Abner & Me (6 page)

“Jefferson kept slaves,” Little John said. “So did Washington. They all did.”

“If all men are created equal,” Willie asked, “how come there ain't no rich boys out here fightin'? 'Cause it's a rich man's war and a poor boy's fight. That's why.”

“Don't say nothin' in the Constitution about slavery,” Little John said.

“How would you know, Little John?” Joshua laughed. “You can't read.”

“Well, I had it read
to
me,” Little John said. “And it don't mention slaves nowhere.”

“Look,” Joshua said, “it boils down to this. Slavery or liberty. It's one or the other. That's why it's called the
United
States. A country can't have both. We're fightin' to save the Union.”

“Well, which is it?” Little John asked. “The Union or the slaves? We better be riskin' our necks for somethin' worthwhile, that's all I got to say.”

Little John looked over at the graves. I thought he might cry again.

“I'm fightin' to save my own neck,” Willie said. “If I kill a Reb and he don't kill me, I done good. That's all I know.”

“Well, I think they shoulda took care of the problem back in 1776,” Little John said. “If they didn't want slavery, they shoulda got rid of it then.”

“Well, they didn't,” Joshua said. “So
we
got to.”

Off in the distance there was a loud boom. We all turned our heads in the direction of the sound.

“That's a thirty-pounder,” Joshua said. “It can fire a shell more'n two miles. The Rebs ain't quit-tin'.”

“Reckon it's easier for folks to fight it out than it is to figure it out,” Joshua said, ending the discussion.

Suddenly I realized how tired I was. It really was time to be getting back home. Joshua and Willie and Little John started cleaning up from dinner. Mom and I helped. There was another cannon blast in the distance.

“We been fightin' this thing out for two years,” Willie said. “Maybe we'll just fight it out forever.”

“I think it's almost over,” Joshua said. “I got a sense.”

“You think we're gonna lose this war?” Little John asked, almost fearfully.

“Well, here's the way I see it,” Joshua said, spitting into the fire. “We lose here at Gettysburg and the war might be over. The Rebs can just march to Washington and take the city. That'll be the end of the United States. Eighty years. They'll say democracy didn't work. But if we
win
here, the war might be over too. The Rebs won't have no army left. That's why I think it's almost over, one way or another.”

“We ain't gonna lose,” Willie insisted.

“They got General Robert E. Lee on their side,” Little John said.

“So what?” Joshua said. “We got General Meade. He's a good man too.”

“Yeah, but Meade is the third general we had this year,” Little John said, “He only took command a few days ago.”

“And Doubleday ain't got no idea what he's doin',” said Willie.

My ears perked up.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Did you say Doubleday?”

“Sure,” Willie said. “General Doubleday.”

“Would that be General
Abner
Doubleday?”

“Well, of course that would be General Abner Doubleday. Don't know of no other General Doubleday.”

Suddenly I wasn't tired anymore.

SO IT WASN'T ALL A BIG TIME TRAVEL MIX-UP
!
ABNER
Doubleday
was
here! He was a general in the Union army. That's why Mom and I ended up at Gettysburg. “General Doubleday took command of First Corps just this morning,” Joshua told me, “after General Reynolds was killed.”

According to Joshua, General Reynolds was sitting on his horse near McPherson's Ridge when a Confederate sharpshooter hiding in the woods picked him off. The bullet went in one side of his head and came out the other. He died instantly. He was replaced by his second in command, General Abner Doubleday.

“And he's the guy who invented baseball, right?” I asked.

“Don't know nothin' about that,” Joshua said.
Willie and Little John looked at me like I was crazy. For all I knew, they had never even heard of baseball.

“Can you take me to General Doubleday?” I asked excitedly. “I've got to ask him a very important question.”

“Me, I got things to do,” Joshua said. “Got to fortify this position tonight. Bobby Lee and the Rebs are sure to come back at us with all they got at first light tomorrow morning.”

“I'll take 'em to Doubleday,” Willie said. “I ain't much good with this bum arm anyhow.”

“Okay,” Joshua said, “But I need Little John.”

I said good-bye, and Willie led my mom and me on a search for Abner Doubleday. It wasn't going to be easy, Willie warned me. There were about eighty thousand Union soldiers at Gettysburg. Most of them were at Cemetery Ridge and Culp's Hill. But the battlefield covered six square miles, and the first day of fighting had scattered soldiers everywhere. We might never find Doubleday. He might have been killed too.

Still, it was worth it to try. I hadn't traveled a century and a half just to give up now.

We were no more than fifty yards from the ditch when I was hit by a sight that I will never forget.

Death. Everywhere.

