The Whistling Season Read online

  When I spelled it all back to him at about the pace of a crack telegrapher, he walked a tight circle by his desk and then said, "One more, but this time in synphonic fashion: fish."

  Had I misheard? Surely Morrie couldn't want me to tootle out the composition of the little word as if I were a mock symphony orchestra? No, he always enunciated every curve of every letter when he wanted to drill home a point, and from the roomful of mystified expressions around me, I was not the only one trying to puzzle out synphonic. Was it like synthetic? In any case, I could not think fast enough to meet Morrie's catch spelling word with anything other than f-i-s-h, although I was greatly tempted to play to the crowd by adding on a y.

  "Technically correct, imaginatively off the mark," Morrie gave the not unexpected verdict. "Consider this." He stepped to the blackboard and wrote ghoti.

  Every eye in the room strained to take this in as Morrie declaimed: "Synphonic, meaning 'similar in sound.' You must watch out for words; they have tricks up their sleeves." As he spoke, the chalk in his hand flashed across the blackboard and yielded cough. "When you come down with a cold, this is what you have in your chest, isn't it. Not this." Beneath cough, he chalked cow. Laughter pealed from us all.

  "Ah, but," the stick of chalk came up like a finger of warning, "when you feed the fire to keep warm during your affliction, the tree branch you break up and put into the stove is this." Beneath cow, Morrie wrote bough.

  While that mischievous chime of rhyme was going off in heads around the room, Morrie further sobered the spelling-bee contestants and, for that matter, me. "Always be aware you are at the mercy of the whim of the word. It decides how it is pronounced and what it means. It chooses up its own letters, often in ways we wouldn't. And it can be a shameless mimic, by sneaking in one of those sound-alikes tucked away in the alphabet." He spun to the blackboard again as if those devilish letters were listening there. "Preposterous as this 'fish' looks"—from somewhere he produced his pointer and went en garde with ghoti as if to slay it—"it is made up of similarities perfectly well known to our tongues. Sound it out for yourselves," he whapped through the letters, "gh as in 'cough,' o as in 'women,' and ti as in 'motion.'"

  This seized me. Morrie had been addressing us all, from big-eyed first-graders to narrow-eyed eighth, yet it was one of those tingling moments when the entire might of learning seemed to have descended into the one-room school specifically for my benefit. True, I'd have been happier if it happened less obtrusively. I felt I had been taken down a peg, maybe several. I still did not know why. But my experience with Morrie thus far was that any mental extravaganza he went to the trouble of staging was worth some reflection.

  "Paul?" His tone of voice relented on me. "I entirely see why you are excused from the spelling bee. Carry on with your reading in peace." I did my best at that, but a spelling contest with Morrie in charge proved to be as adventurous as anything Kipling was coming up with.

  In no time, the schoolhouse was wild with claps and groans and hoots and Morrie's exhortations. "Lily Lee, put your tongue to mucilage, so to speak." "A worthy try, Milo, and if any of us were in charge of such matters xylophone indeed would have a z." He was a dervish of vocabulary; I wished Father were there to savor it. Beyond that, though, he elevated the spelling bee into an everybody-in tournament. For a while he paired second-and fifth-graders, and third and fourth, the younger ones valiantly reciting the letters aloud after frenzied conferences in whispers. (Toby mountaineering his way through r-h-i-n-o-c-e-r-o-s with the entire fifth grade breathless behind him was something to behold.) Then for one ferocious round he pitted the entire sixth grade against Carnelia and she haughtily spelled them down, one after another, until Morrie decided the time had come to take some of the shine off her. The next word he gave her the crazy one for that celebration where people serenade newlyweds and dress them up funny and wheel them around in wheelbarrows and so forth.

  "It is pronounced 'shivaree,' but be careful," Morrie warned scrupulously, "this one has a number of things up its sleeves." Did it ever! Carnelia missed it from the first letter. Damon went down on the same word—actually, the same letter—and sent me a pained look. Next, Rabrab flounced down in defeat. I sat there restless behind my propped book, wincing as everyone misspelled from the instant they opened their mouths. Isidor made a brave doomed try at the word. Now it was up to Grover Stinson, last hope of the sixth grade. Grover and I were best friends, or as close to that as the year of difference in our ages would let us be. Both of us read everything we could lay our hands on, Grover's eyeglasses unfortunate proof of that in his case, and we thought alike in a surprising number of ways. Naturally enough, then, when he gazed my way in concentration before tackling the fiendish word, I casually rubbed my eye, hoping he would connect that to see and from there to c. He blinked a couple of times, pursed up thoughtfully, and took the plunge: "c, h, a..." So it came to be that Grover was the conqueror of charivari.

