Chapter 2

I know what you're thinking. There I was, talking to a girl who had a twenty-five year old body, and a fifteen year old voice, who had just suggested that she was over a hundred years old. You're thinking this girl was a couple of bricks shy of a load ... a joker or two short of a full deck ... that the lights were on, but nobody was home. I know that, because that's what I was thinking. I decided I should humor her. Who knew when these wacko types might go up in flames?

"That's nice," I said. "You do good work."

She slapped me on the shoulder - hard!

"Look at them!" she ordered me. "Look at the two of them side by side, seam by seam."

I humored her by examining the workmanship on the boxes.

And then I noticed something.

They were the same!

And I'm not talking about being the same color, or the same design. I mean both pieces of wood on the tops had been split from the same log! The patterns were almost identical in that way that fine furniture, all made from one log is the same. I looked closely at the joints. They were identically made too, and not in a mechanical way. What I mean is I knew mine was hand-made, with no power tools. Hers was too. All the dimensions and techniques used were exactly the same. The authenticity of those joints was unmistakable. My box was more beat up than hers, but they were obviously made by the same person.

And her box was obviously brand new!

Now I looked at her knife. That was a little harder. Boot daggers look like boot daggers. But the color of the wood was the same, though mine had that patina of age on it that darkened the wood a bit, what with the skin oils that had soaked into it over the generations. But the metal parts were identical! And the rivets that held the handle on were also identically patterned, having little dents in the brass rivets where a tiny ball peen hammer or something had been used to spread them in their holes. It was clear to me that both these knives had been made by the same person too!

Except here, the differences were much more stark. My knife had scratches and dings, and had been sharpened with a stone that was too coarse. I hadn't really noticed all that before. And the reason I noticed it now was that her knife was flawless. There were no dents. No scratches. The edge of the blade was razor sharp, but you couldn't see any striations on it from whatever had sharpened it at all.

Her knife was obviously brand new. And by brand new ... I mean made within the last month or so.

And yet ... I would have bet my last dollar it was a genuine Jonathan Rutledge knife.

I looked at her box again. It was brand new too.

That's when I freaked out.

I would have babbled, except I couldn't think of a single thing to say. I had all kinds of evidence right in front of me, but it was telling me impossible things. She let me wig out for a while, and then touched my face.

"Let me tell you what happened," she said. "Then you'll understand why I'm here."

We stayed up all night. During that time I took her out to find something to eat. She has an odd diet, meaning it's not traditionally carnivorous, but what she was telling me was so fascinating that I didn't care if she wanted to eat raw milk straight from the cow's teat. But I won't repeat the whole thing. I'll synopsize it, because as fascinating as it all is, she didn't have the technical background to understand what was happening, and it would probably frustrate you as much as it frustrated me.

So here's the deal.

She was riding her bike, like she does every chance she gets, when the world went all wavy around her and she crashed into the dirt road. That was the first problem, because she hadn't been riding on a dirt road. She'd been riding on a sidewalk. Not only that, but the houses and street and all that were gone as well. She was in the country.

There were two men standing there, dressed "retro" as she called it. One of them was a man named Wyndham Foster, who was responsible for her being there.

The other was Jonathan Rutledge ... my great-great grandfather.

Foster lived with Jonathan, as a boarder. My great-great grandmother had already passed on due to consumption, which we know now as tuberculosis. Mr. Foster, as it turned out, was a self-styled scientist, and in 1915, he developed first a theory, and then a contraption that, when hooked into a source of electrical power - in this case an automotive battery - was supposed to create an impenetrable field of energy. His thought processes were that this process could be generated around a vehicle, making it into a transport for troops that would be invulnerable to known devices of war.

Wyndham Foster wanted to make a better tank.

But when he tested it on a vehicle out in the countryside, with his landlord there as a witness, what he created was a time warp that sucked Tuesday back into 1915, and left the vehicle sitting on a sidewalk in Perry, Oklahoma. You could check that out yourself. I know for a fact that it was local legend in Perry, about how this old truck just appeared on the sidewalk one day. The stories about how that had happened got wilder and wilder. That old truck got famous for a while, but the mayor decided it was all a scam, and he had the vehicle melted down for scrap so that tourists would stop coming ... and laughing ... at the town. I knew about all that when Tuesday first showed up at my door. Of course her story could have been just another wild story about how that truck got there, except there was actually some empirical evidence that she was telling the truth. I'm telling you, the joints in those presentation boxes couldn't be faked!

