Fallen in Fredericksburg Page 4

“Would you like us to apologize to her?” Greg asked. “We really are sorry.”

  Mrs. Belman thought about it, but then shook her head. “I’ll tell her you came by to apologize. She gets very emotional sometimes, and she does tend to overreact about things.” She paused. “Just promise me you won’t do anything like that again. And it wouldn’t hurt for you kids to be nice to Deedee. She’s had a hard time making friends this year.”

  I wondered if that might have been part of the reason Little Belman had come by the Kitchen Sink earlier — not just to threaten us about her brother, but because secretly she was lonely and wanted to make some friends, as weird as that sounded.

  We assured Mrs. Belman that we would be nice to Little Belman from now on, and we told her again how sorry we were, and we probably would have continued standing there apologizing, but she finally interrupted to thank us, and then shooed us away.

  “Whew!” Julie said. “I’m glad that’s over.”

  “Yeah,” said Greg. “And I’m just glad she wasn’t mad at us.”

  “And we didn’t have to see Belman,” I added. “Or Little Belman.”

  We turned and headed down the steep steps to our bikes. It was getting even darker and cooler now that the sun was almost all the way down. But it wasn’t too cold for this time of the year, so that was a relief since I still had to ride over to the hospital.

  But we weren’t going to get away quite so easily, as it turned out, because a water balloon exploded on the sidewalk beside us, and then another, both splashing all over us and our bikes.

  Little Belman was leaning out of a second-story window, holding yet another. “You guys are big fat liars!” she shouted. “I heard what you said to my mom! And the ghost I saw wasn’t a boy, it was a girl!”

  Then she threw the third water balloon, and this time her aim was better. Greg ducked but it hit him anyway, right in the back. We didn’t wait to see if she had any more. We hopped on our bikes and tore away from there as fast as we could. A block away we nearly ran into Belman himself, and his three friends who we called the Three Stooges. They scattered off the sidewalk as we zoomed past. I was surprised they didn’t push us off our bikes.

  We didn’t have time to do what Julie calls a postmortem on the attack by Little Belman, and everything else that had happened that afternoon, which was almost too much to even hold in my brain. According to Julie, a postmortem is when you go back over things to figure out how they happened and what they could mean.

  I had to split off from Julie and Greg to go the hospital, and they were both late getting home, too, so we just said we’d talk to one another later, and off we went. Mom was asleep when I got to her room, but just dozing. I was going to sit down and read a book so when she woke up I could pretend I’d been there for a long time, but she opened her eyes as soon as I walked in.

  “Must have been quite a band practice you guys had,” she said. She smiled. I breathed a sigh of relief because she didn’t seem mad or anything that I was a little late.

  “Sorry we took so long,” I said. “How are you feeling?”

  “Well enough to go home,” she said. “But they want to keep me here for one more night for observation. They didn’t say anything about me having to stay in the room, though, so what do you say we take one of those hospital wheelchairs out for a spin?”

  “Who’s riding — me or you?” I asked, trying to be upbeat even though I was bummed she had to stay another night. “Or were you thinking we could both be in one and have a race?”

  Mom laughed, which made me happy. “You push,” she said. “I ride.”

  “What about Dad?” I asked. “He come by yet?”

  “Not yet,” Mom said. “And he better bring us something good to make up for it when he gets here.”

  “Or else what?” I asked.

  Mom laughed again. “Or else if we see him while we’re out joyriding in the wheelchair, we run over his foot.”

  Dad showed up fifteen minutes later. Lucky for him he brought donuts.

  “I’ve written out a list of questions,” Julie said the next afternoon when we met up for band practice. My mom was out of the hospital and resting back home. She practically threw me out of the house when I got home from school because I kept checking on her and asking if she needed anything.

  “Okay,” Greg said. “Let’s hear what you’ve got.”

  “Number one, let’s start with the ghost. How could he remember that specific day — December 5, 1862 — and could also remember that his parents died from tuberculosis, but not remember his name, or what unit he was with, or where he was from?”

