Fallen in Fredericksburg Page 5

  “Probably not,” Julie said. “So maybe we should actually do something with these instruments.”

  “Like what?” Greg asked.

  Julie rolled her eyes. “Uh, like practice?”

  Belman — not Little Belman, but the real Belman — was back giving us a hard time the next day at school. He came up behind us in the cafeteria and didn’t say anything at first. Julie had something called a bento box that her dad, who was Japanese, had made for her, with Japanese food: sushi, edamame, and seaweed salad. (Julie’s mom was American, and when she made Julie’s lunch it was usually just a peanut butter sandwich.) Belman grabbed a piece of sushi, lifted the top slice of bread off Greg’s peanut butter sandwich, and shoved the sushi down on the peanut butter. Then he smashed the bread back on top. He started to do something with Julie’s seaweed salad, but she pinched the back of his hand with her chopsticks and that stopped him.

  “Hey, I was just going to look at it,” Belman said. “I never saw anybody eat grass before. I thought only cows did that.”

  “It’s not grass,” Julie said. “Now leave us alone.”

  Belman pretended to have his feelings hurt. “Ouch! Here I am just trying to be friendly and you’re being rude to me. That’s not nice.”

  “You’re not nice,” Greg said, examining his sandwich and probably trying to decide if it would still be edible if he took the sushi off.

  Belman’s voice changed, and so did the look on his face. “You’re right,” he said. “I’m not. Especially when some little punks go scaring my sister. We look out for one another in my family, so you three better watch out.”

  He didn’t wait for us to respond. Instead he grabbed Greg’s peanut butter sandwich — with the sushi still inside — and ate it. Then he left.

  “I’m beginning to not like that guy,” Greg said, which was the understatement of the day.

  That afternoon at band practice we had just worked our way through one song when Julie stopped playing, right in the middle of the chorus.

  “What?” Greg asked. “Why’d you stop playing?”

  “Because I’ve been thinking about something,” she said. “About the ghost.”

  Greg and I waited, still holding our guitar picks above the strings as if Julie might decide instead to finish the song. She didn’t.

  “Well, ever since Little Belman said the ghost was a girl, I keep picturing his face and just, well, wondering.”

  “You mean if he could actually be a girl?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said. “I mean no. I mean I’m not sure. He’s so young, for one thing. And you can tell he doesn’t shave. There’s no beard or anything, or even, like, the stubble of a beard. Or peach fuzz. And remember how when we first saw him I said ‘she’ instead of ‘he,’ but I didn’t even realize it at first? Maybe I subconsciously recognized that the ghost was a girl even then.”

  “That could be,” Greg said. “And another thing — we were talking about how the ghost had a New York accent and maybe an Irish accent, but did you guys notice he also has a pretty high voice, kind of like a girl’s?”

  “This is crazy,” I said, even though I had noticed that, too. “Why would a girl be in the army? And pretending to be a boy?”

  Greg drummed his fingers on his guitar for a second. “They let women in the army now,” he said.

  “Yeah,” I countered. “But they didn’t let them in back then.”

  “About that,” Julie said, “I’ve been doing some research.”

  “And what did you find out?” I asked.

  “That there were actually hundreds of women who fought in the Union and the Confederate armies during the Civil War. They dressed up like men, in uniforms, and just pretended they were guys.”

  “Wow,” Greg said. “That is crazy. Why would they do that?”

  “All kinds of reasons,” Julie said. “Maybe they wanted to serve with a family member, or even their husband, or maybe they just believed in the cause they were fighting for so much that they wanted to be part of the fight, or maybe for a lot of them it was for the money. There were a lot of really poor people back then, and women didn’t have a lot of options for jobs that paid very much.”

  “But how could they get away with it?” I asked.

