The mules, they’d killed the boy.
Not themselves, no. He’d thrown himself flat in a ditch, dodging their hooves.
But they’d still been harnessed, the team of six strong and stubborn beasts. Harnessed to the limber that towed Little Johnny. Instead of balking and rolling the way they did when the enemy artillery shells went shrieking overhead, the mules bolted. Downhill and gaining speed, and Little Johnny’s two wheels — hickory and iron — thunked right into that muddy ditch.
If the boy had time to scream, we couldn’t hear him. Nor could we hear what must have been the terrible, mortal crunching sound of ribs and spine.
Another barrage passed by then and that time the mules did buck and squeal and roll, and got so entangled they could go no further. We reached them and as we tried to calm them back under control, Sergeant Lewis gathered up the boy in his arms.
So small, he was. Six years old, seven at the most. Towheaded, in homespun trousers and a sack-shirt, and just… just broken; broken like a jointed twig-doll someone had trodden on. The way his arms and legs dangled… the way his neck lolled… we’d all seen enough death by then to know he never would’ve had a chance.
It had been quick, though. There was that.
We tried to find out his name, where he’d come from, or who he belonged to. There were women who accompanied the army — laundresses, seamstresses, officers’ wives, cooks and nurses, among others — and a few of them had children. There were farms and towns around the area. Some family was missing their boy, some mother her child, some father his son, but nobody ever came forth to claim him.
In the end, we saw to his burying ourselves. Each of us put in toward his coffin out of our own wages. Sergeant Lewis had the detachment’s chaplain say a few words. We called him Johnny, for lack of anything else.
Not six weeks later was when Mullins spoke up, there by the tent as we ate our supper of salt pork, beans and cornbread.
He’d seen the boy, he said.
We’d moved on by then, left that sad spot far behind. Yet not one of us doubted Mullins for an instant, because we’d all seen him too.
The same boy, the same towheaded boy… but not a broken twig-doll. The boy, up and lively, chipper as a chipmunk… capering around the gun limber, happy and clapping, laughing fit to split. Not that we heard him, not that we could hear him, but we’d seen him, sure as Christmas, and there was no mistaking that delighted gap-toothed grin for anything but joy.
So, we’d all seen him, but what of it? No one else seemed to, but what of that, either? Wasn’t doing any harm. Wasn’t like he scared us. If anything, it was the opposite; when Dobbs and I went to talk to him one night, he vanished like a dream upon waking soon as we said a word.
It got so we were accustomed to it. He’d just be there, sitting on the ammunition box or astride the gun’s bronze barrel like it was a rocking horse or broomstick pony. Came to be like he was our mascot of sorts.
And why not? There was another detachment with a dog, a scruffy and spotted mongrel that followed them around, even wore a unit kerchief around its neck. A man with the 16th had a tame barn owl he’d raised from a fledgeling. I’d seen an artillery unit in Louisiana who lugged around an old ship’s figurehead mermaid as their Lady Luck touchwood.
Was it so strange, then, that we had our boy?
Some of us — again, we didn’t know who’d gone and done it first — took to leaving the odd biscuit or piece of jelly fold-over out by Little Johnny. They’d be gone by morning but that was hardly surprising, what with the birds, mice, and other scavengers about.
Dobbs, hardly more than a boy himself at fifteen, started leaving some of the trinkets he collected: snail shells and buckeyes, interesting stones and the like. These, too, would be gone by morning.
Same with the candy. One of the Brubaker brothers, Tad, had a powerful sweet tooth and a weakness for the sanded hard candies sold by the camp sutlers. Lemon and butterscotch if he could get them, sassafras or horehound if not. He guarded them the way some men might guard lockets with snips of their sweetheart’s hair or letters from home, but now he’d spare at least one from each bag.
Then there was the matter of the socks.
Carey’s maiden aunt had been in the practice of regularly sending him care packages — soap, tinned oysters, sewing packets of needles and buttons and thread, tooth powder, scripture pamphlets, gloves, rum-cake, decks of cards, cookies — which he shared out generously among the rest of us. Some weeks after his father had written to inform him that influenza had carried the elderly lady off, a parcel arrived by mail-wagon. It had undergone months of misdirections and delays before finally reaching Carey. The wrappings were tattered, the ink smudged and worn, but it was intact with the contents undamaged.
There were canned peaches and a drawstring bag of coffee beans, some peppermint sticks, and several pairs of thick wool socks, with a note to the effect that her church knitting circle had made them and she hoped they’d included enough for “you, my dearest nephew, and your gunnery friends. Love always, Aunt Agnes.”
Few comforts in all this world are so simple and so welcome as the putting on of a new pair of warm, dry socks. When you’re a soldier, feet pruned white and rubbed raw inside your boots after miles of marching in the wet and cold, it’s a blessing beyond compare. Only a meal of hearty home cooking comes close.
We praised Carey’s aunt. We doffed our caps and held them to our chests, heads bowed, in a moment of silent prayer for her God-rested soul. Each of us made haste to peel off the worn and ragged old socks he wore and replace them with the new. They felt like cradling mothers’ arms, the woolen embrace of angels.
There were indeed enough for us all. And then, as he was gathering and smoothing the crumpled newspapers with which his aunt had stuffed the parcel — we’d read them, eagerly, however mundane and months-out-of-date they might be — Carey paused.
He’d found another pair of socks tucked into the very bottom of the box, as if they’d gotten in there by mistake somehow. He held them up without a word. We all saw that, unlike the ones we now wore on our feet, this last pair was… small.
No one spoke.
I had a chill; I doubt I was alone in it.
We looked at those socks. Those small socks. The size a child might wear.
Still without a word, Carey got up from his seat by the campfire. He walked over to Little Johnny, where the 6-pounder sat under a canvas shelter between our tents and the mule-pen, and placed the socks under the bronze smoothbore barrel.
Then we went to our bedrolls. In the morning, the socks were gone.
It went on for some weeks. Mullins won a shiny new tin cup playing dice, but left it out and kept using his dented one. Thomas, who whittled, made some spinning wooden tops which he painted with bold striped colors. I traded my old jacknife to a twelve-year-old drummer lad for a pouch of clay marbles. We didn’t discuss it. We just… did it.
And the things were always gone the next morning.
I wondered, suspected even, that Sergeant Lewis was behind it. That he crept out there in the night to retrieve whatever the rest of us might have left. Not meanly, no … kindly, in his way, thinking it better not to dishearten us, to give us something to believe in and cling to, foolish superstition though it may be.
Ghosts, after all…
Who believed in such things?
We did.
So, I soon learned, did Sergeant Lewis. He didn’t collect what we left. He had no more explanation for it than the rest of us.
One evening, he wrote a letter, but instead of taking it to the company post-master, I saw him set it atop the ammunition box and weigh it down with a rock so it wouldn’t blow away.