  “That sounds like about six questions,” I pointed out, but Julie ignored me and answered her own question.

  “The only explanation is that, well, he’s a ghost, and it’s hard to remember everything right away,” she said. “We’ve seen it before with our other ghosts. Also, he disappeared right when things seemed to be coming back to him, about his parents, and about him and his little brother being orphans, so maybe getting emotional about all that was too much for him and that’s why he disappeared just then.”

  “Wow,” Greg said. “You’ve already thought a lot about this.”

  Julie nodded. “I must have stayed up most of the night. Anyway, we’re just going to have to wait for the ghost to come back to see what else he can remember.”

  “Wait,” Greg said. “Since yesterday was the real December 5 — you know, in our time — and when he found that out that’s when he remembered his December 5, maybe since today is the real December 6 now he’ll be able to remember his December 6. From 1862.”

  “That makes sense,” I said. “Plus, I bet he’ll keep remembering more stuff from before December 6, too.” I shook my head. “Boy, this ghost stuff can sure get complicated. They’re all just so different from one another.”

  “Except one thing,” Greg said. “Which is that it’s us they keep coming back to, and we’re the only ones who can see them.”

  “Not quite,” Julie interrupted. “What about Little Belman? She saw the ghost yesterday afternoon when she came down here to confront Anderson.”

  “Is that on your question list?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “And right after it is the question about why she said the ghost was a girl, not a boy.”

  “Yeah, that was really weird,” Greg said. “Maybe she just got confused. It was probably her first ghost and she did get pretty freaked out.”

  “Any more questions?” I asked. “Because I don’t think we have very good answers to the Little Belman questions. And I’m not too sure we’ve got things quite figured out about what the ghost was able to remember yesterday, either.”

  “I have one,” Greg said. “How in the world did that little kid manage to eavesdrop on us talking to her mom, then race upstairs, fill three water balloons, and get to the window to throw them at us that fast?”

  Julie shrugged. “Either she already had the water balloons waiting, or else she’s just super efficient.”

  “Maybe she’s the Flash,” Greg said. “World’s Fastest Man. Or Girl Flash, I guess.”

  “Oh, please,” Julie said. “There’s no such thing as the Flash. That’s a comic book.”

  “Oh, sure,” Greg said, laughing. “So we’re okay believing in ghosts, but not the Flash.”

  “Yes, that’s right,” Julie said. “Ghosts are real.”

  “Back to Little Belman,” I said. “I’m still stuck on the question about how she could see the ghost. Remember, we’ve seen ghosts while we were riding with Uncle Dex in his car, and we’ve seen them at school — or at least I have — but nobody else, not even Uncle Dex, has seen them. So why Little Belman?”

  Greg pulled off his beanie and scratched his wild red hair. “I guess some people just can, and she’s one of them, like us. Only she got so scared that maybe she won’t see any more.”

  “We got scared, too,” I pointed out. “At first.”

  “Yeah, but we got over it
,” Greg said. “She went home and hid in her house and filled up water balloons.”

  “Which, now that I think about it, she probably did to throw at the ghost if it followed her home,” Julie said. “That must be why she was able to get to them so quickly and throw them at us.” She looked at Greg. “And on us, in Greg’s case.”

  “Maybe we should get back to the important business here,” I said, “which is still the Battle of Fredericksburg and what happened to our ghost.”

  “And what happened to his little brother,” Greg added.

  “Right,” Julie said. “So here’s what I think. The ghost and his little brother were both in the Union army, and probably in the same unit, and the little brother deserted, or got killed or went missing or got captured in the battle. So that’s why the ghost is still looking for him, or trying to find out what happened to him.”

  “The ghost must have gotten killed, too,” I said. “Because, well, he’s a ghost.”

  “Of course, Anderson,” Julie responded. “That goes without saying. And like the other ghosts we’ve met, he must have been missing, too. And that’s part of the mystery we have to solve.”

