Gettysburg: The Crossroads Town Read online

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  “The Civil War defined us..."

  Dedication

  An explanatory note from the author.

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Appendix

  Gettysburg: The Crossroads Town (Tesla’s Time Travelers, Book 2)

  By Tim Black

  Copyright 2017 by Tim Black

  Cover Copyright 2017 by Untreed Reads Publishing

  Cover Design by Ginny Glass

  The author is hereby established as the sole holder of the copyright. Either the publisher (Untreed Reads) or author may enforce copyrights to the fullest extent.

  This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher or author, except in the case of a reviewer, who may quote brief passages embodied in critical articles or in a review. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  This is a work of fiction. The characters, dialogue and events in this book are wholly fictional, and any resemblance to companies and actual persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Also by Tim Black and Untreed Reads Publishing

  Daydreams & Diaries, with Taylor Black

  Tesla’s Time Travelers (Vol. 1 of the series)

  www.untreedreads.com

  “The Civil War defined us as what we are and it opened us to being what we became, good and bad things... It was the crossroads of our being, and it was a hell of a crossroads.”

  ―Shelby Foote, The Civil War: A Narrative

  This book is dedicated to Anya, Jacob, Sydney, Chloe, Frances, Nikau, Gray, Levon & Felix

  An explanatory note from the author. Throughout the story, Union troops are referred to as Federals and Yankees, as well as Union troops. Confederates are also referred to as Rebels or Rebs, and the Confederate States of America is also referred to as the Confederacy. People of that time used these terms interchangeably.

  Chapter 1

  Victor Bridges received a text message from Mr. Greene: “AP Exam scores are in. Check yours.” He immediately went to the website of the “Acorn People,” as he referred to the College Board, and nervously typed in his password. It wasn’t that he thought he failed the exam, it was just that he feared he hadn’t scored a coveted 5. What if Minerva scored a 5 and he only scored a 4? That would be worse than death itself if his former girlfriend bested him in his favorite subject. The ultimate humiliation. Now that they weren’t dating any longer, their relationship had quickly cooled in the weeks after the Philadelphia trip.

  Victor should have scored a 5 on the A.P. Exam. It was fairly easy. After all, the Document Based Question for the United States Advanced Placement Examination was on the Second Continental Congress and the vote for ratification of the Declaration of Independence, the perfect question for their class, since they had been right there at the time of the discussion.

  There it was: 5. Beautiful! A wave of relief overcame him. He didn’t think he had written such a great free response essay to the question on the relocation of the Nisei at the start of World War II, having compared the Nisei internment to the Nazis’ “Final Solution.” It wasn’t very American of him, he knew, but darned if he hadn’t seen the parallels, and had postulated that if the United States had lost the war, perhaps the Nisei would have been exterminated like the European Jews had been eliminated by the Germans. After completing the exam, Victor told Mr. Greene what he had written and Mr. Greene did not say a word, but he had raised his bushy eyebrows, which Victor took as a sign of disapproval. He feared that his Nisei essay might have reduced his score to a 4.

  Victor received a text from Bette Kromer: “Five!”

  “Me 2,” Victor thumbed back. “Minerva? Twins?”

  “?”

  Victor wanted to text Minerva, but she informed him on the last day of school that she wanted to take a break in their relationship, and she hadn’t spoken to him in over a month. His masculine pride kept him from calling her, even just to say hello. He admitted to himself, but to no one else, that he missed her, he missed talking to her, and he missed holding her hand. He definitely missed kissing her—boy she could kiss—he thought, as an image of Minerva Messinger entered, front and center in his cerebral cortex. Victor had earned a 5 in Biology A.P. as well, but he really didn’t care about Biology after his mini course with Minerva in comparative anatomy, nor did he care about the 4 he earned in English After all, the junior English exam wasn’t literature, it was icky grammar and other crapola. He had a hard time distinguishing a gerund from a gerbil.

