Fallen in Fredericksburg

by Steve Watkins

  Boy, the things you learned on the way to learning about other things!

  Anyway, roads were terrible so it was impossible to transport the pontoons that way. They tried floating some down the Potomac River, but it wasn’t enough. They needed hundreds of pontoons, and they weighed, like, a ton each, just like Julie had said, and they got started late, and they didn’t have enough pontoons so had to order more built. And on and on went the problems.

  And meanwhile, just like the ghost said, the 130,000 Union soldiers just sat around and waited. And waited. And waited. They marched drills. Scrounged around for any local food to eat. Some of them were sent out on scouting parties, though they were never able to find anywhere else to cross the river except right there in Fredericksburg. Everywhere else was too difficult to get to, or too rocky to cross, or they thought it was already defended by the Confederates.

  Meanwhile, Confederate snipers hiding out on the Fredericksburg side of the river shot at the Union guards on the Stafford side of the river until one of the Union generals sent a message over to the mayor of Fredericksburg that if the citizens didn’t stop providing hiding places for the Rebels, then the Union cannons would bomb the city.

  The snipers quit sniping.

  I also found out something else during study hall. The Union army had lost one battle after another after another through much of the first two years of the Civil War, suffering a lot more casualties than the Confederates. People in the North were getting angry and frustrated, and a lot of them were calling for an end to the war. President Lincoln knew he couldn’t quit, though. The cause was too important. He had issued an Emancipation Proclamation declaring that on January 1, 1863, all the slaves in the Confederate states would be free, and he was convinced that for people to believe it would make any difference, the Union needed a victory — and a big one at that — just before he did it.

  I was the first one to band practice that afternoon — or at least I thought I was. Uncle Dex told me on my way in that Julie and Greg weren’t there yet. He had his new music system set up and was playing old rock albums. The one he had on when I walked through was a band called The Band, which was pretty weird. The song was weird, too. Uncle Dex said it was called “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down.” I stood and listened for a couple of minutes. I liked the song, but more than that I was knocked out that a seventies rock band would write about the Civil War.

  As I headed downstairs to our practice room, I heard voices. And not just any voices, either. I recognized them right away: Little Belman and our ghost. And they were arguing. They didn’t even notice me when I walked in, so I stood there just inside the door and listened.

  “I know you’re a girl,” Little Belman insisted.

  The ghost — on the other side of the room from Little Belman — snapped. “I already told you, ain’t none of your business who I am. I can out-shoot, out-march, and out-fight just about anybody in President Lincoln’s army. Out-ride, too, if I only had a horse, which I don’t. Not that that’s none of your business, neither. Now why don’t you run on along and go play with baby dolls or something. Your mama’s probably out looking for you to change your diaper.”

  “I don’t wear diapers,” Little Belman snapped right back. “I’m in fifth grade and I’m not leaving until you tell the truth. You’re a girl!”

  “And if I wasn’t all the way over here, I’d come over there and give you a good whooping,” the ghost said. At first I thought he meant if he wasn’t all the way across the room from Little Belman, but then I realized it was a different kind of distance he was talking about, the kind between the living and the dead, or the mostly dead, or whatever these ghosts were.

  “You don’t scare me,” Little Belman said.

  The ghost took what was probably meant to be a menacing step forward toward Little Belman, but I decided it was time for me to intervene.

  “How did you get in here?” I demanded.

  Little Belman whirled around. “Where did you come from?”

  I had to laugh. “You’re standing here talking to a ghost and you want to know where I came from? I came from upstairs.”

  Little Belman glared at me. “Well, I snuck in when that man up there had his back turned.”

  I put my hands on my hips and stood up as tall as I could and tried to sound like a grown-up. “Well, you better leave right now, because you don’t have permission to be here, and I’d hate to have to call your mom and tell her about you trespassing on private property.”

  Little Belman put her hands on her hips, too. “I’ll tell her about the ghost,” she said.

  “She won’t believe you,” I said back. “Nobody will.”

  “My brother will,” she said, though I could see the doubt in her eyes.

  “Anyway, what ghost are you talking about?” I asked, looking around, pretending there was nobody — or nothing — there, which was easy, because the ghost had disappeared shortly after I interrupted their argument.

  Little Belman looked around, too. She even raced around the room looking high and low, though there really wasn’t anywhere for the ghost or anybody else to hide, if that’s what they wanted to do. She stopped at the mysterious trunk. It was closed up tight, though, and she didn’t try to open it. I wondered what had drawn her there, though. And I wondered how it was that she could see, and talk to, the ghost. And why she was so convinced that the ghost was a girl — not that Julie didn’t have me and Greg wondering the same thing.

  “All right,” Little Belman announced. “I’m leaving. But don’t think for a minute that this is over.”

  “Whatever,” I said. “Just be careful on the stairs.”

  She stuck out her tongue at me and turned around to leave. I heard her stomping the whole way — just like a little kid.

  Once again, Julie and Greg came in right after Little Belman left.

  “Here again?” Julie asked. “Really?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “She said she snuck in and I believe her.”

