AT NOON THE BAROMETER showed a pressure of 30.20, up a bit from morning. The temperature was at eighty-one but Anne didn’t think it would touch quite so high today as yesterday, what with that light breeze and some cloud cover coming in out of the southwest. Thin white clouds, no storm. Not yet.
She spent the morning on laundry. Was a time when laundry was not an all-morning task, but the washer and dryer were in the basement, and those narrow wooden stairs gave her some trouble now. Oh, she could take them well enough, just a bit slower. That was true of so much these days. Just a bit slower.
She had the laundry done by eleven and then made some iced tea and went out onto the porch with the newspaper. The New York Times, which she’d taken for more years than she could count. It was important to know what was going on in the world, and last time she’d trusted TV was the last day Murrow had been on it.
At noon she got up and checked the temperature and wind direction and speed and the barometric pressure, wrote it all down in her notebook. She had logs going back more than six decades, five readings a day. Make a real interesting record, if anyone cared. She suspected not many would.
Her weather-watching habits had their roots in childhood. And in fear. She’d been petrified of storms when she was a young girl, would hide under her bed or in a closet when the thunder and lightning commenced. It had amused her father-she could still remember his soft, low laugh as he’d come in to fetch her from under the bed-but her mother had decided something needed to be done about it and had found a children’s book about storms, one with illustrations of dark thunderheads, swirling tornadoes, tossing seas. Anne had been seven when she got the book, had the binding split from countless readings by the time she was eight.
“You can’t be scared of them, because being scared of them won’t change a thing,” her mother had said. “Won’t make ’em stop, won’t make you any safer. You respect them and try to understand them. More you understand, less you’ll be afraid.”
So Anne had returned to the book for another reading and started forcing herself to stay at the window when storms blew in, watching the trees bend and the leaves whip through the air as rain lashed the house, drilling off the glass. She went to the library and found more books and kept studying. Had it been a different time, she’d have probably gone up to Purdue and studied meteorology. But that wasn’t how things worked then. She had a sweetheart, got married right out of high school, and then the war was on and he was overseas and she had to get a job, and then he was back and they had children to raise. Children she’d put in the ground already, hardest thing she could imagine anyone bearing, her daughter gone at thirty with cancer, her son at forty-nine with a stroke. No grandchildren left behind.
She was thinking about her son when she first saw the car approaching slowly up the road, remembering the time he’d fallen off this very porch and landed on a flowerpot below, breaking his wrist. Five years old at the time, and he was trying to stand on the rail to impress his sister. Goodness, how that boy had cried. The car came to a stop then and turned in her drive, and her thoughts left the past and she got to her feet. The wind had freshened a touch just as the car pulled in, got the chimes jingling on the porch and lifted some dust off the floorboards. She swept the thing twice a day, but the world never would run out of dust.
The visitor got out, a man with short hair of a color that had gotten confused somewhere between blond and brown. He needed a shave but seemed clean enough.
“Anne McKinney? They gave me your name down in French Lick,” he said, swinging the door shut and walking up the steps when she nodded. “I’m interested in Pluto Water. The old stories, the folklore. Think you’d be willing to talk about it?”
“Oh, I’m willing enough. Day I’m not willing to tell the old tales, you best call the grave digger-if nothing else just so he can hit me in the head with his shovel. Ought to issue a disclaimer before I get to it, though: time I get to storytelling, you best be comfortable. I’ve been known to go on.”
He smiled. It was a nice smile, warm and genuine.
“Ma’am, I’ve got plenty of interest and time.”
“Then come on up here and have a seat.”
He walked up the steps and offered his hand. “Name’s Eric Shaw. I’m down from Chicago.”
“Oh, Chicago. Always loved that city. Haven’t been there in years. I can remember riding the Monon up more than a few times, though. In fact, that’s where my husband and I went on our honeymoon. Spring of ’thirty-nine. I was eighteen years old.”
“When did the Monon stop making that run?”
“Monon stopped making any runs, period, in ’seventy-three.”
Thirty-five years ago. She didn’t consider dates all that much, but she’d just rattled two of them off, and they both sounded impossibly long ago. She remembered the day the Monon made its final run quite well, actually. She and Harold went up to the Greene County trestle and watched it thunder on across, waving good-bye as it went. Hadn’t realized exactly all they’d been waving good-bye to. An era. A world.
“Each of the hotels here had its own train station for years,” she said. “Doesn’t that seem hard to believe now? But here I go-talking away from the topic before we even got started. What was it you wanted to know about Pluto Water?”
