“It’s started.”

I was dreaming that the ghost had come into my room, looking a lot more Sam than Sally. Standing at the end of my bed and saying that:

“It’s started.”

“What has?” I replied in my dream.

“The pontoons, down to the river,” the ghost said.

I opened my eyes and realized it wasn’t a dream after all. The ghost was in my bedroom, and she was speaking to me from the end of my bed.

“What time is it?” I asked. “And how did you get here? I thought you couldn’t leave the building, or downtown, or whatever.”

“It’s two a.m.,” Sally said. She looked around my room and seemed surprised to find herself there. “And I don’t know how I got here. Wherever this is.”

I told her it was my bedroom.

“We’re at my house,” I added. “We live just a couple of blocks from Sunken Road. When you were here for the battle it was all just open fields, but now it’s a neighborhood.”

Sally nodded, then said again, “Well, I just needed to tell you that it’s started. They’re sliding pontoons down to the river from the Chatham Heights.”

“Is it working?” I asked. “I mean, did it work?” I was confused because Sally was speaking in the present tense, as if everything was actually happening right now, when of course it all happened a hundred and fifty years ago.

“Nah,” Sally said. “Too steep. Crashing down too fast.” She switched to past tense. “So they switched up their tactics and had to haul those long pontoon wagons slow down the hill to the different crossing points.”

“Then what?” I asked, sitting up in bed and checking my clock. Sure enough, it was now just a little after two. Another night I wasn’t going to get much sleep.

“Putting the pontoons in the water, nailing on the planks, working fast as they could to get it done before the Rebels could figure out what was going on.” Sally paused. “At least that’s what I could see. We were at the Middle Crossing. So cold we were all shivering, waiting in our formations to make the crossing once those engineers were done. Only that didn’t quite happen the way it was supposed to.”

“So what happened?” I asked.

“Rebels woke up to what we were doing,” she said. “They fired a couple of cannon shots, though they didn’t hit anywhere near the pontoons. Then their snipers started shooting our engineers, so Old Burnside, he ordered our cannon to return the favor — all hundred and forty-seven of them. Figured if the Rebels were going to fire at us, we might as well unleash a barrage on the town where they were hiding. Especially since their sharpshooters started taking aim at the engineers. Our artillery boys sent a hundred shells a minute. You could see it as the sun rose — houses and buildings over there collapsing, chimney’s toppling over, roofs catching fire. And our boys at the river’s edge fired across with their muskets, too. But I guess they were shooting blind, ’cause the Rebels just kept on shooting at our engineers, finally chasing them off the bridge, which wasn’t even half finished. I figured it must be the same on the other bridges, too, ’cause we could hear the rifle fire north of us, and the shouting.” Her voice got lower, almost to a whisper. “And the screaming when one of them was hit.”

Sally said the engineers waited until the shooting stopped on the Confederate side of the river, then they ventured back out onto the unfinished pontoon bridge and went back to work.

But as soon as they did, the Confederate sharpshooters started picking them off again. So again they retreated. Again the cannons roared until the sharpshooters’ rifles quieted down. Once again, though, as soon as the engineers went back to work, the shooting commenced and more Union bodies fell into the river.

“I guess when the cannons were firing the Rebels must have retreated themselves to safer places,” Sally said. “Or maybe they were just too well dug in and hidden. I’m sure some of them must have got hit by cannon, or trapped in those buildings that collapsed or caught fire or both. But not enough, ’cause that back-and-forth business went on into the afternoon. Only good thing for us — and for them — was it warmed up quite a lot. Frankie and me got sent on detail to help haul up the wounded to the hospital they set up at the Chatham Manor. Must have made a dozen trips back and forth. ’Course I made Frankie wait back at the tree line and not expose himself there too close to the river and those Rebel sharpshooters, even though they weren’t taking so much aim at us as they were just the engineers.”

“How did you ever get across, then?” I asked. Julie had told us there were complications, but I didn’t know things had gotten this complicated.

“Somebody pointed out that pontoons were the same thing as boats, and why didn’t we fill some of them up with our boys and their rifles and paddle across quick as they could and attack the Rebels over on their side, roust out all those snipers hidden up in there and clear out the town. Everybody knew General Lee’s main army was well on the other side of town, hidden up on those hills where they’d have the advantage on us. They weren’t all there in the town, ’cause they’d have been too close to our cannon.”

“So that’s what they did?” I asked.

“You bet they did,” Sally said. “Wish they’d have sent my unit over, but they sent the 89th New York first. Half a dozen boats where we were. Probably forty men in each, some of them paddling with the butts of their rifles. Brave boys, let me tell you. Those Rebel sharpshooters kept firing but didn’t nobody turn back, though I did see one of them pontoon boats paddling in a circle, not making much headway for quite a while. Finally, though, enough of them made it across, and then the fighting started right there in the streets. From what I heard, the fighting at the upper crossing was a whole lot worse. Somebody said they sent the 7th Michigan over at the Upper Crossing — even before the 89th New York went over down where we were at the Middle Crossing — then once those Michiganders got a toehold on the Fredericksburg side, they sent in the Harvard Regiment — bunch of Massachusetts boys. I heard later on that there was fierce fighting not just street to street but door to door, starting at the north end of town and working their way south to meet up with the Middle Crossers in the center of town and drive out the Rebels. Took quite a while, though, and quite a lot of casualties, ’cause the Rebels were shooting down on our soldiers from upstairs windows, rooftops, hiding behind walls, you name it. A third of the Harvard Regiment went down as casualties. But God bless ’em, our engineers were finally able to get back to their work and they finished up those pontoon bridges in just about no time. Once that happened, you bet General Burnside sent plenty of the rest of us pouring across to join the fight.”

Sally smiled, but it wasn’t a happy smile. More like a satisfied smile, I guess you could say. But like every ghost soldier we’d met, there was sadness there, too.

“All those Confederates holed up in Fredericksburg, they either died there that day, or they finally turned and ran back to join old General Lee outside of town up there on Marye’s Heights where they had their fortifications. They left the town to us — or what was left of it, anyway.”