Written in Time (18 page)

“Pleased to meet y’all,” Mary Bledsoe seconded, a shy smile crossing her pale lips, her hands bunched on the edges of a long white cotton apron.
 

A girl about Elizabeth’s age approached hesitantly.
 

“Come on, girl. Come on up here and meet these folks.” Tom Bledsoe waved the girl forward.
 

“Hey,” Lizzie said, smiling.
 

No one could resist Lizzie’s beautiful smile, and Jack Naile had that confirmed when the Bledsoe girl sort of half curtsied and said softly, “A pleasure to meet y’all folks. I’m Helen.”
 

Jack Naile deduced that it was his turn. “I’m Jack Naile, and this is my wife, Ellen, our daughter, Elizabeth, and our son, David. We were on our way to California, crossing the mountains, when there was a terrible accident with our wagon.”
 

“You poor things!” Mary Bledsoe blurted out, wringing her hands around her apron and then smoothing it as she went on. “Helen!”
 

“Yes, ma’am?”
 

“Go start puttin’ food on the table while I find Mrs. Naile and her daughter something decent to wear. Scoot, child!” As Helen ran off—she had a good stride, skirts raised in order to accomplish it—Mary Bledsoe started gathering Ellen and Elizabeth to her, like a mother bird folding her wings about the babies. “It’s terrible for you poor things.”
 

Despite the fact that Mary Bledsoe seemed positively outraged that females—even strangers—were forced by circumstance to wear trousers, it was easy to see who wore the pants in the Bledsoe household. Jack Naile looked over at Tom Bledsoe. “David and I didn’t know what we might bump into. Didn’t want to put you folks off by walking up here with these.” He gestured with the 1895 Marlin lever action that was in his right hand.
 

“Man’d be a fool for sure not goin’ armed in these parts, critters with four legs and critters with two, and of ’em, the two-legged kind is the worse.”
 

David asked, “Crooks—I mean outlaws?”
 

“Reckon y’all didn’t pass through Atlas, didchya?”
 

Jack answered, “We were in kind of a hurry to get over the mountains into California, and we had all the supplies we needed, until the wreck, anyway.”
 

Tom Bledsoe had long since lowered his rifle—a Winchester 1873—from a casual port arms to rest against his leg, the fingers of his left hand barely touching the muzzle to support it. “You’ll need a hand fetching anything else from the wreck?”
 

“There’s nothing left worth salvaging.”
 

“That’s a shame. You folks don’t have much left.”
 

“How far is it into town, into Atlas?”
 

“About two hours by wagon. My wife, Mrs. Bledsoe, her sister Margaret keeps school in Atlas, and young Bobby Lorkin rode out not more’n an hour back tellin’ us Margaret was feelin’ poorly and wanted Mary to look in on her. We reckon to set out early ‘morrow mornin’. Y’all got people in Atlas? Well, reckon not if’n y’all didn’t go a-stoppin’ there. You can stay with us a spell.”
 

Jack responded, “You and your family are very kind. If it’s no trouble, we would very much like to spend the night tonight and take you up on that ride into Atlas. But I heard tell, I think, that there was a hotel in Atlas, or maybe we could rent a cottage.”
 

“I never been inside no hotel, but it’s a fact there is one. Ain’t no cottages I heard ‘bout. Lemme take some of y’all’s possibles and let’s go on up to the house.” And with that, Tom Bledsoe grabbed up one of the suitcases in his right hand. “Never seen no thing like this afore. Travellin’ bag?”
 

“That’s what it is,” David agreed.
 

“Leather, huh?”
 

“Special kind of leather called expanded polyvinyl,” David told Tom Bledsoe, smiling.
 

Mary Bledsoe was Elizabeth’s height, a little over five foot three. Mary had three dresses besides the one that she wore, four extra aprons (one with a bib front and lace trim all around it) and a solitary skirt.
 

Holding one of the dresses in front of her, Ellen realized that it was four inches too short, about the length that a young girl might wear. She opted to borrow the dark gray circular skirt and wear it with her own sleeveless top, but took the shawl Mary Bledsoe offered to cover the unseemly sight of bare arms. Elizabeth fared better, one of Mary’s dresses—a lighter gray—was a perfect fit except for the bustline, which was tight. Young Helen provided Lizzie with a shawl.
 

