Time and Again

Bridgeport, Wis.

July 11, 1987

I write this letter to myself, so that the postmark may prove beyond controversy the day and year that it was written, and I shall not open it but shall place it among my effects against the day when someone, a member of my own family, God willing, may open it and read. And reading, know the thing that I believe and think, but dare not say while I am still alive, lest someone call me touched.

For I have not long to live. I have lasted more than a man's average alloted span, and while I still am hale and hearty, I know full well the hand of time, while it may miss a man at one reaping, will get him at the next.

I have no morbid fear of death, nor any sentimental wish to gain the brief immortality that a thought accorded me after I am dead may give me, for the thought itself will be a fleeting one and the one who holds it himself will not have too many years of life, for the years of man are short…far too short for any perfect understanding of any of the problems that a lifetime poses.

While it is more than likely that this letter will be read by my immediate descendants, who are well acquainted with me, I am still aware that through some vagary of fate it may fall yet unopened into the hands of someone many years after I am long forgotten, or even into the hands of strangers.

Feeling that the circumstance which I have to tell is of more than ordinary interest, even at the risk of reporting something which may be well known to the one who reads this letter, I shall here include some of the basic facts about myself and my locality and situation.

My name is John H. Sutton and I am a member of a numerous family which had its roots in the East, but one branch of which situated in this locality about one hundred years ago. While I must ask, if the reader of this be unacquainted with the Suttons, that my word be taken at face value without substantiating proof, I would like to state that we Suttons are a sober lot and not given to jokes, and that our reputation for integrity and honesty is singularly unquestioned.

While I was educated for the law, I soon found it not entirely to my liking and for the last forty years or more have followed the occupation of farming, finding more content in it than I ever found in law. For farming is an honest and a soul-warming job that gives one contact with the first essentials of living, and there is, I find, a satisfaction that is almost smug in the simple yet mystifying process of raising food from soil.

For the past number of years I have not been physically able to continue with the more strenuous labor of the farm, but pride myself that I still do most of the chores and still hold active management, which means that I am in the habit of making regular tours of the acres to see how things are coming.

Through the years, I have grown to love this country, although it is rough and in many instances not suited to easy cultivation. In fact, I sometimes find myself viewing with pity the men who hold broad, flat acreages with no hills to rest their eyes. Their land may be more fertile and more easily worked than mine, but I have something that they do not have…a setting for my life where I am keenly aware of all the beauties of nature, all the changes of the seasons.

Of late years, as my step has slowed and I have found that more than normal exertion is tiring, I have fallen into the habit of arbitrarily setting for myself certain places of rest during my inspection of the farm. It is not mere coincidence that each of these resting places is a spot which recommends itself to the eye and spirit. I believe, in fact, if the truth be told, that I look forward to these resting places more than I do the inspection of the fields and pastures, although, Lord knows, I derive much satisfaction from every aspect of my trips.

There is one spot which has always had, from the very first, a sense of the special for me. If I were still a child I might best explain it by saying that it seems to be an enchanted place.

It is a deep cleft in the bluff that runs down to the river valley and it is located at the north end of the bluff pasture. There is a fair-sized boulder at the top of the cleft, and this boulder is shaped appropriately for sitting, which may be one of the reasons why I liked it, for I am a man who takes to comfort.

From the boulder one may see the sweep of the river valley with a stressed third-dimensional quality, due no doubt to the height of the vantage point plus the clearness of the air, although at times the whole scene is enveloped with a blue mist of particularly tantalizing and lucid clarity.

The view is a charming one and I have often sat there for an hour at a time, doing absolutely nothing, thinking nothing, but at peace with the world and with myself.

But there is a strangeness to the spot and this strangeness is one that I find hard to explain, for search as I may, I find no word at my command to adequately express the thing I wish to say or the condition which I would describe.

It is as if the place were tingling…as if the place were waiting for something to happen, as if that one particular spot held great possibilities for drama or for revelation, and while revelation may seem a strange word to use, I find that it comes the closest of any to the thing I have felt many times as I sat upon the boulder and gazed across the valley.

It has often seemed to me that there on that one area of earth, something could or might happen which could or might happen nowhere else on the entire planet. And I have, at times, tried to imagine what that happening might be, and I shrink from telling some of the possibilities that I have imagined, although in truth, in other things I am perhaps not imaginative enough.

