The Whistling Season Read online

  The Whistling Season

  Ivan Doig

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  ...

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

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  HARCOURT, INC.

  Orlando Austin New York San Diego Toronto London

  Copyright © 2006 by Ivan Doig

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced

  or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including

  photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system,

  without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Requests for permission to make copies of any part of the work should

  be mailed to the following address: Permissions Department, Harcourt, Inc.,

  6277 Sea Harbor Drive, Orlando, Florida 32887-6777.

  www.HarcourtBooks.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Doig, Ivan.

  The whistling season/Ivan Doig—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  1. Brothers and sisters—Fiction. 2. Irrigation projects—Fiction.

  3. Housekeepers—Fiction. 4. Teachers—Fiction. 5. Widowers—Fiction.

  6. Montana—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3554.O415W48 2006

  813'.54—dc22 2005025457

  ISBN-13: 978-0-15-101237-4 ISBN-10: 0-15-101237-7

  Text set in Adobe Caslon

  Designed by Linda Lockowitz

  Printed in the United States of America

  First edition

  C E G I K J H F D

  To Ann and Marshall Nelson

  In at the beginning

  and reliably fantastic all the way

  1

  WHEN I VISIT THE BACK CORNERS OF MY LIFE AGAIN AFTER so long a time, littlest things jump out first. The oilcloth, tiny blue windmills on white squares, worn to colorless smears at our four places at the kitchen table. Our father's pungent coffee, so strong it was almost ambulatory, which he gulped down from suppertime until bedtime and then slept serenely as a sphinx. The pesky wind, the one element we could count on at Marias Coulee, whistling into some weather-cracked cranny of this house as if invited in.

  That night we were at our accustomed spots around the table, Toby coloring a battle between pirate ships as fast as his hand could go while I was at my schoolbook, and Damon, who should have been at his, absorbed in a secretive game of his own devising called domino solitaire. At the head of the table, the presiding sound was the occasional turning of a newspaper page. One has to imagine our father reading with his finger, down the column of rarely helpful want ads in the Westwater Gazette that had come in our week's gunnysack of mail and provisions, in his customary search for a colossal but underpriced team of workhorses, and that inquisitive finger now stubbing to a stop at one particular heading. To this day I can hear the signal of amusement that line of type drew out of him. Father had a short, sniffing way of laughing, as if anything funny had to prove it to his nose first.

  I glanced up from my geography lesson to discover the newspaper making its way in my direction. Father's thumb was crimped down onto the heading of the ad like the holder of a divining rod striking water. "Paul, better see this. Read it to the multitude."

  I did so, Damon and Toby halting what they were at to try to take in those five simple yet confounding words:

  CAN'T COOK BUT DOESN'T BITE.

  Meal-making was not a joking matter in our household. Father, though, continued to look pleased as could be and nodded for me to keep reading aloud.

  Housekeeping position sought by widow.

  Sound morals, exceptional disposition. No

  culinary skills, but A-l in all other household

  tasks. Salary negotiable, but must include

  railroad fare to Montana locality; first

  year of peerless care for your home thereby

  guaranteed. Respond to Boxholder, Box 19,

  Lowry Hill Postal Station, Minneapolis, Minnesota.

  Minneapolis was a thousand miles to the east, out of immediate reach even of the circumference of enthusiasm we could see growing in our father. But his response wasted no time in trying itself out on the three of us. "Boys? Boys, what would you think of our getting a housekeeper?"

  "Would she do the milking?" asked Damon, ever the cagey one.

  That slowed up Father only for a moment. Delineation of house chores and barn chores that might be construed as a logical extension of our domestic upkeep was exactly the sort of issue he liked to take on. "Astutely put, Damon. I see no reason why we can't stipulate that churning the butter begins at the point of the cow."

  Already keyed up, Toby wanted to know, "Where she gonna sleep?"

  Father was all too ready for this one. "George and Rae have their spare room going to waste now that the teacher doesn't have to board with them." His enthusiasm really was expanding in a hurry. Now our relatives, on the homestead next to ours, were in the market for a lodger, a lack as unbeknownst to them as our need for a housekeeper had been to us two minutes ago.

  "Lowry Hill." Father had turned back to the boldface little advertisement as if already in conversation with it. "If I'm not mistaken, that's the cream of Minneapolis."

  I hated to point out the obvious, but that chore seemed to go with being the oldest son of Oliver Milliron.

  "Father, we're pretty much used to the house muss by now. It's the cooking part you say you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy."

  He knew—we all knew—I had him there.

  Damon's head swiveled, and then Toby's, to see how he could possibly deal with this. For miles around, our household was regarded with something like a low fever of consternation by every woman worthy of her apron. As homestead life went, we were relatively prosperous and "bad off," as it was termed, at the same time. Prosperity, such as it was, consisted of payments coming in from the sale of Father's drayage business back in Manitowoc, Wisconsin. The "bad off" proportion of our situation was the year-old grave marker in the Marias Coulee cemetery. Its inscription, chiseled into all our hearts as well as the stone, read Florence Milliron, Beloved Wife and Mother (1874–1908). As much as each of the four of us missed her at other times, mealtimes were a kind of tribal low point where we contemplated whatever Father had managed to fight onto the table this time. "Tovers, everyone's old favorite!" he was apt to announce desperately as he set before us leftover hash on its way to becoming leftover stew.

