Alive and Dead in Indiana

WHISTLER’S FATHER

To get to the fort, you have to cross the St. Mary’s River on an arched footbridge made of concrete and steel. The bridge is steep enough to make you lean forward. There is nothing moving on the river that needs this kind of clearance.

The St. Mary’s runs down under the Spy Run Bridge, and then it meets the St. Joe River, to form the Maumee, which flows on to Toledo and Lake Erie.

The fort is built on the tongue of land between the two rivers. So it floods a lot. But this summer they’ve lifted the rollers down on the Anthony Street Dam, and the rivers are almost dry.

I can see the Three Rivers Apartments down by the confluence from here, the elevated tracks built over the old canal, and the whole sweep of Fort Wayne’s skyline — bank towers, the golden dome of the courthouse. It is the kind of picture they like to show before the local news. Along the river, I can still see some piles of sandbags from the spring’s flood and the lines each crest left through the summer. The riverbed is beginning to dry and crack below the levee. I like to stand here each morning on my way to the fort and watch all the flags go up on the buildings downtown.

I work at the fort. The bridge is supposed to make it easier for the visitors to imagine they’re walking into the past. You have to leave your car on the lot next to the ticket booth and cross the bridge to the fort. Spy Run, after it crosses the river, goes right by the fort, but they do it this way instead. The ticket booth is also a gift shop with little brass cannons, postcards, pens and pencils. There are racks with all the literature. At night the bridge is closed off. There is a gate made out of cyclone fencing that hangs way out over each side of the walkway so nobody can climb around it. I think it’s funny, a little screen fence protecting a fort.

The oak logs of the fort are white and unweathered. They would have been unweathered then. It is always the summer of 1816.

We do all the regular things other places do — like dip candles, card wool, spin, and weave. The soldiers make shot and clean their weapons. Someone plays the fife. The children hold their ears when we shoot off the six-pounder. But we’re not saying all the time, “This is how they make stew on an open fire” or “This is where the men sat and read their Bibles.”

Everybody plays a person, somebody who was really here in 1816, and we make up stories to get the facts across. Otherwise, we just go about our business, answer questions when we can.

“Do you think Polk will be President?” We just look at each other and scratch our heads. “Who’s he, mister?”

There are fifteen stars on the flag and fifteen stripes. They are running out of room. The Congress is trying to figure out what to do next.

When I head in the gate, Jim is working out the flogging with Marshall. There was a flogging on this day in 1816.

I am George Washington Whistler. I’ll die during an epidemic in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1849.

I was in Russia as an engineer, building the railroad between St. Petersburg and Moscow for the Czar, making harbor improvements, looking over the dockyards. One of my sons will be the painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler, who was in London when I died. He was only sixteen. That’s why you never see a portrait of his father.

In the summer of 1816, I am sixteen too.

My father designed and built this fort, the third and last American fort on the site, as well as the one that was standing here in 1800. That’s the fort I was born in.

Most of what I know about George is all going to happen to him after he leaves here — his marriage, his work on the border between the U.S. and Canada. That doesn’t help me much now. So I just do what I think a sixteen-year-old would have done back then. I fetch things. I haul water. I whittle. I run across the compound while the soldiers drill. I tag behind Jim, who is Major John Whistler, my father, until he pretends to send me on errands. I sulk in the corner of his office while he lectures on strategy and boasts of the fort’s design to a group of visitors. I gripe about school to the other kids. We’ve got some books from the time — primers and things. Or I tell them about how it was when we walked here from Detroit. Most of all, I talk about leaving and heading off to the military academy at West Point.

That’s what’s going to happen to my person pretty soon, and that’s most of what I know, things that will happen soon.

Late in the day, with my chores all done, I’ll go down to the river and skip a few stones. The people crossing back over the bridge will be able to see me there on the bank.

Most of the other people who work here — the soldiers and their wives, the settlers, the traders — are history majors out at Indiana-Purdue University on the bypass. They are always telling me a new fact they’ve come up with in the library — like a diary that mentions something a person did, or what was in a letter found folded in an old book. They’re always building things up from just a few clues. My sister, Harriet, for instance, is supposed to have been a real gossip and mean. That’s what they decided from some letters they found along with a recipe for cornbread. She fretted greatly over Major Whistler, our father, who seems to have not gotten along at all with B. F. Stickney, the Indian agent, or with his son-in-law, Lieutenant Curtis. I’ve seen Jim — who is really a professor out at the campus — have yelling matches with the man who plays Mr. Stickney. Visitors will come through the gate, and the two of them will be shouting. Major Whistler is out on the balcony of his quarters. Mr. Stickney is over by the hospital. It’s something about the payments and the sale of alcohol.

