The Totally Made-up Civil War Diary of Amanda MacLeish

by Claudia Mills

  The girls got out of the car. The September afternoon was hot enough for a swim, but they hadn’t brought their suits. Amanda had thought of it—maybe it would make the visit feel more festive and fun—but decided against it. This wasn’t a pool party, where she and Steffi would dunk each other during a lighthearted game of Marco Polo. Steffi had a grim, determined look on her face, as if she just wanted to get the whole thing over with.

  “Seventy-two.” Amanda read the number from one of the first doors they passed. Searching for their father’s motel room, she felt a bit like a spy creeping through unfamiliar territory. Maybe she should make Polly Mason sneak away from home to spy for the North. Or for the South. She wasn’t sure which side Polly would be spying for.

  “It’s this one,” Steffi said, stopping before the door that said 97. “Go ahead and knock.”

  “No, you knock.”

  Steffi tossed back her hair. Then she rapped tentatively against the wooden door with her clenched knuckles.

  Instantly the door swung open. “Girls! Come in!” Their father’s tone was hearty, almost jovial. “You brought your suits, I hope. Go ahead and get changed. Last one to the pool’s a rotten egg!”

  “We didn’t bring them,” Steffi said coldly.

  “I almost brought mine,” Amanda added, so he’d know it was all right that he’d mentioned a swim. “But then … I guess I didn’t.”

  Her father gave her shoulders a quick hug. “That’s fine. Have a seat.” He waved his hand expansively toward the inside of the room. “Sit anywhere.”

  The room had a large bed with a blue-patterned bedspread, a small sofa, and a stately-looking armchair with a low upholstered footstool in front of it. Amanda thought it was called a hassock—an old-fashioned-sounding word. Maybe Polly Mason’s cabin could have a hassock in it. Though the Masons might not have any furniture that fancy.

  Amanda looked at Steffi to see where Steffi was going to sit. When Steffi made no move to sit down, Amanda chose the armchair. Timidly she swung her feet up onto the hassock. It was comfortable. Polly Mason ought to have one.

  Steffi continued standing long enough to make the moment stretch out awkwardly. Then she seated herself stiffly on the edge of the bed. Their father sprawled on the sofa, his long legs stretched out on the soft carpet.

  No one spoke.

  Amanda studied the picture hanging over the bed, a pleasant painting of a landscape with a small farmhouse next to a rolling field of golden hay. “That’s a nice painting,” she said.

  “Which one?” her father asked.

  Amanda pointed.

  “Oh, that one.”

  The three of them looked at it, even Steffi. The farmhouse resembled Polly Mason’s cabin. Amanda wondered if people grew hay in Maryland. She wondered if that was hay in the picture, or just some kind of golden grass. Or alfalfa, whatever alfalfa was. She tried to hear Mr. Mason’s voice: “Jeb, Thomas, time to plant the hay!” “Jeb, Thomas, time to plant the alfalfa!” Alfalfa sounded better.

  Steffi was the first to look away. She stared down at her nails. Amanda could see that the polish was half chewed off them. Steffi painted her nails so she’d stop chewing them, but then she chewed off the polish instead.

  “Are you girls hungry? There are vending machines down the hall.”

  Steffi shook her head, so Amanda did, too. If only Steffi weren’t acting this way, it might have been fun to see what the machines had in them. Amanda enjoyed the kind of vending machines that had a little mechanical arm that reached up and grabbed each individual candy bar or bag of chips. It was like having an enchanted mechanical man at her service; her own private Tik-Tok of Oz.

  “Or—wait! Let’s go out for some ice cream. How does that sound? Banana splits? Hot fudge sundaes? We won’t have to tell your mother.”

  It was the wrong thing to say. The joke might have worked in a happy family, but not when the parents weren’t living together anymore.

  “I’m not hungry,” Steffi said.

  “I’m not hungry, either,” Amanda echoed.

  “How’s school?” their father tried. Amanda had known he would.

  Steffi shrugged. Amanda wanted to tell him what was happening with her Civil War diary project, but she couldn’t with Steffi there. Steffi would think it was babyish to be so enthusiastic about a dumb social studies assignment.

