The Whistling Season Read online

  Now he mauled the edge of the oilcloth with a thumb while he tried to find the right words to put together, and finally he hunched forward to the table. "That's an even more generous offer, and I appreciate it, Rose. But I don't think it's a good idea for you to be—"

  Damon and I were looking at each other.

  "I'll go," I said after a moment.

  "I could, I guess." He nibbled his lip at the thought.

  "You couldn't either," I scoffed. "You'd sleep through breakfast. You'd sleep through school?

  "Go where?" Father asked in exasperation. "What are you two running off at the mouth about?"

  "To Aunt Eu—to Rose's house, to sleep. We can haul Toby's bunk down to your bedroom, so she can be in there with him. You can have my place, with Damon." I saw Damon undergo a fleeting seizure at the prospect of sleeping with Father, snorer supreme, but heroically suppress it.

  Matters were getting away from Father faster than he could see them coming. He opened his mouth to speak, but I beat him to it. "Why wouldn't that work?" I asked, as if all this was reasonable as moves on a checkerboard, which was pretty much the way I thought of it at the time.

  "Everybody has to sleep someplace," Damon clinched the matter.

  "There now, you see?" Rose opened her clasped hands as if this solution had been concealed in there all the time. "Don't you worry," she told Father again. I wondered why he didn't seem reassured at hearing it a second time.

  "—and then, Tobe, you and I were on this kind of teetertotter, only it was a sawhorse and we were on each end of a giant stick of firewood, and one of us would go down and the other would go way, way up, high as the top of the house, and we kept seesawing like that, higher and higher, until we heard somebody say, 'You boys have won the teetertotter prize!'"

  Sanitizing my dreams for Toby took some doing; it was good training later on for writing my Department of Public Instruction annual reports. What really occurred in that dream was that I was on the teetertotter alone and it went up and down on its own in a manner that mystified me and the voice had called out, "Paul Milliron, you are going to break your fool neck." My amended version did the trick for Toby, who wriggled in excitement against his pile of pillows and let out, "Wow, Paul."

  "And do you know who it was?"

  "Aunt Eunice?"

  "You guessed it. And she had a whole wheelbarrow of candy for us—"

  "Taffy, I bet."

  "Uhm, fudge, more like." In my dream it was firewood and Aunt Eunice was belaboring me that she wanted every stick sawed to the exact length of a rat-tail comb. "Anyway, here she came, big as life, and told us, 'Dig right in.' Damon was there, too"—I raised my voice on this part so it would carry to the kitchen, where he was bent over his geography book; the specter of the inspector, as Father called it, had even him doing homework—"and Aunt Eunice not only fed us fudge until we were about to bust but took ah three of us on her lap at once. How, I don't know."

  Abruptly Toby's lower lip pooched out. "I miss her."

  I didn't. Rather, I didn't have to, for Rose's homestead still held an inordinate amount of its previous occupant as far as I was concerned. How could a woman that tiny linger in every pore of a house? Especially the bedroom, where every night now I crept between the covers like a trespasser in what had been female territory since time immemorial. Rose had done away with Aunt Eunice's doilies on everything, thank heavens, but that whole fussy room still carried an atmosphere of having been crocheted into existence rather than carpentered. What unnerved me even more was that the place felt occupied by leftovers of existence. It was not simply that death had a dominion at the other end of the house, where I had walked in on Aunt Eunice as she was going cold. No, the immense parade of Eunice Schricker's years still was passing through that borrowed bedroom for me. I had worked it out that she was Toby's exact age the last time Halley's comet flew past Earth, and from there she had gone on to declaim at The Spencerian Academy and then cornered a husband and gave the world George and single-handedly nagged a Wisconsin town and in old age traipsed west to lord herself over Marias Coulee, vociferously crisscrossing other lives all the way. Then came Rose and her jampacked record of life with Morrie and poor late Mr. Llewellyn, next in the gallery of existences that was that restless bedroom. And here I was, tenant of the moment, with the night-heightened destinies and fates of everyone I knew swirling around whatever my own were. A person would need an orrery as big as mankind to keep track of it all.

