Sally started walking slowly down the hill in the direction of Sunken Road. Several cars had passed by while we were standing next to Federal Hill, but if anybody saw anything unusual, they didn’t show it. I figured it just looked like four kids standing around, talking, leaning on their bikes, hanging out after school.

We followed along next to Sally, walking our bikes, retracing the steps of the Irish Brigade where Hanover Street merged with George Street halfway down the hill. “I told Frankie to stay behind me no matter what,” Sally said. “He was so scared, he could hardly breathe. I even told him that, too: to keep breathing. And to keep behind. I told him if anything happened to me, if I got shot, to keep behind me then, too. To lie right down on the ground behind me. No bullet would reach him that didn’t go through me first. I told him I would protect him. And you know what he said to me? He said, ‘None of this is right, Sissy.’ He told me he ought to be helping the wounded off the battlefield and taking care of them back at the field hospital, not marching down this road, getting ready to kill the Confederates.”

“Wait,” said Julie. “There’s something we didn’t tell you yet, Sally.”

I had wanted to be the one to give Sally the good news about Frankie, but I guessed it was okay that Julie did it, since she’d found out about it, too.

“He lived!” Julie said. “We found the casualty list and he wasn’t on it. That means he survived the battle!”

Sally froze at the news. I believe she would have cried, except she’d spent so much time pretending to be a guy — and not just a guy but a tough soldier of a guy — that she probably didn’t know how anymore, or couldn’t afford to, in case someone might suspect who she really was. Not that boys can’t cry, too, of course. It’s just that a lot of people — and especially back then — don’t think they should.

“That’s a heavy burden off my shoulders and my heart,” she whispered, her voice cracking. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Julie said. “I just wish we were able to find out more about Frankie for you, but it was so long ago.”

“That’s plenty right there,” Sally said. “Plenty enough to know he lived another day. And I can have my hopes that he got to do just what he said — go back to one of those field hospitals and help those who were suffering, instead of being the one to inflict the suffering. It wasn’t in his nature to ever hurt nobody.”

We all stood there for a few minutes longer until Sally seemed ready to push on. There was a battle still raging all around us — or at least there had been a hundred and fifty years before — and we had to go deeper into it to find out what happened to our ghost.

Sally confirmed it. “Now if I can just find out how I came to be missing,” she said. “That might be the last thing I need to know.”

Sally continued talking as we walked. “General Meagher — he was the one that formed the Irish Brigade and the one that gave us our battle order — told us to all pull a sprig of leaves off some boxwood bushes, and tuck it into our hats. He said it was green for Ireland. We all did what he said, and we all listened to what else he said, too, ’cause he could see what we’d seen, and he knew what was coming up on us once we charged across that field.”

She swallowed, then continued. “He said, ‘This may be my last speech to you, but I will be with you when the battle is the fiercest; and, if I fall, I can say I did my duty, and fell fighting in the most glorious of causes.’ I’ll always remember that.”

She kept walking and talking. “There were four brigades that had already attacked Sunken Road and the stone wall and Marye’s Heights, and we were determined that they wouldn’t need any more after the Irish Brigade was done taking the fight to those Rebels. We fixed bayonets when they ordered and kept marching right up from town. That Confederate artillery opened up as soon as we got in their range. Shells exploding overhead, shot bouncing off of what buildings there were, tearing through the ranks. One shell hit the 88th New York and we must have lost two dozen men all at once.”

Sally shook her head. “We didn’t turn back, though. We couldn’t. We broke into a jog and kept right on at them — me once again making sure Frankie stayed behind, as close to safe as possible, which, now you tell me, turned out to be safe enough, so hallelujah for that. We got to the bottom of this hill and climbed over or splashed through that millrace, then the officers called us to ranks again. General Meagher gave us the order to advance forward, double-quick, which of course we did, and next thing we knew we were out on that open plain, charging forward as hard and fast as we could go. Another thing slowed us down, though — the most terrible thing of all.”

“More cannonballs?” Greg asked.

“Worse,” Sally said. “Our own men. The ones on the ground, the ones that were wounded from the earlier waves, they grabbed at our trousers to try to stop us. ‘Don’t go,’ they cried out. ‘It’s murder! It’s murder!’ But we couldn’t stop. We pulled away. We ran around them. There were so many; I hate to say it but we even had to run over some of them, living and dead. All that running — all that hard charging — it only got us to that Rebel volley sooner, the closer we made it to their stone wall, and just like those brigades before us, the Confederates cut us down like hogs in a hog pen, too.

