The Whistling Season Page 11

  Beside me, Damon was on edge. He rightly sensed that having Morrie in the schoolroom every day, with all the rest of us there, would be a drastic alteration from the two of them poring over sports exploits together. Tobys reaction was the opposite; as far as he was concerned, Morrie inhabiting the teacher's chair would be the next best thing to having Rose on hand. With our hopes going off in various directions, we listened while Father used every caliber of persuasion in his arsenal to bring around his fellow school board members to the concept of resorting to Morris Morgan.

  Walt Stinson was ending up where Joe Fletcher had started out, at that apparent gap between Morrie's attainments and his current situation:

  "Then why's he not doing better for himself in life than chores at Eunice Schricker's place? Can't be he likes exercise that much."

  "All I can tell you, he and his sister are gluttons for work." Father expended a breath that must have made the walls of our kitchen move. "Gents, we are up against it. We are short of a teacher, we have a man right here handy to the job, and the man happens to be a granary of learning. I ask you, isn't the logic looking us right in the face? Are we ready to take a vote?"

  Without incident Morrie's call of the roll reached Damon's grade, the populous sixth. First up was the bashful girl in front of me who had a certain corner of all our hearts because of her long and lonely ride to school. She gave a shy little curtsy and said:

  "Wiwian Willard."

  Morrie's forefinger paused in its journey through the Marias Coulee enrollment register. He tapped the paper tentatively as if to encourage its help on this.

  "Lillian, I'm sorry but I don't seem to have you on the roll."

  "Wiwian," she said again.

  "Miriam?" Morrie tried again.

  A guffaw erupted from the back of the room, the den of eighth-grade boys. Morrie peered back there in interested fashion. "A volunteer, full of gaiety. Just the kind of messenger the gods like to send when enlightenment is required." He singled out the author of the gusty laugh, Milo Stoyanov, with a stare as level as a pointer. "Well? Enlighten me."

  Caught off-guard, Milo looked right, looked left, then gulped out: "Vivian's her name."

  With that clue, Morrie managed to spy Villard, Viv. on his list.

  "Ah." He gave her a gesture of apology. "Mea culpa, Vivian, not youa culpa? Everyone in the schoolroom except Damon and Toby and I blinked.

  Catching a second wind, Morrie briskly elicited names from Isidor Pronovost and Miles Calhoun. Then Barbara Rellis sprang up and identified herself in her cheeky tone of voice. Every male in the room over the age of nine knew she was going to go out in the world and break hearts. Morrie nodded in satisfaction after finding her on the list, but Barbara stayed standing.

  "Teacher? May I please trade my first name in for another one? Just for school."

  All who knew Barbara could have told him it was not a wise move, but Morrie asked speculatively, "And what would that be?"

  "Rabrab."

  I saw Morrie brace for a gale of laughter from the rest of us, but none came. We were all as intrigued as he was. In the expectant silence, Morrie made a try at formulating:

  "Technically, Barbara—to address you in the customary manner, for the moment—what you are requesting seems to be an antonymous nickname. If I am not mistaken, 'Rabrab' constitutes your given name, at least a majority of it, backwards. Why would you prefer that?"

  "Boys get to be contrary warriors their way," she said with a devilish innocence I could have throttled her for. "I figured I could at least do it with my name."

  My face felt red enough to ignite. Her usual elbow-length away from me, Carnelia Craig snickered to herself.

  Morrie managed to quell the outburst of debate—whether she was Barbara or Rabrab, half the school instantaneously backed her and the other half reflexively rallied to the opposing view—and take the matter under advisement.

  "Names are mighty things," he intoned, folding his arms on his chest in what I recognized as his deep-thinking mode. "They may carry the essence of our person, particularly if incised, which is to say nicked, with an apt bit of elaboration. Think of Richard the Lion-Hearted. The Divine Sarah Bernhardt. The Real McCoy," his gaze just above Damon's head for that one. "We mustn't take lightly what the world knows us by, and I commend Miss Rellis for the imagination to seek something she finds more fitting. But there is also the matter of official record," he tapped the roll call list again, "community custom, and need I say, parents."

