Time Stamp

By Emily Meier

A novel that ranges over the subjects of loss, marriage, politics, and art, Time Stamp is a searing depiction of the way parents’ lives affect their children through their untold or barely told stories—things that exist in the ether of family life and persist, yet play out differently on the stage of a new generation. Told in alternating narratives that open in 1911 when eleven-year-old Will Wheelock is on the periphery of a South Carolina lynching, and in 1997 when Will’s daughter, Maddie, is attending a London retrospective of her photographs of refugee camps, Time Stamp encompasses most of the twentieth century. With the trajectory of two arrows aimed at the same target, Will’s story moves forward and Maddie's backward until they collide in 1972 during Richard Nixon's Christmas bombing of Hanoi. It is a pivotal moment when Will’s lifetime as a fence-sitting public servant shatters, and Maddie's true personal and artistic quest begins.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Emily Meier
• Release date: Dec 29, 2011
• ISBN: 9780983669258

Emily Meier

Emily Meier’s fiction has appeared widely, including in The Second Penguin Book of Modern Women’s Short Stories, the North American Review, Prairie Schooner and the Threepenny Review. She has won national fiction contests at the Florida Review and Passages North, been a Loft-McKnight Fiction award winner, and received fellowships from the Minnesota State Arts Board and the National Endowment for the Arts. She is the author of Suite Harmonic:A Civil War Novel of Rediscovery; Time Stamp: A Novel; In the Land of the Dinosaur: Ten Stories and a Novella; The Second Magician’s Tale; Watching Oksana and Other Stories; and Clare, Loving: A Novel in Three Novellas.

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Time Stamp

Emily Meier

Sky Spinner Press

St. Paul, Minnesota

© 2011 by Sky Spinner Press

117 Mackubin

St. Paul, MN 55102

Smashwords Edition

skyspinnerpress.com

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, scanning, or otherwise—without the express written permission of the publisher.

Published in the United States of America

Sky Spinner Press Books Distribution through Itasca Books

itascabooks.com

ISBN 978-0-9836692-5-8

First Sky Spinner Press Printing, 2011

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Catalog Control Number: 2011911658

Cover design: Jeenee Lee Design

Cover photograph: © Robert Meier

Portrait in cover montage Courtesy Robert Lee Blaffer Foundation

Contents

-1-

October 1911, Near Honea Path, South Carolina

-2-

December 1997, London

-3-

1924-1925, Greenwood, South Carolina

-4-

February 1990, Paris and Madrid

-5-

1925-1929, Greenwood, South Carolina, and Washington, D.C.

-6-

Washington, D.C., and Brugge, Belgium

-7-

1943 and 1944, Greenwood, South Carolina, and Washington, D.C.

-8-

November 1975, Paris and Thailand

-9-

December 1969, Washington, D.C.

-10-

March 1973, Paris and Washington, D.C.

-11-

December 1972, Washington, D.C.

Author’s Note

About the Author

Description of Time Stamp

Read the Title Story from In the Land of the Dinosaur: Ten Stories and a Novella

Description of In the Land of the Dinosaur

Also by Emily Meier

In memory of my father

-1-

October 1911

Near Honea Path, South Carolina

Joe? Will Wheelock gripped the edge of the wagon seat as it bumped along. There was a strange new sound. He couldn’t tell if it came from the rear axle when the wheels turned all the way around and, just before the full circle, hitched slightly, or if something was caught beneath the wagon bed and was clicking rhythmically as the horses pulled forward. Joe, you hear anything funny?"

His cousin was sitting impassive, the reins held lightly in his hand and a bulge of tobacco in his cheek. After a minute he spit into the dirt and cocked his head toward the back. A wheel working loose. This mud gets much deeper, it comes right off.

Can we fix it?

Nope. Just hope we get to Cellar’s place before it goes. You want some chew?

Will shook his head and rubbed his hand across his mouth. He gripped the seat again.

Joe laughed. You still a baby?

It tastes rotten.

How would you know? I was chewing when I was eleven.

And Aunt Sally still yells at you when she catches you.

You drive. Joe held the reins out for him. I’m getting in back. Don’t roll me out in the mud.

Will moved across the seat, trying not to let the alarm he felt show in his face. The fact was he wasn’t comfortable around horses. They didn’t have them at home—too damned edgy, his father always said and anyway they had the Model T—and all the occasional days he had spent visiting his uncle’s when his parents were in Charleston or Washington, at the St. Louis World Fair, or in a cabin in the Blue Ridge as they were this week, had not been enough to teach him even to like horses.

