Chapter 17

As dawn broke, a soft, gentle rapping on the hotel room door awakened Victor. Mr. Greene, oblivious to the sound, kept on snoring, causing Victor to wonder if his teacher was exhibiting early signs of sleep apnea. Groggily, Victor arose and walked to the door and opened it. Looking straight ahead, he saw no one. Then a tiny hand tugged on his nightshirt and he looked down and spied a small barefoot boy with jet black hair and raven-like eyes.

“Is this Nathan Greene’s room?” asked a tiny voice.

The boy was wearing only a t-shirt, which was much too big for him, and seemed to serve as a nightshirt.

“Yes, this is Mr. Greene’s room.”

“Then you must be Victor Bridges, I presume.”

“Yes. Who are you?”

“Excuse me, it was very rude of me not to introduce myself. I am Nikola Tesla at your service.”

Victor laughed. “Okay, Kromer, you can come out now. This is pretty funny. You too, Minerva. Come out, come out wherever you are.”

“I assure you, Victor, I am not a ruse perpetuated by your classmates. May I come in? I have a message to convey to your teacher,” the boy said as he brushed by Victor and went straight to the snoring teacher and began to poke the pedagogue productively. Mr. Greene awoke.

The light from the sunrise illuminated the hotel room and Victor took a closer look at the boy’s nightshirt. The wording: “A teacher affects eternity. He never knows where his influence stops. Henry Brooks Adams.” What in the world was going on? Victor wondered.

Grumpily, Mr. Greene rubbed the sleep from his eyes and looked at the boy. “Who are you?”

“Nikola Tesla, Mr. Greene. I hope you don’t mind, but I borrowed this shirt from your classroom closet. I couldn’t very well walk into Gettysburg in my birthday suit now could I?” the boy asked.

Mr. Greene squinted at the boy’s t-shirt, seeing both the wording on the shirt and the illustration of the boy with the backpack standing atop a stack of books and gazing off at the mountains on the horizon.

“You are Tesla, really?”

“Yes, and I am as surprised as you are at my appearance, Mr. Greene, having been dead for so long. You see, Henry Adams, the man who wrote the quotation for the shirt I’m wearing, came to me at my museum in Belgrade where I prefer to haunt, and asked me to help rescue you. It seems Mr. Adams learned about the chicanery perpetrated by Monsieur Catton and Monsieur Foote changing the dates on your computer. Fascinating really. You see I didn’t know what had happened to my time travel prototype and Adams told me where Thomas Edison had hidden my device. I always suspected the so-called Wizard of Menlo Park was behind its disappearance, but I could never prove it. Anyway, I thought you did a pretty fair job of applying the device to your classroom portable, but unfortunately Adams and his group of dead historians hadn’t the foggiest idea of how to use the device and so I was summoned. I tinkered around with the original device here and there and updated quite a few applications, for even though I am dead I have been following how Apple keeps updating its devices. I even chatted with Steve Jobs, too. Fascinating, a true, albeit, dead visionary. So I thought, why not update my prototype? Well, from here on in, with a remote I developed, you will be able to send and summon your classroom at will. But for me, the fascinating part of my journey back in time was reanimation. I never saw that coming.”

“Victor, hand me my cane, please,” Mr. Greene said, as the teacher had forgone his crutches for the cane and his leg was healing rapidly. “What do you mean by reanimation?”

“Since I was alive in 1863 when I arrived here in the portable I became the seven-year-old boy you see before you. Actually, my birthday is tomorrow. I will be seven then. It is something I did not foresee about time travel. If one travels to the past and stops in at a time when one was alive, one becomes the age he was then, yet with all the knowledge one gained throughout one‘s lifetime. Fascinating wrinkle, I think. I can hardly wait to share my experience with Albert.”

“Albert?” Mr. Greene asked.

“Einstein,” young Tesla said. “Anyway, Mr. Greene, I have installed a cloaking device, a bit of stealth technology, and the classroom is resting west of the Lutheran Theological Seminary. It is invisible, of course. Here is my dilemma. Mr. Henry Adams is in the portable now, but he is as naked as the day God made him. You see, neither of us foresaw our own reanimation. Mr. Adams is twenty-five and he couldn’t very well don only a shirt to walk into town and frankly, the trousers in your closet were much to gargantuan for him. He wrote down his measurements and if you will give me a piece of paper and a pencil I will write them down for you as I have an eidetic memory, but you do not.”

“I do,” Victor chimed in.

“I have heard that Victor,” Tesla replied. “But we shall see about that.”

Young Tesla wrote out Henry Adams’ measurements for Mr. Greene. “He would appreciate it if you buy him a simple suit of clothes, Mr. Greene, and deliver the clothes to him at the portable. We would like to leave by 10 a.m.”

