Finally, Mom opened her eyes halfway and struggled to sit up. She put her arm around me. “What a sweet little family we are,” she said. “We sure have been together a lot lately, haven’t we?”
I said we sure had, and Dad said he wouldn’t have it any other way.
Saturday was super busy for everybody — it was chore day at my house, and I had to actually scrub the kitchen floor, if you can believe that. And vacuum every room! Greg and his dad liked to do special stuff on Saturdays, like go for hikes in the mountains, but since it was raining they went to not one but two movies. Ever since his dad stopped drinking, and Greg started going to Al-Anon meetings, he and his dad had gotten a lot closer, and Greg didn’t come over nearly as often as he used to to spend the night with me.
Julie had a tae kwon do tournament on Saturday that she said would take up the whole day. She was on the tournament team, and did sparring and something called “forms,” whatever that was. Until she told us, I hadn’t even known she did tae kwon do.
Sunday afternoon we all were supposed to meet up at the Kitchen Sink for band practice, and I got there before the others. Well, almost there. I was a block away, just turning the corner onto Caroline Street on my bike, when somebody grabbed the handlebars and stopped me. It was Belman.
“Stay away from my little sister, dork,” he ordered.
“What do you mean?” I asked, nervous, getting off my bike. I didn’t know if he’d been waiting on me, or if he just happened to be there — but I didn’t ask.
“My mom told me all about you Dopes of War scaring her, pretending one of you was a ghost,” he said. “Deedee told me it was a real ghost, but then she changed her story. Now she won’t talk about it, but I know she came back over here yesterday. You probably invited her. She won’t talk about that, either. What are you doing, trying to get her to join your little band? Or do you have a crush on her? Is that it? You have a crush on my sister?”
I nearly fell over. “I don’t have a crush on your sister,” I said. “I don’t even like her!”
That did not make him happy. “And just what’s that supposed to mean?” he snarled.
I tried to recover. “I’m sure she’s really nice and everything,” I said. “I just meant, you know, I don’t like like her. That’s all. Plus, she’s just in fifth grade.”
“And you’re a sixth-grade dork,” he said. “So just stay away from her.”
I couldn’t believe this conversation. For one thing, I’d never had a girlfriend — I’d never even held hands with a girl. And Little Belman … definitely no way!
“Whatever,” I said. “I mean, okay. I mean, I promise I’ll keep not liking her. I mean, I’ll keep not like liking her. And I won’t talk to her. And I won’t invite her over here, even though I didn’t in the first place.”
“You better,” he said, standing so close over me that I got a kink in my neck looking up at him.
He deliberately bumped into my shoulder as he walked past, knocking me off balance as my bike crashed to the sidewalk. I might have fallen down if Greg hadn’t shown up just then and caught me.
“What was that all about?” he asked. “You want me to go jump on him?”
“NO!” I practically shouted. “What the heck would you do that for?”
“It looked like he was threatening you,” Greg said.
“Well, he sort of was,” I said. “He didn’t say what he was going to do to me, though. Anyway, he thinks I have a crush on his sister. He was telling me to stay away from her.”
Greg went from angry to laughing his head off in the space of about a second.
“It’s not that funny,” I said, but he couldn’t stop laughing. Julie came up just then and asked what was going on, and when Greg told her she cracked up, too.
This was turning out to be the weirdest week of my life.
We hadn’t seen the ghost — or one another — all day Saturday, and I was starting to wonder if we’d see her on Sunday. Julie’s theory was that Sally had exhausted herself the day before dealing with Little Belman, telling me the secret about her identity that she’d kept from everybody except her brother for more than one hundred and fifty years, and remembering all about her parents and her childhood and joining the army and the Battle of Antietam.
“She probably doesn’t have enough psychic energy to show up right now,” Julie said. “I think when the ghosts stay away it can be because they need to recharge their batteries, so to speak.”
“Or that their batteries are just running out and maybe can’t be recharged,” Greg added. “So to speak.”
