The Whistling Season Page 28

  Father took another difficult breath. "I'm going to get my courage up and ask Rose to marry me. I brought you here to the hardest place in the world to say that. To see if I could."

  Not even the wind made a sound after that. The spell of silence gave Father a chance to compose himself somewhat.

  "Well, what do you think about this?" He scanned our faces anxiously. "Rose in the family will be different than it was with Mother."

  "I'll say," I said. I had to. Damon uncharacteristically did not seem to trust his voice.

  Father shot me a look.

  "A lot more whistling."

  There was a long pause while Father's face tried to make up its mind, so to speak. Gradually the sniffing sound that announced laughter came. I would not have said my remark warranted it, but Father laughed until tears came.

  21

  "MORRIE? YOU'LL BE OUR UNCLE AS WELL AS OUR TEACHER next year, won't you."

  "What?" He was caught by surprise, grating the chalk against the blackboard where he was concentrating on tomorrow's history test for the sixth grade. "Ah, that. We shall all have to try to not let it show." Letting me know with a strong glance over his shoulder that I should be more engrossed than I was in translating the twelve labors of Hercules—I was up to number three—he advised, "When you have a chance, look up avuncular, so you won't be too disappointed by my failure to match the definition." Chalk still poised, he mused a moment more: "Actually, I suppose step-uncle-in-law would be the cumbersome but apt term. There is no word for that. Where is Shakespeare when we need him?"

  The circumference of love depends on the angle you see it from, I learned in the course of that madcap week after Father proposed to Rose.

  As soon as he took himself over to the Schrickers and, still nervous and giddy, spilled out the news that he and Rose were getting married, Rae said knowledgably, "Well, of course you are." And George managed, "Good for you." At school, Damon and I ranged through each recess wary of opinions trickling into the schoolyard from parents at home. A few times we had to double up our fists at leers and crude comments, but mostly what reached us—the politics I am in today could learn some civility from the playground kind—was a community sigh of relief at the regularizing of things, finally, under the Milliron roof. The Drobny boys thwacked my shoulder in congratulation until it hurt.

  Toby's reaction was the most down-to-earth of all. "Rose, can we still call you Rose?"

  When she slipped into the house as early as usual the morning after Father popped the question to her, she still was radiant enough to turn a sunflower's head. A bit giddy myself, I watched her stop short in the kitchen doorway, as though the altar were right there. Her dazed smile hung a little crookedly on her while she checked on me across the room, eternal audience of one.

  "I pinched myself, first thing when I woke up," she whispered as if I had asked. "To make sure this is really happening to me. It's so much like a dream, don't you think?"

  "Cocoa's ready," I dodged off from that.

  She came and sat down catercorner from me, scooting into the chair nearest the stove. It dawned on me this would be her place at the table from now on, every mealtime. The place where Mother always sat.

  Rose fiddled with her cup, not even taking a perfunctory sip. Crystal ball-gazing into the cocoa, she murmured, "It makes a person wonder, Paul. Am I the right person to take this on?"

  Dumb me, I thought she meant things such as breaking eggs and other feats of cooking. "Well, if they turn your stomach too much—"

  "I don't know anything about raising boys," her whisper coincided with mine. "Children, I mean—but especially someone else's." The knit line between her eyebrows was deeper than I had ever seen it. There was a glisten in the corners of her eyes, of the sort Father had at the cemetery.

  All at once I felt as if I were in the witness chair. Tongue-tied, clumsy, and without direction. When you have been without a mother, how are you supposed to graft your heart to a new one at a moment's notice? I could have pratded out to Rose any number of fancy reassurances, but there still would have been three sets of facts clopping through this house in boys' shoes. Damon tended to be a schemer, that had to be admitted. Toby on his magic carpet of innocent confusion was going to hit things and break bones, that was proven. Then there was me, something like a dream-wrestling monk mumbling in a foreign tongue half the time. Father was another matter—Rose would have to judge that one for herself—but as far as I could see, we three weren't much of a bargain for her to walk in on. Viewed from our side, adventures in the leather trade and perdition and westbound trains to unknown places weren't the most motherly of attributes, either. Yet we were all ending up with each other, as that oldest utterance of destiny had it, for better or worse.

