Running Out of Time Read online

  Wondering whether she’d ever have a chance to see the East, Jessie began her daily battle with her hair. It was dark and coarse and uncontrollable. Jessie braided it as tightly as she could, knowing wisps of hair would begin freeing themselves as soon as she finished.

  Finally ready, Jessie climbed downstairs and started taking the family’s chamber pots out to the outhouse. She hated that chore, but it was her turn. Two of her brothers, Nathan and Bartholomew, were helping Pa feed the cattle, pigs, chickens, and horses. Andrew, who was just two years younger than Jessie, carried wood toward Pa’s blacksmith shop. Hannah and Katie, the youngest, helped Ma with breakfast.

  Jessie stopped at the well to wash her hands. Pa, heading from the barn to the forge, stepped behind her.

  “Morning, Jessica. Did milady sleep well?”

  It was his joke, to call his daughters “milady,” even though he didn’t believe in royalty. Jessie had heard Mrs. Seward say once that, for a Jacksonian Democrat, Joseph Keyser certainly put on airs.

  “Yes, Pa,” Jessie said. She looked at him closely, trying to figure out if he knew about the “something very dangerous” that Ma wanted.

  “What’s wrong? Did I forget to shave?” Pa made a show of trying to look down at his chin. Jessie decided he didn’t know anything about Ma’s plans. That scared her, but she clowned an answer.

  “I think you missed a patch right there—” Jessie said, pointing at a spot on his right cheek and bringing her hand up suddenly to splash water on his face.

  Pa laughed and splashed her back.

  “Pa! I don’t want to be soaking wet at school!” Jessie protested.

  “You started it!”

  Jessie dried her hands on her apron as Pa, laughing, went on to the smithy. Jessie had heard Ma complain that Pa acted worse than the little boys sometimes. With his curly brown hair and laughing eyes, he looked a lot like Nathan. Jessie knew he was actually thirty-five, because it said in the family Bible, “Joseph Andrew Keyser, born May 18, 1804, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.” Ma was three years younger, but she acted older. The circuit rider minister, Reverend Holloway, always preached that wives were supposed to be obedient to their husbands. It didn’t seem to work that way at Jessie’s house. Oh, Ma pretended to be obedient, but she was really in charge.

  Only, Pa usually knew what she was planning.

  Jessie walked slowly back to the house, stumped about what Ma might want her to do. Usually Jessie could find some answer to any question at school, even when she wasn’t entirely sure. But she couldn’t figure out anything now. In the sunny yard, Jessie almost wondered if she’d imagined going to the King of the Mountain rock. Had she dreamed it? But no—when she stepped in the cabin door, she saw the wilted leaves Ma had picked on their way out of the woods.

  “No dawdling, now,” Ma said as everyone converged at the table. Jessie could smell the salt ham from across the room. There were also eggs, biscuits, gravy, back bacon, apple pie, and mush.

  The light from the fire glowed behind the table. The cabin was dim otherwise, because the oilpaper windows were so thick. Often Jessie wished for glass windows like Dr. Fister’s, but today the dimness seemed cozy. Across from the door, the ornate mirror on the back wall reflected little light. Even if it was one of the few heirlooms brought from Pennsylvania, Jessie had never liked the mirror. Maybe she’d been yelled at to stay away from it too many times when she was younger. But she’d been told just as often to be careful around the framed picture of Andrew Jackson and the tacked-up map of the United States, which hung on either side of the cabin door. And she had always thought the map and the picture looked downright friendly.

  Pa began his prayer. As always, it was long, and Jessie wasn’t the only one to open one eye and peek at the food.

  “We implore you, Lord, to keep our village and family safe from any sickness abroad in the land,” Pa said. Jessie glanced up, but Pa’s face wasn’t any different from when he prayed for the wisdom of the government.

  Jessie caught a stern glance from Ma and closed her eyes again until the “Amen.”

  THREE

  Mr. Smythe had asked the question twice, and Jessie still hadn’t heard it.

  “The presidents,” Mary Ruddle hissed. “Recite the presidents.”

  Jessie nodded gratefully and stood up.

  “George Washington,” she began. “Elected in 1789 and served two terms. Father of our country. Led the military in the Revolutionary War….”