Nobody tells the visitors what they’re getting into. They just have to catch on. It must seem like these are real fights at first.

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.

We head north by Penguin Point, with the trash cans shaped like penguins, and then run along the bike path on the bank of the St. Joe. We cross State and off to the right is North Side across the river. The ventilating scoops all swiveling like weather vanes left and right. That’s another thing we can never figure out, how those scoops are all pointed in different directions in the same breeze. Spy Run bears down on the Old Crown Brewery, dead ahead, but turns sharp left to meet up again with Clinton. Mr. Centlivre is all lit up on the building’s roof. His foot is planted on a keg like a big game hunter. We start talking about going to Ohio. But we never do.

On weeknights I keep score for my dad’s softball team. I fill up the frames with little red diamonds. They’re winners. It’s fast pitch. They have uniforms and everything. When the ball gets by the catcher and no one’s on base, he throws it to the third baseman, who always plays in. The third baseman relays it back to the pitcher, a windmiller, his ball jumping over the plate. They’re sharp. I call out the lineups. On deck, in the hole.

They all ask about the fort and tell me how they mean to come by.

They work during the day, and on vacation they usually go away. I tell them there is plenty to see right here in town. But they know I am kidding.

I like the plinking sound of the aluminum bats. I like to see the white ball go bouncing beyond the lights out into the high grass of Hamilton Park, a grown man chasing after it like a kid.

I warm Dad up before the game, taking one step back after two throws. He’s always very deliberate, pretending to throw after he throws. He tells himself what he’s doing wrong. I can hear snatches of it. I’m all encouragements. When he’s not in the field but swinging the lead bat, I hold his glove to keep it off the ground, make sure there’s a ball inside to keep the pocket.

Dad takes some of us from the fort to the various parades and festivals where we’ve been appearing. We go all over this part of Indiana. Mom comes along to help with the maps and to look over the handicrafts. They won’t accept mileage. We’re all in the backseats of the station wagon in full-dress uniforms. Shakos, crossing white belts, bayonets in the scabbards. The muskets are up on the luggage rack. Mom always says, “I bet the wool is itchy.”

We don’t look very smart since our clothes are authentic and handmade. You’d expect more. But we do all right in the parades, staying in step and following orders. We fire off a salute at least once.

Dad works for Rea Magnet Wire and worries about the way the car smells. As long as I can remember, his cars have smelled of copper and the enamels. He even smells that way when I get close enough to him. It’s like something you were trying to melt in a pan, chocolate or butter, was just starting to burn instead.

He hangs little green paper Christmas trees from the rearview mirror, but they don’t do any good. Mom asks why draw attention to it by trying to cover it up. I don’t think the people from the fort notice — or if they do, they get used to it like we all do. They’re nervous about the parade and how they look.

All summer I have been thinking about my chemistry problem. I’ll be taking third-year chem in the fall. I’ve liked chem since the first class. It’s the teacher, I think, and because I have a knack for it. My senior year will be organic and a special project. I’ve known what I wanted to do for a long time, ever since Mr. Dvorak showed us the clock reaction in an early lecture.

A clock reaction is close to magic.

The stuff in the beaker changes colors all by itself.

It didn’t seem like science at all. That’s why it was great for beginning classes. He poured these three clear liquids into a beaker. The liquid turned a bright orange and seemed to thicken. He kept on stirring slowly with a glass rod, clinking it against the glass beaker. All of a sudden, the orange turned black. It was just like someone had flicked a switch. He told us that a professor at Princeton had designed the reaction, and that orange and black are the Princeton colors.

Since then, I’ve been thinking about my own clock reaction in white and red, North Side High colors. It has to be in that order since the white couldn’t cover the red.

I need to find three compounds, ABC. A and B can’t react. B and C can’t react. But A and C do react, and their product is a white solid. In that product somewhere there has to be something that will then combine with B, but not all at once.

I can’t have pink.

For two years I’ve been mixing precipitates — blue-green coppers, orange potassiums, cobalt blues, the yellows. The test tubes go from clear to color, and the solid settles instantly or suspends, milky and in motion.

Iron gives red, and there are many white metals.

Dvorak says there are tables and books that just list the colors. That would save me time, but I like to see them for myself — the colors and the grades of solids, sand or silt or crystal. There’s one, just a drop, that turns as it falls through the acid, a little gray worm by the time it hits the bottom.

Don’t worry — one day I’ll say, “See?”

White, red.

My mother thinks I think too much. She’s caught me staring into the sink, watching the Ajax oxidate and turn blue. She thinks I should go out more. My dad doesn’t say anything but worries out of habit. We’ll sit together out on the porch swing. I’ll be reading, and he’ll be smoking a cigar. “Boats this year,” he’ll say after a while. “Sailboats.”