But these two, Jelly and Nan, seemed unaware of that. They plodded on without changing their gait, too old or too much in a rut to care about his nervous touch on the reins. The ground changed and they kept their pace, pulling with the muscles in their backs and necks.

Will looked over his shoulder at his cousin stretched out on top of the tarpaulin in back with his hat pulled down over his face. Joe was taller this year, a lot taller, and though his jeans were long enough, they were bunched up around his waist, obvious hand-me-downs. Where his wrists stuck out of his shirt they were bony as if all the growing he’d done over the summer had been not so much an addition to him as some kind of stretched-out rearrangement of what he’d already been to start with. His hands seemed not to have changed at all. They were still boys’ hands—brown and stubby—and Will looked at his own hands and knew that even if they were not a man’s yet, they were square and large and very agile. He did not think about it long, but for just an instant he remembered his mother saying when she told him good night that hands like his, lying on the coverlet, would have to be hands he used for work so they stayed out of trouble.

Will relaxed a little on the seat and did not hold his back so erect. He loosened the reins where they were cutting across his fingers. It had turned out to be a better day than they had expected for their errand of hauling new planks to Lyman Cellar’s for adding onto his house. There had been rain, but it wasn’t as much as yesterday’s and what there was had kept the temperature from getting too high. Now that the sky had cleared a little, Will thought if the sun came out it would start to dry the mud on the road and they could go faster and get to Cellar’s before dark. He wondered briefly about the wheel, but he did not think he believed what Joe had said about it. Generally he’d found it was safer to think twice about what Joe said, and anyway he couldn’t hear the noise anymore, and a wheel coming off if it couldn’t be helped didn’t seem like something to worry about ahead of time.

Will glanced back at his cousin again and saw his hand twitching in sleep. Joe, he called softly, but there was no answer. Hey it’s just us. Hey Jelly, hey Nan, he whispered, but the horses kept on going without any more indication than Joe that they’d heard him.

Will fidgeted on the seat and scratched at his wrist where a mosquito had bitten him. He’d been on this road only once before and it was still a surprise to him he was here now. Earlier in the week his uncle had told Lyman Cellar that he’d send his planks over with Joe when the weather lifted. They’d been standing in the front yard, and his uncle had squeezed Will’s shoulder. And this one, he said. He has to earn his keep.

It was why he was here. The wagon was pitched a little toward the back and the horses were going slower now, pulling uphill. Will could almost touch the tree branches that curved over the road. As Jelly and Nan climbed farther up the hill, the branches dipped even lower, and one brushed against his cheek. The trees were denser, too, and the patches of sky that were visible through the leaves seemed so far away that Will thought any rain that fell wouldn’t even reach him. It was like a nest he was in, all road and mud and heavy foliage.

Have we passed the bridge yet?

Will felt his shoulders clinch at Joe’s voice. Not yet, he said. No bridge. Wait. Here we are. The horses had come to the top of the hill, and Will saw the river spread out below. It was shining as the sun broke out from behind the trees.

Stop at the bottom. For water, Joe said.

Will nodded and pulled tighter on the reins. They had started down the incline and he realized it was steeper than any they had come down all day. The wagon was pressing hard on the horses, and Will was worried they would lose their footing. His breath was tight in his throat. The reins were so taut across his hands that they were closing off the circulation. He didn’t know what he could do, but then the ground leveled out and he no longer felt the forward push of the wagon. He eased his grip on the reins and was ready to exhale, and then Joe was shouting at him, No, no, don’t let them pull off. Jesus, Will! Pull up!

It was too late. Joe was clambering over the seat, and Jelly and Nan had already left the road. They were headed straight toward the riverbank and then, abruptly, they were yanked to a halt, the wagon wheels stuck in the muddy ground.

Now you did it. Joe jumped down and tugged at the wheels. Man, they’re in there. He threw up his hands in disgust and then walked to the riverbank and leaned down and scooped up some water to drink. He wiped away the dribbles on his chin. These are two DUMB horses. He was yelling at the sky as he flopped down on the embankment. He looked back at Will. There’s no clearance to turn around. Not even if we get unstuck. And these horses sure can’t back the wagon up to the road.

Will got down from the seat. He was tall for eleven, but without the elevation he felt small standing next to the wagon. It’s my fault, he said.

Yeah, it is, but you’re a kid. My dad’ll say it’s my fault. Joe stood up and examined the wheel rims. OK. I’ve thought about it. Let’s try pushing a board under here. Grab an end.

It was five hot minutes later when they heard a car approaching the bridge from the other side. Keep holding that board. Don’t let it slip. Hold it! Joe ordered, and while Will braced his leg against the front wheel of the wagon and dug in, leaning into a mud-caked board, Joe ran up the embankment to the road. Will saw the long rip in Joe’s pants leg and his sweat-soaked shirt, and he tried thinking about that. He clamped his teeth together.