“Return home?” Mr. Greene ventured.

“No,” young Tesla replied. “We are going to take you to your original destination, November 18th, the day Abraham Lincoln arrives in Gettysburg. As Mr. Adams has informed me, in July 1863 no one in Gettysburg has any idea that the president will visit the town. As of this date, Lincoln has not even been invited. It is an idea that will come to lawyer David Wills later on. I am suggesting that you reserve your rooms for that date, as when word gets out that the president will attend the cemetery dedication, a room at the hotel will be impossible to book. Mr. Adams suggests you pay ahead and get a receipt.”

“Why is Mr. Adams being so nice to us? He hates me.”

Young Tesla smiled. “It seems Mr. Adams was riffling through your things in your classroom and chanced upon the shirt I am wearing and had a change of heart about you. Between us, I believe the t-shirt appeals to his vanity. To paraphrase Shakespeare, ‘vanity thy name is historian.’ He was deeply moved to find this shirt among your possessions. He insisted that I wear it to meet you as you would surely realize by my appearance in said shirt that I was telling the truth. Anyway, I must insist upon clothing for my naked companion who has been reanimated to his age of twenty-five. Mr. Adams is not a naturalist, I assure you, and requires more than a figurative fig leaf to cover his nether regions.”

“I don’t understand, Nikola. If you are alive, where is your younger self?”

“At age seven I was in Serbia which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. I suppose he is there, but frankly I don’t know. The real Mr. Adams is with his father in London where the senior Adams is Ambassador to the Court of Saint James. Perhaps our two selves can exist if we are on separate continents or if we are separated by a large body of water. I have no idea why this is so, but then I never thought I would ever reanimate, either. A fascinating wrinkle in time travel, I might add. As I said, I can’t wait to discuss this adventure with Albert and get his thoughts on the matter, if you will excuse my physics pun, for ‘matter can neither be created nor destroyed.’” Young Tesla laughed. Victor and Mr. Greene smiled, not wishing to encourage Tesla by chuckling.

“Would you care to join us for breakfast, Mr. Tesla?” Victor asked.

Young Tesla smiled. “I haven’t eaten since 1943, Victor, and I don’t seem to be very hungry this morning, either. I think my appearance in the hotel dining room and my lack of suitable apparel would draw unwanted attention. I had an odd enough glance from the front desk clerk when I asked for your room number. I’ll just wait here, but I would appreciate if you would also buy me a proper outfit suitable for a seven-year-old boy, Mr. Greene.”

“Certainly,” Mr. Greene replied. Shall we go down to breakfast, Victor?”

Victor and Mr. Greene had barely pulled their chairs out from the table when Bette and Minerva arrived to join them.

“Did I hear a young boy’s voice in your room, Mr. Greene?” Bette asked. “The walls are paper thin.”

“Yes,” Mr. Greene said with a wry smile. He put his finger to his mouth to stop Victor from blabbing.

“Well who was it?” Minerva wanted to know.

“A boy named Nikola,” Mr. Greene replied.

“Nikola who?”

“Let me think, did you catch his last name, Victor?”

“I think it was Tesla,” Victor said.

“Yes,” Mr. Greene agreed. “That’s it. Nikola Tesla.”

“Funny, Mr. Greene,” Bette frowned. “Very funny.”

Mr. Greene shrugged. “What do you want for breakfast, kids?”

“Wait a minute,” Minerva said. “Something isn’t right here, you two are too blasé about this. What is going on?”

“Okay, Victor, you can tell them,” Mr. Greene said.

“The portable is back. Just like a Deus ex machina. It is cloaked and sitting out west of the Lutheran Theological Seminary. Something really weird happened. The ghost of Nikola Tesla reanimated and brought it back. It seems our old friend Henry Adams discovered Catton and Foote’s plan, but none of the dead historians knew how to operate the classroom…”

“It takes a teacher to run a classroom,” Greene said.

“Uh huh,” Victor nodded. “Well, there is a little wrinkle. It seems even if you are a ghost if you stop at a time when you were alive, you reanimate. Nikola Tesla was seven in 1863. So he appeared in our room as a seven-year-old boy, but still brilliant beyond belief, his eidetic memory intact.”

“He popped up wearing one of Mr. Greene’s goofy t-shirts,” Victor added.

“I remember those,” Bette said. “I always liked the ‘Loose lips sink ships’ one he wore when he lectured about World War II.”

“I liked the snake one and the ‘Join or Die’ logo,” Minerva added.

Victor waited a moment to see if the girls were finished interrupting and, when he assumed they were, he continued. “He’s updated his device and invented a remote for it so that we will be able to summon the portable in the future at any place or time.”

