The Totally Made-up Civil War Diary of Amanda MacLeish

by Claudia Mills

  How come everyone else in Amanda’s family knew so much about divorce? Had her mother been reading up on the topic? The ideal conversation sounded horrible to Amanda, the way her mother had described it, false and scripted, a prepared speech that people could recite without meaning a word of it. But at least if her family were having that ideal conversation, her father would be here now, and Amanda could look into his eyes and try to figure out if he wanted to leave, or if his leaving was all Amanda’s mother’s idea.

  On the other hand, if he had been there, giving her a meant-to-be reassuring grin, Amanda wouldn’t have been able to keep from crying.

  “He said he’d call you. At eight o’clock tonight.”

  “I already told Tanya I was coming over to do homework,” Steffi protested.

  Amanda knew Steffi and Tanya weren’t going to be doing homework. They were going to listen to music and analyze every sentence spoken to Tanya by Mike Weil. Amanda couldn’t believe that Steffi would choose an evening doing that over talking to their dad, when he was sitting all alone in some barren motel room, probably listening to happy families splashing in the heated pool outside his window.

  Her face must have shown what she was thinking, because Steffi shot her a defensive glance. “It’s not like I’ll never be able to talk to him again.”

  “That’s all right,” their mother said. “Amanda, you can be the one to talk to him tonight.”

  Amanda wondered if Steffi was going to tell Tanya what had happened. Maybe Tanya would think it was a relief to get your parents’ divorce over with.

  But Amanda would never feel that way. She wasn’t going to tell Beth, she wasn’t going to tell anyone, she wasn’t going to “deal with it.” She was just going to wish as hard as she could that it weren’t really true.

  The phone rang exactly at eight. On the first ring, Amanda snatched it up. “Hello?”

  “Hi, Mandy,” her father said. He was the only one who called her Mandy.

  “Hi, Daddy.” She still thought of him as Daddy, not Dad, even though she knew it sounded babyish.

  There was a pause.

  “I’m sorry, honey.” His voice was quiet, sad, not like his usual voice at all.

  “I’m sorry, too.”

  “I didn’t want this to happen.”

  Then don’t let it happen! Make it un-happen. Come back home again. But he couldn’t come home, not if her mother didn’t want him there.

  “I love you, you know that, don’t you? This has nothing to do with you and Steffi.”

  It sounded just like the ideal conversation, but Amanda didn’t think he was quoting lines he had read in a book.

  “I know.”

  Another long pause.

  “Are you and Mom going to get a divorce?” She knew now, from Steffi, that it was fifty-fifty. She could picture Steffi rolling the Monopoly dice, one die at a time, to make the outcome what she most wanted it to be.

  “I don’t know,” he said.

  There was an awkward silence. Amanda couldn’t think of anything else to say. She didn’t think her father could think of anything else to say, either.

  “Is Steffi around?”

  “She’s at Tanya’s.”

  “Tell her I love her, okay?” He didn’t sound mad that Steffi wasn’t there.

  “Okay.”

  “And I love you, Mandy.”

  “I love you, too, Daddy.”

  Then she hung up the phone.

  May 15, 1861

  Dear Diary,

  It’s good I have you to write to. Thomas is gone. Jeb is gone. Jeb left the morning after Thomas did.

  “Who’s going to help me with the crops?” Father asked Jeb. Father hadn’t asked that of Thomas when Thomas said his goodbyes.

  Jeb didn’t look sorry. “Polly here’ll help you, right, Polly?” He grinned at me.

  “No,” said, refusing to give him my permission to leave us all behind. In truth, I wanted to work outdoors, feeling the warm sun on my hair and smelling the freshly plowed earth. But not if it made it easier for Jeb to go.

  He kissed me anyway, and kissed Mother, and shook hands with Father. And then he was off to join his regiment.

  The house is awful quiet without them. Three people aren’t enough for a cabin made for five. The kitchen floor is so clean without their big old boots tracking in mud after every rain. I hate to look at it. Shep still keeps watch by the front gate, waiting for them to come home. Blackie leaps into my lap as soon as I sit down. She always liked Thomas best, but now I’m the sudden favorite. Whitie dragged in a dead bird as a present to cheer us up, but it didn’t cheer me up at all. With Jeb gone, I was the one who had to pick up that stinky, rotten thing and throw it back by the pigpen.

