Chapter 12
I slept for probably an hour, maybe two. It was the first time I slept in four days, so I was still tired when I woke up. But where was I when I woke up? I woke up not to the blue sky, but to a ceiling fan blustering a cool breeze on my face and in a comfortable bed with cotton pillows. Maybe someone found us out there and thought we were lost, so they put us under their wing for the night. But how did they move us and pull those blankets without awaking us. John was lying in the bed next to me and I heard Zeke at the foot of my bed, curled up in a ball and still snoring away with his muzzle buried under his two front paws.
I turned to John and whispered, “John… You awake?” He didn’t move. So I tried again. “John… You awake?”
He turned towards me, sleepy-eyed and muttered, “What is it Daniel?”
“Look around you. Where are we?”
He took a look around the room at all the pictures on the wall and all the fancy furniture that covered the floor like trees cover the forest and muttered, “We’re in the middle of the woods in our shelter.”
“No, John! Look again!”
He rubbed the sleep out of his eyes and blinked a couple of times. He took another look around and when he finally came out of his deep sleep, he leaped out of bed, landing on the ground with a big thump that woke up Zeke; and he leaped, too, with a big thump that made me leap out of bed, too. I stood there and stared at John and he stared at me. He was wearing different clothes—like the kind they used to wear back in the colonial days. We both wore the clothes; I looked in a mirror hanging from the wall and I could see myself in a frilly, white shirt and black trousers. My hair was curled, too, just like they used to wear their hair back then.
At a snail’s pace, I made my way closer to the mirror with my whole body shaking like I was about to have a seizure and not believing a thing I saw. It had to have been a dream, a nightmare! But it wasn’t. John thought it was a dream, though. He sat on the edge of the bed for a little while, and then said calmly, “Well, I guess it’s all a dream. Better go back to bed,” while he said this, he crawled back into bed and hid himself under the covers of the blanket to go back to sleep.
“No!” I hollered, “No! It’s not a dream! Get out of bed, you idiot! We have to figure out where we are, and what’s going on!” He got back out of bed as I told him to and regained his senses, thoroughly looked at his new clothes, and fainted. His body, which was as limp as a wilting flower, fell to the ground with a thump twice as big as the one he made before. Zeke walked with his head down and his nose bobbing up and down toward John’s body, which looked almost dead against the wood flooring that I didn’t notice before, and licked his face. He was desperately trying to wake him up, since every friend of his master’s is a friend of his.
I picked up John off the floor to set him on the bed; and his floppy arms and legs dangled down—he was so lifeless that it was unreal to me—his head wilted, too. Right after I set him down, someone knocked on the door. I answered and there in the doorway, stood a young woman in a decorative, white dress who probably heard all the thumps that went on in the room. “Good morning to you, sir.” She said, bowing her head in respect and then carried on, “I heard a great deal of pounding up here in your room, and I decided to check and see if everything was alright this morning.” She was a smooth-tongue (that’s what I called a person from the North who speaks proper)
I replied, annoyed, “Alright? Do you play me for a fool, woman! I’m wise to your little trick—I’m no fool! It was you who took us from the forest! It was you who changed us into these weird clothes! It was all you!”
“Frankly, sir, I don’t know what you speak of. No one took you out of the forest and those clothes—you wore them when you checked into this inn at a quarter after four yesterday.”
“Give it up!” I retorted.
“What do you speak of, sir? I would like to know why you accuse me of kidnapping you and your friend.”
She wasn’t lying. But if she wasn’t, where was I? I said back to her, “Well, if I’m not somewhere in Virginia, where am I.”
She answered, looking like she had no clue what was gong on, just like I did, “You are on the third floor of the Firebrick Inn of Boston, Massachusetts.”
I dropped my mouth down to the floor in awe. I think I scared the woman ‘cause she flinched back a little when I did this. She asked, concerned, “Are you alright, sir? Perhaps you need a cup of coffee.” She handed me a silver platter with a few coffee mugs on it. I was so confused that it hurt my head to even think about being confused, so I just stood there, like a tree.
I closed my mouth and stuttered, “Wh-wh-what… What y-year is it?”
