The Whistling Season Read online

  "—or cooks," Damon contributed.

  "—or cooks," Father picked that up gamely. "So if it takes a housekeeper to set us to rights, why on earth shouldn't we get one?" He scanned the table in beleaguered fashion. "Is anyone else going to take mercy on that last Missouri T-bone?"

  Rae passed him the final chicken drumstick. "Keep your strength up, Oliver."

  Aunt Eunice was not going to be deterred or detoured. "Times change, they say," she uttered as if not believing any of it. And immediately followed up with:

  Yet, Experience spake,

  the old ways are best;

  steadfast for steadfast's sake,

  passing the eons test.

  Again, general silence met her spirited recitation.

  Aunt Eunice appeared to expect no understanding from this gathering. "Oh, well," she fanned herself with a tiny veined hand, "soon I'll be dead."

  That particular utterance of hers never failed to drive an icicle straight through the heart of every male in the room, except Toby. He turned as soulful as a seven-year-old could. Around most of the rest of the table, I could have predicted the responses. George's tone broke slightly as he tried to make the usual hearty assertion, "Mum, you're sound as a dollar." Then Father: if Father nicked himself shaving he thought he was two feet into the grave. Even worse, invocations of mortality, with Mother's memory so raw to him, always turned him as adrift as a castaway. Damon's eyes narrowed; if Aunt Eunice was on her way to the hereafter, it plainly seemed to him to be by a highly roundabout route.

  Rae, who had been hearing Aunt Eunice predict imminent demise for years, merely lifted an eyebrow as if interested in the prospect. But then I caught her notice across the table and she turned concerned.

  "Paul, you look a bit peaked."

  Certainly the inside of my head had gone pale. Against my will, the floodgate of remembrance had been jarred open by Aunt Eunice's icy utterance, and my dream from the night before poured back to me.

  Since that time I have had nearly half a century of indelible dreams. People are always telling me they wish they could remember exactly what their dreams were about, but I wonder if they have any idea what that means. Only the few persons closest to me know anything of the quirk that causes the roamings within my sleep to live on in me intact in every incised detail and every echoing syllable. My wife learned, in our first nights together, that my mind does not shut down at midnight; it goes visiting in the neighborhoods of imagination and recapitulation and other nocturnal regions that do not quite have names. Damon could have warned her. Everyone is familiar with the concept known as amnesia: a departure of memory. My condition, as I have gingerly explored it, is best called simply mnesia: protraction of recall. Dreams slide over into my memory, in a way that I am helpless to regulate; as well as I can describe it, my dream experiences become something like frescoes on the countless walls of the brain. Not that this mental trick will ever win me a job in a sideshow. Except for the acuity I am credited with by my supporters in state government, reward for the right guesses I have made in the administration of education down through the years, there seems to be no other particular power of mind in my mnesiac case. As often as anyone else, I lose track of my fountain pen somewhere between the ink bottle and whatever awaits signature on my desk. But I never forget a dream. They stay with me like annals of the Arabian Nights, except that mine now go far beyond a thousand and one.

  So it was with the episode that had everyone at the Sunday table cocking an eye at me now. Dreams—at least mine—are scavenger hunts to anywhere, but I could sort out some of the sources of this one. When we arrived west on the train of emigrant cars and the boxcar next to ours was unloaded at the Westwater siding, out came a casket, empty; we never did know if it represented some settler's pessimism or was merely in shipment or what. The version of it delivered in my dream was not empty, and Mother was missing, and Damon and I and Toby—who did not exist at the time—were by ourselves in the doorway of another boxcar, one so high off the railroad bed we could not figure out how to hop down. Sitting out there supervisory in the buffalo grass was Aunt Eunice in her rocking chair. Father and, for some reason, his fellow school board member Joe Fletcher were laboring to lift the coffin onto the unhitched dray. "They forgot the horses," Damon kept fretting as we toed the brink of the boxcar, wanting to go to the aid of the men. Aunt Eunice was the only person around who could help us down, but she wasn't about to. "Don't let those boys at that," she bossed the men struggling with the casket's brass handles. "They'll drop it."