“Right,” said Julie, who clearly liked it when Greg repeated the way she said things. I rolled my eyes. I didn’t think much of their theories, but I didn’t have anything better to suggest so just kept quiet.
We practiced for a while — all our old standards, plus without our even discussing it we launched into a rock-and-roll version of “The Battle Hymn of the Republic.” I remembered Sally singing it with me — and then soloing — the day before, and wished she was there to sing it with us just then. That would have been cool.
After the last “Glory, glory, hallelujah,” Julie decided we’d practiced enough. She also decided to fill us in on details about the Battle of Fredericksburg that she’d stayed up late the past couple of nights reading about.
“So tomorrow, December 11, is the big day,” she said. “That was the day the Union army engineers finally got the pontoons down to the river, and the army started crossing over into Fredericksburg, but it got very complicated very fast.”
“Like how?” Greg asked.
“For one thing it was just twenty-four degrees out, and they started at three in the morning, so it was freezing and it was hard to see. But at least the river wasn’t frozen solid. The engineers had to anchor dozens of the pontoon boats side to side all the way across the river, which is pretty wide where they were trying to cross, and then build the bridges with planks on top of the pontoons.”
“Wait,” I said. “You said ‘bridges’ plural?”
“Right,” said Julie. “Three pairs of bridges. One to cross at the north end of Fredericksburg, one to cross a mile away at the south end of town, and a third one downriver another mile farther beyond the town. Half of the Union troops, about sixty-five thousand men, would go across the first two bridges into town — they called those the Upper and Middle Crossings — and attack the main Confederate force at the Rebels’ defensive position outside of town in Marye’s Heights. Sally and her brother, Frankie, and the Irish Brigade would have crossed over there and been in that part of the battle.
“The other half of the Union force would cross farther downriver at what they called the Lower Crossing and hopefully surprise the Confederates by sweeping around behind them from the south and east. Only that’s not what ended up happening.”
“Why didn’t it?” Greg asked.
“It was about as ridiculous as them having to wait so long to get the pontoons,” Julie said. “Major General William B. Franklin was in charge of the troops at the Lower Crossing and he messed up his orders from General Burnside. On December 13, Franklin sent only thirty-eight hundred men to attack the Rebel line instead of all sixty-five thousand!”
Greg and I stared at Julie, bewildered.
“Why didn’t he double-check with General Burnside?” Greg asked. “I mean, why would they send that many soldiers down there, but only want him to use a handful?”
“Yeah,” I said. “That doesn’t make sense at all.”
Julie nodded. “I know. I told you it was ridiculous. But all the historians agree that the order General Burnside wrote down at about three o’clock in the morning, just hours before the attack, wasn’t clear. General Franklin thought General Burnside wanted him to hold most of his troops back near the river. Just in case of, well, who knows? Nobody to this day has been able to exactly figure out why Franklin didn’t send a messenger back to Burnside to double-check the order. The whole battle would probably h
ave turned out totally different. So instead of the Union army overwhelming the Confederate defenses, the Confederates were able to push that one lonely Union division of General Franklin’s back to the river without too much trouble. It was at this place we now know as Slaughter Pen Farm.”
“I know where that is,” I said. “We’ve driven past it a million times. It’s a few miles from here.”
“Right,” said Julie. “Well, it turned out there were nearly forty thousand Confederate troops positioned up on high ground overlooking Slaughter Pen Farm, way more than anybody on the Union side thought. Even at that, one Union division still managed to break through the Confederate line — briefly. But then when there were no reinforcements sent in, the Yankees were forced back by the Confederate counterattack. I think there were something like five thousand Union casualties in that part of the battle, including some other smaller fights, and cannon fire back and forth. And four thousand Confederate casualties.”
I could picture now where all that fighting had been at Slaughter Pen Farm, but what I couldn’t picture was nine thousand men there — dead or wounded or injured or captured or missing in action.
