The teacher is giving everyone boxes for the project. The one she gets off the bus carrying in her arms is medium sized and has black lettering on its side: POWDER FREE Nitrile gloves, general purpose, ambidextrous, the front already cut away.
“Does his wife work in the medical field?”
“I don’t know,” my fourteen-year-old replies. “He said he went somewhere and got them.”
“What scene are you doing again?”
“Andersonville.”
“The prison? Did you tell him you’ve actually been?”
“No.”
“So, what are you going to show? The soldiers wasting away?”
“I guess.”
“Is Drew doing one too?”
Drew, our neighbor up the road, is also in eighth grade. Since we live in the woods, he’s pretty much our only neighbor. He’s very quiet and he plays soccer, the serious kind where you have a match in another town almost every weekend.
“Yes, he’s doing one but he’s not doing the prison. He’s in another class and they gave them more options.”
“I wonder what he’s doing.”
“I don’t know. He didn’t say.”
I’m busy, much too busy for Andersonville. It’s the end of the semester at the college where I teach and I have final portfolios to read and grade. I don’t think any more about the prison till Sunday evening when I’m on the landing and spy my daughter hesitating at the bottom of the stairs: she needs materials to work on that diorama in class this coming week, could we maybe go to the craft store? I tell her I’m not going to Michael’s at almost 5pm on a Sunday, this close to Christmas. I just. Can’t. Though it’s also my fault for not springing to action sooner, I give my daughter the big speech about telling your parents what they need ahead of time, in time for them to actually do something about it, then open my laptop so we can rush-order items from our evil Lord and Savior Amazon Prime: a 300 pack of popsicle sticks—more formally known as “wood craft sticks”—for the stockade fence and set of 25 wooden pegs similar to the ones we bought last year when she had to do a diorama featuring the Berlin Wall (and while I’m already on there, some bedding for Bart, my other daughter’s hamster).
“Hey,” I tell my daughter, “I still have some trees leftover from that Communism thing. A three pack. I was going to take them back to the store, but I lost dad’s receipt. Could you use those?”
“I don’t know. I guess not unless they were outside the prison?”
“Oh right. I guess they cut all the trees down.”
“Who is they?”
“I think the brochure we got when we visited said slaves did most of the work.”
“Of course they did. How many pegs did you buy?”
“A twenty-five pack. That should be enough, right?”
“Yes.”
“Maybe you can do what you did last time.”
“Maybe.”
Last time, she painted the trunk part of the peg-people in East Berlin grey while the West Berliners wore yellow, blue, and green (on the preliminary requirements/rubric sheet every student received at the start of the project, the use of color or lack thereof in the messaging formed an integral part of the overall scoring system). Just in case the various hues, or lack thereof, didn’t send an overt enough message, the Easter Berliners all received black permanent marker frowns while the West Berliners found themselves stamped with perpetual smiles. We eventually recycled the box, but maybe we should have saved those pegs. Maybe she could have used the grey ones for Confederate guards, their already extant frowns able to shift into something slightly more menacing in this new dire context.
The next day, my daughter has to carry her box back to school in heavy rain, a system that started on the West Coast, bringing snow to the Sierra and hurricanes to Louisiana before shifting North. Today it’s supposed to dump snow all over New York.
“Do you have to take that all in? The supplies don’t come till Thursday.”
“Yes, we have to work on it during class time and I don’t want to get in trouble. I’ll do some painting.”
–What diorama are you doing up there? I text the neighbor.
—The Battle of Kennesaw Mountain (eyeroll emoji)
Wednesday, while my daughter’s still at school, the popsicle sticks arrive. The stockade material, a day earlier than promised! Now we just need those pegs to hurry up and get here.
The next time I’m in my bedroom, I walk over to my dresser to check on something. Yes, just as I thought, I did save one peg when we threw the old diorama out. There it is at the back of my jewelry tray, a bit of dried glue on its hem, East German eyes downcast beside a few bobby pins and some fake diamond earrings my mother produced from the tissue innards of a Ziploc bag on a recent visit: I’ve seen your photos all year on Facebook. Maybe you should wear something different now and then besides those gold posts.
The Battle of Kennesaw Mountain? I can guess where it occurred, of course, but what, exactly, happened? A quick Wikipedia glance informs me that the event, which took place on June 27, 1864, “was the most significant frontal assault launched by Union Major. Gen. William T. Sherman against the Confederate Army of Tennessee under Gen. Joseph E. Johnston, ending in a tactical defeat for the Union forces”—Apparently, it was only the gloat of a day since Sherman still burned Atlanta about five months later, but nonetheless. I send the neighbor a text.
–Are you actually making a mountain?
–Yes (grimacing emoji). Trader Joe’s paper sacks turned inside out/tons of crumpled newspaper. Pray.
