Read Alive and Dead in Indiana for Free Online

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