The Legend of Garison Fitch (Book 1): First Time (9 page)

Ironic, isn't it, that someone who has made a successful of life of quantum physics is afraid of people because they present too many variables?

Excerpt from
A Fitch Family History by Maureen Fitch Carnes

As Darius stood looking at the wide Mississippi, perhaps watching the sun set as it dipped below the horizon on the other side, he finally acknowledged something he had probably known ever since he left the Cherokee village: he couldn't go on without White Fawn. Even his service and duty to General Washington paled in the face of love. And everything took on a sickly pallor with the prospect of facing the world without White Fawn by his side.

When dawn broke, Darius started back to the Cherokee village. The trip back was actually much quicker than the trip to the river had been for he was taking no time to stop, survey, or meet the locals. He had a singular purpose in mind and let nothing slow him down from his pursuit.

Chapter Eight

Garison soon proved himself a more than able smithy and, true to his word, a quick learner. From the start he began to notice elements of the process which could be made more efficient and even ways in which the metals they worked with could be improved. He kept his ideas to himself, for fear of being too presumptuous, but knew that—over time—he could make Finneas Franklyn's smithy the talk of the colonies. Some of his knowledge came from the advantage of being from the future, but much of it came simply from the fact that he always tried to improve anything he worked on.

He held back for another reason, as well, though. The thought kept coming to Garison that, if he really had traveled backward in time—and every indication he could find corroborated the assumption—then any move he made could have dilatory effects on the future he knew. The wrong move—however innocent—might have dire consequences on his own family tree and, thus, his very life.

On the other hand, he reasoned, it was entirely possible that he had already done something that would change the future. He had read the fiction and even serious works that had hypothesized that even a small move in the past could change the future. If he were to, for instance, intercept a flu virus intended for someone else he might rewrite the world. Stepping on a caterpillar might have some disastrous effect on the food chain. The truth was, he realized, that he had already interacted with the past and, possibly, changed the future. And there was no way he could know. So his only choice was to live his life the best he could in the present until he could find a way to return to the future.

March 21, 1739 (Evening)

I have decided to regard the problem in this way: the future does not exist. The world that I remember has not yet happened, nor is it a foregone conclusion that it will happen. Therefore, my best solution would be to treat each day as I would have treated them in the 2000s; to wit: live and let live.

I have decided this day that I will not change the world by suddenly revealing all the marvelous inventions of my time. I will improve Mount Vernon in small ways that I see fit, but I will not—for instance—wire the town for electricity. I believe the shock that that would cause in the people would be too great (no pun intended). Such leaps as that need to be arrived at naturally. After all, one does not give a hammer to a one year old child, one allows the child to mature to the point that he can handle the hammer.

This stance (of revealing some advances and not others) may be hypocritical of me. Perhaps I should reveal absolutely nothing, but I find it almost impossible to stand by watching something being done when I know a better way to do it. I have not explored that side at this time. But, deep down inside, there is a voice telling me not to disrupt things too much because I may, indeed, return home some day. I am not sure I believe that one simple act can change everything—but it is best not to take chances. I am also not convinced that I will ever return "home", but if this has taught me anything, it's that nothing is certain.

So, I will live life unobtrusively, contributing where I can, and staying silent where need be. Maybe this is the life I have always wanted...deep down.

Garison worked six days a week in the smithy and on Sunday he and everyone else in town went to church. Garison had at first balked at the idea of attending church, mostly as a result of thirty years of brainwashing. But he realized going to church might be the chance he had wanted for some time to explore the Bible with other people and find out about the thing called "Christianity" he had wondered so much about. In addition, there was no better way to become part of the town and get to know the people than to start attending church with them. Church was a prominent part of village life in Mount Vernon, even for those people who didn't seem to hold too tightly to the tenets the Bible set forth. There were strong, seriously religious church attendees in Mount Vernon (as everywhere), but there were also a few who went to church strictly for the society it contained. And some went only because not going would have caused them too much trouble in the community.

There was a prominent Puritan church in town and a sizable Anglican church nearby, but Garison preferred the congregation which met in a barn to the west of town. It was composed of many Scotsmen, and had a distinct hint of presbyterianism, but was not officially associated with any denomination. Garison liked it for, not only was it smaller and devoted more to Bible study than preaching (being without a minister at the time), it was where Sarah went. Of course, the single men and women sat on opposite sides of the “aisle” (families sat together in what was, for the time, a progressive idea), and Garison never had the nerve to say more than "Hello" or "Good day," to her, but he told himself he would one day work up the nerve to have another conversation. Until then, at least he was in the same room with her. Once or twice she caught him stealing glances her way, but she never said anything or acted as if she cared, though she had given him a polite smile once.

Worship services at the small congregation began approximately two hours after sunrise, which gave the working people of the church—almost all the members were of the "lower class"—time to do their chores before coming to worship. Once there, the men and women divided into two groups for Bible study and the children were set aside for schooling. The schooling was of the "Alphabet and Mathematics" variety as many of the children worked full time on the farm during the week and were not able to attend the town's real school for more than three months in a year. Even though the schooling was of a somewhat secular nature, all the reading and writing assignments were heavily influenced by—if not taken directly from—the Bible. When Garison allowed as how he knew something about mathematics, he was given the task of teaching numbers to the children and soon had them ahead of the children who were attending the town school for full semesters. He had even found that a couple of the students were especially adept at mathematics and was tutoring them evenings during the week when possible.