  "Well done for grade six!" rang out the commendation from Morrie, already ransacking his master primer for a next word. If he had not been as busy as a paperhanger on a divided stairway, keeping track of the contest between grades and scampering for spelling challenges at the same time, he might have avoided the trouble just ahead. But without looking up he chanted out: "That advances grade six to take on grade eight, I believe. The lucky individual who is next up for grade eight, please. Your word is the triangle that has two equal sides. It is pronounced—"

  Eddie Turley, on the receiving end of isosceles, looked as if he had been tossed a hot coal.

  I closed up Kipling in favor of this. During his ten-year journey through eight grades, Eddie had managed to provide the Marias Coulee classroom some never-to-be-forgotten moments. Once when Miss Trent sent him to the blackboard to work on a subtraction problem, he had stomped from the board complaining, "I can add some, but that takin' from is a bugger." According to the squinched-up expression on him now, so was isosceles.

  "How's it pernounced again?" Eddie waffled as seven grades of Marias Coulee school collectively rooted for the word to leave a major bruise on him.

  "I-sos-celes," Morrie delicately sounded out.

  "E-y-e," Eddie agonized out loud, and got no farther before hoots went up and Morrie waved him out of the round.

  But for Eddie to traipse out of contention to the far end of the room, he had to pass right by the triumphant sixth grade. First in line there was Grover, a sweet-as-pie smile still pasted on him from charivari. Eddie squinted in annoyance at this display of high spirits. "What're you grinnin' at, four-eyes?"

  Grover had a touch in these matters. "Nothing," he answered Eddie, but enunciated it in slow, spoon-fed syllables the way Morrie had portioned out isosceles.

  Eddie's face flamed. Big as a house, he whacked the smaller Grover backhand across the chest, sending him bouncing against the teacher's desk.

  Reaction raced through the spelling-bee ranks like a line of firecrackers going off. The boys of grade six boiled to Grover's defense, Damon climbing over a desk in an effort to get at Eddie, Isidor determinedly balling up his fists and trying to wade toward his target, the others in a general surge that clogged the aisle. Rabrab contributed a scream.

  Sensing riot, Morrie leapt in. "Everyone! Take your seats!" he shouted. It might have ended there if Eddie, fired up to take on the legion of the sixth grade, hadn't assumed the person charging up behind him was Grover on a mission of revenge. He wheeled around, delivering a roundhouse punch as he came.

  By luck or instinct, Morrie bobbed low and took the blow on his hairline. "Ow!" cried Eddie as his fist met skull. All motion in the schoolroom stopped.

  Morrie straightened up slowly. Hitting a teacher was a capital offense, we all knew. A teacher hitting back was entirely another matter. White-eyed, Eddie stood there shaking his hurting hand, awaiting his fate. A red place the size of a set of knuckles showed at the edge of Morrie's mussed hair. His tie flapped down his front and his collar was off-kilter. For long seconds the
compact man and the taller schoolboy faced one another, the school teetering on the frozen scene. Then Morrie adjusted his collar and tie and said almost normally, "Eddie, I will deal with you at the end of the day. Everyone else, be seated and prepare for geography period."

  "And then he kept Eddie after!"

  Father was grave as he listened to Toby tell about the day at school. Damon and I stood by, content to be material witnesses. Toby's recitals always carried more oomph than ours. "Eddie doesn't ever get kept after!"

  Rose hovered at the kitchen doorway long enough to catch the gist of the story, rolled her eyes at what Morrie had gotten himself into, balled up her apron, and left for the day.