When my daughter comes home, I excitedly present the early arriving popsicle sticks and sit next to her while she’s eating her Harvest Cheddar SunChips, a daily after school ritual. As we chat, I’m horrified to learn of her elaborate plans to construct a freestanding fence: “Maybe I could make some kind of actual parapet and put pegs up on it to be guards looking down at the prisoners?”
“Think how much hot glue you’d need and how hard it would be to moor it!” I splutter, “Maybe you could just glue all the sticks right to the box and…cut a silhouette of a guard out of construction paper and glue that to the box as well?”
The perfectionist pauses, painfully considers one dimension.
“Remember that ice cube thing.”
I’m not trying to encourage her to completely slack off, but she and I both know she also has a science project to work on some insulator thing to keep an ice cube from melting as long as possible with materials procured from around the home such as cotton balls and bubble wrap. I can tell she’s overwhelmed. I see my opening and go for it.
“If you glue it right to the box, I’ll help you make the bottoms of all the sticks even.”
After she reluctantly agrees, I take the scissors out of the knife-block on the kitchen counter and get to work, pressing down, hard, harder, till stick-nubs fly off every-which-way, balsa-shrapnel.
Watch your eyes.
After a slapdash spaghetti dinner, I sit down for a minute and observe as my daughter somewhat dejectedly continues to glue the fence right to the box. When she was at school today, she painted the sky a bright blue and the grass a verdant green. Noticing me there, she hesitates.
“Do you think there was grass?”
“I don’t know. There is now, of course, now that it’s a national park, but maybe not when it was newly cleared forest?”
Her body slowly growing inside mine. Did that really happen?
“What else will you show?”
“Maybe some of those tent things they made for shelter?”
“Oh yeah. The…shebangs? I guess you wouldn’t need any of that fake food we got. Sadly.”
“No.”
Last fall, we bought a ton of miniature dollhouse food at the craft store to show all those communism free folks in West Berlin living it up: a wooden crate of gleaming, lacquered apples and a fancy silver plate of assorted cookies and cakes including a pink and round one with cross-hatch white lines, a chocolate toothsome with a little nub of cherry on top, and last but not least, a picnic basket with the obligatory red and white fabric lining and a succulent loaf of French bread, devil-may-care jauntily peeping out. A virtual feast weighed down their representative table alongside a newspaper and a book (care for some free circulating information with that croissant?), whereas the other side had nothing but an almost empty cardboard stall with a few dispirited clay carrots and a lone Manifesto.
–Are we going to have to do one of these every year? I text the neighbor.
—I hope not! I’m getting sick of it. Apparently she and her son have gone to four different places this afternoon looking for those plastic army men but they’re always all sold out. Perhaps the other parents in the county beat them there.
—Big Lots, success! The neighbor texts about half an hour later.
I guess, I muse to my daughter after reporting their victory, that you couldn’t use those, because don’t they all have guns in their hands? Which the prisoners wouldn’t. And the guns would probably look too modern.
“Right.”
When she gets up for a bathroom break, I notice that she’s painted the deadline, the place where the prisoners were not to step or risk getting shot by a guard immediately, a light brown shade the paint bottle touts as Burnt Sienna. I put my thumb on it, a dare, then pull it back. My phone pings then pings again. Two texts in rapid succession.
–I need to get Katie something else for X-mas. Ideas? Maybe that World Atlas she wanted? (my mother)
-Almost a 100 dollars now! (the neighbor)
I reply to both.
–Atlas sounds great! Thx.
–The sad part about all of this is that those poor boys had absolutely nothing.
But my husband and I have intentionally moved to a county that’s predominantly well-to-do and white and all the schools have a nine out of ten rating, a place on the map where deprivation is something that must be shown, a carefully constructed tableau (what wealth needed?! To show such poverty!).
My husband later that evening: “You used the kitchen scissors to cut off the bottoms of popsicle sticks? Our good ones?”
The next morning, my daughter leaves the box at home, saying she’ll start writing her report during the class work time.
“And the pegs?”
“They’re coming. Today.”
While she’s still at school, I sit at my desk to work, but find myself, at odd intervals, going into the craft room to stare into the box, still devoid of its wretched masses. Though I’d never say anything, she won’t get any points this time if they want color to indicate the appropriate mood. The grass is too green, sky too blue, and the Stockade Branch, pristine, without any urine or offal or disease running in it. Of course, it’s already all off, not an appropriate scale. How could a few pegs out of a 25 pack represent the 45,000 soldiers who found themselves trapped in those sixteen acres? The real way to show it, or closer, at least, would be to glue so many pegs there was no standing room left then start tossing in pegs on top of that. Whittled down pegs covered in vermin and offal.
