Gettysburg: The Crossroads Town

by Tim Black

  “Is this Nathan Greene’s room?” asked a tiny voice.

  The boy was wearing only a t-shirt, which was much too big for him, and seemed to serve as a nightshirt.

  “Yes, this is Mr. Greene’s room.”

  “Then you must be Victor Bridges, I presume.”

  “Yes. Who are you?”

  “Excuse me, it was very rude of me not to introduce myself. I am Nikola Tesla at your service.”

  Victor laughed. “Okay, Kromer, you can come out now. This is pretty funny. You too, Minerva. Come out, come out wherever you are.”

  “I assure you, Victor, I am not a ruse perpetuated by your classmates. May I come in? I have a message to convey to your teacher,” the boy said as he brushed by Victor and went straight to the snoring teacher and began to poke the pedagogue productively. Mr. Greene awoke.

  The light from the sunrise illuminated the hotel room and Victor took a closer look at the boy’s nightshirt. The wording: “A teacher affects eternity. He never knows where his influence stops. Henry Brooks Adams.” What in the world was going on? Victor wondered.

  Grumpily, Mr. Greene rubbed the sleep from his eyes and looked at the boy. “Who are you?”

  “Nikola Tesla, Mr. Greene. I hope you don’t mind, but I borrowed this shirt from your classroom closet. I couldn’t very well walk into Gettysburg in my birthday suit now could I?” the boy asked.

  Mr. Greene squinted at the boy’s t-shirt, seeing both the wording on the shirt and the illustration of the boy with the backpack standing atop a stack of books and gazing off at the mountains on the horizon.

  “You are Tesla, really?”

  “Yes, and I am as surprised as you are at my appearance, Mr. Greene, having been dead for so long. You see, Henry Adams, the man who wrote the quotation for the shirt I’m wearing, came to me at my museum in Belgrade where I prefer to haunt, and asked me to help rescue you. It seems Mr. Adams learned about the chicanery perpetrated by Monsieur Catton and Monsieur Foote changing the dates on your computer. Fascinating really. You see I didn’t know what had happened to my time travel prototype and Adams told me where Thomas Edison had hidden my device. I always suspected the so-called Wizard of Menlo Park was behind its disappearance, but I could never prove it. Anyway, I thought you did a pretty fair job of applying the device to your classroom portable, but unfortunately Adams and his group of dead historians hadn’t the foggiest idea of how to use the device and so I was summoned. I tinkered around with the original device here and there and updated quite a few applications, for even though I am dead I have been following how Apple keeps updating its devices. I even chatted with Steve Jobs, too. Fascinating, a true, albeit, dead visionary. So I thought, why not update my prototype? Well, from here on in, with a remote I developed, you will be able to send and summon your classroom at will. But for me, the fascinating part of my journey back in time was reanimation. I never saw that coming.”

  “Victor, hand me my cane, please,” Mr. Greene said, as the teacher had forgone his crutches for the cane and his leg was healing rapidly. “What do you mean by reanimation?”

  “Since I was alive in 1863 when I arrived here in the portable I became the seven-year-old boy you see before you. Actually, my birthday is tomorrow. I will be seven then. It is something I did not foresee about time travel. If one travels to the past and stops in at a time when one was alive, one becomes the age he was then, yet with all the knowledge one gained throughout one‘s lifetime. Fascinating wrinkle, I think. I can hardly wait to share my experience with Albert.”

  “Albert?” Mr. Greene asked.

  “Einstein,” young Tesla said. “Anyway, Mr. Greene, I have installed a cloaking device, a bit of stealth technology, and the classroom is resting west of the Lutheran Theological Seminary. It is invisible, of course. Here is my dilemma. Mr. Henry Adams is in the portable now, but he is as naked as the day God made him. You see, neither of us foresaw our own reanimation. Mr. Adams is twenty-five and he couldn’t very well don only a shirt to walk into town and frankly, the trousers in your closet were much to gargantuan for him. He wrote down his measurements and if you will give me a piece of paper and a pencil I will write them down for you as I have an eidetic memory, but you do not.”

  “I do,” Victor chimed in.

  “I have heard that Victor,” Tesla replied. “But we shall see about that.”

  Young Tesla wrote out Henry Adams’ measurements for Mr. Greene. “He would appreciate it if you buy him a simple suit of clothes, Mr. Greene, and deliver the clothes to him at the portable. We would like to leave by 10 a.m.”

