War and Millie McGonigle

by Karen Cushman

  I frowned at him. “You were just horsing around in the water? There’s a war on, you know.”

  Rocky’s face was pale and clammy. “I’m no soldier. I’m going to college. Be an engineer.” His eyes filled with tears. “Why are we talking about this now? Quit yapping at me and get some help.”

  I stared at him. No longer a muscled dreamboat, a Greek god on a surfboard, he was just a boy, scared and in pain. He looked hardly older than Pete.

  “Wait here,” I told him. “I’ll go get someone to help you.” I plodded through the sand, tore up Ocean Front Walk, and left him behind.

  Wait here? Where could he go with that gash in his leg? How stupid of me, but I didn’t stop to think about it. I had Rocky to save.

  I found Peter Palmer at the Burger Shack, and he went to pick Rocky up in the battered Plymouth he called the Surfmobile. I didn’t go with him. I needed to think about Rocky. I felt a little disappointed. I wanted him to be a great hero, charging up hills and winning the war. But war was awful and people died. I didn’t want Rocky to die. I imagined adding him to my Book of Dead Things and shuddered. Head spinning, I walked slowly home.

  Lily was digging in the dirt in front of the cottage. She looked a bit pale. “Are you okay?” I asked her.

  She nodded. “No wheezing.” She poured dirt from a teapot into the bed of a dump truck. “But I wish Edna didn’t live here. I don’t like her.”

  “What has Edna ever done to you, besides stink up the house with perfume?”

  “She said that sometimes fairies steal away a healthy baby and leave a sickly fairy child in its place. And that’s what I am, she said. That’s why I’m sick a lot. She told me not to tell Mama and Pop because they’d send me back. So don’t you tell them.”

  Poor Lily. Her Shirley Temple curls were greasy and flat, her eyes deeply shadowed. She looked so worried and afraid. I clenched my teeth and frowned. Darn that Edna. I knew she was silly and confused sometimes, but I didn’t know she could be mean. I, too, wished Edna didn’t live here, but what could I do about it, except maybe get her drafted—and then watch out, U.S. Army!

  “Applesauce!” I said to Lily. “I know it’s really you and no fairy child.” I pinched her chin. “I saw this dimple in your chin the day you were born, and it’s still there.”

  “Really? Truly?”

  “Would I lie to my favorite sister?”

  Lily smiled and dumped dirt from the truck into teacups.

  Lily would be okay, and Rocky would be okay, but what about me? My dreamboat had sunk.

  The sun was hot and the tide out. After school I went looking for dead things. I found a dead jellyfish and the carcass of a baby shark and squatted down to draw them in the book.

  A voice from behind me said, “So that’s what you do with that book you carry around—draw fish?” It was Rosie.

  I hadn’t yet told Rosie about the Book of Dead Things. It was between me and Gram. I wanted to tell her now, but what if she thought it creepy or babyish? I took a chance. “Dead fish and other dead things. And the names of people who died.” I closed the book and tucked it into my pocket.

  “Why dead things?”

  “Well, for one thing, they don’t move, so it’s easier to draw them.”

  “Har-har, Millie. You do know that keeping a Book of Dead Things is weird? Even ghoulish and grisly,” Rosie said.

  “It’s for my gram. She told me to keep track of dead people and things so I don’t forget them.”

  “Do you really think she meant dead jellyfish and dog bones—yes, I heard about that.”

  I shrugged.

  Rosie stared sideways at me. “No wonder you’re gloomy a lot, Millie. You’re allowed to have fun once in a while, you know, even during a war, even if your gram dies.”

  There was silence until Rosie added, “You know what you need, mournful Millie?” She grabbed my hand. “You need to jitterbug on the beach! C’mon, I’ll teach you.” She pulled me off the mudflats onto the sand. “Now relax and smile and do what I do.”

  She grabbed my left hand with her right hand, took my right hand in her left, and held them down toward our knees. “Now step back and close again. Swing out and swing in. Stick your butt out and swing, swing, swing!”

  I stumbled and moved away.

  “Hey, this is the easy part. Wait until we add flips and lifts and handstands.” She danced by herself, butt out, fingers snapping.