  In the end, the most honest thing I could offer Rose Llewellyn was the benefit of the doubt.

  "Father's had enough experience at boys for you both, probably," I whispered. Then thought to tag on: "Anyway, Tobe and Damon and I have it in writing that you don't bite."

  Rose let out a kind of a hiccup laugh, reheved to have the conversation go in that direction for the moment. "Morrie put that in the advertisement. Funny man." She shook her head slightly. "I'll have to learn to get along without him, more."

  I stirred. Habits of a lifetime were a lot to be sawed through by a wedding ring. At the betrothal news Morrie had declared gallantly "I would not want to yield her to anyone but you, Oliver." Why did that remind me of his last-ditch testimonial after Rose insisted on buying Aunt Eunice's homestead?

  Worse, what if cold feet ran in their family? Maybe I was not much of a diagnostician, but I seemed to be the only one available. "Uhm, Rose," I jittered this out, barely hearable even to myself, T know this is a big step for you, at least that's what people always say. If you're going to have, uh, second thoughts, Father would want you to have them right away now instead of after—"

  "No, no, not one little bit," she whispered back insistently. "Paul, your father is a find." Her cheeks colored up. "A surprise, I mean to say. The best ever."

  It has always intrigued me: did Rose know what was up, that day of Father's proposal? As soon as he lured Damon and me into the roundabout route to the cemetery, did her whistling change over to Mendelssohn? If so, she hid all sign of it by the time we came galloping back to the homestead. Each time I go over this in my mind, she and Toby are at the pothole pond taking turns flinging a stick, Houdini giving himself a bath a minute by plunging in to fetch. I see her perfectly there yet, in Father's Lake District, apron bright against nature's colors as if she had been thought up in a poem by Wordsworth. "Back the same day, I see," that young Rose of then calls over to us as if males generally did not have such homing instincts. Her arm draws back and she sends the stick sailing again. The Milliron men, for Damon and I felt quite elevated after Father's conference with us, stride abreast to the pond, grinning like fools. I'd have given skin off an elbow to listen in on Father's proposal to Rose, and probably that went double for Damon. We did our duty instead. Before Toby knew what hit him, he had been swept away from the Lake District on the pretense that the two of us could not possibly snare gophers without him and Houdini. Left alone with each other, a woman who was used to bossing dust around, and a man trying to master emotions he swore he would never have, had to find common ground if they could. Latin was not a hard topic at all compared to romance, from what I could see.

  Cold cocoa now brought us to our senses, both a little embarrassed at our kitchen spill of trepidations.

  Rose laughed softly. "Do you know, I really am a case this morning. I didn't even think to look at the comet."

  "You'll be sorry." I glanced quickly toward the window, but at that time of year, daylight was cutting into the small hours when the comet showed itself. "It's growing a new tail."

  "You're a spoofer," she murmured, although she didn't sound sure. "As bad as Morrie sometimes."

  "See for yourself tomorrow morning," I whispered airily. "Morrie told us i
n school what it's about." Tracing a long arc in the oilcloth with my fingernail, I showed her. "Back here at the end of the tad, there's a gas that separates from the comet dust. The sun pulls it away or something, nobody knows. Usually it happens over so many nights people don't really notice. But once in a great whde the comet goes bobtail, and has to grow back. This is one of those times."

  ***

  ROSE HAD TO TAKE MY WORD FOR IT THAT HALLEY'S COMET was busily sprouting a new tail, because by nightfall clouds had hidden the sky. When I poked my head out in the last of dark, that next morning, up there was what looked like a vast laundry pile, gray mixed in with white, as if the weather had been saving up and here was the heap. My hopes high, I walked out into Rose's field a little way to listen for the cry of the curlew at dawn, which is supposed to forecast rain. The curlew could not find its music that morning, but that didn't much worry me. It had to rain sometime, didn't it?

  Each dark, cloudy day after that we started off to school convinced we would need our slickers—Father put Toby's on him before swinging him up behind my saddle every morning, and Morrie did the same for him before hoisting him aboard behind Damon for the ride home—and every time we trotted back into the yard as dry as when we had left. Always threatening and not delivering, the aggravating weather kept on like that all week. I thought to myself Friday night, Damn. It's going to do it to us, isn't it.

