The visitors move around, trying to get out of the way, and I ignore the whole thing. So we’re pretending all the time, and as the summer’s gone on, the little things we’ve started with have been added to.
It takes all day to do everything we’ve invented to do.
One soldier shoves me up against the flagpole every morning to show how nasty he was supposed to have been. Someone else does nothing but stay in bed in the hospital. He dies all summer. But he’s been gaining weight.
We are always saying how we could really use people who can speak French the way they did back then.
This is educational for everybody. The fathers are always quieting their sons saying, “Listen to this,” as the Sergeant Major pats the barrel of the howitzer and tells his little story about Fallen Timbers. The women and the girls hang around the kitchens and out near the bower down by the river, where the ladies from the fort do the laundry. Sometimes people will help weed the plots of vegetables or churn butter. They’ll add a few stitches to the quilt.
The college kids who work here get credit, I think. Or write papers. Something.
Everybody who visits is interested in sanitation.
I take people around to the privies, point out the chamber pots, tell them how it was a real problem in the previous fort during the war and the siege.
“Here is the gutter that Major Whistler, my father, had dug around the parade ground for the water to run off.”
I’ve learned a lot too about history and speaking in front of people. I like talking about these things and having people listening. I like it when they nod and whisper to each other. The little boys look at what I’m wearing.
Kids my age will try to trip me up, asking about hamburgers or the Civil War. But I haven’t made a mistake once. Well, once I did, but the guy who asked didn’t know I did, so it was all right.
I’ll be a senior next year at North Side High School, which is up on the banks of the St. Joe near the site of a French fort. Fifty years ago, when they dug the foundation, they found an Indian burial site. That’s why we’re called the Redskins. My teachers think this will be good experience. They wrote good recommendations for me. My own father isn’t so sure, but he is happy I have a job and that I work outside.
To him, it’s a summer job, that’s all.
Lieutenant Curtis, who is my brother-in-law by marriage to my sister Eliza, has mustered the garrison together for the morning assembly and flag raising. The orders and officers of the day are posted, regulations concerning fraternization and venereal disease are read. He goes on a bit about B. F. Stickney, thinking aloud about the man’s character. The men are at parade rest. They’re dressed in the hot wool uniforms or the white fatigues.
The flag is popping.
There is already a large crowd watching.
Behind the crowd is a file of late arrivals going in and out of the buildings.
Before we opened, we talked about fudging a bit, holding up the flogging until we had enough people to make it worthwhile. That won’t be a problem now. It’s something we always have to work out since the visitors aren’t around for the whole day usually. We don’t want anyone to go away without seeing a special event, a rifle firing or the band playing at least. But we can’t be flogging every hour on the hour.
“Next flogging in twenty minutes.”
We try to be true to the facts we have. The trouble is that the visitors see a few hours of what took years to come about. So it’s kind of hard to explain why they’re whipping this man today. It’s funny that more people don’t ask.
It is all done by the book — down to the knots and the tattoo the drummer’s doing. I am sitting on the roof of the magazine. The magazine is the shed where they kept the powder and munitions. It was supposed to be brick, so it wouldn’t burn or blow up. But there were just too many trees around. Major Whistler sodded the roof instead, and the grass is long and green.
The magazine is near the east wall. Between the thwap, thwap of the whip and Marshall’s screaming, I can hear the traffic going by on Spy Run.
The street is on the other side of the wall. Cars honk at the sentry in the blockhouse from time to time as they go by.
The real fort was on the other side of the river, near where the apartments are now, up on the high ground. That’s how they got the land to build this fort. It’s on the flood plain along with all the parks.
There is a lot of flood plain when you have three rivers running through a town.
One of the first jobs I did in the spring was sandbag the fort during the flood. We pumped the water out into Spy Run and back into the river. But the water really didn’t go anywhere. I was happy to work three days and nights without pay. It was a good way to get to know the people I was going to work with. And it was a big flood, a hundred-year flood, and I was in it with historians.
That night the President’s helicopter was beating around overhead. Its spotlight was dancing all around and lighting up this little clearing. There we were, passing heavy wet bags. The water was rippling into waves from the rotors. Looking up I could see the rain pouring through the beam of light. Jim still worries about rot damage to the wood, termites and such, but everything is green and cool this summer, and it will probably stay this way until fall.
The roof is nice with clover blooming.
Most of the people in the crowd wear dark glasses. We can’t, of course. My face is tired at night from squinting. I have just started wearing contacts, so I can go without my glasses. Jim’s face is lined from the weather and from worry. We’re always trying to get the visitors to see how much quicker people aged then.
This will be my only summer here, you know. George Washington Whistler has to be sixteen.
Marshall’s been carried off to the hospital. Lieutenant Curtis has dismissed the men, and they are dispersing. My sisters have been dabbing the corners of their eyes with handkerchiefs. Their bonnets hide a part of their faces. My father is talking to a group of visitors, slapping his gloves, in his hand, on his flexed knee — talking about discipline and justice and a peacetime army, I imagine.
“Who are you?” says a little boy, calling up to me on the magazine roof.
He is wearing sunglasses with six-shooters in the upper corners of the lenses.
I tell him who I am, and he asks if I know the soldier who was beaten.
I tell him that I do know him and why he was punished.
“Can I come up there?” the boy asks.
“Nope,” I say.
This isn’t the only thing I’ve been doing this summer. I still go out. I ride around town with some of the guys from school. We make the loop from the one Azar’s Big Boy out on the bypass to the other one by South Side High School. Everybody’s got their first jobs, running registers or dropping fries. They cut grass on Forest Park. It gives them money for the cars and enough left over to order food and hold down a booth without getting kicked out.
Some of my friends are going to summer school, and that’s what my job seems like to the others, like summer school.
We go by the Calvary Temple sign that flashes Calvary, Temple, Calvary, Temple.
Clinton splits off into a one-way street. We go past the old power plant and the fenced substation with wires going out everywhere. On the ribs of the big transformers are these fans pointed at the fins on the side. They are on sometimes to cool down the transformers. But at night the blades are feathering, turning slowly in the breeze.
Les always says how funny it is that they use some electricity to run the fans to cool the transformers to make the electricity. Over the St. Mary’s, by the armory, under the overpass, through downtown, under the overpass, and into the near south side of the city. Coming back, we go up Lafayette, which turns into Spy Run by the bridge. We go by the fort, all dark of course, except for the lights of the cars playing along the walls, and the guys all kid me. One night, they’ll break in, and it will be trouble for me. Maybe T.P. the whole place. They’ll leave my name in red paint on the walls.