An Acceptable Time (7 page)

Then came a book by an eighteenth-century philosopher, Berkeley. She sat with the book unopened on her lap. Max had talked to her about this philosopher, who was also a bishop (was he anything like Bishop Colubra?), who had had the idea, amazing in his day, that the stairs outside his study were not there unless he was aware of them, that things had to be apprehended to
be
. “The anthropic principle,” Max had called it, and had seen it as both fascinating and repellent.

If Polly did not believe that she had seen and talked with Anaral, would that keep the other girl in the past where she belonged? Would it close the threshold? But she had seen Anaral, and there was no way she could pretend that she hadn’t. The threshold was open.

Last in the pile was a copy of the
New England Journal of Medicine
with an article by her grandmother on the effect of the microscopic on the macroscopic universe. What might seem to have been a random assortment of books was beginning to reveal a pattern, and the pattern seemed to Polly to have something to do with Anaral and the Ogam stones, though she did not think that her grandmother had had either Anaral or the Ogam stones in mind when she had chosen the readings, any more than she had had Polly in mind when she redecorated the bedroom.

Polly studied for a couple of hours, making notes, absorbing, so that she would be able to answer her grandparents’ questions. She was fully focused in the present moment, and she did not know what made her look at her watch. It was after eleven. One of her jobs was to drive to the post office for the mail. If something was needed for lunch or dinner, her grandmother would leave a note with the outgoing mail.

She went downstairs. No one in the living room or kitchen. Her grandmother’s lab door was closed, but Polly knocked.

“What?” came the not very gracious response.

“It’s Polly. Is it all right if I get the mail and go to the store?”

“Oh, Polly, come in. I didn’t mean to snarl. I suppose it’s no use wishing Nase had never retired and come to live with Louise.” Her grandmother was sitting on her tall lab stool. There was an electron microscope in front of her, but the cover was over it and looked as though it had not been removed in years. She wore a tweed skirt, lisle stockings, a turtleneck, and a cardigan—a downto-earth country woman. And yet Polly knew that her grandmother delved deep into the world of the invisible, the strange sub-microscopic world of quantum mechanics. Her grandfather looked most comfortable in an old plaid flannel shirt, riding his tractor; and yet he had actually gone into space, orbiting the earth beyond the confines of the atmosphere. Her grandparents seemed to live comfortably in their dual worlds, the daily world of garden, kitchen, house, and pool, and the wider world of their scientific experiments. But Bishop Colubra had thrown them completely off course, Bishop Colubra and Polly’s own unexpected journey through time.

“Grand?”

“I don’t know, Polly. I don’t know what your parents would say…” Her voice trailed off.

“Just to the post office and the store, Grand. I didn’t want to go without asking you.”

Her grandmother sighed. “Have I been living in a dream world? The only piece of equipment in my lab that gets any real use is the obsolete Bunsen burner, because it’s become family tradition. Like your grandfather, I’ve been doing thought experiments.” As Polly looked at her questioningly she continued, “Alex and I have sat in our separate worlds, doing experiments in our minds.”

“And?” Polly prodded.

“If a thought experiment is capable of laboratory proof, then we’re apt to write a paper about it, and then either we or another scientist will put it to the test. But quite a few thought experiments are so wildly speculative that it will be a long time before they can be proven.”

Which was more of a dream? The thought experiments in the minds of her grandparents and other scientists? Or the world of three thousand years ago which was touching on their own time?

The lab was damp. Polly wondered how her grandmother stood it. The floor was made of great slabs of stone. There was a faded rag rug in front of two shabby easy chairs, and the lamp on the table between them gave at least an illusion of warmth. Only the permeating cold grounded her in present reality. “Grand?”

“What is it, Polly?”

“The post office?”

“I suppose so. We can’t keep you wrapped in cotton wool. I’m not even sure what we’re afraid of.”

“That I’ll get lost three thousand years ago? I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

“Neither do I. I still haven’t given it my willing suspension of disbelief. But just the post office.”

“We’re out of milk.”

“All right. The store. But check in with me when you get back.”