Anyway, there she was, back in 1915. When that was understood, she naturally freaked out a bit. Who would blame her, right? The two men were even more freaked out, not only by the fact that his truck had turned into a bicycle, but that it came with such an unconventional looking woman to boot. She looked then very much like she looks now. And her clothing was completely foreign.

It was the bicycle that established beyond doubt what had happened. There was no bike like that anywhere in the world in 1915. Some of the metals in it hadn't even been invented yet. So both Foster and my grandfather (all those great-greats just clutter things up, so I'm calling him grandfather from now on, okay?) knew that she was from the future, and that time travel had taken place. They had no idea how that had happened. They just knew it had.

Of course Tuesday wanted to go home. She had a seven-year-old little boy to take care of, one who needed her and might be looking for her at that very moment. And if they had brought her there ... they could send her back ... right?

Well, there was a little complication, it seemed. The whole gizmo Foster had built, which had done something it wasn't supposed to do at all, was now a pile of smoking, molten wreckage. And when she found out she wasn't going anywhere ... well Tuesday can be difficult when she's unhappy.

But life goes on, as they say. Grandfather had rooms, so she moved into one of them while she supervised Mr. Foster's replication of his machine. I say "supervised" there, but in all honesty, while her scientific knowledge vastly outpaced theirs in many ways, he still understood his theories and his now defunct machine much better than she did.

I was trying to be nice instead of saying she nagged him into building another time machine. But basically, that's what she did.

On the other hand, her head really was stuffed full of things that neither man was aware of yet. Wyndham was a smart guy, never mind the fact that his invincibility machine turned out to shift things in time instead. And he was smart enough to understand that all these fascinating things this strange woman from the future was telling him had no place in rebuilding his machine. Not if he wanted it to work the same way it had already worked. Once she was safely back where she belonged (hope! hope! hope!) then he could incorporate his new knowledge into things.

Of course Tuesday thought she could help make things better. I'm not banging on her. She's just a very headstrong woman. But I'm very thankful to Wyndham Foster that he was strong enough to resist her.

My grandfather, however, was not. Able to resist her, I mean.

Tuesday has this mystical ability to ensnare a man in multiple ways. A man can just sit and watch her ... look at her ... for hours and be completely happy. If he gets to listen to her at the same time, he'll probably get an erection. She's smart, sassy, fun to be around, a good conversationalist and good looking to boot. She has no problem telling you what she thinks, even if what she thinks is, that you are an idiot.

In short, she wasn't like any woman alive in 1915. She was much more interesting than most of them, not because she was a better human being, but because she was so much more liberated. She had the advantages they were denied, back then.

Anyway, suffice it to say that my grandfather was smitten. He had always compared other women to his wife, but this one was impossible to do that with. So this one he evaluated differently. This part of the story is a bit mushy, because she wasn't aware of what was happening between them either. From her viewpoint she had to stay there, so she did. She had to make sure Wyndham built another machine, so she could go back home, so she did. She had to contribute towards her upkeep too, so in the wild spirit that probably let her survive the whole thing in the first place, she became my grandfather's student. Not in making knives (though she eventually helped in that too, ) but by learning how to make the presentation boxes that the knives went into.

She earned her keep by becoming a cabinetmaker.

It took Wyndham a year to rebuild the machine. She worked with my grandfather every day, all day, for that year.

And they fell in love.

She tells me it was only two months before she got up one night and went to his room. He was snoring, and she got into bed with him. She slept naked, and that's how she got into his bed. That first night, he didn't wake up when she got into bed with him. And I guess there was some excitement the next morning when he arose and found a deliciously naked woman in bed with him.

He basically told her that kind of thing wasn't appropriate. She basically told him she was tired of being lonely and sleeping that way.

He basically told her she was being a lewd woman. She decided to see if he was a passable kisser.

He resisted for all of ten more minutes, being slowly worn down by her lips, and hands, and body pressing against him, very much like a wind up toy that is running down, until he ran out of energy to fight her off.

They both discovered his erection at that point. Apparently he hadn't had one in quite some time, and his moral resistance was replaced with delight.

Some time later (she keeps claiming it was hours, but I doubt that very much) he was begging her for mercy.

Thus began their upgraded relationship, in which he kept demanding she marry him, and she kept reminding him she was going back to the future someday. He said he could live with that, but not if their amorous activities got her with child. That concept seemed to excite him, she said. Possibly because, when he was excited about something, he was an extra good lover (so she says) she neglected to tell him she had an IUD implant that was going to make sure she left the same way she got there, which was un-pregnant. He probably would have thought an IUD was something from the devil anyway. But the thought that she was fertile kept him excited, which meant she had a really good time in bed. And when you've been hijacked into the past, the least you deserve is a really good time in bed.