“So,” Mr. Greene said, resuming command. “We are going to eat breakfast, do a bit of shopping for Mr. Tesla and Mr. Adams, who I am afraid is in his birthday suit inside the portable. He was twenty-five at the time of the Battle of Gettysburg. Anyway, we need to buy the two fellows suitable clothes and then we are going to jump ahead to November 18th, 1863 and return to Gettysburg the day before Abraham Lincoln gives his address. Remind me, Victor, I need to make a reservation at the hotel for two rooms for the 18th and 19th and pay in advance, since once it gets out that Lincoln is coming to Gettysburg the rooms will be impossible to get.”

“Why?” Minerva asked.

“Tens of thousands of people will descend upon Gettysburg for the cemetery dedication, Minerva. So, let’s coordinate. We will meet in the hotel lobby at 9 a.m. and head for the Fahnestock Store, buy a suit of clothes for each of our reanimated ghosts and then walk out Chambersburg Street past the seminary. From there we shall find our portable and travel ahead a few months. Agreed?”

“Agreed!” the three students said in unison.

Then Victor asked, “What about Mr. Catton and Mr. Foote?”

“They are off with the armies,” Mr. Greene said. “Catton is with the Army of the Potomac and Shelby is with the Army of Northern Virginia. The Confederates are still on this side of the Potomac River, but they are replacing the pontoon bridge that the Federals destroyed, and will be back in Virginia within a week. I am sure our little rascals will be back for Mr. Lincoln’s recitation, however. They wouldn’t miss that.”

Halfway through breakfast, Victor remembered his promise to Basil Biggs to join him for another day of body burial. He decided that he would just have to apologize to Biggs if he saw him when they returned in November.

*

After breakfast, the group gathered the few items they had originally brought on their trip and reassembled in the hotel lobby with young Tesla in tow. Victor was surprised to see that young Tesla was a bit of a flirt, for when Victor introduced Nikola to Minerva, the lad winked at her and said in a little boy’s high-pitched voice, “Hello, beautiful, where have you been all my life?”

Minerva, who was not generally quick with repartee, was out of character this day, for she snappily retorted, “I wasn’t even born yet and neither was my mother.”

Which only made the scientist’s black, hypnotic eyes twinkle with delight. He laughed accordingly and said, “Well put, well put!” Then the sly Nikola Tesla took Minerva’s hand and said innocently, “I am only seven, Minerva, someone should hold my hand. It might as well be you.”

Minerva laughed, but she didn’t shake his hand away. After all, like her classmates she was a fan of the late inventor. Victor felt a short rush of jealousy, but he held his tongue.

After making reservations for the 18th and 19th of November and paying ahead for the rooms, Mr. Greene and the group left the Gettysburg Hotel. Victor and Mr. Greene strolled ahead of the girls who walked on either side of Nikola Tesla. Not missing a beat, Nikola extended a hand to Bette and the three walked together hand-in-hand across the Diamond. Tesla was a little “cake-eater,” Victor thought, remembering some Jazz Age slang. A ladies’ man.

The girls selected suitable wear for Nikola and took the paper with Adams’ measurements and chose a rather smart outfit for Henry Brooks Adams.

“Too bad there’s not a Men’s Warehouse,” Bette said.

“You are right there, Bette. I miss the mall,” Minerva complained.

As they walked out of the store Nikola, acting like a seven-year-old boy in summertime, quickly took off his shoes, tied the laces together and tossed them over his shoulder, preferring to exercise his boyhood rite of going barefoot.

“So much better,” he observed. “It is good to feel the earth underneath one’s feet after so many years.”

Hospital tents were stretched out in the field west of the seminary and Mr. Greene commented as they passed, “When we return in November, these will all be gone. Between now and then, Camp Letterman east of town on the York Road will be established to take care of the wounded and the dying.

Minerva saw a nurse walking between the tents. The nurse made eye contact with Minerva and hurried toward them shouting to her, “Minerva, where are you going? We need you!”

The group halted. Minerva, still holding on to young Nikola, called back to the nurse. “Hello, Miss Bucklin.”

Young Tesla squeezed Minerva’s hand. “We don’t have time for this, Minerva,” he said. “Get rid of her.”

“Tesla’s right,” Mr. Greene said. “We need to get going.”

Too late: Sophronia Bucklin was upon them, a pouty frown on her dour face. Mr. Greene came to the rescue.

“Miss Bucklin is it?” Mr. Greene said in a haughty voice. “I did not give my niece permission to work as a nurse. A nurse is not a fit occupation for a young lady,” Greene went on. “We are returning home to Mercersburg.”