“Sure.”

Polly would keep her word and go only to the post office and the store. What she wanted was to talk to Anaral again. Go to the Grandfather Oak and see Karralys and his dog and hope that this time he would stay and talk with her.

Thursday was All Hallows’ Eve and Bishop Colubra took it with great seriousness. Samhain. A festival so old that it predated written history. Polly’s skin prickled, not with fear now, but with expectation, though for what she was not sure. All she knew was that she was touching on that long-gone age as it rose out of the past to touch on another age, a present that was perhaps as brutal as any previous age, but was at least familiar.

Her grandparents’ car was elderly, and it took a few tries before the engine turned over and she shifted into reverse and pulled out of the garage. She went to the post office, to the store, speaking to the postmistress and the checkout girl, who were curious and friendly and already knew her by name.

When she got home, her grandmother had left the lab and was making toasted cheese sandwiches for lunch. They had just finished eating and were putting the dishes away when they heard a car pull up noisily. Bishop Colubra.

“Just a quick visit,” he said. “Louise made me promise to come right back. I just wanted to bring Polly my Ogam notebook.” He sat down at the table, indicated the chair next to him, and spread out the book between them.

It was tidily and consistently done, vocabulary, and simple rules of grammar, and a few phrases and idioms. “Druids had a vast amount of information in their memories after long years of training, but Ogam was an oral language rather than a written one. What I have here is in no way pure Ogam. It’s what Anaral and Karralys and the People of the Wind speak today—their today, that is.”

In three columns he had listed words used by Anaral’s people before Karralys and Tav came; then there were words which were strictly Ogam and which Karralys and Tav had brought to the language; plus a short column of words which were still recognizable today; such as mount, glen, crag, bard, cairn.

“You can read my writing?” he asked.

“Yes, it’s lots clearer than mine.”

“Fascinating, isn’t it, to see how language evolves. I wonder how many of our English/American words will still be around in another thousand years or so.” He stood up. “I must go.”

Polly picked up the notebook. “Thanks a lot, Bishop. I’m glad you’ve written out the pronunciation phonetically.” She turned the pages, nodding, while he stood on one leg, scratching his shin with the other foot, looking more like a heron than ever.

“It’s pretty arbitrary of me to call it Ogam, but it seems simplest. The language has evolved fairly easily, a sort of lingua franca.”

“Bishop, you did teach Anaral to speak English?”

“Shh.” He put his foot down and glanced at Mrs. Murry, who was feeding the fire, and at Mr. Murry deep in an article in a scientific journal. He leaned over the chair toward Polly “She’s very bright. She learned amazingly quickly.”

“But you’ve spent a lot of time with her.”

He glanced again at her grandparents, sighed deeply. “This is no time for secrecy, is it? Yes. Whenever the time gate has opened for me, I’ve gone through. But you—” He shook his head. “I have to go.” He ambled toward the pantry door. “You will stay close to your grandparents?”

She, too, sighed. “Yes, Bishop. I will.”

Polly spent several hours with Bishop Colubra’s Ogam notebook. In the late afternoon her grandmother went swimming with her. Nothing happened. Anaral did not come. The evening passed quietly.

On Tuesday the bishop asked her over for tea.

“Go along,” her grandmother said. “I know you’re going stir-crazy here, and even though I don’t think anything will happen while I’m with you, refusing to believe that three thousand years ago can touch directly on our own time, I’m just as happy to have you away from the pool.”

“You don’t need the car?”

“I’m not going anywhere. Louise’s house is no distance as the crow flies. Our land is contiguous with hers. But by car you have to go down to the main road, drive west a couple of miles, and then turn uphill to the right the first chance you get.”

The phone rang. Zachary. Obviously wanting to talk. “Polly, I’m just so glad to be in touch with you again. You’re like a bright light in these filthy days.”

“Autumn seems pretty glorious to me.”

“Not in an office that’s a small box with no windows. I can’t wait to see you.”

“I’m looking forward to it, too.”

“Polly, I don’t want to hurt you.”

