Philip Cox + Noble Winthrop

A Note from the author:

I wanted to revisit the world of the Homestead Act story again. As I sit here looking out my basement apartment window, the lawn is at eye level and I swear the grass is growing as fast as I write.

Liberty IN, 1864

     Philip Cox wasn't out front in his woven Quaker chair, but by the sound of stone grinding steel I could tell he was home. Knocking the dirt of my shoes on his single step I walked right in. The old man was bent over his kitchen table, which he often used for a work bench. Today he had clamped a scythe blade to the edge of the table, and was carefully grinding off the burr.

     "Afternoon Noble, how you keepin' up with the Rs?"

     "Reckoning is far and away my least favorite."

     Philip smiled without looking up, "By how well you fancy reading and writing, I'm not surprised."

     "You know..." I began, but Philip smiled knowingly and shook his head, "What?"

     He stopped grinding. "Beg your pardon, you were about to tell me about some way my life could improve."

     How could he have known? "I wasn't. I... ahh... your scythe blade there reminded me of something I read in the Herald..."

     "Go on."

     "About four years ago they opened a great big menagerie in New York city in Central Park, and they bought these things called reel mowers to cut the grass around the cages. Apparently it's this machine that spins some kind of wheel of blades while you push it from behind."

     Philip went back to grinding. "Sound about as safe as blindfolded boxing in your pa's tool shed. You want to know what cuts grass better than any steel contraption?"

     I frowned at him for talking about my father like that, but then again, my father had asked me to clean it this past weekend, so I kept my mouth shut and shouldered the responsibility. "No. I want to know how you knew what I was going to say." I folded my arms across my chest.

     "I told you I was a time traveler."

     He had. Back when I first met Philip he told me about how he was a delivery man for some freight company, and how riding out from the big cities was like traveling back in time.

     "No, really."

     Philip tested the edge with his thumb and the sound resonated loudly off the face of the table. He loosened the wooden clamp and it complained with a loud squeak. "You have this habit, every time you're about to tell me something you think I ought to know, you say, 'You know'. Now, hold this steady while I tighten the nut." He said, fitting the scythe blade into the dark brown metal band that wrapped around the end of the curvy wooden handle. Bearing down on the square nut that tightened the band he said, "Don't be so embarrassed. It's like that feller in the Future World you're always writing about..." He waited for me to provide the name. Ander. "That's the one. He's always getting himself in trouble 'cause he's seen enough to know where those primitive folks' headed." He stood, straightening his back slowly until he was upright. He handed me the scythe and headed outside. "That's just like you and me. I've been around longer and seen the way things shape up time and again, but you're greener than a grasshopper's turd, and every time you have a new thought you think it's the first time it's ever been had."

     Philip found a perverse entertainment in getting me riled up, said it was like watching a dog chase its own tail; just plain entertaining. Though I was boiling inside I refused to give him the satisfaction. Instead I tried to prove him wrong, "Speaking of Future World, Shiloh and I figured out–"

     "Hold up a minute there grasshopper." He settled down in his Quaker chair, but when I tried to hand him the scythe, he pointed to the corner of his lawn and said, "Start at that corner and work your way around the side." As I walked across his yard he asked, "This the same Shiloh had imprints of your peach-fuzz on his knuckles?"

     "Yeah... no. He only hit me that one time. I avoided him for a while, but a few months after you got my journal back he started following me after school. This town's too damn small–"

     "No, need to curse. Don't pull it, you ain't shaving the lawn; Twist at your hips."

     "Sorry. This town's too small to lose him and he ended up finding out where I lived. I figured I was safe as long as I was indoors, but one weekend he had the guts to come right up and knock on the front door. He gave my mother this stack of papers tied together with some twine. Each one was a corkboard notice or advert, he must have taken from out front O'Hara's general store."

     "What'd he figured you wanted them for?"

     "Couldn't figure it out at first, but then I turned it over: He'd written a story on the back of each notice, labeled each one with a page number in case I got them mixed up. The spelling wasn't that good, but it was set in my Future World."

     Philip slapped his knee, "Ain't that the way?"

