Read Part One || Read Part Two
“I wasn’t ready to leave yet. That was rude!” My brother, Orville, made a noise. He questioned me a little breathlessly as I hurried him along the path back toward the Indian mound. “Didn’t you want to stay and talk to those pretty girls?”
“Orville, I don’t think you understand what’s really going on here. You can’t just go around blurting out everything that passes through your mind. People are going to think you’re nuts.” I said, “When Millie said she saw your flying machine drawing as a model at the World’s Fair, didn’t you think for a second? About how strange it was she talked about it like it was old news?”
My brother stopped still in his tracks, blinking as realization hit him. “Wilbur! Are you telling me that we did go through time again in the tunnel? That explains the strange buggy that ran me down!”
Orville let out a whoop of excitement. I kept walking.
He said, “This is the future! Oh! What does that mean about my drawing? Will, what is going on? You think… you think maybe we…”
My brother trailed off. He hurried to catch up with me as I kept a fast pace walking through the wooded area. I was trying to get us back to the giant dirt mound near the river. That ancient, mystical tunnel had to be there. Then we could go through it, back to the woods behind our aunt’s house in Columbus, Ohio. Back to the year 1880. This eerily similar landscape– Des Moines, Iowa in 1912–was giving me the chills.
I tried to explain what the man we first knew as Signor Andreas di Verroccio of Venice–and who currently went by the name Andrew Vickers–had told me while Orville had been inside the Earhart home, being pampered by and flirting with the pretty young ladies. But the bigger meaning behind why the sister called Millie—Amelia, her mother had called her–had seen a model of Orville’s drawing was slow to sink in for both of us. As we rushed along the trail, we talked about our theories.
“Orville, I think there is a bigger picture here. We are in the future, after all,” I said. “Maybe what it means is that in the future we’ll actually build the flying machine in that drawing.”
Orville grabbed my arm to bring me to a halt. His eyes were wide and shining with excitement like a little kid.
“That’s it!” He said, “Wilbur, all this traveling through time stuff is showing us our mission in life: to learn to fly! For real!”
My head was spinning with all the possibilities. Why not? I was beginning to believe that anything was possible. We had already done something that most people would think we were crazy if we talked about it, traveling through space and time. Maybe our dream of flying was something that people only thought was impossible. Then Orville and I were meant to prove that it was possible.
I sat back on my heels. It was a lot to take in, and that was just one theory as to what was going on.
I took a deep breath, and centered my thoughts on a different part of reality. The one where I knew that, if we didn’t make it back to Aunt Hilda’s house before dark like our mom had instructed, we were going to be in a world of trouble… and we might be grounded so deep that we’d never find out the meaning of our time travelling.
“Orville,” I finally answered, “I don’t know anything for sure except we need to find the entrance to that tunnel and get our butts back home.”
We hurried down the last bit of the path to the foot of the mound. Orville turned to go around the left side of the mound just as I turned to go around the other direction. We each took a couple of steps and then stopped and looked at each other in confusion.
“I thought it was this way,” Orville said, at the same time that I said, “Hey, isn’t the entrance over here?”
I sighed. “Well, now what?”
Orville said, “It doesn’t matter which way we go, right? It’s a round hill; there’s only one entrance. We go around until we find it! Come on!”
With that, he was off in a flash, scurrying clockwise around the underbrush that covered the slope of the Adena mound. This was starting to feel like de ja vu or something, but, after hesitating for the briefest second, I took off after my impulsive younger brother.
I could have sworn that we had come out of the tunnel from the other direction, but I guess it didn’t matter if we ran a circle around the whole mound. We’d come to the tunnel eventually, right?
Orville was a few steps ahead of me when he glanced over his shoulder at me with a huge grin. He called out, “Here it is, Wilbur! Are you ready for another trip?”
He shoved aside some hanging vines and stepped into the narrow, dark opening.
I caught up and looked again at the tunnel entrance. There was a big rock right beside the opening. I didn’t remember that being there before. Maybe I just hadn’t noticed when we had come out of the tunnel earlier? I was still in a daze from the head-spinning experience of Traveling when we’d stumbled out of the hole in the mound, so I shrugged my shoulders. Again, I followed my brother into the darkness.
This being my fourth time experiencing the overwhelming sights and sounds of Traveling, you would think that I would be used to it by now. But the instant that I stepped out of the bright sunlight into the dark opening in the Indian mound, I was blown away. Literally blown away! This was nothing like the time we fell for what seemed like ages and then landed in the water. And it sure wasn’t like just that same morning when we’d walked through the tunnel during an earthquake and a windstorm. No, this time when I entered the Traveling tunnel it felt like I was being sucked straight up in the air!
The wind rushed by so fast that it snatched my breath away. I wildly swung my arms to grab onto something, anything, but there was only empty space everywhere! I couldn’t even feel the ground beneath my feet or the walls of the tunnel.
I could hear Orville’s voice –coming from somewhere up above me– whooping loudly. My own voice sounded thin and weak to my ears as I shrieked out one long, “Aaaa!”
Like the other times we’d Traveled, it was completely dark except for flashes of multi-colored lights, like being inside of fireworks that were exploding. The butterflies in my stomach tap-danced as I swooshed up and up and up. Then came a deafening boom of thunder right next to my head, followed by a quiet, meek pop!
Suddenly my head popped up out of a hole like a groundhog in the springtime. I shot out of the earth, catching a glimpse of my brother sprawled on the ground beside the tunnel. I flew a few more feet into the air then fell back to the ground beside Orville. I landed with a bone-jarring thud and a grunt as my breath knocked clear out of me.