  “We’re still studying the Civil War,” Amanda said. Somebody had to say something.

  “Great! There’s so much Civil War history right here in Maryland—Frederick, Antietam.”

  “We’re going to have a class trip to Gettysburg.”

  “Great!” her father said again.

  Steffi made a face. “We went there when I was in fifth grade. The bus ride took forever, and one girl threw up, and then when we got there, it’s this big field. We drove a whole hour each way to see a big field.”

  Amanda’s father didn’t reply, but he shot Amanda a sympathetic glance: a Civil War battlefield wasn’t just any old big, boring field. Maybe next time Amanda could come to the Best Western alone and show her father what she had written so far in Polly Mason’s diary.

  Steffi clicked on the TV.

  “Sure,” their father said, “go ahead and see if any of your favorite programs are on.”

  Amanda didn’t have any favorite programs; she didn’t watch much TV. But Steffi was wild for cooking shows on the Food Network, even though, as far as Amanda knew, Steffi had never cooked anything in her life.

  On the screen, there was a competition between teams of wedding cake bakers to build the most elaborate tiered wedding cake, covered with white-frosting leaves and vines and flowers and birds. Amanda began to get interested in spite of herself. “I hope Jennifer’s team wins,” she said.

  “Pierre’s team wins,” Steffi said. “I’ve seen it before.”

  So much for any suspense. And Pierre’s team did win, though Amanda still thought Jennifer’s cake was prettier. She wondered what kind of wedding cake their parents had had. If she had seen a picture of it, she didn’t remember what it looked like.

  “We should go soon,” Steffi said, looking at her watch when the program was over. “I have a ton of homework for tomorrow.”

  And a ton of instant-messaging to do with Tanya, Amanda knew.

  “Okay.” Their father sounded almost relieved to have the visit over. From the top of the shiny, varnished bureau, he scooped up his car keys. “Bring your suits next time, and we can swim.”

  Steffi was already outside the door in the parking lot. Amanda turned toward her father and threw herself into his arms.

  He held her close and patted her back. “It’s okay, Mandy. It’s going to be okay.”

  Amanda had hoped their father would come inside the house when he dropped them off, to say hello to their mother, check his mail, maybe even visit for a while longer. But he just pulled into the driveway and then pulled out again. He could have been someone else’s father, giving them a ride home from a playdate.

  “That was fast,” their mother commented when they came into the kitchen.

  “It’s not that thrilling to sit around in a motel room,” Steffi said.

  Amanda wanted to defend their dad: they could have brought their suits and gone for a swim; he had offered to buy them ice cream; he had tried to make conversation about school; he had acted interested in the Civil War. What more could he do?

  For some reason, Steffi seemed to be siding with their mother, or at least siding against their dad. But he had to leave if his wife told him to go. Steffi was like Jeb, fighting for the South. Amanda was like Thomas, fighting for the North, for the side that deserved to win.

  She longed to write another Polly Mason diary entry, but she always saved Polly for a reward after math homework, and this weekend the math homework was so hard that she had put it off as long as possible. At her desk, in her bedroom, she opened her math book and struggled for fifteen minutes with the least common denominator. It was a strange expression.
You’d think you’d be trying to find the most common denominator, not the least. Not that it mattered. Amanda couldn’t find any kind of common denominator at all.

  Amanda’s father was good at math, but it was too odd to call him at the Best Western Motel, especially after the strained visit just half an hour ago. Her mother could do Amanda’s math problems fine herself, but she got impatient trying to explain them to Amanda. Things that were obvious to her seemed to need no explanation. “Just think, Amanda!” was one of her typically unhelpful remarks.

  No one answered when Amanda called Beth’s house. Amanda remembered then that Beth was going on a long bike ride with her parents. Maybe because Beth was an only child, she and her parents did a lot of activities together.

  Amanda had a thought. Before she could change her mind about it, she pulled out the school directory and called James.

  His mother answered the phone. From the back-to-school open house, Amanda remembered that James’s mother was white and his father was black. She almost hung up, but instead she made herself ask, “Is James there?”