It’s the sheriff’s car. Hey! Joe yelled, waving his arms as the car came onto the bridge.

Out of the way, boy! The driver was shouting out the window and honking his horn. Move! We’re not stopping.

Joe had barely gotten off the road when the car rumbled on past him and started up the hill. Jesus, he said. Will, that must have been him.

Him? Who? Who’re you talking about?

The boy who got to that girl. Looks like they caught him.

Will felt a strange working in the pit of his stomach that he thought was from the heat. He blinked the sweat out of his eyes and let the board fall onto the ground. It’s too hot, he said, leaning over, and he pressed his face against the soft earth of the embankment. He was seeing dark spots dancing on the grass.

You OK? asked Joe.

In a minute, Will said and he held on to the grass beneath his fingers and felt the smothering heat along his neck. He thought of the face, black and frightened behind the back car window, black and young, staring out at him and then disappearing beyond the hilltop, retracing in the car the muddy road he and Joe had driven across earlier.

Will let go of the grass and kept his eyes on Joe. He was sliding the muddy board into the wagon along with the others and fastening the tarpaulin again. Beyond them to the north grackles were yammering in a stand of trees. It was an unholy racket, but in a while it died down.

You can stay here and watch the wagon, Joe said. He had finished tying down the cover. I’m riding to Cellar’s to get help.

When Joe had unhitched Nan and headed off across the bridge, Will watched him out of sight and then walked over to Jelly thinking he should make friends with her. Are you hungry? he asked. He saw a flicker of attention in her eyes. There’s a sandwich left. You like sandwiches? Will took a rumpled bag out from under the wagon seat and unwrapped a big chunk of bread that was folded around a ham slice. He held it a little way from the horse’s nose, and she looked past him and turned her head away. Will stood a minute. Then he sat down on the bank of the river and started to eat by himself.

He was halfway through the sandwich when an idea struck him. I need a pail. Jelly, we’re in this mess because you wanted water, he said, and he nodded in agreement with himself as he started poking around under the wagon seat. All he could find was a tin cup with a handle that was nearly twisted off.

This has to do—one gulp at a time, he said when he’d walked over to the riverbank and, taking hold of a tree branch with one hand, he’d held the cup down into the water and filled it and gone back to Jelly.

He had repeated the trip back and forth between the river and Jelly three or four times when he heard a car in the distance. He could tell that the sound was coming from across the bridge in the direction Joe had gone and, in another moment, he realized what he heard was more than one car.

It surprised him and he stood near the road waiting, thinking he would wave for help. He could see a puff of dusty air swelling above the road and he heard the rumble of car engines growing louder and louder. It sounded like a parade out in the middle of nowhere. And then slowly, slowly like water rising to crest over a mud dam, like a rain barrel filling, the knowledge of what was happening came to Will.

He had moved into the shadow of a tree at the river’s edge when the first car drove into view. It was like the head of a train with car after car following behind it and first one part of the line swinging out at the curve in the road and then another. Will stepped back a little way from the river and thought how visible he still was, the one person here who did not belong to the caravan, the one person set in the opposite direction—a young boy with a horse and wagon, taking water from the stream. He thought how unnatural it was for him even to be here.

The lead car was rolling onto the bridge and, as it drew parallel to him, it slowed down to a halt. Then a man stuck his head out the window. Boy, he called down to him. Hey, boy, you seen the deputy from Honea Path up through here?

Will felt a little scattered, a little wild. Had they seen Joe? And if they’d seen Joe, what had Joe told them?

But he had to say something. No sir, he answered, and he tried to think how his voice sounded, if it seemed like he was lying.

Boy, you sure? You didn’t see a car?

I was asleep. Will motioned toward the wagon bed. I’m waiting for my cousin. Will twisted the cup in his hand and felt the jagged handle cut into his thumb. It was all he could do not to cry out. I maybe heard a car, he said.

The man ducked his head back in the car, and Will could hear him talking to the other men before he stuck it out again. You see the deputy, boy, you tell him he’s got friends looking to help him out. Will heard the laughter of the other men as the car started moving again and watched as the whole caravan passed across the bridge, men with their shotgun barrels resting against the window frames. He pressed his hand against his side trying to stop the bleeding.

He did not know what time it was when Joe finally came back with the men to get the wagon out. He had fallen asleep with his hand in the river and when he woke up with Joe leaning over him, it was dark and the men who were working to free the wagon had strung lanterns in the trees. For a minute, confused, Will wondered if these men were the same men he’d seen earlier. Then he realized that, besides Joe, there were just three people—Lyman Cellar and two younger men he guessed were his sons.