  At school, I haven’t told Betsy yet that Jeb is gone. She knows about Thomas, but I can’t make myself tell her about Jeb. Because he’s too young to go to war, and Betsy’s family is for the Union, and if they say anything bad about Jeb being a Rebel, it’ll break my heart. Not that there’s anything good to say about it. Plus, even if she doesn’t bad-mouth Jeb, she’ll feel sorry for me. I hate it when anyone feels sorry for me. I don’t get to feel sorry for Betsy, because she doesn’t have any brothers.

  Let alone two brothers off fighting against each other.

  4

  During music period on Thursday, Amanda’s class was learning Civil War songs for a Civil War concert that would be held in about a month. The music teacher, Mrs. Angelino, liked to tie the songs they sang to what they were learning in other subjects. She was old: she had been Amanda’s father’s music teacher when he had gone to Green Meadow Elementary thirty years ago and played the saxophone in the fifth-grade band.

  Amanda wondered what Mrs. Angelino would think if she knew that little Tommy MacLeish was now all grown up and living at a Best Western motel because his wife didn’t want him at home anymore.

  Even though she was gray-haired and stout, Mrs. Angelino was full of energy. “All right, class!” she called out. “Everyone, watch me. Ricky, I think it’s best if you and Lance aren’t standing next to each other. Come over here by Amanda. That’s better. Now, here are the motions for ‘Dixie Land.’”

  Standing beside Amanda now, Ricky gave a loud groan.

  “For ‘I wish I was in the land of cotton,’ you’ll bend over like this and with your right hand pretend to be picking cotton. Bend over once on wish and a second time on land.”

  Mrs. Angelino did an emphatic cotton-picking demonstration while singing the opening line of “Dixie.” She flashed the class a big, toothy smile as she sang, conveying the impression that cotton-picking was the most fun activity in the whole wide world. Amanda remembered Lance’s diary: his slave boy hadn’t thought it was pleasurable to pick cotton all day in the hot South Carolina sun. Out of the corner of her eye, she caught a glimpse of James watching Mrs. Angelino without expression.

  “‘Old times there are not forgotten!’” Mrs. Angelino sang next. Her voice was high and quavery, like an opera singer’s. For that line, she clasped her hands together over her heart, keeping the same blissful smile.

  “‘Look away!’” She put one hand over her eyes and peered to the left.

  “‘Look away!’” She jerked abruptly to peer toward the right.

  “‘Look away!’” She peered straight ahead, gazing off expectantly into the distance.

  “‘Dixie Land!’” She flung out both arms, as if she had finally spied Dixie Land after all her frenzied peering and was racing forward to embrace it at last.

  “All right, class, now you try it.” Vigorously, Mrs. Angelino began thumping out the music on the classroom’s ancient upright piano.

  Amanda picked her cotton, remembered old times, peered in all directions, and flung out her arms to welcome Dixie Land. Unfortunately, when Ricky flung out his arms to welcome Dixie Land, he whacked Amanda on the side of her head.

  “Sorry,” Ricky mumbled.

  “Are you all right, Amanda?” Mrs. Angelino asked.


  Amanda nodded, but she suddenly found herself blinking back scalding tears.

  “Class, be careful when you fling out your arms. We don’t want to be so excited about Dixie Land that we knock our classmates off the risers.”

  She went on showing the class motions for the rest of the song. For “I wish I was in Dixie! Hooray! Hooray!” they were to punch their fists into the air. “In Dixie Land I’ll take my stand” was accompanied by an emphatic stomping of their feet. Most dramatic were the motions for the line “to live and die in Dixie.” On “live” they stood up extra tall and straight, and then began crumpling into a wounded heap on “die,” only to scramble back up in time to pound themselves on the chest on “Dixie.” Were they singing in a bizarre new form of sign language for thoroughly confused deaf people?