So most of a year passed and she became an expert woodworker, with antique tools. Apparently she was good enough that my grandfather said he was going to keep one of her boxes to pass down to his descendants. He had a son who was in the Army, and who he hoped would come home someday and take over the family business. He never did, by the way, but at least he kept the knives his father gave him, and passed them down, including the box Tuesday made.

Many times, Tuesday has lain her head on my shoulder and mournfully said how much she misses him. But the fact that she loved him did not alter the fact that she had a son who needed her, and that she still wanted to go back to her own time.

And, eventually, Wyndham said he was ready. He had rebuilt everything exactly the same way. Everything was exactly like his original drawings, except that the polarity was reversed. It was all he could think of to try. Everyone agreed that the second test of the device had to take place at exactly the same place as the first test.

So, on the appointed day, she kissed Jonathan, detected his erection and, as usual, called him a dirty old man. He grinned, and then cried. Wyndham ignored them, as he had ignored what was happening in the house the whole time. She was his friend, and that seemed enough for him.

She sat on her bicycle, holding the box she had made, containing the knife Grandfather had made for her, and watched as Wyndham slammed home the lever that completed the circuit. She saw sparks, felt sick at her stomach, and woke up in a hospital. She was found lying next to her bicycle in the street, her antique clothing smoking, clutching a boxed knife wrapped in a gunny sack. She told everyone she remembered nothing. She's a strong woman. Have I mentioned that? Well just imagine waking up in a hospital, not knowing whether it worked or not. You could get some indication of the date by the level of technology around you, but no specific date. And while the hospital room looked 21st century normal, she'd have still been desperate to know the exact date, and what the status of her son was. Wyndham had arranged the test of his second machine to coincide exactly with the lunar date of the first one, and adjusted the time of the experiment to take into account the fact that there was a six hour difference between last year at two P.M. and this year at two P.M. In other words, he was trying to send her back - if that's what actually happened - at exactly the same time and date he had sucked her back in time.

And, as truth is stranger than fiction, it had worked. She returned, as best she can estimate, about ten minutes after she left. She and her bike were a year older, and she had a box with a brand new, hundred-year-old knife in it, but she was back where she ... belonged.

Except that the man she loved was now dead and buried, somewhere in Oklahoma.

It only took her a week to remember that the man she loved ... had descendants.

And that was when she decided to look for me.

Of course I had a hard time believing all this, as she told me the tale, lying on the bed beside me. Don't get the wrong impression. We were both clothed, and there was nothing romantic going on. We just found that if she told me a chapter, lying in bed that way, in the dark, that it was easier for her to tell, and easier for me to hear. She had a way with words. She could be a master storyteller if she wanted to.

And it took a while for her to tell the whole story. That first night turned into three more. In the daytime, we didn't talk about the past. She was a web developer, and had work to do. She'd brought her laptop with her, and she sat and pecked for most of each day. I had my own work to do, and I sat and pecked for most of the day too. We ate separately, fixing whatever each of us felt like eating.

But in the evening, if I turned on the television, she'd come take my hand, remind me that TV rots the brain, and pull me to my bed, which was bigger than hers.

Then she'd tell me a story, describing what her life was like during the year she spent in Oklahoma in 1915.

It was fascinating in ways that are difficult to explain. For example, one day Jonathan asked her if she was pregnant. She laughed (and didn't tell him why) and said she was not. He looked concerned, and then nervous, and acted odd until she made him tell her what was bothering him. He hemmed and hawwed and blushed and flushed, acting more like a little boy than a forty year old man, but eventually she got it out of him. He was baffled, because he was quite sure she hadn't had a menstrual period while she was there. But that wasn't the kind of thing a man discussed with a woman, particularly one he was not married to. She thought that was hilarious. There were a lot of stories about that kind of disconnect, when there was a cultural difference that caused problems. And yet ... she was a product of that culture!

And I cannot begin to tell you how entertaining it was to lie there in the dark and listen to the stories that I now believed were absolutely true. It was like listening to J.K. Rowling in the dark, telling about the alternate universe she was sucked into one time, where she met a bunch of students at an academy of magic. It was so detailed, so full of color and emotion ... that it couldn't possibly be fiction. Nobody could make something like that up. It was too strange to be merely a story. It had to be ... true!