Sophronia Bucklin backed down. A product of the age she lived in, Sophronia was not about to argue with a girl’s uncle. She merely looked at Minerva with sad, but understanding eyes. “Sir,” Miss Bucklin said to the teacher. “I have met many men like you and you sir, are no gentleman.” And with that declaration, she turned around and walked back to the long row of hospital tents.

“May the saints forgive my sexism, and my apologies, girls,” Mr. Greene said. “We have to be on our way.”

“Don’t worry about it, Mr. Greene,” Bette said. “You were only playing the part of a piggish 19th century male.”

Minerva managed a smile, but she felt awful that she had let her heroine down. “I feel so guilty,” she murmured.

About a hundred yards beyond the hospital tents and off the Chambersburg Pike, rested the portable classroom, albeit cloaked.

“I am keeping the cloaking device intact as there are folks not that far away. You will have to follow me precisely,” Tesla said. “Let’s get into a line. I will go first, then Minerva, Bette, Nathan and Victor. You will notice the person ahead of you will disappear into the portable before you do. We are going to use the handicap ramp, due to Mr. G’s leg injury. Victor, I am going to count on you to make sure your teacher does not stumble or fall and to catch him if he does.”

“Yes, sir,” Victor said, feeling funny for addressing a seven-year-old as “sir.” Inside their classroom, Mr. Greene remarked, “Where is Mr. Adams?”

“In here!” came a shout from the closet in the back of the room. “Did you bring me suitable clothing?”

“Yes, Mr. Adams,” Minerva said and carried the historian’s clothes to the closet door. She extended the clothes to him.

An arm crept from the closet and a voice demanded, “Turn around. Avert your eyes!”

“He’s a bit prim and proper, but after all he is a Bostonian,” Tesla teased. “He’s afraid to show off his shortcomings.”

“Be quiet you little slavic elf,” Adams snapped.

Tesla laughed. “I have been called much worse, Henry, by Edison, in fact.”

“Thomas Edison?” Minerva asked.

“Yes, Minerva. Tom was a bit jealous of me. But I will say this about Mr. Edison, he could take another man’s invention and turn it into a consumer product. That was his genius, I think.”

“But didn’t Edison give you a start?” Mr. Greene asked.

“Indeed he did, and I am indebted to him for that. I just failed to worship at his altar. I didn’t fall for the Wizard stuff. Edison was actually very superstitious. Why, Hugo Gernsback wanted to take a photograph of Edison’s tinkering hands for one of his magazines and at the last moment Edison turned over his mitts as he didn’t want his palms to be readable in the photograph. He was afraid a palm reader would tell his future to the world.”

“That’s rather odd for a man of science,” Victor said.

“Yes, it is, Victor,” young Tesla replied. “Okay, Mr. G., let me show you and your students what adjustments I made to your computer to allow you to more easily travel through time.”

Mr. Greene produced the minie ball and handed it to Tesla.

“No need for talismans anymore, Mr. Greene. I fixed that bug in the device as well. Use the remote or the computer; no need for trinkets or lucky charms or other historical hocus-pocus.”

The students joined their teacher, and the group stood behind young Tesla who sat on a stack of books as a booster seat to the teacher’s chair so that he was level with the laptop. When he had finished his explanation, Tesla handed Mr. Greene a small device about half the size of an iPhone. Mr. Greene had to squint to see the font. However, young Tesla, showed him how to increase the font size.

“The battery to the remote is solar powered. It recharges with ten minutes of sunlight and keeps the charge for up to ninety-six hours, or four days. It has a historical range of six hundred years, so that limits your travel to the fifteenth century and afterwards. That’s the overview of the updates. So, Mr. G, please type in a time you wish to arrive on November 18th and after everyone is seated and strapped in, press the new Travel button instead of the Enter tab and we will be off.”

“But what about Mr. Catton and Mr. Foote?” Minerva said, having forgotten what was said before about the dead historians’ fate.

Emerging from the classroom closet, a fully dressed Henry Adams answered Minerva, “As Mr. Greene said previously, I’m sure they will be along. If they come back at this moment, I have my orders to return the portable to its resting place at Cassadaga Area High School. They are in big trouble with Thucydides.”

“Been there, done that,” Mr. Greene said. “Is everybody ready?” the teacher asked as he readied his finger to push the Travel button.

“How does this dang thing work?” Henry Adams asked about the seat belt attached to the desk in which he sat.

Victor unbuckled his seat belt and walked over to assist the Harvard professor. He snapped him in properly.

“Thank you, boy,” Henry Adams said. “I haven’t been all thumbs since I shuffled off this mortal coil,” he added, quoting Shakespeare. “I never was one for gadgets,” he added.