  Amanda noticed that some of the kids, like Patrick, weren’t good at motions. Patrick tended to get his right hand or foot confused with his left. When everyone else took their stand in Dixie Land on their right foot, Patrick took his on his left. During concerts, Mrs. Angelino usually put Patrick in one of the back rows. Other kids, like Meghan, could have been professional actors, beaming out at the audience as they sang.

  James, Amanda saw, did just enough gesturing to satisfy Mrs. Angelino. It would be a lot less risky standing next to him than to Ricky.

  By now Ricky had changed the words of the song from “Dixie Land” to “Dixie cup.” Amanda wondered if Dixie cups of ice cream had anything at all to do with the South. Maybe people ate more ice cream there because it was so much hotter than in the North.

  “Oh, Dixie cup, I’ll eat you up! I’d love to eat a Dixie!” Ricky sang. He tried out a spooning motion on the first line and a tummy-rubbing motion on the second.

  “Ricky!” Mrs. Angelino called to him. “Watch me again. Like this.” She repeated the correct motions, apparently unaware that Ricky was creating his own motions to be funny. Over the sound of the piano, she probably couldn’t hear his new words. Amanda stifled a giggle. Every time Mrs. Angelino demonstrated the motions, she was as completely enthusiastic as she had been the first time. Amanda would have to ask her dad if Mrs. Angelino had stomped her feet and pounded her chest for Dixie thirty years ago, too.

  The next time she saw him. At the Best Western pool.

  After school, Amanda went with Beth to Beth’s house. Beth’s cat, Punkin, brushed up against Amanda’s legs. Amanda reached down to stroke his soft fur. She and Steffi had both begged for a cat for years, but could never get one because their father was allergic.

  “Hi, girls,” Beth’s mother greeted them. “Come have some apple-smoked Cheddar cheese that I got at the farmers’ market. I got a half-bushel of Jonathan apples, too.”

  Amanda put some cheese and apple slices on her plate. All the plates at Beth’s house were old, colorful, mismatched, bought for a dime or a quarter at a flea market or garage sale, usually with a story behind them.

  “Where did this one come from?” Amanda asked. It was a nursery rhyme plate, with a picture of a chubby black-and-white cow jumping over a bright orange moon.

  Beth’s mother looked at it. “Oh, the cow! That was from a yard sale last spring. The woman was crazy about cows. Cow dish towels, cow salt-and-pepper shakers, cow teapots, cow place mats.”

  “If she loved cow things so much, why did she sell her cow plates?” Beth asked.

  “She said that for Christmas and her birthday, her relatives sent her so many cow things that every few years she had to have a cow sale or her husband would divorce her.”

  Amanda stiffened. She hoped Beth and her mother didn’t notice. That had to be the worst reason for a divorce that Amanda had ever heard.

  Beth’s plate was bright yellow, a plate full of sunshine. Amanda didn’t ask its story.

  The cheese was delicious, though more crumbly than store-bought cheese. The apple slices were firm and tart. Food always tasted so good at Beth’s house. Beth’s father appeared from his study and offered them some organic cider from the farmers’ market, too.

  Upstairs in Beth’s room, Amanda pulled out her math homework. She liked to get math over with right away, and if there were any hard problems, Beth would help her. Beth was the best math student in the class, after James.

  Amanda finished two problems—fractions—but then her thoughts wandered. If you took away one-fourth of a family, were three-fourths left? If you took away one-fourth of a family, Amanda wasn’t sure you had a family left at all.

  “Are you okay?” Beth asked. “You seem sad, or something.”

  Amanda couldn’t bring herself to tell Beth, whose parents looked so contented as they handed out farmers’ market snacks on whimsical storyland plates. Besides, maybe by suppertime, her father would have checked out of the motel and moved back home again. Every day, she still expected to walk in the door after school and find him there, unpacking his suitcase and admitting that the separation had been a terrible mistake.

  “These problems are pretty hard.”

  “No, they’re not! I’ll help you. Let me run downstairs and get another apple and we can cut it up in pieces and do apple math. I’ll bring some more cheese, too, and we can do cheese math.”

  Amanda forced a smile. “Okay.”

  While Beth was downstairs, Amanda gathered Punkin up onto her lap and tried to remember the last time her family had been happy together, like Beth’s.