What time is it? he asked. He was trying to settle in his own mind if the volley of gunfire he had heard earlier was something he had dreamed.

Past midnight, Joe said. The men just got back from town awhile ago. What happened to your hand?

I was giving Jelly a drink from the cup and…I cut it is all. Joe, did you hear some shots?

Nope. Joe got a clean handkerchief from one of the men and tied it around Will’s hand.

Everyone was working to free the wagon. Finally, when it had been unloaded most of the way, they pushed it back far enough so the horses could turn around and haul it up the embankment. It was nearly four in the morning when they finally got to Cellar’s.

You boys can bed down in the loft, Lyman Cellar told them when the horses were fed and put in the barn. Think you can sleep any more, Will?

Yes sir, he answered and Lyman Cellar slapped Jelly on the rump and closed the stall behind her before he went out the door.

Will climbed up the ladder after Joe, and they both stretched out on the hay. I’m beat, Joe said.

Me too, Will answered, but as he lay there and listened to Joe’s breathing grow heavy, his hand began to throb and he stayed wide awake. He pushed at the loft door and it swung open. He saw the night landscape before him with its massed edge of opaque trees, and in him, like some answering force, he felt the dark, swelling shape of his own fear.

With a start he turned over and buried his face in the hay. He could feel the night around him and he tried to push it from his awareness, to think that the sun was moving up the horizon and that, instead of the dim static along his eardrums, he heard the first sounds of morning.

But he was still afraid. He was not worried about anything he could think of, about rolling out the window or over the loft edge and breaking his neck, or that in the darkness someone would come up behind him and touch him. Instead his fear was something to do with the night itself, something about the secret it held, and the leering laughter from the caravan.

He fell asleep at last when the sky was growing purple over the yard.

-2-

December 1997

London

For the briefest instant, Ellen Wheelock thought Guy had pushed up behind her. She expected his hand on her shoulder. She listened for the low-voiced Maddie that was her name for most purposes and most people, and short for her middle name, which was Madeleine.

But Guy wasn’t here. He was at home with the newest caregiver, and Maddie was alone in this gallery with the hundreds of people who had crowded their way into her retrospective, the eerie mix of The Joshua Tree and Adagio for Strings she’d found in Guy’s studio playing in the background. There were posters on the gallery window, posters on the Tube with a signature piece of her work and the tucked-in, arty picture of her that the gallery rep had insisted on using, a sepia-toned shot that looked more like her mother from the ’30s than Maddie from the ’60s, though Maddie had always loved it because the resemblance to her mother was so strong. The rep had convinced her finally by not trying to flatter her it was still accurate.

Ellen Wheelock: 25 Years of Seeing with the Camera’s Eye.

Maddie turned from the would-be buyers and would-be photographers she’d been talking with to a man who was much taller than Guy and exceptionally handsome, his hair receding but so slightly he might have still had his boyhood hairline.

Maddie knew better. Carter, she said. Amazing. It really is you?

She could tell he was freshly shaved when he leaned down to kiss her. Aunt Maddie. Yes, of course it’s me, Maddie. His voice was deep, but he was still soft-spoken. He squeezed her hands. Tell me I’m not late for the gallery talk.

They made their way toward a space behind the podium in the next room, which was set up for her talk, Maddie nodding her way past the nation of people claimed from the London night, the whole gallery smelling damp from the mist that had patterned their clothes and then faded away to a scent. There were women with invitations held tight to their handbags, goateed men in jackets and crew neck sweaters. Mostly there were seventeen-year-old girls and their inevitable dates, the girls sporting lemon or purple hair and making an immediate track to the wine and the canapés.

We should get you a drink, she said. Tell me everything. When did you get here? You’re straight from the airport? Good. You really must stay with us. Guy’s not…you’ll understand. Just make allowances. But how did you know? Maddie aimed a thumb at the walls, at her pictures that, surrounding her with their intensity, their contrails of history, had made her so ridiculously emotional. She hurried on. And your children? Your wife. And Mercy. How’s Mercy?

Fine. Asleep in Virginia. All of them. Careful. Here comes the microphone. We’ll catch up later. I’ll be right over there.

You’re—

Here for a conference. Radiology.

The invisible light.

Opposite of yours. It’s a stunning show, Maddie.