I spy a piece of popsicle stick which managed to escape my detection last night and bend down to pick it up. Despite grumbling to the neighbor, I guess the teachers at my daughter’s school, elaborate rubric notwithstanding, aren’t necessarily doing anything new. Wasn’t my own brother required to re-create the battle of Bunker Hill in fourth grade? I remember my mother buying him those same plastic army men and my father going out to the edge of our driveway to spray-paint them red and blue, to distinguish between the British and those who didn’t want to be British much longer, my brother gluing bits of lichen late at night as he sat at the kitchen table in our house in Washington state. We’d never traveled east of the Mississippi, but as I stood there in the hall watching him work so diligently, I almost smelled the musket fire. And then there was that time in high school my family visited the Gettysburg Diorama, an elaborate construction paired with narration and light and sound effects which would put any child’s school project to shame.
All afternoon my ears strain to hear a delivery truck pull up. It doesn’t. The tracking site says they should be here from 4-7pm but what if they aren’t? It’s ten days out from Christmas, after all! They still haven’t arrived when my daughter comes home from school to remind me the project is due tomorrow. Maybe we can go somewhere else, I say, eventually locating some emergency pegs online, in-stock at a Hobby Lobby four miles away, along with two “reviews” including a glowing five star one posted just six days ago by a very pious Anonymous: “Perfect for A kids Nativity set!”: “Used hot glue, fabric scraps, and yarn to make a lovely little toy nativity set with kids. Joseph, Mary, 3 wise men, 2 shepherds, an angel, and we bundled up a wood bead for baby Jesus!” (The second review, left by “Mark,” is a bit more underwhelming, and perhaps not even a review so much as a rather lackadaisical prophecy: “i think i’m gonna start looking for these next time i go there”—though it could be postulated that someone who can’t even be bothered to capitalize their pronouns might not ever gather enough initiative to actually ever leave their domicile).
But, before my child has even finished her SunChips, there’s a rustle on the porch and a new notification ping. The pegs (and hamster bedding)! Even though we rush to the front door, the driver and truck have already vanished by the time we arrive.
As my daughter continues working, I find myself back at my laptop, searching for the Gettysburg diorama online, curious to see if it still exists. It does, and what’s more, is currently being featured as a “Stocking Stuffer”; in the advert, Santa looking slightly startled (but not cannon-fire startled, just someone just told a slightly ribald joke startled), holds a gift card near a bright scarlet stocking with the name Max emblazoned on it. Get Max to Gettysburg right away! For a package tour which includes the diorama’s highly dynamic thirty-minute informational program. One could argue this all in bad taste, though perhaps bad taste at Gettysburg (and elsewhere) is nothing new, the supine victim in famed Civil War photographer Alex Gardner’s A Sharpshooter’s Last Sleep strikingly similar to the prostate subject in the subsequent Home of a Rebel Sharpshooter, Gardner dragging the corpse in question almost half a football field away to stage a second melancholy scene, taking liberties to prop the head to face the camera and even adding a rifle for a prop. Maybe we aren’t the first to labor hard to painstakingly recreate it? Misery.
All throughout the afternoon and evening my daughter continues, stopping only for one quick baked potato break, sans butter and cheese. On a mission, she paints blue coats on the prisoners and grey on the guards, including a bearded frowning Captain Wirz. Some prisoners are blonde, some brunette, and she makes sure at least two of the pegs represent the over one hundred African American soldiers who were imprisoned there, receiving harsher treatment from the guards and fellow prisoners alike. Next, she constructs three shelters from twigs from the front yard and a scrap of old cloth then places some more peg-prisoners near the tents and infected stream. Lastly, she takes a peg and glues it prostrate on the deadline, a delicate wisp of red along the back.
“Do you think it could happen again?” she asks.
“What do you mean?”
“Like. The Civil War. People seem pretty divided lately.”
“I hope not,” I say, though I don’t know how convincing I sound. Maybe her great-great-great grandchildren will be required to construct a diorama of something even worse than this. Maybe there will be no school assignments at all besides just trying to breathe.
Around 9pm, the neighbor texts a picture. Kennesaw Mountain looks amazing, sexy even! covered with boulder-pebbles and elaborate trees constructed from moss and sticks. Confederate soldiers stand atop the impressive hill with their toothpick flag, while the Union soldiers lie vanquished at the bottom, limbs severed, thick globs of red paint pooling around their artfully fragmented bodies.
—Wow! How will you get that to school?
—In our new car. It won’t fit in my husband’s.
–Totally an A.
–Better be.
All these deceased souls might be touched we’re still remembering them, still commemorating their suffering almost a hundred and sixty years later, albeit in a tiny, ridiculous way for a middle school state history class. Or they might scream and slap us almost senseless. What the hell are we doing. Coming back here.
Do you think he wanted to do it? I text my daughter after she leaves for school the next day with her box and report. The soldier there on the deadline.
Mom.
I just mean, in your mind.
I think he did.
A few minutes later, I text another question, though I fill with dread as I type and end up deleting it, three dots in the grey bubble going, going, poof.
(Before you glued it down…did you draw a face?)