  “So it’s a double mystery,” Greg said. “The ghost and the ghost’s little brother. Wow. We haven’t had to tackle anything like this before.”

  “There’s something else making this one difficult,” Julie said. “With the other ghosts we were able to track down people who were still alive and could help us solve the mystery of what happened to them.”

  “But this ghost died more than a hundred and fifty years ago!” I exclaimed.

  “Yep,” said Greg. “Nobody still alive from back then, that’s for sure.”

  There was a sort of shimmering in the air next to Greg, and then, like a blurry picture slowly coming into focus, the ghost finally, fully, appeared.

  “Well, I’m here now, ain’t I?” he said.

  “Welcome back,” I said, but he dismissed it with a wave of his hand.

  “No time for niceness,” he said. “Let’s get back to the remembering. Now what day is it?”

  “It was still snowing on December 6, I remember that much,” the ghost said after we told him what date it was for the actual day we were in. That seemed to be all the prompting he needed.

  “They sent us back out on a scouting patrol, only this time we didn’t just go down to where the bridge used to be. This time we made our way on the bank upriver a ways, to where it was lots of big rocks and rapids. You had to watch where you were walking on account of how our feet were so cold we couldn’t hardly feel them, and you could step in water and not even know it. I heard about some of our boys who got frostbite and even lost some toes. Surgeons had to pull them right off.”

  I shuddered at the thought of that.

  “I guess you guys were still waiting for the pontoons,” Greg said.

  The ghost made a fist and shook it at Greg. “Don’t even talk to me about those pontoons! I’m still mad about the sorry bums back in Washington that fell down on the job! Word was that we could have waltzed right across that river with no Rebels on the other side to give us any trouble at all if we’d just had those pontoons earlier, when we needed them. And then we could have marched right up on Richmond and the Rebels wouldn’t have had their capital anymore or their president, Mr. Jefferson Davis, and the war might have been over right then and there. If we’d only been able to cross that river in time.”

  “Wasn’t there someplace else you could have forded the river?” I asked. “Somewhere upstream, where you could have maybe walked over on the rocks?”

  “Well, sure,” the ghost said. “You don’t think we scouted all up and down that Rappahannock? Plenty of places troops could have gotten across, but not the cannon and not the horses and not the wagons or anything else on wheels. And you’re talking about a hundred thousand of us boys in blue. It wasn’t just about getting across yourself. It was about getting a whole army across. And you need bridges for that. And for bridges you need pontoon boats to string across the river and planks to nail on.”

  “So was your brother with you?” I asked. “Was he in the Union army, too? We were wondering about that.”

  “Well, of course he was,” the ghost said. “What do you think I was doing there except trying to take care of him?”

  “We just figured you both joined up together,” Greg said. “At least that’s what I thought. I read last night that they would take guys even if they were teenagers, and some were really young teenagers and lied about their age.”

  “I didn’t lie about my age,” the ghost said. “Or Frankie’s, either. Might have fudged a little, okay, but a lie — that’s when you’re trying to pull one over on somebody and do something mean to them, and we didn’t do anything mean to anybody. We just joined up was all. And thank you for the bonus money, too.”

  I wanted to ask a hundred more questions, but Julie beat me to it. “Can you tell us anything else about that day, December 6, and the scouting party you were on?”

  “Saw more Johnny Rebs,” he said. “I remember that. Frankie was nervous, but I reminded him about us shouting over to the Rebs the day before and them shouting back, and us having a pretty regular conversation. Then I pulled out a sack of sugar and showed it to him. He asked me what it was for and I said it was for trading with the Rebels, of course.”

  “How did you trade it?” Julie asked.

  “Went out on the rocks as far as I could get. Me and another fellow from my unit. Couple of those Rebels did the same. We probably weren’t more than twenty feet apart from them, but couldn’t get close, so we had to hurl that sack to them and they had to hurl back what they had for us.”

