by Tim Black
“The battery to the remote is solar powered. It recharges with ten minutes of sunlight and keeps the charge for up to ninety-six hours, or four days. It has a historical range of six hundred years, so that limits your travel to the fifteenth century and afterwards. That’s the overview of the updates. So, Mr. G, please type in a time you wish to arrive on November 18th and after everyone is seated and strapped in, press the new Travel button instead of the Enter tab and we will be off.”
“But what about Mr. Catton and Mr. Foote?” Minerva said, having forgotten what was said before about the dead historians’ fate.
Emerging from the classroom closet, a fully dressed Henry Adams answered Minerva, “As Mr. Greene said previously, I’m sure they will be along. If they come back at this moment, I have my orders to return the portable to its resting place at Cassadaga Area High School. They are in big trouble with Thucydides.”
“Been there, done that,” Mr. Greene said. “Is everybody ready?” the teacher asked as he readied his finger to push the Travel button.
“How does this dang thing work?” Henry Adams asked about the seat belt attached to the desk in which he sat.
Victor unbuckled his seat belt and walked over to assist the Harvard professor. He snapped him in properly.
“Thank you, boy,” Henry Adams said. “I haven’t been all thumbs since I shuffled off this mortal coil,” he added, quoting Shakespeare. “I never was one for gadgets,” he added.
When Victor was back in his seat he nodded to his teacher and Mr. Greene tapped the Travel button and the portable hummed in place. Victor looked out a classroom window and realized that the portable wasn’t moving, but time was passing by. The day slowly turned to night and then the change accelerated until the days whizzed by one after another. Mr. Greene had his bad leg up, leaning on another desk, but after a few moments, the teacher smiled and withdrew his limb, pulled up his pant leg and revealed a perfectly healed appendage. The metamorphosis reminded Victor how the Anderson twins surprisingly sobered up on the trip home from Philadelphia. As the whirling weeks passed by outside the portable, Mr. Greene’s leg miraculously healed.
The figurative flipping of the calendar’s pages slowed until finally, at noon on November 18th, 1863 the portable came to a total stop, albeit still cloaked from view. Victor peered out the window. The tent city was gone. A line of people were headed into Gettysburg on the adjacent Chambersburg Pike.
“We can’t go outside the portable,” Mr. Greene advised his students. “Someone will surely see us. We need the cover of darkness to emerge.”
“Let’s go back before dawn, Mr. Greene,” Victor suggested. “How about 5 a.m. on the 18th?”
Mr. Greene looked at Minerva and Bette, as well as young Tesla and Henry Adams. “What do you think?”
“That’s a good idea,” Tesla said.
“Show of hands?” Mr. Green said.
All the hands went up, although Henry Adams seemed a tad reluctant. Victor assumed the Harvard man’s recalcitrance was because it was not his own idea.
Mr. Greene typed in a new time and pushed the Travel button again. It was soon dark outside. 5 a.m. The students retrieved their personal items. Minerva was relieved because she had just enough toothpaste for two more days.
Tesla said, “We should leave the cloaking device on until we are ready to leave tomorrow night.”
“Everyone mind your step as you leave, as the British might say,” Mr. Greene advised.
Victor chuckled when he watched his teacher skip down the handicap ramp. Normally grumpy Henry Adams was the most excited of the group.
“This is wonderful!” the Harvard historian shouted. “I can see now why you love to travel so much, Mr. Greene.”
“Hold your voice down, professor,” Victor admonished. “You aren’t a ghost in this era, and human sound carries farther in the dark. We don’t want to draw attention to ourselves.”
“Oh…or as you young folks say, ‘my bad’?”
“Yes, sir, that’s it,” Victor replied.
“It really is a silly saying, Victor,” Adams commented.
Victor nodded in agreement.
Mr. Greene smiled at Adams. “Professor Adams, I hope you will enjoy your stay in Gettysburg.”
“Well,” Adams said as his face formed into a rare smile. “My alter ego is in stuffy London at the moment. It was truly boring there, let me tell you, but my father didn’t want me in the fight. Many of my friends paid three hundred dollars to avoid serving in the army. They weren’t proud of it later, but at least they had a ‘later.’”