  Needless to say, my dreams went after such thoughts like a wolfer after wolves.

  Ragged as my nerve ends were from bunking at Rose's homestead, I did my utmost to stay sunny during my bedside shifts with Toby. He was studying me somberly now in the aftermath of my dream recital.

  "You're so lucky, Paul. I just go to sleep, bam."

  "You'll grow into dreams when you're bigger, don't worry about that."

  He dandled a hand down to the snoozing mound of dog that had become nearly permanent beside his bed. "I think Houdini has dreams sometimes."

  "Probably good ones, too," I agreed. "Catching rabbits while he's lying down."

  Toby made a face at my mention of lying down. Bed rest was thought to be the cure for everything then. He, however, was the world's most restless patient. Rose was putting the majority of her daytime into keeping him occupied and Father sat with him evenings and Damon and I pitched in after school, and still Toby was like someone confined to a zoo cage. Now he plucked at the bedding and I saw the glisten of tears in his eyes.

  "Paul, tell me something. Am I ever gonna get up?"

  "Sure you are. You heard the doctor yesterday. Just another couple of weeks yet." Then crutches. Then a long stint of careful footsteps, which did not come naturally to a boy like him. I didn't say any of that.

  "I still can't go to school for a while after," he pouted. His face darkened. "It's gonna be awful to flunk a grade. I'd be in the second grade with Josef and Maggie and Alice and Marija, and they're little kids."

  I was caught off-guard. Rose and Father were making sure he did the schoolwork sent home to him, and Morrie himself managed to drop by at least a couple of times a week, but evidently all of that did not weigh the same to Toby as classroom lessons. Myself, I would gladly have lain flat on my back for hours on end and let people spoon-feed education into me, if the subject could be Latin.

  "For crying out loud, Tobe, what makes you think you're going to flunk? If you need more help with your schoolwork, I can—"

  "I'm not there, am I," he screeched, "for the spelling bees and the comet stuff and reading out loud and all the rest, I'M ABSENT! I DON'T HAVE PERFECT ATTENDANCE ANYMORE, I DON'T HAVE ANY ATTENDANCE!"

  "Is that what's eating you?" I tousled his hair; he needed a haircut, but he so hated being barbered that none of us had the heart to give him one. "Morrie is not going to flunk you just because you're not there in the second row every minute, honest. I'll tell you what." I lowered my voice. "I'll get him to show me your grades there in his record book. He's not supposed to," I made this up frantically as I went along, "that's one thing the inspector inspects, whether a teacher blabs grades, but I'll work on Morrie and I bet he'll do it for you. Then I'll tell you if you're flunking or not, how's that? But it can't be anything but a secret, all right?"

  Toby attempted to shake his head and nod at the same time, whatever it took to vow secrecy.

  "I have to scoot on out of here," I told him, looking at the time. "I won't forget, about Morrie and your grades."

  I made a beeline for the kitchen, passing Damon at the table, where he was trying to be invisible behind his geography book. "Your turn," I said under my breath.

  Damon whispered back, "If I have to read him Heidi one more time I'm gonna puke."

  "Trade with Rose, then. Milk the cow while she does the reading." That shut him up. "Clear out of here, okay?" I shooed him toward Toby's bedroom. "I need to cook."

  "Cooking" was a generous description of it, I realize. But with Father in
the fields until the end of each day, I had fallen heir to the can opener and the pot of boiling water for potatoes or beans and the ham hocks and beef briskets and anything else that passed for victuals. Dismal as my supper efforts might be, no one seemed to think they were any worse than Father's best.

  ***

  MORNINGS NOW, I CROSSED THE FIELD IN THE DARK TOward the window glow of our kitchen where I knew Rose was puttering until I arrived, whistling softly to herself. I carried a bull's-eye lantern to find my way across the fresh furrows, a chocolate sea perturbed into long regular waves by Father's plowing and seeding, but in the middle of Rose's field I would put down the lantern for a minute and step away from it until my eyes adjusted to the dark, and then scan the sky. The moon went about its business, the stars were set in place, but search as I would, I could find no sign of a miraculous spark traveling from millions of miles away. Sir Edmund Halley and Morris Morgan said the comet was coming. They had better be right, I thought to myself, and picked up the lantern.