  Rose skimmed in on Saturday blissful as she had been lately. Anticipation looked good on her. She was over her case of the flutters, and every morning now we sat jabbering in whispers about her life ahead with us. Without it ever quite being said, she and Father thought it wise to get off to a clean start with Marias Coulee general opinion. They had set the wedding date—the first Sunday after the end of school—not terribly far off but far enough to show they were not being pressed into this by, say, a race with the stork. That all went over my head at the time, naturally. I only knew she was on a cloud of her own, or rather she and Father were. This particular morning, the wavy curls bounced fetchingly on her forehead as she quick-stepped through the kitchen doorway and toward me at the table. "It still looks like rain," she reported in a husky whisper, full of faith. "Maybe today it means it."

  "There's going to be trouble," I predicted, not bothering to keep my voice down.

  Rose froze in mid-slide into her chair, shooting a wide-eyed look of question across at me.

  "HE'S NOT GONNA COME, IS HE?"

  The earsphtting wail from Toby in the upstairs bedroom hung in the air of the house like a stuck echo, then was chased by loud sobs.

  "There it is now," I said.

  Rose raced out of the kitchen and I followed. There was a clatter in Father's bedroom, and he charged into the hallway trying to tuck in his shirttad and slick back his hair at the same time. He pulled up short at the sight of Rose, and gave her the full-of-sap smile a fiance gives a fiancee with two weeks to go before the wedding.

  "Good morning, my dear. It sounds as if we have a crisis with our impatient patient. Come on up; you may as well get in practice for this sort of thing. You too, Paul; we may need all the troops."

  When we reached there, Damon had floundered over to Toby's bed, dragging most of the bedclothes from his and mine on the journey, and was sitting with his arm draped around Toby blearily reciting, "What's the matter, Tobe? Tobe, what's the matter?" although the reason was right out the window.

  "THE DOCTOR!" Indignantly Toby managed to break off crying long enough to loose another blast at the sight of Father and Rose and me and point to the grayed-over window by his bunk. "IT'S GONNA RAIN, AND HE WON'T COME! WHY COULDN'T IT RAIN A COUPLE OF DAYS AGO?"

  Toby's agony was justifiable. This was the day set for his last looking-over by the doctor, but if it wasn't a case of life and death, no physician in his right mind would dare to launch a Model T onto Marias Coulee's roads ahead of a deluge. Henry Ford's pride and joy was no match for our mud. Like the rest of us, Toby had seen too many fledgling automobiles in the ditch to hold any hope for a traveler arriving when the clouds were practically dragging the ground out there. A pang for him went through me. After all his weeks as a patient, from the look of things Toby was going to have to keep right on lugging his foot around as if it were made of glass, and he howled again at the prospect.

  "It just isn't fair, is it," Rose at once pitched in, kneeling to dab away his tears with her handkerchief, a stylish monogramed RL one, I noticed, rather than the old yellowed thing Aunt Eunice had always put to the same purpose. "But the doctor will come the first minute he can, I know he will."

  I was not going to bawl about it, but I was almost as desperate as my little brother in hoping she was right. As my passenger to school every morning, Toby had nearly worn the skin off my back and middle with his wiggle-worm restlessness behind the saddle. Damon now woke up enough to look just as dismayed at any more days of hauling our whirling dervish home behind him. Wall to wall, there was not a being in our household, probably including Houdini, who was not more than ready for Toby to be certified as mended.

  Father, however, was in a predicament. Here he was, a farmer who madly wanted it to rain and rain some more, but the parent of a terminally disappointed boy marooned by the prospect of mud. Covertly, I watched him gauge back and forth from the gray, swollen clouds outside to Toby's stormy little face and make up his mind.

  "Tobe, my man, we'll go to him," he reached the valiant decision. "The team and surrey will take the mud all right, if the weather does cut loose. I'll throw on a vulcanized tarp to keep us dry. We'll get you to that doctor in royal style."