  Now he resorted to a lengthy slurp of his infamous coffee and came up with a response to me, if not exactly a reply:

  "These want ads, you know, Paul—there's always some give to them. It only takes a little bargaining. If I were a wagering man, I'd lay money Mrs. Minneapolis there isn't as shy around a cookstove as she makes herself out to be."

  "But—" My index finger pinned down the five tablet-bold words of the heading.

  "The woman was in a marriage," Father patiently overrode the evidence of the newsprint, "so she had to have functioned in a kitchen."

  With thirteen-year-old sagacity, I pointed out: "Unless her husband starved out."

  "Hooey. Every woman can cook. Paul, get out your good pen and paper."

  ***

  THIS JILTED OLD HOUSE AND ALL THAT IT HOLDS, EVEN empty. If I
have learned anything in a lifetime spent overseeing schools, it is that childhood is the one story that stands by itself in every soul. As surely as a compass needle knows north, that is what draws me to these remindful rooms as if the answer I need by the end of this day is written in the dust that carpets them.

  The wrinkled calendar on the parlor wall stops me in my tracks. It of course has not changed since my last time here. Nineteen fifty-two. Five years, so quickly passed, since the Marias Coulee school board begged the vacant old place from me for a month while they repaired the roof of their teacherage and I had to come out from the department in Helena to go over matters with them. What I am startled to see is that the leaf showing on the calendar—October—somehow stays right across all the years: that 1909 evening of Paul, get out your good pen and paper, the lonely teacher's tacking up of something to relieve these bare walls so long after that, and my visit now under such a changed sky of history.

  The slyness of calendars should not surprise me, I suppose. Passing the newly painted one-room school, our school, this morning as I drove out in my state government car, all at once I was again at that juncture of time when Damon and Toby and I, each in our turn, first began to be aware that we were not quite of our own making and yet did not seem to be simply rewarmed 'tovers of our elders, either. How could I, who back there at barely thirteen realized that I must struggle awake every morning of my fife before anyone else in the house to wrest myself from the grip of my tenacious dreams, be the offspring of a man who slept solidly as a railroad tie? And Damon, fists-up Damon, how could he derive from our peaceable mother? Ready or not, we were being introduced to ourselves, sometimes in a fashion as hard to follow as our father's reading finger. Almost any day in the way stations of childhood we passed back and forth between, prairie homestead and country school, was apt to turn into a fresh puzzle piece of life. Something I find true even yet.

  It is Toby, though, large-eyed prairie child that he was, whom I sensed most as I slowed there at the small old school with its common room and the bank of windows away from its weather side. Damon or I perhaps can be imagined taking our knocks from fate and putting ourselves back into approximately what we seemed shaped to be, if we had started off on some other ground of life than that of Marias Coulee. But Toby was breath and bone of this place, and later today when I must go into Great Falls to give the county superintendents, rural teachers, and school boards of Montana's fifty-six counties my edict, I know it will be their Tobys, their schoolchildren produced of this soil and the mad valors of homesteaders such as Oliver Milliron, that they will plead for.

  2

  THE NEWS OF OUR HOUSEKEEPER-TO-BE GALLOPED TO SCHOOL with us that next morning, or rather, charged ahead of Damon and me in the form of Toby excitedly whacking his heels against the sides of his put-upon little mare, Queenie.

  "I bet she'll have false teeth, old Mrs. Minneapolis will," Damon announced as we rode. "Bet you a black arrowhead she does." Before I could say anything he spat in his right hand, thrust it toward me, and invoked "Spitbath shake," the most binding kind there was.

  I was not ready to stake anything on this housekeeper matter. "You know Father doesn't like for us to bet."

  Damon just grinned.

  "Let's get a move on," I told him, "before Toby laps us."

  As soon as we topped the long gumbo hill at our end of the coulee, the other horseback contingents of schoolchildren loped or lolled into view from their customary directions, each family cluster as identifiable to us as ourselves in a looking-glass. Toby by racing ahead had caught up to a dilemma. Should he go tearing off to as many troupes of schoolcomers as he could reach, or make straight for the schoolhouse and crow our news to the whole school at once?

  He settled for the Pronovosts, the newcomers who joined us every morning at the section-line gate.

  "Izzy! Gabe! Everybody!" That general salutation was to Inez, riding double behind Isidor. She was in Toby's grade and sweet on him, an entangling alliance he did not quite know what to do with. "Guess what?"

  Whatever capacity for conjecture existed in the three minimally washed faces turned our way, it surely did not stretch to the notion of domestic help. The Pronovosts were project people, although the distinction between those and drylanders such as us was shrinking fast. Father already was spending less time on farming and more on hauling wares from the Westwater railhead to the irrigation project camp nearest us, the one called the Big Ditch; the father of the Pronovosts drove workhorses on the gigantic diversion canal under construction there, that breed of old-time earth-moving teamster called a dirt skinner. Not just by coincidence, the Pronovost kids were skinny as greyhounds—a family their size living in a construction camp tent was never going to be overfed.