“What happened to the tents, Mr. Greene?” Minerva asked.
“When Camp Letterman opened, all of the tent cities closed and the wounded were moved to that hospital. They have been gone since the end of July, I believe. Lincoln’s train will arrive later today, and we should be at the railroad depot to see his arrival,” Mr. Greene suggested.
The little group was halfway down the Chambersburg Pike on their way to the dining room at the Gettysburg Hotel when the ghosts of Bruce Catton and Shelby Foote reappeared.
“Where have y’all been?” Shelby Foote asked.
Henry Adams glared at the ghosts. “You are in deep do-do, Foote,” he said. “You, too, Catton. Thucydides is hopping mad.”
Catton looked at Henry Adams. “Who the deuce are you?” he demanded.
“Henry Brooks Adams,” Adams said. “And I have come to bring you back.”
“Damn, Adams, is that really you?” Foote said, amazed. “You are alive!”
Young Tesla spoke up. “It seems gentlemen that when a ghost travels to a time in which he was alive, the ghost reanimates.”
“Who’s the brat?” Shelby Foote asked, pointing a ghostly finger at Tesla.
“My name is Tesla, Nikola Tesla, and I invented the time travel device, you mud-brained Mississippian. And you two must be the miscreants who disregarded the students’ safety for your own vanity.”
Catton was stunned. “You are just a kid. Don’t lecture me!”
“And you are just a dead historian. I was a scientist, an inventor,” young Tesla replied, obviously annoyed. “I was seven years old in 1863. My friend Adams is twenty-five, for that was his age in that year.”
“You two have been banished from time travel for twenty years,” Adams said to Catton and Foote.
Foote looked to Catton. “Yup, that’s Henry Adams alright, Bruce. Still the stuck up little prig.”
“I am not a little prig,” Adams protested.
“If there weren’t ladies present I would tell you what you really are, Henry,” Catton added.
Mr. Greene intervened. The last thing he needed at the moment was squabbling ghosts. “Is Gettysburg crowded?”
“It sure is,” Catton said. “Once it got out that Abe Lincoln was coming to town, the people flocked here. You know they closed Letterman Hospital a few days ago, but they kept all the tents intact to accommodate all the out-of- town visitors. You can’t get a room anywhere.”
“We have reservations,” Mr. Greene said.
“Good thinking, Nathan,” Foote said in a congratulatory tone. “Bruce and I are going to float around for a while, but we’ll catch up with you at the cemetery dedication tomorrow for sure.”
“You are not to be out of my sight,” Adams demanded.
“Oh stuff it Henry!” Catton said.
Shelby Foote put his thumb to his nose and wiggled his ghostly fingers at Henry Adams. “Suck it, Henry!” he shouted.
“Miscreants!” Adams retorted.
*
The dining room at the Gettysburg Hotel did not open until 6 a.m. and the group waited in the lobby. Mr. Greene took the time to confirm his reservations for two rooms, sorry now that he had not reserved three. The four males were to share one room and the girls the other.
“We can’t get into our rooms until ten,” Mr. Greene said as he returned to the group. “I suppose after breakfast we could walk up Baltimore Street and see how the
cemetery is coming along.”
The teacher and his students watched in wonder as Nikola Tesla and Henry Adams gorged on food. Even though Minerva thought the fare at the breakfast table was rather bland, the reanimated scientist and the back-to-life historian savored every crumb and every morsel.
“Ah,” young Tesla squeaked. “To eat again! Blessed butter!”
“Yes, to taste the bread of life…literally,” the history professor said. “Oh my,” he said excitedly. “I feel a bowel movement coming on.” Adams excused himself from the table to search out the closest privy. In a few minutes he returned, a smile of satisfaction marking his countenance.
Bette and Minerva chuckled at the odd pair and watched as they ravenously consumed everything within arm’s length. In fact, the entire group ate heartily and Mr. Greene, in a festive mood, gave the waitress a twenty-dollar gold piece and told her to keep the change.
The waitress smiled profusely and asked, “Weren’t some of you here before…during the battle?”
“Yes,” Mr. Greene replied. “And you were our waitress then. We are back in town for the cemetery dedication.”