  A moment later a text from Mr. Greene erased Minerva’s image from his mind as if Greene had pulled up the sheet on an Etch A Sketch, a toy that Victor had loved as a little boy. “Congrats to Bette, Minerva and Victor for acing exam.” So, Minerva earned a 5 as well. No mention of the Anderson twins. Victor wondered if they even scraped by a with a 3. They weren’t the brightest bulbs on the Christmas tree, Victor mused. They’d even gotten Mr. Greene clunked in a bar fight in Philadelphia, and Victor had had to get them back to Cassadaga Area High School safely. Victor was surprised to see that there was a follow-up text from Mr. Greene.

  “Would like to congratulate you three at school tomorrow at 4 p.m. if possible. RSVP.”

  Maybe they were getting trophies, Victor thought. Or hats. He could use a new hat.

  Chapter 2

  With his brother off for orientation at North Dakota Wesleyan College, where Junior Bridges had earned a partial scholarship to play football, Victor possessed a car to drive for senior year. Although Junior Bridges rationalized that at North Dakota Wesleyan, he might become a second Carson Wentz, a first-round NFL pick from North Dakota State, the failure of Junior to land a Division 1 scholarship had tarnished the family’s first born in the eyes of his father. Mr. Bridges was an advocate of primogeniture, who had hoped that his heir would achieve the athletic heights that Victor’s father had failed to climb. Certainly, there was not much chance of an NFL future for Junior Bridges via the gridiron of a Division 3 school in Nowhere, North Dakota. And with Junior’s academic acumen, Victor was hard pressed to see what type of career would best suit his Simian sibling. Troglodyte perhaps? Victor mused, knowing his semiliterate older brother would have never have known the synonym for caveman.

  Although it was only mid-July, juniors were busy sanding off the names of the recent graduates from the parking places and repainting their own senior names onto the coveted fall parking spots. Victor dutifully parked in the space marked “Victor Bridges.” It was the moment he felt like a senior. Finally, at the top of the heap, he thought. The late Mary Beard, a dead historian, made herself visible to Victor. Wearing a flapper’s short dress and playing with a pearl necklace coquettishly, the deceased historian’s outfit reminded Victor that she could be a bit daffy at times. Certainly flighty, Victor thought, smiling at his pun as the former
historian floated over to say hello. She was something of a grandmotherly ghost, he thought.

  “Hello Mrs. Beard. Where is Charles…is he haunting Carpenter’s Hall again?”

  Her husband Charles, also deceased, had once been the nation’s foremost historian for his theory on the economic reasons for the Constitution, a hypothesis which had fallen from favor with modern historians. Charles had a penchant for haunting not only the halls and classrooms of Cassadaga Area High School, but Philadelphia’s historical buildings as well. The dead historians who haunted the high school only made themselves visible to members of the History Channelers, a select group of Mr. Greene’s Advanced Placement students. The Beards had served as guides to colonial Philadelphia in the last trip to the past, albeit not without incident. Too bad Mr. Greene had been grounded and forbidden to use Tesla’s time travel device, as Victor had hoped for a senior trip to the past. He really wanted to meet Harriet Tubman and help her retrieve a slave on the Underground Railroad.

  Mary Beard smiled at Victor and said, “No, no, nothing so adventurous for my old Charley. He’s up at the Cassadaga Hotel eavesdropping on a séance.” The Cassadaga Hotel was the center for mediums and psychics and consequently the area was a destination for hundreds of ghosts, especially in the winter months. Victor had no idea why ghosts, like Northern tourists, flocked to Florida in the winter, but they did. “We’re banned from travel outside Florida, Victor,” Mary Beard lamented and then added, “There sure are some cute boys here today.” Mrs. Beard, Victor knew, loved to flirt.

  “We had a fun time on our last trip, didn’t we, Mary?”

  “That we did. I still am not sure how we wound up helping to make Benedict Arnold the second president of the United States though,” she mused. “Must have been that Peggy Shippen girl. What brings you out to school during summer vacation, my boy?”

