The Whistling Season Read online

  "I want you to dogpile him. Right there where he is sitting."

  Whatever blue this came out of—and none of us was about to question a chance to get a crack at Eddie, with the authority of a teacher behind it—we immediately were the troops for it. The Drobny brothers' sunken eyes shone. Verl perked up mightily, and Peter gave a happy little hellfire snort that must have come out of his Viking lineage. Damon positively beamed. I have to say, Toby and I balled up our fists in anticipation along with the rest of them.

  Morrie shushed us and held us back, saying he needed to write something on the blackboard first and then would give the signal.

  While the others gathered at the far end of the cloakroom and buzzed with glee as Damon assigned bodily parts of Eddie as targets for each of them, I edged to the doorway and took a look in. Eddie had his head down on his desk, refusing to look up as Morrie wrote on the blackboard. The chalked sentence stood out boldly until it seemed to hiccup at the end; I had to strain to make out the final three words. Turning, Morrie saw me and put a finger to his lips.

  "All right, boys," he sang out, and in everybody swarmed, all over Eddie. Toby and Peter dove under the desk and grabbed a leg apiece. Eddie's upper parts were submerged under Damon, Sam, and Nick. Verl squashed down on him from behind. I hesitated for about a heartbeat, then joined the pile. Only Eddie's head showed out of the heap of boys. "I'll tell! My father—!" he managed to croak out. One or two of the Drobnys and doubdess Damon got their licks in on him with their elbows and knees before Morrie could hover in, ordering us to hold Eddie still. He opened a cigar box he'd had stashed somewhere and took out a pair of eyeglasses, the everyday kind sold in any mercantile. He fitted the glasses onto the struggling boy.

  "I don't want them things," Eddie gagged out. "Get 'em off me!"

  "Read the board," Morrie coaxed. "Eddie, read the board?

  Eddie peered there in confusion, batting his eyes furiously. Morrie gave it a few seconds, watching him squint, then replaced the glasses with another pair from the box.

  "Eddie, please, read the board."

  Eddie stared. Stared some more. At last he slowly recited:

  "'My name is Edwin Turley and I can read this—'" He stopped at the much smaller final three words, confused again. Every one of us wrapped across him held firm, but we all had our heads turned toward those blackboard words.

  Morrie replaced the glasses with yet another pair.

  Swallowing hard, Eddie read off: "'My name is Edwin Turley and I can read this with glasses on.'"

  Morrie craned over the pile of us until he was squarely in Eddie's field of vision. "They are called reading glasses, Eddie. They do not need to be worn all the time, do you understand that? Just here at school, perhaps. If you don't want to take them home," he let that sink in, "they can be kept here in your desk."

  Morrie peeled Nick Drobny off Eddie's chest. The rest of us untangled and fell back in a half-circle around Eddie's desk. Eddie hadn't said anything, but the glasses still were on him and he was gawking around like a newly hatched owl. Morrie was breathing as hard as any of us. "The rest of you, Eddie's reading glasses are to be a school matter." By which he meant a secret, we knew. "The girls and the others will be let in on it tomorrow. Isn't there some kind of handshake you swear on in the schoolyard?"

  "Spitbath," said Toby, demonstrating.

  16

  EDDIE EDGED TOWARD HIS DESK NEXT MORNING, AFTER HIS usual furlough at the outhouse, and took his seat with every eye in the schoolroom on him. Pausing in the recitation of his expectations of us for the day, Morrie waited with all the aplomb he could muster. Eddie was looking down at his desktop as if it might bite him. Gingerly he lifted it enough to feel around in there and came up with the eyeglasses. He unfolded them sharply, the way you open a jackknife, and for a moment I wondered whether he might snap them in half. However, the earpieces after a couple of tries found his ears, and the lenses bridged his landmark Turley nose; Eddie looked like a collie someone had slipped goggles onto, but he was staring defiantly toward the blackboard as if waiting for Morrie to put up there something worth seeing.

  I half expected the schoolroom door to be kicked to splinters and a pink-mouthed wolfer to come charging in to tear Morrie from limb to limb for turning his offspring into a four-eyed sissy. But before long, Eddie's furtively fixed-up eyes became just one more trait in our mortal bin of them, along with Vivian's lisp and Anton's purple birthmark and Marta's nosebleeds, Rabrab's slyness and Carnelia's haughtiness and Milo's goofiness, Toby's excitability and Damon's crafty side and my odd accents of mind, Seraphina and Eva's dark spirit, Lily Lee's easily hurt feelings, on down through the list of things we learned to simply chalk off as part of one another in one-room life. That is to say, it would have taken more than reading glasses to gain Eddie Turley any adherents. ("Now he can see to hit better," Grover muttered at recess.) When it came to his right to work around a calamity that went by the name of a parent, however, the Marias Coulee School instinct in favor of that was as fully tuned as a Stradivarius.

