Predestination Unknown Read online

  My hands tightened into fists. I didn’t care what century this was. I wouldn’t be treated like an animal.

  “It’s below freezing, Father. Mr. Johnson is a free man, so he assures me. I think you are not in favor of cruelty towards negroes.”

  “Have you papers?” Mr. Cheever asked me. “I suppose you want me to take your word for it that you are free and then next thing I’ll have the constable out here.”

  My hand reached for my wallet even as I realized the futility of it. There wasn’t anything in my wallet that proclaimed me to be a free man, because shit. I was a man, a person. Of course I was fucking free. I’d freeze to death before I spent a night under this man’s roof, and I certainly wasn’t spending it in his barn. I’d suffer whatever hardships it took to bring me back to civilization.

  So why was I just standing there gaping at him instead of laying into him or storming out of his blighted, unwelcoming door? The twenty-first century was full of subtle racism, and God knew the shit that appeared in the news daily was every bit as bad as what was currently going down in front of me, but life hadn’t prepared me to confront extreme bigotry head-on.

  “Father,” chimed in a little voice from the end of the table. The girl who’d piped up appeared to be nine or ten, dressed like her mother with a pair of braided pigtails dropping down her back. “I think the negro is a man.”

  “Well, I didn’t say he wasn’t a man.” Mr. Cheever huffed, but his cheeks pinkened.

  “Then I suppose he belongs in the house, not the barn. It seems to me that is what you would tell us. By way of logic, sir.”

  It wasn’t at all what Mr. Cheever had been telling us, but the little girl’s manipulation paid off. Mr. Cheever drew himself up like he’d come to a new conclusion all by himself.

  “Of course the man belongs in the house, Abigail. That was never in question. I merely questioned whether I should prepare for a visit from the constable.”

  “We’d not turn him in, I think,” Abigail pondered, as though she were posing a question for her father to answer.

  “I do not traffic in slaves myself,” Mr. Cheever pronounced, his gaze alternating between his daughter and me. “Horrific business, slavery. Not in keeping with Christian principles.”

  “So you’ve taught us,” Ezekiel agreed.

  I could hear the relief in his voice. It was sweet that the Cheever family was all on the same page now, but I still wasn’t subjecting myself to accepting the grudging hospitality of a racist blowhard, no matter how hungry I was or how cold the night might be.

  “Will you sup, Mr. Johnson?” The lady who’d risen when we came in had been busy all this while, and she now placed two full plates on the table, one on each side of her own seat. The other bodies on the benches shifted to leave gaps near the end.

  “We should wash up,” Ezekiel said. “I’ve been down at the far barn all afternoon with my hands in dust and cow dung.” He headed for the back of the room, catching at my elbow to drag me along with him.

  “I can’t stay,” I told him. I kept my voice low since Mrs. Cheever and Abigail had been nice enough, and Ezekiel too. “Your father doesn’t want me here and I won’t stay where I’m spoken about like that.”

  Ezekiel poured some water from a pitcher into a basin and dipped his hands into it. “The Lord calls on us to forgive,” he said as he reached for a hand towel.

  “Wait. You want me to forgive your father?”

  “Please?”

  I’d expected him to defend his father, or at least to act as though no harm had been done. I hadn’t expected him to ask for forgiveness. It took the wind out of my sails.

  “My father is a school teacher, a Godly man, and a good father and husband. That were not his finest moment you witnessed, but you’ll not let yourself spend a night out of doors without giving him a second chance, I hope.”

  “I …” I hesitated. I’d nearly lost my fingers to frostbite on the ride over, and that was with them sliding over Ezekiel’s hot body. “If you think it’ll be all right for me to stay,” I conceded. But Mr. Cheever was getting one more chance and that was it.

  Ezekiel clapped me on the shoulder and gifted me with a grin that was almost worth dining with a racist to see. Puritans weren’t supposed to have such pretty teeth. I imagined his white, even teeth lined up like a row of Chiclets between the bubblegum pink of his lips nibbling on me—a much happier thought than the one I’d been entertaining a moment ago.

  I rinsed my hands in the cold water pre-dirtied from Ezekiel’s hand-washing, rubbing lightly at the dried blood on my hand so as not to re-open the wound it had come from.