When Victor was back in his seat he nodded to his teacher and Mr. Greene tapped the Travel button and the portable hummed in place. Victor looked out a classroom window and realized that the portable wasn’t moving, but time was passing by. The day slowly turned to night and then the change accelerated until the days whizzed by one after another. Mr. Greene had his bad leg up, leaning on another desk, but after a few moments, the teacher smiled and withdrew his limb, pulled up his pant leg and revealed a perfectly healed appendage. The metamorphosis reminded Victor how the Anderson twins surprisingly sobered up on the trip home from Philadelphia. As the whirling weeks passed by outside the portable, Mr. Greene’s leg miraculously healed.

The figurative flipping of the calendar’s pages slowed until finally, at noon on November 18th, 1863 the portable came to a total stop, albeit still cloaked from view. Victor peered out the window. The tent city was gone. A line of people were headed into Gettysburg on the adjacent Chambersburg Pike.

“We can’t go outside the portable,” Mr. Greene advised his students. “Someone will surely see us. We need the cover of darkness to emerge.”

“Let’s go back before dawn, Mr. Greene,” Victor suggested. “How about 5 a.m. on the 18th?”

Mr. Greene looked at Minerva and Bette, as well as young Tesla and Henry Adams. “What do you think?”

“That’s a good idea,” Tesla said.

“Show of hands?” Mr. Green said.

All the hands went up, although Henry Adams seemed a tad reluctant. Victor assumed the Harvard man’s recalcitrance was because it was not his own idea.

Mr. Greene typed in a new time and pushed the Travel button again. It was soon dark outside. 5 a.m. The students retrieved their personal items. Minerva was relieved because she had just enough toothpaste for two more days.

Tesla said, “We should leave the cloaking device on until we are ready to leave tomorrow night.”

“Everyone mind your step as you leave, as the British might say,” Mr. Greene advised.

Victor chuckled when he watched his teacher skip down the handicap ramp. Normally grumpy Henry Adams was the most excited of the group.

“This is wonderful!” the Harvard historian shouted. “I can see now why you love to travel so much, Mr. Greene.”

“Hold your voice down, professor,” Victor admonished. “You aren’t a ghost in this era, and human sound carries farther in the dark. We don’t want to draw attention to ourselves.”

“Oh…or as you young folks say, ‘my bad’?”

“Yes, sir, that’s it,” Victor replied.

“It really is a silly saying, Victor,” Adams commented.

Victor nodded in agreement.

Mr. Greene smiled at Adams. “Professor Adams, I hope you will enjoy your stay in Gettysburg.”

“Well,” Adams said as his face formed into a rare smile. “My alter ego is in stuffy London at the moment. It was truly boring there, let me tell you, but my father didn’t want me in the fight. Many of my friends paid three hundred dollars to avoid serving in the army. They weren’t proud of it later, but at least they had a ‘later.’”

“What happened to the tents, Mr. Greene?” Minerva asked.

“When Camp Letterman opened, all of the tent cities closed and the wounded were moved to that hospital. They have been gone since the end of July, I believe. Lincoln’s train will arrive later today, and we should be at the railroad depot to see his arrival,” Mr. Greene suggested.

The little group was halfway down the Chambersburg Pike on their way to the dining room at the Gettysburg Hotel when the ghosts of Bruce Catton and Shelby Foote reappeared.

“Where have y’all been?” Shelby Foote asked.

Henry Adams glared at the ghosts. “You are in deep do-do, Foote,” he said. “You, too, Catton. Thucydides is hopping mad.”

Catton looked at Henry Adams. “Who the deuce are you?” he demanded.

“Henry Brooks Adams,” Adams said. “And I have come to bring you back.”

“Damn, Adams, is that really you?” Foote said, amazed. “You are alive!”

Young Tesla spoke up. “It seems gentlemen that when a ghost travels to a time in which he was alive, the ghost reanimates.”

“Who’s the brat?” Shelby Foote asked, pointing a ghostly finger at Tesla.

“My name is Tesla, Nikola Tesla, and I invented the time travel device, you mud-brained Mississippian. And you two must be the miscreants who disregarded the students’ safety for your own vanity.”

Catton was stunned. “You are just a kid. Don’t lecture me!”

“And you are just a dead historian. I was a scientist, an inventor,” young Tesla replied, obviously annoyed. “I was seven years old in 1863. My friend Adams is twenty-five, for that was his age in that year.”

“You two have been banished from time travel for twenty years,” Adams said to Catton and Foote.

Foote looked to Catton. “Yup, that’s Henry Adams alright, Bruce. Still the stuck up little prig.”

“I am not a little prig,” Adams protested.

“If there weren’t ladies present I would tell you what you really are, Henry,” Catton added.

Mr. Greene intervened. The last thing he needed at the moment was squabbling ghosts. “Is Gettysburg crowded?”