Bodies were scattered across the field so thickly that you could barely walk without stepping on them. Blue uniforms and gray ones. Dead horses
lying on their side. Puddles of blood in the grass, and streaks of it on rocks and trees. Flies buzzing around bodies and buzzards circling overhead. Ten yards from a body we would see an arm or a leg that once belonged to it. It was disgusting.

The sun was getting lower in the sky, but it was still hot. The smell of blood, sweat, and skunk hung in the air. I couldn't blame a skunk for spraying. Willie gave Mom and me handkerchiefs to hold over our noses.

“Watch out for sharpshooters,” Willie advised us as we walked around one of the craters that dotted the battlefield. “They mostly aim for officers, but you never know.” I scanned the distant woods to see if anyone was hiding up in the trees.

Soldiers were going from corpse to corpse, removing weapons, ammunition, canteens, blankets, and supplies. Anything that might be useful. The dead would not be needing any of it.

Another group of soldiers was picking up bodies and carrying them off the battlefield to be sent home to their families. If a body couldn't be identified, it was buried right where the man had fallen. In some cases, bodies were being stacked in mass graves.

It occurred to me that all these men had died right next to a cemetery. It seemed kind of…convenient.

I was surprised to see some Confederate soldiers out there on the field picking up their dead right alongside the Union soldiers. It was so
weird
. Half
an hour ago the soldiers on both sides had been trying their best to kill each other. Now they were chatting with each other as they did their morbid work, sometimes stopping to swap food, tobacco, or news with the other side.

It kind of made sense, in a way. They were all Americans. They spoke the same language. Most of them had the same religion, the same heroes, the same history. Some of them came from the same families. What was harder to understand was why these Americans were fighting each other in the first place.

“Anybody see General Doubleday?” we asked as we stepped gingerly around the bodies. Nobody seemed to know where he could be found.

One guy said he thought he saw Doubleday back behind Cemetery Ridge, so we circled away from the battlefield and up the hill. Union soldiers were building barricades at the top of the hill out of stone and logs to defend against tomorrow's Rebel charge. We asked if they had seen Doubleday, but they just shook their heads.

There was a sign at the gate of the cemetery that read: “All persons found using firearms in these grounds will be prosecuted with the utmost vigor of”—I couldn't read the rest of the words. They were filled with bullet holes.

In the cemetery itself, some soldiers were sitting against tombstones, asleep. Or maybe they were dead. It was hard to tell. Every so often I'd see some
one just sitting there sobbing over a grave he had dug. We didn't bother those people with questions.

Behind the Union line, it was like a small city. There were little white tents as far as you could see, and just about as many campfires. Soldiers were everywhere, and everybody looked busy. They were cooking and eating their dinner. Some were cleaning their guns, chopping wood, or grooming their horses. Guys sat against trees, writing letters or reading letters from home. Some were shaving or brushing their teeth. Some played checkers, cards, or dominos. It all looked very…normal.

“Seen Doubleday?” we asked everyone.

Rumors were flying around. I heard a soldier say the Union had lost ten thousand men today, and the Rebels as nearly as many. The 24th Michigan regiment supposedly lost five hundred out of its six hundred men.

We passed by a big tent filled with guys playing with some little machines and listening intently while they scribbled in notebooks. I realized they were telegraph operators, sending home news about the war. These guys must be the nineteenth-century equivalent to computer geeks, it occurred to me. They didn't know where Doubleday was either.

A soldier limped by with a cannonball chained to his leg. I asked Willie about it, and he said the guy was probably caught sitting down on guard duty. Another guy had a big letter C branded into his forehead.

“Coward,” Willie explained.

“Have you seen General Doubleday?” I asked a man rushing by us.

“No, and I don't reckon to,” he replied. “I'm going home.”

“If they catch you, you could be shot for desertion,” Willie warned the guy.

“If I stay, I could be shot by Rebs,” the guy said, and he continued on his way.

I was starting to get frustrated. Why did this happen every time I traveled through time? I would always wind up somewhere
near
the person I was trying to meet, but not right next to him.

Willie Biddle looked like he was running out of patience, and so was Mom. She'd never had much interest in finding Abner Doubleday in the first place. As we walked around the Union camp, she became increasingly concerned with the dirt and filth the soldiers were living in.

“Look at this!” Mom said, aghast. “The latrine runs right into the source of their drinking water. No wonder men are dying of dysentery and diarrhea. I can only imagine the medical facilities around here. Where are the ambulances?”

“Mom,” I whispered, so Willie wouldn't hear, “this is 1863. They didn't have ambulances.”

“There's an ambulance right over there, ma'am,” Willie said.