  “I should wrap that for you,” Ezekiel said. “And look at the cut on your head.”

  “After dinner maybe. The table’s been set.” And our food was getting cold. My stomach rumbled and Ezekiel’s rumbled back sympathetically. The two of us agreed about the need for food and possibly also the joys of homoerotic horse riding.

  Back at the table, I seated myself between Abigail and her mother, across from Ezekiel, as far from Mr. Cheever as I could get. In front of me was a piece of meat—I wasn’t sure what it was, but I wasn’t feeling picky—surrounded by potatoes and carrots and slathered in gravy. I reached for my knife and fork, absolutely ravenous, then realized that Ezekiel had bowed his head.

  I bowed mine too. I should have known better. Did my grandmother ever allow me to eat without saying grace? Ezekiel kept his prayer quiet and short, thank God, and I followed it with an enthusiastic amen. I didn’t have much of a relationship with God, but I was plenty grateful for food and warmth and cute dudes sitting across from me.

  “Mother,” Ezekiel said. “I didn’t present to you my friend, Luther Johnson.”

  His use of the word friend healed some of the anger Mr. Cheever had stirred up. I turned towards the woman with a little bow and returned her smile. Though Ezekiel called her mother, I still didn’t see how she could be so much older than he was.

  “You’ve met our Abigail,” she said. “At the far end from you is our eldest daughter Isabel.”

  I nodded down the table at Isabel. She was probably eighteen, a pretty enough young woman, but not, thankfully, Ezekiel’s wife.

  “That’s our youngest, Abraham, she has in her lap and this ragamuffin next to Ezekiel is our boy, Tom.”

  Tom, who appeared to be about five and who was dressed like his little sister in a skirt and pinafore, said, “I’ve never seen a negro sit at a table before,” as though I were performing a circus trick.

  “It’s quite common where I’m from,” I told him instead of replying that I’d never seen a little boy in a pinafore before.

  “And where is it you’re from, Mr. Johnson,” Ezekiel’s father asked.

  “Connecticut.” I wished everyone would stop talking to me and let me eat. I’d decided the meat was lamb, a bit on the stringy side, but the gravy made up for it.

  “I’ve been to Connecticut.” Mr. Cheever said. “Some of our brethren formed a colony there some time back.”

  “Did they? I haven’t run into them.” That was true enough.

  “I don’t recall men with speech and customs as foreign as yours. You seem to come from somewhere farther off.”

  “I’m originally from Connecticut, but I’ve traveled.”

  I’d certainly traveled, whether in time or space I still wasn’t sure, but the more I realized how odd I seemed to the Cheevers, the more convinced I became that I was either in the seventeenth century or in Oz. And there weren’t enough lollipop-wielding Munchkins for this to be Oz.

  “Do all the negroes sit with the white people in Connecticut?” Tom asked.

  “Yes,” I told him firmly. Mr. Cheever pursed his lips, but Tom seemed satisfied with my answer. Ezekiel grinned at me from across the table.

  There was enough light in the room that I could make out his features better now. He had heavy eyebrows, several shades darker than the dirty-blond hair on his scalp. The eyes they arched over were a
light shade of brown, amber in the orangey firelight. They were wide-set and over-large and they framed the slender, pointed nose that was the only thing that kept his face from being cherubic.

  He’d inherited his father’s nose, but it set better on Ezekiel because it topped a mouth quick to smile, outlined by a pair of narrow, pink lips and filled with those Chiclet teeth. My own teeth were straight thanks to braces and white thanks to fluoride, not to mention my father’s insistence on good dental hygiene, but Ezekiel’s must have been straight and white thanks only to luck.

  A very light shadow around his jawline told me that he shaved. I ran a hand over my own jawline. I’d started a beard to usher in the winter season. It was thicker than stubble, but not much. I didn’t want to end up working anything like Mr. Cheever’s full-on Duck Dynasty monstrosity, so I added my trimmer to the list of things I was going to wish I had in the morning, right up there with running water, indoor plumbing, and a cell phone signal.

  “Your beard is fuzzy,” Tom observed.