  “Return home?” Mr. Greene ventured.

  “No,” young Tesla replied. “We are going to take you to your original destination, November 18th, the day Abraham Lincoln arrives in Gettysburg. As Mr. Adams has informed me, in July 1863 no one in Gettysburg has any idea that the president will visit the town. As of this date, Lincoln has not even been invited. It is an idea that will come to lawyer David Wills later on. I am suggesting that you reserve your rooms for that date, as when word gets out that the president will attend the cemetery dedication, a room at the hotel will be impossible to book. Mr. Adams suggests you pay ahead and get a receipt.”

  “Why is Mr. Adams being so nice to us? He hates me.”

  Young Tesla smiled. “It seems Mr. Adams was riffling through your things in your classroom and chanced upon the shirt I am wearing and had a change of heart about you. Between us, I believe the t-shirt appeals to his vanity. To paraphrase Shakespeare, ‘vanity thy name is historian.’ He was deeply moved to find this shirt among your possessions. He insisted that I wear it to meet you as you would surely realize by my appearance in said shirt that I was telling the truth. Anyway, I must insist upon clothing for my naked companion who has been reanimated to his age of twenty-five. Mr. Adams is not a naturalist, I assure you, and requires more than a figurative fig leaf to cover his nether regions.”

  “I don’t understand, Nikola. If you are alive, where is your younger self?”

  “At age seven I was in Serbia which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. I suppose he is there, but frankly I don’t know. The real Mr. Adams is with his father in London where the senior Adams is Ambassador to the Court of Saint James. Perhaps our two selves can exist if we are on separate continents or if we are separated by a large body of water. I have no idea why this is so, but then I never thought I would ever reanimate, either. A fascinating wrinkle in time travel, I might add. As I said, I can’t wait to discuss this adventure with Albert and get his thoughts on the matter, if you will excuse my physics pun, for ‘matter can neither be created nor destroyed.’” Young Tesla laughed. Victor and Mr. Greene smiled, not wishing to encourage Tesla by chuckling.

  “Would you care to join us for breakfast, Mr. Tesla?” Victor asked.

  Young Tesla smiled. “I haven’t eaten since 1943, Victor, and I don’t seem to be very hungry this morning, either. I think my appearance in the hotel dining room and my lack of suitable apparel would draw unwanted attention. I had an odd enough glance from the front desk clerk when I asked for your room number. I’ll just wait here, but I would appreciate if you would also buy me a proper outfit suitable for a seven-year-old boy, Mr. Greene.”

  “Certainly,” Mr. Greene replied. Shall we go down to breakfast, Victor?”

  Victor and Mr. Greene had barely pulled their chairs out from the table when Bette and Minerva arrived to join them.

  “Did I hear a young boy’s voice in your room, Mr. Greene?” Bette asked. “The walls are paper thin.”

  “Yes,” Mr. Greene said with a wry smile. He put his finger to his mouth to stop Victor from blabbing.

  “Well who was it?” Minerva wanted to know.

  “A boy named Nikola,” Mr. Greene replied.

  “Nikola who?”

  “Let me think, did you catch his last name, Victor?”

  “I think it was Tesla,” Victor said.

  “Yes,” Mr. Greene agreed. “That’s it.
Nikola Tesla.”

  “Funny, Mr. Greene,” Bette frowned. “Very funny.”

  Mr. Greene shrugged. “What do you want for breakfast, kids?”

  “Wait a minute,” Minerva said. “Something isn’t right here, you two are too blasé about this. What is going on?”

  “Okay, Victor, you can tell them,” Mr. Greene said.

  “The portable is back. Just like a Deus ex machina. It is cloaked and sitting out west of the Lutheran Theological Seminary. Something really weird happened. The ghost of Nikola Tesla reanimated and brought it back. It seems our old friend Henry Adams discovered Catton and Foote’s plan, but none of the dead historians knew how to operate the classroom…”

  “It takes a teacher to run a classroom,” Greene said.

  “Uh huh,” Victor nodded. “Well, there is a little wrinkle. It seems even if you are a ghost if you stop at a time when you were alive, you reanimate. Nikola Tesla was seven in 1863. So he appeared in our room as a seven-year-old boy, but still brilliant beyond belief, his eidetic memory intact.”

