The Whistling Season Read online

  "More than anything."

  Now came the part that worried me most. Father was all too aware, and I sensed it along with him, that this carried the same sort of financial risk as dealing with postal box 19 in Minneapolis had. "Morrie, straight out, all right? I can't pay you much." He cast a whimsical glance toward Rose, who right then was refusing to meet the eye of anyone but Morrie. "I'm already laying out wages to a housekeeper, aren't I. I don't know what the going rate for a tutor is, but—"

  Morrie erased that in midair. "This is on the house, Oliver. I could stand to sharpen up some, myself, on ablatives and such. If you can spare Paul for an hour after school every day, I'll give him a running start in life beyond Marias Coulee. Fair enough?"

  "That's where he's headed, I know," Father said softly. "Fair enough."

  Shortly the gathering broke up, Morrie declining to stay for supper with the excuse that he had a sage hen awaiting in marinade and Rose saying she would have a bite as usual with George and Rae. I remember I went through our meal and the rest of that evening in a state of unnatural excitement, as if everything inside me was on tiptoes. At bedtime Father surprised us, Toby most of all, by saying: "Tobe, you don't look that sleepy, nor am I. How about a game of Chinese checkers? Houdini can be on your side."

  Damon and I climbed the stairs in tandem, Father watching us all the way. As soon as we were in the bedroom, we halted and stood there face-to-face. Damon attempted a grin. "You want to go to school after school? How loony can you get?"

  "I need to, is all." I made a floundering gesture in the direction of where his scrapbooks were forever spread open. "This is something like those. Only in my head." Still looking at me, Damon shrugged, which could have been yes or no. "You're gonna have to be in charge of Tobe, coming home," I blathered. "When it's really stormy I won't stay after, I'll come with—"

  "Tobe and me can get by. Paul, it's all right."

  It was and it wasn't. We both knew that. When we turned in, Damon rolled to his side of the bed, and I lay there waiting to see where dreams were going to take me now.

  14

  DAYS FLEW OFF THE SCHOOL CALENDAR FROM THEN ON. IF I could bodily pick up the appropriations chairman and deposit him somewhere enlightening, it would be at our schoolhouse those culminating weeks of 1909. The sun rose and set in the tireless figure at the front of the classroom.

  —"The polka dot bowtie on Jimsy stuck out, as ex—extra—"

  "Sound it out when you don't know it, Sally, remember? One syllable at a time, now try it."

  "Ex-truh-vay-gant."

  "Very good, merely a little work needed on each a. Say it after me: extravagant. It means 'to go beyond the limits of something.' That is why extra is in there, and vagant you can remember by its resemblance to vagrant, a person who wanders around. Does everyone have that fixed in mind? Proceed, Sally."

  "—extravagant as spats on a rooster. Mr. Morgan, what's 'spats'?"

  "Vests for your shoes. Your turn to read, Anton, please."

  Even the vendettas of recess were taken in hand.

  "—dumb honyock, your folks don't even speak American, they talk that broken stuff!"

  "Is that so? Put 'em up, squarehead!"

  "Ah, comparing knuckles, are you, Martin and Milo? If I didn't know better, I would have I thought I heard harsh words while I was sitting inside grading papers. People could get the wrong impression. I'll tell you how we are going to avoid that in the future. See this coin? If the flip comes up heads, Martin and Carl and Peter and Sven hereafter take recess when the rest of us come in. If it's tails, Nick and Sam and Ivo and Milo take recess then."

  And in my case, Morris Morgan dipped me into Latin like a wick into ready candle wax.

  I'm convinced Morrie was secretly as relieved as I was that no one else's parents—not even Grover's, and blessedly not Carnelia's—chose to enlist their offspring in our after-school sessions when he offered. Just the two of us every afternoon after Damon and Toby loyally waved as they rode off home together, we went to that other language as if indeed building a bridge across the Rubicon. Morrie had been right. Latin gave my mind a place to go, and to make itself at home for a good, long while. The danger to this, I realize, was that it fed my pedantic streak. But how much better a pedant Morrie made me, I like to think. "Look to the root, you must always look to the root," I heard him say whenever I was stumped by some fresh swatch of vocabulary or labyrinthine conjugation, and it caused me to see into two languages at once. Fabula, story; I gaped at the birth of fabulous and fable. Similarly school from schola, recess from recedere—suddenly everything I read was wearing a toga.

