Culpepper's Cannon

by Gary Paulsen

  “Good.” The sailor waved toward the iron tent, and the boat started back out to the bay. The crowd cheered again, and the band started playing.

  Amos stood shivering and watched the Merrimack move away from the pier. He remembered the note and reached into his pocket. He felt a hand on his shoulder. When he turned around he saw Melissa.

  “Land sakes,” Melissa said, “are you all right?”

  “Fine. A little cold.” He stood there shivering and watched a puddle form around his feet. “Melissa, why did you follow me?”

  “Follow you?” She looked puzzled.

  “Do you know where the time hole is? I can’t remember. If you do, we’ve got to find Dunc and—”

  “You are a strange boy, aren’t you? I just don’t know what you are talking about.”

  “Melissa, we don’t have time for this. We—”

  “Melissa? Who is this Melissa?”

  “Aren’t you Melissa?”

  “I think that cold water has addled your brain. There’s no Melissa here. My name’s Maggie.”

  “Maggie? You’re not Melissa?”

  “My name is Maggie Hansen, and I’ve never heard of a Melissa. What’s your name?”

  “Amos. Amos Binder.”

  “Well, Amos Binder,” she said, “you are a very strange boy, and you’re going to be a very sick boy if we don’t get you home and out of these wet clothes.”

  “You can’t take me home.”

  “And why not?”

  “It’s a long story. I live a long way from here.”

  “Then we’ll take you to my house.” She held him by the arm and started leading him off the pier. “You can borrow some of my brother’s clothes until yours are dry.” Amos let her lead him. I’ve dreamt of this all my life, he thought. She loves me. She really loves me. Dunc will never believe this.…

  He took his hand out of his pocket but left the note inside.

  Maggie led him down the waterfront and up a street leading away from the bay toward a long row of large, stately mansions. The air was cold, and the water had soaked to his skin, and he was shivering violently.

  “Don’t worry,” she said, “it won’t be long.” She squeezed his arm tight and started to hug it to her side, but backed off a second later. “You’re so wet,” she said, “I can’t even hug you. And you’re such a cute boy.”

  Amos didn’t say anything. He was never very good at accepting compliments—probably because he didn’t get very many—and he’d never had any experience accepting them from Melissa Hansen, or even from girls who looked like Melissa Hansen, for that matter.

  “So,” she said, “you’re not from around here?”

  “No,” Amos said. He thought for a moment. “Yes.”

  “No or yes? Which is it?”

  “No and yes. I mean, I don’t live here, but I spend a lot of time here, I guess.”

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. With an uncle.”

  “Do I know him?”

  “Probably not.”

  “What’s his name?”

  Amos thought quickly. “Bremish. Sergeant Bremish. He’s in the Army.”

  “I don’t know him.”

  “That’s good.” He said it out loud, but his teeth-chattering distorted it too much for her to understand.

  “Well, here we are,” Maggie said. She swung him around and headed him up a walk to a large white house with green shutters. “Mummy will be so glad to see you. Mummy simply loves helping people. And she loves funny stories. She’ll love to hear about the cute boy in the funny clothes who fell off the pier. And she’ll tell everyone in town. The whole town will be talking about you.”

  “Great, that’s just great,” he said, not too enthusiastically. I am the dork, he thought, and everybody will talk about me. Super dork. She opened the door and led him inside.

  Amos found himself standing in an elegant foyer with a brass chandelier overhead and an ornate mirror on the wall. He looked in the mirror and saw how shabby he looked. He felt like a half-drowned rat waiting at the entrance to Buckingham Palace to see the queen.

  “Now you wait here,” Maggie said, “and I’ll go fetch you some dry clothes, then we’ll sit down and have lunch and make a party of it. It will be such fun! Mummy!” She left the foyer and disappeared around a corner.