  “Tobacco?” Julie asked.

  The ghost nodded.

  “You know that’s bad for you, don’t you?” Julie asked. “It can give you cancer.”

  The ghost blinked at her the way he’d done the day before when we made reference to things that were totally foreign to him. Then he shrugged. “Doesn’t much matter, ’cause they caught the bag of sugar, but they couldn’t get enough throw into that tobacco pouch and it landed square in the water. I thought my buddy was going to jump right in after it, but I held him back. Wasn’t a thing we could do about it except stand there and try not to cry.”

  “So you didn’t get anything in the trade?” Greg asked.

  The ghost shook his head. “Not that day. They said if we came back the next day, they’d have some more for us, though, so we said okay, we would volunteer again for scout duty. It wasn’t until about then that I saw those Rebels we’d been trading with, a couple of them didn’t have shoes or boots on, just rags tied around their feet. Those boys were cold and shivering a whole lot worse than us. I mean, I couldn’t feel my toes, but at least I had leather boots on.”

  “Is there anything else you remember about that day?” Julie asked. “Anything else about your brother or your unit, besides your brother’s name?”

  The ghost went back into blinking mode for a minute, and then shook his head. “Frankie was real quiet anyway, and he didn’t say much. I made sure he stayed on the driest ground anywhere we went, and I made him stay to the back, away from the riverbank, just in case there were some of those Rebels over there who had a big idea to shoot at us instead of trade with us. But that didn’t happen. Didn’t happen on that day anyway.”

  He blinked some more, not saying anything else, and I hoped there might be more. There was.

  “Oh yeah,” he continued. “When we came back, those pontoons were still just sitting there where they’d been since the end of November. Some of them had come from Washington, some on wagons a hundred miles all the way from Harper’s Ferry. They were parked up on the ridge high above the Rappahannock River. We had artillery up there and had been shelling the town off and on — any time any of their snipers decided to take potshots at us. Now the engineers — that’s the boys who had the job of putting together the bridges — they just needed to find a way to get the po
ntoons down to the river, and into the river, and across the river, and you could just tell that wasn’t going to be easy. Not easy at all.”

  The way the ghost had settled in, just chattering away about the events of December 6, 1862, had me thinking he would just stick around and keep talking for the rest of the afternoon. I had been trying to figure out his accent since the day before, and the whole time he talked today I kept trying. I finally decided it must be a New York accent, though not a very strong one. There was a kind of musical quality to his voice, too, that I still couldn’t quite figure out.

  Then, before I could, and almost right in the middle of a sentence, the ghost vanished. He knew it as it was happening, because he even managed to blurt out, “Wait!”

  And just like that he was gone.

  “Wow!” Greg said. “That was fast.”

  “I know,” Julie said. “Usually it’s more gradual than that. That made me dizzy.”

  “Me too,” Greg said, and he put his hands on his beanie as if to stop his head from spinning. I was pretty sure he was just playing along with Julie, not that she seemed to mind. She smiled at him and he smiled back at her.

  “It didn’t make me dizzy,” I said, partly just to be contrary. “Just frustrated. We still didn’t find out his name, or what regiment or brigade or anything he was in, or where he was from, though I’m guessing it’s New York.”

  Julie nodded. I guess she wasn’t dizzy anymore. “I was thinking that, too. Because of his accent.”

  “I kind of thought he might be Irish,” Greg said. “Or part Irish anyway.”

  “That’s it!” I exclaimed. “That’s the musical part of his voice I couldn’t figure out. He’s New Yorkish and he’s Irish.”

  “I don’t think New Yorkish is a word,” Julie said, but I let it go. She knew what I meant. Greg nodded in agreement.

  “Yeah, that sounds about right,” he said. “Now we just need him to come back so we can ask him. Maybe us suggesting it will help him remember.”

  “Wonder if he’ll come back today?” I asked. As if in answer, the hounds on the other side of the wall at the Dog and Suds started howling.