“It sure is,” Catton said. “Once it got out that Abe Lincoln was coming to town, the people flocked here. You know they closed Letterman Hospital a few days ago, but they kept all the tents intact to accommodate all the out-of- town visitors. You can’t get a room anywhere.”

“We have reservations,” Mr. Greene said.

“Good thinking, Nathan,” Foote said in a congratulatory tone. “Bruce and I are going to float around for a while, but we’ll catch up with you at the cemetery dedication tomorrow for sure.”

“You are not to be out of my sight,” Adams demanded.

“Oh stuff it Henry!” Catton said.

Shelby Foote put his thumb to his nose and wiggled his ghostly fingers at Henry Adams. “Suck it, Henry!” he shouted.

“Miscreants!” Adams retorted.

*

The dining room at the Gettysburg Hotel did not open until 6 a.m. and the group waited in the lobby. Mr. Greene took the time to confirm his reservations for two rooms, sorry now that he had not reserved three. The four males were to share one room and the girls the other.

“We can’t get into our rooms until ten,” Mr. Greene said as he returned to the group. “I suppose after breakfast we could walk up Baltimore Street and see how the cemetery is coming along.”

The teacher and his students watched in wonder as Nikola Tesla and Henry Adams gorged on food. Even though Minerva thought the fare at the breakfast table was rather bland, the reanimated scientist and the back-to-life historian savored every crumb and every morsel.

“Ah,” young Tesla squeaked. “To eat again! Blessed butter!”

“Yes, to taste the bread of life…literally,” the history professor said. “Oh my,” he said excitedly. “I feel a bowel movement coming on.” Adams excused himself from the table to search out the closest privy. In a few minutes he returned, a smile of satisfaction marking his countenance.

Bette and Minerva chuckled at the odd pair and watched as they ravenously consumed everything within arm’s length. In fact, the entire group ate heartily and Mr. Greene, in a festive mood, gave the waitress a twenty-dollar gold piece and told her to keep the change.

The waitress smiled profusely and asked, “Weren’t some of you here before…during the battle?”

“Yes,” Mr. Greene replied. “And you were our waitress then. We are back in town for the cemetery dedication.”

“Everybody is,” the waitress remarked. “The most people we’ve had in town since Robert E. Lee stopped by for a visit,” she smiled. “But these folks are a lot nicer.”

“I imagine so,” said Mr. Greene.

After the waitress walked away, Minerva whispered to her teacher. “That was nice of you, Mr. Greene.”

“It was,” Bette agreed.

Victor was too busy shoveling food in his mouth to comment.

“I will ask all of you to return any unused money upon our return. We may need it to finance our next trip.”

All three students nodded agreement.

They started off for the cemetery after breakfast. However, halfway to the Evergreen Cemetery, Bette said to Victor, “Victor, what do we say to Elizabeth Thorn?”

“What do you mean, Bette?”

“You and I are the Kardashians, remember?”

“Oh, Lord, that’s right,” Victor said. “Mr. Greene, we have a problem.”

Mr. Greene signaled for the group to stop. “What is it, Victor?”

“We met Elizabeth Thorn and Bette said our last name was Kardashian” Victor explained.

“What?” Mr. Greene said.

“I’m sorry Mr. Greene, it was the first thing that came in to my mind,” Bette apologized.

“That’s really stupid, Bette,” Minerva said.

“Oh shut up, Minerva!” Bette responded.

“Okay, okay…I will straighten things out if it comes up. I’ll say that I told you to use a false name,” Greene suggested.

“Did you call yourself Kim Kardashian, Kromer?” Minerva teased.

Bette slipped her erstwhile pal the Italian salute.

The group stopped by the Gatehouse at the Evergreen Cemetery. The soldiers’ cemetery was adjacent to the local Gettysburg cemetery. Outside the building, swaying gently in a rocking chair sat a woman holding an infant. She was cooing to the infant as the baby drifted off to sleep.

Bette, dragging a reluctant Victor by the hand, went over to the woman. “Hello, Mrs. Thorn,” she smiled.

Smiling Elizabeth Thorn looked up, her face recognizing Bette. “I remember you,” Elizabeth Thorn said. “You and your brother dug a grave for me. That was very Christian of you.”

Bette smiled.

“It’s the Kardashians,” Elizabeth Thorn said.

Bette blushed. “Mrs. Thorn, I’m afraid I didn’t give you our true name when we met before.”

“Oh?” said Elizabeth Thorn curiously.

“You see, we were running away from my uncle,” Bette said.

Victor looked at his classmate. He raised an eyebrow in disbelief with a poem reciting in his mind… “oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.”

“Yes, sister, tell her our true name,” Victor needled.

Bette smiled at her classmate. “Okay, I will, ‘brother,’” she said. “Mrs. Thorn we are the Kromers.”

