Free On Etruscan Time by Tracy Barrett

hesitated. What could he say? That a boy had taken him back in time to an Etruscan village? Ettore would tell the others, and then they would laugh and say he’d been dreaming. So he just shook his head.
    â€œYou look sad,” Ettore noted, his head on one side, considering Hector’s face. Hector shrugged. “Are you missing your father and your sister?”
    â€œNo,” Hector said. “I don’t see much of them even when we’re home.”
    â€œYour friends?”
    To his surprise and embarrassment, Hector felt his face turn hot and his eyes sting with tears. He looked away so Ettore wouldn’t see, but the man didn’t appear to mind.
    â€œIt’s too bad there are no other kids here,” he said. “Shall I ask in the village and find out if there is someone who wants to play with you?”
    â€œNo,” Hector said, so loudly that he startled himself. “I mean, no, thank you.” Did Ettore think he was five years old and needed someone to play with?
    â€œOkay,” Ettore said. “Why not be an archaeologist for the summer, then? You are good at it, and you could be a help. Really,” he added, as Hector hesitated. “I’m not saying that the way you say to a little boy, ‘Oh, what a helper you are.’ I mean it. You found the most important sherd of this summer, and I myself walked past that same piece a dozen of times without noticing it. What was it that made you want to dig it out, anyway?”
    Hector said, “I don’t know. It just looked different, somehow. Like it didn’t belong.”
    â€œGood eye,” Ettore said approvingly. “So, you want to be an apprentice archaeologist?”
    Hector nodded. It was either that or watch the same music videos over and over again until they went home.
    â€œBravo,” Ettore said. He took Hector to the shed and showed him the different implements the archaeologists used and his own most useful tool, a small notebook in which he carefully wrote down where each piece of pot, scrap of metal, and broken brick was found. This was the whole point of the dig, he explained. Sure, it would be great to find a beautiful statue or a pot of gold, but the things that excited archaeologists were usually small, and uninteresting to other people. A coin with the picture of a ruler whose dates historians knew, a vase shaped in a way that no one made until a certain time, a written text mentioning a historical event—these were the real treasures for archaeologists. Hector concentrated. What Ettore was saying helped keep him from thinking about what he’d seen that afternoon.
    â€œWhen we study these things we learn about the people who made them,” Ettore explained. “It’s like going back in time. These were our ancestors—not just mine, but yours too, since the Etruscans helped the culture of Rome take form, and the Romans went all over Europe, and the Europeans went all over America. If we know where we have come from, we understand us a little better. For example, if that building over there is a temple—” He stopped talking and shook his head ruefully.
    Hector glanced up to see if a cloud had covered the sun, but no, the sky was still an unbroken, piercing blue. Then why had he felt a chill, deep enough to cause a shudder?
    â€œIt is a temple,” he said without thinking, and then flushed.
    â€œHow do you know?” Ettore asked.
    Hector shrugged. He couldn’t say, “Because I saw it when it was whole.” He wouldn’t know how to explain it. And Ettore would tell him he’d been dreaming or think Hector was a baby playing make-believe.
    â€œI just bet it is,” he said lamely.
    â€œI bet it is too,” Ettore agreed. “But I won’t be sure until I find more things.”
    â€œWhat kind of things?”
    â€œI won’t know until I find them. But temples usually had an altar. There might also be some holy