  It wasn’t last summer on their annual vacation to the beach. Steffi had said she didn’t want to go at all if Tanya couldn’t come with them, which had made Amanda feel that Steffi didn’t care anymore about being sisters. Their mother had been seasick on the ferry ride over to Cape May and blamed their father because the excursion had been his idea in the first place. And then Steffi had gotten stung by a jellyfish and blamed everybody for making her go on the trip without Tanya.

  Christmas? Amanda’s parents had quarreled on Christmas morning, because her father had given her mother a nightgown she didn’t like and was insulted he could even think she would like, and the whole argument took place in front of Grandpa and Grandma, visiting from Arizona, who had given both girls Barbies even though Steffi was in seventh grade then and Amanda had always hated Barbies.

  But there had been one family night, a Friday night a few months ago, when Amanda’s father decided to make fudge from scratch, using a candy thermometer they had gotten as a gift some other Christmas and never used. The fudge hadn’t turned out—it was grainy instead of creamy, and refused to harden into a firm slab—but they had eaten all of it anyway, gobbling it from the pan with spoons, and her mother had laughed, and her father had kissed her mouth, which still had a smear of chocolate.

  That had been a perfectly happy evening, the kind Beth’s family had, except in Beth’s family the fudge would have turned out if they had made it, but they wouldn’t have made it because Beth’s father didn’t believe in eating processed sugar.

  The next morning, though, Amanda’s mother had seen the fudge-covered pots and pans all over the kitchen and had told her father that it was typical of him to make a big mess and leave it for someone else to clean up, and she was very sorry, but she wasn’t his maid. Then she had left the house and slammed the door behind her.

  Polly Mason might not know who was to blame in the Civil War, but Amanda knew it was the South; Polly would realize that someday. In the MacLeish family civil war, it was Amanda’s mother who always spoiled things. Amanda didn’t know why her mother couldn’t see it, too.

  “Apple math and cheese math!” Beth sang out, returning with two plates, a pink-flowered one holding apple slices and a daisy one holding cheese. Punkin jumped down from Amanda’s lap and began meowing.

  Amanda picked up her math homework. Unfortunately, Beth’s well-meaning efforts couldn’t do any good when the only math problem Amanda cared about was take away one father, and leave behind everybody else.

  June 5,1861

  Dear Diary,

  It is still too quiet at ou
r house. There have been no battles yet. Everyone says the war will be over after the first battle, and the Union will win. I hope they are right, except that I wish the war could be over before the first battle. Then both of my brothers would come home again.

  At school we are studying fractions. All of the answers on my slate are wrong. I am the worst dunce at fractions in the whole school. I feared that Master Taylor would make me sit on a stool in front of the class wearing a tall white dunce cap, but he did not. Maybe he knows that I am worried about my brothers. Of course, I was a dunce at fractions last year, too, before President Lincoln ever got elected and the South set itself against him.

  After fractions, we sang songs. Our one-room schoolhouse has no piano, but Master Taylor plays the fiddle. We sang lots of different songs, and then Peter Partridge asked if we could sing “Dixie.”

  Master Taylor looked angrier than I have ever seen him. “I will not allow my pupils to sing a song in praise of any slave-holding states,” he said. “I am loyal to my country, and I hope and expect that all of you are, too.”

  He told Peter Partridge to write one hundred times on the blackboard, “I will not sing ‘Dixie.’”Peter Partridge told him that he would rather be whipped instead. Master Taylor said, “All right, young man, that can be arranged.” He took the big stick he keeps by his desk and waved it at Peter. Peter said his father would whip Master Taylor if Master Taylor dared flog him for wanting to sing “Dixie.” Then Peter took his slate and his lunch pail and walked out the front door and didn’t return.

  Master Taylor said we were done with music for today.

  This was definitely the most exciting day our school has ever had. But I liked school better when it was less exciting.

  I liked my family and my country better when they were less exciting, too.

  5

  Amanda’s mother dropped Amanda and Steffi off in front of the Best Western office, next to the pool. “Room ninety-seven,” she told them. “On the ground floor, around to the back. He’ll give you a ride home.”