After traveling down the road with its scenic hilltops and rocky hillsides, Billie slowed at a crossroads and honked the horn at the proprietor sitting on the porch of a roadside store, a weathered structure with a rusty tin roof. The storekeeper sat on a homemade willow twig rocking chair below a large picture window scribed with black letters, “U.S. Post Office and General Store.” He tipped his hat at the passing car. In front was a hand-cranked gasoline pump, painted red with a large glass bowl for measuring fuel. Alongside the gas pump, an attendant lugged a wire-rack carrier of glass oil bottles with long metal spouts toward the door of the building.
Dorian looked out the truck’s window at the station and at a field next to it; a graveyard of rusted automobiles littered the landscape of a neglected meadow. There were gutted cars with sprouts growing out of the engine compartments, and along the front, near the road, the remnants of a wood wagon. He took delight at every sight. Everything here was a new experience for him. Having been displaced into this new world of two thousand years in the past, he found it a primitive, simple life unlike anything he had known in his own time.
Billie turned to Dorian, her lower lip pouting.
“Will you be stayin’ long?” Billie asked.
“Until I find a ruby, at the very least.”
She looked out the corner of her eyes at his clothes, scanning him from head to toe. She was captivated by the novelty of his unusual clothing.
“I swear I’ve never seen anyone wearin’ clothes like that before, ’cept in some Buck Rogers story my brother Andy used to read. Where’d you say you’re from?”
“Well, I didn’t. It’s a long story.”
“You jes’ wanted to give your girl a ruby, right?”
“I wish it were that simple. From the looks of things, I may have to get one out of the earth myself.”
“What?”
“Dig one up from the ground, I suppose.”
“Pa finds lots of rocks when he’s diggin’ the ground. I don’t think he has any rubies, though.”
“Your Pa? You mean your father, he digs rocks? A geologist. Can I see him?”
Billie slammed on the brake, Dorian was thrown against the dash, bumping his head on the windshield. She slid on the gravel, fishtailing sideways and wrestled the big wooden steering wheel to line up with another dirt road to the left.
“Ya said that jes’ in time. The house is down this way.”
Billie notched down the throttle as they drove down the makeshift road that followed the contour of the landscape, causing the vehicle to lean as the road banked in one direction, then the other. Dorian looked out the window at densely wooded areas on both sides of the road as they passed through alternating patches of shade and sunlight. At first, there was a slight dimming of the light and the beginning of darkness ahead, then the sky was closed up entirely under the thickening branches.
The way to Billie’s house was by obscure roads off the main highway, leading through a vast wilderness so remote that very few strangers would have any reason to trespass through the property, even if they had a need to be roaming in this part of the country. The primitive, narrow track was a world of uneven ground. It rose to huge swells, deeply pitted and potholed, full of hollows and blind passages, with great drop-offs on either side. Down through the hollers they went, steam billowing from the radiator cap. The scar of winding gullies washed out by the rain further hampered the truck’s ability to stay upright. The vehicle tilted from side to side with each pitch of the sloping terrain, springs squeaking, frame rattling, and at times bottoming out on a rough patch of road.
Occasionally, Billie would have to slow almost to a stall to swerve around washed-out gullies and large rocks in the road. The hillside dipped down with breath-taking steepness, a quality of savage grandeur, sloping to a small brook, that wound through the bottom to a shallow creek bed of eroded rocks. At times, there was just shade, and then darkness was thrown over them like a blanket, blotting out most of the sky. It was a drive that tunneled through foliage and a network of dark green threads.
The road went up an incline into a clearing of straight road lined with a rail fence made from split pine, darkened and decayed. To Dorian’s relief, there was the slight forgiveness of smoother, rolling terrain, and the truck began to slow down. They made a right turn around a rusty mailbox into a driveway in front of a humble, turn-of-the-twentieth-century homestead that stood several hundred feet from the road. A simple wood frame house, it was old and run down, yet picturesque and home-like, as if it held many pleasant memories. The two story house stood prominently among several out-buildings, including a barn that held a commanding view of the hillside in front of the property.
CHAPTER THREE
The Accident
Although it was late April, the early evening air was cool. On top of the decaying house, a chimney made from fieldstone spilled smoke, filling the air with the pleasant fragrance of a wood burning stove. As the truck continued up the lane toward the house, Dorian saw that the yard was mostly barren, naked of grass, and littered with ancient car parts and rusted farm implements. The farmhouse had deteriorated horribly over the years from neglect; the pointed roof sagged at the center and most of the wood shingles were more or less rotten. The house, as with most of the outbuildings and barn, was in need of repair or replacement. On the weathered and unpainted front porch, a woman in her mid-forties sat in a padded rocking chair holding a small child. She was Billie’s mother. Her head was in motion, her eyes following like searchlights as Billie, with her strange passenger, drove past. Four other children, stair-step in age, played in the dirt below the porch.
The truck continued across the yard alongside a barn with a weathered cupola. The remnants of several abandoned bird nests hung from the openings in the vent. Billie notched the throttle down, and the old Ford backfired like artillery fire, with a puff of smoke tumbling from the back. Finally, they came to a stop in front of a machine shed near the barn, in a patch of shade. The air was thick with the smell of oil, grease and dry rusted metal.
Billie stepped out of the truck, removed the blossom from her hair and placed it on the floorboard next to the gear shift. She held out her hand to Dorian. He took her rough, slender fingers in his hand, and side by side, they strolled toward the shed. Dorian scanned the area, a disappointed look on his face. Clearly, he had, in his naïveté, misjudged the situation badly.
“Your father’s not a geologist, is he?”
“I don’t think so, he jes’ farms,” she said.
They walked together toward a machine shed where a middle-aged man and two younger men were attempting to repair an overused, gas-powered tractor with iron wheels. Tactfully, Dorian withdrew his hand from hers as they approached.
“This here is Pa, and two of my brothers,” Billie said.
Dorian greeted them with a nod. He looked at Billie’s father, Clyde, as he crawled from under the tractor.
Clyde was in his mid forties and wore dirty, blue-denim bib overalls covered with spots of grease and oil. Sweat darkened the front of his shirt. A stain of dried tobacco juice was clearly visible in the whisker stubble on his chin. With brown nicotine stained fingers, he took off his hat and brushed the sweat from his eyes with the back of his sleeve. He was singularly tall and thin, not an overweight man by any means, the result of making a living through hard labor and strenuous toiling in the fields. He had worked this two-hundred-forty acre tract of land most of his life. It was a hard-working farming life, caught up in hard economic times. Long years ago, the railroad boom had brought its lines through the area because of the vast lumber mills and lead mines. However, the right of way through the property had been sold a few decades earlier before he had bought the land, unfortunately for Clyde’s family.
As