  The pertinent morning of this, I was barely through the kitchen door before the faint suggestion of a tune broke off and in its place the whisper: "Is anything up?"

  "Rose, that field only was planted last week."

  "Ah. I lose track of time. The days are so—" She darted to the stove where the teakettle was going off at an alarming rate. I couldn't tell exactly what description she might have given our daily household situation, but strewn came most readily to mind. Still and all, for a situation where she was camped out at our house, amid our bachelor habits all the time, things weren't going as badly as they could have. I'd had sizable second thoughts about the prospect of Rose and Father talking past each other, and Damon and I ineptly trying to referee, around the clock. Except for anything to do with farming, though, the two of them were getting along well enough within the same confines to surprise me.

  I ferried our cups from the drainboard and spooned in the cocoa and poured the hot water. When we settled at the table and Rose had taken a hummingbird sip, I whispered the usual: "How'd Tobe do last night?"

  "He didn't want to go to sleep." The little knit of consternation was between her eyebrows. "How can one boy come up with so much to worry about? The latest thing bothering him is that he won't get well in time for the comet."

  It indeed was going to be a close race, whether Toby mended before he drove us all crazy. I sighed. "I've told him twenty times we'll chop a hole in the roof if we have to for him to see the damn comet."

  When I glanced up after taking a slurp of cocoa, Rose was gazing at me with concern. "You're getting circles under your eyes. Isn't my bed comfortable?"

  I mumbled something about not being used to such luxury and hoped she would let it go at that. Not Rose. She gave me a knowing smile, as clinical as it was sympathetic, and here it came. "You miss Latin after school, don't you."

  That observation had been made to me so many times by so many different persons I was ready to pull my hair out. Because this was Rose, I merely grimaced and muttered, "After-school is shot until Tobe is himself again, that's all there is to it." I shoved back from the table and said crossly, "I have to wake up the bear den," meaning Father and Damon.

  I just about made it to the doorway before the murmur cut me off. "Paul?" I turned around, and there was one of those glints in Rose's eye.

  "And so." When she said that, you could never tell where things were heading. "Don't necessarily tell Morrie where you got the idea. But there's always before school."

  ***

  "MORRIE? DOES COPULATE MEAN WHAT I THINK IT DOES? In English, I mean."

  The morning I asked that, he had a terrible time keeping a straight face. Between yawns and cups of coffee that would have given Father's a run for its money and trying to prepare for the Department of Public Instruction inspector coming to lop his head off, he was doing his best to administer Latin to me before everyone else showed up for school. At that hour I was chipper as Chanticleer, which probably was no help to a bleary teacher who had to come an hour early every day to unlock the schoolhouse and light the overhead lamps and stoke up the stove and then face me and my translations. Morrie hadn't yet uttered a peep of complaint, however, and now he looked more than passingly interested in my question. "Dare I ask why you ask?"

  "Just wondering." I dabbed my finger onto the open page of the Latin collection of readings he had most recently provided me. "Besides, it's right here."

  Morrie blanched, then scrambled over to my desk to take a look. "Navem capere, copulas manus ferreas injecebamus," he read aloud hastily, then translated with relief: "To capture the vessel, we threw ropes with grappling irons.' The grappling is not that severe in the English form. But look it up."

  By the time I was through doing so, Morrie had banged the triangle for the start of school and everyone was fifing in. This day as others, Toby's desk stayed significantly empty as the rows around it filled, and that absence continued to make itself felt a number of ways between our fellow students and Damon and me. Rabrab made sure to give us each a dramatic dose of pity every time she passed. At the other extreme, Martin Myrdal leered in our direction whenever it occurred to him. Recesses were touchy, because Martin's was not the only tongue in the schoolyard that would like to have got at Damon and me with gossip from home about Rose's nightly presence under our roof. Ah, but with the Drobnys at our sides, we comprised a Slavic splinter state no one wanted to risk hostilities with. So it went, between sympathy and scandal. I caught Eddie Turley looking at us speculatively a few times, but so far I had managed to stare him down—I didn't want Damon to get into it with him.

