Sally smiled, but it wasn’t a happy smile. More like a satisfied smile, I guess you could say. But like every ghost soldier we’d met, there was sadness there, too.
“All those Confederates holed up in Fredericksburg, they either died there that day, or they finally turned and ran back to join old General Lee outside of town up there on Marye’s Heights where they had their fortifications. They left the town to us — or what was left of it, anyway.”
I don’t know how long we talked — or, rather, how long Sally talked and I listened, asking the occasional question, until my yawns started to run together, despite how totally fascinating her story was. But I couldn’t help myself. I got so tired that everything looked bleary to me, so much so that I couldn’t even read the clock on my bedside table.
“I’ve kept you too long,” Sally said when she finally noticed how I was drooping. “Sorry about that. It’s just, I guess you do remind me of Frankie in some ways, and Frankie and me used to talk and talk and talk, sometimes practically all night. And by that I mean Frankie let me run my mouth about anything and everything. I know I probably took too much advantage of that. But spending so much of my day pretending to be somebody else other than who I really was, it was awful nice to get to just talk to somebody who knew me — the real me — and that I was a girl. Am a girl.”
Sally paused for a second, then stood as tall as she could, like she was at attention. “One more thing I remembered,” she said. “Almost forgot it again.”
Then she saluted. “Private Sam Keegan,” she announced. “Army of the Potomac. Second Army Corps. First Division. Second Brigade. 88th New York Regiment, Company G.”
I grabbed a piece of paper and wrote it all down quickly, before I could forget.
We both smiled. Hers faded first. “And don’t forget about Frankie,” she said, her voice already sounding far away.
I’d pointed out to Greg and Julie that Sally didn’t do any of that flickering business that we’d seen in our other ghosts as time seemed to be running out on us solving their mystery. But now, there in my room, Sally was doing just that — flickering, getting staticky, fading in and out. I suddenly had a million more questions for her, but it was too late.
Sally flickered one last time and then disappeared. I was so dopey and tired that I actually reached out for her, as if I could take hold of her arm and keep her there, which was absurd. I even said out loud, “Wait, Sam. I mean Sally!” But that’s just how tired I was. I went to sleep soon after.
We had no school on Monday for one of those professional development days for teachers, so Julie, Greg, and I met up early at the Kitchen Sink, where I filled them in on everything Sally had told me in the middle of the night. I could tell they were disappointed that Sally had come to my house and not theirs — though that’s how it had been with all our ghosts so far: They showed up at the Kitchen Sink, at my house, and sometimes other places like school or the backseat of Uncle Dex’s car, but only if I was there. I couldn’t explain why it was that way, any more than I could explain why Julie and Greg could see and speak to the ghosts in the first place — and why I could — but nobody else.
Well, nobody else except Little Belman. That was another whole mystery that I just didn’t have the brainpower to try to figure out just then.
Julie got over her disappointment quickly, and peppered me with a hundred questions about what Sally had told me the night before. “Now that we have a last name, and her regiment and company and everything, plus her brother’s name, we should be able to find out a lot more,” she said. “I’ll look it up tonight.”
Greg asked a few questions, too, but he really didn’t need to bother. Julie had covered pretty much everything. And when she saw that I didn’t have any more answers, she took over the story where Sally had left off with the river crossings and the street fighting and the occupation of Fredericksburg.
“I read that things got a little crazy after they chased off the Confederates,” she said. “Or a lot crazy.”
“How?” Greg asked. “What?”
“Yeah,” I echoed. “How?”
Julie gave us her disapproving look. “So I’m guessing neither of you has done much research on your own?”
We didn’t answer. I guess we didn’t need to, though we’d both done some. Just, well, not as much as Julie.
Julie sighed. “Okay. Well, whatever. But we’re all supposed to be working on this together, you know?”
“We have been,” Greg said. “Just not all in the same way. Anyway, um, maybe you could tell us what you found out, and then give us some reading assignments.”
“Fine,” Julie said. “Your assignments are once we leave here we should ride our bikes over to some of the important sites of the battle.”
“Why wait?” I asked. “Let’s go now.”
So we did. First we went from downtown over the Chatham Bridge out of Fredericksburg and over to the Stafford County side of the river. Once we were there, we rode our bikes up a steep hill to Chatham Manor, which was where everything started for General Burnside and the Union army. In front of the mansion, facing the river, were these incredibly gnarled-up trees — they were called catalpas. They definitely looked like they should have fallen over already and died, except they were being propped up by braces because they were such important and famous trees. We read about it on one of the plaques. This famous poet, Walt Whitman, helped take care of casualties after the battle and he wrote about surgeons in Chatham Manor having to amputate hands and feet and arms and legs and tossing them outside the window and all the amputated limbs piling up under the catalpa trees.
Greg and I shivered when we read that. Julie did, too, even though she usually wasn’t too affected by things like that. We went farther out on the grounds in front of Chatham Manor to the cannons that were still there, aimed from Chatham Heights across the river at Fredericksburg, which we could see as clearly as anything. They also had a replica of the pontoon wagons that the engineers had used for building the bridges. Sally wasn’t kidding when she said they were huge and heavy. No wonder they’d been so hard to transport all the way here.