He sat down on the chair across from her and pulled out one of those tiny tape recorders and held it up, a question in his eyes.
“Oh, sure, if you actually want to listen to me go on about this a second time, you’re more than welcome to it.”
“Thank you. I was wondering if you could tell me what you’d heard about the… more unusual effects of the water.”
“Unusual?”
“I know that eventually people realized it was nothing more than a laxative, but in the early days the stuff had a reputation that went well beyond that.”
She smiled. “It certainly did. For a time, Pluto Water was reputed to do just about anything short of put a man on the moon. The popular response to your question, of course, would be that as the years passed, people got smarter, learned more about science and health and figured out that all of that had been nothing more than snake oil sales. That the company survived for a time by toning down the claims, advertising it as a laxative, but the world’s finest laxative. Then people saw through that, too, or found a better product, and Pluto Water went the way of a lot of old-fashioned things. Quickly forgotten, and then it disappeared entirely.”
“You said that would be the popular response,” Eric Shaw said. “Are you aware of a different one?”
That got her to grinning again, thinking about what her daddy’s reaction to this man would be if he were still here. Why, he’d be coming up out of his chair by now, taking his pipe from his mouth and waving it around to emphasize his point. All the poor man had ever wanted was an audience for his Pluto Water theories.
“Well, sure, I’ve heard a few,” she said. “My father worked for the company, understand. And the way he told it, the water changed over the years. Originally, they’d just bottle it fresh out of the springs and what you drank was essentially direct from the source. Problem they ran into with that was, the water didn’t keep. They tried putting it into kegs and casks, but it went bad quickly. Unfit to drink. That wasn’t any real dilemma until people realized how much money could be made from shipping the water all over. Then they had to do something about it.”
“Pasteurization?”
“Of a sort. They boiled the water to get rid of some of the gasses that were in it and then added two different kinds of salt that fortified it, allowed it to keep. Once they had that process figured out, they bottled it and shipped it all over the world.”
Eric Shaw nodded but didn’t speak, waiting on more. She liked that. So many people were impatient these days, hurried.
“The company and most of the people involved with it swore up and down that nothing changed in the water during that boiling and salting.”
“Your father disagreed,” he said, and she chuckled.
“He suspected the preservation process changed what the water could do.”
“You didn’t believe him.”
“I’d be willing to believe, maybe, that water fresh from the springs had more effect than the stuff they bottled and shipped. Isn’t that true of most things? You eat a tomato from your own garden, it tastes different than the one you buy from the store.”
“Sure.”
“He also had a notion,” she said, “that your standard-issue Pluto Water was a special thing, capable of startling healing powers, but that there were some springs in the area that went a touch beyond that. This area is filled with mineral springs. Some large, some small, but there’s a lot of them.”
“Did you ever hear rumors that the water caused hallucinations?”
That lifted her eyebrows. She shook her head. “I never heard that, no.”
He looked positively disappointed but was trying to conceal it, nodding his head and rushing out another question.
“What about the temperature? I’ve, uh, I’ve heard that it would stay unusually cold. That there was some sort of… a chemical reaction, I guess, and you could leave the bottles out in a warm room but they’d stay cold, even get a little frost.”
“Well,” Anne said, “I don’t know who you’ve been getting stories from, but they sound like a colorful source. I’ve never heard of anything like that.”
He was silent for a moment, eyes concerned, and seemed to be groping for something.
“But you had the water that had been preserved or fortified, right?” he said eventually.
“Yes.”
“What if it had been fresh water, bottled back before they did that process?”
“That would require the water being from before eighteen ninety-three, I think,” she said. “I really couldn’t say much about that, but I never heard anything about any unusual coldness.”
“What might happen if you drank Pluto Water that hadn’t been preserved?”
“Well, the way I was always told, it simply wasn’t fit for human consumption after much time had passed.”
“And if someone did drink it?”
“If they could actually choke enough of it down,” Anne said, “I do believe it would be fatal.”
That seemed to rock him. He wet his lips and dropped his eyes to the porch floor and looked a little queasy. She frowned, watching him, wondering about all these questions now, about what exactly she had on her hands here.
“You mind my asking what you’re working on?”
“A family history,” he said.
“Someone that worked for Pluto?”
“No, but I’m trying to put as much area history into it as I can. I’ll be making a film, eventually, but today I’m just doing some preliminary work.”
“Who was it filled your head with all those ideas about the water?”
“An old man in Chicago,” he said, and then, before she could respond to that, he asked, “Hey, is there a river around here?”
“A river? Well, not right here in town, no. There’s the creek.”
