For a minute it seemed as if all the houses between Federal Hill and that murderous stone wall disappeared, and the actual battlefield in front of us was back the way it had been on that awful, awful day. Judging from the look in Sally’s eyes, that’s what she was seeing, too.
“They ordered in the next wave, and the next one after that,” she said, “and it was the same as the first. We’d seen that level of slaughter before, of course — at Antietam. They had a sunken road there and when we overran it those poor Rebels trapped there suffered the same fate as our boys were suffering now. But the difference was it didn’t stop this time. The difference was they ordered in that next wave.
“And then they ordered in us.”
Sally started walking slowly down the hill in the direction of Sunken Road. Several cars had passed by while we were standing next to Federal Hill, but if anybody saw anything unusual, they didn’t show it. I figured it just looked like four kids standing around, talking, leaning on their bikes, hanging out after school.
We followed along next to Sally, walking our bikes, retracing the steps of the Irish Brigade where Hanover Street merged with George Street halfway down the hill. “I told Frankie to stay behind me no matter what,” Sally said. “He was so scared, he could hardly breathe. I even told him that, too: to keep breathing. And to keep behind. I told him if anything happened to me, if I got shot, to keep behind me then, too. To lie right down on the ground behind me. No bullet would reach him that didn’t go through me first. I told him I would protect him. And you know what he said to me? He said, ‘None of this is right, Sissy.’ He told me he ought to be helping the wounded off the battlefield and taking care of them back at the field hospital, not marching down this road, getting ready to kill the Confederates.”
“Wait,” said Julie. “There’s something we didn’t tell you yet, Sally.”
I had wanted to be the one to give Sally the good news about Frankie, but I guessed it was okay that Julie did it, since she’d found out about it, too.
“He lived!” Julie said. “We found the casualty list and he wasn’t on it. That means he survived the battle!”
Sally froze at the news. I believe she would have cried, except she’d spent so much time pretending to be a guy — and not just a guy but a tough soldier of a guy — that she probably didn’t know how anymore, or couldn’t afford to, in case someone might suspect who she really was. Not that boys can’t cry, too, of course. It’s just that a lot of people — and especially back then — don’t think they should.
“That’s a heavy burden off my shoulders and my heart,” she whispered, her voice cracking. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” Julie said. “I just wish we were able to find out more about Frankie for you, but it was so long ago.”
“That’s plenty right there,” Sally said. “Plenty enough to know he lived another day. And I can have my hopes that he got to do just what he said — go back to one of those field hospitals and help those who were suffering, instead of being the one to inflict the suffering. It wasn’t in his nature to ever hurt nobody.”
We all stood there for a few minutes longer until Sally seemed ready to push on. There was a battle still raging all around us — or at least there had been a hundred and fifty years before — and we had to go deeper into it to find out what happened to our ghost.
Sally confirmed it. “Now if I can just find out how I came to be missing,” she said. “That might be the last thing I need to know.”
Sally continued talking as we walked. “General Meagher — he was the one that formed the Irish Brigade and the one that gave us our battle order — told us to all pull a sprig of leaves off some boxwood bushes, and tuck it into our hats. He said it was green for Ireland. We all did what he said, and we all listened to what else he said, too, ’cause he could see what we’d seen, and he knew what was coming up on us once we charged across that field.”
She swallowed, then continued. “He said, ‘This may be my last speech to you, but I will be with you when the battle is the fiercest; and, if I fall, I can say I did my duty, and fell fighting in the most glorious of causes.’ I’ll always remember that.”
She kept walking and talking. “There were four brigades that had already attacked Sunken Road and the stone wall and Marye’s Heights, and we were determined that they wouldn’t need any more after the Irish Brigade was done taking the fight to those Rebels. We fixed bayonets when they ordered and kept marching right up from town. That Confederate artillery opened up as soon as we got in their range. Shells exploding overhead, shot bouncing off of what buildings there were, tearing through the ranks. One shell hit the 88th New York and we must have lost two dozen men all at once.”