  At Latin, the end of that day, a portion of me refused to stick to the nominative and accusative cases of pluvia— Morrie still was preoccupied with the rain gauge, poring over a weather service bulletin on hydrography between my written drills on nouns of the first and second declensions—and circled around the meaning of I want you to dogpile Eddie instead. I kept coming out at different places, the more I thought about it. Never in a hundred years would Eddie, on his own, have resorted to something as unmanly as specs; those were for the Grovers and girls of the world. Yet what a tricky gamble Morrie took, in slipping those schoolish lenses onto the son of a man whose living was killing. I knew Morrie's move could not be termed impetuous, because he'd had to give thought to every bit of it beforehand: the various pairs of glasses, the number of boys to subdue Eddie. Was there such a thing as petuous? A word that meant thoroughly thinking a matter through, then risking your neck anyway? Morrie glanced up as I migrated between the Latin and English dictionaries. "Declensions are not done with the feet."

  "Just looking something up."

  But it wasn't there, in either language.

  ***

  The morning after that brought something I never could have prepared for: Rose in tears. Awash in them, from the look of her when she drifted disconsonately in through the kitchen doorway, bonnet drooping from one hand.

  "Here, sit down." I leaped out of my chair and provided it for her. My voice was husky but I kept it down, not wanting to panic the whole household. "What happened? Did you hurt yourself on the way over?"

  Her soggy whisper could barely be heard. "It's Morrie."

  I knew it. Sooner or later, gambling on outmaneuvering Brose Turley would catch up with him. From the way Rose was carrying on, he must have had the heart stomped out of him.

  I asked shakily, "How bad—?"

  "Just awful," she sniffled. "He is against my buying Eunice's place."

  Visions of blood left my imagination, but Rose's gush of tears demanded attention. She dabbed at her eyes with the dishtowel I hurriedly fetched to her. "Oh," she moaned, "why did it have to happen? We've always agreed on matters. And for this, of all things, to come between us." She managed to look up at me, red-eyed. "Can you imagine? One minute we were talking about, I don't know, the weather, and the next we were having a—" Terminology failed her once again.

  "—family spat?" I filled in without thinking. "They're nothing."

  That set her to crying harder.

  I scrambled to dig out another dishtowel and hand it to her. She fired the damp one onto the cupboard counter. Through the next flood she blubbed out: "You know how he can be. 'I am not avid to see you do this.'" For a sobbing woman dealing in whispers, it was a remarkable job of mimicking.

  I puzzled over Morrie's verdict. He himself was installed nice and snug there in the teacherage, apparently as proud as a pheasant in a parrot cage. Why wouldn't he want Rose to have a place of her own? Was it my imaginatio
n, or did the behavior of grownups become more baffling the nearer I grew to membership? Another freshet of tears came from Rose, and I sidled toward the doorway. "I'll get Father in here, why don't I."

  "Wait." She blew her nose and blinked back tears for half a minute. With a hard swallow she began, so low I had to lean in to hear.

  "Paul, I am sunk if your father were to have second thoughts about letting me draw ahead on my wages to make the down payment. I'd rather he not be told about Morrie's and my—difference of opinion." She smiled weakly and made the cross-your-heart-and-hope-to-die gesture over her breastbone. "Pretty please?"

  At the rate secrets I was sworn to were accumulating, I'd soon need one of Damon's scrapbooks to keep track.

  "Wh-what do you want me to do, then?"

  Her chest heaved, and she looked around the kitchen like someone trying to find her way out of the woods. When her gaze came around to me again, Rose seemed marginally steadier as she confided, "I just needed to talk to someone with a head on his shoulders. To see if I sound like a total fool about Eunice's place." Suddenly her whispered tone turned fierce. "I am trying to make something of myself, and I'm not always sure how much I've got to work with. Bright as you are, I don't suppose you ever feel that way, but for me—"

  "Sure I do. Half the time."

  "Half—?"

  "The school half. When I'm around Morrie."

  A few minutes later Father surged in, stretching and yawning, and asked: "Where's Rose?"

  "Hanging some dishtowels out."