  She zipped through the rest—Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, J. Q. Adams, Jackson, and the current president, Van Buren—without thinking about them. Sometimes she liked to mention extra details, like her father’s admiration for Andrew Jackson, even though it got her in trouble. But this time she did the list straight. She didn’t understand why the others, especially Hannah, thought this recitation difficult. Portraits of George Washington and Martin Van Buren hung on the wall over Mr. Smythe’s desk, so it would be impossible to forget either of them. There weren’t that many presidents in between. Hannah’s problem was that she spent too much time craning her neck to see into the mirror that hung beside the eighth graders’ desks. Jessie had never understood what it was doing there, unless Mr. Smythe wanted to torture vain students like Hannah.

  “And the next presidential election—” Mr. Smythe prompted.

  “This year. November 1840,” Jessie said automatically. Mr. Smythe always wanted his students to say what year it was. Jessie thought that was strange. Didn’t everyone know?

  “Good,” Mr. Smythe said, and turned his attention to third-grade reading. Jessie waited until he wasn’t looking and made a face. She didn’t like Mr. Smythe. He had hairs growing out of his nose and a way of looking at students as though he knew something they didn’t. Jessie couldn’t believe he knew as much as the students, because he always had to check their work with his books. Just the day before, he’d forgotten the year that Miles Clifton came up from Kentucky to found the village. And he threatened to get out the whip when the sixth graders tried to tell him the right answer.

  “Did anyone ask you?” he’d screamed. And when all the other students looked up to watch him yell, he began fuming, “Am I talking to you? Everyone has to stay after school!”

  Jessie hoped he wouldn’t make them stay late today. She sat down and saw that her friend Mary had written, “What’s wrong?” on her slate.

  “Nothing. Just daydreaming,” Jessie wrote back. But then she felt bad about not letting her best friend in on something. “Did you see Sally and Betsy are sick, too?” she wrote.

  Mary grimaced and nodded. Jessie looked around to count the empty benches. Nine pupils were missing between Katie’s first-grade row and the seventh- and eighth-grade row where Jessie, Hannah, Mary, Chester Seward, and Richard Dunlap sat.

  “Back row, are you doing your spelling words?” Mr. Smythe asked.

  “Yes, Mr. Smythe,” Hannah said. She was the only one, since Chester and Richard were drawing dirty pictures.

  Jessie bent over her slate and wrote “independence” five times. She couldn’t wait for school to get out.

  But when Mr. Smythe finally dismissed everyone, Jessie held herself back from the rush for the door.

  “Want to come home with me? Pa gave me some extra clay,” Mary said. Her father was the potter, and when he was feeling generous he let his children play in his workshop. He once helped Mary and Jessie make a clay doll for Jessie’s sister Katie.

  “No thanks. I’ve got to pick some herbs for Ma,” Jessie remembered to say.

  She was walking out behind Mary when she noticed Katie still sitting in the front row.

  “My insides don’t feel good,” Katie said.

  Jessie stooped beside her and felt her sister’s forehead, as she had seen Ma do with sick people. Katie’s face was burning up, but the little girl shivered so hard that her teeth clattered.

  “What hurts?” Jessie asked gently.

  Katie pointed to her throat. She looked like sh
e was going to cry, but she sneezed instead.

  “Here.” Jessie handed Katie her handkerchief. Katie blew her nose, loud for such a little girl, and began coughing.

  “Can you walk home?” Jessie asked Katie.

  “No,” Katie whispered. Her eyes filled with tears.

  Jessie rubbed Katie’s eyes with the handkerchiefs clean end.

  “That’s all right,” Jessie said. “I’ll carry you, just like when you were really little.”

  Crying, Katie climbed onto Jessie’s back. It was awkward to carry Katie, both their lunch pails, and all their books. Jessie wished Mr. Smythe were a nicer man, and would come help them. But he was watching poor Caleb Benton erase the blackboards, as if waiting for Caleb to make a mistake.

  “Don’t worry. You’ll be okay,” Jessie said softly, so Mr. Smythe couldn’t hear her. She didn’t want to be punished. “Okay” was a bad word no one was supposed to say, but Jessie liked it. Sometimes she wondered if it was forbidden because it had a secret power to make things okay. If that was true, Jessie wanted that power now. She wasn’t sure Katie would be okay. Betsy Benton had said she had a sore throat yesterday, too. And now she was so sick even Ma looked worried.