  "At least we know you're not off your feed, Paul," Father deduced from my empty plate, his words snapping me out of the dream visitation. Leaning my way at the table, he reached to feel my forehead with the back of his hand. I had no idea what he would find there, fever or chill, but the diagnosis never took place. Instead came a terrifying wail from Toby:

  "AUNT EUNICE, I DON'T WANT YOU TO D-D-DIE!"

  This commotion took some while to settle down, Toby sobbing the front of Father's shirt wet and then Rae's blouse. I suspected Aunt Eunice of being secretly pleased, but outwardly she showed only impatience as she at last directed: "Oh, for heaven's sake, let me have the child."

  Still full of sniffles, Toby went to her, the lifting oof was given, and he perched unsteadily on those venerable knees. "Mustn't cry," she ordered, dabbing him dry with the lace hanky. "Now I want you to be a good boy all week, and tell me all your doings next Sunday."

  As Toby blinked and tried to muster a shiny-eyed smile, she added as piteously as before:

  "If I'm spared until then."

  ***

  THE LETTER WAS THERE WHEN WALT STINSON DROPPED OFF our sack of provisions and mail the Friday of the next week.

  Father plucked it up as if it were the royal invitation he had been expecting. But he tapped the envelope thoughtfully against the fingertips of his other hand a few times before sitting down to slit it open with his jackknife blade.

  The three of us crowded around him at his place at the kitchen table. The page full of staccato handwriting was too much for Toby. "Read it to us," he implored. Damon's lips were moving silently as he tried to scan the closely worded sheet of paper over Father's shoulder.

  "I think Paul should be in charge of the elucidation," Father said as soon as he had figured out the gist of the letter.

  The "Dear Mr. Milliron" salutation and the rest of the formal part of the letter I read off as if it had come from Shakespeare himself; perhaps Aunt Eunice's nagging about elocution had made more impression than I thought. I slowed up markedly, though, at the penultimate paragraph and then the ultimate:

  The salary you have suggested is, may I say, not quite adequate to my current needs. Fortunately, however, I do see a way out of impasse on this matter. Were I able to draw my first three months of wages ahead of time, that would be a sufficiency to enable me to take my leave of Minneapolis and join your employ.

  If you will send the wage sum and the ticket price by Western Union, I will embark on the most immediate train for Montana.

  Sincerely yours,

  Rose Llewellyn

  "Rose Llewellyn," Toby all but rolled in the sound of it. "That's a swell name, isn't it, Paul? Damon, don't you like it too?"

  Damon, though, was rocked back on his heels by something else. "We have to pay her until after Christmas to even get her here?"

  "Wait, there's something on the back," I said, seeing the ghost line of ink that had come through the paper. I turned the letter over and read aloud:

  PS. May I say, Mr. Milliron, you write a splendid hand.

  It is inspirational to correspond with one to whom

  penmanship is not a lost art.

  I tried to hide a grin of pride. Meanwhile Father, who had not been heard from during any of this, cleared his throat.

  My brothers and I expectantly sank to our chairs at the table.

  Father still said nothing. As we watched, he held the letter up in front of him and ran his other hand
back and forth through his hair, as if massaging his next thought. I still wonder what the outcome would have been if Houdini had not chosen that moment to get up from his spot by the stove, shake himself vigorously, and plop back down in a settling cloud of dog hair and dust. Father took so long he might have been counting the motes, but eventually he straightened up in his chair, gave a little sigh, and sent the letter across the tabletop in my direction.

  "Paul, get out your pen. We have to draft a telegram of surrender."

  ***

  WHAT A TIRELESS INSTRUCTOR MEMORY IS. DON'T I WISH I could put it on my department's payroll. Its hours are unpredictable, however. Keeping an eye on the time today as I must, I see that the future—with whatever lasting recognition it will attach to October of 1957—is about to pay a visit. I have to make myself go out for a look.