  “Just a minute, I’ll get him. May I ask who’s calling?”

  It was too late to back out now. “It’s Amanda. From school. I just have a question about the math homework.”

  A few moments later, James was on the line. “Hi, Amanda. What’s up?”

  “I was just wondering—the math homework? The least common denominator? Do you know how to find it?” And why anyone would want to?

  “Sure.” James acted as if girls called him all the time about math homework. Maybe they did.

  After fifteen minutes, Amanda thought she understood the homework, though it would have been easier doing it together in person, instead of over the phone.

  “Which Civil War person are you?” Amanda asked when they were finished. James hadn’t volunteered yet for a turn to read any of his diary entries to the class.

  “I’m Robert E. Lee.”

  “Wow!”

  Mr. Abrams had assigned the characters randomly, he had said. Amanda felt luckier than ever to have gotten Polly, instead of Abraham Lincoln or Ulysses S. Grant. Though maybe if she had gotten Lincoln, he would have started to feel as real to her as Polly did now.

  “What’s happening so far to Robert E. Lee?” she asked.

  “He just decided to fight for the Confederacy. He was really torn, you know. He opposed slavery—even freed his own slaves—and he loved the Union.”

  “So why did he fight for the South?”

  “He loved Virginia more.”

  The simple, direct way James said it sent a little shiver down Amanda’s spine. It made Lee’s choice sound noble, and tragic.

  “What about your girl?” James asked. “The one with the two brothers?”

  “Polly. They left for the war, Jeb fighting for the South, Thomas fighting for the North. Now there’s going to be the Battle of Bull Run.”

  “Do her brothers live through it? Or does one of them get killed?”

  Amanda was flattered that James cared enough to ask. “I don’t know. I haven’t written it yet.”

  “I think they should live.”

  Amanda laughed. “I guess I should say that I hope Robert E. Lee wins the war, but I don’t. And I know he doesn’t.”

  An awkward pause followed. Amanda waited to see if James would say anything else, but he didn’t.

  “Anyway, thanks for the math help.”

  “Anytime.”

  Amanda hung up the phone, finished her awful math homework, and took out her Polly notebook. It was time for the first big battle of the Civil War to begin.

  July 22,1861

  Dear Diary,

  Oh, what a strange story I have to tell.

  Mother and I were both feeling so sad and mopey, with the boys gone, that Father sent us to visit Aunt Sally and Uncle William in Washington. He stayed behind to take care of the farm. Mother and I took the stagecoach to Washington, and we’re at Aunt Sally’s fine house right now. I feel guilty that we left Father all alone. I hope he doesn’t miss us too much.

  Aunt Sally and Uncle William have no children, so they’re not sure how to entertain a ten-year-old girl. Guess what they thought of. Yesterday they took us to see—a battle! The very first battle of this terrible war.

  Lots of people went. Everyone knew it would be fought on the banks of a creek called Bull Run, because that’s where the Union and Confederate troops were camping. So people came and brought picnics and sat on the grass overlooking the creek to watch it all, like a play in the theater, not that I’ve ever seen a play. Father thinks plays are sinful. If he doesn’t want us watching plays, I wonder what he’d thinh about our watching a battle.

  Aunt Sally brought a fine picnic for us—fried chicken and biscuits and butter and honey. She has a cook who is not a slave but a free black woman named Jessie Mae. Jessie Mae fried the chicken and churned the butter and made the biscuits.

  From our grassy picnic place, we could see the blue of the Union troops and the gray of the Rebel troops. Gray seems a strange color for uniforms. Blue is so much brighter and braver-looking. Everyone said the blue uniforms would win the battle. The blue side would fire off a couple of cannons, with big scary booms, and shoot their rifles into the air, and the gray side would run away. And the war would be over.

  I squinted as hard as I could into the distance, but I couldn’t see any blue soldier who looked like Thomas, or any gray soldier who looked like jeb. Probably the whole army didn’t come for just one battle. Maybe my brothers were busy marching or setting up tents or fixing the fried chicken for the soldiers to eat for supper after the battle. Jeb fries chicken as well as Mother and I do, almost as well as Jessie Mae.