  “He popped up wearing one of Mr. Greene’s goofy t-shirts,” Victor added.

  “I remember those,” Bette said. “I always liked the ‘Loose lips sink ships’ one he wore when he lectured about World War II.”

  “I liked the snake one and the ‘Join or Die’ logo,” Minerva added.

  Victor waited a moment to see if the girls were finished interrupting and, when he assumed they were, he continued. “He’s updated his device and invented a remote for it so that we will be able to summon the portable in the future at any place or time.”

  “So,” Mr. Greene said, resuming command. “We are going to eat breakfast, do a bit of shopping for Mr. Tesla and Mr. Adams, who I am afraid is in his birthday suit inside the portable. He was twenty-five at the time of the Battle of Gettysburg. Anyway, we need to buy the two fellows suitable clothes and then we are going to jump ahead to November 18th, 1863 and return to Gettysburg the day before Abraham Lincoln gives his address. Remind me, Victor, I need to make a reservation at the hotel for two rooms for the 18th and 19th and pay in advance, since once it gets out that Lincoln is coming to Gettysburg the rooms will be impossible to get.”

  “Why?” Minerva asked.

  “Tens of thousands of people will descend upon Gettysburg for the cemetery dedication, Minerva. So, let’s coordinate. We will meet in the hotel lobby at 9 a.m. and head for the Fahnestock Store, buy a suit of clothes for each of our reanimated ghosts and then walk out Chambersburg Street past the seminary. From there we shall find our portable and travel ahead a few months. Agreed?”

  “Agreed!” the three students said in unison.

  Then Victor asked, “What about Mr. Catton and Mr. Foote?”

  “They are off with the armies,” Mr. Greene said. “Catton is with the Army of the Potomac and Shelby is with the Army of Northern Virginia. The Confederates are still on this side of the Potomac River, but they are replacing the pontoon bridge that the Federals destroyed, and will be back in Virginia within a week. I am sure our little rascals will be back for Mr. Lincoln’s recitation, however. They wouldn’t miss that.”

  Halfway through breakfast, Victor remembered his promise to Basil Biggs to join him for another day of body burial. He decided that he would just have to apologize to Biggs if he saw him when they returned in November.

  *

  After breakfast, the group gathered the few items they had originally brought on their trip and reassembled in the hotel lobby with young Tesla in tow. Victor was surprised to see that young Tesla was a bit of a flirt, for when Victor introduced Nikola to Minerva, the lad winked at her and said in a little boy’s high-pitched voice, “Hello, beautiful, where have you been all my life?”

  Minerva, who was not generally quick with repartee, was out of character this day, for she snappily retorted, “I wasn’t even born yet and neither was my mother.”

  Which only made the scientist’s black, hypnotic eyes twinkle with delight. He laughed accordingly and said, “Well put, well put!” Then the sly Nikola Tesla took Minerva’s hand and said innocently, “I am only seven, Minerva, someone should hold my hand. It might as well be you.”

  Minerva laughed, but she didn’t shake his hand away. After all, like her classmates she was a fan of the late inventor. Victor felt a short rush of jealousy, but he held his tongue.

  After making reservations for the 18th and 19th of November and paying ahead for the rooms, Mr. Greene and the group left the Gettysburg Hotel. Victor and Mr. Greene strolled ahead of the girls who walked on either side of Nikola Tesla. Not missing a beat, Nikola extended a hand to Bette and the three walked together hand-in-hand across the Diamond. Tesla was a little “cake-eater,” Victor thought, remembering some Jazz Age slang. A ladies’ man.

  The girls selected suitable wear for Nikola and took the paper with Adams’ measurements and chose a rather smart outfit for Henry Brooks Adams.

  “Too bad there’s not a Men’s Warehouse,” Bette said.

  “You are right there, Bette. I miss the mall,” Minerva complained.

  As they walked out of the store Nikola, acting like a seven-year-old boy in summertime, quickly took off his shoes, tied the laces together and tossed them over his shoulder, preferring to exercise his boyhood rite of going barefoot.

  “So much better,” he observed. “It is good to feel the earth underneath one’s feet after so many years.”

  Hospital tents were stretched out in the field west of the seminary and Mr. Greene commented as they passed, “When we return in November, these will all be gone. Between now and then, Camp Letterman east of town on the York Road will be established to take care of the wounded and the dying.