“So this is where they blasted away at Fredericksburg with all the Union cannons,” I said.
“And where they brought the pontoons down to the river,” Greg said.
“And it was one of their hospitals, of course,” I added.
“And one of their headquarters,” Greg also added. “There were a couple of different mansions like this that belonged to Confederate sympathizers or whatever that the Union generals took over. I did read something about that. I think it was on a brochure from the battlefield Visitor Center. Did I tell you guys I went there?”
“No,” I said. “But it’s not very far from your house.”
“We’ve all been there,” Julie reminded us. “On field trips in elementary school? Remember? Hello?”
Greg shrugged. “I might have been too busy running around to notice where we were,” he said. “We probably could have gone to Mars on those field trips and I wouldn’t have exactly noticed.”
Julie sniffed. I could tell Greg didn’t like that, but he didn’t say anything.
“Sally was here,” I said. “Or near here. And her brother. It’s weird to think about. They were with their brigade, I guess, camped in fields over here for, like, three weeks. Waiting for those pontoons.”
“And going on those scouting missions,” Greg reminded me.
“And helping those escaped slaves to freedom,” Julie said. “If you think about it, the Rappahannock River was one of the dividing lines between North and South during the Civil War, and a dividing line between slavery and freedom.”
She sounded like a tour guide, but it was still cool thinking that our river, and our town, played such a giant role in the Civil War and in the history of America.
“Anyway, now we have our panoramic view,” Julie said. She pointed to different places on the river. First to our right, near what was now the Falmouth Bridg
e. “Upper Crossing,” she said. Then to our left and the Chatham bridge we’d just come over on our bikes. “Middle Crossing.” And finally she gestured to the railroad bridge down near the city docks. “Another mile down that way was the Lower Crossing.”
We stared at each spot until Julie drew our attention back to the town, and the line of hills just beyond. We could see some of the redbrick buildings of the college up on those hills. Just like nearly all of the houses there, the college — actually a university now — hadn’t been in existence during the Civil War. It was where the Confederate troops dug in their defenses, and waited for the Union attack.
“So what about the crazy part you mentioned before?” Greg asked. “Is that something we’re supposed to be able to see from here, too?”
“No,” said Julie. “That all happened back in town, and not in any one place in particular, but really all over. The Union soldiers went on a rampage and started looting and partying all over what was left of Fredericksburg. Dragging couches and beds out into the streets, stealing whatever of value they could lay their hands on. Setting more fires to stuff. They even dragged pianos outside and played on them and sang and danced around fires they set in the middle of the streets. Some of the soldiers even put on dresses they confiscated from some of the houses. And they consumed all the food and alcohol they could find. There were a lot of letters written by soldiers that recounted everything. And diaries by the Fredericksburg people who, for some reason, had stayed in town and so witnessed it all.”
“How long did it go on?” I asked. “Didn’t they have a battle to fight?”
“I’m sure in some places it went on all night,” Julie said. “General Burnside wanted to wait another day to keep planning his attack, which was probably not very smart since it just gave General Lee more time to build up his defenses and plan his strategy for repelling the Union army once they did attack. At some point they started arresting soldiers who were doing the looting and vandalism. Southerners all over the Confederate states were outraged when word got out about what the Union soldiers had done. Nobody had ever heard of soldiers looting a conquered city before, at least not in America. And definitely not by Americans.”
I’d always thought of the Union soldiers the same way I’d always thought about the Allied soldiers in World War II — that they were the good guys, fighting to right a terrible wrong. So I wanted to believe that they were always good in the ways they behaved during the wars, too. But it was pretty clear, now that we were helping our fourth ghost solve our fourth ghost mystery, that the good guys could sometimes be not so good, too, even if they were on the right side overall.
Greg was thinking something different. “I wonder if maybe they were just, you know, so angry and upset about the Confederate sharpshooters shooting the Union engineers, and the people who lived in Fredericksburg letting the Rebels use their houses and businesses to hide in while they were doing it,” he said. “I bet I’d be pretty mad, too, if it was my friends or my fellow soldiers who were getting shot. Or if it was me getting shot at. And knowing that everybody in town not only helped the snipers, but hated me and my friends and what we were fighting for. I bet I’d not care too much about all their stuff, and I might take what I wanted, or even destroy some things, too.”
“That wouldn’t be the right way to be,” Julie said. “But I also think I understand.”
“Well, either way,” I said, “it sounds like what happened with all that vandalism was nothing compared to what was about to happen in the actual battle. I’m not even sure why we’re talking about it.”
Greg and Julie acted surprised that I’d said that. At least I thought that’s why they looked so surprised all of a sudden. But then I realized they were staring at something behind me, so I turned to look, too, thinking maybe Sally had made her way over to Chatham.
But she hadn’t. It wasn’t Sally. It was Little Belman.