  “Comfortable?” Jessie asked as she walked unevenly out the schoolhouse door.

  Katie just sniffled, her face buried in Jessie’s hair.

  “You’ll be okay,” Jessie repeated, so quietly that maybe even Katie didn’t hear. She didn’t answer, only moaned when Jessie stumbled and jolted her. As they lurched past the Websters’ house, Jessie saw there was no quarantine sign on the door. Was that good or bad?

  Although she stumbled a few more times, Jessie finally made it to the door of the Keyser cabin.

  “Hello? Ma?” she called.

  No one was home. Jessie’s brothers were all out in the forge helping Pa, and Jessie remembered that Hannah had planned to stop off at Seward’s store and look at some fabric she wanted but would never be able to afford. Ma must be at one of the neighbors’—which was strange. Usually at this time of day, Ma was in the cabin fixing supper. The fire was banked on a Dutch oven full of some kind of food, but there was no other sign that Ma had been in the cabin since morning.

  “Here, we’ll get you to bed. Then you’ll be fine,” Jessie told Katie with false confidence. “Doesn’t that feel better?”

  Katie’s face was almost as pale as her bedding.

  “Thirsty,” she murmured.

  Jessie got her a drink and waited until Katie fell asleep. It didn’t seem right to leave Katie, but Ma had acted like it was important to meet her in the woods. Jessie stopped at Pa’s blacksmith shop on her way.

  “Can you tell Ma that Katie’s sick?” Jessie asked Andrew, who was sorting scrap metal while Pa worked at the forge.

  “Why can’t you?”

  Andrew was Jessie’s favorite brother, but he could be a horrible pain.

  “Ma wanted me to pick some herbs, and I don’t want to go in the dark,” Jessie explained.

  “Chicken?” Andrew taunted.

  “Of course not. I just want to be able to see.”

  Andrew shrugged, which Jessie took to mean that he would tell Ma about Katie. He waited until she had walked down the road before he yelled after her, “Sure you’re not going out to meet some boy?”

  “Shut up!” Jessie shouted. Then she ran, hoping Pa hadn’t heard her.

  “Shut up” was like “okay,” another bad word no one was allowed to use. They were even worse than taking the Lord’s name in vain. Jessie could never understand why. She could see that God might be offended at being used as a common curse, something she’d heard only a few men do when they appeared very, very mad. But even though Jessie pretended “okay” had special powers, she knew it wasn’t black magic or anything. And “shut up” was maybe a little rude, but … Jessie knew it was no use trying to figure it out. This was another secret.

  Jessie stopped running only when she reached the woods. With all the branches blocking the sun, it was always a little dusky and hard to see in there. She knew from school that the woods went on and on, clear to the Mississippi River, with only a few settlements like Clifton carved out in their midst. She kind of liked that, even though she’d heard some grown-ups talk about being afraid of the woods. She guessed it was because there were still dangerous Indians about when they came out from the East. But the Indians had all moved farther west now.

  Jessie remembered the stories about the battles of Fallen Timbers and Tippecanoe and shivered. It didn’t seem fair. The Indians had been here first. But Mr. Smythe had threatened to spank her for saying that in school.

  Jessie sat down on a log, thinking it would never be truly dark. Since she was here, she might as well pick herbs. She turned around to pull bark from a witch hazel tree.

  And then Ma was standing beside her.

  “You shouldn’t let people sneak up on you like that,” Ma said. It seemed like a joke, but Ma’s voice held an edge.

  “It’s just you, Ma,” Jessie said. She waited for Ma to smile, but Ma didn’t. “Where were you? What’s the dangerous thing I have to do? Is Katie—”

  “Shh.” Ma looked around, guardedly, then placed her lamp and medicine bag on the ground. She bent beside the rock as she had the night before. Jessie moved into the same pose.

  “I think we’re safe, but we’ll have to whisper,” Ma said. “I’ll answer all your questions, but it’s going to take a while. I did see Katie—”

  “Does she have the same sickness as Sally and Betsy?”

