“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 pontoons 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.

“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?”