War and Millie McGonigle

by Karen Cushman

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  This is a work of fiction. All incidents and dialogue, and all characters with the exception of some well-known historical and public figures, are products of the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Where real-life historical or public figures appear, the situations, incidents, and dialogues concerning those persons are fictional and are not intended to depict actual events or to change the fictional nature of the work. In all other respects, any resemblance to persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2021 by Karen Cushman

  Cover art copyright © 2021 by Izzy Burton

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Visit us on the Web! rhcbooks.com

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 978-1-9848-5010-2 (trade) — ISBN 978-1-9848-5011-9 (lib. bdg.) — ISBN 978-1-9848-5012-6 (ebook)

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  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

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Author’s Note

  Acknowledgments

  For Frances and Maxine, the Segal girls of San Diego—

  and with thanks to Philip, for sharing his memories

  and for, well, everything

  THIS WAS A PEOPLE'S WAR,

  AND EVERYONE WAS IN IT.

  —COLONEL OVETA CULP HOBBY,

  INSCRIBED ON THE WORLD WAR II MEMORIAL,

  WASHINGTON, D.C.

  George lifted the slimy creature to his mouth and bit it right between the eyes. I had seen him and the other Portuguese octopus fishermen do that a hundred times, but it still made me shudder. “Doesn’t that taste muddy and disgusting?”

  “Nah,” he said, wiping his mouth on his sleeve. “Only salty. I told you, this way he don’t die but only sleeps, stays fresh ’til he’s cooked.”

  George threw the octopus into a bucket and slid over to another hole in the mud. He filled a turkey baster from a grimy Clorox bottle and squirted the bleach into the hole. In a minute another octopus slithered to the surface to avoid the bleach. George grabbed it, pulled it out, and bit it. “You want? Makes good stew.”

  Another shudder ran up my back, and I shook my head. I’d as soon eat sand-flea soup or mud-snail chowder! I’ll take my fish from a can, thank you, mixed with mayo and chopped onion. Black olives, maybe. Anyway, the McGonigles’ money troubles, bad as they were, did not require us to eat octopus stew. Not yet, anyway.

  I pulled my Book of Dead Things from the waistband of my shorts.

  The octopuses in the bucket weren’t exactly dead, but close enough, I decided, to add to the book. Squatting down, I examined them closely: squishy and grayish with yellow splotches, many legs, bright blue eyes on…“Hey, George, octopuses have blue eyes!”

  He wiped his face with his wet and muddy hands, leaving his face wet and muddy. “Nah, those fake eyes.” He pulled another from its hole. “Their real eyes up here, see.”

  I looked. Indeed the octopus’s real eyes were higher on its head. Dark and kind of sad. And George bit it right between them.

  I sketched an octopus as best I could, not being any kind of artist. My drawing looked like a blob of nothing, which is pretty much what the octopuses looked like but with bright blue fake eyes.

  Tucking my book away, I walked on. Above me the September sun was bright and warm. In San Diego it was almost always bright and warm. People called it paradise, but often I’ve longed for a dreary day—heavy dark clouds, wind whistling over the water, rain tapping on the roof and falling plop plop plop, leaving little pockmarks on the sand. Mama snorts when I say this and calls me a romantic. I don’t think it’s meant as a compliment.

  Except for the fishermen, I was alone on the beach. Summer visitors were mostly gone. Mission Beach is a spit of land two blocks wide and two miles long, with the ocean on one side and the bay on the other. Likely there were sunbathers and sand-castle builders over on the ocean side, but here on the bay it was quiet, with a scattering of cottages—some new, some shabby, all small—and few people to bother me. That was the way I liked it. I had tides to watch and dead things to find.

  I sat myself on the end of the Lempkes’ dock, one of several wooden docks that reached out as if trying to touch the tiny island in the middle of the bay. The tide was out, and the mudflats, speckled with eelgrass, were alive with fiddler crabs, flies, and sand fleas. Here and there, a boat marooned in the mud squeaked and scraped, awaiting the high tides that would float it once again. Twice a day, every day, the tide came in and went out. Pop said the changing tides were caused by gravitational forces related to the sun and the moon. I didn’t understand how it worked, but each day I saw the waters of the bay recede and leave behind an expanse of mud and sand, and then return blue and deep. I could count on it. Every day the same.

  I lay back on the warm boards of the dock, scratched the flea bites on my leg, and sniffed deeply of the rich, salty, fishy smell of the mud. Gulls screeched like rusty hinges as they soared above me, and flocks of curlews and sandpipers pecked for bugs for breakfast. There was plenty of life on the bay but a peaceful stillness, too, that comforted me when I needed comforting.

  A brown pelican came to a clumsy landing on the mud and shook water from its feathers. “What’re you doing here?” I asked. The bird studied me closely with its dark, beady eyes but said nothing.