“A bullet tore through my cap,” she continued, caught up in her own story. “I felt it whistle by my ear. Then I felt one slam into my arm and I went down but just for a second, then pushed myself back up with my rifle, only the bad thing happened then — the worst thing of all — which was I lost sight of Frankie. I called for him and called for him, but there wasn’t time to go looking. We made it fifty yards from the Rebels and that’s where we took our stand — firing back at them as fast as we could load and aim, which wasn’t fast enough to keep even more of us from getting cut down. We didn’t last but a couple of minutes and then our proud Irish Brigade dissolved just like the brigades that had come before us and just like the others that General Burnside would send in behind us. Some managed to turn and run back to town, back to safety. Some managed to crawl off the battlefield. I felt something explode into my side and down I went a second time only I couldn’t get back up no matter how hard I tried, except to push myself behind a dead horse that had managed to get itself killed out there, but at least it was some protection, even if not much. Even if not much at all.”

By this time we were at the National Park, a thin stretch of land at the old Sunken Road where they’d rebuilt the Confederates’ stone wall, and restored one of the small wooden houses where Union soldiers had tried to hide from the Rebels’ withering gunfire. Beyond, on the other side of the stone wall, was Brompton, which had served as one of the Confederates’ headquarters, and which was now the university president’s house. Next to that, with those tiers of grave sites going up the side of the steep hill, was the National Cemetery.

Sally had quit speaking. I imagined her, disguised as a young soldier, a boy, lying somewhere near where we stood, wounded, not able to move, with a dead horse the only thing keeping her from being hit and killed by more Confederate bullets.

“Why did they keep sending in more troops?” Greg asked. “I mean, you all didn’t stand a chance. What was General Burnside even thinking?”

Sally shrugged. She seemed to be too deep in her own thoughts to care too much.

Julie answered. “He thought General Franklin was attacking the Confederate line to the south, from Slaughter Pen Farm. He didn’t know that Franklin hadn’t understood the orders and had sent only those 3,800 men. General Burnside was convinced that he had to keep Lee’s troops occupied here at Sunken Road, so Lee couldn’t send reinforcements to fight Franklin’s troops. It was all a big, confusing, tragic mess. Plus, if General Burnside didn’t send more men into the battle here, he wouldn’t be able to offer any protection to all the men who were wounded and trapped on the battlefield. The Confederates would be able to just sit there and pick them off one by one. Which is sort of what happened anyway.”

Sally came out of her reverie and nodded. “Between attacks, anybody that moved, they shot them. Wouldn’t let hospital wagons out on the battlefield to take back the wounded or the dead. They all just had to lie there, same as me. Some couldn’t move even if they wanted to. Some couldn’t wait any longer for help and tried to crawl off the battlefield. Some made it. Most didn’t.”

There were seven waves in all. Julie knew the numbers. A third of the Irish Brigade went down as casualties. There were even more casualties from the other assaults. Nearly thirteen thousand Union casualties in all. The Confederates suffered a thousand wounded or killed. As terrible afternoon turned slowly into night, General Burnside was finally convinced not to send any more Union troops into the slaughter. What was supposed to have been an easy, surprise river crossing that could have led to an unobstructed march to Richmond and an early end to the Civil War had turned into the bloodiest battle and most lopsided Union defeat so far. There would be over two more years of awful, awful fighting before it was all over.

But Sally didn’t know any of that at the time.

All she knew, lying there for hours and hours on the battlefield with thousands of others, bleeding, dying, not able to escape, was that the most curious thing started happening in the night sky. “I didn’t know what it was at first,” she told us. “I thought maybe I had already died and what I was seeing was heaven itself. But then I realized it was the northern lights, which I knew nobody ever saw this far to the south. And yet there it was, lighting up the sky with every color there is. I had never seen anything so beautiful. I didn’t know what it meant, and I didn’t have anybody to ask. I so desperately wished Frankie was there with me right then so we could see it together, and so I could know he was safe.”

She paused again. “It was then, seeing the northern lights, that I resolved to not let myself die, to crawl wherever I had to go, to search the entire field, no matter how badly shot up I was, to find my little brother.”