The Whistling Season Page 18

  "Oliver? I want to try an idea on you."

  Father stopped short and turned around to Rose. "Silly me. I thought I might actually get through a morning without one of those being tried on me."

  "May I?" She gestured to a chair at the table; Toby's, as it happened. This was new. Up until now, not even the most urgent housekeeping crisis had necessitated a sit-down conference.

  "Have a seat." Father sank slowly to his own spot at the table, peeking aside at me to see whether I was in on this. I widened my eyes in disclaimer; the feverish look on Rose was as much news to me as it was to him. He faced across to where she sat as if hoping that whatever this was, it wasn't catching. "You seem a bit wound up. Is something wrong, Rose?"

  "I would like to buy Eunice's homestead."

  Father and I listened slack-jawed while everything raced out of her from there. Opportunity took the lead—"Who would ever have thought such a chance would come up?"—and was overrun by optimism—"Really, to think of land and a place of my own after everything was lost!"—and the final relay was achieved by that pair of old reliables, fate and destiny: "Oliver and Paul, I absolutely feel I am meant for this! Your letter in answer to my advertisement, the way Morrie and I have fit into life here, poor Eunice passing away—" Rose halted for the length of a breath, then resumed at a pace that was sweetly reasonable: "I feel quite on top of things and able to take this step now that I have the house in trim. There, now. What do you say?"

  "I'm floored."

  With that, Father bought time for strategy, although not much. He glanced in my direction again, but I still was speechless. Rose as a permanent neighbor, in place of Aunt Eunice? Too good to be true. But where did that leave housekeeping? For that matter, where did it leave bookkeeping?

  Father was tackling that now: "Have you tried this out on George? Why do I even ask, of course you have. Let me rephrase the question: what's the tab?"

  "George and Rae will be content with a wee bit of down payment," she replied eagerly, "and, oh, monthly dabs after that."

  Numbers may have been conspicuously absent, but we knew they added up to another hefty draw ahead on housekeeping wages, unless there was some wild miracle waiting out there. Father did his best to summon one:

  "Rose, surely you must know Eunice got by on that place on main strength and orneriness, as the saying goes. It almost always takes two people to keep up with a homestead." He swept an arm around so comprehensively I had to duck a little, as he indicated a household near at hand that had needed to call in a housekeeper. "I imagine," he managed to imagine this with great heartiness, "Morrie is going in on this proposition with you?"

  "No."

  "No?"

  "No."

  Now Father set his jaw. As calmly as a frustrated man could, he pointed out to a listening Rose that her span of employment with us had not yet remotely caught up with the wages already advanced to her. Rose absorbed this and offered the thought that weren't we all lucky to have hit upon such an arrangement? If that were merely to be repeated, it would furnish her the same welcome sufficiency which to the best of her memory had amounted to four months' wages—

  "Three," Father and I said together.

  —and in turn she would gladly extend her guarantee of peerless care for our home for yet another year. There, now. Surely that was logical?

  I felt like a deaf spectator at a Brother Jubal sermon. Meanwhile, Father sensed he was getting onto ground, in more ways than one, where he did not want to be. "A homestead is a farm," he said testily. "Say you do buy Eunice's place. You're going to farm it how?"

  "I was hoping you could see your way clear to farm it for me. On, what's it called, on shares'?"

  "Whoa right there. Why not let George have the honor of this?"

  "His lumbago is getting worse. Rae tells me they will have all they can do to handle their own place."

  "That sounds familiar—I have all I can do to handle this one. Sorry, but no farming on shares." Father shook his head so emphatically that Rose was taken aback.

  "Oliver, why ever not? You did it for the previous occupant."

  "And just between us, I would happily never set foot in that field again." Father slapped the palm of his hand down onto his end of the table as if that was that.