  “That looks pretty silly, Rosie.” It did. And strange.

  “Because we need music! Some Benny Goodman. In the mood…dah dutton dah dah, doo wah doo wah…”

  “Still looks silly,” I said, but not very loudly. I actually envied her style and her confidence.

  Watching her closely, I began to lean over in a slouch, swivel my head, and flap my arms. It might not have been jitterbug exactly, but it felt good.

  “Swing it, girls!” someone shouted. Gary Grayson and others were splashing through the water out past the mud. “Hey, Rosie, you’re cookin’ with gas, lass!” called someone else.

  Rosie waved, slouched down, and snapped her fingers.

  “I dig that jive,” Gary called. “We’re going to get Cokes at the Shack and feed the jukebox. Wanna come with us?”

  Rosie turned to me and raised her eyebrows in question.

  “No, I’ve got homework.”

  “There’s plenty of time.”

  “You go. Have fun. Fractions are calling me.” I wanted to go, sort of, but—I don’t know—it seemed so frivolous, especially with a Book of Dead Things in my pocket.

  After breakfast, while Pop was working, Mama slept, Edna and Lily and Pete engaged in a ferocious game of Go Fish, and the radio played the mournful and grim “Song of the Volga Boatmen”—da da DA da. After a commercial for the new Chevrolet Deluxe, a program started celebrating the life of the movie star Carole Lombard. She was dead! Why didn’t I know that? She had died in a plane crash in Nevada two days ago as she was flying home from selling war bonds. I’d never seen her in a movie—Mama said I was too young—but the magazines I read at Bell’s had stories and pictures about her romantic marriage to Clark Gable, who was the star of Gone with the Wind, which Mama let me see because it was historical, even though Clark Gable said damn in it, so her death seemed pretty personal.

  “Go fish!” Pete hollered.

  I jumped up and escaped outside. Mumbling angry words, I kicked pebbles all the way to the point and sat with my feet in the cold water. How could it happen? Carole Lombard was young and beautiful and a movie star. If she could die, why not me? Or anyone?

  And Clark Gable! How sad he must be. If only I could hold his hand and give it a sympathetic squeeze.

  I’d have to write Carole Lombard in my Book of Dead Things. It had been a while since I’d added anyone’s name. Probably I should also add soldiers and sailors who died in the war, but there were so many and I didn’t know their names and it was becoming all too tragic and scary.

  Both Mama and Rosie had called me gloomy, morbid, and peculiar. Was I? Did I enjoy all the sadness and worry like they said? But would it be dangerous to stop? I gnawed frantically at my thumbnail while tears dribbled down my cheeks. I wasn’t crying for Carole Lombard and Clark Gable so much as for all the world, the dead and wounded, animals and people, the scared and angry and confused. I couldn’t stand it.

  A movement to my right turned out to be a large bird. A very large bird, as tall as Lily. I wiped my eyes and studied his blue-gray feathers and long, skinny brown legs. His face was nearly white, and a pair of plumes ran from just above his eye to the back of his head. It was a great blue heron standing ankle-deep in the water. I’d seen pictures but never a live one up so close.

  I stood, startling the bird, who stared at me for a long moment before taking to the sky with slow, deep wingbeats, graceful and peaceful and so alive. I watched him fly, a large dark shape with legs traili
ng behind. Didn’t some people believe in reincarnation? Carole Lombard had been on a plane that crashed. Could someone who died while flying now be a bird? Could that bird be Carole Lombard? And Gram—what kind of bird would she be? A chicken at the zoo? I smiled.

  “Yo, Millie,” I heard from behind me. Rosie. “Let’s go for a walk.”

  “Absotively,” I said. “But even better than a walk, we can swim to the Petersons’ raft and stretch out in the sun. It’s plenty warm and sunny still. What d’you say?”

  The tide was high and small waves slapped against the shore. “Is it safe to go in there?” Rosie asked, scrunching up her nose.

  “Sure. It’s not like the ocean, no big waves or riptides. You just have to be careful not to step on a stingray or bump into a jellyfish. There are small leopard sharks sometimes, but they’re more afraid of you than you are of them.”