  As soon as he was alone, Amos reached into his pocket and took out the note. It was soaking wet and began to tear as he tried to unfold it. When he finally did get it unfolded, it was in three pieces, and most of the ink had run so badly, he couldn’t read it. “… quickly … time … trapped here … going through … directions for portal … next note at plaza … Bremish watching …” was all he could make out. He put the note back in his pocket and debated if having lunch with a girl who looked just like Melissa was worth the risk of missing the hole.

  The decision wasn’t easy—Maggie was such a perfect copy of Melissa, and he had waited so long—but before Maggie came back with the clothes, he had left the house and was running, his shoes squelching with every step, back toward the plaza.

  Love was great, but being a hundred and thirty years in the past wouldn’t work. They didn’t have anything he liked—except Maggie. No hamburgers, no video games, no tennis shoes, no skateboards, no sidewalks, no television. Well, that wasn’t so bad. But no anything else. And of course, no Dunc.

  •9

  He was so cold when he reached the plaza, his knees would hardly bend. He lurched forward like Frankenstein in an old horror movie. The plaza was alive with people, people everywhere, running about as if there were a war going on, and it took him a moment to remember that there was.

  “The note,” he said to himself, “I’ve got to find the note.” He began to look around. There were so many people there, he couldn’t see anything but legs and bodies and faces. And cannons. There were three long lines of cannons, more than fifty of them.

  Amos worked his way through the people over to the south side of the plaza and collapsed against a wall in the southwest corner. It was impossible. He was going to have to stay, locked in the past, if he didn’t find the note, and he couldn’t think, couldn’t think.…

  He looked at all the people and all the cannons and buried his head in his hands in frustration. It was hopeless. There was no possible way to find a single sheet of notebook paper in all this chaos.

  He was stuck in the Civil War until the day he died—which, if Sergeant Bremish had his way, would not be very far away and would not be very pleasant. He heard swearing and looked up to see Sergeant Bremish nearby. I should surrender, he thought—it would be better to die right away than prolong the suffering. He was so cold, his teeth felt brittle. What was the difference—a world without video games and hamburgers was not a world worth living in.

  The people began to move out of the way as team after team of horses were brought in to haul away the cannons. Amos watched the men hook up the horses’ harnesses to the cannon frames and drive them away, bumping and clattering and clanking. Cannon after cannon left the plaza, and soon the large yard began to look empty.

  Two men were hooking up a cannon right in front of him. He listened as they spoke.

  “Why are we moving everything out?” one of them asked. He was only a boy, just a few years older than Amos.

  “We have to get them out of here,” an older man said. “The Yankees have their own armored ship. The Virginia can’t get past it.”

  “So?”

  “So it looks like the blockade is going to hold. We have to get these cannons to General Lee before everything collapses and the Yankees get hold of them.”

  One of the horses in the team, a big mottled gray, whinnied loudly and tried to jump out of its harness. “Whoa, girl,” the man said.

  “What’s spooking her?” the boy asked.

  “I don’t know. Must be the excitement of it all. Let’s get this cannon out of here.” They finished hooking up the harness and motioned to the driver to leave. Amos watched the team a
s it left. The driver was going through the plaza fast—too fast—and as he rounded a pile of crates, the gray mare almost stepped on the brown spotted dog that was rummaging in the boxes. She spooked and jumped into the air. The cannon careened to the side, and the right wheel bounced up into the crates. There was a sharp crack like thunder as the wooden spokes broke and the wheel snapped in half. The cannon skidded to a halt.

  The man and the boy ran across the plaza toward the broken cannon. “We’ll just pull it over to the side,” the man shouted. “I’ll find a wheelwright to fix it later. Let’s get the rest of them out of here.”

  Amos sat where he was and watched them working. There was something about the cannon—something about it, like the parrot, that was very familiar.…

  He could swear he had seen that cannon before, somewhere in the past …

  Or somewhere in the future.

  •10

  Amos was on his feet and running toward the broken cannon before he knew what he was doing. It was the cannon, the courthouse cannon, and the mystery of the note he and Dunc had found in its barrel suddenly made sense to him.

