Gettysburg: The Crossroads Town

by Tim Black

  Minerva’s tears mixed with the raindrops hitting her face. She nodded in concession to Bette.

  Lightning lit the night momentarily and muskets crackled in the rain! Aimed at the momentary silhouettes outlined by the illumination, some of the bullets found their targets and men on both sides fell. Another bolt of lightning hit a tree a hundred yards away and a Union cavalry man, dismounted. While trying to calm his skittish mount, he was hit in the face by a Southern round, falling to the ground, face up. Even in the rain, Minerva could see that the man’s face was missing, his eyes and nose were gone.

  “Oh my God!” she screamed.

  Suddenly Minerva didn’t feel so brave. She looked at Bette who replied, seriously, “I hope I don’t pee in my pants.”

  The comment broke the tension for Minerva. Having wanted to sob, Bette’s comment made her laugh.

  “What’s so darn funny, Minerva?”

  “Our trousers are soaking wet and you are worried about peeing in your pants,” Minerva replied.

  Bette paused a moment and began to laugh. Suddenly, Bruce Catton and Shelby Foote stood in front of the girls. Another bolt of lightning and once again they were exposed to Confederate sharpshooters. In that brief second Minerva could see a Rebel not forty yards away aiming his rifle directly at her. “Oh Lord, sweet Lord, save me!”

  Minerva saw the muzzle flash, she heard the explosion and in an instant Shelby Foote’s hand reached up and caught the bullet.

  “Nice catch, Foote,” Bruce Catton said.

  “Did you see that?” Minerva asked Bette.

  “See what?” Bette replied.

  “Mr. Foote caught a bullet that was coming directly at me.”

  “Oh, sure,” Bette said. “Like he can really do that.”

  “We can, Bette,” Bruce Catton said. “But we are forbidden to save any soldier or resident of the 19th century. Just time travelers eighteen and under.”

  “Then why didn’t you stop the bullet from hitting Mr. Greene?” Minerva asked.

  “He is older than eighteen,” Foote added. “Which reminds me, Victor may need my assistance about now.”

  *

  When the shooting began, John Quincy Adams and his family laid flat on the floorboard of the wagon.

  “We should try to escape!” Victor shouted amid the shooting. A bullet zinged through the canvas top and Victor didn’t give his next move a second thought. He jumped from the wagon and darted into the tree line. The shooting accelerated. He couldn’t make out troops from either the South or the North. Only with an illumination from lightning was he able to get his bearings. The wagon train was composed of hundreds of wagons, and he could only see his own, the one in front and the one in back. Drivers had abandoned their wagons and the unmanned horses frightened out of their wits by gunfire, began to frantically pull wagons in all directions. A lightning strike exposed a deep ravine on one side of the road and he saw a horse and wagon topple into the ravine and heard the thud as the poor animal hit the bottom. Victor crawled on his hands and knees, staying off the road. It was slow going, but so far no one had used him for target practice. Federal soldiers overwhelmed the back of the wagon train, retrieving the plunder from Pennsylvania that the Rebels had accumulated from towns such as Chambersburg, Gettysburg and York. Victor wondered if some of these wagons were the wagons that Jeb Stuart had captured on his bizarre ride around Pennsylvania, a joy ride that denied Robert E. Lee crucial intelligence, which only a cavalry division could provide. Stuart’s extensive ride blinded Lee’s army, and when Stuart finally arrived in Gettysburg, proudly showing his commander his captured wagons, like a little boy trying to impress his father, Lee reprimanded Stuart for his folly.

  Victor continued his crawl. Finally, Shelby Foote returned. Shelby noticed a Union sharpshooter waiting for the next lightning strike to discharge his weapon. Victor would provide a suitable target. The lightning once again lit up the landscape and the Union soldier fired, but Foote caught the minie ball in air as he had with the bullet which had endangered Minerva earlier.

  “That’s some trick, Mr. Foote,” Victor said. “Thank you.”

  Foote smiled. “You can stand up now, Victor. Just stay close to me and I will lead you to the girls.”

  “The girls are here?”

  “Yes, they were hobnobbing with General Custer.”

