Clockwiser (17 page)

Nate clicked on the Thirteenth Massachusetts. Then he typed in Watson. “There you are.” Nate pointed to the screen. “William D. Watson.”

We all stared at the screen, and my blood grew cold right down to my toes. Everyone stiffened as they read the text in front of us.

It mentioned the battle of Chancellorsville, May 4, 1863.

“I die? Willie whispered.

Chapter Twenty-One

TIM

Hurry up and wait.

Too many bugs, too much heat and hunger. Way too much time. I wished now I’d paid attention to the Civil War unit in my history class. I was as clueless as the rest of the guys here as to when the next fight for this regiment would happen.

I moved into the tent to escape the heat and moments later I’d inch back outside for a breath of fresh air. A vicious mind-sucking cycle. When my stomach growled, I dug through my rations. I pulled out the dried,
desiccated
veggie thing. It looked like a piece of cow dung.

I waved it around like a prize. “How d’ya eat this?”

Henry presented his tin dipper. “I made a soup.”

Okay. I put the mini cow pie in my tin dipper and added water. I held it over the fire in the same manner as Henry.

“Heard from Sara?” I asked.

Letter writing and receiving was a big event. On slow days like this, the scratching of pencils was almost louder than the birds. Of course, I never wrote anyone or got any letters. When the guys asked me about it, I just shrugged and said most of my family didn’t know how to write.

“Yes, she fine, though terribly worried about her brother, as we all are.”

I studied this stocky, quiet, serious guy.

“You plan on marrying her?”

Henry seemed startled by my direct question, but he answered it anyway.

“Yes.” He got all dreamy-eyed. “Sara is an amazing woman. Strong, intelligent, beautiful.”

Wow. He was smitten.

He looked up from the fire and asked, “Is there a special girl at home for you?”

“Nah.” I said and stirred my vegetable/cow dung soup.

I prided myself for not getting serious like some of my friends had. They just got burned in the end. I liked my “relationships” short and sweet.

“What’d you do, you know, before the war?” I asked him.

“My father is in banking. I’m following his footsteps.” Henry turned the question back. “How about you?”

“Oh, just school,” I said.

I couldn’t exactly tell him I delivered pizza, not that he would even know what that meant. Although now he probably wondered why no one could write if we went to school, but before he could ask more probing questions, I turned the topic back to my so-called soup.

“Is that chunk cabbage or cauliflower?” I asked.

James and Joseph joined us then. “They’re handing out coffee and sugar.”

Henry jumped up along with half the regiment, but I stayed put. I was a coffee snob, Americano with cream. I couldn’t stomach what they passed off for coffee here.

I sipped my soup while James and Joseph cooked their coffee. Joseph didn’t look old enough to drink it, but he didn’t look old enough to be a soldier in the army, either. Not even as just a bugle player. He looked equally out of place in the evenings when the guys puffed on their pipes.

I was curious about James and his friendship with Willie. Willie was going to need someone solid when he got back, and I wondered how he was coping with being in the future.

“So, James, what’s up with Willie, do you think?” I said.

He cast me a dark look, the kind that made me glad I was on his side in this war.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, you’re friends, right?”

“We are. Have been since we were youngsters. We attend the same church. We attended the same school house.” His lips pulled up into a slight smile. “We liked to cause a little trouble for Mrs. Wyatt, our teacher. Willie and I would sit on opposite sides of the room and make cricket noises. Mrs. Wyatt would scour the room looking for the insect. When she figured out it was a couple of us kids, she tried to catch who was doing it, but she never did.”

He sipped his coffee and gazed out at the meadow. “I don’t understand what happened to him. He wouldn’t just leave without telling me about it.”

“I think he’ll show up again with a good explanation,” I said.

James settled his blue eyes on my face. “I hope you’re right.”

Henry came back with his coffee ration. “Prepare to pack up,” he said. “I overheard some talk. The General is about to call us back to marching. Seems a battle is awaiting.”

Yes
. I jumped to my feet to start packing.
It was about time.

Chapter Twenty-Two

CASEY

Lucinda grabbed Willie’s arm. “You don’t have to go back.” Then she pierced me with her deep brown eyes. “He doesn’t have to go back, right?”

Truth was, I didn’t know. How was I to know if Willie’s sudden disappearance from his natural time line didn’t upset the universe in some way, like that whole Butterfly Effect thing? This was one huge butterfly.

On the other hand, making Willie go back now felt like a death sentence.

“If you don’t go back,” I said quietly, as the librarian was starting to give us the evil eye, “you’ll never see your family again.”

“But if he dies, they wouldn’t see him again anyway,” Lucinda persisted. She obviously had stronger feelings for Willie than she’d admitted to. The girl definitely had a thing for redheads.

“She has a point there,” Nate added. Now I felt like the bad guy. It wasn’t like I wanted to see Willie dead.

Willie lowered his head. “This might sound really selfish, but I don’t want to die.”

I reached for his hand. “That’s not selfish, it’s normal. You don’t have to make your mind up right now.”

“Casey,” Lucinda said sharply. “Don’t touch him.”

I scowled at her. Was she making the decision for him?

“I wish there was someone we could talk to about this,” Nate said. “We have to be sure that whatever we decide doesn’t have repercussions.”

“Like Willie staying is going to start the third world war?” Lucinda snapped, clearly annoyed. “It would be wrong for us to insist he go back.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, an idea forming. “I know who we could talk to.”

“Who?” They said this practically in unison. Now we did get the librarian’s evil eye.

I lowered my voice and leaned in. “Samuel.”