  “Have you come to try and cheer me up, too? Everyone wants me to cheer up, but I refuse. Know why?” I sat up and glared at the bird. “The world’s full of war and death
. That’s why. Hitler’s gobbling up one country after another, and I’m afraid he’ll come here next. My pop can’t find a job, Mama’s crabby, and Lily is sick all the time. What’s there to be cheery about?” I took a deep breath and let it out with a whoof. “Want to hear more?”

  The bird made loud clacking sounds with its enormous beak but still said nothing, just yawned a huge yawn and ruffled its feathers. Then it hopped awkwardly down the beach, flapping its mighty wings before soaring into the air, growing smaller and smaller until it disappeared. That’s what I get for trying to have a serious discussion with a pelican. Stupid bird.

  I pulled out my Book of Dead Things again. Next to the octopus blob, I drew what else I’d found this morning—six sand dollars stuck together with tar, a faintly orange ghost shrimp, and a sand crab no bigger than my thumb. I was trying to capture what exactly marked them as dead: the lifeless droop of the shrimp’s pincers, the emptiness in the eyes of the crab. Where were they now? Why did they die and not some other shrimp or crab? Why did Gram die?

  She did die. In July. On my birthday, of all days. It was so wrong and unfair. We had all gone to a matinee of the new Bob Hope comedy, Caught in the Draft, to celebrate my birthday. There were awful newsreels about the war in Europe and the movie was about soldiers and danger and shooting, and I started to think again about war and death. What a world. Even Bob Hope movies left me worried and scared.

  When we got home, I was gloomier than usual. Mama told me to get out until I was in a better mood, so Gram and I took a walk along the bay.

  Still grumbling, I picked up stones and bombarded the water, the seagulls, the piers and docks we passed.

  Gram grabbed my hand and held it still. “Where has my Millie gone, my merry squirt, my grumbly but funny dance partner and poker buddy? She had the biggest laugh. Anyone who heard it had to laugh, too. I don’t hear that laugh anymore.”

  “Sorry, Gram, but this is how I am now. Better get used to glum and scared.”

  Gram shook her head. “Bah, you’ve just taken on the world’s troubles sooner than a young person should have to. Too sensitive and smart for your own good, if you ask me. Now you’re no longer a merry squirt, you’re a gloomy squirt. And a gloomy squirt, dear Millie, can be a pain in the backsi—um, neck.”

  I hid a smile at that before responding. “Why shouldn’t I be gloomy? You know what’s happening in the world. Hitler marching with tanks and planes and goose-stepping Nazis. Radios and newspapers and newsreels at the movies shouting about war and bombs, ruined cities, dead soldiers, loss and pain. How can I not think about that? And how can I not be gloomy about it?”

  “I know. Terrible things are happening, but it’s not all tragedy and death.” She dropped my hand and gestured vigorously around, the loose skin on her arm moving like little waves on the bay. “Look, Millie, at this amazing place you live in. The sun and the warm breezes, the sea and the sky, the birds in the air, and the marvels of life in the sea. They can bring you joy. Remember them. Treasure them. Don’t let them be lost in your gloom.”

  I would not be comforted. “But they die, the birds and the fish. I see them dead on the beach all the time. And what if Nazi bombs destroy the beach and the bay and everything in it?” I drew in a deep breath.

  She put her arm around my shoulders. “Ah, Millie, of course you’re worried, but life’s not hopeless. We can do something about what worries and scares us. That’s why I march, pass out flyers, circulate petitions.” She gave my shoulders a squeeze. “And I’m not the only one. Despite the horror, people care, work together for a better world, and bravely fight back. There’s good, even in wartime—remember that.”

  “What do you mean?” My voice got tight and screechy. And loud. “What’s good about war and death?”

  Gram pulled a package wrapped in Happy Birthday paper and a green ribbon out of the pocket of her jacket. She made me unwrap it right there. Inside was a bright yellow notebook and a purple pen. “I thought you might like to keep a diary,” she said, “but now I have a better idea. Use this to remember the good things in this world, the things you care about. Family and friends, sunrises and sunsets, the birds in the air and the fish in the bay. Things that seem lost or dead—keep them alive and safe in your book. Write. Draw pictures. Whatever is lost stays alive if we remember it.”

  I was happy with the notebook but unsure about Gram’s idea. Did she really mean I should be drawing pictures of dead things? It was too late to keep them safe. Did she mean keep us safe? It was confusing. Still, I thanked her and hugged her before we went back home.

  After the twelve candles had been blown out, twelve kisses given, and the cake eaten, Gram had gone home. As she left, she gestured to the notebook and said, “Don’t let yourself forget, Millie.” It was the last thing she ever said to me.

