He didn’t have time to think about that right now. He had a pamphlet to write. A speech to give. Or several of each.
His time was too valuable now. So they said. Worse, they were right. Paine’s words belonged in Franconia this year:
The Sun never shined on a cause of greater worth. ‘Tis not the affair of a City, a County, a Province, or a Kingdom; but of a Continent-of at least one-eighth part of the habitable Globe. ‘Tis not the concern of a day, a year, or an age; posterity are virtually involved in the contest, and will be more or less affected even to the end of time, by the proceedings now.
A different continent, but it was nonetheless true.
So, for now, his time was too valuable for him to step out into the breeze. He turned back to the table and picked up his pen. Placing the first sheet of paper over one printed with heavy black lines to provide guidance in keeping the lines of his handwriting straight, he entered the heading.
The Past Lies as a Nightmare upon the Present.
At least, he still knew better than to think his efforts were indispensable. If he were not writing pamphlets, somebody else would write pamphlets. Not precisely the same ones, saying precisely the same things, but close enough.
If he ever forgot that, the ram might as well be a king.
On Ye Saints
Eva Musch
April 1633: Grantville, Thuringia
“Dem bones, dem bones, dem dry bones; dem bones dem bones dem dry bones . . .” Willard Thornton’s perpetually off-key humming was starting to get on his wife Emma’s nerves.
“Willard,” she lamented, “I have papers to grade. I honestly do. I am trying to grade these papers. Honestly I am. Please, Honey, please. Take the dry bones out and spade the garden, or something.”
“I’ll be good,” he swore, hand on his heart. “I promise, Teacher. Please let me stay inside. If you look up from those papers and out the window you will see that . . .”
“It’s raining.” Emma leaned over and kissed him on the back of the neck; then returned to the stack of senior English Literature essays.
“Dem dry bones would be getting very wet.” Willard returned to hunting and pecking on the old manual typewriter that he had gotten back when he was in high school. “The toe bone’s connected to the foot bone, and the foot bone’s connected to the ankle bone . . .”
Emma got up. After checking to see that each kid was about his or her assigned chores, she went into the kitchen to make meatloaf. Whatever it was, Willard would tell her about it when he got good and ready, but not one instant before.
* * *
Good and ready came on Monday evening.
“I never did my missionary service,” Willard said, after he had led the family in their devotions. “Because, well, you know.”
Emma knew. In 1980, Willard and Emma ran off and got married the night of their high school graduation, believing (quite rightly, in regard to Emma’s side) that both sets of parents would be profoundly opposed to their marriage. Immediate marriage meant that he would not do his stint as an LDS missionary as his parents thought he should; and her parents, whether the marriage might be now or later, considered LDS to be a cult. They were both eighteen, with no more sense than the average run of teenagers. Willard had really been afraid that if he left for two years, Emma’s parents would manage to change her mind. So they ran.
They hadn’t taken their first baby on the honeymoon, if you could call three nights in a strip motel in Charleston a honeymoon, but they had certainly brought her back with them. She was born dead, barely seven months into the pregnancy. Emma, sobbing, had said that she looked like a little bird without feathers that had fallen out of the nest too soon.
Then Emma had gone through a crisis, believing that this was some kind of divine punishment for the elopement-a punishment which she associated with not having honored her parents. Willard worked at the Home Center, sent her to college, and hung in there with great determination, studying LDS materials on his own. When Emma discovered that she was pregnant again, the same week that she received her M.Ed. degree and seven years to the day after the first baby’s death, she had interpreted this as a sign of divine forgiveness and joined the LDS. In which, she admitted to herself, she often still felt rather like a fish out of water, even after more than a dozen years of membership.
Willard was drawing a deep breath. She knew that he had always hated the parts of school that involved standing up in front of the class and saying something.
“You know how we’ve talked and prayed about how the events in the Book of Mormon are unlikely to happen that way in this timeline. And we’ve agreed they were inspired by God, and are as relevant to this timeline as to the old. We’re ready. The German version of the Book of Mormon is at the printer’s. We were certainly blessed that Howard Carstairs was stationed in Germany and kept all his materials after he came home. We’re ordering more of the little pamphlets we’ve been handing out to the refugees here, inside the RoF. The branch has to start its missionary program here, down-time, some time. It looks like the time is now. And, well, Howard wants me to be the one. It’s going to be one, to start with. Full time. There’s no one else who can go with me, to make a pair. But I’m not an eighteen-year-old kid, either. They can count on me to be responsible. Howard said that once I’ve sort of, well, pioneered the thing. Tested the water. After that, he said, they can send the boys out. We should pray about it.”