She was hiding — though not very well — in a little gazebo, next to a statue of Pan, the Greek god who was half goat and half human, or at least half human form. It was weird to see him in the Chatham Manor garden, and even weirder with Little Belman peeking out from behind Pan’s goat butt.
“What are you doing here?” Julie shouted. “Are you following us?”
But Little Belman didn’t answer. She stepped out from behind Pan, hesitated for a second, and then ran away. Greg started to chase her, but Julie stopped him.
“Let her go,” she said. “Let’s just get on our bikes and ride out to Slaughter Pen Farm and see if she follows us there. It’s a few miles out of town and I bet she doesn’t.”
“But why is she following us in the first place?” Greg asked.
“Who knows?” I said. “She’s just weird. And she thinks she saw a ghost.”
We got on our bikes and rode down a long, steep gravel driveway to River Road, which was paved and which followed the edge of the Rappahannock. It was just a little ways on River Road back to the Chatham Bridge and into town, and then on to Slaughter Pen Farm. I couldn’t help but think about the Union engineers and soldiers and the wheels of the pontoon wagons creaking over some version of this same road a hundred and fifty years ago, at two in the morning, getting ready for the crossings.
We decided to stop downtown to get some lunch first, though, and went into Goolrick’s Pharmacy to get grilled cheese sandwiches, pickles, and potato chips. We also split a chocolate milkshake. I wasn’t sure where Little Belman went while we ate — maybe down to her house to get her own lunch.
She was back to following us once we finished and climbed back on our bikes, though. We had to be really careful riding out to Slaughter Pen Farm because there was no sidewalk for much of the way, and the road was pretty busy, but we kept to the shoulder the whole time, and I was relieved to look back and see that Little Belman did, too.
Slaughter Pen Farm was just that — a farm, a house, a barn, a couple of big shade trees, and a wide expanse of fields that were now another part of the National Park. It was just off the highway. We’d driven past it all our lives and never thought much about it, but now we knew it for what it was — a giant failure of communication that was the site of one of the biggest blunders of the Civil War. We didn’t stay too long there because there wasn’t much to see. Julie pointed to a small hill where a Confederate officer named Pelham with a single cannon kept half the Union army ducking for cover for nearly an hour. Then she pointed to the tree line at the far end of the fields where a Union general named Meade led the one charge that broke through the Confederate line, until the Rebels regrouped. She pointed to the line of retreat where Meade’s division backed out of the fighting, and where the Confederates knew better than to give chase because almost sixty thousand more Union soldiers were down by the river.
Little Belman stayed on her bike near the road and took off once again as soon as we got back on our bikes and rode out of Slaughter Pen Farm. She must have hidden somewhere, because we next rode a couple of miles over to Lee Drive to see where the Confederate defenses had been — even though we’d also been there a million times before. But we were all seeing with very different eyes now, and everything seemed different. Lee Drive was no longer just this nice place to jog or ride bikes. It was where the Civil War could have been shortened by a couple of years if the Union had prevailed, and it was where thousands of Americans fighting Americans died in the attempt.
Near the south end of Lee Drive, close to a place called Hamilton’s Crossing, was a twenty-five-foot-tall stone pyramid that had been raised there after the war. It was next to the train track so that when people rode by on the train to and from Richmond they would see it and remember that this was the place where half of the Battle of Fredericksburg was fought.
It was getting to be late afternoon, maybe an hour of sunlight left, and we had the whole length of Lee Drive to ride north to get to Lafayette Boulevard and then home, a good five miles in all, so we set off, all of us tired, but still having to pedal up and down a bunch of
rolling hills. We hadn’t seen Little Belman for quite a while so thought she must have long since gone home, but then Greg caught sight of her behind us.
“Oh man!” he said. “That kid is still there!”
We all stopped and turned to look. Little Belman stopped, too, maybe fifty yards behind us.
“Come on,” said Greg. “Let’s just go. She’ll keep following us. There’s one more stop we should make before we go home.”
“Where?” I asked.
“The National Cemetery,” he said. “Where they buried a lot of the Union soldiers.”
The cemetery was along Sunken Road and we’d all been there before, of course, usually on Memorial Day when the Boy Scouts set up and lit thousands of luminarias — bags with candles in them — at the graves. The graves were spread out in tiers, rising up the side of a steep hill, with thousands more graves covering several acres at the top. There were also some statues up there, some cannons, some monuments, some big shade trees. Mostly it was just peaceful. Well, peaceful and sad.
We parked our bikes at the entrance and hiked up to the top and just sat there for a long time, not speaking, all seeing things differently, I suspected, than we’d ever seen them before. Looking down on Sunken Road, where the worst of the next day’s battle took place, and knowing that thousands died there, made it even sadder.
The sun was going down when we descended back to our bikes. Little Belman was still there, too, half hiding behind a tree next to the Visitor Center. She looked scared.
Julie took control of the situation. “Oh, just come on and join us!” she called out to Little Belman. “It’s getting late and you shouldn’t be out here by yourself. Don’t worry, we won’t be mean to you.”
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