  ***

  ROSE AND MORRIE PATCHED THEIR QUARREL UP SOMEHOW. People do, sometimes. I know she spent the next weekend in a frenzy of housekeeping at the teacherage, and in turn Morrie moved furniture tirelessly when the day came that Rose took possession of the cold, empty house left to this world by Aunt Eunice. We all pitched in, Damon and Toby and I racing across the snirt field as early as was decent that Saturday morning, and George there for moral support while Rae stayed home and cooked a feast for us all, and even Father showed up promptly enough after his chores at our horse barn.

  By the end of that long-ago January day, Rose was officially our neighbor as well as our housekeeper, Father was her sharecropper at well as her employer, and Morrie, I could tell, was determined to stay good-natured on the subject of Rose's home-steading fling, always a hard way to go about it.

  17

  WINTERS WERE THE TREE RINGS OF HOMESTEAD LIFE, CIRcumferences of weather thick or thin, which over time swelled into the abiding pattern of memory. Everyone still spoke of the big winter of 1906 with its Valentine's Day blizzard that kept us out of school for a week, and eternally drifting snow that mounted beneath the eaves of houses until it reached the sharp hanging curtains of iceles. By any comparison, our weather of 1910 came into the world in the same fashion it had left 1909, puny. Only the wind showed some spirit.

  Day after day on our ride to school, high thin moody clouds kept the sun dim, and we and our horses scarcely had shadows. With nothing in nature in the way of his perfect attendance record, Toby bounced in his saddle those dusky mornings as happy as if he were on a carnival pony ride. Even so, the three of us and the Pronovosts continually watched over our shoulders at the weather, given strict orders from home to take shelter at the nearest house, anybody's, at the first smudge on the horizon that signaled a blizzard coming. Everyone in Marias Coulee was used to that kind of winter behavior. But the sky of this young year never did turn threatening, only stayed stuck on disagreeable. The few times it ever snowed Damon still could not make the dusty stuff hold together in a decent snowball, and if he couldn't, no one could.

  From the ground up and the sky down, then, that set of school weeks stands in my memory as one of the strangest of seasons. Long, indeterminate days, as though each one was stretched by the wind blowing through it, yet not nearly enough time to follow everything.

  The schoolroom whizzed with things to think about. There was the surprise right under my nose when Verl Fletcher and Vivian Villard developed a raging crush on one another, I trace it back to the day Morrie decided to enliven a spelling bee by having people choose up teams, and Vivians first pick was loud and clear enough: "Werl." Oh oh, I thought, and justifiably so, because with his desk right behind mine and hers directly in front of me, there I was in the Cupid seat between. Luckily, I suppose, the generalized lust of a teenager was late in developing in me, and at the time I viewed such matters with comparative detachment. Still, I must have passed a hundred smitten notes back and forth for the lovebird pair that hothouse winter.

  There was also the considerable challenge, as much for my brothers as for me, of becoming honorary Drobnys. Up until then in our school career, the Drobny twins, swarthy Nick and Sam in one case and even swarthier Eva and Seraphina in the other, never paid much heed to us either way, probably figuring the best thing that could be said for our type was that we were not Swedes. After the bunch of us together swarmed Eddie Turley for that optical fitting, however, the Drobny clan all but made us blood brothers. This was an unnerving development. Recess took on gypsy overtones. Apparently Damon and I and even Toby possessed black arts we hadn't known of. Maybe Damon's generalship in the cloakroom did it, or maybe it was by virtue of my voluntary dive into the monumental dogpiling at Eddie's desk; but I suspect it was Toby fearlessly grabbing a drumstick on Eddie that day that sparked a glitter in Drobny eyes. Now we were regularly greeted on the playground with stinging whacks on the shoulder and Nick or Sam growling a comradely "Howya?" and hanging at Damon's elbow or mine like pint-sized bodyguards. For their part, Seraphina and Eva dealt vigilante justice to anyone who so much as brushed against Toby; when he got into a mild spat with Emil Kratka over turns at the swing, they pinched poor Emil purple. Friends like these distinctly narrowed our social circle. For one thing, it was rumored that the Drobnys were sewn into their long underwear at the start of winter and never took it off. Ruthless and foreign and sinister as they were, though, I still think fondly of those twofold hard-skinned twins every time I need to ambush some legislative foe of my department.