  Ma looked away, as though she was too sad to look at Jessie.

  “I’m afraid she does. It’s a disease called diphtheria.”

  It scared Jessie that Ma sounded so solemn. Jessie thought about her towheaded little sister, who was only six but always tried to do what “the big girls” did.

  “Is she going to be all right?” Jessie asked. “Are Sally and Betsy and the others—”

  “That depends,” Ma said. “I have a lot to tell you.”

  Ma stopped. A strong wind rustled the leaves of all the trees around them. Jessie shuddered. But maybe that wasn’t just because of the wind.

  “I never wanted to tell you like this,” Ma said. “Jessie, I don’t know how you’re going to react—”

  “To what?” Jessie asked impatiently. Ma’s voice frightened her.

  Ma held her finger to her lips.

  “Be still a minute,” she said. “I’m trying to think. How do I tell after all these years? It’s so complicated….”

  Jessie waited, not used to seeing Ma so puzzled and worried. Finally Ma looked back at Jessie.

  “We’ve been in Clifton for twelve years now, right? Remember how Pa always told you we came here because there was more opportunity than back in Pennsylvania?”

  Jessie nodded.

  “Well, that’s true, but not in the way we led you to believe. Clifton isn’t an ordinary village. It’s a historical preserve.”

  “What’s that?” Jessie’s voice shook a little.

  Ma’s gaze was steady.

  “Here, everything’s like it was in the 1800s,” Ma said slowly. “Outside, it’s”—Ma seemed to be counting in her mind—“Outside, it’s 1996.”

  FOUR

  For a long moment, Jessie couldn’t say anything. How could it be 1996? Jessie’s mind felt jumbled. If it wasn’t 1840, last year wasn’t 1839, and—

  “Jessie?” Ma said. “Are you listening?”

  “I’m trying to,” Jessie said.

  “Pa and I always wondered if we were being fair to you children. At least—I always wondered. Many times I wanted to tell, especially you and Andrew. But it got so it was safer not to.”

  “Why?”

  Ma frowned.

  “I don’t understand everything myself. I know what Miles Clifton said in the beginning, but I can’t believe it anymore. How can I explain what I don’t know?”

  Jessie had never seen her mother so uncertain. She snatched on t
he familiar name. “You said Miles Clifton—”

  “Yes, I know you learned about him in school,” Ma said. “What’s the story again?”

  “He built the first cabin in Clifton in 1825, invited other people to live here, then moved on when he felt Clifton had become too civilized,” Jessie said in the singsongy voice she used to answer Mr. Smythe. It was comforting to repeat the well-known history.

  Ma laughed bitterly.

  “That’s so ridiculous. Miles Clifton couldn’t survive two days in Clifton. He’s a millionaire—he’d probably die without his limousine.”

  Jessie tried to understand.

  “What’s a millionaire? What’s a limousine?”

  “A millionaire is someone who’s very rich. A limousine is a big car,” Ma said. Jessie must have looked puzzled, because Ma went on. “And a car is—oh, Jessie, this is too hard! There’s so much you need to know, and so much even I can’t tell you—”

  Ma looked like she was going to cry. Jessie felt frozen. She swallowed hard.

  “Tell me what you do know,” she said, trying to sound calm.

  Ma nodded, and soon she went on, her tone as even as when she explained the multiplication tables to Nathan.

  “Miles Clifton did found this village, in a way. He came up with the idea of building an authentic historical preserve, instead of doing it halfway, like at Williamsburg.”

  “Williamsburg? The old capital of Virginia?” Jessie asked, hoping she’d recognized another name. Maybe she wasn’t as ignorant as Ma thought.

  “Well, yes—you would know that, wouldn’t you?”

  “Mr. Smythe’s from Virginia, remember, and he talks like it’s really the only state in the Union.”

  “That’s right. Only Williamsburg pretty much fell to pieces after the capital was moved. Then it was restored years ago as a tourist site.” Again, Jessie felt confused, but this time Ma added the explanation smoothly. “A tourist site is someplace people travel to, to look at. Sometimes they go to learn something—Williamsburg was restored to help people understand the past. But mainly people go to tourist sites just for fun.”