Victor nearly gagged.

“Oh,” Mrs. Thorn said. “Are you German?”

“It only gets more tangled,” Victor mumbled.

“Ah, our grandparents came from Germany.”

“Oh? Where?”

Bette was tongue tied.

“Berlin,” Victor said, rescuing her. “We dropped the umlaut, of course.”

“But you didn’t change the name to Kramer,” Elizabeth Thorn said. “I knew a family that changed from Kromer to Kramer when they landed in America,” Mrs. Thorn said. “Would you like to hold my little Grace? Grace Meade Thorn. Her middle name is for the commander of our victorious army, General Meade. Grace was born on November 1st.” She handed Bette her baby.

“Is that your uncle over there with the little boy, the other man and the girl?” Thorn asked.

“Yes,” Bette replied.

“He doesn’t look so mean,” Mrs. Thorn said.

Victor drifted off back to the group as Bette and Elizabeth Thorn continued to chat.

“She seems to be fast friends with Elizabeth Thorn,” Mr. Greene observed.

Minerva suddenly felt jealous and competitive. “I met Julia Culp, Sarah Broadhead and Sophronia Bucklin,” she bragged.

“Uh huh,” Mr. Greene said without much enthusiasm.

“So what, Minerva. I met General Meade and General Custer as well as Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, but you don’t hear me bragging about it,” Victor said, and then he blushed when he realized that he had just bragged to her.

Mr. Greene looked at Minerva. “Minerva, will you go over to Bette and see if you can pry her away from Mrs. Thorn?”

Victor was startled when they entered the National Cemetery. There were fresh, open graves and Victor spotted two black men lowering a Union soldier into the grave. He recognized one.

“Mr. Biggs!” Victor shouted and ran over to the man.

Responding to his name, Basil Biggs turned around and recognized Victor. He smiled and shouted back. “Where have you been, boy? You only worked one day,” Biggs said, adding, “Ain’t that just like a white boy, lazy as can be,” he teased. But he held out his hand to Victor.

“We left for Mercersburg the next day, Mr. Biggs,” Victor lied. “We came back to see the president.”

“Gonna be a big day tomorrow. Father Abraham and all. You missed some big money, boy. I have put away a few hundred dollars digging up the bodies and replanting them here. You see the design is an idea of lawyer McConaughy, the graves sort of fan out. They’ll be putting an obelisk up and the graves will fan out from there in a semicircle. An awful lot of men here that have no names on the stones. Officers are buried next to enlisted men. No Rebels though. I kind of feel sorry for them,” Biggs added. He pointed to Mr. Greene and the group. “That your family is it?”

“Yes.”

“Your sisters or your sweethearts?” he asked, referring to Bette and Minerva.

Victor blushed. “Sisters,” he lied. “I guess I better join them. I’m glad I was able to see you again, Mr. Biggs.”

“Basil, boy. Call me Basil.”

Mr. Greene, in lecture mode, stood on a ridge at Cemetery Hill and explained the design of the cemetery to the group, repeating some information that Basil Biggs told Victor. “Over there,” he pointed. “Tomorrow they will have a dais and Lincoln will deliver his famous speech following an oration by Edward Everett, the most famous speaker of his day. Lawyer David Wills is the man who had the stroke of genius and invited the president to make a ‘few appropriate remarks.’ However, the cemetery’s layout was identical to a semicircular cemetery layout that David McConaughy suggested in a letter to the editor a year before. Landscape architect William Saunders, perhaps inspired by McConaughy, designed the cemetery as a wide semicircle that radiated from a central point. A grand monument, an obelisk, will eventually mark the central point. The cemetery is divided by states, and the smaller states are closer to the monument as there were less casualties. From now until March of next year, the bodies will continue to be buried in the new cemetery.”

Tesla and Henry Adams wandered off to inspect the battlefield and Minerva joined them for she, unlike Victor and Bette, had not witnessed the fighting. The bodies were long gone, but many trees were splintered, pieces of equipment were strewn about here and there and no one had filled in the Union trenches, which had been a redoubt for the Federal soldiers on Culp’s Hill.

Mr. Greene, Victor and Bette joined the other three and they began walking out along Cemetery Ridge, pausing only when they came to the copse of trees and the stone fence. Speaking like a registered battlefield tour guide, Victor said to the group, “This is the high-water mark of the Confederacy, the apex of Pickett’s Charge,” Victor explained. He pointed into the distance to Big Round Top. “Bette and I were atop the larger of the two hills at what they call Big Round Top. We watched the Rebel assault from there.”

“I am envious,” Mr. Greene said.

“Don’t be, Mr. Greene,” Bette interjected. “It was horrible.”

