Ghost Soldier (8 page)

I slid the pieces of my recorder together and tried to play a song by heart, a Shaker tune I liked, “Simple Gifts.” The notes were meant to be played smoothly, but my breath came in jerks and the rhythm fell apart. I was scared of the ghost and ashamed of myself and angry, too—angry at Dad for bringing me here, and even angry at Mom, for once—angry at her for telling me I was special for seeing ghosts and then leaving me to face them alone. Too many feelings were mixed up inside of me. I needed a different kind of music. I thumbed through the music book, almost ripping the pages.

“Red, I'm sorry,” the ghost said. “Are you upset because I frightened the girl? I truly did not mean for her to crack that plate. I wish I could apologize to her.”

Well, he couldn't! But I wasn't going to answer him. I just clamped my lips over the recorder's mouthpiece and stared hard at the wavering notes on the page of music. It was a book of American folk music, and I saw the song was “Dixie.” Its jazzy, syncopated lilt seemed better suited to the nervy way I was feeling, and I let the music break loose inside of me. I could feel my breathing even out as I phrased the notes, and the anger inside of me quieted.

When the last note hung in the air, I turned the page and saw “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.” You never got home, I thought at the ghost, and felt unexpectedly sorry for him. My fingers rested on the recorder stops instead of gripping the instrument, and my breathing was steady as the melody rippled smoothly.

Then the music swelled. Not stopping, I looked up and saw the ghost blowing into a harmonica. His eyes smiled as he slid the stops up and down across his mouth, and he tapped the beat in the air with his right boot.

We blew the last note together and smiled at each other.

“Music sure has a way of settling folks down, doesn't it, Red?” he asked peaceably.

I slid the pieces of my recorder apart and wiped down the inside. I could go on running from the ghost, or I could face him and find out what he wanted. I looked up, and he was still smiling faintly at me. I took a deep breath, said, “I guess it does,” and realized I'd decided to stop running away. “Okay—you'd better tell me how you think I can help you, Richeson.” I shook my head. “That's quite a mouthful. Is that what everybody called you?”

He grinned. “Fewer syllables than Alexander, if you're counting. Richeson is a family name—my grandfather's name on my mother's side. My oldest brother, George, got my father's name. And the Francis comes from Francis Scott Key.”

“You're related to Francis Scott Key?” I asked, impressed.

“Of course not,” he said, wiping his harmonica. “A lot of families named their sons for heroes in the War of 1812—their middle names, at least. My friends called me Rich,” he added, almost shyly.

I put the pieces of the recorder away in their case and leaned back on the porch swing. It's funny how you can get used to that smell of oranges and even the cold. “Okay, Rich,” I told him, “tell me what you want.”

“I need to know what happened to my family,” he said. “It should be quite simple for an out-of-timer to find out, but I can't do it myself. I tried.”

“How am I supposed to tell you what happened to your family?” I asked.

“You can hold things,” he explained. “I can't.”

I frowned. “But you can stand on the ground, and you can hear me and the others and see us.”

“Being a ghost can be confusing,” he said wryly. “I still have my senses—I can see and smell and hear and feel—I can feel tired, for instance, and I sleep when I do, or I can feel sore if my boots rub my feet, or feel the weight of my musket. I'm not standing on the ground, though—I'm just, well, sort of floating here. I could as easily be up in the sky, but it seems more polite to be here beside you. I could even taste if I could only eat! And sometimes I do feel hungry when I smell good food like that country ham tonight. But I can't hold food or anything else.”

“What do you call that?” I asked, pointing to the harmonica.

He held it up, turning it so that the light from the living room reflected off the polished metal side plates. “But this is from my time, from my life. You'd have trouble holding it, I think.”

As he crossed the porch and held it out to me, I reached out one finger tentatively. The little instrument felt like a slab of dry ice, so cold it burned, and my finger went numb immediately. I jerked the hand back and tucked my finger in my armpit to thaw out. “I see what you mean!”

He smiled sadly and slipped the harmonica into his knapsack. “I can't hold anything in your time, or in any time after my death. My hand just goes through it as if it's nothing but a cloud. And there's something I need to get that you can hold for me. I think that will tell me where my family went.”

Rich sighed and propped his musket beside him. He floated cross-legged on top of the plank floor, leaning back against his bedroll. “We owned a farm in Wake County, North Carolina, near Stirrup Iron Creek.”

“Two Stirrups,” I said, remembering his words at the battlefield.

