The ghost left shortly after that. I never did bring up the conversation he’d been having with Little Belman, but I told Julie and Greg about it once the ghost was gone.

“That Little Belman is so rude,” Greg said when I finished. “What a little meanie.”

“She really is just like her brother,” Julie said.

They spent the next few minutes discussing the Belmans while I thought back through the conversation I’d overheard. There was something there I had missed, I just felt it, but I couldn’t think what it could be. Maybe something the ghost said. Or maybe something the ghost didn’t say.

And then it hit me. “You guys!” I said. “I just remembered. When Little Belman was asking the ghost about being a girl, the ghost kept saying how he could out-fight and out-march and out-shoot any soldier in the Union army, but he didn’t ever actually just come right out and deny that he was a girl.”

Greg and Julie stared at me for a second, and then Greg asked, “And he never said anything like ‘I am a boy’?”

“Or ‘I am a man’?” Julie added.

“Right,” I said. “I mean, neither one. He didn’t say he wasn’t a girl, and he didn’t say he was a boy. Just all that other stuff. And Little Belman kept saying over and over that she knew the ghost was a girl. You’d think the ghost would get mad about it. Well, I guess he did get mad about it, but not scary-ghost mad. More like defensive-ghost mad, now that I think about it.”

“Curiouser and curiouser,” Julie said.

Greg gave her a quizzical look.

“It’s from Alice in Wonderland,” Julie said. “Alice says it when she turns into a giant.”

“Oh,” said Greg. “I never read that.”

“You really should sometime,” Julie said.

“Guys!” I snapped. “Can we focus here? I’m just about convinced that our ghost soldier is a girl.”

Julie shrugged. “I was already convinced,” she said.

Greg nodded. “Maybe if we ask him about it — in a nice way, that doesn’t make him defensive and angry — then it will help him, or her, remember his, or her, name. And what unit he, or she, was with in the Union army. And who his, or her, brother was. And where they were from. And why she pretended to be a boy and join the army? And what happened to her, or him, or whoever?”

The pronoun uncertainty was driving me crazy. Greg, too, apparently, because he started rubbing his temples as if he had a headache. Come to think of it, I had a headache, too.

“Good points,” Julie said. “But he’s gone now, and he doesn’t seem to be showing up very often.”

“Yeah,” said Greg, still rubbing his head. “Just pops in, stays for a while, tells us what happened on this particular date in 1862, then pops back out into the whatever.”

“Into limbo?” Julie suggested.

“Yeah,” said Greg. “I guess so. And, you know, also next door into the Dog and Suds.”

The dogs had started barking again and we could, of course, hear them all too loud and all too clear through the basement wall.

“I think maybe we should call off practice today,” Greg said. “My head hurts, and now with those dogs going crazy it hurts even more.”

“Want me to ride with you to your house?” Julie asked. “Just to make sure you can get home okay?”

Greg blushed but said sure. Neither of them looked at me. I just rolled my eyes at how weird they were being.

“You guys go on ahead,” I said. “I have to do a couple of things here and then I’ll head home after that.”

They didn’t even bother to ask me what I needed to do. They just grabbed their stuff and said good-bye and left.

I sat and waited until I was sure they were gone, and until Uncle Dex hollered downstairs that he was closing up shop and would I please make sure the front door was locked behind me when I took off, too?

I assured him that I would. I didn’t actually have anything I had to do in the basement, though I did pick up my guitar and played some. I tried picking out the melodies of some of our songs, but I wasn’t nearly as good at that as Greg, so I switched back to just playing chords. Next thing I knew I wasn’t playing any of our songs. I was playing “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” and thinking about all the ghosts singing it in that dream I had. I started singing along, softly:

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;

He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;

He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:

His truth is marching on.

I knew it had been written during the Civil War, but I wondered if the ghost had ever heard it, or if it came later, after the ghost turned into a ghost.

I didn’t have to wonder long, though, because pretty soon another high voice joined in with mine for the “Glory, glory, hallelujahs,” and there was the ghost, standing next to me, singing along.

I didn’t know any other verses, so just listened as the ghost kept singing and I kept playing my guitar:

I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,

They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;

I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:

His day is marching on.

Performing with a ghost from the Civil War! I had to figure it was about the coolest thing ever. There seemed to be a million more verses — well, four, anyway — and the ghost knew them all, and he kept singing in that high, and, well, pretty voice all the way to the final “Glory, glory, hallelujah,” and the last “While God is marching on.”

We both sat quietly for a few minutes once it was over, and it seemed to me there was a sweet echo of our voices reverberating through the room. I didn’t hear it so much as I felt it, and I wondered if the ghost did, too. I kind of thought so.

Finally, the ghost spoke.

“I know why you stuck around here,” he said. “After your gang left.”

“Uh, you do?” I said.

He nodded. “You heard what that little girl said and you got to wondering about it, too. Was I a girl.”

“Well, yeah,” I said. “Sort of. I mean, it did come up when we were talking earlier this week — me and Julie and Greg. My, uh, gang. But I wasn’t going to say anything. I don’t want to be rude or anything.”

The ghost sighed. “I guess it ain’t rude to wonder. And once that little girl got going about it, it got me wondering about it, too. I don’t know how that girl saw what she did. I have to give it to her, though — she may be meaner than a snake, but she’s a tough little thing. Wouldn’t have minded having her with us in President Lincoln’s army. She’d have whipped up on her share of Rebels, and then some.”

I thought about it and had to agree. “I bet she would,” I said.

Then I waited some more. The ghost got up and paced around the room for a few minutes, not saying anything, at least not to me, but he seemed to be muttering to himself, too low for me to hear exactly what.

And then he stopped and turned to me. “I remember now.” He swallowed hard.

“In the uniform like you see me right now, my name is Sam, only they call me Sammy.”

He swallowed hard again. “But inside the uniform, I ain’t a Sam or a Sammy neither one.”

The ghost sat down again. At first I thought this was all too hard for him and he might even start crying. But then a sort of sly grin appeared on his face.

“Nope,” he said. “Not Sam or Sammy.”

The grin spread even wider.

“Might as well tell you, I’m a girl all right, just like she said, and my real name is Sally.”