  With that word, the conspiratorial air that had preceded the wrong-end-to race returned to the room. In the hush, every one of us watched Morrie intently as he deliberated. "I need to know if there is a foundation of precedent upon which 'Rabrab' might be installed. Does anyone else go by a nickname, just here at school?"

  "Me." Miles Calhoun raised his hand as high as it would go.

  Morrie stared at him in consternation. "Miles, I am as certain as anything that you just now informed me that your name is—Miles."

  "That's what everybody calls me. That's what I go by. But my name's Hector and that's what I get all the time at home."

  "Then why—" From the corner of his eye Morrie caught my infinitesimal shake of my head. A trackless bog lay ahead of him in the fact that Hector was dubbed Miles by the schoolyard at large because of his habit of saying by a mile, as in "Is two against one fair, by a mile?" and "I don't believe a word you say, by a mile."

  Pulling back just in time, Morrie returned to the issue at hand. With a Solomonic flair that impressed even those who did not want Barbara to get away with anything, he rendered his decision: "If you can sufficiently convince your fellow young scholars, Rabrab it can be, until different notification."

  Peering once more into the ranks of the sixth grade, Morrie looked relieved at the prospect of getting the roll call back on track with Damon. I knew better. Damon had given me a wicked wink during Barbara's—Rabrab's—mischief and I could about hear what was coming, some wisecrack about reversing his name to Nomad. But before he got to pull this off, he happened to turn in the direction of his deskmate as he started to stand up.

  "Gaahhh! She's bleeding to death again!"

  Damon's yelp would have raised the hair on the dead. For all his fascination with gruesome fates of sports heroes, he shared Father's queasiness around actual blood. And there beside him sat Marta Johannson, perfectly calm, with a red rivulet running out of each nostril and darkening her upper lip. Marias Coulee school had probably more than its share of nosebleeds, usually brought on by fists, but this spontaneous one of Marta's was judged sensational. As Damon tried to scramble away from her, Grover Stinson leaned across to see past him, adjusting his spectacles for a better look. The Drobny sisters, Seraphina and Eva, smiled at Marta's plight like a pair of drawn stilettos. Several sets of feet drummed on the floor excitedly. "I think I'm going to throw up," Rabrab announced. "You do and I'll hit you one," Eddie Turley pledged. Milo let out another room-shaking guffaw.

  "Everyone! Quiet, a moment."

  Speeding down the aisle toward Marta, Morrie glanced to the seventh grade for interpretation as he passed.

  "She gets these," Carnelia and I said together in veteran fashion.

  Morrie slid down onto one knee in front of Marta, working fast. He tore a strip of tablet paper and rolled it into a tight little ball. "Push this up under your lip and hold it there, that's the way." With Marta staunching the flow, he professionally dabbed away the bloody residue with a dampened handkerchief. It was all over in record time.

  Breathing a little hard, Morrie walked back to the front of the room and resolutely picked up the roll call list again. I began to wonder if he was going to get us to first period, arithmetic, before the end of his initial teaching day.

  The remainder of the sixth grade, perhaps impressed with Morrie's capability around blood, reeled off names without event. Carnelia and I, the total seventh, accounted for ourselves in no time. This left the eighth grade, that logjam of big boys. Carl
Johannson and Milo Stoyanov had both needed to repeat a grade along the way, and Eddie Turley had flunked two. There was a rim of fuzz on the upper lip of each of them, as if they were starting to grow moss from all their years trapped in the schoolroom. Martin Myrdal and Verl Fletcher merely were man-size ahead of schedule, and markedly brighter than the others, but their renegade moods of growing up were such that you had to watch your step around them, too. I had the impression that even Carnelia was taking an interest in how our new teacher would fare with this bunch. Permanently mad at each other though we were, she and I shared unspoken relief that we did not have to go through life amid the galoots of grade eight.