But at least it was all starting to make sense — the geography of it, anyway. I knew the Rebel defenses and artillery had been lined up for miles south of Slaughter Pen Farm on what is now called Lee Drive. People drive there all the time to check out the old cannons and Confederate trenches and Robert E. Lee’s lookout post high on what they used to call Telegraph Hill. It’s part of the national park, although most people just ride bikes and jog and rollerblade up and down Lee Drive, not really thinking about what an important Civil War site it is.
“I wonder when we’ll see Sally again,” I said. “It would be good to ask her what she knew about Slaughter Pen Farm and the fighting on Lee Drive.”
“I bet she didn’t know anything about it,” Greg said. “Because she was in town the whole time, and there wasn’t any TV or radio or anything to let people know about what else was going on even just a few miles away. I mean, according to Julie, General Franklin didn’t even ask General Burnside a simple question, like, ‘Are you out of your mind? You just want me to send in one division?’ ”
“I wish Sally was here so we could just ask her,” I said again.
“What happens if she doesn’t show up?” Greg asked quietly. “How will we ever help her find out what happened — how she ended up missing, and how she died? What if she used up all her, what did you call it, Julie? — her psychic energy — telling Anderson everything on Friday, and now she’s just, well, done.”
“I can’t believe that,” I responded. “She was so excited to be remembering everything, as hard as it was to talk about. I had the idea that she felt sort of free, getting to tell somebody that she was really a girl. She didn’t seem all staticky and fading in and out like our other ghosts did when they were nearing the end of their time being able to see us and talk to us and everything.”
“I just hope it’s what I said before,” Julie said.
“You mean recharging her batteries?” Greg asked.
Julie nodded. “I’m not sure how that happens, exactly, except maybe it’s like us taking a nap.”
“Or going to sleep at night,” I added, “which all this week I bet is something none of us have done very much of.”
Greg yawned, as if to prove my point. Julie and I couldn’t help it: we yawned, too. Then we all laughed, not that it was all that funny.
We waited another five minutes, none of us saying anything, all of us hoping. But in the end there was no Sally. Not that day, anyway.
“It’s started.”
I was dreaming that the ghost had come into my room, looking a lot more Sam than Sally. Standing at the end of my bed and saying that:
“It’s started.”
“What has?” I replied in my dream.
“The pontoons, down to the river,” the ghost said.
I opened my eyes and realized it wasn’t a dream after all. The ghost was in my bedroom, and she was speaking to me from the end of my bed.
“What time is it?” I asked. “And how did you get here? I thought you couldn’t leave the building, or downtown, or whatever.”
“It’s two a.m.,” Sally said. She looked around my room and seemed surprised to find herself there. “And I don’t know how I got here. Wherever this is.”
I told her it was my bedroom.
“We’re at my house,” I added. “We live just a couple of blocks from Sunken Road. When you were here for the battle it was all just open fields, but now it’s a neighborhood.”
Sally nodded, then said again, “Well, I just needed to tell you that it’s started. They’re sliding pontoons down to the river from the Chatham Heights.”
“Is it working?” I asked. “I mean, did it work?” I was confused because Sally was speaking in the present tense, as if everything was actually happening right now, when of course it all happened a hundred and fifty years ago.
“Nah,” Sally said. “Too steep. Crashing down too fast.” She switched to past tense. “So they switched up their tactics and had to haul those long pontoon wagons slow down the hill to the different crossing points.”
“Then what?” I asked, sitting up in bed and checking my clock. Sure enough, it was now just a little after two. Another night I wasn’t going to get much sleep.
“Putting the pontoons in the water, nailing on the planks, working fast as they could to get it done before the Rebels could figure out what was going on.” Sally paused. “At least that’s what I could see. We were at the Middle Crossing. So cold we were all shivering, waiting in our formations to make the crossing once those engineers were done. Only that didn’t quite happen the way it was supposed to.”
“So what happened?” I asked.