“Don’t have me much in underthings,” Mary had confided to them.
 

“We’ll be just fine, Mary,” Ellen had told her, grateful not to have to wrestle with weird and uncomfortable underwear. By forcing the skirt down closer to her hips than her waist, it wound up at a respectable length.
 

Ellen and Elizabeth helped Helen set the table with very pretty plain white china, likely Mary’s best. Mary finished the cooking. There was a potbellied stove at the center of the solitary large room, but the hearth was what was used for cooking. When it was cold, bricks would be heated on the hearth and placed in the beds in the two other rooms of the house. By comparison to frontier homes about which Ellen had read, the Bledsoe place was a condo on Chicago’s Gold Coast, even boasting a well-fitted board floor.
 

When Lizzie volunteered to assist Helen with fetching water, the mere mention made Ellen Naile realize that she hadn’t peed since a few minutes before boarding the helicopter.
 

Ellen Naile almost asked, “Where’s the john?” Instead, she asked, “The outhouse?”
 

Mary Bledsoe’s face flushed at the mention of something so intimate, so personal. “‘Hind the house, o’ course.”
 

“Of course. Thank you.”
 

The outhouse—complete with crescent moon cutout on the door, also handy for letting flies in during the right season—would have defied even Jack’s powers of description. Pulling the skirt’s waistband up to her natural waist, her face twisting into a grimace designed to limit oxygen intake through the nose, Ellen Naile stepped inside, for once in her life wishing that she were a man.
 

David had laughed at both of them when he saw them, and Jack had merely smiled, asking, “Having fun, darling?”
 

“Oh, peachy, Jack.” Ellen was wearing an apron. After she had volunteered to help Mary finish preparing dinner, Mary had run to fetch one for her. Ellen, despite her sex, had worn an apron voluntarily perhaps half a dozen times in her adult life. “What have you guys been doing, Jack?”
 

“Tell her, David.”
 

David sat down on the crate he’d brought in, evidently bidden to do so by Tom Bledsoe. There were seven for dinner and only six chairs in the entire house, including the rocking chair and one of those little fireplace chairs with a spatulate-shaped back, a heart-shaped cutout at its center.
 

“Well,” David began, “Mr. Bledsoe kindly showed us his tack, let us see the horses and showed us the field he’s going to plant next spring. He’s got one fine manure pile, let me tell you.”
 

“Gosh, menfolk have all the fun, don’t they, Helen?” Lizzie lamented, wiping her hands on her apron.
 

Helen didn’t say a word, only smiled enigmatically.
 

Dinner was a surprisingly tasty rabbit stew with a number of overcooked and hard-to-identify vegetables, great-tasting dumplings and fresh wheat bread. David had always looked older than he was and was solicited by Tom Bledsoe to join him and Jack for a “snort from the jug and a chaw on the settin’ porch” while the women saw to “clearin’ and all.”
 

Ellen Naile would have loved to be able to turn herself invisible and watch and listen in; but since she could not, she helped Mary, Lizzie and Helen make quick work of the dishes (in a way that made her shudder to think that she’d just eaten off of these same dishes). There was no mention of joining the men on the porch or having an adult beverage for themselves, but Mary put on the kettle for tea and showed off her latest needlepoint, confiding that there was always so much mending to do that she had little time for such frivolous activity.
 

Despite the unspeakable outhouse, clean as such things went, she imagined, and the awkward clothing and social status, Ellen Naile realized that she wasn’t really having such a bad time. It had been years since they had dined in the home of friends.
 

Ellen and Lizzie were washing the breakfast dishes, helping Mary while she fed the chickens and collected the eggs and milked the cow. It was already late, according to something she’d overheard Tom Bledsoe saying. By Ellen’s own reckoning, the time was about six in the morning. Jack and David were assisting Tom with hitching up the team and feeding and watering the rest of the stock.
 

“I think I felt a mouse near my foot last night,” Lizzie confided, edging closer to Ellen at the wash basin.
 