  Morrie did not appear perturbed as one after another of them unfolded out of the desks that were too small for them and muttered a name. He did pause a barest moment when the roll call reached Eddie Turley. Just sitting there, Eddie looked like a menace to society. He took his time about getting onto his feet and made a face at the whole process, to show he had no problem with sneering at the new teacher.

  But beginner's luck was with Morrie. When Eddie lurched back down, the last student of all happened to be Verl Fletcher. Before Verl could reclaim his seat, Morrie popped him a question:

  "Verl, I must ask—do you happen to know the derivation of your distinguished family name?"

  "Nope."

  "No? Allow me then to tell you what a vital profession it was, that of a 'fletcher,' one who 'fletched.'"

  I was the one person in the schoolroom who had ever witnessed Morrie soar off into full trapeze flight this way. The whole student body, however, instinctively understood that our new teacher had to catch onto something up there or fall far. Already Verl was looking uneasy with a family tree of ones who fletched.

  Morrie advanced on the lanky eighth-grader unfazed. "You see, Verl, in days of old a fletcher was an arrowsmith, a maker of arrows. Knights of the Round Table, huntsmen, Robin Hood, they all depended on the skill of the fletcher to make that arrow straight and true." Snatching up the yardstick that Miss Trent used to whap on the blackboard to get our full attention, Morrie pantomimed an archer drawing back the arrow to let fly. "We take the measure, so to speak, of those long-ago fletchers every day of our lives. Verl, what do you notice about the length of this 'arrow'?" Morrie patiently held his archery pose.

  "It's a yard?" Verl hazarded.

  "Exactly! And that is where we get that unit of measure from. The cloth needed for a bowman's coat had to be as wide as that arrow was long, didn't it. Watch!" Morrie whipped off his suit coat, turned it upside down, held one corner up by his ear where the feathered end of the arrow would have been, thrust out his arm in drawn-bow fashion again with the other corner of the coattail in his fingers, and there it was, the yard-long length of cloth. Everyone in the room had seen their mothers or the clerk at the Westwater mercantile measure from a bolt of cloth that way, and now we knew why. Several of the girls who sewed, Carnelia among them, verified Morrie's domestic insight with testing motions of their shoulders. Toby and the others in the lower grades were examining their arrow arms with new respect. Verl looked somewhat dazed but newly knighted.

  Putting his coat back on and adjusting his cuffs, Morrie headed toward the more usual teacherly territory at the front of the room. "You may sit down, Verl, thank you very much. That excursion into times past whence measurements come from brings us, I believe, to arithmetic period."

  Rose mercilessly took charge when Morrie moved in to the teacherage out back of the schoolhouse, shaking her head over its prior level of housekeeping every way she turned.

  "I take exception to flounces," she declared of Miss Trent's taste in curtains as she flung up a window to air the place out. "Absolute dust catchers. Oliver, surely the school board—"

  Father gave Rose a look that seemed to say there it was again, that exceptional disposition of hers. Nonetheless he patted his pockets for something to write "new curtains" down on. Toby and Damon and I prowled the previously forbidden premises, disappointed not to find teacher secrets cropping up anywhere. Damon in particular was convinced Miss Trent, when she was away from the eyes of the schoolroom, had spent her time smoking cigarettes, insisting, "Why was her breath like that, if she wasn't?" So far, despite his best efforts he had not been able to find where she might have stashed her Woodbines. Toby divided his time between pitching in on Damon's search and shadowing Rose as she swept and swiped at dust. My role as water bearer followed me from home, and no sooner did I have the stove reservoir and the drinking bucket freshly filled than Rose waS brandishing the mop bucket in my direction and saying, "Paul, would you terribly mind—?" Once more I headed out to the pump in the schoolyard.

  This time I passed Morrie on his way from the wagon, dispatched to fetch a box of housewares Rose had insisted he could not get along without. Did Thoreau's luggage include a toasting fork, I wondered as I saw that item poking out of Morrie's box. "Thank goodness it is a small house," he murmured to me in passing, one servant of Rose to another.