  Father pitched in heroically. Evenings now, when his finger ran down the listings in the big dictionary, he would pause at captivating Latinate derivations and share those with me. But whatever moved me to do so, I waited until I was alone one night to look up the words paired in my curiosity as indelibly as, well, Rose and Morrie. For some reason I had expected fate to be Greek in origin. However, there it was, derived straight as a spear from fatum. And destiny, too, was as Roman as could be: destinare, to make firm.

  I don't mean to award Morrie perfect marks for those weeks, only top ones. He had discovered a central virtue of the one-room school, the porosity between grades so that a lesson given in a good, clear voice to one level of students would find its way into others as well. Toby and Inez, I noticed, were all ears now whenever the grade ahead of them did its spelling. But there will always be some who are impervious. The eighth grade, for example. Morrie made real headway on Verl and maybe even a smidgin on Martin, but Milo and Carl had very little more capacity to put to use; and Eddie Turley simply stared toward the blackboard as if it were just another wall. To a remarkable degree, though, Morrie had everyone else in that schoolroom functioning, and it showed in morale.

  "Mr. Morgan?" True to his name, Miles Calhoun was trying to put his hand a mile in the air to gain Morrie's attention. "It's December already."

  "December already, yes, I have noticed that. It comes with ventilation, doesn't it, in Montana. But what brings up this matter of the calendar so urgently?"

  "The Christmas play!"

  "The Christmas play. Are we speaking of the Nativity? I see by the forest of nodding heads we are. Very well, someone please tell me how this has taken place in other years. Wait, wait, one at a time. Why do I not encounter so many hands up when the topic is arithmetic?"

  Carnelia and I cowered, our memory still raw with our fifth-grade experience of having been cast as Mary and Joseph. For once we needn't have worried. Morrie appointed a play committee that proved to have acute directorial instincts. Rabrab, under the stage name of Barbara, starred as a very fetching mother of the doll-baby Jesus. Grover made a distinguished Joseph with his eyeglasses above his dark-dyed cotton beard. We three brothers were in the safe anonymity of shepherds, albeit in fashionable robes Rose whipped up for us. All the parents came, with the unmissable exception of Brose Turley. It gave me hope that he would stay boot-deep in the distant snows on through until spring.

  On the final Friday, Morrie dismissed school on the cheery note that he would see us next year, and with Father at home for a change while the Big Ditch construction was shut down and Rose and Morrie off to the bright lights of Great Falls on a short holiday of their own, we came to that Christmas.

  ***

  "HER AND HER OLD TAFFY. BE LUCKY IF WE DON'T BREAK our teeth on it." Scooping up a mittenful of dry snow, Damon tried to pack it into a snowball to hurl at a deserving fence post and gave up in disgust.

  "Remember what Father said," I warned. "Said" did not quite describe it. He had threatened Damon and me separately—although gently, because after all it was Christmas morn—over the niceties of taking our obligatory gift to Aunt Eunice and thanking her for the jar of barely chewable taffy she handed each of us every year. Sparta and Corinth cannot have exchanged tribute any more grudgingly, but Father was resolutely sunny about our prospects of truce with Aunt Eunice for this
one day. "She'll be in the spirit of the season, you'll see," he assured us as he turned us out of the house on our gift mission. "I saw her in her yard just the other day and she gave me her annual smile."

  "I like taffy." Toby, always our ace in the hole with Aunt Eunice, was carefully maintaining his arctic route of march between the pair of us as if under escort. "Don't you, Paul?"

  "It'll strengthen our jaw muscles, Tobe. We'll be like those circus strongmen who lift anvils with their teeth and we'll owe it all to Aunt Eunice."

  Damon continued to kick along in the disappointing snow on the road, as if somewhere under the thin skift there ought to exist a chance at an honest snowball. "I still don't see why we couldn't do this when we're at George and Raes for dinner."

  That part had been in Father's briefing to me. "Because this way it makes an occasion for her," I recited practically word for word. "She's an old lady and doesn't have that many occasions in her life."

  "Huh!" Damon unhappily turtled his head down into his scarf and turned-up coat collar to try to escape the pestering wind. It always amazed us that the Marias Coulee wind managed to be in our faces no matter what direction we were going. "Have to put on a ton of clothes to go sit in her kitchen for ten minutes."