If anyone remembered his strange attire of his first day, they never said anything about it, for he was proving himself a valuable member of the community. There were other people in town who had come to the new world for a fresh start and people generally took to a man who could carry his weight and was no trouble. So Garison was becoming known as both a hard-worker and a church-going man and his stature in the community began to rise.

Following the Sunday School, which lasted anywhere from an hour to two, all the brothers and sisters (as they referred to each other) would gather in the barn—or outside on especially pretty days—for their time of worship. They sang hymn after hymn—accompanied by whatever instruments had been brought—took the Lord's Supper each week, and then listened to a sermon. The sermon was brought each week by the men of the congregation who exposed a different scripture to hermeneutical light for anywhere from two to three hours with varying degrees of oratorical skill. On the one Sunday a month when the circuit preacher came through, sermons often preceded lunch for a couple hours, then a common meal was shared, then the sermon was preached to its conclusion for another hour or sometimes three.

If someone were "converted" on a Sunday morning, the service could then have another hour tacked on as they all went down to the Potomac for the baptism. Owing to their practice of baptizing by complete immersion, the little church had come to be known as the Baptists, though their theology was distinctly non-Calvinist.

Following the service (if there were still daylight left), and leading to severe looks from the other two churches in town who believed Sunday after church should be a solemn time, the presbyterian off-shoots would linger for hours singing both worship and secular songs while the children played at "tag" and "Johnny-on-the-pony" and a new game Garison had introduced called "football." Garison had purchased a top-notch India rubber ball in Alexandria and had been teaching all the local children the game during the week but his congregational friends were getting special instruction. Due to the fact that the ball was harder than the footballs he was used to, and weighed considerably more, he had purposefully neglected to teach the children about "heading." He had found some old fishing nets and, with the help of a couple teen-age boys one Saturday night, had even erected regulation size goals near the barn where they worshipped.

One Sunday, in the evening after church, but before Garison begun teaching the children the game of soccer, Garison had slipped over to the smithy and borrowed a block and tackle, a large tarpaulin, and a good length of rope. He asked for and received permission to use Finneas's dray wagon and mules, though he neglected to say what for. Sneaking stealthily out of town, as stealthily as one can move with a heavy wagon and a team of mules, Garison went back to the field where he had left his machine. His route was somewhat circuitous as he avoided the first town he had come to, for though he had gotten to know some of the residents through his work, he had yet to become friendly with any of them.

He was glad to find the machine apparently undisturbed and no worse for the wear of sitting out in the elements for over two weeks. Using the block and tackle and a handy tree limb, Garison lifted the machine off the ground and drove the wagon under it. He gently lowered the machine onto the wagon, praying it wouldn't be too heavy. His fears were unfounded—or his prayers were answered—for the wagon was used to carrying heavy loads of metal and barely moved under the weight of the machine, which Garison estimated at 350 to 400 pounds. After cleaning up as much sign of his presence as possible and covering the machine with the tarp, he started back to town.

He arrived well after dark, which was his plan, and took the machine to an abandoned shack he knew of on the west side of town. Garison had talked to the owner and was in the process of buying the shack from its owner with small, monthly payments. The owner had agreed to secrecy and Garison felt he could trust the man as he was a leader at the church Garison attended. The man had seemed curious, but Garison had dropped hints that led the man to believe he was keeping articles from his days as a sailor in the shed.

Garison had forged a lock for the door and he locked it behind him when he left after cleaning it up one day. He had decided to keep one key on his person at all times and put one beneath the floorboards in the one-room cottage he was now renting. After putting away the machine, he locked it again and made certain his key was secure.

He was about to drive the mules back over to the smithy when a voice asked him, "What was that?"

He fairly jumped out of his skin as he turned and saw Sarah standing there in the moonlight. The blue beams of the world's lesser light added a strange but enchanting hue to her blonde hair and pale face.

"What are you doing here?" he asked, when he had recovered his breath.

"I could ask you the same thing."

He got down off the wagon and came over to her. She backed up a step, but no further. "How much did you see?"

"Just the town's newest—and might I say 'oddest'?—citizen coming out of a deserted shack carrying a tarpaulin and preparing to drive away with the smithy's mules and wagon." She looked toward the shack and asked, "What's in there?"

"What do you mean?" he asked, trying to sound either innocent or ignorant and doing neither well.

"I mean there I am sitting in my room, reading my Bible, when I hear the sound of a wagon being driven past my window. It's not often I hear that sound at night as my window faces out on an alleyway. So I peek out my window and in a shard of light from some lamp or maybe the moon, I see the silhouette of that odd Garison Fitch."

"'That odd Garison Fitch'? Is that my nickname now?"

"Yes, but don't change the subject." She looked at the shack and asked, "Is the secret of Garison Fitch in that shack?"

Somehow, Garison felt like he could trust this girl he hardly knew. He shrugged and said softly, "You might say that."

"Will I ever learn this secret? Will anyone?"

"If anyone does, it will be—I mean, if there were anyone I would like to tell it to, it would be you." After a pause, he asked, "May I ask you something?"

With a forced chuckle, that was still a pleasant sound to Garison's ears, she replied, "Why not? It seems like someone's questions ought to be answered. And since you obviously aren't going to answer mine..."

"You talked to me that first day I was here in town when no one else would and here you are, a young, single woman, talking to me after dark in an alley. Why? Neither would seem to fit with the customs of the ti—of this town."

She answered quickly, maybe a little too quickly she thought, "Because first I didn't know you were a stranger and tonight I was curious."