The Whistling Season Read online

  As soon as I saw Carnelia halt, turn her head a bit to one side as if hearing something sublime the rest of us had missed, and then aim herself straight toward Toby, I knew the terrain of hostilities ahead. Even Carnelia's family did not have a housekeeper.

  I yelped "Last catch!" to Grover while throwing him the ball and raced over to head off Carnelia.

  Too late. By the time I got there she was practically atop Toby, her hands on her knees in the manner of Florence Nightingale bending over a poor fallen boy, and crooning her first insidious question:

  "Tobias, will she tuck you and Damon and Paul in at night?"

  "Huh uh!" Toby answered with the terrifying honesty of a second-grader. "She's gonna sleep at George and Rae's. I asked."

  "Oh, is she," Carnelia noted for posterity. "Not a live-in, then," she lamented, evidently for Toby's sake and Damon's and mine. I tried to break through the circle around Toby, but Eddie Turley chose that moment to get me in a casual headlock around the neck and I barely managed to croak out, "Pick on somebody your own size, Carnelia!" By now Damon had tumbled to what was impending, and he yelled out in fury, "Carnelia hag, leave him alone!" But he couldn't reach there from the horseshoe pit in time either.

  Carnelia was smart—worse, she was clever—and what she asked next sounded for all the world like a note of concern for the well-being of the Milliron household:

  "But then she'll have to get up ever so early to come over and cook your breakfast, won't she, Tobias?"

  "She can't cook," Toby confided sadly to what was now the entire listening schoolyard. Then he brightened. "But the newspaper says she doesn't bite."

  That did it. We slunk home after that school day with even the Pronovosts barely able to contain their smirks.

  ***

  "YOU WERE NIGHT-HERDING AGAIN," DAMON MURMURED, AS IF I didn't know.

  By then it was Sunday, and my dream the night before had nothing to do—for a change—with the teasing circle of Hell that the schoolyard had been for him and Toby and me all week long, and everything to do with what lay in wait for us at Sunday dinner.

  "Bad?" I said back in the same low tone he had used. Just out of hearing behind us, Toby romped with our dog, Houdini, both of them hoping for an ill-destined jackrabbit to cross their path. "Worse than usual?"

  Damon considered while he reached for the next pebble of the right size. He was in one of his baseball phases at the time and had to throw rocks at fence posts the whole way along the section-line road to George and Rae's place. He wound up and fired, frowning when he missed the post. "Usual is bad enough, isn't it?"

  Naturally Damon figured that my excursions while asleep were nightmares. It was nothing that simple. I rapidly thought back over this particular nighttime spell and decided against describing it to him in precise detail. I had tried that before. "I keep telling, you, give me a poke when it bothers you that much."

  "Paul, I'm scared to. You're like somebody one of those mesmerers—"

  "Mesmerists."

  "—yeah, like somebody one of those has put to sleep." Hypnosis? Even if I had the knack of administering it to myself, the nocturnal state of my mind was not subject to command.

  We trudged on toward the beckoning finger of smoke from the kitchen stovepipe next door—which in homestead terms meant half a mile away—neither of us knowing what more to say. Until Damon, who could all but wink with his voice when he wanted to, intoned:

  "Anybody I know? In your big dream?"

  I had to laugh. "What do you think?"

  "I can just see her." Squinching his face into the approximation of a prune, he mimicked: 'Cat got your tongue, boys?"

  It was like that most Sundays. Once in a great while the Sabbath-day invitation to Father and his omnivorous boys would come from the Samaritan Stinsons, Grover's parents, or from the reliably civic Fletcher family if school board business needed tending to, but standardly we were asked over to our Schricker relatives' for Sunday dinner. The meal itself we always were surpassingly grateful for. Rae Schricker was our mother's cousin, and with the same calm flint-gray eyes and impression marks of amusement at the corners of her lips, she resembled Mother to an extent that sometimes made my throat seize up. Certainly Rae seemed to regard herself as Mother's proxy on earth at the cookstove. Any of us would have had to grant that Mrs. Stinsons mincemeat pie and Mrs. Fletcher's cream puffs could not be bettered anywhere. But Rae operated on the assumption this was our one square meal of the week and tucked ham with yams or fried chicken with mashed potatoes and gravy into us until we wobbled in our chairs. Meanwhile, George in his whiskery way would attempt to preside over the feast with encouraging injunctions of his own: "Oliver, heavens, you're out of coffee already! Toby, here you go, the wishbone!" I say attempt because unlike us, George still very much had a mother, right down there at the opposite end of the dinner table. At these Sunday repasts Aunt Eunice, as we boys were forced to address her, ate sparingly as a bird, preferring to peck in our direction.