To approach the boulder, I cut across the lower end of the bluff pasture, a place which is often in better grass than the rest of the grazing area, for the cattle, for some reason, do not often venture there. The pasture ends in a thin growth of trees, the forerunners of the verdant mass of foliage which sweeps down the bluff side. Just a few rods inside the trees is the boulder and because of the trees the boulder is always shaded, no matter what the time of the day, but the view is unobstructed because of the rapid falling away of the ground.

One day about ten years ago, July 4, 1977, to be exact, I approached this place and found a man and a strange machine at the lower end of the pasture, just clear of the trees.

I say machine, because that is what it appeared to be, although to tell the truth I could not make too much of it. It was like an egg, pointed slightly at each end, as an egg might look if someone stepped on it and did not break it, but spread it out, so that the ends became more pronounced. It had no working parts outside and so far as I could see not even a window, although it was apparent that the operator of it sat inside its body.

For the man had what appeared to be a door open and was standing outside and working at what may have been the motor, although when I ventured to look, it appeared like no motor I had ever seen before. Truth to tell, however, I never did get a good look at the motor or at anything else about the contraption, for the man, as soon as he saw me, most adroitly maneuvered me away from it and engaged me in such pleasant and intelligent conversation that I could not, without the utmost rudeness, change the subject or free myself from his inquiries long enough to pay attention to all the things that stirred my curiosity. I remember now, thinking back, that there were many things which I would have liked to ask him but which I never got around to, and it seems to me now that he must have anticipated these very questions and deliberately and skillfully steered me away from them.

As a matter of fact, he never did tell me who he was or where he came from or why he happened to be in my pasture. And while that may seem rude to the reader of this account, it did not seem rude at the time, for he was such a charming person that one failed to measure him by the same yardstick as one would other people of less accomplishments.

He seemed well informed on farming, although he looked like no farmer. Come to think of it, I do not remember exactly what he did look like, although I seem to recall that he was dressed in a way which I had never seen before. Not garishly, nor outlandishly, nor even in such a manner that one would think of him as foreign, but in clothing which had certain subtle differences difficult to pin down.

He complimented me on the good growth of the pasture grass and asked me how many head of cattle we ran there and how many we were milking and what was the most satisfactory manner we had found to finish off good beef. I answered him as best I could, being very interested in his line of talk, and he kept the conversation going with appropriate comment and questions, some of which I now realize were meant as subtle flattery, although at the time I probably did not think so.

He had a tool of some sort in his hand and now he waved it at a field of corn across the fence and said it looked like a good stand and asked me if I thought it would be knee-high by the Fourth. I told him that today was the Fourth and that it was a mite better than knee-high and that I was very pleased with it, since it was a new brand of seed that I was trying for the first time. He looked a little taken aback and laughed and said so it was the Fourth, and that he had been so busy lately he had got his dates mixed. And then, before I could even wonder how a man could get his dates so mixed that he could miss the Fourth of July, he was off again on another track.

He asked how long I had lived here, and when I told him he asked if the family hadn't been here a long time; somewhere, he said, he had heard the name before. So I told him that we had, and before I knew it he had me telling all about the family, including some anecdotes which we usually do not tell outside the family circle since they are not exactly the kind of stories that we would care to have known about ourselves. For while our family is conservative and honorable in the main and better in most things than many others, there is no family which does not have a skeleton or two to hide away from view.

We talked until it was long past the dinner hour, and when I noticed this I asked him if he would not take the meal with us, but he thanked me and said that in just a short while he would have the trouble fixed and would be on his way. He said that he had virtually completed whatever repair was needed when I had appeared. When I expressed fear that I had too long delayed him, he assured me that he did not mind at all, that it had been pleasant to spend the time with me.

As I left him, I managed to get in one question. I had been intrigued by the tool which he had held in his hand during our conversation and I asked him what it was. He showed it to me and told me it was a wrench and it did look something like a wrench, although not very much so.

After I had eaten dinner and had a nap, I walked back to the pasture, determined to ask the stranger some of the questions which I had realized by this time he had avoided.

But the machine was gone and the stranger too, with only a print in the pasture grass to show where the machine had lain. But the wrench was there, and when I bent to pick it up I saw that one end was discolored, and upon investigation I found that the discoloration was blood. I have, many times since, berated myself for not having had an analysis made to determine whether the blood was human or from some animal.

Likewise, I have wondered many times just what happened there. Who the man was and how come he left the wrench and, why the heavier end of the wrench was stained with blood.