  It was late in the day, and the day was late in the season. The pewter cast of light that comes ahead of winter crept into the schoolground as I performed the last of my water errands, shadows growing dusky instead of sharp almost as I watched. From the feel of the air, night would bring our first hard frost. The schoolyard seemed phenomenally empty as I crossed it this time. I could distinctly hear my lone soft footsteps on ground that was stampeded across at each recess. Around at the front of the school where the pump stood next to the flagpole I slung the mop bucket into place under the spout, but for some reason did not step to the pump handle just yet.

  I suppose it was the point of life I was at, less than a man but starting to be something more than a boy, that set me aware of everything around, as though Marias Coulee School and its height of flagpole and depth of well were the axis of all that was in sight. I remember thinking Damon and Toby might come around the corner looking for me any minute, and if I wanted this for myself I had better use my eyes for all they were worth. So, there in the dwindling light of the afternoon I tried to take in that world between the manageable horizons. The cutaway bluffs where the Marias River lay low and hidden were the limit of field of vision in one direction. In the other was the edge of the smooth-buttered plain leading to Westwater and the irrigation project. Closer, though, was where I found the longest look into things. Out beyond the play area, there were round rims of shadow on the patch of prairie where the horses we rode to school had eaten the grass down in circles around their picket stakes. Perhaps that pattern drew my eye to what I had viewed every day of my school life but never until then truly registered: the trails in the grass that radiated in as many directions as there were homesteads with children, all converging to that schoolyard spot where I stood unnaturally alone.

  Forever and a day could go by, and that feeling will never leave me. Of knowing, in that instant, the central power of that country school in all our fives. It reached beyond those of us answering Morrie's hectic roll call that first day, although we were that clapboard classrooms primary constituents, its rural minnows much in need of schooling. Everyone I could think of had something at stake in the school. For Father, all the years he spent as a mainstay of the school board amounted to his third or fourth or fifth fine of work at once, depending on how strict the count. Along with him, the other men of Marias Coulee had built the snug teacherage with their own hands the summer before, and the graying schoolhouse itself back when the first homesteaders came. The mothers dispatched their hearts and souls out the door every morning as they sent waist-high children to saddle up and ride miles to school. Somehow this one-room school had drawn from somewhere Morris Morgan, walking encyclopedia. Now Rose had arrived on the teacherage scene and dust would never be the same in the vicinity of Marias Coulee School. We all answered, with some part of our fives, to the pull of this small knoll of prospect, this isolated square of schoolground.

  There at the waiting pump I could not sort such matters out totally,
but even then, I am convinced, began in me some understanding of how much was recorded on that prairie, in those trails leading to the school. How their pattern held together a neighborhood measured in square miles and chimneys as far apart as smoke signals. I would say, if I were asked now, that the mounted troupes of schoolchildren taking their bearing on that schoolhouse on its prairie high spot traveled as trusting and true in their aim as the first makers of roads sighted onto a distant cathedral spire. Yet that is the erasure, those tracks in the grass that have outlined every rural school district of this state for so long, that I am called on to make at the convocation tonight.

  "I was about to send a search party," Rose met me with as I lurched in with the heavy bucketful of water. After she put it to immediate use—she could mop a floor while most women were thinking about it—Father reappeared from whatever he had been doing at the wagon and stood inside the doorway surveying the scrubbed teacherage and its fresh occupant. Stowing silk socks in the rude pinewood dresser, Morrie looked more out of place than ever. Father swallowed, as a man will who has stuck his neck out quite far, then took care of the last of business for the day. "Morrie"—he warily included Rose in his inquisitive glance—"is there anything else within the less-than-infinite power of the school board that we can provide for you?" He checked his jottings. "So far, its curtains, fresh ticking for the mattress, draft excluder, and lamp wicks."

  Morrie's answer was swift. "Maid service would be appreciated."