Sally shook her head. “We didn’t turn back, though. We couldn’t. We broke into a jog and kept right on at them — me once again making sure Frankie stayed behind, as close to safe as possible, which, now you tell me, turned out to be safe enough, so hallelujah for that. We got to the bottom of this hill and climbed over or splashed through that millrace, then the officers called us to ranks again. General Meagher gave us the order to advance forward, double-quick, which of course we did, and next thing we knew we were out on that open plain, charging forward as hard and fast as we could go. Another thing slowed us down, though — the most terrible thing of all.”
“More cannonballs?” Greg asked.
“Worse,” Sally said. “Our own men. The ones on the ground, the ones that were wounded from the earlier waves, they grabbed at our trousers to try to stop us. ‘Don’t go,’ they cried out. ‘It’s murder! It’s murder!’ But we couldn’t stop. We pulled away. We ran around them. There were so many; I hate to say it but we even had to run over some of them, living and dead. All that running — all that hard charging — it only got us to that Rebel volley sooner, the closer we made it to their stone wall, and just like those brigades before us, the Confederates cut us down like hogs in a hog pen, too.
“A bullet tore through my cap,” she continued, caught up in her own story. “I felt it whistle by my ear. Then I felt one slam into my arm and I went down but just for a second, then pushed myself back up with my rifle, only the bad thing happened then — the worst thing of all — which was I lost sight of Frankie. I called for him and called for him, but there wasn’t time to go looking. We made it fifty yards from the Rebels and that’s where we took our stand — firing back at them as fast as we could load and aim, which wasn’t fast enough to keep even more of us from getting cut down. We didn’t last but a couple of minutes and then our proud Irish Brigade dissolved just like the brigades that had come before us and just like the others that General Burnside would send in behind us. Some managed to turn and run back to town, back to safety. Some managed to crawl off the battlefield. I felt something explode into my side and down I went a second time only I couldn’t get back up no matter how hard I tried, except to push myself behind a dead horse that had managed to get itself killed out there, but at least it was some protection, even if not much. Even if not much at all.”
By this time we were at the National Park, a thin stretch of land at the old Sunken Road where they’d rebuilt the Confederates’ stone wall, and restored one of the small wooden houses where Union soldiers had tried to hide from the Rebels’ withering gunfire. Beyond, on the other side of the stone wall, was Brompton, which had served as one of the Confederates’ headquarters, and which was now the university president’s house. Next to that, with those tiers of grave sites going up the side of the steep hill, was the National Cemetery.
Sally had quit speaking. I imagined her, disguised as a young soldier, a boy, lying somewhere near where we stood, wounded, not able to move, with a dead horse the only thing keeping her from being hit and killed by more Confederate bullets.
“Why did they keep sending in more troops?” Greg asked. “I mean, you all didn’t stand a chance. What was General Burnside even thinking?”
Sally shrugged. She seemed to
be too deep in her own thoughts to care too much.
Julie answered. “He thought General Franklin was attacking the Confederate line to the south, from Slaughter Pen Farm. He didn’t know that Franklin hadn’t understood the orders and had sent only those 3,800 men. General Burnside was convinced that he had to keep Lee’s troops occupied here at Sunken Road, so Lee couldn’t send reinforcements to fight Franklin’s troops. It was all a big, confusing, tragic mess. Plus, if General Burnside didn’t send more men into the battle here, he wouldn’t be able to offer any protection to all the men who were wounded and trapped on the battlefield. The Confederates would be able to just sit there and pick them off one by one. Which is sort of what happened anyway.”
Sally came out of her reverie and nodded. “Between attacks, anybody that moved, they shot them. Wouldn’t let hospital wagons out on the battlefield to take back the wounded or the dead. They all just had to lie there, same as me. Some couldn’t move even if they wanted to. Some couldn’t wait any longer for help and tried to crawl off the battlefield. Some made it. Most didn’t.”