  "Old Aunt YEW-niss," Damon now crooned in rhythm to his pitcher's motion, and bopped a post dead-center.

  "Go easy," I warned, with a glance toward Toby as he raced Houdini to catch up with us.

  "Maybe she won't've heard," Damon muttered to me.

  "And maybe the cat will get her tongue for a change," I muttered back. "But I wouldn't count on it."

  Father was sending us over first this Sunday noon, as usual. "Tell George and Rae I'll be there in a jiffy," he instructed, his favorite measure of time. It was strange how many last-minute chores in the horse barn demanded his immediate attention when visiting with Eunice Schricker was the other choice. First, though, he had made sure to curry us up, ensuring that we scrubbed behind our ears, slicking our hair down for us with the scented stickum he called "eau de barber," and judiciously working us over with a comb the size of a rat-tail file. It was then that Damon, who hated to have his hair parted, pulled away from under the comb and demanded to know: "How is she our aunt?"

  A perfectly sound question, actually. By what genealogical bylaw did we accord aunthood to our mother's cousin's husband's mother? Particularly when she showed no affinity with the human family?

  "By circumlocution," Father said, which I resolved to look up. "I want you boys," he tapped Damon with the comb, "to tend to your manners over there. It's good practice for when our general domestication happens."

  When, indeed. By mutual instinct, Damon and I had not mentioned to Father the teasing we were taking at school about the nonbiting housekeeper. ("Does she come with a muzzle?" "Is she so old she's a gummer?") And we were managing to keep a stopper in Toby by telling him over and over that our tormentors were merely jealous. But the housekeeper matter was wearing us down day by day. The letter had gone off to Minneapolis, my best Palmer penmanship setting forth Father's much mulled-over wage offer, and all we had to show for it so far was red ears from the torrent of razzing. I longed for our phantom correspondent, whoever she proved to be, to materialize as such a model of domestic efficiency that the rest of Marias Coulee would swoon in tribute; but at the same time I harbored doubts that I could not quite put words to. Besides, Father more than once had warned us not to get our hopes up too high, although plainly his were elbowing the moon.

  So, off we went to the lioness's den, two of us longing for this Sunday to be over and Toby impatient for it to start. No sooner had Rae let us in the kitchen door and slipped us an early bite apiece of the gingerbread she had just baked, than the sort of thing Damon and I dreaded was issued to us from the parlor.

  "Is that those boys?" came that voice, snappish as a whip. "Don't they have manners enough to say hello?"

  His face full of smile and gingerbread crumbs, Toby charged in, we two apprehensively trailing after. There Aunt Eunice sat, as if not having bothered to budge from the week before, folded into her spindleback rocking chair, the toes of her antique black shoes barely reaching the floor. George as usual was seated stiffly on the horsehair sofa at the other e
nd of the room. As I look back on it, the Schricker family line contradicted the principle of inherited traits. You would have had to go to their back teeth to find any resemblance between George, his ever-hopeful broad countenance wreathed in companionable reddish beard, and the elderly purse-mouthed wrathy figure, half his size, whom he felt the need to address as "Mum." Sunday-clad in her Victorian lavender dress, crochet hook viciously at work on yet another doily to foist onto Rae—the parlor looked snowed on, so many of its surfaces were covered with this incessant lacework—Aunt Eunice was the obvious victor over any number of challenges of time. Thus far, the twentieth century had had no effect on her except to make her look more like a leftover daguerreotype.