“Our Samuel?” Willie said. “He’s still alive?”

“Yes, but he’s changed a lot since you’ve seen him last.”

Nate and I started visiting Samuel regularly after his sister Rosa died. By a strange twist of fate, we’d discovered Rosa was my dad’s biological mother, which made her my grandmother and Samuel my uncle.

“Samuel was born in 1944, which makes him sixty-eight today,” I said.

Willie shook his head. “I just saw him a few months ago. He was a teenager.”

“He was looping from the sixties when I accidentally accompanied him on his loop.” I explained how I ended up going to 1961 with Samuel when I was on my own loop to Willie’s time.

“It’s so confusing,” he said. “But, if there are two time-travelers, could there be more?”

“I only know of one more, a girl I met last year in a convenience store. I saw the racoon eyes form on her face and her demeanor change from cheerful to confused in a second. Her name was Adeline.”

“Did she share your loop?” Willie asked. Nate and Lucinda had already heard this story, but Willie was all ears.

“No, she said she looped to the fifties. I haven’t been able to track her down since. I wish I would’ve gotten her number. She mentioned something about moving west with her dad.”

“Maybe you could put an ad out,” Lucinda said. “Looking for blond teen time-traveler who recently moved from Cambridge to Hollywood.”

I grunted. “Like that wouldn’t attract the wackos.”

Nate pulled into a row of single story, fifty-five plus, brick townhouses, stopping in front of number twenty-four.

“Maybe we should’ve called first,” I said.

“Nah, he’ll be thrilled to see us,” said Nate. “Especially Willie.”

I actually wasn’t so sure about that. And he might not be too impressed with my carelessness in bringing someone from the past to the future. We
had
warning coming back, and he knew that.

I knocked tentatively on the door. “Maybe he’s napping,” I said, but then the door cracked open.

“Hi, Samuel!” My voice sounded un-naturally cheerful. “We have a surprise.”

As I suspected, his bright toothy grin disappeared when his eyes settled on Willie. “Oh, my. You best come in,” he said.

He turned and shuffled to the sitting room. We scuttled in behind him, and stood awkwardly.

Lucinda spoke first. “Hi, Mr. Jones.”

Then Nate added, “It’s nice to see you again.”

Willie offered a timid, “Hello.”

“Hello to you, Master Willie,” Samuel replied.

I jumped in. “You don’t have to call him master, Uncle Sam.”

“And you don’t have to call me uncle.”

It was a slip. My dad insisted I call him that, so I had to when Dad was around.

Samuel ran a hand through his grey curls. “I feel like such an old man.” He pushed his glasses up on his nose. Though his skin creased around his eyes, this cheeks remained full and soft like dark, tanned leather.

“Take a seat,” he said, with a voice that had aged like old tree bark. “I’ll get tea.”

I offered to help. Samuel’s kitchen was small with a U shaped counter top. The walls were off-white with a window above the sink. The fridge was apartment-sized but large enough for the minimal grocery items Samuel kept in there. I opened it to get the milk.

“It was an accident,” I whispered as I took five teacups and saucers out of the cupboards. “It’s no big deal, right?”

“That depends.” The whistle blew and Samuel filled the tea pot. “What’s he missing by not being there?”

“Death?”

Samuel raised a bushy grey eyebrow.

“And what else?”

“I don’t know. Is there anything else?”

I carried the tray into the sitting room, placing it on the coffee table in front of the others who had crammed onto the room’s only sofa.

“Sugar?” I asked.

I pointed to the box of sugar but left everyone to make up their own drink.

Willie took a moment to examine his portion of sugar, neatly hardened and packed into a cube, before dropping it into his tea. “We think of everything in the future, don’t we?” he said.

Samuel sat in the lone recliner and a grey tabby cat jumped onto his lap. “Hey, Watson,” he said, petting it.

“You named your cat, Watson?” Willie asked.

Samuel grinned. “The name brings back memories. Mostly good.”

We all took long quiet sips of our tea.

Samuel placed his cup in its saucer with a shaky hand. “Casey filled me in a little in the kitchen.”

Lucinda cleared her throat. “Did she tell you that Willie will die in the Civil War if he goes back? He doesn’t have to go back, does he?”

“I certainly wouldn’t want to put Willie in harm’s way intentionally.”

“Good,” Lucinda said grabbing Willie’s arm. “That settles it, Willie stays.”

When did she become the boss of us?

“Samuel?” I said.

Samuel pushed the cat off his lap, and pulled a piece of string out of the side pocket of his recliner.

“Watson loves to play with it,” he said in way of explanation. He laid it out in a flat line on the coffee table.

“Imagine this string goes in either direction for infinity. This is time.”

Then he took his finger and made loops with the tops touching each other. “This is still infinite time. But every once in a while, in ways I don’t understand, time folds for a specific individual, and two time zones, if you will, touch each other.”

I hadn’t thought of it like that before, but it made sense. Sort of.

“Say this is you, Casey,” Samuel took a pen and made a mark at the top of one loop, “and this is Willie.” He made another dot on the top of the neighboring loop. The dots were close enough to each other that they touched.

He pulled the string flat. “It’s still you, in the same place, but in your own time.” He looped the string again, until the two dots touched. “It’s you, Casey, in folded time. It feels like you’ve gone to the past, but you’ve actually only been folded up next to it. Make sense?”

I looked at the others and we all had a blank look. “I guess.”

“Even though your time is folding, your life
unfolds
as it should. But,” he looked up to make sure we got the next thing he had to say. “Willie here has jumped loops.”