Free Ghost Soldier by Elaine Marie Alphin Page B

remembered his envious tone when he’d asked if Nicole was my sister. “We were the youngest, and I suppose we were a bit spoiled. Louise had the most wonderful ideas for ways to get out of chores, and a whole collection of hiding places around the farm so we wouldn’t get caught. Once we were free, she came up with terrific games that we could play. I would be Sir Lancelot in shining armor, and she would be Joan of Arc.” He laughed. “Centuries apart, of course! But things like that never bothered Louise. At Petersburg, I thought about Louise all the time, wishing I were still back home. Things didn’t work out at all the way I thought they would when I enlisted.”
    â€œWhy did you enlist?” I asked, tugging at a tough dandelion with a deep root. “I mean—you can’t be much older than I am. They wouldn’t let me in the Army.”
    â€œI was fifteen,” Rich said. I’d thought he was younger—he was shorter than me. But with his lean frame, just muscles and no fat, he also looked older than fifteen. “The Confederate Army was desperate for soldiers. That Christmas, in 1864, Governor Vance made a speech calling on every man who could handle a musket or stand behind a breastwork to rally to the Confederacy’s defense. And the summer before, President Davis said that the War would go on until the last man fell in battle, and his children seized his musket and fought on. George and Jefferson had joined the Army long before. I knew it was time for me to do my part.
    â€œI didn’t even tell Louise what I was planning. I was half afraid she’d beg me to stay and half afraid she’d insist on coming with me and we’d both be sent home. I just slipped out early and enlisted at the county courthouse.” He smiled faintly. “They weren’t worried about ages. The man just said, ‘You look sixteen, Chamblee,’ and I didn’t disagree, so he gave me the oath right there and I was a soldier.”
    I ripped out the last of the weeds and sat back on my heels.
    â€œLook,” Rich said, pointing, a smile spreading all the way to his eyes.
    I smoothed the soil around a squashed-looking crocus that was starting to straighten up now that the weeds were gone. “I bet there’s more of them, but it’s getting too dark to work tonight.” Somehow twilight had closed in around us. I stood up, brushed off my jeans, and headed back to the porch swing. “I don’t get it. If your brothers were already in the Army—”
    â€œAnd my father was in the Home Guard,” he interjected, following me.
    â€œThen why did you have to join? Your family had already done its part.”
    â€œIt was not merely a matter of doing your part!” Rich said sharply. “Friends in South Carolina wrote to us. Sherman’s raiders—” His face darkened ominously, and I shivered a little. “I cannot call them soldiers,” he went on, almost biting off the words, “for they dishonored the idea of patriotic duty! I faced Union soldiers at Fort Stedman—they were honest men who fought for what they believed, even if they were the enemy. But they fought against armed men, as soldiers should, not against women and children. Sherman’s raiders beat on the door of a nearby house in the middle of the night and turned the women and children out into the dark!”
    His fists clenched around his musket. “Children! They were children, not soldiers who could fight back!”
    I nodded and thought that he didn’t seem to realize he was just a kid himself, who shouldn’t have had to fight soldiers.
    â€œThe raiders ran through the house,” he went on, his voice strained, “setting torches to the curtains and bed quilts, screaming like banshees. My father’s friend wrote that the crackling of the flames and the crashing of rafters were horrible. The people themselves were left