Free Soldier's Heart by Gary Paulsen Page A

army: One part of an army didn’t always know the business of another part. The thousand men in the regiment would be in companies of eighty to a hundred men from each section and it would be hard for a man to know men who weren’t from the same area.
    Charley couldn’t join where they knew him. Somebody would spill the beans and he’d get sent back or used as a runner or drummer boy. He wasn’t any boy. He was going to sign to fight as a man and he knew a way to do it.
    They would gather at Fort Snelling, up alongthe Mississippi. All the companies from all the towns would assemble there before they went off to fight.
    He’d just take him a walk, Charley would, take a walk by himself until he was at Fort Snelling and there he would lie about his age and sign up as a man and get him a musket and a uniform and go to see what a war was like.
    â€œI won’t get into any trouble, Ma,” he said, wrapping some bread and cold potatoes and half a roast chicken in some tow cotton. “Plus they’ll be paying me. I hear they give eleven dollars a month. I’ll send most of it on home to you and Orren.” Orren was his younger brother. “You can use the money and I won’t be under your feet all the time.…”
    â€œYou aren’t under my feet.” She hated it when he talked fast. He always got his way when he talked fast. He’d smile and that cowlick would stand up in the back and he’d talk fast and she couldn’t keep him from what hewanted. He was a good boy, as good as they came, but ever since his father, Paul, had been kicked to death by a horse gone mad when a swarm of bees landed on it, Charley only had to smile and talk fast and he got his way. “You haven’t ever been under my feet.”
    â€œSame as,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m always in the way. Best I go off and see what the big fuss is all about.”
    â€œYou ain’t but a boy.”
    â€œAnd I’ve got to be a man sometime. You’ve said it more than once yourself. Charley, you said, you’ve got to be a man. Well, here it is—my chance to be a man. A boy wouldn’t go off to earn eleven dollars a month and wear a uniform. Only a man. So I’m going to be a man and do what a man can do.”
    And he won. She knew he would and he did and he took his bread and cold potatoes and chicken and left home walking down the road for Fort Snelling, and if she had known whatwas to come of it, if she had known and could tell him what would come of it, she would have fought to drag him back and let the federal government keep their eleven dollars a month.
    But she also had heard the songs and the slogans and seen the parades, had been to the meetings, and though it was her son Charley leaving she did not think it would be so bad. Nobody thought it would be so bad. Nobody thought it
could
be so bad. And all the officers and politicians and newspapers said it would be a month or two, no longer.
    It would all be over by fall.

CHAPTER TWO
FORT SNELLING
    T hey didn’t have uniforms for him. There was a pair of black pants that were so short his calves showed, a pair of gray socks and a black felt hat. That was the uniform he received to go for a soldier. The socks and pants were stout but the hat was cheap and with the first little sprinkle it sagged around his head and drooped over his face.
    They took his name. The colonel of the regiment read a list of things he couldn’t do—desert his post, traffic with the enemy, steal from his fellow soldiers, act immoral or without decency—andthen he signed his name, told them he was eighteen and they didn’t challenge it, and he was a soldier. He could read and write, Charley could, though he hadn’t had much schooling. His ma had made him stick to reading and writing and he wrote her letters telling her of how it was to be a soldier.
    â€œThe food is bad,” he wrote. “Beef so