  The D on the note was short for Dunc, and Bremish wasn’t after them because they stole something from him—he was after them because he thought they were spies.

  And Amos had only one chance. Just one chance to go back through and get home. He ran toward the cannon, and the men that were working on it, as fast as he could. He had to see the note. He couldn’t remember which corner of the plaza the time hole was in, and he couldn’t remember the code word. He knew it was g-something. He knew it was g-a-z-something.

  The man and the boy were frantically trying to move the cannon to the north side of the plaza, out of the way. They weren’t having much luck. The gray mare was still frightened and was pulling in the direction opposite from the way the other horse was trying to go. The boy was trying to calm the mare while the man was pushing against the broken wheel.

  “What’s going on here?”

  Amos froze where he stood. It was Bremish’s voice.

  “What’s going on here?” the voice repeated. Amos saw the sergeant striding across the plaza toward the broken cannon. Bremish hadn’t seen him yet.

  “The wheel broke,” the boy said. “We’re just trying to get the cannon out of the way.”

  “Well, put some muscle into it,” Bremish said. He had reached the cannon now, and he motioned the man pushing on the wheel out of the way. With a mighty heave he pushed the cannon against the wall.

  “There now,” Bremish said, brushing the dirt off of his hands, “all it takes is a little grit, and you can do wonders. Now get this team unhooked, and get back to the other cannons. I—” He stopped in midsentence. He had turned around and seen Amos standing in the middle of the courtyard.

  “You!” Bremish shouted. “Come here!” He started moving toward Amos.

  “Come here!” Bremish shouted again. He was getting closer now. Amos tried to calculate if he could work his way around Bremish and reach the cannon. He thought he could until the sergeant pulled a revolver out of his side holster and pointed it at him. It’s time, Amos thought—time to run.

  “Stop!” Bremish yelled. “Stop or I’ll shoot!”

  That’s where that line comes from, Amos thought, his legs pounding. He’d heard that line in every cop show on television: Stop or I’ll shoot. Bremish had started it.

  Amos didn’t listen to him. He barreled toward the northwest corner of the plaza.

  There were still enough horses and people milling about that Amos had to do some fancy dodging to reach the corner. When he got there, he stood still for a moment. He couldn’t remember the code word. He knew it was g-a-z-something.

  “Gazelle!” he shouted. Nothing happened. He looked over his shoulder. Sergeant Bremish was getting closer.

  “Gazette!” Nothing happened again.

  “Don’t move, spy! If you move, I’ll shoot!”

  “Gaz—gaz …” Amos threw up his hands. Work, brain, before he shoots us. Come on! Bremish was almost on him, and he couldn’t wait any longer. He started running toward the northeast corner.

  Amos heard a shot, and a bullet spanged off the wall beside him. He didn’t stop. He ran faster.

  “Stop!” Bremish bellowed.

  When he reached the northeast corner, he was so out of breath, he almost couldn’t say what he thought might be the code word. “Gazelle!” he whispered breathlessly.

  Nothing happened.

  “Gazette?”

  Nothing happened again. Bremish was almost on him, and he took off for the southeast corner.

  “Stop him!” Bremish yelled. “Somebody grab him!”

  Amos was dodging around traffic so fast, he lost his sense of direction. When he got to the south side, he realized he was closer to the southwest corner than he was to the southeast, so he took off in that direction, shouting as he went.

  “Gazelle!”

  Again nothing happened. Amos looked at the corner ahead of him. The brown spotted dog was hiding there, watching him.

  “Gazette!”

  Nothing happened again. Amos was getting tired now, and his wet clothes were slowing him down. Bremish was so close, Amos could almost feel his breath.

  “Gaz … gaz …” He just couldn’t think of the word—try as he might, he just couldn’t think of it. He felt Bremish’s fingertips brush the back of his neck.

  “Gazebo!” he shouted. “The word’s gazebo!”