  Then, oh, Diary, the battle began, and it wasn’t at all like anyone expected. As long as I live, I’ll never forget it. So many rifles firing, and smoke billowing everywhere, and the screams of dying soldiers, and wounded horses. The screams of the horses were the worst. And people running—the blue soldiers running, and the gray soldiers still firing, firing, firing. Constant firing and running and screaming. All the picnickers were running and screaming, too, leaving behind our tablecloths and chicken and biscuits, hoping not to be trampled by the fleeing troops and the frightened horses. Mother and I ran as fast as we could, to the safety of Aunt Sally’s wagon, but not fast enough to escape the sound of those screams.

  And Mother and I didn’t even know if Thomas and jeb were there—Thomas firing, Jeb running—Jeb firing, Thomas running—both firing, both running.

  Dear God, please let my brothers not have been at the Battle of Bull Run.

  Please let them be sitting in their tents, Thomas in a tent for the North, Jeb in a tent for the South, safe and sound.

  If they were there, then, if any soldiers fired at them, make it be that their bullets missed.

  Please, dear God.

  Amen.

  6

  “Who would like to share with us this morning?” Mr. Abrams asked on Friday as the class gathered on the floor by the rocking chair.

  Even though she wanted to read her Battle of Bull Run diary, Amanda didn’t raise her hand. It was her best entry yet. She had been thrilled when she read in one of their classroom Civil War books that people in the nation’s capital had actually gone to watch the first battle of the Civil War as a picnic entertainment. That was the kind of strange and startling thing you couldn’t just make up. But she didn’t want to raise her hand to read every single day.

  “Anyone we haven’t heard from yet? Beth, how about you?”

  Beth made a face, but opened her social studies notebook. “Mine is dumb,” she warned.

  “I doubt that very much,” Mr. Abrams said.

  “You haven’t heard it yet.”

  “These are supposed to be real people’s diaries, not great works of literature,” Mr. Abrams reminded her.

  Well, they could be both. Amanda wanted Polly’s Civil War diary to be both.

  “Okay. My per
son, Sarah Andrews, is the wife of a Civil War soldier who gets killed at the Battle of Bull Run. I don’t want to write about the Battle of Bull Run till later, because then he’ll be dead and my story will pretty much be over. So I’m trying to make time go by very slowly. So he won’t be dead yet.”

  “That sounds like a good strategy,” Mr. Abrams said.

  “‘Thursday, June 6, 1861,’” Beth read. “‘Dear Diary. It is ten o‘clock in the morning. It looks like it might rain. One drop just fell against the window. Then another drop fell. The log on the fire crackled. One piece of wood fell off the log. It made a loud sound. Now it is ten-oh-two.’”

  Beth stopped reading. “The end.”

  Ricky and Lance laughed. Beth laughed, too. Even Mr. Abrams smiled.

  “I told you it was dumb,” Beth said good-naturedly.

  Amanda raised her hand. “I don’t think it’s dumb. I like how she wrote down every tiny thing that happened in that one minute. That’s what it’s like when you’re waiting, waiting, waiting for something to happen. She’s waiting for her husband to come home. You’d expect time to move slowly, second by second by second.”

  “That’s a good point,” Mr. Abrams agreed. “Beth, what are you planning to have happen in your next entry?”

  “It’s going to stop raining. The sun is going to come out. Then it’s going to go behind a cloud, and three more raindrops are going to fall.”

  The rest of the class laughed. It was hard not to. Beth was so clearly trying to make her diary entry sound as dull as possible, reciting each new line in a flat, expressionless, deadpan voice.

  “But that is what it feels like to be all alone and waiting,” Amanda tried again. “That’s exactly what it feels like.”

  Suddenly she could see the young, lonely soon-to-be-widow so vividly in her mind’s eye that she had to blink back tears. The minutes would seem even longer when she found out her husband was never coming back. Maybe for the rest of her life she’d count every raindrop as it fell.