  "What were you looking up?" Grover whispered as I passed his row on my way back from the dictionary.

  "Have to tell you later." I slid into my seat just as Morrie wondered aloud if we happened to know who Archimedes was. Good, it was going to be one of those days. I settled back to digest my morning's Latin, not even particularly minding the existence of Carnelia next to me, and listened to Morrie start in on how you could move the world if you had a lever long enough.

  Five minutes into the school day, he was in full spate when the door behind him opened quietly. The visitor was well into the room before Morrie became aware of him, although that was not the case with the rest of Marias Coulee School. A suck of wind went through us all.

  "A visitor, do I detect from your faces?" Morrie said resolutely, straightening his tie. More than half expecting the inspector all this while, he turned around.

  Brose Turley stood there.

  It was nothing like what my dreams had been forecasting all those months. The schoolroom door did not splinter and fly off its hinges. The wolfman of the high country did not come garbed in shaggy winter mackinaw and bloodstained mittens. Far from it. He had materialized there at the front of our schoolroom in everyday trapping attire, which in my first instant of seeing him seemed even more horrible. The heart-destroying boots. The greasy slouch hat made of who knows what. The well-used haft of the skinning knife sheathed at his belt. Brose Turley seemed to be enjoying his school visit; he strutted a few steps closer to our ranks of desks, looking us over as if we were a carnival sideshow.

  Like everyone else, I swung around to check on Eddie. The eyeglasses were off, hidden in his desk, and with remarkable presence of mind he was rubbing the telltale place on the bridge of his nose. Had he somehow heard the hoofbeats of the big gray horse when the rest of us didn't, or simply sensed his ogre of a father?

  "Mr. Turley good morning." Morrie recovered to the extent of manners, but his voice had a real edge to it. "Do you need to speak with Eddie about something that cannot possibly wait?"

  "Lot more than that. I want him home." Brose Turley relished the next words in the pink of his mouth before slowly rolling them out. "From here on." Sparing Eddie nothing, he squinted down the aisle of desks to his alarmed son. "On your feet, boy."

  I saw, and I am sure Damon saw, the ever-so-slight motion as Morrie brushed his fingertips along the side
pockets of his suit coat. If brass knuckles resided there, this time they did not emerge. Morrie drew himself up and wielded authority. "This has gone far enough. School is in session. You can't just—"

  "Look it up, teacher man. This is his birthday. Old enough to leave school, and that's what he's gonna do."

  Morrie appeared stunned. We all were. To show Turley he would not let him run a bluff, he strode to his desk and whipped out the student register. His head down, he flipped through until we could tell he had come to the eighth grade's page. After a bit, he looked up at Brose Turley. "Eddie should have some say in this."

  Turley shook his head, one wag each direction, like some animal ready in ambush, switching its tail. All eight grades of us stared at the spectacle occurring over our heads, so silly and savagely sad at the same time. There was fear in the room, and there was hatred. Brose Turley—or for that matter, Father—would have had to pry my cold, dead hands from my desk to withdraw me from a place of learning. Damon, Grover, Isidor, Gabe, Verl, Vivian, Carnelia, Rabrab, Miles, Lily Lee, any number of us in that classroom felt the same way, and even those among us who were not as keen on school knew that from a parent, this was not right. Yet this trespasser into our schoolhouse had the law on his side, something not even Morrie could remedy.

  He was trying common sense on the situation. "For heavens sake, be reasonable," he implored Turley. "It's only a matter of weeks until the end of school. Eddie can graduate—"

  "He's doing that this damn minute." Turley made a swipe at the air; it couldn't be called a beckoning gesture, only a signal of impatience. "Come on here, you. Don't make me have to tell you again."