  “Mr. Greene wants to see me...well he wants to see Bette and Minerva, too,” Victor admitted, frowning when he added Minerva’s name.

  “So things aren’t going well with Miss Messinger, Victor?” Mary Beard smiled knowingly. “I thought you two hit it off pretty well on our trip to Philadelphia. No more canoodling, my boy, I gather.”

  Victor shrugged. “I don’t understand women, Mary.”

  “The male lament,” Mrs. Beard chuckled. “Been going on ever since Adam wondered why Eve gave him that apple. Women are mysterious, enigmatic creatures Victor,” Mary advised. “At least to men. Word among us dead folks has it that your teacher was cleared and can travel. I saw Shelby Foote float over to Mr. Greene’s portable earlier.”

  “Mr. Foote, really?”

  “It was either him or Bruce Catton. I mix up my Civil War historians; they all look alike to me.”

  Civil war historians, Victor thought, painfully remembering how he chased John Wilkes Booth across the stage at Ford’s Theater on his first trip to the past. It was not Victor’s finest moment, as he had tried to interfere with history. What was going on? Why was Shelby Dade Foote Jr. involved?

  *

  Victor walked out to the portable. Bette and Minerva were already sitting at desks. Darn, Minerva looked lovely, not a pimple on her face. He frowned at his own stupid thought, which made Minerva think he was frowning at her, and she erased the welcoming smile from her face. She looked away in distain and returned to a booklet she was reading: The Diary of a Lady of Gettysburg. Minerva had become something of a fan of women’s Civil War diaries and had even read Mary Chestnut’s lengthy diary of the war. Minerva, for her part was playing coy, holding the booklet to cover her face but peeking out at Victor every now and then. The boy unnerved her, but darned if she still didn’t care for him.

  “Hello Victor!” Bette Kromer shouted cheerfully. “How do you like my do?” asked Bette, referring to her short summer haircut. She looked like G.I. Jane, he thought.

  “Ah nice,” replied Victor with a little white lie.

  “Beastly hot this summer, so I thought I would get scalped,” Bette said.

  Minerva ignored Bette’s banter.

  “Uh huh,” said Victor with a polite smile at Bette, but he wasn’t paying attention to Miss Kromer. Not with Minerva in the room. He focused his eyes on Minerva Messinger’s haughty, indifferent face, not letting his eyes drift down to her chest, for he knew how she hated that about boys, but it was difficult to keep his gaze upright, and when she turned her head away, he glanced downward quickly, nearly sighing.

  Then he silently nodded to his classmates and Bette nodded back and a peeved Minerva pretended to ignore him. Mr. Greene was going to teach European Advanced Placement in the fall and Victor would be in the class, although he wasn’t certain that Bette and Minerva had enrolled. Victor took a seat on the other side of Bette, as geographically as far away from Minerva as possible in the portable classroom.

  Mr. Greene walked in, dressed as usual in shirt and tie, although his shirt was a tad rumpled and his hair was characteristically unkempt. Minerva and Bette had talked about giving Mr. Greene a makeover, but the very idea had set them to laughing. Mr. Greene was what he was: an eccentric.

  “I want to congratulate you three for your perfect scores,” Greene began. “I also wanted to announce that I have finished my sentence of time travel probation given to me by the dead historians and I am now free to visit the past. In honor of your achievement, and as members of the History Channelers, I would like you to accompany me to hear Abraham Lincoln deliver the Gettysburg Address in person. How appropriate that you are reading Sarah Broadhead’s diary today, Minerva…for I want to make a trip back to late November of 1863 to Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. After the battle. We don’t need to be going there during the battle, that’s for sure. It is too dangerous. You will notice that my Dunlap broadside of the Declaration of Independence is missing from the billboard. I recently sold it to acquire some antebellum double-eagle gold pieces, as I would like to pick up a few Civil War souvenirs while I am in town. I would like to leave a week from today at 7 a.m. and be back after Lincoln boards the train back to Washington in the evening of that day, which is the 19th of November 1863. Of course, you don’t have to come, but if you want to keep the club alive…and the twins will not be coming so I doubt if anyone will be hanging out in taverns or starting brawls… I certainly hope not. So just a one-day trip, any takers?