  "R-r-really?" Toby's sobs ebbed away at the prospect of a trip to town. He got busy wiping his nose with the back of his hand, Rose determinedly substituting the handkerchief every swipe she could. Blinking away last tears, he peered at her in adoration. "Rose, can you come too?"

  She looked up at Father. "If it would help—?"

  I'd love to have your company," Father shook his head, "but you'd better hold down things at this end. Get your clothes on, Tobe. Damon, you could stand some, too."

  I had hopes myself on the matter of town, but as soon as Father and Rose and I were back downstairs he made it clear other duties beckoned me. "Barn chores," he ratded off, his mind mostly elsewhere, "you and Damon, need I say more?"

  Then, strangely, he drew quite a breath and turned so he was facing Rose square on. Determination was in his expression, and inquiry in hers. Whatever this was about, I started to edge to the kitchen to leave the two of them alone, but Father crooked a finger at me.

  "I have another task for everybody. Florence's things"—his gaze shifted from Rose's face to include me—"Mother's things-need going through."

  "Oh, Oliver. I couldn't." Rose, who had never met a chore she couldn't prevail over, appeared flustered. A closet of clothes every stitch of which would remind me of Mother did not appeal to me, either.

  "It needs doing," Father said in both our directions. "I haven't been able to face it myself, and besides, I'm no expert on women's garments. I'd ask Rae to come over and help you, but Tobe and I should try to beat the weather to town." He looked more resolved than ever. He put his hands squarely on Rose's shoulders. "You're to have anything you can make use of," he made clear to her, "and Paul can set aside anything in the way of keepsakes, and the rest we give away."

  Rose and I glanced at one another. That was all it took. If we had to do it, we had to.

  Father was heading for his yellow slicker coat, to go and harness the horses to the surrey, when he thought to say over his shoulder to me:

  "Get Damon in on it. Maybe it'll get some of the excavating out of his system."

  From taffeta to gingham, Damon and I peered in confound-ment at our mother's wardrobe in one end of the closet in the downstairs bedroom when Rose had finished her other chores for the day. I won't say we all put off the task, but none of us was eager for it. Already I had the feeling I would see these garments again, in many a dream.

 
Lucky for us, Rose saw she had to take charge. She took the first few things at hand from where they were hanging and carefully laid them out on Father's big bed for sorting. "Your mother had some pretty things."

  True, but on the other hand she had not been nearly the clotheshorse Rose was. Mother's everyday dresses, faded in that bleached-out-all-over way ones from the catalog do, instantly were as familiar to me as days of the week. The few more elaborate frocks, the ones Father meant when he would say "Put on a pinafore, Flo, we're going dancing at the schoolhouse," on the other hand looked good as new.

  I could see why this was too much for Father. Mindful of his instructions, Damon and I tried time and again to give something to Rose, but she only thanked us warmly and declined to take any of it, not even an apron. Eventually she hesitated over a fox fur muff when Damon reached it down from the closet shelf.

  "It's from when we lived back east in Wisconsin," he recognized it soberly.

  I was awkward about it, but I felt the offer should be made one more time. "Don't you think you should have this, Rose? It can get cold here, winters, honest."

  Diplomatically or honestly or even both, she replied, "It's lovely. I'd be honored to have it." When Damon presented it to her, she stroked the fur and smiled at us. "I'll save it for occasions."

  The cleaning out went quicker after that. We dispensed and disposed, this for the missionary society bundle, that for the rag bag. A nice patterned dress that Rose thought would suit Rae was carefully set aside. Things flew along that way until Damon reached in way at the back of the closet and pulled out what proved to be Mother's wedding gown.

  He and I goggled at it, afraid to say anything. Rose once more stepped into the breach. "We'll want to keep this and put it away for your father. Here, I'll wrap it and find a drawer for it."

  I believe that turned the last corner for all three of us. While Rose busied herself carrying the wedding gown over to lay it out for folding, Damon keenly dug into the dresser drawer where Mother had kept handkerchiefs and sachets and such. In my case, enough load was off my mind that my thoughts started to roam. They marched into that timeless procession of men and women coming down the aisle together—in my view of history, from Rome on down. "Nuptiae primae. Sorry. Your first wedding, I was thinking about, Rose. I bet you had a spiffy gown like that, too, didn't you?"