  George beamed in relief at us, desperate for any diversion from making conversation with his mother, and we variously mumbled or blurted our greetings back. As Damon beat an immediate retreat to the Chinese checker board kept on the tea table by the window and I edged dutifully toward the far end of the sofa, George said from the corner of his mouth: "No word yet?" I shook my head. He sighed a little, which indicated to me that he. too had been receiving an earful on the subject of our housekeeper.

  Right now, though, Aunt Eunice was all sparkle. "Toby, come here by me," she coaxed as if calling a puppy, and next thing, our sunshine boy was groaningly hoisted onto what there was of her knees.

  Damon scowled but did not look up from where he was devising across-the-board jumps with his marbles, and I sat there trying to appear congenial. It was part of the Sunday ritual that where the other two of us drew dark mutters from Aunt Eunice about "young roughnecks" and "overgrown noiseboxes," she literally lapped up Toby. Out of her sleeve now came a lace-edged handkerchief, which she put to work on his gingerbread traces. "Poor thing, sent off from home looking like a mudpie."

  Toby squirmed adorably while she clucked over him, and I mentally told him to enjoy being doted on while he could. The minute he grew too big for Aunt Eunice's scanty lap, he would be consigned to rogue boyhood with Damon and me.

  "And school, dear?" she probed. "How are you getting on at school these days?"

  Bless him, Toby thought to look my way before answering, and I twitched my mouth in warning. With effort, he stuck to "I have perfect attendance, same like last year."

  With an oof Aunt Eunice discharged him from his bony perch, meanwhile declaring, "What a pity it doesn't run in the family. That father of yours would be late for his own funeral."

  "Now, now, Mum," George protested weakly. Damon, thunder on his brow, clattered marbles into place to signal Toby to join him at the checker board. It was up to me to defend Father, seldom a rewarding task: "He had to tend the workhorses, is all."

  "As per usual," Aunt Eunice crowed. Now that I had drawn her attention, I could be worked on to the fullest. She lifted her chin as if sighting in on me with it, while her face took on an expression of grim relish. "So, you, Paul—"

  "Yes, Aunt Eunice?" I was not going to let her corner me into the cat-and-tongue situation.

  "—does that teacher of yours make you learn anything by heart? I always stood first in my class at elocution." Who could doubt it?

  "I can say 'The boy stood on the burning deck—" Damon volunteered with deadly innocence. I shot him a look that said Don't, knowing how his version ran:

  —his feet were covered with blisters.

  He tore his pants on a rusty nail

  So then he wore his sister's.

  Luckily, Aunt Eunice wanted no competition. "Your geography and physiology and spelling bees and all that will only carry you so far," she admonished, still intent on me. A Nile of vein stood out on her frail temple as she worked herself up. What was behind such ardor? Rage of age? Life's revenge on the young? Or simply Aunt Eunice's natural vinegar pickling her soul? In any case, something about me that Sunday had set her off. "I know you have your nose in a book all the time, but those are not the only lessons in store for you. When you get out in the world, Paul Milliron, you'll see." Pursing up dramatically, Aunt Eunice delivered in singsong fashion:

  Life lays its burden on every soul's shoulder,

  We each have a cross or a trial to bear.

  If we miss it in youth it will come when we're older

  And fit us as close as the garments we wear.

  Not even George knew what to meet that with but abject silence.

  Just in time came the bang of the kitchen screen door and further sounds of Father arriving. "Hello, Rae. It smells delicious around here. Brought you a sack of Roundup coal, not that slack stuff. Remind me to take the scuttle out and fill it for you." His theory evidently was that if he bustled enough, it would seem as if he had been here all the while. "Oh, the nourishment is about ready? Give me a minute to freshen up and reacquaint the boys with the washbasin, and we're yours to command."

  He stuck his head through the parlor doorway, his face ruddy from shaving and his raven-black hair slicked back the same as ours. "Eunice, my goodness!" he exclaimed, as if surprised to find her there. "Aren't you looking regal today."