  *

  Victor, who was soaked to the skin from the rain, was certainly glad to see his classmates. So soggy that he squished as he walked, Victor approached Bette, hugged her, and gave her a kiss on her cheek. Then, still dripping, he embraced Minerva and, catching her unprepared, planted a smooch right on her lips. She blushed. And then she boldly returned his kiss.

  Shelby Foote laughed at the teens and then excused himself, explaining, “I have promises to keep and you have miles to go before you sleep, if you will excuse me paraphrasing Robert Frost.”

  “Thanks, Mr. Foote,” Victor said, holding Minerva in his arms.

  “Ahem,” Bette coughed and Minerva broke from her clinch with Victor. Bette raised her large lollipop like the Olympic Torch, nodding for Minerva to join her. Smiling, Minerva held up her lollipop as well. Bette gave a signal and the two girls licked their candy simultaneously.

  “Mission accomplished!” Bette said.

  Victor was safe.

  After a few minutes Shelby Foote returned atop a horse. “I scared a Confederate off it,” the ghost explained. “No one bothered to shoot a rider-less horse deserting the Army of Northern Virginia,” he added unnecessarily, as the students realized that none of the 19th century people could see the ghost of the dead historian as he rode along Maria Furnace Road.

  On their way back to Gettysburg, the three were stopped and challenged by a group of Union rearguard troops. A captain, water dripping from the brim of his campaign hat, demanded proof of their identity. Thankfully, Bette produced her pass from General George Meade and Victor shouted theatrically, “God bless the honorable Abraham Lincoln, President of these United States!”

  The captain was more impressed by the sheet than the shout, and they were allowed to pass.

  “Why did you say that, Victor?” Minerva asked.

  “I don’t know. I thought it might help,” Victor answered honestly.

  The girls laughed at their classmate.

  *

  It was dawn before the three Cassadaga Area High School students arrived back in the town of Gettysburg. They returned two of the horses to David McConaughy’s stable behind his office on Chambersburg Street, unsaddling the mounts and giving them food and water. Victor decided to give the attorney the third horse, and he unsaddled him and he joined his two equine companions in a delicious pail of oats. Then the three humans walked down the alley until they came out on Baltimore Street and turned onto the Diamond and, exhausted, returned to the Gettysburg Hotel, stopping in the dining room when they spotted their teacher having breakfast. Mr. Greene beamed at them when he made eye contact and waved for them to join him.

  Minerva looked at Bette and they both looked at Victor with beseeching faces and Victor got the message.

  “You two go up to bed,” Victor said. “I’ll talk with Mr. Greene. I am kind of hungry anyway.”

  “You are always hungry, Victor,” Minerva said, but it was said in a light voice and punctuated with a quick thank you kiss. Bette added one as well.

  As Victor went into the dining room to report to his teacher, the girls climbed the stairs to their floor. Within a few minutes they were in their night shirts. Bette went quickly to sleep, but Minerva was restless and kept thinking about the kiss she gave Victor. Did she want to get back with him, or was the kiss just a “in the spur of the moment” smooch? She didn’t know, but she wanted to get her mind off it. She got out of bed and went to the closet where she had hidden Sarah Broadhead’s Diary for safe keeping. She opened it up to that day, July 5th, 1863.