  “I don’t think that’s true,” said Rosie. Her face was kind of green.

  “You’re afraid? Aren’t there fish in your lake?”

  “Of course. Pike, perch, smallmouth bass. Nothing that stings or eats you. And I don’t have to see or touch them.”

  “Okay, then,” I said, “a walk it is.”

  We walked Dover Court over to the ocean side. Rosie started picking up stones and various bits and pieces from the sand. “What’s this?” she asked, holding something up. “Why is it all smooth and frosty-looking?”

  “It’s sea glass, a piece of glass from broken bottles and such tumbled smooth by waves for years. Sometimes even a hundred years. I have lots of green pieces like that and some white ones, but no pink, purple, or red. They’re awfully rare, but I’m still looking.”

  “This is a pretty piece,” Rosie said, showing me a smooth, goldish glass shard.

  “Rosie, beginner’s luck! I’ve never found amber.”

  Rosie put the pieces in her pocket. “This might be my favorite thing about Mission Beach,” she said. “Except for you.”

  We walked on. Waves were crashing on the beach and Rosie made sure she stayed far away. “Too big and dangerous for me.”

  I’d thought Rosie was braver and less jittery than me. She wasn’t worried about bombs and war, being poor or dying, being embarrassed by Rocky. But she had fears, too—seagulls and the sea, stingrays and leopard sharks. Knowing that, I liked her even better.

  There were no surfers out, but a bunch of boys were bodysurfing—swimming out past the breakers, catching and riding waves back to shore without a board. I tried it once but got sand and seawater up my nose, so I haven’t tried it again. Yet. But maybe this summer.

  When we got closer, I recognized Gary Grayson and Ralphie’s big brother, Louie, in the water. Someone else stood in the surf but didn’t go in any deeper. Someone with a bandage on his leg. Rocky. I turned aside, still not sure what to think about him.

  “It’s starting to cloud up,” I told Rosie. “Let’s go home.”

  The Cap was sitting on the tumbledown porch of his shack as I approached. He was mending nets, holding them right up close to his eyes and squinting as he knotted.

  “Can you still see to do that with your old eyes?” I asked him.

  “Young McGonigle! Welcome. Don’t you worry about me. I can see just fine up close. The rest is blurry but most of it I don’t want to see anyway.” He coughed a bubbly cough and spit over the porch railing. “How’d your abalone dive go?”

  “Turns out you were right about it being too hard for me. At least I didn’t get swept out to sea and came home with three perch in the bargain.”

  “Glad you’re okay.” He peered at me. “You know, you’re growin’ to look a bit like your gram.”

  Maybe, as soon as my hair turned red and I grew curvy. I liked the thought. “You knew my gram?”

  “I shore did. She was a pistol, that Tillie.”

  He smiled but I could feel tears welling up. “I miss her something terrible.” I snuffled. “I still use the notebook she gave me to keep track of dead things and people.”

  The Cap frowned. “Doesn’t sound like your gram. You sure that’s what she wanted?”

  I nodded. “I think so. She sort of said it would keep us safe. Like from the war.” Cap said nothing, but he chewed on his mustache. “You fought in the Civil War, Cap. What was it like? Were you scared?”

  He laughed a rumbling laugh. “Civil War? How old you think I am? I was in the Great War. ‘The war to end war,’ they called it.” He spit over the rail again. “Landed here in 1920 and been here ever since. One thing I like about the beach is there ain’t no war, no dead soldiers, no one shootin’ at me.” Cap shook his head. “I don’t like talkin’ about the war, and remembering the dead, and neither should you. You’re a young thing, walkin’ and breathin’ and movin’. Don’t get all strange and ghoulish.”

  “But I promised Gram—”

  He waved me silent. “Horsefeathers! Your gram used to say we’re too soon old and too long dead. She loved life and lived every minute. Last thing she’d want is for you to be all wrapped up with death and dead people.”

  I was confused. Was he right? Had I misunderstood her?

  The Cap went on. “Mebbe instead of keeping company with dead things, you could do something to help fight against the evil that’s come. That’s what your gram would do.” He rubbed his eyes. “Now I’m talked out. No more dark and gloomy. Go find something useful to do while you’re young enough to do it.”