  Soon after, we sat up to the table and began to do justice to Rae's fried chicken and baking-powder biscuits and milk gravy and compulsory vegetables, with the promise of that gingerbread spurring Damon and Toby and me to clean our loaded plates. Father and George talked crops and weather and horses and the doings of neighbors, the argot that farmers had been speaking since seed time on the Euphrates. For while those generous Sunday noons were presented to our cookless household as rituals with victuals, I am convinced it was the table talk that nourished Father and George in their unforeseen lives as adventurers in homesteading.

  "The steam plow is going to be at Stinson's place anyway, why don't you go ahead and break that five acres on your east end? I'll throw in with you; I have that couple of acres of gumbo around the Lake District that needs doing."

  "I don't know, though, Oliver. I'm stretched as it is, to handle what I planted this year."

  These were not fluff-filled men. High-toned and fanciful as he could be, Father put in staggering days of manual labor, for others as well as himself. I always thought that the world got two for the price of one, when Fathers personality was counted into the earthly mix. One minute he could summarily kill a rattlesnake with a barrel stave, and the next, he might be fashioning out loud a theory of the evolution of the human thumb. In an earlier time, Father would have been the kind to take ship for the farthest places; I can see him as someone like the evercurious naturalist Joseph Banks, sailing around and around the world with Captain Cook. His inborn hunger for a fresh horizon hopelessly mismatched him for the drayage business handed down to him, in a set-in-its-ways Wisconsin city that wasn't even Milwaukee. But one last unexpected unfolding of the American map came to Oliver Milliron's rescue. As the finale of homesteading, the federal government offered a vast wager: western dry land thrown open free for the taking, if you were willing to uproot yourself and invest the requisite years of your life on that remote virgin patch of earth. With Montana singing in his ear, he had piled everything with the name Milliron on it—including Mother and us; I was five at the time, Damon four, and Toby merely a gleam in Father's eye—into an "emigrant car," one of those Great Northern Railway boxcars that held our furniture and dishes wrapped in bedding and a few Wisconsin keepsakes at one end, and pallets for us to sleep on at the other. Astutely, as it proved, a second boxcar brought the best one of Father's drays that had conveyed beer and meat through the cramped streets of Manitowoc, and his top two teams of workhorses. Marias Coulee awaited us, a promised land needing only agricultural husbandry and rain. Within a year, George and Rae followed from their becalmed life of dairy farming near Eau Claire, equally ready to try a new point of the compass.

  "Neither one of you works a field enough," came a certain voice again now, sharp as a pinch. "My place looks like a cat scratched around on it when you're through with your so-called plowing."

  And, I must always make myself admit, just as much a homesteader as eithe
r of the field-weathered men at that table was Eunice Schricker. George may have thought he was putting two states between him and his mother when he made his move west, but he only managed to transmit Montana fever. In no time at all she too had alit into Marias Coulee, filing her homestead claim on the acreage next to George and Rae's, living on it in her shanty for proving-up purposes, and giving George and our father constant fits as they tried to farm it for her in anything resembling the way she wanted it done.

  Sod was comparatively safe ground, so to speak, in these dinner-table contentions. I was hoping that the agricultural trio would stay dug in on dryland plowing until past dessert. But keeping tabs on Aunt Eunice even more than usual this perilous Sunday, I knew from the instant her chin took on that particular lift and she aimed it dead straight at Father, we were in for it.

  "Household help always steals," Aunt Eunice announced, as if her opinion had been broadly solicited. "I am surprised someone of your experience of life doesn't know that, Oliver. You watch. This housekeeper of yours, if she ever manifests herself, will be light-fingered. They all are."

  Nervously, Toby looked at Father.

  "Eunice, please, the poor soul hasn't even set foot across our threshold yet," Father protested. "Besides, as long as it's the dust and the clutter, she's welcome to everything we have."

  "Go right ahead and make jokes," Aunt Eunice snapped. "If you end up robbed blind, don't say I didn't tell you."

  "I never would," Father said levelly. "Eunice, all I am trying to do is to bring a bit of order out of a houseful of chaos. The boys pitch in as best they can, but they're not laundresses, downstairs maids, seamstresses—"