They didn’t even bother to ask me what I needed to do. They just grabbed their stuff and said good-bye and left.
I sat and waited until I was sure they were gone, and until Uncle Dex hollered downstairs that he was closing up shop and would I please make sure the front door was locked behind me when I took off, too?
I assured him that I would. I didn’t actually have anything I had to do in the basement, though I did pick up my guitar and played some. I tried picking out the melodies of some of our songs, but I wasn’t nearly as good at that as Greg, so I switched back to just playing chords. Next thing I knew I wasn’t playing any of our songs. I was playing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and thinking about all the ghosts singing it in that dream I had. I started singing along, softly:
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.
I knew it had been written during the Civil War, but I wondered if the ghost had ever heard it, or if it came later, after the ghost turned into a ghost.
I didn’t have to wonder long, though, because pretty soon another high voice joined in with mine for the “Glory, glory, hallelujahs,” and there was the ghost, standing next to me, singing along.
I didn’t know any other verses, so just listened as the ghost kept singing and I kept playing my guitar:
I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:
His day is marching on.
Performing with a ghost from the Civil War! I had to figure it was about the coolest thing ever. There seemed to be a million more verses — well, four, anyway — and the ghost knew them all, and he kept singing in that high, and, well, pretty voice all the way to the final “Glory, glory, hallelujah,” and the last “While God is marching on.”
We both sat quietly for a few minutes once it was over, and it seemed to me there was a sweet echo of our voices reverberating through the room. I didn’t hear it so much as I felt it, and I wondered if the ghost did, too. I kind of thought so.
Finally, the ghost spoke.
“I know why you stuck around here,” he said. “After your gang left.”
“Uh, you do?” I said.
He nodded. “You heard what that little girl said and you got to wondering about it, too. Was I a girl.”
“Well, yeah,” I said. “Sort of. I mean, it did come up when we were talking earlier this week — me and Julie and Greg. My, uh, gang. But I wasn’t going to say anything. I don’t want to be rude or anything.”
The ghost sighed. “I guess it ain’t rude to wonder. And once that little girl got going about it, it got me wondering about it, too. I don’t know how that girl saw what she did. I have to give it to her, though — she may be meaner than a snake, but she’s a tough little thing. Wouldn’t have minded having her with us in President Lincoln’s army. She’d have whipped up on her share of Rebels, and then some.”
I thought about it and had to agree. “I bet she would,” I said.
Then I waited some more. The ghost got up and paced around the room for a few minutes, not saying anything, at least not to me, but he seemed to be muttering to himself, too low for me to hear exactly what.
And then he stopped and turned to me. “I remember now.” He swallowed hard.
“In the uniform like you see me right now, my name is Sam, only they call me Sammy.”
He swallowed hard again. “But inside the uniform, I ain’t a Sam or a Sammy neither one.”
The ghost sat down again. At first I thought this was all too hard for him and he might even start crying. But then a sort of sly grin appeared on his face.
“Nope,” he said. “Not Sam or Sammy.”
The grin spread even wider.
“Might as well tell you, I’m a girl all right, just like she said, and my real name is Sally.”
Telling me she was a girl, something she’d kept secret from the world for more than a hundred and fifty years, seemed to be an enormous relief for Sally. Suddenly, she remembered a lot more about her past, and the story came pouring out as we sat together in the Kitchen Sink basement. The dogs next door went totally quiet, as if they were straining to listen in.
“I already told you about Mama and Papa,” Sally said. “How the consumption took them both. There’s too much grief in my heart for me to talk any more about the particulars of when they passed. I was with them both times, at the sanatorium. I made Frankie wait outside. Where we were living then was upstate New York, in Schenectady, and had dairy cows. Me and Frankie milked them every day and night, and Mama taught us to make the soft and hard cheeses. You name it. Hard work, but I guess we did all right. Frankie and me got to go to school most days, although some days the chores were too much and kept us away.”
She paused for a second, and then said softly, “We lost the farm once Mama and Papa died. I was fifteen and Frankie was fourteen.”
“What did you do then?” I asked. “Did you have other family you could live with?”
She shook her head. “And weren’t a lot of people wanted to take in Irish kids. They thought we’d be trouble. So Mrs. Slominsky — she was the teacher at our school — she gave us the name of a cousin of hers in New York City, said her cousin could help me get on at a clothing factory, and point us to where we could live. And that’s what happened. Frankie got a job working with a street vendor, but I didn’t like him being out there all day without me. Things could happen in the city, and they did. Twice he got beat up for being Irish and wandering into the wrong neighborhood. I don’t know why those city toughs hated the Irish so much but they did, a lot of them. Anybody say anything to me and I’d give ’em a black eye, but Frankie wasn’t any kind of a fighter.
“But it was still a good thing he had any kind of work. It gave him something to do, someplace to be. The flophouse we stayed at turned us out at the crack of dawn and wouldn’t let us back in until sundown, so we had to have something to keep Frankie occupied while I was at the factory. I hated that sewing, though. I could do it okay, don’t get me wrong about that. I might be a tomboy, but I know plenty of girl things. My mama saw to that. But Papa needed me to work a man’s job on the farm and that’s what I did. He expected the same out of Frankie, but Frankie’s always been more delicate, you might say, so I always did half of his chores after I did mine.”