  "Fifteen, Damon, damn it, didn't you hear Father? Come on, let's cut across."

  The plowed field between the road and Aunt Eunice's place clipped considerable distance off our journey, but now we had furrows underfoot and snow that was even more fraudulent than the stuff on the road. What scrunched under our overshoes as we trudged through the stubble of the grainfield was the nasty mix of moistureless snow and windblown dirt that we called "snirt." Except for plenty of wind, ever since that first generous storm the winter had produced no real weather to speak of, only stingy snow squalls. This day was typical, Marias Coulee stretching around us like a colorless bay beneath a dishwater sky. Even so, this was a brighter Christmas than the year before, which had been our first one without Mother.

  The snirty field was heavy going, and Damon was on the mark about one thing, the clothing Father had made us pile onto ourselves: wool pants over our everyday ones, and warmest coats and mittens, and wool sock-lined overshoes, and scarves, and caps with the earflaps firmly down. We were armored against the elements, no question. Surviving the social call on Aunt Eunice was going to be another matter. As we waddled across the field, I rehearsed to myself the version of "Merry Christmas, Aunt Eunice" I had worked up for her. "Laetam natalem Christi, Amita Eunicia!" She couldn't possibly pick a bone with Latin, could she? Beyond that, a quarter of an hour of conversation with her could well be as up and down as the footing there in the furrows. Aunt Eunice, in your elocution class, did you ever recite Shakespeare? Do you know he made up the word 'bare-faced' just because there wasn't one for that?" No, better not; something that rarefied had Morrie written all over it. Our only safe exponent on anything to do with school was Toby, who still had perfect attendance.

  A thin string of smoke that somehow looked querulous was whipping out of the kitchen chimney as we approached Aunt Eunice's place. In case she had her eye on us behind the curtains, Damon and I deployed Toby in the lead as we trooped out of the field into the farmyard. He was bearing our gift for her, a tin of toffee. Father had his own sense of humor where Aunt Eunice was concerned.

  As we were passing the long batch of neatly stacked firewood, Damon grinned slyly in my direction. "Don't forget the part about the woodpile."

  "Toby gives her the gift, I offer to bring in wood for her. That leaves you to thank her for the taffy, doesn't it, smart guy."

  Outside the door of the house, one last thing needed tending to. "Wipe your noses, everybody." I set the example with the back of my mitten. Stamping snirt off our feet, we went on into the mud room, as people customarily did, to kick off our overshoes and then knock on the inner door. Toby, in the lead, was the first to see that the inner door was standing open.

  He stopped short at the sight of the wide-open door, Damon bumping into him from behind, and I nearly fell over them both. The three of us stood bunched there, gawking at the vacant doorway. In weather such as this, no one would let the cold draft of the mud room into the house intentionally.

  "Aunt Eunice? We're here!" Toby uncertainly started toward the doorway and I grabbed him back.

  "Merry Christmas?" Damon ventured. "Can we come in?"

  No answer arrived except an odd little blurty sound. It took me a moment to recognize it as the sputter of a teakettle nearly boiled dry.

  "Take Toby and go get George," I told Damon. "Quick, run. I'll stay here."

  The outer door banged behind them as they fled off, and I approached the opposite doorway with slow, unsteady steps. Ridiculously, I was carrying in one hand the tin of toffee, although I had no memory of taking it from Toby. Stepping up into the kitchen, I was bracing myself to search the house when I saw I did not need to look past the kitchen table.

  Aunt Eunice was collapsed forward in her chair, her thin, bare arms outstretched across the table. She was wearing only a yellowed old underdress—was it called a chemise, I wondered stupidly? Her head was turned in my direction and her lifeless eyes were open wide, as though to announce See? to whoever stepped through the doorway and found her, unspared at last. I gulped so hard I choked on it. It was my first time in the immediate presence of death, Mother having died in the hospital in Great Falls.

  I dealt with the dangerously dry teakettle by hooking it off the stove with the poker from the wood box, then went and closed the door to the mud room. Over on the washstand was the basin of water she had poured, washcloth and towel, both damp. She had been taking a spitbath to prepare for her callers. A freshly ironed dark dress with a bit of lace at the collar was laid out at the end of the table. Her white hair disarranged by her sprawl onto the table, she still fiercely clutched the handle of a rat-tail comb in her withered hand. No one could accuse Aunt Eunice of having timidly slept her way out of this world.