Her grandmother had left the kitchen and gone out to the lab, leaving Polly alone with the phone. “Why should you hurt me?”

“Polly, it’s my pattern. I hurt every girl I get involved with. I hurt you last summer.”

“Not really,” she protested. “I mean, it turned out all right.”

“Because your friends came and rescued us after I’d upset that idiot little canoe. But you’re right. That was minor, compared to—”

He sounded so desperate that she asked, gently, “Compared to what, Zach?”

“Polly, I’m a self-protective bastard. All I think of is my own good.”

“Well, don’t we all, to some extent?”

“To some extent, yes. But I take it beyond some extent.”

“Hey, are you at work?”

“Yah, but don’t worry, I’m alone in my box and things are slow today. I’m not goofing off. There’s nothing for me to do right now. I just want to say that I’m going to try really hard not to hurt you.”

“Well. Okay. That’s good.”

“You don’t believe me.”

“Sure I believe you, that you’re not going to hurt me.”

“No, what I mean is, how self-serving I am. Listen. Once I was with a girl I really liked. Her grandfather was sick, dying, really, and we went to the hospital to get blood for him, and she was upset, of course, really upset. And there was a little kid she knew there, and the little kid was having a seizure—well, Polly, the thing is that I really don’t know what happened because I ran out on it.”

“What?” She kept her voice gentle.

“I ran away. I couldn’t take it. I got into my car and drove off. I just left her. That’s the kind of putrid stinker I am.”

“Hey, Zach, don’t put yourself down. That’s in the past. You wouldn’t do it again.”

“I don’t know what I’d do, that’s the point.”

“Listen, Zachary, don’t get stuck in the past. Give yourself a chance. We do learn from our mistakes.”

“Do we? Do you really think so?”

“Sure. I’ve made plenty. And I’ve learned from them.”

“Good, then. All I wanted to say is that I think you’re terrific, and I want us to have a good time on Thursday, and I don’t want to do or say anything to hurt you.”

“We’ll have a good time on Thursday,” she promised.

“Okay, then. Till Thursday. I’m glad you’re on this earth, Polly. You’re good for me. Goodbye.”

She was baffled by his call. What on earth was he afraid he would do that would hurt her? She shrugged, went out to the pantry, and took the red anorak off the hook, knocked on the lab door. “Grand, can I help with anything before I go?”

“Not a thing. Just be back in plenty of time for dinner. I’m sorry to be having an attack of mother hen-ism, but I can’t wipe out your experience of crossing a time threshold just because it’s totally out of the context of my own experience.”

“I keep asking myself—did it really happen? But, Grand, I think it did.”

“Go have tea with Nase.” Her grandmother’s voice was slightly acid. “Perhaps he’ll see fit to tell you more than he’s told us.”

As Polly drove up the hill to Dr. Louise’s yellow house, surrounded by maples and beeches dropping yellow leaves, the bishop came out to meet her, led her in, took the red anorak.

Dr. Louise’s kitchen was smaller than the Murrys’, and darker, but large enough for a sizable oak table by the window, and brightened by a surprising bouquet of yellow roses as well as copper pots and pans. The bishop took something lopsided out of the oven.

“Alex’s breadmaking challenged me. This is supposed to be Irish soda bread, but I don’t think it’s a success.”

“It’ll probably taste wonderful,” Polly said, “and I’m hungry.”

The bishop put the bread out, with butter, jam, and a pitcher of milk. “Tea, milk, or cocoa?”

“Cocoa would be lovely. It’s cold today.”

“Perfect autumn weather, pushing sixty. Sit down, be comfortable.”

Polly sat, while the bishop puttered about making two steaming mugs of cocoa, slicing the soda bread, which did indeed taste better than it looked, especially with homemade rose-hip jelly.

“What happens to what’s happened?” Polly asked him.

“It’s a big question,” the bishop said. “I seem to have found one time gate. There may be countless others.”

“What was going on three thousand years ago?” she continued.