I tried to imagine what it must have been like for Sally and Frankie so long ago, having to make it on their own without their parents. Just losing their parents must have been so devastating. I worried all the time about my mom with her MS, and what would happen if — I guess when — it got a lot worse. I couldn’t even bring myself to think about not having my mom around.
And then to have to fend for yourselves — and in Sally’s case, to move from the town you grew up in, and make your way in a big city, and work all day and sleep in a flophouse at night — just seemed like too much for anybody to have to manage. Sally said her workday was ten hours long, and sometimes twelve. And they didn’t get to take breaks at all, except for a fifteen-minute lunch break when she would eat moldy bread and cheese and drink stale water, and then right back to work. Frankie got plenty to eat working for the street vendor — until he realized the vendor was subtracting the cost from his weekly pay, which wasn’t much to begin with.
“I finally found us a room once Frankie stopped eating so much and we scraped together the money,” Sally continued. “It was a six-story walk-up and wasn’t much better than the flop, since the family we rented from wanted us out first thing in the morning and not back until even later at night. So after work I’d find Frankie and we’d walk the streets and find something to eat until it was late enough that they’d let us in our room.
But at least when we were in our little room there wasn’t anybody saying the kinds of ugly things we heard all the time at the flop or on the street. The only good thing was there were lots of street musicians out all the time, especially outside the bars, singing for their supper.”
“You mean buskers!” I said. “Greg and I have done that before.”
Sally looked at me for a minute, confused. “You lost your mama and papa, too? That how you made your way?”
“Oh no,” I said. “Sorry. No. My parents are alive, and we didn’t have to be buskers. We just liked doing it, and liked making money. That’s all I meant.”
Sally nodded. “Wish I’d played an instrument. I’d have done that, too, rather than what I was doing. That factory was the hottest place I’ve ever been, but if you sweated on anything you were sewing, they’d take it out of your pay the same as that vendor took it out of Frankie’s for eating up the profits.”
“What were you sewing?” I asked.
Sally laughed. “That’s the funny thing. We were making uniforms for the army. Well, not the whole uniform, but the trousers and coats. It was machine sewing we were doing.”
“You must have been exhausted by the end of the day each day,” I said. “Frankie, too.”
She nodded. “Bone tired. But it was what we had to do. And would have probably kept doing it, too, but then one day Frankie decided to go for a soldier without even telling me. They were putting together an Irish brigade, under Brigadier General Thomas Meagher, recruiters beating the bushes all over the city for red-blooded Irishmen, and offering a signing bonus. And thirteen dollars a month pay, room and board included!”
“So that was a lot back then?” I asked.
“Oh, you bet,” Sally said. “Only they didn’t take girls, and there Frankie was all of fifteen by then, and me just sixteen. He told me he did it so I wouldn’t have to work those long hours anymore, and he said I had taken such good care of him that it was his turn to take care of me. But I knew that Frankie, as good-hearted a kid as he was, needed somebody to keep an eye out for him. And since there was no getting out of him signing on already, and since I’d promised Mama and Papa that I’d take care of him, I went down to where they were recruiting for their Irish brigade and I signed on, too. So we both got the signing bonus. That was about the only good thing. Me and Frankie, for the first time in our lives, and probably the last, we were rich! Even took ourselves out for a steak dinner! That was July of 1861.”
“But how did you do it?” I asked. “You said yourself they wouldn’t take girls.”
“It was right easy,” Sally said. “First thing was cut my hair to look like a boy’s. Frankie actually did that for me. Got hold of some loose clothes, bound up my chest, dirtied my face some, put on a hat, tried to talk in a deep voice, or deep as I could. But heck, my voice was already deeper than Frankie’s, and once my hair was short I already looked more like a boy than him and a lot of those other young fellows signing up.”
“And they didn’t do, like, some sort of physical exam?”
“Of course they did,” Sally said. “Checked my teeth to make sure they weren’t rotten and that I still had most of them — which I did and still do.”
She showed me, just in case I doubted her.
“They made me march back and forth across the room to make sure I wasn’t bowlegged,” she continued. “Asked me if I had worms. Made me show them my fingers, too, to make sure I had them all, and especially the trigger finger, which is the most important. I told them I’d been shooting a gun since I was knee high to a grasshopper, and I even offered to show them if anybody had a musket. They said that wasn’t necessary. Said they’d teach me everything I needed to know, and that was that.”
“Why did they call it an Irish brigade?” I asked. “Because most of the people in it were Irish?”
Sally laughed. “Can’t nobody call you a dummy,” she said. “Some of those other units didn’t want us Irish joining them. There was a lot of prejudice against the Irish, you know. All those hoity-toity New Yorkers afraid we’d come in and take the jobs that they thought belonged to them. Saying we were all nothing but a bunch of drunks and Catholics. Truth was, when Frankie and me were growing up, we hardly even knew we were Irish. Just knew we talked a little different from most in Schenectady. But there were guys in the brigade so Irish they still spoke the language, and hardly any English. And when they did speak English they mangled it so bad that Lord knows what they were saying. We turned out to be a tough bunch of fighters, though. And if you don’t believe me just ask any of those Johnny Rebs we lit into at Antietam.”
