James shrugged.
“Especially in math. I thought nothing could be worse than fractions, and then we started decimals.”
James laughed. “I like how you made your Polly hate math, too.”
“And poor Polly doesn’t have you to call for homework help.”
James laughed again, and Amanda laughed with him.
The last straggling group came out of the restrooms, and Mr. Abrams started his explanation of their battlefield tour. They were free to wander on their own in small groups of six students led by one of the parent volunteers. Amanda was hoping her father would be assigned to another group, but when Mr. Abrams read off the names, the two of them were together: all the parents had been placed in the same groups as their children. But if a father didn’t care enough about his daughter to live in the same house with her, why should he get to be in her group on a class trip?
The rain had let up a bit; the gray skies overhead were stretched somewhat thinner, like the worn heels of a pair of old woolen socks. Amanda walked more slowly than the rest of her group, partly to avoid her father, partly to be by herself for a little while, so she could enter quietly into Polly’s world and see Gettysburg through Polly’s eyes.
The battlefield was actually beautiful—rolling Pennsylvania farmland, the grass green even in late October, the trees still decked in their brilliant autumn colors. It was hard to picture these calm, quiet fields filled with the deafening explosions of cannon fire and the screams of wounded men and frightened horses.
Her father fell into step beside her.
Returned now to the present, Amanda could hear snippets of conversation from the group of girls ahead: “And then he goes …” “No kidding!” “And then I go …”
For a while she and her father walked along in silence.
“It’s different from how I thought it would be,” Amanda finally said.
“More peaceful?”
“Uh-huh. And prettier. I didn’t expect a battlefield to be pretty.”
“There’s not much that’s pretty about war.”
A pair of birds, perched on the split-rail fence behind them, flew away. Amanda saw a flash of scarlet as they went by.
“Red-winged blackbirds,” her father said.
They kept on walking.
“You didn’t tell me you were having a concert,” he said. “It was last Wednesday?”
Amanda nodded. Mr. Abrams must have made some reference to it in his e-mail.
“I asked you if you had any concerts coming up, and you said no.”
Steffi would have said, “So I lied.” Amanda said nothing. Her father was a fine one to talk about lying.
They had reached the shelter of a group of oak trees. Their leaves weren’t bright yellow or orange or red, just a dull, depressing brown.
“You know I would have come,” he went on.
Amanda glared at him. What made him think she wanted him to be there? He didn’t deserve to be there; he didn’t deserve to be here; he didn’t deserve to be her father anymore.
“I saw you,” she said, emphasizing every word.
“What?”
“At the Arts Center. I biked there to tell something to James—he’s this boy in my class—and you were coming out of your sax lesson, and she was there, and you kissed her.”
With some grim satisfaction, she saw him wince. With pain? With shame?
“Oh, Mandy, oh, honey.”
He tried to put his arm around her shoulders. She pushed him away.
“Does Mom know? Is that why you left? Were you ever going to tell us? All this time—all this time I was thinking it was Mom’s fault, and then I saw you with her.”
“I’m sorry. Mandy, I should have said something to you and Steffi. I didn’t want you to find out like this. I had no idea you’d be at the Arts Center that day.”
“What’s her name?”
“Caroline.”
She was that much more real, having a name.
“And, yes, your mother knows. But I didn’t start seeing Caroline—seeing her that way—until after your mother and I agreed that we should separate.”
“So it was your fault, not Mom’s.”
“It’s more complicated than that.”
“You kissed her! And that morning, in the motel—you lied to me. You told me that whole story about the crab sandwich, and I believed you. Steffi didn’t, but I did. I never guessed—I would never have guessed—that you could lie to me.”
Her father’s face flushed crimson. “I was wrong, Mandy. I was very wrong. I just didn’t want to hurt you. And I thought it would hurt you more if I told you the truth.”
Amanda refused to let her heart soften. She wished she could close her ears as he kept on talking.
“I’m not sure about much of anything these days, but one thing I know is that when people quarrel, there’s usually plenty of fault, if that’s the word you want to use, to go around. I don’t know of any divorce where one person was one hundred percent right, and the other person was one hundred percent wrong.”
Divorce. He hadn’t said separation.
“So you love … Caroline … more than you love Mom?”
He waited to answer for a moment. “I laugh more with Caroline, because Caroline laughs more. Caroline certainly likes me more than your mother does. If I played Monopoly with Caroline, we’d actually have fun playing it. There’s a part of me that will always love your mother, and it’s killing me to have to say that it’s over, but we can’t live together anymore. We just can’t.”
The other kids in their group had turned around and were heading back toward them. Mr. Abrams must have given the signal to return to the bus for the long ride home.