  At least the day itself seems neutral, which does not happen often at Marias Coulee. I think back to the winters here and shiver, and to the dry summers when Father and George and the other homesteaders watched as cloud after cloud dragged across the Rockies and the tufts of rain would catch on the distant peaks and be of no help to their fields. But around me now, the sky could not be more guiltlessly empty. Even the wind has nothing to say, for once. The only sound anywhere around is at the pothole pond where waterfowl, passing through with the seasons, sometimes alight. Whistler swans, my lifelong favorite, are the maestros, and geese next, but today it is a few dozen mallards that have migrated in and formed a fleet, with much quacking. Some kind of duck event and they have the prairie to themselves for it, except for me and whatever is passing over.

  I search the unmarked blue sky, even though I know the human eye isn't adequate anymore. It is up there more than a hundred miles, the newspapers say. The Russian orbiter, Sputnik, that emulates the moon—and that will have such a tidal pull on our education system. Now that the Soviet Union has sped past this country into space, science will be king, elected by panic. It has already started, in the editorials and legislative rumblings. Those rumblings soon will grow into growls. If I have an enemy in this world, it is the chairman of the appropriations committee. Car dealer from Billings that he is, he knows how many times I have outwitted him. This time, even though it is a borrowed sum for an I.Q. like his, substance of debate is on his side. There will be no mercy on aspects of education that can't be argued as miracle cures in catching up with the Russians in the launching of satellites, such as one-room schools at the thin edges of the counties of Montana. A thousand such schools fall under my jurisdiction.

  I have to catch my breath at this barbwire twist of my career. It is as if the person I thought was me—the Paul Milliron known to the world of education—has been eclipsed by this Russian kettle of gadgetry orbiting overhead. Yes, I was the youngest state superintendent of schools in the nation back when I was first elected—inevitably, "the boy wonder of the West" in the Time magazine article—and am now the longest-serving. Yes, I took the schools of Montana through the Depression without such wholesale closings. Yes, my depleted department fended tooth and nail during the Second World War when everything was rationed and teachers evaporated daily into the war effort, and again we never closed schools by swipe of the hand. But now it has fallen to me to pronounce the fate of an entire species of schooling, the small prairie arks of education such as the one that was the making of me.

  I do not know where to turn. There is no help to be had from the governor's office; governors come and go, and the current one has a date with obscurity. No, I have been singled out—my office has been singled out—to deliver the word to the teachers and school boards of the one-room schools all across the state that there is no place for them in the Age of Sputnik. To some extent I know how it will go, in Great Falls this evening. The convocation of delegates from the rural school systems will include old friends, people I have known since I had my own country classroom. "Mr. Milliron, good to see you," they will say, or "Superintendent, hello again." Not a woman nor a man of them is comfortable calling me "Paul." They likely are not going to want to anyway, after today.

  There is time before that yet. For the meeting of another sort where, like Toby, I can at least boast perfect attendance. Back there at memory's depot where Rose stepped down from the train, bringing several kinds of education to the waiting four of us.

  3

  SHE ALIT TO THE PLANKED PLATFORM OF THE WESTWATER depot on feet as dainty as Toby's little ones.

  In those days people poured off the afternoon train—it was called that even though it was the only one all day—and peered around like sailors in uncharted latitudes as they waited for their belongings from the baggage car. Babies lulled by the rocking motion of the train were coming awake with shrieks at their new surroundings. Coal dust from the engine tender and the smell of mothballed things gotten out for long journeys clung in the air. Our eyes big with the occasion, Damon and Toby and I couldn't help but stare at the black-clad Belgian boys in the latest colony of families transplanting themselves from Flanders, nor they at us.

  Father, who in strongest terms had prescribed best behavior for us at the depot, was standing on tiptoe and teetering a bit as he tried to sort anyone housekeeperly from the swelling crowd of land pilgrims and Big Ditch workmen and homestead people like us on town errands that called for Sunday clothes.

  The disembarking passengers were dwindling rapidly, though, and Father's composed expression along with them, when we heard "Coming through!" and had to move back to dodge the cart of cream cans that were the freight for the train's return run to the mainline. Ever since, I think of Rose as having materialized to us like a genie from a galvanized urn.

