Chapter 1

January, 1995

The ground hasn't shaken for days. One by one, drops of long-passed rain slip from drooping, barren twigs, breaking the stillness of the night with juicy little impacts on the cold, hard turf. Other than that, all is calm.

Bruton deeply breathes the raw, January air and peers into the impenetrable blackness whose chill, wet surface plasters every inch of exposed flesh. The parson’s house has to be nearby. It’s but fifty paces from the bakery. He had counted the distance between every building in the village, lest he find himself as he now finds himself, lost amid the village’s towering beechwoods on a thick, moonless night.

He searches for the glowing, golden slats that denote the bakery’s candle-lit windows. “Have I gone wrong?” he asks himself.

He remembers stepping out of the bakery and onto the stony path. Yes, he lost his balance and teetered into a shrub. The thorny twigs punctured his legs, ripping his silk stockings. The sensation made him jump. His three-cornered hat tipped over his eyes. He recoiled from the shrub, pushed the hat back to its proper position, and took the proper ten paces down the path from the bakery, where he was met by young Mr. Von Aldo, who was conveying himself through the darkness in the company of a lantern. The light was new. The candle stood tall, safe behind the protective panes of glass.

Bruton remembers asking Mr. Von Aldo if the delegation from the state had arrived.

“They have not,” replied Mr. Von Aldo, setting the lantern at their feet. With one hand he took off his three-cornered hat; with the other, he roughed up his hair, which had been flattened by its confinement in the hat. “God love us, Mr. B, but I’ll never understand weather like this. It isn’t hot, but it makes you pour from every pore. It isn’t cold, yet it chills you to the bone. I wish it could make up its mind, go its way, and leave us in peace.”

Bruton remembers leaning forward, sensing something amiss with Von Aldo’s rough, green wool coat. “Mr. Von Aldo, you’re militia, are you not?”

“Yes, indeed, squire,” said Von Aldo, looking pleased. “We’ve got a muster any minute.”
“Then where, sir, is your musket?”

Von Aldo’s pleasure folded into friendly guilt. He sniffed, passed his forearm beneath his runny nose. ”Thought you wouldn’t notice, sir. God’s blood, it’s so hell-black out here, not even the Redcoats would notice.”

“Well, Mr. Smith’s going to notice. And if Mr. Smith can notice, chances are the Redcoats will notice, too. So will the delegation from the state. Now be a good boy. Go back and get your musket and play your part properly. Understand?”

Thus the interview ended. Bruton recalls he’d been so concerned about the impression Von Aldo would make upon the delegates that he didn’t think to ask the fellow to point the way to the parson’s home.

Now Bruton is worried. The parson’s home isn’t far from the chapel, a plain, white clapboard structure with tall, narrow windows, that can usually be seen at night, if only for the expanse of its whiteness, if not for the illuminated windows. Those windows should be bright now; the choir is supposed to be rehearsing in the sanctuary. Bruton should be able to hear them.

He listens, fondly hoping for the familiar sound of off-key voices singing “so death may soon disrobe us all of what we here possess.” But he hears nothing save the delicate dripping from the trees.

“Where did I go wrong?” he wonders. “Where in this world did I go wrong? Ought I to have turned right, instead of left? Or did I in fact turn right, when I ought to have gone left?”

Again, Bruton relives his encounter with Von Aldo. Hard at thought, he walks.
He doesn’t walk like a person lost in the dark. There are no tentative steps; no flailing of arms. He marches forward, head raised, fearless of whatever lurks in his path. If he is on the path that leads to the parsonage, so be it. If he is on the path that leads to the steep, sloping steps that stretch from the back of the church down to the footbridge, so be it. “Though I walk in the valley of the shadow, I shall fear no evil,” he mumbles. “Thy rod and thy staff, they guide me.”

Suddenly the darkness is obliterated by a light more brilliant than the noonday sun. Bruton grabs his eyes, once again knocking his hat from his head. “Jesus, Mary and Joseph! Who put that thing there?”

Someone is running. Von Aldo shouts. “Doctor B! Doctor B! Our visitors! They’ll hear!”

“The hell with what they’ll hear. Look what the fuck they’ll see!”

Eyes watering, Bruton throws his arms out in the direction of the steel-framed lantern hanging from a post at the side of the path. “This is a Revolutionary War community, damn it. The last I heard, they didn’t have fluorescent bulbs in 1776!”

Von Aldo shoves his authentically reproduced, wood-and-glass Colonial lantern in Bruton’s face, though the modern lantern reveals with sufficient detail the consternation that disfigures Bruton’s rumpled jaw and lived-in face. “Aw, c’mon, Brut, you know we have to keep the paths well lighted. It’s a question of liability.”

“Liability, my ass. It’s a matter of you people in the state capital telling us how to run our business when you know nothing about historic interpretation.”

“Don’t blame me; I’m only a ranger, for crissake. They tell me to hang fluorescent lamps? I hang fluorescent lamps.”

“And if the governor told you to set fire to the place, you would do it.”

Von Aldo briskly turns and walks away.

“Where are you going?”

“Back to the eighteenth century. The stress of acting like an anachronism is more fun than watching you have a twentieth century fit.”