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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