There were seven waves in all. Julie knew the numbers. A third of the Irish Brigade went down as casualties. There were even more casualties from the other assaults. Nearly thirteen thousand Union casualties in all. The Confederates suffered a thousand wounded or killed. As terrible afternoon turned slowly into night, General Burnside was finally convinced not to send any more Union troops into the slaughter. What was supposed to have been an easy, surprise river crossing that could have led to an unobstructed march to Richmond and an early end to the Civil War had turned into the bloodiest battle and most lopsided Union defeat so far. There would be over two more years of awful, awful fighting before it was all over.
But Sally didn’t know any of that at the time.
All she knew, lying there for hours and hours on the battlefield with thousands of others, bleeding, dying, not able to escape, was that the most curious thing started happening in the night sky. “I didn’t know what it was at first,” she told us. “I thought maybe I had already died and what I was seeing was heaven itself. But then I realized it was the northern lights, which I knew nobody ever saw this far to the south. And yet there it was, lighting up the sky with every color there is. I had never seen anything so beautiful. I didn’t know what it meant, and I didn’t have anybody to ask. I so desperately wished Frankie was there with me right then so we could see it together, and so I could know he was safe.”
She paused again. “It was then, seeing the northern lights, that I resolved to not let myself die, to crawl wherever I had to go, to search the entire field, no matter how badly shot up I was, to find my little brother.”
Deedee had been so quiet since joining us that I’d forgotten she was even there. So it surprised me — surprised all of us — when she spoke.
“You loved your brother that much,” she said quietly.
“I promised my parents,” Sally said. “I had to find him.”
“But what could you do?” I asked. “The Confederates would shoot at anything, or anybody, who moved.”
“I moved anyway,” Sally said. “Pushing myself into the mud, crawling on my belly with one arm, holding my wounded side with the other. I whispered Frankie’s name. Men begged me to help them. They begged for water. Some had been lying in the field, wounded or just trapped, for hours and hours. I gave as much of my water as I could spare, but I had to save some in my canteen for Frankie. It was horrible. I couldn’t tell what was mud I was crawling through and what was blood. The bodies seemed to spread out endlessly. Once, twice, I made too much noise and they shot at me. One shot hit my boot and tore off part of my foot. I was sure of it, but I couldn’t afford to reach down to find out. The pain kept me conscious. I couldn’t pass out. I had to find Frankie.
“But I never did.”
I looked at the others when Sally paused there in her story. Everybody was crying, even Julie who never cried. Even Deedee. I put my arm around Deedee’s shoulders and patted her, hoping that would help. I wished I could do something for Sally, but as close as she was to us, she was too far away for me to ever put my arm around her, too.
Without my fully realizing it, we had started walking away from Sunken Road, back toward town. We were on Mercer Street, one of the closest to the battlefield, and Sally stopped there, next to a brick house that looked like it dated back to the Civil War. There was a sign on it: THE STRATTON HOUSE.
“I remember this place,” said Sally. “After hours in the battlefield, I had to give up on my search for Frankie. I hoped maybe he’d been able to escape the slaughter and I would find him in town. Maybe he was wounded and I’d find him at one of the houses that they’d turned into a hospital. Maybe he’d done what he said and was in one of those hospitals helping the surgeons, trying to save other soldiers.”
“What about this place?” Greg asked.
“I made it this far, using a rifle for a crutch now, to hold myself up. But I staggered anyway, like a drunk man. There were men packed here inside and out, some living, more of them dead. The dead they rolled outside. The dead horses they used for breastworks, piling the bodies up high enough to act as a wall. I studied all the faces of the dead, but none of them was Frankie. So I staggered on toward town. I knew if I didn’t get help for myself soon that I wouldn’t last. But if I stayed there, or stopped moving anywhere along the way, I was dead, too. I had to find a hospital.”
“But they would find out you were a girl,” Deedee blurted out, only the second time she’d spoken since joining us what seemed like a hundred hours before, though really it was just then pushing five o’clock.