“Everybody is,” the waitress remarked. “The most people we’ve had in town since Robert E. Lee stopped by for a visit,” she smiled. “But these folks are a lot nicer.”
“I imagine so,” said Mr. Greene.
After the waitress walked away, Minerva whispered to her teacher. “That was nice of you, Mr. Greene.”
“It was,” Bette agreed.
Victor was too busy shoveling food in his mouth to comment.
“I will ask all of you to return any unused money upon our return. We may need it to finance our next trip.”
All three students nodded agreement.
They started off for the cemetery after breakfast. However, halfway to the Evergreen Cemetery, Bette said to Victor, “Victor, what do we say to Elizabeth Thorn?”
“What do you mean, Bette?”
“You and I are the Kardashians, remember?”
“Oh, Lord, that’s right,” Victor said. “Mr. Greene, we have a problem.”
Mr. Greene signaled for the group to stop. “What is it, Victor?”
“We met Elizabeth Thorn and Bette said our last name was Kardashian” Victor explained.
“What?” Mr. Greene said.
“I’m sorry Mr. Greene, it was the first thing that came in to my mind,” Bette apologized.
“That’s really stupid, Bette,” Minerva said.
“Oh shut up, Minerva!” Bette responded.
“Okay, okay…I will straighten things out if it comes up. I’ll say that I told you to use a false name,” Greene suggested.
“Did you call yourself Kim Kardashian, Kromer?” Minerva teased.
Bette slipped her erstwhile pal the Italian salute.
The group stopped by the Gatehouse at the Evergreen Cemetery. The soldiers’ cemetery was adjacent to the local Gettysburg cemetery. Outside the building, swaying gently in a rocking chair sat a woman holding an infant. She was cooing to the infant as the baby drifted off to sleep.
Bette, dragging a reluctant Victor by the hand, went over to the woman. “Hello, Mrs. Thorn,” she smiled.
Smiling Elizabeth Thorn looked up, her face recognizing Bette. “I remember you,” Elizabeth Thorn said. “You and your brother dug a grave for me. That was very Christian of you.”
Bette smiled.
“It’s the Kardashians,” Elizabeth Thorn said.
Bette blushed. “Mrs. Thorn, I’m afraid I didn’t give you our true name when we met before.”
“Oh?” said Elizabeth Thorn curiously.
“You see, we were running away from my uncle,” Bette said.
Victor looked at his classmate. He raised an eyebrow in disbelief with a poem reciting in his mind… “oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.”
“Yes, sister, tell her our true name,” Victor needled.
Bette smiled at her classmate. “Okay, I will, ‘brother,’” she said. “Mrs. Thorn we are the Kromers.”
Victor nearly gagged.
“Oh,” Mrs. Thorn said. “Are you German?”
“It only gets more tangled,” Victor mumbled.
“Ah, our grandparents came from Germany.”
“Oh? Where?”
Bette was tongue tied.
“Berlin,” Victor said, rescuing her. “We dropped the umlaut, of course.”
“But you didn’t change the name to Kramer,” Elizabeth Thorn said. “I knew a family that changed from Kromer to Kramer when they landed in America,” Mrs. Thorn said. “Would you like to hold my little Grace? Grace Meade Thorn. Her middle name is for the commander of our victorious army, General Meade. Grace was born on November 1st.” She handed Bette her baby.
“Is that your uncle over there with the little boy, the other man and the girl?” Thorn asked.
“Yes,” Bette replied.
“He doesn’t look so mean,” Mrs. Thorn said.
Victor drifted off back to the group as Bette and Elizabeth Thorn continued to chat.
“She seems to be fast friends with Elizabeth Thorn,” Mr. Greene observed.
Minerva suddenly felt jealous and competitive. “I met Julia Culp, Sarah Broadhead and Sophronia Bucklin,” she bragged.
“Uh huh,” Mr. Greene said without much enthusiasm.
“So what, Minerva. I met General Meade and General Custer as well as Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, but you don’t hear me bragging about it,” Victor said, and then he blushed when he realized that he had just bragged to her.