  “From what I read, it wasn’t very hard,” Julie said. “They’d cut their hair short, and uniforms usually didn’t fit too well so they’d get a loose-fitting uniform. And a lot of times when you joined the army they didn’t have a doctor examine you, they just maybe looked at your teeth and made sure you had two arms and two legs and the right number of fingers and toes, and made sure you could see okay, and that you weren’t too obviously sick, and that was the end of it. So nobody ever saw you with your clothes off.”

  “What about when you took a shower, or went to the bathroom?” Greg asked. “That must have been weird.”

  “Not really,” Julie said. “Back then they hardly ever took baths or showered or anything. They slept in their uniforms. And if you went to the bathroom you could just go out in the woods and do your business and nobody had to see you. It just wasn’t that hard to pull off pretending you were a man. Or a teenage boy.”

  “So are you saying that our ghost was — is — actually a girl?” I asked.

  Julie shrugged. “I don’t know. I’m just saying that Little Belman got me wondering if it’s possible, that’s all.”

  “Well, anything’s possible,” I said, though I still wasn’t buying the idea.

  “Did you find out anything else in your research about this?” Greg asked, not ready to quit the topic.

  Julie nodded. “Here’s the totally crazy part. There were at least three women that they know about who fought in the Battle of Fredericksburg. One was a girl, a teenager, named Lizzie Compton. She had joined the army — pretending to be a boy — when she was just thirteen or fourteen, and she fought in a bunch of battles, on the Union side. She got wounded during the Battle of Fredericksburg but recovered. That’s how they found out she was a girl — when the doctors were treating her and bandaging up her wounds.”

  “What did they do then?” Greg asked.

  “Made her leave the army,” Julie said, “but apparently she just joined up again under a different name and fought with another unit.”

  Greg grinned. “That’s awesome.”

  “And there was another woman, a lady named Sarah Edmonds,” Julie continued. “She used the fake name of Private Franklin Thompson, and during the Battle of Fredericksburg she was an orderly, and she rode a horse for twelve straight hours the day of the battle, under fire just about the whole time, bringing orders and reports from the headquarters to the front and back.”

  “What about the others?” Greg asked. I was too dumbfounded by all Julie was saying to ask any questions myself.

  “The third woman who fought on the Union side, they just knew she was from New Jersey, and she was a corporal at the start of the battle, but she was so fierce and heroic in battle that they promoted her to sergeant. And that’s not all.”

  Greg and I were both just sitting there openmouthed, stunned by all Julie was telling us.

  “It turned out that during the battle she was pregnant!” Julie exclaimed. “And a month later — just one month later! — she had a baby.”

  That was so wild that Greg and I had to laugh and shake our heads. “You swear you’re not making this up?” Greg asked.

  Julie raised her right hand. “I totally swear. And that lady Sarah Edmonds, she actually wrote a book that was sort of about her experiences in the war. In her book — which was a bestseller right after the war — she pretended that she had just been a nurse and a spy during the war, but stuff came out later that people knew about her actually being in uniform during the fighting and pretending to be a man.”

  “So it’s definitely possible that our ghost is a girl!” I said, still not believing that I was saying such a thing. But the more Julie talked, and the more I pictured our ghost, and the more I thought a
bout her voice and the way she looked, and how certain Little Belman was, the more I was starting to come around.

  The dogs next door got louder again with their barking and we all looked over at the wall.

  “This would be the perfect time for the ghost to show up,” Greg said. “You know, we’re talking about him and zeroing in on this big question, and then, boom, dogs start barking and then he shows up and remembers everything.”

  “Just like in the movies,” Julie said.

  “What movies?” Greg asked.

  Julie sighed. “It’s just an expression, Greg. You know how movies always end in clichés. Coincidences happen. That sort of thing.”

  “Well, this isn’t exactly a movie,” I said.

  The ghost must have agreed, because he — or possibly she — didn’t show up that afternoon. We stumbled through a couple of songs and then we all went upstairs to head for home.

