“I need your help, Edmund. You must give me back the pewter ring, for only then will I have the strength to aid you and secure your ultimate salvation. You shall follow, but first you must return to your own age. You cannot depart unless you release the ring to me… Here, lad, take a little more grog.”
Dizzy with strong drink, Aymar had no desire to disappoint his ancestor and yet hesitated to give him the ring. But John Marshall Aymar would brook not the merest hint of opposition. Grinning maniacally, he lunged at Aymar’s left hand. Instinctively recoiling from the assault, Edmund Aymar lurched clumsily to his feet, upsetting the table and glasses before them. More accustomed to heady beverages than his descendant, the older man regained his balance in a moment and seized him from behind. The two tumbled to the sawdust floor, where they rolled like beasts until their cries brought men rushing in from the outer room. Dark faces filled with cruel anticipation were the youth’s final sight before he lost consciousness.
* * *
When Edmund Aymar woke up, bruised and sore, he found himself lying in the street, next to a homeless person also stretched out and disheveled, in front of a familiar house. Indeed, it was the same building he had entered perhaps hours before, but now it was covered with brown shingles where clapboard had been; too, electric street lamps illustrated the scene, not gas-lights. Aymar made his way to the Sheridan Square subway. That the pewter ring was missing from his finger he was too numb to notice.
In the months that followed Edmund Aymar wondered whether his coming to New York had been such a good idea after all. He obliquely discussed his “dream” experience with his therapist, sounding him out on the matter of free will versus determinism and the paradoxes inherent in time travel. Eventually he became fed up with the tiresome sessions and, like some Creationist repudiating evolution, dismissed his therapist, unshaken in his belief that heredity is more important than environment and that personality is largely innate. Resigned to whatever fate might bring, indifferent to his usual aesthetic pursuits, he gave up working altogether and scarcely stirred outside his cave-like apartment.
He also began to lose weight, to be prone to colds and the slightest infections.
The night before he was supposed to enter the hospital for tests, Edmund Aymar dreamed again of the old things. He was picking his way uncertainly along an unfamiliar path in what he thought was Riverside Park—though it was a wild, unlandscaped Riverside Park. Ahead of him, on an imposing outcropping of rock, he spied a cloaked figure, silhouetted against the setting sun. The man turned to meet his gaze, displaying a head of fine-webbed hair, wide brow, liquid eye, and silken moustache, then vanished into a copse beyond. Gaining the crest of the rock, Aymar beheld a great river, surely the Hudson, whose far shore was an unmarred stretch of cliff topped by an expanse of green rapidly darkening as night closed in. Then from behind he was accosted by the bland, blond form of his ancestor who, as he held out his hand to reveal a gleaming pewter ring, laughed with deep, sardonic pleasure.
The vision faded, and he realized that he was back in the New York of his own time, in the park at night—where three Hispanic youths were now demanding of him that he “hand it over, mister, or—” His protests that he no longer had the ring did not satisfy them, and in the ecstatic moment just after the fist struck his cheek and just before he lost consciousness Edmund Aymar felt renewed in his faith—faith in all the promises of his ancestor that he soon would be “having it all.”
JOHN LEHMANN ALONE
BY DAVID KAUFMAN
JULY, 1993
I guess I should begin by saying that it’s not the easiest thing in the world for me to tell a story. I don’t really know much about that sort of business. I never went but to the fourth grade, and even then I didn’t hardly care for reading. I did like arithmetic a lot, though. Arithmetic’s not like other things. You’ve got something solid there. You always know what you have with an arithmetic problem.
It’s a funny thing to me now, it really is, but I didn’t want to do nothing but get out of school and go to work on my daddy’s farm. And I was let out early for need.
In those days, you see, you could leave school to help out at home if you were needed bad enough. That was the law then. Well, I couldn’t wait, and my daddy did need me, so I got to quit school very early in life and go to work with him. It was a happy day for me.
My mother was against it, she wanted me to go on at least to the eighth grade, but I insisted. I figured I knew better. So I finished the fourth grade, as I said, and then I quit.
The only reason I say all of this is because I went to school with John Lehmann. And we been friends for all these years since. That was nearly sixty years ago, so you can see that I knew him for a long time.
What happened to him and to his shouldn’t of happened to anybody.
Well, his daddy’s farm was right below my daddy’s farm, down low in the valley south of Garlock’s Bend, and so in time it turned out that his farm was right below mine, they both come down to us by rights. It was good bottom ground. And so wonderful for water because the Susquehanna cut right through it. It even flooded every dozen years or so, and that made the ground around there even better. There was a lot of water. That’s important to remember.
I never got married. John, he did, to a wonderful girl from over to Skinner’s Eddy, Caroline Jacobs, and they had kids, and time passed like it does for us all. The kids grew up and didn’t want to stay around Garlock’s Bend so they left and went down to Harrisburg to work. Carrie, his wife, she sort of just seemed to not quite care so much about things after that.
Now I always liked Carrie, don’t get me wrong about her. I really did. A whole lot more than liked. A whole lot more. In my own way, of course. I guess that in the end that’s important to remember, too.
Miller’s Store, where all this sort of comes to a head, you’ll have to understand about. It’s kind of the place in Garlock’s Bend where everybody goes. You can buy groceries there, and you can buy clothes there. And tools. And even light meals. You get so you don’t have to leave town very often. It’s an honest-to-goodness general store, in the middle of town right down along the river. I knowed it through four owners ever since the building was put up. And my daddy was one of the men who helped to do that. The current owner, Bill Miller, bought the store off of his second cousin, Henry, who decided to retire pretty nearly thirty years ago now, and he’s run it ever since.
Generally it’s open by eight, only hardly nobody would ever be in there that early but Bill, fussing around with boxes and cans on the shelves, keeping things all straightened up. Not hardly ever anyone else, though. Not much happens early in Garlock’s Bend. It’s a town used to slow starts. But the people of the town and the hills around, too, consider Miller’s to be something of a meeting hall, so it is almost always open. Later in the mornings there’s lots of them comes in. The talk is just plain satisfactory. You’ll have that. And the coffee is special. So it’s not at all unusual at ten or eleven in the morning to see a fistful of men stuffed into orange hunting jackets all clustered around the home-made wooden tables, elbows on red-checkered table cloths, sipping hot coffee rich with cream and sugar. Listening to young Dale Heberlein, the morning disk jockey from over at Towanda. Every one of them men laughing at Dale’s humor. With maybe a bought doughnut or some eggs and home fries, all peppered up. Add the smell of that coffee, maybe even some hand cut bacon, and it’s as good a way to start the day as there is.