Sally nodded. “I thought of that. I was delirious, I guess you could say, but I still managed to think of it, and to think of what it would mean. They wouldn’t let me stay in the army, and how would I ever take care of Frankie then? If I tried to reenlist in the same regiment, they’d know who I was and they wouldn’t let me in. If I enlisted in another regiment, I wouldn’t be with Frankie.”
We kept walking back to town. I imagined wounded and dying men littering the ground all around us, which must have been the case. And I remembered reading that a lot of bodies of Union soldiers were buried right where they died, in people’s yards, just about everywhere. I wondered if they could still be under us — and if Sally might be one of them.
But she said no. “Every time an ambulance wagon passed me I waved them away,” she said. “I told them I was fine. Just bone weary from the battle. They had men stacked like cordwood — the living and the dead — and didn’t have room for me anyway. They were glad to push on wherever they were going. I pushed on, too, the questions vexing me more and more, the closer I got to town: How could I pass for a soldier any more if I went to a hospital and put myself in the hands of the surgeons? The blood was running through my hands from the bullet hole in my side. I could hardly stand by the time I stumbled downtown. I needed time to think. I needed to lie down somewhere and rest, and think things through.”
We were all the way back downtown now, on Caroline Street, actually standing in front of the Dog and Suds building, next door to the Kitchen Sink.
“It didn’t look like this back then,” Sally said. “Our cannon had taken off the roof, and the top floors. There was only the first floor left, and not much of that. Door hanging off the hinges. Windows blown out. Everything inside thrown upside down, or stolen, or destroyed. I figured nobody would think to go in there, so that’s where I went, only it was too much street light from fires and lanterns, so I found my way to the cellar and crawled back as far into a dark corner as I could. I told myself I just needed to lie down there for an hour. I just needed to rest. If I could just rest for a while, I’d be better. My wounds — I told myself they weren’t too serious. Why, look — how could they be if I’d been able to make it all the way back from the battlefield? So just an hour hidden there and I’d be better. Better enough to go back out and find Frankie. That’s what I convinced myself of anyway.
And so that’s what I did.”
I looked around to see if anyone on Caroline Street had taken any notice of us standing there. The Dog and Suds was already closed for the night, so Mrs. Strentz wasn’t around, though Uncle Dex was still standing behind the counter inside the Kitchen Sink. He saw me, and waved, but then went back to whatever he was doing. A few people passed us on the sidewalk, but once again, like when we met up with Sally at Federal Hill, we probably just looked to them like four kids with bikes, hanging out and talking. No ghost — or at least no ghost they could see or hear.
“I don’t remember anything after that,” Sally said. “I only remember going inside, like I said.” She took a step closer to the building. Then she said, “Like this.”
And with another step forward Sally passed through the locked front door and inside the Dog and Suds, vanishing into the darkness, leaving us behind.
We all stood there for a good ten minutes after Sally disappeared, feeling empty and lost and helpless.
Greg finally broke the silence.
“Hey, Anderson, your uncle knows all about the history of Fredericksburg. Do you think he’d know when this building was built? Or when it was rebuilt — like, after the war?”
I gave him a quizzical look, wondering why that would matter.
“This is the last thing Sally remembers,” he said. “Which must mean this was where she died. What if that’s what happened, way down in the cellar or wherever — some place nobody thought to look? What if they tore down the building after the war, not knowing she was in there? Or what if the building collapsed on her? That would explain why she disappeared, why they never found her body, and why she’s been stuck here all these years, waiting for, well, I guess, waiting for us to solve the mystery!”
Amazingly, Uncle Dex confirmed it. “Oh yeah,” he said when we asked about the history of the building. Since we’d already had conversations with him about the dogs next door, and about Mrs. Strentz’s ghost, and the connection to the Battle of Fredericksburg, it didn’t seem like too strange a thing for us to bring up.
Fallen in Fredericksburg Page 11