“Abraham and Sarah left home,” the bishop said, “and went out into the wilderness. But there were already Pharaohs in Egypt, and the Sphinx was asking her riddles.”

“What else?”

“Gilgamesh,” the bishop continued. “I think he was around then.”

“But he wasn’t from anywhere around here.”

“Uruk,” the bishop said. “Way on the other side of the world. And there was Sumerian poetry, lamenting the death of Tammuz, the shepherd god.” He sliced more bread. “Tammuz’s mother was the goddess Innini. Let me see. Back to Egypt. That wasn’t anywhere around here, either. The great pyramid was built at Giza. The Cheops pyramid conforms in dimensions and layout to astronomical measurements—like Stonehenge, in astronomy, if not in architecture. The stars have taught us more than we realize.” He was rambling on happily. “I wonder what it would be like on a planet where the atmosphere was too dense for the stars to shine through? This bread isn’t that bad, after all.”

“Bishop, please.” Polly smoothed jam onto her bread. “Maybe you’ve told my grandparents, but how did you meet Anaral and Karralys? When?”

“It started last spring.” The bishop folded his legs and made himself comfortable, a piece of bread and jelly in his hand. “I’d never before been so unbusy in my life, and I was wandering around looking for odd jobs to do and came across an old root cellar behind the barn where Louise parks her car. At least, it was called a root cellar, and in the days when it was assumed that one could protect oneself from a nuclear attack some of the old root cellars came into reuse as bomb shelters.”

“Fat lot of help they’d be,” Polly said.

“Louise never bothered with hers. She always said that when she retired she’d have a garden and put it back to its original use, a storage place for tubers. But the thing is, some of the old root cellars were not built as root cellars.”

“What, then?”

“They were dug centuries before the people we know as the first settlers came over from England, and they were dug to be holy places, where the priests or druids or whoever they were could go to commune with the dead, and with the gods of the underworld. They believed that those who had died were still available for advice and help, back for countless generations.”

“Oh, I like that,” Polly said. “Do my grandparents have a root cellar?”

“They used to, but when they put in the pool it got dug up, so I had only Louise’s to excavate, and I spent weeks on it, with a trowel, then a shovel. And there I found the first of the Ogam stones, and the only one not on your grandparents’ land. Over the years, the root cellar had filled in with leaves, loose dirt, other debris, and this had protected the stone. The writing on that first one was far clearer than those I’ve found in the stone walls.”

“What did it say?”

“It was a memorial marker honoring our foremothers.”

A car door slammed outside, and Dr. Louise came in, calling, “Hallo, I’m earlier than I thought I’d be. I hope there’s tea left for me.”

“Plenty,” the bishop said. “I made a large pot, and Polly and I’ve been drinking cocoa instead.”

Dr. Louise shucked off her heavy jacket and then her white coat, both of which she hung on deer antlers to the side of the door. “I inherited the antlers with the house.”

Polly laughed. “You don’t strike me as a hunter.”

“Hardly.” The doctor helped herself to bread and butter. “Nase, you’re really becoming domesticated in your old age. This isn’t half bad.”

“It looks better now than when I took it out of the oven.”

“Bishop,” Polly said softly, “please go on.”

“If I am right about root cellars, and of course I may not be, they were ancient time devices, a way the druids could commune with their past, with their gods, with powers of both good and evil long lost to us. You might call the root cellar a three-thousand-year-old time capsule.”

“Have you been watching too much TV?” Dr. Louise asked.

“It’s probably affected my metaphors,” her brother agreed. “All spring the root cellar kept drawing me, but also sending me out. I found other Ogam stones in Alex and Kate’s stone walls, worked on translating their hieroglyphs. Found three in a small cairn of stones near your star-watching rock, Polly. I knew there was something special about the star-watching rock. That it was a place of power. Benign power.”

Polly said, “It was always a special place to my mom and her sibs. Go on, please, Bishop.”

“In mid-June, as the days lengthened toward the summer solstice, an early heat wave hit us, and the root cellar was cool, so I spent more time there. Not digging anymore. Just sitting. Often moving beyond thought into the dark and timeless space of contemplation.”