“That's right.” He nodded. “My father called it that after the creek. The farm wasn't that big—only about seventy acres. My father and my older brothers, George and Jefferson, laid in a good crop of tobacco each year, as well as the vegetables for the family. I loved growing things even when I was younger, and I had ideas about how to improve the farm.” Rich sat up straighter, pointing at the sloping yard beyond the porch as if he were still alive to make improvements. “I could see the mud in the runoff after the rain, and I got this idea that we should plow
around
the slope instead of up it. Father said he'd consider it after the War…” His voice trailed off and he looked sadly at the Hambricks' yard. “Doesn't it hurt you to see this tangle of weeds?”

I nodded and set the recorder down on the porch swing. “It's not my yard, but I've been aching to do some work on it. We don't live on a farm, but we've got a garden at home—my mother loves flowers.” I went down the porch steps and crouched beside what looked like it had once been a flower bed. When I tugged at the tangle of ivy, it resisted for a moment, then began to tear free. I could see stunted dandelions and other weeds matted beneath the ivy and wondered what else was there. “Go on,” I said as I worked. “Tell me about your family.”

“There were five of us that survived,” Rich said, kneeling down above the patchy grass beside me. “George was the oldest. He was seventeen in '59, before the war. Then there was Amalie. Avery came next, but he died of whooping cough before I was born. Jefferson was fourteen, then came Harriet—she took sick and lived just long enough to be christened. I was next, and then Louise. Mother lost one more boy, Andrew, and a girl, Marietta, before Hiram was born.”

He pointed out a tendril of ivy that I'd missed, and I tugged until it ripped out. “Little Hiram lived only a few weeks, and then Mother died—a fever. That was 1859, right before I turned ten.”

My hand jerked and the ivy slid through it. Mom had left just before I turned ten, also. “What is it?” Rich asked.

I looked back at the weeds. “I lost my mother when I was about the same age.”

“Oh.” He was silent for a moment. “I'm sorry, Alexander. I didn't realize your mother was gone.”

I shook my head. “Not like that—she's not … dead. She left.” I swallowed and began pulling the weeds the ivy had hidden. “I don't want to talk about it.”

Rich nodded after a moment. “I miss my mother, but not the same way I miss my sister Louise.” His voice cracked, and I 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.”

“Why 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.”

“I 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.

“I 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.

“Look,” 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—”

“And my father was in the Home Guard,” he interjected, following me.

“Then why did you have to join? Your family had already done its part.”

“It 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.

“The 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 destitute—the Yankees took everything, even the family jewelry. And these marauders were marching toward Two Stirrups! I wanted to stop them before they ever reached our county. I had to keep Louise safe.”

I could understand that—he'd made up his mind to fight for his family the same way I'd made up my mind to fight for mine. We just had different ways of standing up for what we wanted. But you couldn't just sit and do nothing when your world was falling apart.

“I thought I'd be sent to face Sherman,” he went on. “But they needed replacements in Petersburg the worst, so they sent me there.”

“So that's how you got stuck in Petersburg with Lee's Army,” I said.

“I couldn't believe I wasn't even going to fight in North Carolina! I almost deserted,” he said, turning his musket around in his hands. “I'm ashamed to admit it, but if you're going to help me you deserve to know it all. One of the veterans who'd been with the 49th for a couple of years, Noah Langston, befriended me. I told him I had signed up to keep my family safe. It wasn't right that I was here while Sherman was getting closer every day to Louise and Amalie. I told Noah I had to go to them!”

He reached into a pouch at his belt, took out a cloth, and began wiping the barrel of his musket, as if he'd rather concentrate on that than think about what he was saying. “A lot of soldiers were deserting that winter, going home to their families. I told myself if the others were doing it, then it must be all right. Sometimes you tell yourself things like that when you know what you want to do is wrong but everything all around you seems wrong, too.”

I nodded. I knew all about telling myself one thing, even when I knew it was wrong. But I couldn't admit that to anybody else the way Rich just came right out and told me.

“But Noah stopped me,” Rich went on, and I quit thinking about myself and paid attention to him. “He didn't report me, or stand guard on me, or anything like that. He just gave me a piece of advice, and I've never forgotten it.” The hand wiping down the musket paused, and he looked out into space as if he could see his friend in front of him. “Noah said, ‘You do your job by holding your position here, Chamblee. If you stand fast and hold these earthworks, then you'll keep these civilians in Petersburg, and our government in Richmond, safe. And remember—there's some Virginian in General Johnston's Army who's standing fast against Sherman's raiders, in order to protect your people at Two Stirrups. You can best keep your sisters safe by standing here and doing your job, Chamblee, just as he's doing his. And I keep my wife and children safe by standing fast beside you.'”