Against the Tide of Years (8 page)

“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 officer-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.

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.

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.

“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 Island at the time of the Event.