  15

  DEAD BUT STILL FORMIDABLE, AUNT EUNICE UNBUDGEABLY hung over the tag end of the calendar of that year and the incipient leaf of the next.

  Her burial, there in the week between Christmas and New Year's, dashed everyone's holiday intentions. In a frost-rimmed grave not far from Mother's, Eunice Mae Schricker was laid to rest, although you couldn't have proved it by me or those around me. Uncomfortable in his funeral clothes, Father wore the expression of a person on a forced march in tight shoes. Damon had gone blank, staring fixedly down to where the toe of his overshoe dug holes in the snirt at the graveside. Toby huddled amid us, eyes and nose a running spring of tears and sniffles. And we were not even the immediate family: over on the other side of the open grave, George looked positively wrung out. Rae appeared to be holding up just fine.

  On either side of them stood Morrie, solemn as a visiting statesman, and Rose in black satin under her cloak. I noticed she was shivering, and the weather, unnaturally mild, did not account for it. I came down with my own case of the trembles when the pallbearers approached. The handles of the casket as the six dark-suited men walked it to the grave were brass ones, exactly as they had been in my dream, where Father and Joe Fletcher struggled with a casket while we boys could not get down out of the boxcar and Aunt Eunice sat in her rocker and gloated. She seemed to have the last say even there in the Marias Coulee cemetery.

  The first Monday of 1910, I slouched at the kitchen table, still putting myself to rights after a dream involving three jars of taffy chunks that no one, not even the blacksmith Alf Morrissey, could manage to pry the lids off of.

  I must have looked better than I felt, because Rose did not even remark on my condition when she sailed in for the day. Alas, she was not carrying a dishtowel-wrapped baking pan or pie plate as usual. One consolation Aunt Eunice surely had not intended was that all that week we ate better than we had in ages, off the casseroles and loaves and pies Rae was flooded with from neighbors and in turn sent over with Rose each morning.
r />   "Rae said to tell you sorry, but the condolence food has played out." Somehow Rose's whisper sounded heartier this year and her cheeks practically blazed with color. Clearly she had recuperated from Aunt Eunice's spooky burial more completely than I had. Now she drew her gloves off, undid her scarf, shrugged out of her cloak, and marched close enough to review me, pretty much all at once. "So, Mr. Half of the Seventh Grade." Rose had a way of arching her eyebrow that invited a person into a portal where revelations were possible. "Ready to go back to school?"

  "Sure. I guess." Actually, what I couldn't wait to get back to was after-school Latin.

  "Have you made resolutions, I hope?" she whispered expectantly. "We always did." Her face took on the cast of sudden reflection I had come to know, as if she had bumped up against a mirror of the past. "One new year I resolved not to be jealous, ever again. That lasted until the girl across the street was given a Shetland pony." She startled me with a melody of laugh that got away from itself into a snort. "I still think that was an awfully unfair test of my poor little resolution."

  Livened up by this, I whispered in turn, "What kind did Morrie make?"

  "Oh, I don't remember. Probably to memorize the almanac, wouldn't you think?"

  That set us both to snorting with laughter, which was how Father found us when he peered in the doorway.

  "Happy New Year, Rose, as it apparently is. And for that matter, good morning." This was not like him to be up so early, but for some reason it did not surprise me. I suppose I just assumed the hinge of the year was pivoting any reasonable soul in some new direction, even a natural sleeper like Father. January needed some justification for its existence, didn't it? Now that the holidays were over, the Big Ditch would be gearing up furiously for the last lap of canal digging, and Father and the workhorses and the dray would have all the hauling they wanted while that went on. Yet I could almost tell by the look in my father's eye that he left bed that morning ready to tie into chores here on the homestead as well. Harness to be mended, field equipment to be fixed, the consequences of gravity on the granary roof to be dealt with—the fist was as long as the will of his arm. For when a farmer comes around the corner into a fresh year, what he sniffs is spring, and plowing and planting. He might not have confessed to resolutions, but there was no lack of tasks ahead for Oliver Milliron to face with resolve. Mussing my hair companionably as he passed, he stepped around my chair to start fife afresh with a boost from coffee.