  At her end—well, I have been in on my share of cutthroat negotiations in politics, government, and the Gomorrahs between, but I have never seen anyone lean in on a bargaining table more adroitly than Rose did now. Even though I was not at all sure this would turn out with any benefit to the Milliron side of things, I felt a tickle of admiration as she planted the tidy bend of her gingham-sleeved arms exactly onto the smudged spots made by Toby's elbows and clasped her hands as if she held something secret in them. She addressed Father with just a wisp of mischief coming through: "I would not want to call poor dear old Eunice stingy. But whatever 'shares' are, surely you could receive a more generous, well, share of them than what she provided?"

  That brought thoughtful furrows to Father's brow. It would have to any farmer's. I can't really say he right then felt the tug of plow reins, with dollars per bushel at the other end, but that's close.

  Eventually he brushed away something imaginary on the oilcloth in front of him and said, "I'll take the matter under advisement," and I could tell he was a hooked fish. So, by the time Toby and Damon came lurching downstairs to a breakfast even more tardy and hurried than usual, the cross-stitch pattern of the year ahead was as clear as it could get: Rose would work for us in the house and Father would work for her in the field; wages would fly in one direction and "shares" would crawl in from the other. No wonder she was whistling one tune after another as she dusted the parlor, while he clanked dishes and utensils as if his mind were anywhere but in the kitchen.

  As we saddled up for the ride to school, Damon asked, "What's up?"

  "Gobs. Tell you on the way."

  Talk about New Year's resolutions; when Rose and Morrie came to a calendar change, they did not fool around. As everyone swarmed back into the schoolhouse that morning, trading stories about what Christmas had brought to them, a brand-new face met us. It was Morries, the Marias Coulee student body recognized after a first flabbergasted look. But without mustache.

  The school had all it could do to take this astonishing facial vista in. Shaved, depilated, denuded, unveiled, bare-faced: no one phrase can capture the transformation in Morrie's appearance now that the magic curtain of whiskers was gone. Until that moment I had no idea of the range of disguise that comes with being human. Years came off him along with the mustache. Yet he somehow looked more clever in the ways of the human race, contradictory as that may sound: a blade in a woolly world, and the gleaming upper lip announcing so. When movies became more common, the roguish alabaster countenance of Rudolph Valentino always reminded me of Morris Morgan out from under the mustache.

  One thing had not changed. He could still talk the air full. The year 1910 was ushered in by Morrie in the looping fashion of his inaugural day as teacher, except that those of us in our rows of desks were receiving wholesale introductions rather than providing them.

  He told us one rigor of winter was going to be eased: on the wall by the stove now hung two horse collars, one for the boys and one for the girls, for portable warm seating on outhouse outings these freezing days. This innovation seemed particularly pleasing to the girls.

  He told us spelling bees were going to be resumed but fisticuffs during them were a thing of the past.

  He told us we were about to become scientific.

  In illustration, Morrie produced magician-like from under his desk a tubelike instrument and held it high. "Young scholars, do any of you happen to know what this is?"

  There was a stirring beside me. Carnelia, empress at heart but daughter of an agricultural extension agent until duly crowned, thought she had a pretty good idea of what the thing was. She leaned infinitesimally toward me the way we did when the prestige of the seventh grade overrode our permanent feud. Wit
h all the practice we'd had, we could say barely hearable things to each other without moving our lips. In ventriloquist fashion Carnelia tried out on me: "Pst, pest. It looks like a rain catcher."

  "You might be right for once, priss puss," I whispered through my teeth. "It's your turn, put up your hand."

  Carried away with himself, Morrie was not waiting for hands. He brandished the item even higher and announced heraldically, "It is a pluviometer."

  Everyone looked as mystified as before.

  "A precipitation gauge," Morrie enlightened us, still fondling the thing. "From the Latin pluvia, meaning 'rain.'" He brushed a glance over me, which made me squirm that my vocabulary had not reached that far, while Carnelia wriggled in satisfaction. "A simple but effective scientific instrument which will capture nature's every minute," Morrie was soaring onward, "and allow us to read its moist offerings. Along with the roof wind vane and these"—here he rummaged out of one drawer of his desk a gleaming new foot-long thermometer and out of another a beautiful gilt-bound ledger—"we are meteorologically equipped to set up the Marias Coulee weather station. Need I say, we shall have a new position of responsibility that you shall all take your turn at. Inspector-general of the weather."