  As we rode our bikes down Hanover Street, shivering from the cold, Julie said, “During the Civil War everything in front of us was open fields.” Now it was a neighborhood full of houses and streets. The high school football stadium was at the bottom of the long hill we were coasting down. Julie continued, “So basically once the Union troops started down this hill there was no cover.” She pointed ahead of us, where the land and the street rose up again, higher than the hill we were on. “Marye’s Heights was where the Confederates held the high ground with their headquarters and their artillery, and all their troops, or half of them, actually, dug in behind the stone wall at Sunken Road.”

  We all knew the stone wall and Sunken Road because the battlefield there was a national park, and tourists came all the time to walk around and see where the Battle of Fredericksburg took place. I tried to imagine what it looked like back in 1862 — to the Union soldiers having to go down this hill and then cross open fields to attack the Confederates, and to the Confederate troops opposite them, dug in behind that stone wall, looking down on the tens of thousands of soldiers in blue, exposed as they marched forward toward the Rebel positions, bayonets attached to the ends of their muskets, cannonballs flying back and forth between the two great armies, and a cold winter sun.

  We all stopped our bikes halfway down the hill to zip up our jackets. Maybe they were thinking, and seeing, the same thing I was. Everything felt ghostly to me all of a sudden as I thought about the thousands of men — and some girls and women pretending to be men — who fought here, right exactly here, and so many of them died here in the most terrible ways.

  “Well, bye, you guys,” I finally said, my voice faint for some reason, as I started up again and coasted to the bottom of the hill. They kept going straight, in the direction of Sunken Road — Greg said he was going to ride with Julie the rest of the way to her house since it was getting dark. I turned right on Kenmore Avenue. As I headed west to my neighborhood I remembered something else we’d read — that Kenmore actually used to be a stream — they called it a millrace because it carried water over from the river to operate a mill there south of town — and it was one more obstacle the Union soldiers had to get past on their march to their doom.

  My mind was churning with all the questions we had, and how few answers, when I got home. Mom was just texting me, wondering where I was and to tell me dinner was on the table, when I walked in.

  “You know the days are getting shorter,” she said, her voice sharper than it had been in the hospital. “We were starting to get worried.”

  Dad brought in the food from the kitchen and put it on the dining room table. “You know the rule, Anderson,” he said. “Always call or text if you’re going to be late.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “We just got caught up in practice and stuff.”

  Mom managed to smile, but only barely, and I realized she was still in some pain, either from the MS or from the fall. I felt even worse then about being late and making her worry. I went over and gave her a big hug, and for some reason we both just stayed there for, like, a whole minute or more, hugging each other.

  “Hey,” Dad said finally. “Dinner’s getting cold and you’re leaving me out!”

  Instead of us stopping hugging to eat, though, we let Dad come over and join us and we had one of those big dorky group hugs people always make fun of but that sure felt good right then and there. Sometimes, for no good reason, you just want to be that close to your mom and dad, and you almost feel like you could hold on to them like that the whole rest of the night.

  Julie texted me and Greg later, after dinner. Hey you guys. Did you know today is Pearl Harbor Day?

  She didn’t text anything else, but I knew what she was thinking — or rather who she was thinking about: our first ghost, William Foxwell, who was in the Navy in World War II and served on an aircraft carrier called the Yorktown until he went missing during the famous Battle of Midway in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. We helped him remember what happened — how he went missing and how he died — so he could finally find peace all these years later.

  The war started for him, as it did with the rest of America, with the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii on December 7, 1941.

  I texted Julie and Greg back — We shouldn’t ever forget — and then said a prayer for our friend.

  I slept fitfully that night, tossing and turning and once nearly falling out of bed from flopping around so much. I woke up and found myself hanging off the edge with the covers twisted up around my legs. I was shivering, too. It took me a couple of minutes to untwist the sheets and blankets and set everything back in order so I could crawl back under and not be freezing. My mind was still busy, though — first from dreams about ghosts, and then from all those questions I’d come home with about our newest ghost. In my dreams, all the ghosts we’d met so far were singing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” which was, of course, really weird. And then I couldn’t get it out of my head.