He’s thinking about the Junior Achievement projects for next fall.

Rea gives copper wire to a JA company.

The kids make pictures of things by stringing the wire between carefully arranged pegs. Cars, trains, airplanes — all made out of thread-gauge copper wire, gold-headed tacks, black cloth for the background.

I am waving to the Kiwanis pontoon going by on the river. I can hear pieces of the talk about the beautification project, the downtown, the fort, the portage that made this spot worth fighting for in the first place. My two sisters are washing nearby, letting the crowd of visitors overhear them talk about the Major, our father, and finding him a wife, how that would make him more tolerable to live with. I go on back to the clearing in front of the gate where the rifle squad is drilling and the cannon is being readied for firing. The visitors shade their eyes, take pictures.

They’ve been blowing up buildings across the river downtown. It’s the easiest way to demolish the vacant old hotels. From here, we can see some of it. A building turns to dust and disappears from between the other buildings. If the wind is right, there is hardly any sound, just the cloud of dust rolling away. The Keenan Hotel. The Van Ormen. Once the gun crew tried to time a firing with one of the explosions. They aimed the cannon in the general direction so it would look like we were shelling the downtown, the building collapsing before our guns. Jim said it was a stupid idea. The visitors were more interested in the drill, swabbing out the barrel, ramming, loading, the slow-burning fuse. The visitors were from out of town anyway and probably didn’t know what was going on. The local people would be downtown to watch the building go.

The problem is that it is so hard to imagine this place without buildings even though so much of the old city is leveled now into fields of rubble. The view is broken only by the steeples of the old German churches.

It’s easy for me to pretend I’ve never tasted white sugar. Basketball hasn’t been invented. But I think I stick too close to the facts. Maybe I can’t see much beyond the things I can see.

My friend Les isn’t like that at all. He told me once of the project he’d like to do. Since energy is just matter traveling at the speed of light, he told me, what he’d like to come up with would be some kind of filter that would slow things down. Hold it up to the light and solid blocks of stuff would fall out of the air.

“That would be better than your clock reaction,” he says. “You might have to pick stuff up, but you wouldn’t have the mess afterwards.”

And Jim has no trouble at all being someone else. It is 1816 to him. “Listen,” he says, “what bird did that? One of the swallows from the blockhouse?”

He’s proud of the fort’s innovations — the cubiles for putting out fires, the overhanging ports to shoot down on intruders crouching by the walls. He’s proud that he’s convinced the banks to see it all like he saw it and that he convinced the city fathers to go along. There are signs all over town pointing in this direction. See Old Fort Wayne. For the longest time, all there was of the fort was one replica cannon in the lobby of the library, flanked by a glass case with a model made out of toothpicks and paper.

It had been there as long as I could remember.

It is late in the day. The pies that Harriet and Eliza made are in the windows. I’m supposed to swipe one and take it off to the soldier’s mess. The sisters search each building, rolling pin at the ready. But the men hide me from my sisters. The visitors scream with laughter as I race from one building to another a step ahead of my pursuers. The visitors are on all the porches, resting on the hand-hewn chairs and benches. The sun is hot. The sky is blue. I make it to the hospital and disappear inside just as the sisters emerge from the southeast blockhouse.

Major Whistler steps out on the porch of his quarters and shouts with command, “What in God’s name is going on here!”

The sisters confide to those nearby that the boy needs a mother, that he’s getting too big to chase after.

Harriet is portrayed as a flirt, though distracted with the care of her father. Her motivation for wishing to see our father married again comes from her own desire to be free to find a husband. She will later marry a Captain Phelan who will be killed in Detroit. She’ll live to 1872. Harriet.

Major Whistler will become the military storekeeper at Bellefontaine, Missouri. He will move with the troops to the new Jefferson Barracks in 1826, and die there in September.

Eliza will go with her husband, Lieutenant Curtis, from here to Detroit to Green Bay. She will have a child in the cradle and one in school when, one day, while washing clothes in a river near Fort Howard, she will be killed by a bolt of lightning. That’s it for Eliza.

Daniel Curtis and I are eating pieces of pie in the hospital. He is there caring for Marshall. The record shows that Curtis served as the fort doctor that summer when there was no one else to do it. Had some training, had some schooling. He was liked by the Indians, having witnessed the speeches at Brownstown in 1810. He was a schoolteacher from New Hampshire.

“Stickney,” he said, “is an opportunist. He is receiving money from the whiskey-traders.”

The pie is very good. Made with berries from our own canes.