     I'd finished half of his front yard when he went inside. I could hear his squeaky pump pulling water up from his well. Something about it reminded me that what I was going to tell him before I got distracted. He came back a while later with some sweet lemon water in two tin cups, and handed me one, which I drank right then and there.

     "Earlier you were about to tell me something you and Shiloh figured."

     I nodded, handed him back the cup, and went back to cutting the grass. "In Future World there are so many telegraph lines running to everyone's house that the sky has been darkened, Shiloh came up with the idea that they're made of glass, so light can still pass through."

     Philip thought about it for a while and I started in on the second half of his lawn. Eventually he said, "That reel mower must make a heck of a noise. I wonder if it's better or worse than the snicker-snack your jaws make?"

     When I turned around he threw a small whetstone at me, "It's past time to sharpen your cutting edge. I've been waiting for you to complain about it, but you just been working twice as hard to make up for that dull edge."

     I caught it reflexively, but nearly didn't hang on to it. As Philip talked me through how to sharpen the scythe with just a few well-angled strokes, I wondered why he hadn't commented on the glass wires. Maybe this was his comment?

     "Are you calling me dull?"

     He smiled, "Have you ever noticed those glass bobbins on the telegraph poles?"

Of course, I thought, the glass retards electricity!

     "But... what if in the future they figure out how to make glass carry an electrical signal?"

     "Nonsense. What if in they make an automobile that can cut the grass while it drives around? I promise when it breaks it will take more than a rock and a wrench to fix."

     "Then what if there's another machine that can fix the automatic grass cutter?" I stopped paying attention for a moment, and slit a shallow gash in my thumb.

     "That's exactly my point; you're only creating more problems the more you try to fix them. You know what cut's grass better than steel?" he asked again.

     Around the thumb in my mouth I said, "Wha'?"

     "A goat." He considered it for a moment and said, "Although I'm afraid if we bashed heads as much and you and I, he'd come out ahead far more often than you do."

1862 Homestead act + being a weirdo

"You're a sore sight for sad eyes. You look like a jackrabbit lost his tail in a fox's jaws."

Philip Cox was my first friend in Liberty. No. If I'm being honest with myself he was my first friend period.

"No sir, the only thing I lost was a fight."

"Schoolyard brush by the look of it."

I shrugged, "Doesn't matter."

"This is the first time you tried to catch a Tartar?"

"Yes sir, assuming you mean the first time I've had a brawl."

"You're from Boston." I must have looked at him wide-eyed and amazed because he smiled and made a gravely  sound somewhere between a wheeze and a laugh.  "Have a seat," he said gesturing to the front step, beside which he himself sat in a woven Quaker chair in the shade of his small, one room cabin.

I entered his yard and held out my hand to him, "Noble. Noble Winthrop."

He took it, his hand was wrinkled and soft, and his skin felt thin and loose. "Pleasure. Name's Philip Cox."

I sat down beside him and couldn't help but notice a ball jar of a tan liquid that sat between us. He caught me looking and said, "Applejack. I keep myself busy by jacking over the winter. You looks like you're between hay and grass. Help yourself if you fancy a taste."

"Thank you, no." We sat in silence for a while. The shade felt good and after it had cooled my skin I could feel the heat of what would surely be a bruise on my cheek. Eventually I asked, "How'd you know I was from Boston?"

He smiled and his eyes looked far off, "You talk like a Pilgrim reading the paper."

I tried to smile without using half my face. "Before we moved to Indiana I used to work for the Herald."

"He turned to look at me. You pulling my horns? I never would have taken you for a slang-whanger."

"Oh, I wasn't a... writer." I said, guessing what he meant by 'slang-whanger',  "I mean, I write, but not like a journalist. I was a delivery boy."

"You miss it," he told me.

"I do. Before we moved Mother listed me all the friends she was going to miss the most, but I told her I'd miss reading the news. It makes me nervous not knowing how far north has the Union pushed, or what's happening with the Missouri Sioux?"

"They're both still fighting. No need to know whose fists are where, just who hit first and who hit hardest. Why'd you get hit?"

I took an swig of the Applejack. It was sweeter and not so alcoholic as Laird's, or really anything with its own label. "Shiloh, the sack of bricks that sits behind me in school, followed me afterward and knocked my journal out of my hands. He then offered me a proposition: The only way I'd get it back was to fight him. I've never been in a fight before so I took a pose like a boxer I'd seen in an advertisement for mustache wax. Shiloh laughed and hit my arm making me pop myself in the jaw with my own fist. I felt my lip split and when I lowered my arms he cocked me with a haymaker that sent me to the dirt."

Philip shook his head, "Back when I was younger, I worked for Morehead, Waddell & Co. I made this delivery, small, only a ounce, for which I had to collect a two dollar fee. My first mistake was handing him the package before he'd paid, my second mistake was not noticing he was drunk, my third was declining to fight and getting my flint fixed while my back was turned."

"Thanks for the conversation Mr. Cox--"

"Philip, he corrected."

"--Philip. I should be on my way before my folks get nervous." He nodded and set back to watching clouds.

#

Two days later, Philip Cox was stetting out in the shade passing the time. I waved to him and he waved me over. "Afternoon Noble, got time to chew the fat with an old fool?"

I pulled a long piece of wheat-grass from his front yard and placed it between my molars. As I sat down beside him. He looked at me from the corner of his eyes and asked, "What's Future World?"

"It's the... How do you know about Future World?"

His chair was closer to the step today than it had been before. He leaned over and took my journal from under the front step, and turned it over in his hands. "That boy Shiloh's meaner than trapping cats in a pillowcase..."  He opened the book and read.

"You don't understand!" Said Ander, "I'm not from here, I'm from the future. In Future World there are telegraphs that run to everyone's house, which run through a box that turns your words into morse code, then back into words at the other person's house."

Everyone laughed at him, and pointed at his strange costume, which was a kind of one piece union suit made out of a material that kept him warm in the cold and cool in the heat.

"It's true, the sky is darkened by the wires running overhead. News isn't written down anymore, it's spoken directly into everyone's homes three times a day!"

But the people were unfamiliar with anything more advanced than a drawn carriage, and as Ander tried to explain about things which to us are as magnificent as a locomotive, he only made his situation worse.

"How old are you?" Philip asked.

"Fourteen," I said around the considerably shortened wheat-grass.

"When I was fourteen no one had ever heard of a locomotive. They had been invented already, but we hadn't heard of it. When I did I thought it was a stupid idea. You call it magnificent but nothing will ever be as magnificent as a horse. A horse can ride anywhere, but a train is enslaved to its tracks."

I shook my head, "Train's can move faster and carry more."

He stared off at the clouds for a long time, I didn't want to interrupt him but I was still fuming with pride. I tried imagining something that was better than a horse. What would Ander ride in Future World? A train without wheels? With legs? No, I'm just trying to recreate a horse. A train with a will of its own, maybe?

Finally Philip spoke, "My point is that your Future World assumes things are better."

"They are better--"

"Don't interrupt!" He barked in his grizzled voice, "You have before you, at your service," he tipped an imaginary hat, "a real, live time-traveler."

I was shocked, but not because I believed him.

"When I was working for Morehead, Waddell & Co. I would ride from Boston to Hartford to Philadelphia. Riding between the big cities was like going back and forth in time: the houses change, the language changes, things get simpler, people get friendlier. I moved to Liberty to escape time, but it keeps coming. Why would you want to go and speed it back up?"

Despite my manners I stood and yelled at him, "I hate that it's so simple out here. I hate it! I didn't want to move but Father said the homestead was a good investment, but I don't belong here!" I turned and walked away.

#

I was mad for days without knowing why. I started taking a different route to school and back, which took me past the train station and telegraph office next door. Two buildings dedicated to transportation, one shipping information, the other progress. I thought of Future World and it's sky darkened by telegraph lines, and wondered if these two industries would grow alongside each other and the ground would be hardened by rails spider-webbing out in all directions. I remembered that Philip had worked on horseback until the telegraph lines had put him out of work, and realized that he hadn't come here to escape, he had gotten left behind.

No, that's me. Philip wants to live simply. I'm the one who's afraid of being left behind.