“Why, sir, the year is 1775, in the middle of a rebel against the intolerable forces of the British tyrant, King George, and the Parliament. Why are you inquiring such peculiar things such as the place and the date? Why are you oblivious to these things, sir? I am but a simple innkeeper who simply walked up two flights of stairs to treat you, my guest, with hospitality. Now, I believe you owe me an apology. ” She was really frustrated; and she was right. I was a bit rude. But I thought she kidnapped us, so I didn’t know any better. Still, I apologized, like she told me to. I took some coffee from her platter, which she was still carrying. I invited her into our new bedroom, and I told her all about how and why I left my hometown with John in year 1861, how a bunch of rebel soldiers stole all we had with us, how I had to hunt for food with what I could find in the woods, about fire-making and shelter-building, and how we woke up in this hotel. She listened very well—she seemed to be lost in my story, every word I had to tell her seemed to be swallowed by to her sky blue eyes.
“What’s your name?” I asked her.
“My name is Anne—Anne Knox.”
“I’m Daniel Smith. It’s nice to meet you, Anne.” Suddenly, after I finished saying, “Anne,” John woke up, rubbed his eyes, and stared at Anne.
“John, are you okay?” I said to him.
“Yeah,” He said, “My head hurts a little, though. But other than that, I’m fine.”
“Well, have some coffee.” I picked up a mug and handed it to him. He took a huge gulp as if it weren’t hot. I continued, “You probably need it. This is Anne Watson—the innkeeper of the Firebrick inn. We’ve traveled back to the eighteenth century, John.” He dropped his mouth open like I did, letting hot coffee dribble down his chin and all over that impressive shirt he was wearing.
“E-e-eighteenth century!” he said, tripping over his tongue.
“Yes! Isn’t that just crazy?” I said. I tried to make him feel better, but I probably did more than that—I probably saved him from fainting again. It really was a crazy thing that we were time traveling. I was still completely baffled; but, at the same time, I was happier than ever to be so far (and I mean far) from Rosewood. Rosewood was now a hundred years away and so, I was living a hundred years before all that death, fire, and hatred came and ruined my life forever. It also gave me an adventurous feeling—I was on an adventure that no one in the world had ever been on—no one! How amazing! How fantastic! How adventurous!
John thought so, too, but he wasn’t as happy as I was. He was very happy, but not on the top of the world. Unlike me, he had something to live for—a mama who loves him with all her heart and who would walk a thousand miles for him in a heartbeat. All those things were long gone for me—I had nothing—except for him and Zeke, of course.
Well, what’s going on in year 1775, Anne?” I said with a cheery voice that John no one in the room understood, “You say we’re in the middle of the Revolutionary War. Tell me, what’s happening outside the Firebrick Inn of Boston?”
“The Revolutionary War?” she asked, tilting her head in confusion.
“Oh, oh,” John said, “You see, that’s what us from the nineteenth century call this war you’re in.”
“Really? Huh, that is interesting. Well, we have sailed to the New World in search for freedom from British rule, but King George still wants us to suffer. Still, from all the way across the Atlantic, that tyrant controls us like puppets on strings.
“Those horrid lobster back minions of his are the most intolerable beings ever created. They roam the streets like they are the supreme rulers of all the colonies that man created with his two hands. They come in to my inn, uninvited—they don’t even have the decency to simply check in like any noble man would; they just walk the halls and take a room. I would force them to leave, but if I utter a single word against them, I am dead.’
“So, what does America do now?” I asked.
“We rebel! We fight back!” She said, getting excited and carried away, “They have chastised us for long enough, and I have grown tired of it! If we don’t rebel, we are doomed—we will be under British rule forever!” She got a little riled-up, but not crazy. Those lobster backs sounded like tough men to fight, the way she described it, the way American history says it, we had brains and they had brawn. This was the one war that I liked ‘cause if we hadn’t won, we’d be speaking with a British tongue still and following all the orders they barked at us. America would be miserable if we hadn’t won.
We sat there in silence for a second, and then Anne said, “What is it like in the nineteenth century?”
I told her all about the war between North and South and why they were fighting. She thought it was a stupid thing to fight over something so simple, which it was. She believed in all the things that me and my maw and paw believed in when it came to warfare. I also told her that America beat the British and got the freedom they wanted, so she was jumping around and bouncing off the walls for a while like a wild monkey. I was happy for her, too, just like I was happy for America’s great victory.