“It was probably Helen’s toe,” Ellen reassured her daughter, thinking all the while that Lizzie was probably right. Lizzie and Helen had, at least, had a bed—Helen’s. Ellen’s own sleeping accommodations had been to share the bed with Mary Bledsoe that Mary normally shared with Tom. The bed had seemed clean enough, the mattress too soft, too uncomfortable, the bed’s framework easily felt every time Ellen rolled over. Mary had only one nightgown, and it wouldn’t do to sleep in twentieth-century underwear, so Ellen had slept in her clothes. In the morning, the once-unwrinkled skirt was no longer that way.
 

Lizzie was lamenting, “And that outhouse! Yuck! I just won’t go, Momma!”
 

“A couple of hours riding along a dirt road in the back of a wagon with no springs will make you feel differently. Go potty!”
 

“They don’t wash or anything!”
 

“You’ll hurt their feelings. Think of it this way. Would you really want to use a bathtub set up in front of the fireplace? I don’t think so.”
 

“My hair’s all greasy, Momma!”
 

“So’s mine, so’s your father’s and so’s your brother’s. We’ll find a way of getting clean once we get to town.” Ellen Naile wished that she felt as certain about that as she hoped she sounded.
 

Ellen had spoken precious little with her husband since their arrival at the Bledsoe place, the way of things between men and women in this time. But in a brief moment Jack had told her, “Bledsoe says that things are a little wild in town, advised us to carry pistols if we had them. Make sure Lizzie’s up on using a Seecamp, and you know how to use that derringer. Each of you carries once we start for town.”
 

She’d given Jack a snotty “Yes, sir, Jack, sir,” but realized that he was only looking out for them.
 

With the dishes through, she told Lizzie, “Hey! How’s about this? We go out to the outhouse, and I’ll use it first, then you’ll be using it after me? Okay?”
 

“Yeah, dammit,” Lizzie moaned.
 

“Ladies don’t talk that way, now or anytime.”
 

When they stepped together onto the front porch, the potential lethality of all of the unknown factors into which they were about to insert themselves hit her with the force of a rock. Jack was dressed in the same gray long-sleeved shirt and dirt-stained black Levis he’d worn the previous day. The item of apparel that was different was the gun belt, the black Hollywood rig that Sam Andrews had made for him, the gleaming, long-barreled Colt revolver sitting almost jauntily in its silver concho-trimmed holster.
 

When she noticed David, helping Bledsoe with hitching the team, the rock that had hit her struck again; but this time it had grown to boulder proportions. Her seventeenyear-old son had Jack’s second Colt, the old blued one that someone had cut the barrel back on to an “unofficial” five inches. He wore it in the old brown-leather Arvo Ojala gunfighter rig his father had so proudly traded for years ago, which David had never worn, never even wanted to try on without being forced.
 

David had fired a gun under his father’s tutelage for the very first time when he was only five. In this time and place, seventeen was a grown man’s age and, if others were armed, it would be incumbent upon David to be armed as well. Dumb clothes and outhouses were an inconvenience; Jack and David facing an armed encounter every time they stepped outside into a street was frightening.
 

“Y’all look like one of them ‘range detective’ fellers Jess Fowler went and hired on,” Tom Bledsoe remarked out of the blue.
 

“Range detective?” David asked from behind them.
 

“A euphemism for hired gunfighter,” Jack told his son. “You remember Jack Palance in Shane?” Jack Naile dropped the idea, because, even though David had seen the classic film, he would have pushed it from his thoughts because it was a western.
 

“Jack who?”
 

“Famous guy where we come from, Tom. And Shane started out as a book.”
 

“Can’t say I read much, ‘ceptin’ the Bible and them catalogs down at the general store. Giddyup, there, Dusty.” Tom Bledsoe flicked the reins to the team, Jack Naile noticing the man’s perfect ease. Dusty was obviously the horse on the right side, and had been lagging behind the other animal. When the reins cracked, the rein on the right came down hardest.
 

The four women occupied the wagon bed, Ellen and Mary sitting facing forward, Lizzie and Helen facing back (which was probably making Lizzie a little car sick). David sat scrunched between Tom and Jack on the seat, his gun belt pulled around so that the holstered Colt lay over his
 

right thigh.