She waited while the technician made his adjustments, while the gallery director shuffled through notes, while more racks of chairs were turned into rows that spilled out through the room’s doorway. She was warmed by Carter’s praise. Not just what he’d said, but the wonderful fact he was here. Someone of hers. Almost hers. The nephew from the marriage that predated Guy—predated all of this—but had left her with people she loved. It was a focus after the last weeks when she’d felt crazy, making the final cut on the work, overseeing its hanging, wondering if Guy understood what was going on and how desolate she felt doing it without him. She had even lost her way about clothes, abandoning her usual professional style (pants, a linen shirt, a khaki vest with pockets) and ransacking her closet for skirts and tunics that would echo her picture on the poster. She’d turned down offers from friends to help, had resisted their plans for an after-show party. She had even been tempted to crop her hair.

Now, listening to words both familiar and unfamiliar about her work—environmental clues, haunting bodies, echoing shapes—she felt like herself again. She watched Carter in his chair, his lanky legs, his glasses pushed up as he rubbed at his eyes. Jet-lagged, of course.

She smoothed her skirt, glad it was wool. She touched her blouse, glad it was silk and glad that she’d found something neither over the top nor too practical. She linked her fingers through the beads Guy had bought her long ago at a booth in Brick Lane, then nodded at the applause and stepped up to the microphone, tapping it lightly. She pushed the ON button on the projector so it was ready to show her slides.

Bookends. She remembered now. Carter at thirteen. He’d run the projector for the first-ever public showing of her work. The pictures from the Palestinian refugee camps, the hospital in Saigon. Not an exhibition, but one of his grandmother’s legendary Christmas parties in Georgetown—1972 and the brief pause in the bombs falling over North Vietnam.

Good evening. Maddie heard her voice carrying out into the room, out to the far corners of the gallery. She adjusted the sound, tapping the microphone once more, and when it seemed right, she added her thanks to the crowd for coming out on such a misty night. She quoted her favorite James line from Portrait of a Lady about the English rain: There’s always a little of it and never too much at once…and it never wets you and it always smells good.

There was a low murmur from the crowd—appreciation? assent?—and Maddie went ahead, previewing what she meant to cover. She intended, she said, for the slides to be a framing aid. Though she’d included a few details and some pictures she was often asked about, most of the slides were master shots for each project, a device she’d stumbled on at the start of her career when she’d felt bewildered by the array of unfamiliar images assaulting her, but something she learned to use with greater consciousness later from her husband who was a sound editor in film. (Or had been, she added to herself.) And once she’d finished this overview, she meant to take questions about the work since she always found she learned things from the questions she was asked. She hoped others would, too.

Maddie took a sip of her water and stole a glance at Carter, who hadn’t fallen asleep as she’d thought he might, but was giving her a thumbs-up with his hand lodged against his sternum. He was smiling a little smile and his teeth didn’t show, but she knew how beautiful they were. She started the slide projector, aware that the picture that filled the screen might have been one he had seen as a boy, his teeth newly in braces.

Lebanon, she said. 1971. You can tell this is a composite. I wanted as much information as I could get. The old sea castle embedded in turquoise water and turquoise sky. A wonderful ruin—Maddie held her hand up, turning it from front to back—and the camera moving from that romance to the reality of the tent village, the refugee camp.

She had begun. She was making her introduction of the places that were just as much her memory of self as they were of the people and places captured on film. It was all very orderly on the screen, but in her mind, there was no real chronology. Tindouf in the West Sahara. Cambodia. Thailand. West Bengal. Botswana, Somalia…They were swirling flashes of memory stirred by the pictures—the crawling greenness of the jungle, the unforgiving closeness of her clothes in the heat, their thinness in the cold. Nights that existed in a haze of smoky fires and the sudden staccato of gunshots. She did not say she had started late, an accidental photographer, that recently divorced and fleeing from her father’s sorrow, she had met a man in Paris who’d invited her to Lebanon and abandoned her there with his camera.

So the refugee camps. The hidden part of the world she had tried to make real to the world that was the acknowledged face of the planet. But they were not her only subject. She gave a nod to her lighter work—doorknobs and skillets, street scenes from her trips with Guy to a long list of film locations. Miscellaneous portraits of friends. Yes, she had made exhibits from such work, but they were, she said, her way of staying in the habit of seeing.

She glanced at her watch. Twenty minutes had passed. It was what she had planned, but she was surprised the time had gone by so quickly. She had come to the image that haunted her, had always haunted her. There is some reason—something beyond carelessness—why I shot this with the tent flap cutting off the child’s face. But I really can’t remember. Was he shy and ducking away from the camera? The static line of his body suggests otherwise. Or was there something about his face that reminded me of what an intruder the camera is? I’ve spent two decades wishing that someone else in that picture would show up and explain it to me. Maybe tonight. Are you here? Maddie slanted hand above her eyebrow and peered into the audience. They laughed. She laughed, though it