  I must have imagined it, but another worry line seemed to come into Father's wrinkle-mapped cheek as he sat at the table concentrating on following Toby's titanic tale. Freighting for the irrigation project had not yet let up—winter was holding off, to everyone's surprise—and balancing that and the workload of the homestead was enough to occupy any man twice over. Now he was something like president of the board of the Marias Coulee school for the unruly, on top of it all.

  "Morrie didn't lay a hand on him?" he checked with those of us who had not been heard from yet. "Then or later?"

  "Naw, darn it," Damon responded with the authority of one who had been more than willing to do the job himself.

  "When we left, you couldn't tell Eddie from a setting hen," I amplified. "He had to stay there at his desk doing nothing for an hour. Morrie was at the front of the room at his. Reading Shakespeare, I think."

  "All week!" Toby imparted.

  Father looked relieved at the news that Eddie was unscathed, which I did not appreciate as someone who within recent memory had been spanked. But Damon wiped that off him in a hurry by saying, "I wish Morrie would just lock him in all night and then kick him on out of there. He's cluttering up everything for us tomorrow afternoon."

  "How so?" One of those looks, the kind a father gives when he is about to hear something he would rather not, reached around the table to include ah of us. "What's any of this have to do with any of you?"

  "We're staying after," Damon said patiently, making the crucial distinction from being kept after school. "To get the arrowhead collection ready. Morrie asked us to, the day at the buffalo jump. You said we could, remember?"

  "That was before hostilities broke out."

  Damon nearly fell out of his chair in despair. "It's not our fault Eddie blew his stack! He can be there; we won't even look in his direction."

  Rubbing his cheek as if consulting the wrinkles, Father weighed that argument. It tipped so suddenly in Damon's favor the three of us were caught with our mouths open. "Very well, stay after. I'll pull by on my way home from the Big Ditch. I wouldn't want to miss a chance to see arrowheads, would I."

  10

  THE REMBRANDT LIGHT OF MEMORY, FINICKY AND MAGICAL and faithful at the same time, as the cheaper tint of nostalgia never is. Much of the work of my life has been to sort instruction from illusion, and, in the endless picture gallery behind the eye, I have learned to rely on a certain radiance of a detail to bring back the exactitude of a moment. Perhaps it might be the changeling green of a mallard's head in a slant of sun, as back there on Father's pothole Lake District. Or the gun gray of my thermos jug when I pulled over to the shoulder of the road in The Cut to sip at coffee while reliving a race: the shadow tone of a wolfer's horse.

  The after-school hour when arrowheads were to take on a collected gleam was lit by honest lanternshine. During schooltime the custom was to light the hanging lamps only on the darkest of winter days. But dusk set in so early that overcast afternoon, Morrie declared we must banish the gloom. The room of brown old desks was uncommonly cozy, then, as the arrowhead committee went about its work. We had delegated to Toby the task of scrubbing the treasures in a washbasin of warm water, accepting some splashes on the floor in exchange for his enthusiasm. Damon hummed magisterially as he wiped and buffed and breathed a sheen onto the pointed stones one after another. My pen hand had to be at its most proficient in lettering the label for each one. All the while, Eddie Turley squinted sourly toward us from the back of the room like a prisoner trying to see out of a dungeon.

  "Ah, here now, just what's needed." Morrie came back in from the supply cabinet, where he had rummaged out a dusty entomological display case in which the specimens were past their prime. "The beetles have had their day. Damon, when you're done there, you can be in charge of exhuming. Oh, and Toby, there are pliers and a spool of copper wire somewhere in the kitchen drawers at the teacherage, if you could scare them up, please."

  To a casual visitor, the scene would have looked suitable for engraving on good-behavior certificates. Lads nicely busy on their civic project in the twilight, while in the back corner a miscreant sits out his sentence for, oh, probably spitwads. And Morrie in tweed and mustache, presiding as though an after-school gathering of this sort was nothing out of the ordinary. But I was aware he was keeping a sentry eye on Eddie, just as I was keeping mine on Damon. For if you had happened to look in on Marias Coulee School at recent intervals when it served as a boxing ring, all of us there in the ring corners of that schoolroom—with the cherubic exception of Toby—were either active combatants or potential ones. I had got my famous one punch in on Eddie. Eddie had blindly clouted Morrie. Keen as he was to do so, Damon had not yet managed to sock Eddie, nor had Eddie found the right opportunity to wade into him. If we weren't all careful, the round robin of fists could go on and on.