  Alternately mesmerized by what he was saying and how he looked, all eight grades of us would have followed Morris Morgan anywhere that morning, even into arithmetic. Next, though, he stepped over to a window and gazed up at the sky.

  "This is a special year," he said quietly, the way an orator will when he wants you to listen especially hard. "One that comes rarely. The heavens are going to speak." Morrie rubbed the palms of his hands together. "In a tongue of fire."

  He was smiling reassuringly, though, when he turned around to us. "Halley's comet. So named for the eagle-eyed astronomer who discovered it. A celestial wonder that moves across the sky in a long-tailed streak. It returns only every seventy-five years. That means it was last here before there were such things as homesteads or flying machines or photographs. Think of that." From the upturned faces of Josef and Toby and Inez and Sigrid low in the front rows, on past the glinting lenses of Grover and the motionless braids of Vivian and Rabrab, to the wall of stares that was the eighth grade, the school did.

  Morrie held the pause one last perfect moment, then gestured to the windowful of sky. "It will be here with the coming of spring, and," he sent out a thoughtful look that moved among our young faces, "long from now, some of you may be lucky enough to see Halley's comet again." I did the alarming arithmetic in my head: when we were about as ancient as Aunt Eunice had been.

  "So, our second scientific endeavor of 1910 shall be astronomy," he elaborated. "Closer to the time of the comet I will have quite a lot more to say on that." He gave a little smile at himself that would never have made it through the mustache. "You may depend on it." With that, he went off into an explanation of the Julian calendar and why its last several months were all off $$$ two from the Latin numbers they were named after, and that $$$ right into arithmetic.

  What a matchless morning of school that was. And what an ordeal that afternoon turned into.

  The first hint came when, out of nowhere, Morrie nailed Damon for gawking off into space while he should have had his nose into geography. "I will see you after school, young man," he levied, just like that. There was a malicious grin or two from the direction of the eighth grade, but Carnelia and I and Damon's sixth-grade classmates were dumbfounded. Academically, Damon frequently lived in midair; why pick him off, today of all days?

  Damon's face fell a mile at this hair-trigger sentencing. Hardly any time later, it was followed by Verl Fletcher's after Morrie singled him out for sharpening his pencil with a jackknife at his desk instead of at the wood box. "No open jackknives around a desktop, that is the rule. You can keep Damon company, after."

  Restlessness rippled through the schoolroom like waves of wind through wheat. A teacher on a discipline rampage can be a fearsome thing; every student ever born knows that. But we never expected that kind of behavior from Morrie. Nonetheless he seemed to go out of his way to pick fault with us that afternoon, scanning mercilessly into one grade after another as grammar period ground along and then a spelling test. Casualties piled up fast. Sam Drobny was caught with his eyes not entirely on his own spelling paper. Five minutes later, Morrie said Nick might as well join his brother after school, it seemed to run in the family. Perhaps to be even-handed among nationalities, Morrie shortly gigged Peter Myrdal, the youngest of the Swede clan but also the biggest fifth-grader imaginable, for making a face at Sam and Nick.

  By now it was noticeable that our instructor had declared war on the race of boys. If I wasn't mistaken, Rabrab began to look somewhat miffed at not qualifying to represent the girls in the army of detention. I could not figure it out, this rash of petty infractions. Something hideous had come over Morrie. I'd read Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, but I thought Robert Louis Stevenson made that up.

  There are times when you just know that whatever can go wrong next is about to. I hunched at my desk trying to will against it, through body language and telepathy and nearly semaphore to try to warn the innocent up there in the second row, but here it came.