  I walked home slowly, my ears ringing with the captain’s words. I’d been so sure I knew what Gram meant, but did she truly want me all preoccupied with death and dead people? I wanted to think more about it, but Lily was waiting for me when I returned. “Will you put my hair in braids?”

  “Why?”

  “You know how I look like Shirley Temple?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, I don’t want to look like Shirley Temple. I want to look like Lily McGonigle.”

  Well, I’ll be a monkey’s uncle. Good for her. I got a comb and ribbons and Gram’s silver hairbrush—it seemed like a fitting occasion—and started brushing out Lily’s curls.

  “Ow ow ow!!!”

  “Stop fidgeting, Lily. Don’t be a pill.”

  I continued brushing, somewhat gentler. The rhythm was oddly soothing to both of us and there was quiet.

  Into the silence Lily said, “You know when I got so sick last month? I’m sorry I didn’t die.”

  I stopped brushing. “Why would you say that?”

  “I know how you love dead things. You write their names and draw their pictures in your book. If I was dead, you’d love me and put me in your book, too.”

  I caught my breath. Did Lily really think I’d love her more if she were dead? She was a pill, but she was my sister. Didn’t she know how scared I’d been when she was sick and how much I wanted her to live? Had I never told her? Or showed her? Apparently not. I’d just called her a pill and moved on.

  As I plaited Lily’s hair, I said, “Let me tell you a story.” Lily stopped fidgeting to listen. “Once upon a time there was a girl who lived on an enchanted island with her little sister. The little sister was sometimes a pill and the older sister would lose her temper and be mean, but she loved her little sister. One day the fairies came and said they were there to whisk the little sister away to Fairyland because she was so good and they would leave an awful child in her place. ‘Over my dead body,’ said the older sister, and she grabbed the little girl. She hid her in the bread box behind the Wonder Bread, and when the fairies who were searching got too close, she moved her to the laundry basket. And when the fairies got too close to that, the older sister used her strength and her toughness to chase the fairies away. Finally they gave up and took another good child, leaving an awful child in its place, and that awful child is Icky Fribble.”

  “Yay! Icky!” Lily cried. “Millie, would you fight the fairies like that for me?”
r />   “Of course, silly. That’s why I told you the story.”

  “Yay!” said Lily again. She looked in the mirror at her new braids and said, “No more Shirley Temple!” and she lifted her arms and bent them as if to show off her muscles, if she had muscles.

  The sight of pale, skinny Lily showing off her muscles was so funny I barked a sharp bark of laughter. It felt good, so I did it again.

  No more Shirley Temple, I thought. That should be my motto, too. The captain was right. I was alive, so why was I still all involved with dead things and doing nothing useful? For Lily? For my family? For the war effort? I was getting sort of sick of dead things. Sometimes I forgot what the point was.

  I brushed my own hair as I thought until electricity made it stand out from my head. My options, I knew, were a lot better than Rocky’s or other young fellows’. No one was going to stick a rifle in my hand and send me out to shoot or be shot. I was perfectly safe. I’d been disappointed in Rocky for dodging his responsibility, but it wasn’t my life on the line. And there were more ways to fight a war than picking up a gun.

  I got up off my fanny and went to the Civilian Defense office on Mission Boulevard to see what I could find to do that didn’t involve guns or bombs or being brave.

  After breakfast I sat at the table studying the material I’d gotten from Civilian Defense.

  “What are those?” Pete asked, climbing onto my lap.

  “Pamphlets.”

  “What are flamfuts?”

  “Pamphlets. Booklets that tell about things that we can do to help fight the war.”

  “I thought the war would be done by now,” Pete said.

  “Not hardly.”

  “Then I want to fight the war, too.”

  “Good for you. Now pay attention. Since the war, the Japanese control all the rubber plantations in the world, so we can’t get rubber. Stop wiggling! So the government is rationing tires and other rubber goods and asking people to turn in their old rubber, like tires, raincoats, hot-water bottles, bathing caps, girdles, garden hoses.”