It is hard for me to keep from thinking about the futures of these people. I feel sorry for Curtis, though it is years before his wife’s death and his bungling at Fort Howard. He will be court-martialed and discharged.

We sit and eat the warm pie in pieces he’s cut with his knife. We’ve hidden what’s left of it beneath a bunk. The man who plays Curtis winks at me a lot.

The visitors stick their heads in the door. They see us eating the pie in what seems a normal fashion. They see another log building, bare and chinked. The planking has been ripped out by a two-man saw. The only color is the leather fire bucket in the corner. It’s painted blue.

Les says that it would drive him crazy.

“It’s enough for me just to not think about school this fall.”

We are sitting on the riverbank by North Side, down below the concrete levee. The brewery makes the air smell rotten. Cottonwood seeds are floating in the green water. I tell him it’s kind of like living with premonitions all the time or ESP.

“It’s neat knowing everything,” I say.

The clock on the brewery has read twenty after ten since it was sold to a national brewer.

“See,” I say, “they’re going to let that place go right down the drain. Let it all just fall apart.”

Les just grunts and heaves a rock to make the pigeons fly. Cadmium is light blue, I think, and rhodium is red but expensive. Iodine is not really black but violet. A dark violet.

We have been spying on the cheerleaders who are practicing in the parking lot by the school. We watch them from behind the levee as they work on their movements. The way they clap their hands and bounce on their toes. They climb on each other’s knees and backs. They do the type of cheers you like to watch even though you can’t cheer along with them. Splits and flips. They wear red sweatshirts, white skirts.

“Try and explain that to future generations,” Les says. We keep watching through the afternoon, ducking down to the river when we think they’ve seen us. The littlest one is on the top of the pyramid. We see her skirt fly up. She lands on her feet and bounces. Falling with her from all over the formation are the other girls, landing and clapping. They bounce, no longer in unison. Applaud what they’ve done. Then they do the pyramid cheer again.

I like to think the painter Whistler didn’t paint a picture of his father because he was like me. He didn’t trust his memory, was only comfortable with a model sitting in front of him. He was my age when his father died, and he’d just started drawing.

I have a collection of postcards with reproductions of his paintings and his etchings. Les says if I have etchings, I should tell the cheerleaders to come around and take a look.

They are pictures of docks and streets in France and England — highly detailed — panes in the windows and reflections in the glass. The portraits are all very sad, though I can see that they are beautiful. They are titled after their colors and compared to music.

Arrangement in Black and White.

Blue Nocturnes.

Things like that.

The picture of his mother has a picture hanging on the wall that I can barely make out. I think it is another one of his pictures. I can’t imagine what he looked like. George, I mean. Sideburns, I guess. A high collar? The Czar took a ruler and drew a straight line from St. Petersburg to Moscow.

“Do this,” he said.

And Whistler did.

His father, Major Whistler, and B. F. Stickney are having it out near the gate. Everyone draws in, the garrison as well as the remaining visitors, who feel better about what is happening around them now. This is all made up, they are thinking.

“How dare you, sir! How dare you!” Stickney is saying.

The Major produces maps and indicates lands deeded by the treaty of Greenville to the Richardville clan of the Miami in perpetuity.

“There are white settlers on the land, Mr. Stickney. Here and here.”

I see my father in the crowd, listening to what’s going on.

I guess it looks like a dispute at home plate, both benches emptied.

Soldiers are moving in with muskets. They begin breaking through the crowd. Lieutenant Curtis holds the two men apart. His hat is knocked off his head. “Gentlemen! Gentlemen!”

I edge over to my father, who asks me what’s going on. I tell him about what Stickney’s been up to, selling land to families up from Kentucky, paying off the tribes, and getting the money back by tripling the whiskey prices on payment day.

I can smell the copper.

He has just come from the plant, so it’s strong and mixed in with my own smell and the smell of the wool uniforms that only get washed once a week since that was regulation. My dad begins to ask me another question, but then I can see he starts to understand the way things work. So he waits for me to speak first.

He probably stopped by to give me a ride home, probably got across the bridge without paying since it’s close to closing.

My eyes are very tired and I can’t wait to take them out. I mean the contacts. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to wear them as long as they say you’re supposed to.

The soldiers are pushing us all back with their muskets now. The braid on their shakos is loose. There is an eagle and a white cockade. The hats make the soldiers look taller.

My father takes a few steps back. His tie is loose but still knotted.

This is the first time he has seen the fort. I point out the gardens and the pickets and the Pennsylvania key, notched in the corners of the buildings. Cars are going by on Spy Run. Flashes of color. Engines are revved high. People are on their way home from work. We stand there on the edge of the crowd, my dad and I, listening to an argument that was settled a long time ago.