  At the cemetery, I threw rocks at the gravestones and refused to watch her being put into the ground. That was when I ripped the cheery yellow cover into a million pieces and turned the notebook into The Book of Dead Things, Mission Beach, San Diego, California, 1941.

  I drew several dead clams in my book and closed it with a slam. With my bare feet, I wrote McGONIGLE in the muddy ground, embellished with whorls and squiggles. I considered it signing my work like artists and authors do.

  We McGonigles do not go to church. Not, Gram used to say, until the pope got married so he’d know what life was really like. But I had my own rituals—drawing things lost or dead in my notebook like Gram told me to and signing my name in the mud. The same things in the same way every day. When I don’t, I feel itchy and uncomfortable.

  The mud of the flats felt soft and cool on my bare feet. I wiggled them so the muck squidged between my toes. Marching in place, I sank lower and lower until I was in mud well past my ankles. Then I wiggled and wriggled my legs until the mud gave me up, and I turned for home.

  On Bayside Walk, I passed the few houses, cottages, and downright shacks that straggled along the bay side of Mission Beach. I knew most everyone there, though not everyone wanted to be known, which was okay with me. I am not the chatty-with-the-neighbors sort.

  I nodded to Myrtle Henry, who was sunbathing in her nightgown, and snorted as I passed the Sweeneys’. The only big tree in South Mission, a giant pine, grew in the Sweeneys’ yard. Herman Sweeney tried to climb to the top one New Year’s Eve, but he fell off. People say he only survived because he was drunk and relaxed, but Herman says no, he was saved by an angel. He’s okay now, but his nose is squashed like a potato.

  Behind me sounded the beep beep of a horn and the squeaking tires of a bike. I knew that sound—Dicky Fribble, my archenemy. Once I saw him get beaten up near the roller coaster at the amusement center. Boys often got roughed up there, and that time it was Icky. They swung on him and pushed him around. He was crying when they left. Icky must have seen me because we’ve been archenemies ever since, although I never told anyone what I saw. Superman had Lex Luthor; Captain America had the Red Skull; I had Dicky Fribble.

  “Greetings and salutations, Mil-bert,” Dicky said, slowing down as he passed. “My, but you’re dirty. You should have done the world a favor and smeared that mud all over your ugly face.”

  “Hello, Icky. Drop dead,” I said, and strode off, my legs dark and gooey.

  “Hey, Millie!” Ralphie Rigoletto ran up behind me, pulling his red Radio Flyer wagon. “Come meet my new turtle. I won him at a carnival, and I want him to meet everyone.” There, in the wagon, bouncing in an inch of water, was a little turtle, its shell painted yellow with a tiny green palm tree. “His name is Pepperoni.”

  “Why Pepperoni?”

  “Because I love pepperoni,” Ralphie said. “You can pet him for a penny.”

  “That’s a penny more than I have.”

  “Then I’ll give you one free pet.” I reached out to touch Pepperoni’s painted back, and he pulled his head in.

  “He doesn’t know you. Mayb
e he’s scared,” Ralphie said. “Turtles do that when they’re scared.”

  I waved Ralphie and Pepperoni on to meet the rest of the neighbors and headed toward home, a small cottage perched near the south end of Mission Beach. We could often hear waves crashing on the ocean beach to the west, but the cottage faced the gentler activity of the bay.

  “Millie, is that you?” Mama called as I entered.

  Who else? “I saw Pop with Lily and Pete on their way to the amusement center, so I guess it must be me.” Or were you expecting Cary Grant to come and take you away from your ungrateful family and sweep you off to Hollywood? The drying mud on my legs itched, so I threw myself down on a kitchen chair and began scratching it off with a fork.

  “Millie, if you can’t act like a lady, at least try to act like a human being.” Mama took a slurp of her coffee. “I sent your father and the little ones out so we could talk,” she said.

  Uh-oh. Danger. Mama never sat me down to talk. My skin prickled. “Is it bad war news? Is somebody sick? Or dead?” Dead! I patted the Book of Dead Things in my pocket.

  “Calm down, Nervous Nelly,” Mama said. “It’s nothing like that.” She lit a cigarette and blew a great puff of smoke into the air. “But some big changes are coming for us.”

  I hated changes. I wanted a world I could count on. I fought a sudden urge to write McGONIGLE in the mud.

  “It’s about Gram’s cousin Edna,” Mama said. “She was in some sort of trouble back in Milwaukee, which is how she landed on Gram’s doorstep. But now Gram is gone”—tears glittered in Mama’s eyes—“and Edna can’t be left alone. Last week she walked out of the Piggly Wiggly with a ham tucked under her jacket.” Mama waved her cigarette around. “And yesterday she set the stove on fire! So we’ll have to give up Gram’s apartment, and Edna will come here and live with us.”