  “She nearly stomped on my foot as she stomped out of the store,” Greg said. “Your uncle was singing along to a Led Zeppelin song — ‘When the Levee Breaks’ — and you know what she said to him, just before she stormed out?”

  I shrugged.

  “She said, ‘Your hippie music gives me a headache,’ ” Greg said.

  “Wow!” I said. “How rude.”

  “I know,” Greg said. “That’s just what I said to Julie.”

  Julie nodded. “It’s true. That’s exactly what he said. Although I have to say I kind of agree with the Little Belman.”

  I was still stuck on the fact that Greg knew what Led Zeppelin song was playing. And as if to emphasize the point, he picked up his guitar, plugged it in, turned on his amp, and started cranking through what appeared to be the chords for that levee song he mentioned. He sang some of it, too, his voice cracking, until Julie shushed him.

  “I think Anderson has heard enough,” she said, as if I was the one stopping him.

  The ghost — who had a really bad habit of just suddenly showing up and suddenly disappearing, with hardly ever any gentle fading in or out — just then popped into the room.

  “Hate the voice, but kind of like the song,” he said to Greg, as if he’d been in the conversation all along.

  “Thanks,” Greg said. “I guess.”

  I said welcome back to the ghost, and thought about filling Julie and Greg in on Little Belman interrogating the ghost and insisting he was a girl, but then it occurred to me that the whole girl business wasn’t something the ghost wanted me to talk about. So I switched directions and asked the ghost if he remembered anything else since the last time we saw him, which was two days before.

  “What day is it today,” he answered. “I mean the date and all.”

  “December 8,” Julie said.

  The ghost nodded. “Still cold,” he said. “Still snow on the ground. Couldn’t nobody hardly sleep at night. Kept big fires burning all the time. Had fellows up all
night on fire watch to make sure they kept blazing. We probably burned down a whole couple of forests those weeks we were in Virginia. I shared my blanket with Frankie. Nothing special about that. Anybody would do the same. I already told you how Mama and Papa made me swear I would always take care of Frankie, and I tried to never let them down or let Frankie down.”

  I wasn’t sure the ghost had actually ever told us that before, but I didn’t interrupt because I wanted him to keep going. He seemed to be on a roll.

  “Another day, another scout party down to the river,” he continued. “Same area as before, and some of those same Johnny Rebs as before on their side of the river. They hailed us and we hailed them right back, and we were negotiating another trade. But then right smack in the middle of it there was a rifle went off somewhere above us, and then another, and then a dozen more, and three of those Rebel boys fell into the river and the others took off running back into the trees. It was another one of our scout parties, with a lieutenant who hated Rebels and didn’t believe any of us should be friendly to any of them.”

  He went silent for a minute, then started up again. “That lieutenant, he came down with his men and hollered at us good and proper, said we could get a court-martial for what he called ‘fraternizing with the enemy,’ which is just a fancy way of saying we didn’t try to kill them the second we saw them. Now I’m not saying I was going soft, or that anybody on that scout party I was on was going soft. Maybe Frankie a little bit, but he always had a sensitive nature, and he played banjo at the campfires at nights and that kept everybody’s spirits up and that’s a mighty valuable service if I do say so myself.”

  “Music is important,” Greg said, which sounded kind of dumb, but seemed to cheer up the ghost.

  “Darn right it is,” he said. “So anyway, I was just about to feel sorry for those dead Rebs — there one minute talking to us about wishing they had boots like ours instead of rags tied on their feet, and then the next minute dead and done, and their bodies washing away downriver.”

  “What do you mean you were just about to feel sorry for them?” Greg asked. He seemed to be our spokesman for the day.

  “Just what I said,” the ghost said. “But then there was rustling in the woods across the river and we all dropped behind river rocks and aimed our muskets, but who came out of the woods wasn’t Johnny Rebs but Negroes, some men, some women, some children.”

  “Were they slaves?” I asked. “Escaping?”

  The ghost nodded. “That’s what we found out once we got them across. Some were carrying bundles on their heads half as big as themselves, and I was afraid they might fall in, so we dashed out on the rocks — which was foolish, as there could have been Rebel snipers in the woods opposite us — and helped them over. One of our big fellows picked up one little boy and one little girl and tucked one under each arm and carried them across, hopping rock to rock, that way.”

  “I read that a number of slaves escaped from Fredericksburg during the battle and even more when the Union army finally captured the city,” Julie said.

  “All I know is we passed them along to the other scout party and they escorted the slave families on up to Falmouth, and who knows where else from there.”

  “To freedom,” Greg said solemnly.

  “Sounds about right,” the ghost said. “Or maybe Washington, DC.”

  “I read that there were half a million slaves in Virginia at the start of the war,” Julie said. “And Virginia had the largest slave population of any of the southern states.”

  The ghost shrugged. “I don’t know nothing about that,” he said. “I know this one slave woman told us they sent a lot of the men slaves down to Richmond and made them work in the factories making cannons and such. And had them building up the defenses around their capital, too, doing most of the labor. Those Confederates were bound and determined to get every last ounce of work out of their slaves while they still had them, I guess. That woman also told us that at a lot of the farms and plantations around Fredericksburg, it was women and their children doing most of the farm work ’cause the Rebels took so many of the slave men and put them hard at work for the war.”