  “And your mouth is smart,” Mrs. Cheever said. “If you’ve finished eating, you may be excused.”

  “But I haven’t finished eating.”

  “Then you may be silent,” Mr. Cheever put in from the other end of the table.

  His edict seemed to apply universally, because silence descended. Personally, I was happy to eat instead of defend myself from barbed comments from five-year-olds who should be told better.

  “This is delicious,” I complimented Mrs. Cheever between bites. “Thank you for your hospitality.”

  She shied as though I’d praised her ass instead of her cooking, leaving me to wonder if no one had ever thanked her for dinner before. Or maybe attention from a strange man made her nervous. I decided not to bother the white lady and got back to eating.

  Tom had been told to shut up, and shut up he did, but he didn’t stop staring at me. Abigail’s fascination with me was no less obvious, but apparently she was old enough to have a sense of decorum, because she kept her nosy observations to herself. Now and then she kicked her leg beneath the table in such a way that it swung against mine, like she was feeling antsy or trying to get my attention. When I glanced her way, her eyes met mine frankly but she didn’t speak. Mr. Cheever’s commands carried weight.

  When we’d all cleaned our plates, Mrs. Cheever and her daughters rose to clear the table. Abigail walked with a rocking motion that looked a bit like what I remembered from the horse earlier. Below her mid-calf-length dress I could see that her right leg was shorter and thinner than her left.

  I caught myself staring too hard and turned my attention back to the table. My father had taught me to clear my own plate, but I didn’t want to do anything that would confirm Mr. Cheever’s perception of me as lesser, so I sat uncomfortably idle while a little girl cleaned up after me.

  Mr. Cheever donned a pair of spectacles and lit a candle to supplement the light of the fire which had died down during dinner, leaving the room considerably cooler. Ezekiel had been right about the temperature dropping. I was glad to be inside, although when Mrs. Cheever brought Mr. Cheever a Bible and he began reading from it out loud, I revisited that opinion.

  I had no idea what part of the Bible he was reading from, but it wasn’t one of the more entertaining bits. My eyelids drooped as he droned on without making any effort to enliven the dry text while the rest of us sat in silent stillness. Even Tom didn’t make a sound, though he rested his cheek on his fist with a weariness I shared.

  After what felt like hours but might have only been fifteen minutes, Mr. Cheever closed the book and said a long prayer which concluded with a heartfelt amen—Tom’s and mine being the most heartfelt of all—and we all rose from the table that had begun to feel like a prison to me.

  Mr. Cheever addressed Ezekiel. “As Robert is away, I suppose as you’ve room in your bed for Mr. Johnson. Seeing as he’s your guest.”

  “Such was my intent,” Ezekiel responded.

  It might have been his intent, but it certainly hadn’t … well, it might have been at one point, but I’d given up on the idea of getting laid a few plot twists ago. Now Ezekiel and his father were casually discussing whether or not we’d share a bed. And who was Robert and why did he normally share Ezekiel’s bed?

  Maybe Mr. Cheever had meant we’d share a bedroom, not a bed. I was too exhausted to hear straight. Time travel took it out of a man. Breaking through mirrors, confronting racism, finding out that nothing you thought you knew about reality was true, not to mention riding a horse—it was all a bit much for one day.

  Chapter 4

  Yeah, there was only one bed. And it wasn’t a giant one either. I looked around the small room made of wood. Everything in this house was made of wood. Ezekiel’s bedroom featured wood floors, wood walls, a wood armoire in the corner and, beneath the wood-framed window, a wood-framed bed. Hopefully the mattress wasn’t made of wood too.

  A soft rustle had me turning to catch him undressing by the light of the candle he’d carried up. He’d already shucked his frock coat to reveal a short-sleeved version of the doublet I wore. Beneath it lay a white, long-sleeved blousy thing—something between long johns and a pirate shirt. No wonder he hadn’t been as cold as I’d been. There was nothing beneath my doublet except a t-shirt. I couldn’t remember which t-shirt I’d put on that morning, but I could guarantee it was inappropriate.

  I tried not to stare, to move my glance around the room as if I were looking nowhere in particular, but there wasn’t much to look at besides a bed and a dresser and Ezekiel stripping. Beneath his trousers, which stopped at his knees like mine did, he wore a pair of bloomers, also whitish and also stopping at the knee.