“But it was history,” Victor said.

“Yes, but horrible history,” Bette said.

Mr. Greene defused the coming argument between Victor and Bette. “Sometimes,” he said. “History IS horrible.”

*

They spent the rest of the day enjoying the cool fall weather and wandering around the battlefield, which looked so different without leaves on the trees. Somehow, Victor thought, the battlefield seemed more deathlike without the foliage.

They skipped lunch as Victor provided the group with a guided tour, recounting the fighting of the second day on Little Round Top. Seeing that her classmate was in his element, Bette gave Victor his due and did not interrupt him as he replayed the battle for them.

In the afternoon, they checked into the hotel and relaxed in their rooms as they awaited the arrival of President Lincoln’s train. About ten minutes before it arrived the group met in the lobby and headed north on Carlisle Street to the railroad station. A crowd had gathered. It was 6 p.m. and the streetlights were lit. Some men held lit torches.

A few minutes past 6 p.m., Abraham Lincoln’s train pulled into the station. Mr. Greene pointed out famed orator Edward Everett, the keynote speaker for the dedication ceremony at the National Cemetery, standing on the platform. He said, “Everett is waiting not only for the president, but for his daughter Charlotte Wise and her husband Captain Henry A. Wise of the United States Navy. They are on the train as well.”

A line of notables preceded President Lincoln’s appearance on the railroad station platform. Someone in the crowd began identifying Lincoln’s cabinet members by name for the audience, as well as the president’s two young personal secretaries, John Hay and John Nicolay. And, then, finally, President Lincoln appeared, silk stovepipe hat atop his head.

He towered over everyone. He was taller than all of the other men to begin with, but with the hat atop his head, Abraham Lincoln walked through the crowd like Gulliver among the Lilliputians. Victor thought the president’s eyes seemed tired. He seemed stressed out, for the poor man had seen so much of war during his brief term of office. Lincoln ritually shook dozens of the extended hands of the well-wishers. Victor marveled at how vulnerable Lincoln was walking among the people. There were no Secret Service agents watching out for him. Anyone could approach him and shoot him, Victor thought. It had never occurred to anyone that someone might actually shoot a president, until the day after the last performance of Our American Cousin at Ford’s Theater. Victor thought it was a wonder that Abraham Lincoln lived as long as he did. He remembered reading about the assassination plot that Mr. Pinkerton had uncovered before Lincoln’s inauguration only two years before. That was a close call. Victor listened as the president told a quick story to the crowd. He had a surprisingly high, nasally voice.

“A pair of women from Tennessee called on me the other day at the White House seeking the release of their husbands from one of our prisons. One of the ladies argued for the release of her husband because he was a deeply religious man.

“‘Madame,’ I said. ‘You say your husband is a religious man. Perhaps I am not a good judge of these things, but in my opinion the religion that makes men rebel and fight against a just government in defense of an unjust institution that makes slaves of men whom God made free is not the genuine article. The religion that reconciles men to the idea of eating their bread in the sweat of other men’s faces is not the kind to get to heaven on.’”

The crowd chuckled and clapped and Abraham Lincoln strode down Carlisle Street to the three-story Wills Mansion on the Diamond. The president said no more aloud that was audible, although Victor thought Lincoln seemed to be whispering something to his secretary, John Hay. Victor ran closer and listened, catching the tail end of the conversation:

“I need some time alone to polish my speech, John. I will have to leave the dinner early. Think up a plausible excuse for me without mentioning my tinkering with my address,” the president said with a wink and a smile. “Go ahead of me and see Mr. Wills and make sure my bedroom has a writing desk.”

The small crowd followed the president all the way to the doorstep to the Wills Mansion. At the front stoop of the house, President Lincoln turned and waved to the people in the street. “Please allow me to save my voice for tomorrow,” he said. “I would like to wish you all a good night.”

Someone in the crowd yelled “speech,” and the cry echoed from others until there was a chorus of “Speech! Speech!”

Lincoln smiled and put up his hand to hush the crowd. When there was silence he said, “I do not appear before you for the purpose of making a speech, yet for several substantial reasons. The most substantial of these is that I have no speech to make. In my position, it is somewhat important that I should not say any foolish things…”

To which a heckler interrupted with, “If you can help it!”

The president smiled and wittily replied, “It very often happens that the only way to help it is to say nothing at all.”

And with that retort, Abraham Lincoln uttered not another word and entered the Wills Mansion.

Victor watched as Lincoln walked into the house, followed by Edward Everett, Everett’s daughter and his son-in-law and members of the president’s cabinet. Word around town was that as many as twenty thousand people would attend the ceremony. While that was certainly a large amount, Victor thought, it was dwarfed by the number of unwanted visitors that the town received on those three days in July.