My head spun and my ears rung, but somewhere past it all I heard a young man saying, “What in world! You popped up out of the ground right in front of me! Where did you come from? That hole there? Impossible! It’s hardly large enough for a person! By George, this is truly amazing!”
The young man looked to be about my age, but he certainly wasn’t from my time. He wore knee britches and a frock coat, and held one of those old-fashioned tri-corn hats, waving it back and forth while he chattered excitedly at us.
Well, so much for secrecy. I had no idea how we were going to explain what he’d seen to this gent. Of course, Orville was completely unconcerned about affecting history or altering the future somehow. He jumped up off the ground, brushed some dirt of his rear and cheerfully introduced himself.
“Hi, I’m Orville,” he said, “and this here’s my brother Wilbur. We’re from the future!”
The young man’s jaw dropped open wide but only for a second before he began jabbering away again.
He said, “Ever so pleased to meet you, Orville. Wilbur. My name is Ben, and I’m from Boston. Tell me, when in the future are you from? You’re not yanking my chain, are you? I suppose I can’t think of any other explanation for how you appeared out of nowhere like that. If I had some time, I bet I could come up with a few reasons though! I’m always investigating things and trying to figure out how they work. After all, an investment in knowledge pays the best interest.”
Our new acquaintance reached down and offered me a hand up without ever slowing down his chatter.
“Are you two brothers? You look so similar. I’m the youngest son in my family, you see. There are seventeen of us.” Ben laughed at the looks on our faces. “Yes, I said seventeen children. I suppose the future doesn’t have such large families? Quite all right! Understand, my father was a widower with ten sons and daughters when he met and married my mother. They’ve raised seven more together. How many brothers and sisters do you have?”
He finally stopped to draw a breath, so I took the opportunity to answer his question and make some sense of the conversation. “We have two more brothers and a sister back at home.”
Obviously, we hadn’t arrived back in our own time and place. There was no mound here, and Ben was wearing clothes from a hundred years ago.
“Say, Ben,” I asked, “could you tell us where we are? Uhh, and when?”
Ben looked at me for a second as though I had two heads. “Gentlemen, you are standing in a meadow outside Boston Township in the Massachusetts Bay Colony. It is the ear of Our Lord 1719. May I invite you to tea at my father’s house? You simply must tell me all about yourselves, and I can show you some of my experiments. Please say yes?”
I looked over at Orville with a raised eyebrow. He answered Ben’s meandering invitation for us both with, “Sure, Ben, lead the way!”
Ben walked almost as fast as he talked, and he talked the whole time we followed him down a broad dirt road towards the town. A couple wagons loaded with barrels passed by as we walked and, as we got closer to the bustling township, we could see them going down to the docks. A couple of wooden ships bobbed in the harbor.
We walked along a planked sidewalk past shops and a row of tall, stately red-brick houses where Ben led us through a wrought-iron gate. A couple of laughing girls ran out the door just as we were going in. They called, “Hello, Ben! Ggood-bye, Ben,” and skipped out through the gate.
As we walked in the door, a sweet but firm voice came from an open doorway on one side, “Benjamin, I suggest you go right back out and wipe your feet before you track mud into my parlor.”
Ben reversed his steps and walked out the door, stumbling into me and Orville as he scurried to wipe his feet on a bristly rug. “Mother, I wiped my feet. My friends wiped theirs, too!”
He pointed to our feet as he spoke, gesturing for us to follow suit.
The two of us scraped our shoes across the rug in a daze, and then followed Ben into his mother’s parlor for tea.
She introduced herself as Mrs. Franklin, and she was a nice lady, if a little distracted. Of course, with seventeen children to keep track of, it was understandable that she’d barely even notice a couple of extra kids gobbling up little cream cakes and dropping extra sugar cubes into our teacups.
After tea, Ben wanted to go upstairs so he could show us his experiments and ask us questions about the future.
Orville and I didn’t say anything about how we knew who he was from our history lessons. To give Ben credit, he barely blinked when we told him how we were Traveling through Adena Indian mounds. He wanted to ask us questions about the government of the colonies, and stuff about harnessing electricity, and he wanted to know whether anybody had proved yet that lightening was electricity.
I wasn’t sure if it was okay for us to tell him things about the future, but Orville had no such qualms. He told him there was going to be a Revolutionary War, and that a famous person was going to prove that lightening is electricity in 1752. He winked at me when he said that last part, because everybody knows about Benjamin Franklin flying the kite with a key tied to the string during a lightning storm.
I joined in the conversation every now and then, but mostly listened to Orville and Ben talk. I admit, I was a little star struck. I quietly wondered what it was that we were supposed to learn from Benjamin Franklin about our own potential achievements.
Ben had lots of inventions and experiments to show us. We spent hours poring over maps with him, looking at his attempts to build a printing press, and listening to him tell us about his ideas for bifocal eyeglasses. I started to see a pattern with our new young friend as he talked about all of the times his ideas had not worked out. He still couldn’t figure out how to get two different spectacle lenses of varying strengths to fuse together on one lens. He’d tried several different things but nothing seemed to work. Yet.
That was his theme with all of the ideas that he thought were possible but so many other people told him would never work. We knew that he was going to make a lot of them work, even if some of them never would.
Something he said in his prolific chat stood out in my mind later that afternoon as Orville and I trudged back down the road in search of our Travel entryway. As Ben was talking about how many times he’d failed to get one of his inventions to work as he wanted, he said, “You can’t be afraid to make mistakes. You will know failure. But unless you continue to reach out, you will never know success.”
~*~
To Be Continued…
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Cathy Jones lives on the Crystal Coast of North Carolina. She loves the beach, reading every type of book ever written, inventing delicious recipes, and making up tall tales.