I’d heard of Antietam — I knew it was a battle in the Civil War — but that was about all. Sally must have seen it on my face because she filled me in. “Antietam, up there in Maryland. Bloodiest battle of the war. We fought the Rebels to a standstill, which wasn’t much to brag about, but at least for once we didn’t lose ground or lose as many men as them. The Irish Brigade was in the thick of it. Only I made sure they let Frankie stay behind the lines, running messages between the officers and such.”
She got quiet for a minute. “It was the first time I took and fired my gun at anything real, besides deer and bird and squirrel,” she said. “And close-up, too. So close you could see their faces, and them screaming and bawling like little kids once they were shot, or got the bayonet. Our boys did the same. Some right next to me. And there was nothing you could do about it. No way to save the ones that needed saving. No way to save yourself except keep fighting harder than anybody else, and keep being luckier than anybody else.
“So that’s what I did. And dear Lord help me, but I was good at it, too.”
I had remembered to text Mom and Dad earlier, before talking to Sally, so they weren’t mad at me when I came in late for dinner. Mom was still pretty tired from her fall and everything, and they spent the evening on the sofa in the living room watching TV while I retreated to my bedroom to fill Julie and Greg in on what I’d learned.
Greg was blown away.
“Wow,” he said when I called. “I was just sort of going along with Julie when she said it was possible the ghost was a girl. I can’t believe you got her name, too.”
“Little Belman might have actually helped with that,” I admitted.
“What? Did she come back or something?” Greg asked, confused.
“No. But I think all her yelling at the ghost about knowing the ghost was a girl helped trigger something. At least that’s what it seemed like.”
“Huh. Guess that kind of makes sense. But what about the last name?”
I was stumped. In my excitement to hear Sally’s story, I’d totally forgotten to ask what her last name was.
“Well, at least we know what unit she was in,” I said. “The Irish Brigade. I was going to research that tonight. I guess we need to find out as much as we can even faster now, since it’s just a couple of days until December 11.”
“The day the Union finally crossed the river,” Greg said, practically finishing my sentence for me.
“Yeah,” I said. “That was when they finally got the pontoons to the river, but that’s about all I know so far.”
“Have you talked to Julie yet?” Greg asked. “I bet she already knows everything about it. She’s so smart. I wish I was half as smart as her.”
“You are,” I said, though I had my doubts about either one of us being even half as smart as Julie.
Greg just laughed, as if what I’d said was meant to be funny.
“You should go ahead and call her,” he said. “I bet she’ll totally grill you about the conversation with the ghost. Sam. Or Sally. Or whatever.”
And she did. I called as soon as Greg and I hung up, and spent the next half hour getting the first degree from Julie: Why hadn’t I found out the ghost’s last name? What was Sally’s commanding officer’s name? What did Sally think happened to her little brother now that she was starting to remember so much stuff about their childhood, and how they ended up t
ogether in the Union army? Why did she choose the name “Sammy”? Was it just because of the alliteration — Sally and Sam — or was it something else? Did anyone in the Irish Brigade ever find out she was a girl? Was anyone suspicious?
Of course I didn’t have answers to hardly any of Julie’s questions, and it totally wore me out trying to keep up with the barrage of them, and trying to explain why I hadn’t found out any of that stuff, and the whole time just wanting to crawl into bed and go to sleep. It hadn’t just been a really long day. It had been a really, really long week. And I knew there was a lot more to come.
Finally, I heard Julie’s mom ordering her to get off the phone, so she said good-bye and she would have more questions tomorrow, which was Saturday. She might text me some more tonight.
I groaned — and turned my phone off.
I knew I should get on the computer and read up more on the Battle of Fredericksburg, and Antietam, and the Irish Brigade and the river crossing. But it was getting late, plus I kept thinking about Sally and Frankie and how they lost both of their parents to tuberculosis and had to fend for themselves. I thought about how people were prejudiced back then against the Irish immigrants, which still didn’t make any sense to me, but I guess there are always going to be people who think less of anybody who seems different from them. That’s one of the things we kept seeing in our research into the different wars, to help out our different ghosts, and it was pretty depressing.
But still not as depressing as losing your parents.
I went into the living room and joined my mom and dad on the couch. Mom had fallen asleep and was leaning on Dad. I sat next to her on the other side and wished I could curl up in her lap the way I used to when I was little.
“Hey, buddy,” Dad whispered. “Everything okay with you?”
I nodded. “Is Mom all right?” I asked.
“Oh, sure,” he said. “Just tired. Couple of days in the hospital are enough to wear anybody out. We probably should see about helping her to bed.”
We didn’t do that right away, though. Maybe Dad just somehow knew that I wanted to be close to both of them at least for a few minutes. We sat there together and it felt nice. I don’t even remember what dumb show was on TV. All I really heard was Mom’s breathing, and Dad turning the pages on a magazine he was sort of reading and sort of not.
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