Mr. Greene looked at Minerva. “Minerva, will you go over to Bette and see if you can pry her away from Mrs. Thorn?”
Victor was startled when they entered the National Cemetery. There were fresh, open graves and Victor spotted two black men lowering a Union soldier into the grave. He recognized one.
“Mr. Biggs!” Victor shouted and ran over to the man.
Responding to his name, Basil Biggs turned around and recognized Victor. He smiled and shouted back. “Where have you been, boy? You only worked one day,” Biggs said, adding, “Ain’t that just like a white boy, lazy as can be,” he teased. But he held out his hand to Victor.
“We left for Mercersburg the next day, Mr. Biggs,” Victor lied. “We came back to see the president.”
“Gonna be a big day tomorrow. Father Abraham and all. You missed some big money, boy. I have put away a few hundred dollars digging up the bodies and replanting them here. You see the design is an idea of lawyer McConaughy, the graves sort of fan out. They’ll be putting an obelisk up and the graves will fan out from there in a semicircle. An awful lot of men here that have no names on the stones. Officers are buried next to enlisted men. No Rebels though. I kind of feel sorry for them,” Biggs added. He pointed to Mr. Greene and the group. “That your family is it?”
“Yes.”
“Your sisters or your sweethearts?” he asked, referring to Bette and Minerva.
Victor blushed. “Sisters,” he lied. “I guess I better join them. I’m glad I was able to see you again, Mr. Biggs.”
“Basil, boy. Call me Basil.”
Mr. Greene, in lecture mode, stood on a ridge at Cemetery Hill and explained the design of the cemetery to the group, repeating some information that Basil Biggs told Victor. “Over there,” he pointed. “Tomorrow they will have a dais and Lincoln will deliver his famous speech following an oration by Edward Everett, the most famous speaker of his day. Lawyer David Wills is the man who had the stroke of genius and invited the president to make a ‘few appropriate remarks.’ However, the cemetery’s layout was identical to a semicircular cemetery layout that David McConaughy suggested in a letter to the editor a year before. Landscape architect William Saunders, perhaps inspired by McConaughy, designed the cemetery as a wide semicircle that radiated from a central point. A grand monument, an obelisk, will eventually mark the central point. The cemetery is divided by states, and the smaller states are closer
to the monument as there were less casualties. From now until March of next year, the bodies will continue to be buried in the new cemetery.”
Tesla and Henry Adams wandered off to inspect the battlefield and Minerva joined them for she, unlike Victor and Bette, had not witnessed the fighting. The bodies were long gone, but many trees were splintered, pieces of equipment were strewn about here and there and no one had filled in the Union trenches, which had been a redoubt for the Federal soldiers on Culp’s Hill.
Mr. Greene, Victor and Bette joined the other three and they began walking out along Cemetery Ridge, pausing only when they came to the copse of trees and the stone fence. Speaking like a registered battlefield tour guide, Victor said to the group, “This is the high-water mark of the Confederacy, the apex of Pickett’s Charge,” Victor explained. He pointed into the distance to Big Round Top. “Bette and I were atop the larger of the two hills at what they call Big Round Top. We watched the Rebel assault from there.”
“I am envious,” Mr. Greene said.
“Don’t be, Mr. Greene,” Bette interjected. “It was horrible.”
“But it was history,” Victor said.
“Yes, but horrible history,” Bette said.
Mr. Greene defused the coming argument between Victor and Bette. “Sometimes,” he said. “History IS horrible.”
*
They spent the rest of the day enjoying the cool fall weather and wandering around the battlefield, which looked so different without leaves on the trees. Somehow, Victor thought, the battlefield seemed more deathlike without the foliage.
They skipped lunch as Victor provided the group with a guided tour, recounting the fighting of the second day on Little Round Top. Seeing that her classmate was in his element, Bette gave Victor his due and did not interrupt him as he replayed the battle for them.
In the afternoon, they checked into the hotel and relaxed in their rooms as they awaited the arrival of President Lincoln’s train. About ten minutes before it arrived the group met in the lobby and headed north on Carlisle Street to the railroad station. A crowd had gathered. It was 6 p.m. and the streetlights were lit. Some men held lit torches.