  “Heck yeah,” Victor said.

  “I’m in, Mr. Greene, said Bette, adding a caveat. “But I will need to research female attire of the period.”

  “Of course, Bette,” Greene said. “We all shall have to do that. Sometimes I wonder how the world got on without Google or eBay. What about you, Minerva?”

  “I don’t know, Mr. Greene.”

  “C’mon, Minerva,” Bette said. “It will be fun. I want to find out if Abe really had a high-pitched voice and if he really wore homemade gray socks when he rode the horse in the cemetery dedication parade like Carl Sandberg says. I don’t think he was as hunky as Daniel Day Lewis though,” said Bette, in a reference to the actor who portrayed the Great Emancipator in the Oscar-winning movie Lincoln.

  “We were thinking of doing some visits to colleges,” Minerva said.

  “You aren’t doing that until August,” Bette said. She frowned at her friend.

  Minerva said nothing. Silence filled the portable.

  Victor wondered if he should encourage Minerva. He wanted her on the trip, but he figured if he encouraged her, she definitely would say no. Since he had scored a 5 on the A.P. Psychology exam, he decided to do a little reverse psychology on Minerva Messinger.

  “Don’t bother, Bette. I don’t think she could handle another trip; she barely survived the last one.”

  Minerva swiveled her head. She scowled at Victor and said, “Ha, Mr. Bridges. Bette and I saved you stupid boys on the last trip. I’m in, Mr. Greene.”

  Mission accomplished, and a lot faster than Tom Cruise completed his missions, Victor thought. He wanted to smile, he wanted to cheer, but he said only, “whatever,” in a fei
gned, resigned voice.

  “Okay, then it is settled. I will provide each one of you with two twenty-dollar gold pieces for you to do a bit of antique shopping if you like. Could be a real Antiques Road Show or Pawn Stars,” Mr. Greene added.

  Victor knew that Mr. Greene binge-watched Pawn Stars on the History Channel whenever he got the chance, but Victor thought the show was too staged, and he didn’t really care for it. However, he kept his opinion to himself, not wanting to rankle his favorite teacher.

  “Mr. Greene, will one of the ghosts accompany us on the trip?”

  “Shelby Foote has agreed to accompany us. I was hoping to contact Carl Sandberg, but I was informed that he only haunts in Illinois. Too bad, as he was the authority on Lincoln.”

  “Shelby Foote!” Bette objected. “Mr. Greene, we nearly crashed into the half-completed Washington Monument when he guided us to 1865.”

  “That was my driving, Bette. I was absent-mindedly looking for the completed monument and I forgot they ran out of funds in 1854 and the monument was only a quarter of its present height, and looked more like a Mayan ruin than an obelisk,” Greene replied. “Besides, no one knows the Civil War better than Mr. Foote. I think he and Bruce Catton are the finest historians on the Civil War period. Of course, no one knows Mr. Lincoln better than Mr. Sandberg, but he is not only dead, but obstinate and prefers to haunt the University of Chicago. Can’t really blame him. The University of Chicago is a fine school. We are fortunate that Mr. Foote agreed to a second trip with us. Mr. Catton may come as well. Then we will have two great, albeit dead, Civil War historians. As a matter of fact, the Dead Historians Club insists that Mr. Foote be our guide, and the Beards have been banished from time travel tours for five years as they were rather useless, especially Charles Beard. It was determined that had the Beards chaperoned us properly we would not have changed the past nor have been forced to go back and amend our actions.”

  Victor thought Mr. Greene’s judgment of the Beards was a bit harsh. Victor wondered if he should say a word on behalf of Mary Beard, but his courage deserted him. Frankly, he realized, Mary wasn’t much help. He had no trouble criticizing her husband aloud, however.