  An outline of a door appeared on the wall directly in front of him. It glowed brightly with yellow light. The dog sniffed and took a step toward it.

  “No!” Amos shouted. The dog looked over its shoulder at him for a second, then took another step. The door was still there, so close, and the dog stuck his nose into it.

  “Got you!” Amos felt his collar pull tight across the front of his neck as Bremish grabbed his sweatshirt. The dog will go through, he thought—a dog will come walking out of the dressing room, and I’ll be stuck here with Bremish.

  He was almost to the door now. A strangled cry escaped his throat, and as he tried to wriggle loose, he stepped on his shoelaces again. His collar tore free of Bremish’s grasp, and he fell forward in a perfect swan dive. The dog saw him flying through the air overhead, and it leaped out of the way.

  Amos was engulfed in a world of searing yellow light. He felt dizzy.

  When his head cleared, he found himself in a little room. There were mirrors on the walls and sweaters on the floor, and he found himself looking at his own reflection —a dripping wet, soggy Amos with mud in his hair.

  He was back.

  •11

  He was dizzy for a moment and had to sit down on the floor to keep from falling. As he rested, someone tossed a sweater over the door, and it landed on his head.

  “Hey!”

  “Amos, is that you?” It was Dunc.

  “Yeah, it’s me.”

  “You made it! What took you so long?”

  “What took me so long?”

  “Yeah.”

  “I’m chased around by a man the size of a small mountain range and almost get trapped in time, and the first question out of your mouth is what took me so long?”

  “Well, yeah. I’ve been waiting for you.” Another sweater came over the top of the door.

  “Hey!”

  “What?”

  “Will you quit throwing sweaters on me?”

  “I have to. Ramone is getting suspicious. He keeps asking what’s taking you so long.”

  “And what are you telling him?”

  “That you haven’t found the color you want.”

  Amos stood up and shook his head. The dizziness was gone. “Well, I’m done trying on sweaters.” He opened the door, and Dunc came in and shut the door behind him.

  “You look terrible,” Dunc said. “How’d you get so wet?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “It turned out kind of funny, didn’t it? I ended up writing the note t
hat sent us back there in the first place.”

  “Yeah, hilarious.” He bent over and put his hands on his knees. His back ached. How did that happen? So did his shoulders. It must have been from falling in the water. And he was still soaked.

  “Let’s try it again.” Dunc said. “I figured it out. We could never have met. I was a few minutes ahead of you in time, so we could never be in the same place. But if we try it again and go through holding hands, we’ll come out in the same time—”

  “Are you completely crazy?”

  “Just to see if it still works. It only pulsed once when I came back through. How many times did it pulse when you came back?”

  “It didn’t pulse at all.”

  “That’s what I thought. It pulses one time less every time someone uses it. It should be all used up now.”

  “Well, I don’t want to find out.”

  “We have to. We have to know if anyone else can go through.”

  “Why?”

  “What if Bremish heard the code word?”

  “You’ve got a point.” Amos tried to imagine Bremish in the dressing room. With a gun. He took Dunc’s hand.

  “Give it a try.”

  Amos took a deep breath. “Gazelle,” he said.

  “Wrong word.”

  “Oh, yeah. I found that out with Bremish breathing down my neck. Gazebo.”

  Nothing happened.

  “Let me try,” Dunc said. “Gazebo.”

  Nothing happened again.

  Dunc scratched his head. “Well, it looks like it’s all used up. The end of an adventure. Kind of sad, isn’t it?”

  “Oh, yeah. I’ll be crying all night on this one.” Amos looked down at the sweaters lying on the floor. “What do we do with all of these?”

  “Pick one out. Buy it for your mom or something.”

  “Why for my mom? What about Melissa?”

  “She was just here. When she asked why I was in a women’s clothing store, I said I was waiting for you.”

  “What else did you say?”

  “I told her you were trying on some women’s sweaters.”

  “And?”

  “And what?”

  “You must have told her more than that! You’d better have told her more than that!”