“I was afraid you were becoming a pagan,” Dr. Louise remarked with irony.

“No, Louise, no. I was not then and am not now turning to the old gods. No, the God I have tried to serve all my life is still good enough for me. Christ didn’t just appear as Jesus of Nazareth two thousand years ago, don’t forget. Christ is, will be, and certainly was at the time the druids dug the root cellar three thousand years ago, just as much as now. But we rational and civilized people have turned our backs on the dark side of God because we are afraid of the numinous and the unexplainable. Forgive me, I’m preaching. I’ve spent so much of my life giving sermons that it’s a habit I find hard to break.”

“You’re a good preacher,” Dr. Louise said with sisterly pride.

“So, please,” Polly urged.

“Midsummer’s Eve,” the bishop continued, “I was in the root cellar. When I called it a three-thousand-year-old time capsule, I was in a way joking. It’s a metaphor that seems right. You see, what happened was that I was in the root cellar, and then, without transition, I was on the star-watching rock, and there was Anaral.”

“And—”

“That first time we couldn’t understand each other, except by gestures. I jumped to some conclusions, because she obviously wasn’t an ordinary girl. There was a dignity, a nobility about her that set her apart. But it was a while before we knew each other’s language well enough to communicate and I could truly believe that I had moved through a great deal of time.”

“Bishop,” Polly asked, “can you just go in and out of the time gate whenever you want to?”

“Oh, no.” He shook his head. “I’m not sure how it happens when it happens. There is a feeling, just as you said, of lightning, and the earth quivering, if not quaking, and something seems to happen to the air. After that first time it has never again been from the root cellar, always from the star-watching rock. I go there and wait, and sometimes Annie or Karralys will come to me. But there will be weeks when nothing happens.”

Dr. Louise said, “Thanks for the tea. I have some charts to go over.”

The bishop was stiff. “I know it offends you, Louise. I try not to talk about it in front of you.”

“That’s not the solution, either,” the doctor said. “I keep wondering what Polly’s family would make of your madness.” She turned to Polly. “Are you going to tell them about this?”

“Of course. But not yet. I need to understand more, first. And I don’t want to worry them.”

“You may have to,” the doctor said.

The bishop’s eyes were closed, as though he was listening. “One of the stones from the cairn by the star-watching rock had a lovely rune on it.
Hold me in peace while sleeping. Wake me with the sun’s smiling. With pure water slake my thirst. Let me be merry in your love.
That’s a simplicity that’s gone, at least in our so-called higher civilization.”

“Don’t knock our civilization,” his sister warned. “Cataracts used to make people blind, and still do, in many parts of the world. Your lens implants have you seeing like a much younger man.”

“That’s technology, not civilization.” The bishop was testy. “I’m grateful every day that I can read and write. I don’t underestimate knowledge. But we get into trouble when we confuse it with truth.”

“All right, Nase.”

“Truth is eternal. Knowledge is changeable. It is disastrous to confuse them.”

“My dear, I don’t,” Dr. Louise said. “But I can conceive of your adventures as having little to do with either knowledge or truth. They’re beyond reason. And now I’m afraid they’ve made Kate and Alex terribly upset.”

“I’m sorry,” the bishop said. “I didn’t expect Polly to become involved. If I’ve been closemouthed up till now, it has been not only because of your distaste for what has been happening but because I thought it was my own, unique adventure. I never expected that Polly—I simply have to have faith that all this has meaning.”

Dr. Louise sighed, rose. “I really do have to go over charts.”

Polly, too, stood. “I’d better get on back. I promised I wouldn’t be late.”

She drove off down the long dirt road. The tree frogs were singing their autumn farewell to summer. A few lingering insects chirred away. Above her flew a great gaggle of geese, honking their way south. Their haunting cry was new to Polly, and she found it both exciting and sad. On either side of the road, bushes were red and rust-colored. There was some dry-looking goldenrod and joe-pye weed. As she turned into a curve, she could see the hills shadowed in purple. Low hills weathered by centuries. Comforting hills.