“The other thing I’m sure about?” Amanda’s father said. He stopped walking, so Amanda stopped, too. “Surer than I am of anything in the world, is that I love you and Steffi. I always have, and I always will.”
The slight quaver in his voice was too much for Amanda. Maybe her father was wrong, and her mother was right, or maybe they were both wrong, and neither was right, or maybe it didn’t even matter who was wrong and who was right. Her parents had separated, but they were both still a part of Amanda’s family. She wasn’t ready to let her father go out of her life forever.
In a small voice, she said, “I love you, too, Daddy.”
When he reached out to hug her this time, she let him, their two umbrellas colliding. Amanda couldn’t tell if her face was more wet from the Gettysburg rain or from her own tears. She turned her face up toward him and saw that he was crying, too.
From half the field away, Beth called toward them, “Amanda! Mr. MacLeish! Mr. Abrams said it’s time to go!”
“Let’s go, then,” Amanda’s father said.
Amanda and her father walked across the silent, sacred space of the Gettysburg battlefield together.
January 10, 1862
Dear Diary,
It has been so long since I have written to you, dear Diary. The war is worse and worse and shows no sign of ending.
I am back in school again. Master Taylor is teaching us percents and decimals, and I am an even bigger dunce at them than I was at fractions. He yells at us less now, though. Ever since his son was killed at Leesburg, he doesn’t have the heart to scold us about arithmetic. He doesn’t even rap the knuckles of the boys who write rude things to each other on their slates.
Thomas has a peg leg that he walks on almost as fast as he walked on his real leg before. He was able to dance with Betsy’s older sister, Mary, at the cornhusking bee last fall. I think they’re sweet on each other.
Mother and Father are in good health, though Father’s hair and beard have turned gray since the war began, and I hear Mother crying sometimes when she thinks no one is near.
Blackie still loves Thomas best, but now Whitie follows me everywhere and sits on my lap when I sew and sleeps curled up beside me on my bed. I know she will be Jeb’s cat again, though, when Jeb comes home.
; And, dear Diary, Jeb is coming home! He was very sick with the measles in his army camp, but now he’s coming home to rest until he’s well enough to fight again.
I hope his resting takes a nice long time.
He is coming home today. Mother swept the floors and baked a pie. Father brushed Nell as if a king was going to ride on her. I am knitting, knitting, knitting, trying to finish the scarf I started for Jeb in the fall. The scarf is skinnier in the middle than it is at both ends, but I don’t think Jeb will mind.
Thomas can’t settle down to do anything today. He keeps walking from our cabin out to the road, to peer down it to see if Jeb is coming. Then he comes inside to warm himself for a while by the stove and goes back down the road to watch some more. He’s there now.
Wait—Diary—I hear him shouting.
“I see him! Ma! Pa! Polly! He’s coming!”
Diary, from the window, I saw Thomas running in the crooked way he runs now on his one good leg and one wooden peg.
Jeb was running, too.
They met each other halfway. Jeb threw his only arm around Thomas. My one-legged Union brother and one-armed Confederate brother held each other close.
Oh, Diary, there are so many different ways to be a family.
Then Mother and Father and I rushed out of the house to join in the embrace, and we all hugged each other as if we would never let go.
Also by Claudia Mills
Dinah Forever
Losers, Inc.
Standing Up to Mr. O.
You’re a Brave Man, Julius Zimmerman
Lizzie at Last
7 × 9 = Trouble!
Alex Ryan, Stop That!
Perfectly Chelsea
Makeovers by Marcia
Trading Places
Being Teddy Roosevelt
Copyright © 2008 by Claudia Mills
All rights reserved
by RR Donnelley & Sons Company, Harrisonburg, Virginia
Designed by Irene Metaxatos
First edition, 2008
www.fsgkidsbooks.com
eISBN 9781429934527
First eBook Edition : May 2011
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Mills, Claudia.
The totally made-up Civil War diary of Amanda MacLeish / Claudia Mills.—1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: While dealing with her parents’ separation and her best friend’s distance, Amanda is able to work out some of her anxiety through her fifth-grade project—writing a diary from the point of view of a ten-year-old girl whose brothers fight on opposite sides in the Civil War.
ISBN: 978-0-374-37696-3
[1. Family problems—Fiction. 2. Diaries—Fiction. 3. United States—History—Civil War, 1861-1865—Fiction. 4. Schools—Fiction. 5. Interpersonal relations—Fiction. 6. Family life—Maryland—Fiction. 7. Maryland—Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.M63963Tot 2008
[Fic]—dc22
The Totally Made-up Civil War Diary of Amanda MacLeish Page 14