  I wished our new ghost would show up in my room like the other three had done, but I didn’t expect it to happen for some reason. Things just seemed different about our Civil War ghost. He was okay coming next door from the Dog and Suds to the Kitchen Sink basement, but that was about all. And where had he been today? Had he been close enough to hear us talking — and speculating on the possibility that he was a girl in disguise? — but not close enough for us to see him?

  At some point in the night I did the mental math and figured out we were just six days away from the anniversary of the actual Battle of Fredericksburg — December 13. And if we weren’t able to figure out what happened to our ghost by then, I wondered if that would be it, if our chance would be gone, and if the ghost would be stuck haunting the Dog and Suds forever, every year from the middle of November until the middle of December. Would we have to wait until next year to try again? Would he even come back next year?

  I wished the rules for ghosts were more consistent, and made more sense, but every time seemed to be another wild ride, no matter how much we thought we had this stuff figured out.

  The next day didn’t start off very well. Somebody — and we knew it must have been Belman — had superglued the locks on our lockers so we couldn’t get in to get our books that morning. The janitor had to come in with bolt cutters and cut all our locks. Julie told the principal we were sure it was Belman, but when they called him down to the office Belman denied everything, of course. Any time the principal wasn’t looking, Belman smirked at me and Greg and Julie, so much so that I thought Greg was going to explode. Julie kept hold of his left arm and I kept hold of his right.

  After Belman left, the principal made us stay. “Without any evidence, there’s nothing more I can do here,” he said.

  “You can search his locker for superglue!” Greg said, louder than he should have.

  The principal looked annoyed. “The janitor already did that,” he said. “We’ll be keeping an eye on things. Not only on Mr. Belman, but on the three of you, too. I have to wonder what might have happened to provoke something like this.” He stared
at us for a second with this accusing look on his face, until I actually started feeling kind of guilty.

  “You’ll need to purchase new combination locks for your lockers,” the principal said. “We can’t replace those for you. Be sure to register the combination in the office when you bring those in.”

  Then he dismissed us. We were barely out in the hall before Greg launched into how unfair the whole thing was, and how he was really going to get back at Belman this time, and how —

  But Julie cut him off. “No,” she said. “We can’t keep doing things to get back at him, or his sister, or anyone. All that does is escalate things.”

  “So what are we supposed to do?” I asked. “Turn the other cheek?”

  Greg sniffed. “The other butt cheek maybe.”

  “Just let it go for now,” Julie said. “We have more important things. And to be fair to Belman, we did frighten his little sister half to death.”

  “Not we,” I said. “The ghost.”

  Julie shrugged. “Pretty much the same thing.”

  Greg sniffed again. “Don’t forget how she got back at us with those water balloons,” he said.

  I shook my head. “I’m beginning to understand a little bit more about how all these wars get started,” I said, and that was the end of it. We hurried off to our classes and had to carry all our books and notebooks and everything else from our lockers with us the whole day long. By seventh period I was exhausted.

  During study hall I went to the library to research more about the Battle of Fredericksburg. Though we’d learned about it in school, and though Uncle Dex and Julie had confirmed it, that whole business about the Union army having to wait weeks for pontoons to arrive so they could cross the Rappahannock just didn’t make sense. How could such a huge plan with that many soldiers and generals and logistics get so messed up, and by something so simple? But the more I read, the more I could see how it happened. Everybody seemed to blame the guy in Washington, DC, who was in charge of the supplies — he was called the quartermaster — for not moving quickly enough, but I guess he did try. He had to get most of the pontoons all the way from Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, although it wasn’t West Virginia yet. It was still part of Virginia, and didn’t break off from the rest of Virginia until June 1863, as it turned out, because the people in those Virginia counties voted themselves out of the Confederacy and into the Union — so, no longer part of Virginia.