  “I’ve only the one nightshirt.” Ezekiel pulled what looked like a granny nightgown over his head, ending the strip tease. Shame he wouldn’t be getting naked, but I liked him in the nightgown. It shouldn’t have been sexy, covering him from neck to ankle the way it did, but I had a soft spot for beautiful men in feminine clothes. And for getting them out of those clothes.

  “But I do think as there’s an old one of Robert’s here somewhere,” he said as his head popped out through the neckline. “Mother made him a new one with a bit of lace at the cuffs when he went off to seminary. He be closer to your size anyway.”

  “I’m not that much taller than you.”

  “A few inches, I reckon.” He came and stood much too close, measuring himself against my frame.

  “A few inches,” I confirmed. I swallowed back the temptation to grab him by the hips and yank him up against me.

  “I meant not so much that you are taller, though you are, but that there is more of you through here.” He traced a hand from the juncture of my neck across the top of my trapezius and over the ball of my shoulder.

  I held my breath until he dropped his hand and turned back to the armoire. He opened a drawer and pulled out a white cotton garment like the one he had on. There was no help for it. I was going to have to strip down. At least I was wearing boxer briefs. If I’d gone to Salem with the intention of getting laid, I might have worn my fire-engine-red brief-briefs, the ones with the pouch in front designed to put my junk on maximum display.

  “Who’s Robert?” I moved towards a darker corner of the room and turned my back on Ezekiel to hide whatever band logo graced the front of my t-shirt.

  “My brother.”

  I unfastened the buttons down the front of my doublet. I pulled it off and let it fall to the ground, then quickly yanked Robert’s nightshirt down over the gigantic portrait of Snoop Dog emblazoned across my chest. The nightshirt dislodged the wig I’d almost forgotten I was wearing, knocking it askew. I touched it tentatively.

  “I’ve not got a wig stand,” Ezekiel said, “as I’ve not got a wig.”

  OK, he knew it was a wig. That was good. Though no one from any century could seriously have mistaken the cascade of glossy brown curls running over my shoulders for human hair. But Ezekiel’s comment about a wig stand implied
that a man wearing a wig wasn’t totally anachronistic. I could pictures dudes in wigs like the ones British lawyers wore hanging out with the Puritans.

  I dumped the wig on top of Ezekiel’s dresser, then worked my fly open under the covering of the nightshirt. My phone was a heavy weight in one of my pants pockets, but there was no point in asking Ezekiel if he had a charger for an Android phone. The answer to that would be no.

  Shielding the phone from him with my body, I thumbed it off. My battery had already dipped below fifty percent. With no signal, it’d be drained by morning. I stuffed the phone back in my pocket and snaked my pants out from under the nightgown without allowing my boxer brief-clad ass to moon him.

  Dressed in my own undergarments and a borrowed nightgown, I turned and found him watching me.

  “The nightdress fits well enough,” he said, as though he’d been worried about the fit of a cotton sack. His eyes were focused more on my now-bare head than my sack-encased body. I ran a hand over my hair. It was about two inches long and due a touch up.

  “Your wound be not so bad,” he said, coming over to look at my head more closely, “though it did bleed aplenty.” He wet his thumb and brushed it over my temple. So unsanitary. My grandmother would be pitching a fit right about now, but I allowed Ezekiel to clean me like a cat, wondering at how easily he put his thumb, red with the traces of my blood, back into his mouth to re-wet it.

  In the aftermath of my fall through the mirror, my wounds had felt gapingly big, but all the bleeding had stopped and I was pretty sure I’d live, if I didn’t get sepsis from dirty water and tongue baths. The bigger problem was that Ezekiel’s intimate attentions had my mind in dangerous territory again. I evaded his next touch, stepping back to put some distance between us.

  “So where’s Robert?” I asked, to re-focus on something safer.

  “He’s gone to London to seminary.”

  “You didn’t want to go?”

  “Someone has to look after the farm. My father has his duties as schoolmaster and my brothers are too young to be more than a hindrance. With Robert away, I must stay.”