  The arrowheads arrayed there fresh and shiny kept us at peace, however, at least those of us at the front of the room. Damon seemed to have found his life's work in evicting dead beetles into the coal bucket, gabbing all the while to Morrie about football epics he had been pasting into his scrapbooks as the autumn's newspapers caught up with us. For once, Morrie had nothing to do but look wise and say little. With time to myself after finishing the final arrowhead label—for the darker-than-night obsidian one—I fooled with a scrap of penmanship.

  Morrie cocked a puzzled look at the writing on my tablet when I went to his desk and handed it to him. "As Shakespeare said, this is Greek to me. How is it supposed to read, Paul?"

  "'Fish,'" I said as if the five letters on the paper were the most recognizable thing in the world.

  Morrie more closely studied my coinage of phych.

  "Ph as in phlegm," I came to his aid, "y as in hysterical, and ch as in charivari."

  "Well spelled, as always," he said drily, pocketing the piece of paper. "You are not quite finished with your labels, however. One last one for the front of the case. Make it read: Arrowhead collection donated to the Marias Coulee School, 1909, by the Milliron family.'"

  Eddie chose just then to snort, visit his nose with a finger, and flick a booger contemptuously onto the floor. Fortunately, Damon was occupied with arranging everything to perfection in the display case and so did not go climbing over desks in hunt of Eddie a second day in a row. And here Toby came charging victoriously in with the wire and pliers to affix the arrowheads in the display case. We would be done in no time now, and as soon as Father ever showed up to admire our handiwork, we could head home and Eddie could sit and stew until he was blue far as we were concerned. What waited for him at home was a matter for my Delphic cave of dreams, later.

  Morrie, I noticed, had his big pocket watch out where he could see it on his desk to keep exact time on Eddie's incarceration. Minutes pass more slowly when looked at, so it was some little while before the outside door could be heard opening, the awaited tread at last in the cloakroom, and just in time I dotted the final i of the Milliron family label and blew on it to dry the ink. "Here, Tobe, you can show Father. Hold it in both hands so you don't wrinkle it."

  Looking down at the masterpiece in his hands, Toby hurried toward the doorway. "Father, look what—" he began, as far as he got before seeing the big boots.

  Over Toby's head, Damon and I gaped at Brose Turley as if he were a
creature that had fallen down from the moon.

  According to the scowl that met our gaze, he had not expected the sight of us either. Under the crinkled hat brim his dark mean eyes shifted from us to Morrie, and then found Eddie at the rear of the room.

  "Good afternoon, Mr. Turley." As casual as those words, Morrie moved to stand between the interloper and us. He rumpled Toby's hair, and while his hand was there turned him around like a top and sent him back in our direction. "To what do we owe the pleasure of this visit?"

  Brose Turley did not bother to answer. He strode down the aisle toward Eddie, his wolfskin coat brushing the desktops. Eddie seemed to shrink the closer his father came.

  I heard Damon and Toby catch their breath, and they must have heard me do the same. But Morrie only called out in the same civil way, "Eddie has fifteen more minutes before I can let him go." Turley halted, shaking his head in disgust. He was directly beneath one of the hanging lamps and I could distinctly see the crisscrossed weather-beaten skin of the back of his neck, as though he slept on a pillow of chicken wire. He was a big man all the way up from those tromper boots. No wonder wolves or any other living thing I could think of did not stand a chance against him. I was scared to the roots of myself, and even Damon had lost the color in his face. Toby pressed more tightly against the arm I had looped around him and whispered, "Where's Father?"

  "He'll be here," I barely found enough resource in myself to whisper back, hoping against hope that he was not out there slaughtered in the dusk, from having tried to head off this death dealer in a wolfskin coat.

  Brose Turley turned around the way a statue would, every bulky bit of him in one revolving motion. Ignoring us, he zeroed in on Morrie. "I don't want you keeping my boy after. If he's done something that don't suit, belt him one right then and be done with it."

  "Belting people is what has led to all this." Morrie brushed his fingertips across the bruise at his hairline. "Eddie must learn to keep his fists to himself. This is the best kind of penalty to remind him, I think."