Emma looked at her husband. In her heart, she thought that she knew what Howard Carstairs must be thinking. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints in Grantville-LDS, as it was generally called-had served a much wider geographical area than the Ring of Fire. It had come back in time with all of its buildings, but with only a small portion of its members.
Howard was into conservation. He was going to change the way they do things. He wasn’t going to risk the young unmarried guys until they’d had a chance to marry; not until after they’d had their families. Willard . . .
Was expendable.
No, that’s mean, Emma chided herself. But Howard knew that she could support the kids and that Harold and Arthur, Willard’s father and brother, would give her back-up if the boys got out of hand. He could spare Willard. Everyone on Emma’s side of the family would say: “I told you so.” And Willard knew that never, in front of the children, would she break the united parental front.
Oh, damn, damn, damn!
“Well,” she said. “If you’ve been called to your missionary service, then you should do it . . . We’ll all miss you while you’re gone.”
While, not when. Never when. Furiously, she stamped down the remembrance of Benny Pierce’s voice, as it lived in her mind, rendering, “Will You Miss Me When I’m Gone?” at the Fairgrounds last fall.
While you’re gone. While. Willard Thornton, if you do not come back to me in Time, you’re going to regret it for every moment of the Eternity for which they sealed me to you. While.
May 1633: Fulda
Willard thought that, at least from a distance, Fulda was a pretty place. Getting there had been a pretty decent hike, though, for a guy who wasn’t as young as he used to be. At least, the branch had bought him one of Steve Jennings’ down-time bicycles. He couldn’t ride it a lot of the time, though it did surprisingly well on these plain dirt roads when they were dry and packed. Mud and ruts were different problems, but even then, it was a lot easier to push the thing than it would have been to carry everything he had brought with him on his back.
Willard was transporting a hundred copies of the Book of Mormon. Plus quite a lot more paper, all carefully wrapped in waxed canvas. He didn’t have much more than that, but it was enough. Especially on the up-hill grades. If I had all this in a backpack, he thought to himself, I’d have had a heart attack at least twenty-five miles ago.
The bicycle was good. But a grocery cart would have been even better. Willard could be trundling all his worldly goods with him, like some homeless person in the streets of Charleston.
He headed for the city gate.
The bicycle proved to be the focus of considerable popular interest. Willard had to admit that people of Fulda showed far more curiosity about it than they did about any message he tried to share with them.
* * *
Wesley Jenkins, the NUS civil administrator in Fulda, observed this with profound relief. Derek Utt, the military administrator, as a kind of precaution, tried to make sure that there was at least one up-time soldier in sight whenever Willard was out door-to-dooring.
* * *
By the time Willard left at the end of the month, he had distributed a lot of the one-page flyers and two-page brochures. He didn’t know whether the families had kept them. No one at all had accepted a copy of the Book of Mormon or invited him for a follow-up visit. He believed that his missionary efforts had probably inspired only the placement of eleven orders at Jennings’ bicycle factory in Grantville.
Oh, well.
He dropped his letters for home off at the post office pickup station in the administration building, remembering Howard’s announcement that if they were going to be using mature men with families as permanent missionaries, then the rules about limiting contact with their families were out. That had been all right for young men just out of high school who needed to grow up in a hurry, but in this new universe it would be counter-productive.
Wes Jenkins had seemed a little worried about bandits and the bicycle, the whole time Willard was in Fulda. About the middle of May, he had suggested that since he was sending Denver Caldwell down to headquarters to deliver some reports, Willard should leave when the kid did. Willard wasn’t finished yet, then. About a week later, Wes had suggested that he should to along with a group of down-time traders. Willard still wasn’t finished yet. When he finally decided that he had accomplished as much in Fulda as he probably could, Wes had given him a map the same afternoon.
Shaking the dust of Fulda from his feet, Willard headed off toward the southeast.
June-July 1633: Wurzburg, Franconia
Wes’ directions on how to get from Fulda to Wurzburg were pretty good. Willard didn’t gotten lost, but there weren’t any good-sized towns along the route for him to visit, either. He picked up a packet of letters and newspapers that were waiting for him at the post office, caught up on the news from home, and went back to missionizing.