The “ambulance” was a large wooden wagon pulled by horses. There were six or seven ragged-
looking Union soldiers in it. Some of them were moaning, and others were crying out for their wives, their girlfriends, or their mothers. One of them just sat there silently, like he was in shock. They all had a look of fear in their eyes.

“Food, please,” one of the wounded men begged the driver. “I haven't eaten in two days.”

“Rations go first to those men who are fit for fightin',” said the driver. “Orders from General Meade.”

Mom walked right up to the driver.

“I'm a nurse,” she said. “Can you take us to the hospital?”

“Ma'am, that's directly where I'm goin',” he said. “Hop on.”

“Not the
hospital
!” moaned one of the injured soldiers. “I don't want to go! Let me die here.”

“You'll be fine,” my mother assured him, and she climbed up next to the driver.

“Mom, I want to find Abner Doubleday,” I complained.

“Doubleday can wait,” she replied. “There are men dying here.”

“I'm getting out of here,” said Willie. “Doctors scare me.”

I said good-bye to Willie Biddle and climbed up next to Mom. It didn't take long to get to the hospital, but the road was unpaved and the ride was bumpy. Every time the wheels hit a rut, the soldiers in the back cried out in pain. I felt sorry for them.

The driver stopped the wagon outside a big tent. I only knew it was the hospital because there were a bunch of soldiers lying on the ground outside, moaning and screaming in pain. Some of them looked like they were in really bad shape.

“Dreadful conditions,” Mom said as we climbed off the wagon.

“I need some help in here!” somebody shouted from inside the tent.

“Mom, don't!” I said, holding her back. “It's not your job.”

“Yes it is.”

“Well, I'll wait out here,” I said. “There's too much blood around here, and a lot of it is on the outside of people instead of inside, where it belongs.”

“I want you to come with me,” Mom said, pulling me into the tent. “If we get separated, we may never find each other again.”

It was horrible in there. It looked horrible, it sounded horrible, and it smelled horrible.

There were no beds or curtains or flowers in this hospital. A wounded soldier was lying across a big plank of wood that was supported by two wooden crates. That was the operating table. The plank was covered with a rubber sheet. Underneath the table was a tub splattered with blood that had dripped down from the plank.

The doctor was sweating. His sleeves were rolled up, and his white shirt and apron were soaked with blood. There was a wooden box next to him filled
with weird-looking medical instruments.

“I've been working for six straight hours,” he said wearily. “I could use a hand.”

“I'll do whatever I can to help, Doctor,” Mom said.

Mom must have been freaking out. At the hospital where she works, they've got all kinds of high-tech stuff. MRI machines. Lasers that do all kinds of surgery. Hemostatic bandages. This hospital probably didn't even have X rays or antibiotics. This doctor had probably never even heard of germs or aspirin. On a table next to the operating table there were bottles filled with stuff like “dandelion root.” A lot of good
that
would do. But it was the only medicine they had.

“That's a nasty wound you've got there,” the doctor told the injured man after a short examination. “I'm going to have to take that leg off.”

“No!” the guy screamed. “Not my leg!”

“Is that really necessary, Doctor?” Mom asked.

“Of course it's necessary,” he replied. “If the leg gets infected, this man will die.”

I turned my head away. No way I was going to watch him chop off the guy's leg. But when I looked in the corner of the tent, there was an even more repulsive sight. There was a huge pile of arms and legs that had already been chopped off. They were just sitting there. Some of the legs still had shoes on them. Flies were buzzing around them. I felt like I might throw up.

The doctor picked up this big saw and sloshed it around in a pan of dirty water for a few seconds. Then he wiped it on his apron, which was already red with blood.

“Aren't you going to sterilize that, Doctor?” Mom asked, alarmed. “He'll get gangrene!”

“Don't be ridiculous,” the doctor replied. “Gangrene is caused by bad air. Didn't they teach you that in nursing school?”

The poor guy on the table was screaming and whining and praying and begging to be left alone all at the same time.

“You're lucky they hit you in the leg,” the doctor told the guy. “If they'd got you in the gut, there would be nothing I could do.”

“I don't wanna die!” screamed the guy on the table.

“Hold him down!” instructed the doctor. “You're not going to die, son.”

I grabbed the soldier's arms to prevent him from thrashing around.

“Don't you have any anesthesia?” Mom asked desperately. “Chloroform? Ether? Nitrous oxide?”

“We ran out weeks ago,” the doctor replied, “and Mr. Lincoln hasn't sent us more yet.”

“Even opium or morphine would help him bear the pain,” Mom said hopefully.

“Give him some of this,” the doctor said, taking a thin metal flask out of his pocket and handing it to Mom. She poured something into the guy's mouth. I
could smell the alcohol. Then the doctor took a bullet out of his other pocket.