  Minerva saw a nurse walking between the tents. The nurse made eye contact with Minerva and hurried toward them shouting to her, “Minerva, where are you going? We need you!”

  The group halted. Minerva, still holding on to young Nikola, called back to the nurse. “Hello, Miss Bucklin.”

  Young Tesla squeezed Minerva’s hand. “We don’t have time for this, Minerva,” he said. “Get rid of her.”

  “Tesla’s right,” Mr. Greene said. “We need to get going.”

  Too late: Sophronia Bucklin was upon them, a pouty frown on her dour face. Mr. Greene came to the rescue.

  “Miss Bucklin is it?” Mr. Greene said in a haughty voice. “I did not give my niece permission to work as a nurse. A nurse is not a fit occupation for a young lady,” Greene went on. “We are returning home to Mercersburg.”

  Sophronia Bucklin backed down. A product of the age she lived in, Sophronia was not about to argue with a girl’s uncle. She merely looked at Minerva with sad, but understanding eyes. “Sir,” Miss Bucklin said to the teacher. “I have met many men like you and you sir, are no gentleman.” And with that declaration, she turned around and walked back to the long row of hospital tents.

  “May the saints forgive my sexism, and my apologies, girls,” Mr. Greene said. “We have to be on our way.”

  “Don’t worry about it, Mr. Greene,” Bette said. “You were only playing the part of a piggish 19th century male.”

  Minerva managed a smile, but she felt awful that she had let her heroine down. “I feel so guilty,” she murmured.

  About a hundred yards beyond the hospital tents and off the Chambersburg Pike, rested the portable classroom, albeit cloaked.

  “I am keeping the cloaking device intact as there are folks not that far away. You will have to follow me precisely,” Tesla said. “Let’s get into a line. I will go first, then Minerva, Bette, Nathan and Victor. You will notice the person ahead of you will disappear into the portable before you do. We are going to use the handicap ramp, due to Mr. G’s leg injury. Victor, I am going to count on you to make sure your teacher does not stumble or fall and to catch him if he does.”

  “Yes, sir,” Victor said, feeling funny for addressing a seven-year-old as “sir.” Inside their classroom, Mr. Greene remarked, “Where is Mr.
Adams?”

  “In here!” came a shout from the closet in the back of the room. “Did you bring me suitable clothing?”

  “Yes, Mr. Adams,” Minerva said and carried the historian’s clothes to the closet door. She extended the clothes to him.

  An arm crept from the closet and a voice demanded, “Turn around. Avert your eyes!”

  “He’s a bit prim and proper, but after all he is a Bostonian,” Tesla teased. “He’s afraid to show off his shortcomings.”

  “Be quiet you little slavic elf,” Adams snapped.

  Tesla laughed. “I have been called much worse, Henry, by Edison, in fact.”

  “Thomas Edison?” Minerva asked.

  “Yes, Minerva. Tom was a bit jealous of me. But I will say this about Mr. Edison, he could take another man’s invention and turn it into a consumer product. That was his genius, I think.”

  “But didn’t Edison give you a start?” Mr. Greene asked.

  “Indeed he did, and I am indebted to him for that. I just failed to worship at his altar. I didn’t fall for the Wizard stuff. Edison was actually very superstitious. Why, Hugo Gernsback wanted to take a photograph of Edison’s tinkering hands for one of his magazines and at the last moment Edison turned over his mitts as he didn’t want his palms to be readable in the photograph. He was afraid a palm reader would tell his future to the world.”

  “That’s rather odd for a man of science,” Victor said.

  “Yes, it is, Victor,” young Tesla replied. “Okay, Mr. G., let me show you and your students what adjustments I made to your computer to allow you to more easily travel through time.”

  Mr. Greene produced the minie ball and handed it to Tesla.

  “No need for talismans anymore, Mr. Greene. I fixed that bug in the device as well. Use the remote or the computer; no need for trinkets or lucky charms or other historical hocus-pocus.”

  The students joined their teacher, and the group stood behind young Tesla who sat on a stack of books as a booster seat to the teacher’s chair so that he was level with the laptop. When he had finished his explanation, Tesla handed Mr. Greene a small device about half the size of an iPhone. Mr. Greene had to squint to see the font. However, young Tesla, showed him how to increase the font size.