I still make the boulder one of my regular stops and the boulder still is always in the shade and the view still is unobstructed and the air over the river valley still lends to the scene its strangely deep three-dimensional effect. And the sense of tingling expectancy still hangs above the spot, so I know that the place had not been waiting for this one strange happening alone, but that other strange happenings still may occur; that this one happening may have been only one of many happenings, that there may have been uncounted others before it and countless others yet to come. Although I do not hope or expect that I shall see another, for the life of man is but a second in comparison with the time of planets.

The wrench which I picked up is still with us and it has proved a very useful tool. As a matter of fact, we have dispensed with most of our other tools and use it almost alone, for it will adjust itself to almost any nut or burr or will hold a shaft of almost any size from turning. There is no need for adjustment, nor is there any adjustment device that can be found. One simply applies it to whatever piece of metal one wants to take a grip upon and the tool adjusts itself. No great amount of pressure or of strength is needed to operate the wrench, for it appears to have the tendency to take whatever slight pressure one exerts upon it and multiply that pressure to the exact point needed to turn the nut or hold a shaft from turning. However, we are very careful to use the wrench only when there are no outside eyes to see it, for it smacks too much of magic or of witchcraft to be allowed on public view. The general knowledge that we possessed such a wrench almost certainly would lead to unwholesome speculation among our neighbors. And since we are an honest and respectable family, such a situation is the furthest from our wish.

None of us ever talk about the man and the machine I found in the bluff pasture, even among ourselves, for we seem tacitly to recognize that it is a subject which does not fit within the frame of our lives as sober, unimaginative farmers.

But while we do not talk about it, I do know that I, myself, think about it much. I spend more time than usual at the boulder resting place, just why I do not know, unless it is in the feeble hope that there somehow I may find a clue which will either substantiate or disprove the theory I have formed to account for the happening.

For I believe, without proof of any sort, that the man was a man who came from time and that the machine was a time machine and the wrench is a tool which will not be discovered or manufactured for more years to come than I care to think about.

I believe that somewhere in the future man has discovered a method by which he moves through time and that undoubtedly he has involved a very rigid code of ethics and of practices in order to prevent the paradoxes which would result from indiscriminate time traveling or meddling in the affairs of other times. I believe that the leaving of the wrench in my time provides one of those paradoxes which in itself is simple, but which under certain circumstances might lead to many complications. For that reason, I have impressed upon the family the strict necessity of continuing our present attitude of keeping its possession secret.

Likewise, I have come to the conclusion, also unsupported, that the cleft at the head of which the boulder is located may be a road through time, or at least part of a road, a single point where our present time coincides very closely through the operation of some as yet unknown principle with another time far removed from us. It may be a place in the space-time continuum where less resistance is encountered in traveling through time than in other places and, having been discovered, is used quite frequently. Or it may simply be that it is a time road more deeply rutted, more frequently used than many other time roads, with the result that whatever medium separates one time from another time had been worn thin or had been bulged a bit or whatever would happen under such a circumstance.

That reasoning might explain the strange eerie tingling of the place, might account for the sense of expectancy.

The reader must bear in mind, of course, that I am an old, old man, that I have outlived the ordinary span of human life and that I continue to exist through some vagary of human destiny. While it does not seem so to myself, it may well be that my mind is not as sharp or keen nor as analytical as it may once have been, and that as a result I am susceptible to the entertainment of ideas which would be summarily rejected by a normal human being.

The one bit of proof, if one may call it proof, that I have to support my theories, is that the man I met could well have been a future man, might well have sprung from some civilization further advanced than ours. For it must be apparent to whoever reads this letter that in my talk with him he used me for his own purpose, that he pulled the wool over my eyes as easily as a man of my day might pull it over the eyes of a Homeric Greek or some member of Attila's tribe. He was, I am sure, a man well versed in semantics and in psychology. Looking back, I know that he always was one long jump ahead of me.

I write this not only so that any theories which I may have, and which I shrink from telling in my lifetime, may not be wholly lost, but may be available at some future time when a more enlightened knowledge than we have today may be able to make something out of them. And I hope that reading them, one will not laugh since I am dead. For if one did laugh, I am afraid that, dead as I might be, I would surely know it.

That is the failing of us Suttons — we cannot bear to be made the butt of laughter.

And in case that one may believe that my mind is twisted, I herewith enclose a physician's certificate, signed just three days ago, asserting that upon examination he found me of sound body and sane mind.

But the story I have to tell is not yet entirely done. These additional events should have been included in earlier sequence, but I found no place in which they logically would fit.

They concern the strange incident of the stolen clothing and the advent of William Jones.