  “Boy,” I said. “How ironic is that? Making the slaves work to basically keep them as slaves.”

  The ghost scratched his head. “I think I follow you there. Well, anyway, we confiscated them like we were ordered to.”

  “Huh?” said Greg. “Confiscated?”

  “The slaves,” the ghost said. “That was the law. We were supposed to declare that they were contraband of war and confiscate them. On account of they were property of the Confederates, and any property aiding the Rebels’ war effort that we captured, we kept and passed on up the line. Then once we confiscated them I guess then they got to be free. I don’t exactly know about that. I just know seeing the faces of those folks crossing that river, it made me remember what the fight was all about, and it wasn’t just us killing Johnny Rebs, even though that’s what it felt like sometimes. That slave woman, you could just tell in her face how sad she was that they sent those men in her family, her husband, I guess, away so she might never see him again. Those children with her, you could see it in their faces, too. And they were scared to death. Somebody said they were scared we would send them back across the river and they’d get beat or worse for running away.”

  I thought about that old slave auction block that sat on a corner downtown, on William Street. It was where they used to do actual slave auctions, but even with a plaque there explaining all that, tourists would still have their kids stand on top of the auction block and pose for pictures. How awful it must have been for those slaves, and the families of those slaves, to have their parents or their children or their friends sold and sent away — forever. I got really sad thinking about it. And glad that our ghost had fought on the right side of the war.

  The ghost had been just standing there for a minute, stroking his chin, thinking hard. Then he picked back up where he’d left off. “I still felt bad about the ambush of those Rebels we’d been talking to before that at the river,” he said. “But after seeing those runaway slaves, I didn’t feel quite as bad, knowing what those boys were fighting for and remembering what we were fighting against.”

  The ghost left shortly after that. I never did bring up the conversation he’d been having with Little Belman, but I told Julie and Greg about it once the ghost was gone.

  “That Little Belman is so rude,” Greg said when I finished. “What a little meanie.”

  “She really is just like her brother,” Julie said.

  They spent the next few minutes discussing the Belmans while I thought back through the conversation I’d overheard. There was something there I had missed, I just felt it, but I couldn’t think what it could be. Maybe something the ghost said. Or maybe something the ghost didn’t say.

  And then it hit me. “You guys!” I said. “I just remembered. When Little Belman was asking the ghost about being a girl, the ghost kept saying how he could out-fight and out-march and out-shoot any soldier in the Union army, but he didn’t ever actually just come right out and deny that he was a girl.”

  Greg and Julie stared at me for a second, and then Greg asked, “And he never said anything like ‘I am a boy’?”

  “Or ‘I am a man’?” Julie added.

  “Right,” I said. “I mean, neither one. He didn’t say he wasn’t a girl, and he didn’t say he was a boy. Just all that other stuff. And Little Belman kept saying over and over that she knew the ghost was a girl. You’d think the ghost would get mad about it. Well, I guess he did get mad about it, but not scary-ghost mad. More like defensive-ghost mad, now that I think about it.”

  “Curiouser and curiouser,” Julie said.

  Greg gave her a quizzical look.

  “It’s from Alice in Wonderland,” Julie said. “Alice says it when she turns into a giant.”

  “Oh,” said Greg. “I never read that.”

  “You really should sometime,” Julie said.<
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  “Guys!” I snapped. “Can we focus here? I’m just about convinced that our ghost soldier is a girl.”

  Julie shrugged. “I was already convinced,” she said.

  Greg nodded. “Maybe if we ask him about it — in a nice way, that doesn’t make him defensive and angry — then it will help him, or her, remember his, or her, name. And what unit he, or she, was with in the Union army. And who his, or her, brother was. And where they were from. And why she pretended to be a boy and join the army? And what happened to her, or him, or whoever?”

  The pronoun uncertainty was driving me crazy. Greg, too, apparently, because he started rubbing his temples as if he had a headache. Come to think of it, I had a headache, too.

  “Good points,” Julie said. “But he’s gone now, and he doesn’t seem to be showing up very often.”

  “Yeah,” said Greg, still rubbing his head. “Just pops in, stays for a while, tells us what happened on this particular date in 1862, then pops back out into the whatever.”

  “Into limbo?” Julie suggested.

  “Yeah,” said Greg. “I guess so. And, you know, also next door into the Dog and Suds.”

  The dogs had started barking again and we could, of course, hear them all too loud and all too clear through the basement wall.

  “I think maybe we should call off practice today,” Greg said. “My head hurts, and now with those dogs going crazy it hurts even more.”

  “Want me to ride with you to your house?” Julie asked. “Just to make sure you can get home okay?”

  Greg blushed but said sure. Neither of them looked at me. I just rolled my eyes at how weird they were being.

  “You guys go on ahead,” I said. “I have to do a couple of things here and then I’ll head home after that.”