  For when the creamery cart had passed, there she was on the top step of the nearest Pullman car, assembled in surprising finery, targeting us with an inventive smile which somehow seemed to favor all four of us equally, while at the same time allowing herself to be helped down by an evident admirer from the train.

  "Mrs. Llewellyn?" Father addressed her as if wondering out loud.

  "Yes, absolutely!"

  Before we were done blinking she was across the platform to us, a smartly gloved hand extended. "Oh, I'm exceedingly happy to make your acquaintance, Mr. Milliron. And these are your young men!"

  Naturally the three of us puffed up at that promotion in rank. Names were given, handshakes exchanged right down the line—Rose's hand, like the rest of her, was slender but firm—and our notion of the league of widowhood seriously readjusted. Aunt Eunice always excepted, in our experience widows were massive. We felt ourselves shrink in the presence of those great-bosomed old creatures shrouded in dresses as solemnly gray as the gravestones whereunder their late husbands lay. But this mourner of Mr. Llewellyn, whoever he may have been, was all but swathed in a traveling dress the shade of blue flame—Minneapolis evidently did not lack for satin—and there did not seem to be an ounce extra anywhere on her pert frame. In fact, I had noticed Father give a double look as if there must be more of her somewhere.

  And she was awfully far from being old.

  "Mr. Milliron, let me say at once," the words rushed from her as if she had been holding them in all the way from the train station in Minnesota, "your kind understanding in letting me draw ahead on my wages made a world of difference to my situation. Really it did. I don't know what I would have done but for your letters of—" Here adequate tribute to the Milliron corresponding hand—mine—obviously failed her, and she accorded Father a look of overpowering thankfulness for his existence.

  "It was nothing," Father replied, magnificently bland, "an A-l housekeeper is worth a bit of extra ink."

  Rose blushed becomingly. Modesty's rush of blood went well with her gently proportioned cheekbones and the demure expression that came to her lips. Over that, though, there still were the warm brown eyes to contemplate, and the hairdo where wavy curls and fair forehead played peekaboo in a style slightly saucy compared with, well, our notion of widows. None of which caused disturbance in any of us, let
me say, including Father. Toby was not advanced enough in life yet to think about it, but Damon and I knew Father was immune to women because he missed Mother so. "I will not go through life resenting a woman because she isn't Florence," he had made plain when George and Rae pointed out that people were known to marry again. "And a stepmother for this tribe of heathens"—he meant us—"is apt to be a cure worse than the affliction." So, he was at his most academic as he sized up—or more likely, sized down—Rose Llewellyn there at the depot. All he wanted was a housekeeper, and this one had come with proclamations to that effect all over her. Besides, there were those three months of wages and a train ticket invested in getting her here.

  "Well, shall we be on our way, Mrs. Llewellyn?" His baritone was a bit brusque as he indicated to where our horses and wagon were hitched. He unrooted Damon and me and even Toby with seat-of-the-pants pushes of encouragement toward the baggage car. "The boys—the Milliron young men will gladly fetch whatever you've brought."

  An exclamation that defied translation came from Rose and she gave her head a quick little shake, her dark brunette curls flipping on her forehead, as though just then remembering something. She spun half around, her gaze flying across the now nearly empty platform.

  Our four sets of eyes followed hers to the tweed-suited traveler who had helped her off the train.

  Like her, this individual believed in sparing nothing on appearance. A paisley vest peeked from amid the tweed. A gold watch chain was swagged across the vest. The man was not at all tall, but held himself very straight as if to make the most of what he had. He was lightly built, and an extraordinary amount of him was mustache. It was one of those maximum ones such as I had seen in pictures of Rudyard Kipling, a soup-strainer and a lady-tickler and a fashion show, all in one. Almost as remarkable, he was the only bare-headed man in Montana, the wind teasing his dramatically barbered hair. As we gawked at the stranger he appeared somewhat ruffled, and not merely by the breeze.