The clothing was stolen a few days after the incident in the bluff pasture. Martha had done the washing early in the day, before the heat of the summer sun set in, and hung it on the line. When she went to take in the clothes, she found that an old pair of overalls of mine, a shirt belonging to Roland and a couple pairs of socks, the ownership of which I fear I have forgotten, had disappeared.

The theft made quite a stir among us, for thievery is a thing which does not often happen in our community. We checked through our list of neighbors with a somewhat guilty feeling, for while we spoke no word aloud that anyone could hear, we knew in our hearts that even thinking of any of the near-by folks in connection with the theft was a rank injustice.

We talked about it off and on for several days, and finally agreed that the theft must have been the work of some passing tramp, although even that explanation was scarcely satisfactory, for we are off the beaten way and tramps do not often pass and that year as I remember it was a year of great prosperity and there were few tramps.

It was two weeks or so after the theft of the clothing that William Jones came to the house and asked if we might need a hand to help with the harvest. We were glad to take him on, for we were short of help and the wages that he asked were far below the going pay. We took him on for the harvest only, but he proved so capable that we have kept him all these years. Even as I write this, he is out in the barnyard readying the binder for the small grain cutting.

There is a funny thing about William Jones. In this country a man soon acquires a nickname or at least a diminutive of his own. But William Jones always has been William. He never has been Will or Bill or Willy. Nor has he been Spike or Bud or Kid. There is a quiet dignity about him that makes everyone respect him, and his love of work and his quiet, intelligent interest in fanning have won him a place in the community far above the usual status of a hired hand.

He is completely sober and he never drinks, a thing for which I am thankful, although at one time I had my misgivings. For when he came to us, he had a bandage on his head and he explained to me, shamefacedly, that he had been hurt in a tavern brawl across the river somewhere in Crawford County.

I don't know when it was that I began to wonder about William Jones. Certainly it was not at first, for I accepted him for what he pretended to be, a man looking for work. If there was any resemblance to the man I had talked with down in the pasture, I did not notice it then. And, now, having noticed it at this late date, I wonder if my mind may not be playing tricks, if my imagination, running riot with my theories of time travel, may not have conditioned me to a point where I see a mystery crouching back of every tree.

But the conviction has grown upon me through the years as I have associated with him. For all that he tries to keep his place, attempts to adopt his idiom to match our idiom, there are times that his speech hints at an education and an understanding one would not expect to find in a man who works on the farm for seventy-five dollars a month and board.

There is, too, his natural shyness, which is a thing one would expect to find if a man were deliberately attempting to adapt himself to a society that was not his own.

And there is the matter of clothes. Thinking back, I can't be sure about the overalls, for all overalls look very much alike. But the shirt was exactly like the shirt that had been stolen from the line, although I tell myself that it would not be improbable for two men to own the same kind of shirt. And he was barefooted, which seemed a funny thing even at the time, but he explained it by saying that he had been down on his luck and I remember I advanced him enough money to buy some shoes and socks. But it turned out that he didn't need the socks, for he had two pairs in his pocket.

A few years ago I decided several times that I would speak to him about the matter, but each time my resolution failed and now I know I never will. For I like William Jones and William Jones likes me and I would not for the world destroy that mutual liking by a question that might send him fleeing from the farm.

There is yet one other thing which goes to make William Jones unlike most farm hands. With his first money from his work here, he bought a typewriter, and during the first two or three years that he was with us he spent long hours of his evenings in his room using the typewriter and tramping about the room, as a man who is thinking is apt to walk.

And then one day, in the early morning, before the rest of us had gotten from our beds, he took a great sheaf of paper, apparently the result of those long hours of work, and burned it. Watching from my bedroom window, I watched him do it and he stayed until he was sure that the last scrap of the paper had been burned. Then he turned around and walked back slowly to the house.

I never mentioned to him the burning of the paper, for I felt, somehow, that it was something he did not wish another man to know.

I might go on for many pages and write down many other inconsequential, trivial things which rattle in my skull, but they would not add one iota to the telling of the thing I've told and might, in fact, convince the reader that I am in my dotage.

To whoever may peruse this, I wish to make one last assurance. While my theory may be wrong, I would have him or her believe that the facts I have told are true. I would have him or her know that I did see a strange machine in the bluff pasture and that I did talk with a strange man, that I picked up a wrench with blood upon it, that clothes were stolen from the wash line and that even now a man named William Jones is pumping himself a drink of water at the well, for the day is very hot.

Sincerely,

John H. Sutton