform itself, George Stanley and Frank Hacker met for lunch. Both were on their second marriages. George said, “Tried to get in touch with Roy once or twice, to maybe ask him about that British bimbo.”

And Frank smiled at his memory of Lady Olivia on an April evening and of a time and place gone by as fast as a lighted window seen at night from a speeding train.

(ebook v1.1 Separated from Fantasy & Science Fiction, May2001. Some minor formatting changes made)