“Rebels woke up to what we were doing,” she said. “They fired a couple of cannon shots, though they didn’t hit anywhere near the pontoons. Then their snipers started shooting our engineers, so Old Burnside, he ordered our cannon to return the favor — all hundred and forty-seven of them. Figured if the Rebels were going to fire at us, we might as well unleash a barrage on the town where they were hiding. Especially since their sharpshooters started taking aim at the engineers. Our artillery boys sent a hundred shells a minute. You could see it as the sun rose — houses and buildings over there collapsing, chimney’s toppling over, roofs catching fire. And our boys at the river’s edge fired across with their muskets, too. But I guess they were shooting blind, ’cause the Rebels just kept on shooting at our engineers, finally chasing them off the bridge, which wasn’t even half finished. I figured it must be the same on the other bridges, too, ’cause we could hear the rifle fire north of us, and the shouting.” Her voice got lower, almost to a whisper. “And the screaming when one of them was hit.”
Sally said the engineers waited until the shooting stopped on the Confederate side of the river, then they ventured back out onto the unfinished pontoon bridge and went back to work.
But as soon as they did, the Confederate sharpshooters started picking them off again. So again they retreated. Again the cannons roared until the sharpshooters’ rifles quieted down. Once again, though, as soon as the engineers went back to work, the shooting commenced and more Union bodies fell into the river.
“I guess when the cannons were firing the Rebels must have retreated themselves to safer places,” Sally said. “Or maybe they were just too well dug in and hidden. I’m sure some of them must have got hit by cannon, or trapped in those buildings that collapsed or caught fire or both. But not enough, ’cause that back-and-forth business went on into the afternoon. Only good thing for us — and for them — was it warmed up quite a lot. Frankie and me got sent on detail to help haul up the wounded to the hospital they set up at the Chatham Manor. Must have made a dozen trips back and forth. ’Course I made Frankie wait back at the tree line and not expose himself there too close to the river and those Rebel sharpshooters, even though they weren�
�t taking so much aim at us as they were just the engineers.”
“How did you ever get across, then?” I asked. Julie had told us there were complications, but I didn’t know things had gotten this complicated.
“Somebody pointed out that pontoons were the same thing as boats, and why didn’t we fill some of them up with our boys and their rifles and paddle across quick as they could and attack the Rebels over on their side, roust out all those snipers hidden up in there and clear out the town. Everybody knew General Lee’s main army was well on the other side of town, hidden up on those hills where they’d have the advantage on us. They weren’t all there in the town, ’cause they’d have been too close to our cannon.”
“So that’s what they did?” I asked.
“You bet they did,” Sally said. “Wish they’d have sent my unit over, but they sent the 89th New York first. Half a dozen boats where we were. Probably forty men in each, some of them paddling with the butts of their rifles. Brave boys, let me tell you. Those Rebel sharpshooters kept firing but didn’t nobody turn back, though I did see one of them pontoon boats paddling in a circle, not making much headway for quite a while. Finally, though, enough of them made it across, and then the fighting started right there in the streets. From what I heard, the fighting at the upper crossing was a whole lot worse. Somebody said they sent the 7th Michigan over at the Upper Crossing — even before the 89th New York went over down where we were at the Middle Crossing — then once those Michiganders got a toehold on the Fredericksburg side, they sent in the Harvard Regiment — bunch of Massachusetts boys. I heard later on that there was fierce fighting not just street to street but door to door, starting at the north end of town and working their way south to meet up with the Middle Crossers in the center of town and drive out the Rebels. Took quite a while, though, and quite a lot of casualties, ’cause the Rebels were shooting down on our soldiers from upstairs windows, rooftops, hiding behind walls, you name it. A third of the Harvard Regiment went down as casualties. But God bless ’em, our engineers were finally able to get back to their work and they finished up those pontoon bridges in just about no time. Once that happened, you bet General Burnside sent plenty of the rest of us pouring across to join the fight.”
Fallen in Fredericksburg Page 8