“I was told about a river.”
“The White River’s not far. And then there’s the Lost River.”
The wind kicked up then, set the chimes to work, a sound Anne would never tire of, and she tilted her head to look past Eric Shaw and out to the yard, where the blades were spinning on the windmills. Spinning pretty good, too, a decent breeze funneling through. Still nothing but sun and white clouds, though, no hint of a storm. Odd for the wind to be picking up like this with no storm…
“The Lost River?”
His question snapped her mind back. It was mildly embarrassing to be caught drifting off like that, but this wind was strange, grabbed her attention.
“Yes, sorry. I was listening to the chimes. It’s called the Lost River because so much of it is underground. More than twenty miles of it, I believe. Shows itself here and there and then disappears again.”
“That’s pretty wild,” Eric Shaw said, and Anne smiled.
“Everything that built these towns came up from underground. I walk into those hotels and just shake my head, because when it comes right down to it, they wouldn’t be there except for a little bit of water that bubbles out of the ground around here. If you don’t think there’s a touch of magic to that, well, I don’t know what to tell you.”
“That’s what Pluto was supposed to represent, right?”
“Right. He’s the Roman version of Hades, which isn’t all that pleasant a connotation to most folks now, but there’s a difference between Hell and the underworld in the myths. My father did some studying on those myths. Way he understood it, Pluto wasn’t the devil. He was the god of riches found in the earth, found underground. That’s why they named the company after him, see? Thing my father always found amusing was that in the myths all Pluto was in charge of, really, was keeping the dead on the banks of the River Styx before they crossed it to be judged. So Pluto was essentially an innkeeper. And what followed the water in this town?”
She waved her hand out across her valley, the springs valley. “Inns. Beautiful, amazing inns.”
She laughed and folded her hands, put them back in her lap. “Daddy probably overthought a lot of these things.”
They were quiet for a time then. Her visitor seemed to have something else on his mind, and she was content to sit and watch the windmills spin, listen to the chimes.
“You said you were around the water a lot,” he said eventually. “Think you could recognize a bottle if I brought one to you? Tell me when it might have been made?”
“I sure could. In fact, I’ve got a bunch of them upstairs, labeled with the years. Might be able to find a match. Where are you staying? French Lick or West Baden?”
“West Baden.”
“I head down there in the afternoon and have myself a little sip. If you have the Pluto bottle, you can just bring it down. I’ll be there in a half hour or so.”
That seemed to please him, but he’d looked unsteady over the last few minutes, a fierce bit of worry clearly going on in his head, and she wondered what it was had him so concerned. Maybe he’d harbored hopes of using a lot of nonsense in his film, hallucinations and eerie cold bottles and such. Well, rare was the storyteller who got trapped by reality. She imagined he’d find his way around it easy enough.
He thanked her and got into his car and drove off down the hill, and she stayed on the porch with her hands folded in her lap. He’d come by and sparked memories on a day when they were already warm. She’d been thinking about her son, Henry, that tumble he’d taken off the porch. Then this Shaw fellow arrived and said he was from Chicago and her mind had jumped right off that porch and onto a passenger train. Harold had let her have the window seat and she’d sat with her hand wrapped in his and her eyes on the rolling countryside, the wheels on the track offering a soothing noise, light and steady, clack-clack-clack-clack. He’d helped her to her feet when the train got to Chicago, pulled her into his arms, and kissed her long and hard, and someone on the train had whistled and she’d blushed red as the Monon car that carried them.
Spring of ’thirty-nine, she’d told Eric Shaw. Spring of? ’thirty-nine.
Now she wanted to chase him down the road, pull him out of his car and shout, Yes, it was the spring of ’thirty-nine but it was also yesterday. It was an hour ago, don’t you understand? It just happened, I just took that ride, just tasted those lips, just heard that whistle.
The train had seemed faster than anything to her that day, dazzling in its speed. There were race cars that went faster than the train, though, and planes that went faster than the cars, and rockets that went faster than the planes, but what still blew them all away was time itself, the days and months and the years, oh yes, the years. They went faster than anything man had the capacity to invent, so fast that for a while they fooled you into thinking they were slow, and was there any crueler trick than that?
The day Henry fell off the porch rail and broke his wrist, she’d scooped him into her arms and carried him up the steps and into the house before calling the doctor, doing it easily, without a thought. Today, though, she’d gone down the stairs one at a time, dragging the laundry basket behind her and clutching the railing.
She got to her feet and went inside in search of her car keys, ready to go to the hotel, a place that time had forgotten for a while and then remembered and returned to her.