  Diary of Sarah Broadhead

  July 5–

  What a beautiful morning!
It seems as though Nature was smiling on thousands suffering. One might think, if they saw only the sky, and earth, and trees, that every one must be happy; but just look around and behold the misery made in so short time by man. Early this morning I went out to the Seminary, just outside of town, and which until the retreat, was in the hands of the enemy. What horrible sights presented themselves on every side, the roads being strewn with dead horses and the bodies of some men, though the dead have nearly all been buried, and every step of the way giving evidence of the dreadful contest. Shall we—for I was not alone—enter the building or return home? Can we endure the spectacle of hundreds of men wounded in every conceivable manner, some in the head and limbs, here an arm off and there a leg, and just inside a poor fellow with both legs shot away? It is dreadful to behold, and, to add to the misery, no food has been served for several days. The little we have will not go far with so many. What can we do? is the only question, and the little we brought was distributed. It is heart-sickening to think of these noble fellows sacrificing everything for us, and saving us, and it out of our power to render any assistance of consequence. I turned away and cried. We returned to town to gather more food if possible, and to get some soft material to place under their wounded limbs, to help make them more comfortable. As we returned, our cavalry was moving out to follow the Rebels, and the street was all in an uproar. When I reached home, I found my husband’s brother, who had passed through the battle unhurt, and had come to see us. I rejoiced at seeing him, for we feared he had fallen, and at once set to work to prepare a meal to appease his hunger. As I was baking cakes for him, a poor prisoner came to the door and asked me to give him some, for he had nothing to eat for the last two or three days. Afterward more joined him, and made the same statement and request. I was kept baking cakes until nearly noon, and, in consequence, did not return to the Seminary. The poor fellows in my house were so hungry that they could hardly wait until the cakes were baked.

  Well, Minerva thought, as she finished reading Sarah Broadhead’s diary entry for July 5th. Mrs. Broadhead did not work as a nurse at the Seminary on the 5th, so there was no reason for Minerva to walk out there, as her heroine was not in attendance. She could go to sleep without feeling guilty. She could meet Sarah Broadhead tomorrow.

  Chapter 14

  Meanwhile back at Mr. Greene’s portable at Cassadaga Area High School, a dead, but suspicious historian, Henry Brooks Adams, snooped about the classroom, sifting through a pile of papers on the absent teacher’s messy desk until he discovered the pedagogue’s lesson plan book.

  “Eureka!” he shouted as if had found pay dirt in a gold mine.

  For there, in the lesson plan book, in plain, albeit chicken scratch cursive writing, were the details of Greene’s summertime travel assignment for his students: An innocuous enough plan to visit Gettysburg, Pennsylvania on November 18th and 19th, 1863 and hear Abraham Lincoln deliver his Gettysburg Address.

  But Henry Adams was skeptical of the lesson plan. He had overheard some dead historians talking about Shelby Foote and Bruce Catton sabotaging the trip, playing with Greene’s computer, which was somehow tied up to Nikola Tesla’s prototype of a time travel device. Will and Ariel Durant, the married couple who always felt slighted by the snobbish, degreed historians, had been a salient source of Adams’ information. What Will Durant informed Adams was that Catton and Foote were going to redirect the teacher and his students to the Battle of Gettysburg in lieu of the National Cemetery Dedication. It was not that Henry Adams was concerned about the high school teacher, for as a former Harvard professor, the dead historian had a dim view of most high school history teachers, but the children might be in danger. And, he admitted to himself, after Greene’s trip to Philadelphia, which had temporarily removed his grandfather and great grandfather from the presidency, he was opposed to any more visits to the past by Greene and his students. On the last trip, their actions had replaced John Adams with Benedict Arnold in the executive mansion. Benedict Arnold had even wound up on the ten-dollar bill! The infamy! What could Greene and his miscreants do this time? Help Robert E. Lee win the Battle of Gettysburg? Keep the Union from winning the Civil War?

  Adams thought that a meeting of the dead historians needed to be convened. He knew where most of them were congregated at that moment. Adams wondered if he might find some incriminating evidence in the teacher’s closet that might tie Nathan Greene to the chicanery perpetrated by Catton and Foote. He opened the door and leafed through a number of shirts, which Adams had heard that Greene wore during certain lessons throughout the school year.

  There was even a wig with the name tag “G. Washington.”

  He finally stopped at a shirt with the drawing of a young boy wearing a school backpack, standing on a stack of books and staring off at some distant mountains. Adams liked the drawing, but what really stunned him was the wording on the shirt: “A teacher affects eternity; he can never tell where his influence stops. Henry Brooks Adams.” The ghost was so overcome with emotion at seeing his own words on a shirt in the closet of a man he considered his adversary that he literally fell apart and dissolved into a puddle of phantasmagoria.