  "Toby!" Morrie's voice crackled. "Do you really think this is the time and place for whispering?"

  "M-m-maybe not."

  "You can stay after and decide definitively," the verdict was dropped on him.

  Amazing. Like the Drobnys, the Millirons could practically hold a family reunion after school. Somehow lesson work stuttered on, with Morrie still on the prowl and everybody else on edge.

  Then, with not more than ten minutes to go until school would let out, the terrible words:

  "Eddie Turley. Attitude. After school."

  Damon and Toby and I whirled around in our seats, aghast.

  At first I thought Eddie was going to faint. But a Turley probably did not know how. Instead, he surged halfway up out of his desk as if about to make a break for freedom, then gulped mightily and sagged back into his seat again. Morrie had delivered the words like bullets, and for the life of me I could not see why. Attitude! Eddie's dopey sneer at the world was as natural to him as breathing; why convict him for his facial muscles, particularly when he'd inherited those from Brose Turley? This clinched it for me. Morrie had turned suicidal.

  When school at last let out, while everyone else had fled to their horses and the after-school contingent disconsolately stayed planted at their desks, Morrie showed not a care. Unlike me. Even though I knew Brose Turley was nowhere in our vicinity, piling up pelts in the distant snows of the Rockies, the back of my neck felt like it had something creeping up on it. Eddie looked as dicey as I felt, with the same confused expression on him as the time I slugged him.

  Looking the prisoners over, Morrie absently stroked his lip as if the mustache were still there. "Numerous as you are," he observed as though he had nothing to do with that, "I believe we are going to have a work detail. The cloakroom can always stand a tidying. Eddie, I'll ask you to fill the inkwells and then sit out your time at your desk, but the rest of you assemble out there, please."

  I didn't like the looks of this. How was I supposed to bone up on declensions with my supposed Latin tutor running a chain gang of sulking boys? I went up to Morrie.

  "Uhm, you seem to have your hands full. Shall I just go home and we start Latin tomorrow afternoon?"

  "Not at all. Exercitus ad Galliam iter faciet, philologe novissime—the army will march toward Gaul, young scholar. Never fear. First, though, I'm going to appropriate you for the work detail"—I gaped at him in dismay, and he simply looked back at me coolly—"and then we can proceed to declensions."

  The school's cloakroom was like our mud room at home, the catchall part of the building, only more so. With the nooks and crannies of the supply cabinet along one wall and the overshoe alley beneath the long line of coat hooks and some schoolyard playthings that had been brought in for the winter, it was a room that Rose could have tended
to in, oh, three whistled tunes. It didn't require seven boys. It most definitely did not require me.

  There I was, though, and I didn't know what else to do but button my lip and get this over with. Morrie handed out brooms to the Drobny twins, and Toby and Peter were given dust cloths, and the others of us were pointed to the supply cabinet. Verl stalked to one end and Damon and I paired off automatically to straighten up shelved materials at the other. Wordlessly we worked shoulder to shoulder. After a while Damon said in a low voice, "Know something funny? You're getting fuzz."

  "What? Cut out the kidding."

  "No, really, honest. You ought to take a look." He pooched out his own upper lip experimentally while trying to see down his nose. I took the opportunity to pinch his lips together duck-bill style in the silencing treatment. All we needed was for Morrie to keep us after after-school, for talking out of turn.

  Eventually he strode out from the schoolroom, closing the door behind him, and inspected. The bunch of us stood there in a clump anticipating the worst, given his mood of the afternoon, but he seemed satisfied. He turned to the group with an expression of speculation, looking quite a bit more like the Morrie of this morning.

  "There is one further matter I'm going to ask you to attend to," he had us know. "It's Eddie."

  All of us shifted glumly, awaiting one more grownup's sermon about the necessity of getting along with someone we knew to be a menace. Verl yawned. Even Toby looked halfhearted. Arms folded, Morrie waited until we had to give him stares of attention. Then he uttered: