Jutzi Coblentz, Amish Time-Traveller

Jutzi had been Amish since the day he was born, and lived the simple life that was expected of him. That is, until the fateful day he was kicked in the head by his father’s horse while mucking-out the barn. Since then he’d looked at things differently. You probably would too, if you’d had the Amish kicked out of you by a stroppy nag.

Since then, he’d found his daily chores on the farm very tiresome. For instance, he was always cursing the plow for the way it went about the task, i.e., not very well. And a man with two hands could only milk so many cows. Surely there was a better way?

So, he had become an inventor. He didn’t exactly know it, for the term hardly belonged in the Amish vocabulary. There was no place in Amish life for the very nature of inventing, let alone inventing to the extent that he took it. Mending a broken cart was one thing, but modifying it so that the horse ran behind was another.

Ordinarily his family and peers would frown upon such things, but because all his inventions were so frightfully useless they’d found there was no harm in humouring him. So long as he got his share of proper work done, he was allowed to spend his spare time in an old workshop in the barn.

His eccentricity was made light of by such turns of phrase as: “There’s Jutzi Coblentz, the man with a case of the Contraptions,” or “Yep, that’s Jutzi, working on another of his Doomajiggers.” Jutzi, bless him, didn’t have the brains to know what pride was, therefore no-one could dent it.

Other little foibles had presented themselves after his accident. Speaking in sums was one; which puzzled him greatly, for he could hardly add two and two without a basket of eggs at hand. He’d also developed the unsettling urge to wear a moustache with his beard. This presented two obstacles. One, it was highly frowned upon in Amish society, and two, he’d never actually seen one. But, being the visionary he was, he didn’t let either problem stand in the way.

He surmised that a moustache must be beard-like in nature, thus he made one out of horse-hair. After gathering it with utmost caution, lest he be kicked a second time, he glued it to a piece of matchbox with extra-thick molasses, then trimmed it accordingly and fitted it with string. He donned it every time he entered his workshop, and all his best inventioning was done with it sitting rather bushily under his nose. It did tend to tickle, however, and he developed the habit of scratching his hooter long after hanging the moustache on its special peg by the door.

Tonight he’d been listening to his mother tell stories of his long-departed Great Grandparents, and how they too had plowed fields, made cheese, reaped grain, and done everything exactly as the Amish still did it today. Had they really? he’d thought. Had no subsequent improvements been made down the generations? It seemed a bit odd that he and his fellows should still be using such primitive methods if there were better ones waiting to be discovered. One plus three over the square of the hypotenuse.

He scratched his nose. How I would love to visit my Great-Grandparents and see how they’d really done it, he thought. To see their fields, their cow sheds, their ornery blasted plows. Maybe I could even suggest some improvements, and we’d be decades ahead by now! Yes, that’s it! I’ll invent a time wajoobi!

Just how Jutzi had fathomed the concept of time-travel without ever leaving his isolated community we shall never know. Suffice to say that he had, and with no right-minded person present to tell him he was crazy to even consider building a time machine out of a bucket, some aged cheddar, a pocket-watch, and a pitchfork, he went ahead and did it. No-one was more surprised than he when it worked.

“Six times five...” he said, gawking at the unhinged scene around him. This equated roughly to: “Well, bother me...”

It wasn’t fields, or cows, or barley blowing in the wind he saw before him. There were hard-packed surfaces, and gigantic buildings made out of no kind of brick he’d ever seen. To his right, horseless carriages rushed past; quite frankly scaring him rigid.

This can’t be the past, he thought. He lifted his foot out of the melted cheddar at the bottom of the bucket. Should have used mild.

He took his most prized possessions from his coat pocket: a battered stub of pencil and a writing pad, and wrote: mild. He paused for a moment and added: or perhaps milk. He returned them to his pocket and leaned his time thingamy against a nearby pole. There was a light at the top of it, burning steadily unlike any flame. The place was swarming with lights, of many colours. He too leaned against the pole and let things sink in. A few people wandered past. They gave him cursory glances but seemed unfazed to see a man from the past standing there. He saw a man with a nicely trimmed beard, and his hand went to his own.

Thank goodness for the moustache, he thought. I knew there was a reason!

He relaxed a little, and took a few casual steps along what was obviously a path. It was jolly hard stuff, and there were no uneven paving stones to trip on, or mud to step in. He took out his notepad again, and wrote: find out about that. He left the nature of “that” uncertain, confident he’d know what he meant when he read it back later.

“Ciiiiigarettes,” he heard. “Wiiiiinston ciiiiigarettes.”

Over by the nearest building was a man in an overcoat, holding a tray before him filled with little boxes. Jutzi approached in wonder.

“Hey, buddy,” said the man. “How many boxes d’ya want?”

“Three and a half, minus the sum of the opposite sides,” said Jutzi, when what he really meant was: none.

“Come again?” said the man.

“Please, what are ciiiiiigarettes?”

“Cigarettes? They’re for smokin’.”

“Ah, tobacco?”

“That’s right, here have a free sample.”

The man held up a little paper tube. Jutzi took it between thumb and forefinger and took a sniff. There was no mistaking the smell; it was stuffed with shredded tobacco.

“And they’re packaged in boxes?”

“That’s right, twenty to a pack.”

“Twenty... twenty...” Jutzi began counting on his fingers. “You don’t have any eggs handy, do you?”

“Eggs? Say, you’re not from around here, are you?” said the man.

“You wouldn’t believe how not from around here I am,” said Jutzi, with just a hint of panic. “Where I come from, we smoke tobacco in a pipe made of wood.”

“Wood? You don’t say? We have plastic ones nowadays.”

Jutzi took out his notepad and wrote: plaztik.

“Here, let me light you up.”

Jutzi jumped back in alarm as the man held up a metal thingamadoodle that produced a flame without matches.

“It’s all right, it’s just a lighter. Don’t you have those either?”

Jutzi shook his head, and his moustache started to slip.

“Say, pal... pardon me for askin’, but... is your moustache upside down?”

“It is?”

Jutzi turned away and adjusted it. Fancy wearing it the wrong way up all this time, he thought.

“Is that better?”

“Yeah, swell, just swell. What’s the matter, the cars bother you?”

“Cars?”

“You jump every time one goes by.”

The horseless carriages. “Karz” went into the notepad.

“Tell you what. I’m just about to go on my dinner break. Why not tag along? A fella like you, new in town, never even seen a car before? I bet you’ll get a real kick out of the Automat.”

Jutzi nodded, if only to get away from the horrible karz.

“Er, what about my... stuff.”

“That junk over there? Heck, no self-respecting New York crook would steal that stuff. It ought to be safe where it is till we get back. I’m taking my smokes though. It’d be like leaving gold behind.”

The Automat, it turned out, was right next door. It was a very fancy, shiny building made of metal and glass. There were lots of rounded corners and bold stripes, and above it all was an illuminated sign.

“Pretty neat, huh? It even has go-faster stripes.”

Jutzi wasn’t sure how a building was meant to go anywhere, let alone get there faster, but found the concept worthy of writing down. The interior resembled a cross between a church and a dining room; there were tables and seats to accommodate many.

“Name’s Frank, by the way,” said Frank.

“Jutzi Coblentz.”

Frank gave him a funny look.

“You don’t say. Call you Yutz, then, shall I?”

“Eight to the power of ten.”

“I’ll take that as a yes.”

Frank led him to the far wall, which was made up of lots of little windows with buttons beside them. Behind the windows were all kinds of prepared meals, packages, and even cigarettes.

“Here we are, anything you could possibly want at the touch of a button. Steak and mashed potaters? No problem. You just put the money in the slot, like so, press the button, and... bingo!”

Jutzi watched intently. A buzzer sounded, and Frank lifted the window and took the meal from the cupboard. A moment later, another identical meal appeared in its place from an inner compartment.

“You mean... the food comes out of the—”

“Out of the machine, yes.”

“Machine...” Jutzi wrote the word in block letters. It was so much more dignified than “whatsathinger.”

“This is amazing... food that comes out of machines! Does no-one get their food from the land anymore?”

“Well,” said Frank, taking a seat. “That’s probably where it comes from originally. I mean, they told us that in school. I’ve never actually seen a farm myself though...”

“I come from a farm!” said Jutzi excitedly.

“I can believe that, Yutz. Say... I think someone’s out there messin’ with your fork.”

Jutzi left the Automat so fast he almost left his moustache behind. He reached his time machine to find two men, who’d arrived in a cart, investigating it. They turned when they heard him exclaim: “Cosine x squared!”

“Jutzi?” said one.

Jutzi removed his moustache at once. It was his Uncle Otto and one of his cousins.

“What? How? Er?”

“What are you doing here? I thought you didn’t like to stray from home.”

“I travelled in time!” said Jutzi. “But I ended up in the future instead of the past. How did you get here?”

“We took the road, same as we always do when it’s time to come in for supplies.”

“You mean... this isn’t the future? My time machine didn’t work?”

“It’s still nineteen-fifty, you daft sod, and if by `time machine’ you mean `bucket of cheese with a pitchfork sticking out of it,’ then no, I don’t suppose it did.”

Jutzi was slightly crestfallen, but he’d learned so much as a result of his experiment that the particulars scarcely mattered.

“I guess a ‘town machine’ isn’t a bad second...”

“How did you get here, anyway?” said Otto.

“By, er, karz,” said Jutzi, referring to his notepad.

“Oh yes? You’re lucky you’re so dim-witted or I’d tell your father you were riding in one of those contraptions. Go on then, get on up and we’ll take you home.”

Jutzi climbed into the cart, already thinking of ways to make it go faster by the application of stripes. Yes, his Great Grandparents would be proud.

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