  Regaining his composure and, consequently, his apparitional shape, Henry Brooks Adams suddenly had a new appreciation for Nathan Greene. He examined the shirt and saw the note pinned to the shirt: “For the first day of school.” Suddenly, Henry Brooks Adams had an epiphany and knew that Nathan Greene was innocent of conspiring with the dead Civil War historians and sensed that Greene and his students were in trouble. He decided then and there that he, Henry Brooks Adams, would rescue Nathan Greene and his students. But he needed help. He was clueless how the portable moved through time.

  Henry Adams floated off to the Cassadaga Hotel. The hotel, a hotbed of psychic activity during the winter season when the majority of the mediums and psychics were in town, was slow in the summer, and the dead historians liked to gather in the cool hotel basement and chat about the past. They not only discussed Greece, but remembered slights that they had endured in the course of their careers. For even a small-minded comment by a colleague could unnerve the pedigree of a Ph.D.

  When Adams arrived, the late Barbara Tuchman had the floor and was reciting passages from her seminal work, The March of Folly. Mary and Charles Beard, banned from time travel after the Philadelphia chaperoning debacle, were also there, along with Frederick Jackson Turner, who was futilely raising his hand in the hope that he would be allowed to share the more salient facts of his Frontier Thesis. Unfortunately for Mr. Turner, the other historians considered him a one-trick pony, and were not interested in rehashing the significance of the 1890 United States Census figures or the closing of the American frontier. Turner’s past was passé.

  Adams waited patiently for Tuchman to finish up her caustic comments on the folly of the Vietnam War before raising his hand. Thucydides, bearded, sandaled, and wearing a white robe, was leading the group as usual, for all of the dead historians showed deference to the Greek scribe as they considered Thucydides the first real historian, the scientific historian—unlike that silly Herodotus who wrote down every whopper that b.s. artists in antiquity fed him. Even Henry Adams referred to Herodotus’ historiography as bovine excrement. Thucydides looked at Henry Adams, saw the concerned look on the Harvard professor’s mug, and recognized him.

  Adams began. “Ladies and gentlemen, as you know Mr. Nathan Greene and his students have made another foray into the past. You know I have been against their time traveling, however, on this occasion, I believe the teacher and his students have been hoodwinked by some historical hijinks perpetrated by the Civil War wastrels, Bruce Catton and Shelby Foote. You see, in my investigation, I discovered that the students and teacher presumed they were headed for Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, when in reality our two colleagues sent them to the Battle of Gettysburg.”

  “So?” Barbara Tuchman said.

  “So, Mrs. Tuchman? So?” Adams said, flabbergasted at her reaction. “So, remember
what happened last time?”

  “Yes,” Mrs. Tuchman said. “Your prissy family lost its place in society when Benedict Arnold became the second president. It is always about the Adams family for you, isn’t it Henry? You are such a snob, you old stuffed shirt.”

  Adams huffed, but said nothing. He hated the best-selling Barbara Tuchman, and was annoyed that John F. Kennedy proclaimed that his favorite book was Tuchman’s The Guns of August, which JFK consulted during the Cuban Missile Crisis. Indeed, Adams was disturbed that no one alive seemed to read any of his works any longer.

  Thucydides chimed in. “Henry has a valid point, Barbara,” he said. “We are going to have to intervene in their trip, I’m afraid. Does anyone know how to use that time travel thingee?” the Greek asked.

  All of the dead historians shook their ghostly heads no, shattering their apparitions momentarily.

  “Tesla does,” Turner offered.

  “Nikola Tesla?” Thucydides mused. “Where is he haunting these days?”

  “His museum in Belgrade, probably,” Tuchman suggested. “Thucie,” she said using the Greek’s nickname, which was common among the dead historians, but only Tuchman had the cheek to use it in public. “Are you suggesting we cross disciplines and combine history and science?”

  “Well, Barbara, isn’t this thing Tesla’s invention? “

  “Yes.”

  “And none of us knows how to work it, is that correct?”

  “It seems Bruce Catton and Shelby Foote are competent with its use,” Mary Beard said in an understatement, which drew a frown from the Greek.

  “Obviously, Mrs. Beard,” Thucydides said, raising an eyebrow. “Henry, why don’t you visit Tesla over in Serbia and see if you can get him to help us out.”

  “I don’t know, sir. I am hesitant to cross disciplines.”