  After hearing out Toby's feverish recitation, Isidor, who did most of the talking for the three of them, granted: "Pretty dag-gone good, it sounds like." I noticed he gave his younger brother, Gabriel, a strong look, the button-your-lip kind I recognized because I had given Damon enough of them. But from where she was perched behind Isidor's saddle, small Inez piped up:

  "Is she gonna be your new ma?"

  Instantly Damon reddened, and Toby, mouth open, for once failed to find anything to say.

  I spoke up. "Housekeepers are all as old as the hills, aren't they, Damon."

  The bunch of us clucked our horses along faster. To Toby's dismay, Miss Trent already was banging on the iron triangle that served as a bell by the time we got the horses picketed to graze out back of the school. Miss Trent was death on whisperers, so his news needed to stay sealed tight in him until morning recess. Then, though, he burst into the schoolyard in full voice.

  "—all the way from Minnieapples!" he concluded on a high note to a ready audience of the Stoyanov brothers and the two sets of Drobny twins and gangly Verl Fletcher and his shy sister Lily Lee. At the edge of his following, Inez Pronovost listened to it all again breathlessly.

  "She gonna make your beds?"

  "Who's in charge of spankings, then—your pa or her?"

  "Will she bring one of those featherdust things along with, you think?"

  As the questions flew, Toby fended as best he could, all the while trying to gravitate toward the rival contingent at the other end of the schoolground, consisting of the Johannsons and the Myrdals and Eddie Turley, and gather them into his oration about the wonderful imminence of our housekeeper. Worried, I tried to keep an eye on the factions while Grover Stinson and I played catch with Grover's ancient soft-as-a-sock baseball, as the pair of us evidently were going to do throughout every recess until our throwing arms dropped off. Damon was busy taking on Isidor and Gabriel at horseshoe pitching. The clangs as he hit ringers meant he was on a streak hardly anything could interrupt. The littler kids chugged around amid the rest of us in their own games of tag and such. At the moment, peace reigned. All it would take for the schoolyard to erupt, though, would be for Toby to draw a few of the bunch trailing him with intrigued questions into range of the other group. For it was the hallmark of a Marias Coulee recess that the Slavs and the Swedes never got along together, and Eddie Turley didn't get along with anybody.

  I will say for Miss Trent, whenever Milo Stoyanov and Martin Myrdal or the Johannson brothers and the Drobny male twins or some other combination blew up and went at each other, she would wade in and sort them out but good. However, plenty of fisticuffs and taunts and general incitement could take place by the time she ever managed to reach the scene, and those of us who a minute before were neutrality personified might abruptly find ourselves on one side or the other, right in it. Has it ever been any different, from Eton on down? Over the years in that sanguinary schoolyard I'd traded bloody noses with both Milo and Martin, and Damon naturally had more than his share of tussles with each. But ever since we had become motherless, that had all changed. Some invisible spell of sympathy or charity or at least lenience had been dropped over us, granting us something like noncombatant status in the grudge fights. Neither Dam
on nor I was particularly comfortable with this unsought absolution—it had a whiff of pity-the-poor-orphans to it—and Toby was too young to grasp it, but the schoolyard community's unspoken agreement to spare us in the nationality brawls did have its advantages.

  Here was where my worry came in. I somehow sensed that Toby's innocent bragging about our acquisition of a housekeeper might poke a hole in the spell and render us fit for combat again before we quite knew it.

  Tobe's always considerable luck was holding, though, as I watched him scoot free from his first audience, cross the schoolyard at a high run, and start in successfully on the taller forest of the Scandinavian boys and overgrown Eddie.

  Until Carnelia Craig emerged from the girls' outhouse.

  Carnelia always spent a good deal of recess time enthroned in there, probably to spare herself from the childish hurlyburly of the schoolyard. By a fluke of fate, with nearly two years of Marias Coulee classroom yet to be endured, she already was the oldest girl in school, and it showed. The front of her dress was growing distinct points, and her attitude was already fully formed: life had unfairly deposited Carnelia Craig among unruly peasants such as us instead of putting her in charge of, say, Russia. Admittedly, her family was of a different cut than any of the rest of ours because her father was employed by the state of Montana. He was the county agent, working out of the nearby Marias River agricultural experiment station, and her mother had taught homemaker courses before Carnelia deigned to be born. So, the Craigs were up there a bit on such social scale as we had. And in a strange way, I frequently felt I comprehended more of Carnelia's lofty approach to life, jaded as it was, than I did of my father's latest castles in the air. The reason for that was all too simple. She and I were oldest enemies.

  Even yet I can't fully account for the depth of passion, of the worst sort, between us. After all, with more than a dozen years apiece in this world, together we amounted to a responsible age, or should have. But Carnelia and I were the entire seventh grade of the Marias Coulee school, as we had been the entire first, second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth, and there was not a minute of any of it when the pair of us did not resent sitting stuck together there like a two-headed calf until that farthest day when we would graduate from the eighth grade. Until then there would be battle between us, and it was just a matter of choosing new ground for it from time to time.