  And there was always Eddie himself, way up there on the mental roster of that winter. Every time I checked over my shoulder to the back of the room, he was looking wary behind the eyeglass lenses, but at least looking. I hardly dared to believe it, yet Morrie's gamble on salvaging Eddie by fixing his eyes seemed to be paying off. Helped along, significantly, by the fact that Morrie did not happen to make an appearance during the particular recess when Eddie flattened Milo for teasing him about wearing sissy peepers.

  There was no sign of Brose Turley—so much for my powers of prediction—except in my dreams.

  ***

  "Does anyone happen to know what this is?"

  This time, Morrie was holding aloft a contraption of sprockets and gears and small round objects on metal arms of varied lengths and a crank sticking out of its bright enameled hub.

  Carnelia had learned from the example of the pluviometer. Her hand shot into the air and she did not wait for Morrie to call on her before blurting, "It's a planet machine."

  "Close," Morrie said generously. "A mechanical model of the solar system, actually"—he could not resist giving the crank a twirl to send the orbs whirling around the enamel sun—"and planets, our own among them, of course predominate. Technically, Carnelia and everyone, this ingenious device"—another indulgent turn of the crank and Venus chased Mercury in a beguiling orbit and Jupiter romped neck and neck with Saturn and so on—"is called an orrery." And so the Earl of Orrery's invention joined Halley's predictable comet in our season of celestial science. Before he was done, I could tell, Morrie would have us staying up nights to run our fingers across the stars.

  At the time, though, another part of me desperately hoped this was not a case of Morrie chewing more than he could bite off. A glance at the practically virgin Westwater Mercantile calendar on the side wall told how far his enthusiasm was racing ahead of the actual machinery of the cosmos. Halley's comet was
n't due until well into spring. Was our prophet of science going to exhaust everything skyward, and wear us out on the topic, before the fiery visitor even appeared?

  Hardly As I watched, Morrie craftily set aside the orrery, right then while every one of us in that schoolroom itched to turn that magical crank and send the solar system on its merry-go-round, reached into his bottomless desk drawer, and pulled out an apple. He took a significant bite out of it, munched it thoroughly while we all sat gaping, and then, shades of Aunt Eunice, he was reciting in full voice:

  When Newton saw an apple fall, he found

  in that slight startle from his contemplation—

  'Tis said (for I'll not answer above ground

  For any sages creed or calculation)—

  A mode of proving that the earth turn'd round

  In a most natural whirl, called gravitation';

  And this is the sole mortal who could grapple,

  Since Adam, with a fall, or with an apple.

  In conclusion, Morrie dropped the apple to the floor with a thunk.

  It worked. Did it ever. An epidemic of grins broke out around the schoolroom, infecting even the brighter portion of the eighth grade. The moment set the mark for Morrie's excursions into the science of the cosmos; if he had to go to Eden to show us the field of gravity, he would.

  "Gravity is everywhere around us," he informed us next with the aplomb of a ringmaster, "from the heavens to the ground under us. It is a force utterly consistent in its steadiness, on all items great and small. Watch."

  Scooping the apple into his hand again, he borrowed Josef Kratka's much-bitten pencil, held the objects out equally at shoulder height, and let both drop at the same instant. When apple and pencil struck the floor precisely together, Marias Coulee School blinked with interest. Morrie immediately produced a copper penny and a silver dollar, and dropped them to the same result. "Your turn," he challenged, and grade by grade we madly tested the fidelity of gravity. A ball and an empty lunch pail fell at the same rate. So did a ball and a full lunch pail, we found to our amazement. An overshoe and a pen nib. The yardstick and the blackboard eraser. Damon and Grover came up with the most fiendish experiment, a gunnysack with as much coal as one of them could lift and a needle delicately held poised by the other. The law of falling objects held true every time, and from that foothold in gravitation, Morrie took us up and out, session by session, into the wonders of the universe. "Copernicus," he would say, as if remembering someone he once knew, "now there was a person who saw to the center of things." Then he'd conjure the master of heliocentrism back to life for us, and Kepler and Galileo, and peculiar Tycho Brahe, and lead us into the lenses of their trembling telescopes, and outward to the silver pinpoints of constellations. Heaven's wanderers, he took care to warn us another occasion, in superstitious times past had been no more welcome than tramps on earth. "Never fear, young scholars. An orbital comet foretells only itself, not the end of the world. Halley's has come and gone two dozen times that we know of, and the world seems to still be here, doesn't it." We had to grant the truth of that, but he punctuated it anyway by nailing up i framed Delacroix print of Halley's comet streaking benignly over the heads of terrified peasants in their fields. The Star Dragon, it was tided. "Quite a nice likeness of the comet," Morrie estimated.