Your experience as a standard reader:
Fig. A: Wetu.Toward the end of Pat's rendition of Weetamoo's diary, the sachem-to-be is finally called for her adulthood rite. The year is 1654. She's been anticipating it most of the book; she'll spend several days and nights in a sweatlodge, tending a fire and waiting for contact from the nonmaterial world. In her two visions, a deer she'd unceremoniously killed leads her through the winter night to an important fishing area to the Pocasset, downstream from a waterfall. The second night, the deer leads her to an important fishing area, downstream from a waterfall, where she encounters older versions of herself with Metacom, her sister, and child. Metacom is painting bloodroot on their faces. She wonders why Wamsutta is missing. When she emerges from her vision, the fire in her wetu is almost out. The elders tell her later that most of her responsibility in this initiation was "to keep the fire going."

Your experience as a reader with a dash of history:
Weetamoo is peering into a future. The year is probably early-mid 1675. She's married several men, most recently Wamsutta, who has been poisoned by foot-stomping Pilgrims. Metacom has been gathering indigenous forces against the English, and is now leaning on his sister-in-law to fold her Pocassets into his army, which she will. She will also drown, crossing the Taunton River, a year later.

Let's look at this structurally.

In standard-issue dramatic irony, the reader knows something the characters don't. It creates an inimitable tension, which keeps you turning those pages. It's such the standard of story-telling in Hollywood you might notice its absence more clearly: think of how behind the plot you feel watching The Big Lebowski or Burn After Reading. What an easier ride these stories are the second time around.

Fig. B: The multiverse giveth; the Multiverse taketh away.With historical stories, you get something else, which Pat's working subtly. Here, the reader, before the story, knows what's coming. Let's call this Reader-Supplied Dramatic Irony. The text refers to a point in history – which to the speaker, is unknowably in the future – which the reader is already familiar with. The reader becomes a time-traveler.

There's another model we can tease from this: the text can present events out of sequence, creating a pseudo- Reader-Supplied Dramatic Irony. You encounter effect before cause. (Think Memento.)

Deeper, there's reverse causality, in which the effect happens before the cause.

If we write the events in a modular way, with loose causality, and structure the text so that no one can't predict the order of events, this gets exciting. The reader has multiple, equally plausible narratives. And without an external grasp of the history, plausibility may as well be reality. Narrative becomes impossibly problematic, and the story untrustworthy. We need narrative structure in our history, to understand ourselves, and without it, we're hopeless.

This is the structure I'm pursuing for Saltwater Dredge.

Of course, none of this makes it easier to visit the past, body and all.

None of it brings Pat back.