The Whistling Season Read online

  "No, no, the milking!"

  "Ah, that. Clever of you to think of it, Damon."

  When Rose sailed into the room again under another billow of sheets to be washed, Father began laying out to her the logical connection between the churn and the origin of the milk, therefore—

  "I rather thought this might come up," Rose interrupted him. "It's been a while, but I can milk a cow." She studied Father for a moment. "Are there any other duties that come under the Montana definition of housekeeping?"

  Father brightened. "Actually, there's another skill allied to all your domestic ones we had hoped to call on. We could even add a bit to your wages if absolutely necessary. It would help like everything, Rose, if you could handle the kitchen—"

  "—scraps for the chickens," Rose concluded with a knowing wag of her head. "Inevitable. Poultry are not my favorite creatures and a slop bucket is never pretty, but all right, I can feed the chickens for you and I suppose gather the eggs while I'm at it." Now she peered at Father with mortal seriousness. The top of her head only reached the tip of his chin, but we were to find that there was no shortage of stature in Rose's tone when she spoke up like this. "Oliver, I must tell you—I take exception to pigs."

  "Put your mind at rest, we're hog-free," Father said with an expulsion of breath. He noticed the riveted audience of the three of us. "Don't you have a schoolhouse waiting for you?"

  "We're going, we're going," I said, reluctant to tear myself away. Damon grabbed up the schoolbooks he had brought home but of course had not opened, Toby pecked Father on the cheek as the other two of us manfully watched the daily goodbye kiss we had outgrown, we chorused a parting to Rose, and off we went.

  That October sky was as deceptively clear as this one. Across the crisp grass of autumn, Toby and Damon and I spurred our horses with a verve we hadn't had since before Mother left our lives. Great gains came seldom, in our experience, but we could already count ours up since Rose's arousing knock on the door a mere hour ago. Damon was liberated from the milk pail. I no longer had to ferry our every stitch of clothing to Rae's wash days. And Toby had a name engraved on his heart, as he always needed, and it read Rose Llewellyn. All that, plus the fact that the disheveled house was in for the cleaning of its life. True, we were no better off on the matter of meals yet, but we had to trust that Father would find some way to win Rose over on that.

  As we rode to school, the shadows of our horses lively behind us, the world as we knew it in Marias Coulee seemed to shine with fresh promise. The Pronovosts had loyally waited for us at the section-line fence, late as we were, providing us the earliest possible listening audience about the marvels of housekeeping. Father had harnessed his team of workhorses in record time and already could be seen on the haul road to the irrigation project with the dray, waving jauntily to us across the fields. Perhaps most miraculous, the slow song of a saw from the direction of Aunt Eunices place confirmed that Morrie was gainfully employed. He had asked Father, "What exactly is meant by a cord of wood?" "Four feet wide, four feet high, and eight feet long, that's a cord," Father recited in surprise. "Intriguing," said Morrie. "I wonder whether Shakespeare was working that in, there in the line 'O, the charity of a penny cord.'" "I have a hunch he was merely threatening to hang a nobleman," Father responded. "So. Do you know how to use a splitting maul?" In short, on a morning when even those two fussy autodidacts were in tune with the tasks of this earth, every prospect pleased.

  But that afternoon at recess, I slugged Eddie Turley.

  Damon of all people pulled me off him. Probably more in surprise than charity toward me, the Swede boys held Eddie back as he raged to get at me. Odds were that it was the only punch I would ever land on him, but it had been a good one, a clout to the jaw that knocked him back a step or two. That swing of my fist created an instant sensation in the schoolyard. "That's it, Paul, lay it to him!" Verl Fletcher yelped in encouragement, as if I hadn't just delivered my best. "Ooh, your poor hand," issued from Barbara Rellis, a sixth-grader but already catty. Carnelia's head popped out of the outhouse. I caught sight of Toby in the circle of smaller kids, looking amazed. Everything escalated with the speed of sound. Grover Stinson and Miles Calhoun were talking back to Eddie and his outraged contingent, and since the Swedes happened to be over there on Eddie's side, the Slavs automatically formed up on mine and chimed in. The history-book chapter on the Congress of Vienna had nothing to show us about balances of alliances.

  My immediate adversary, however, was not Eddie Turley but my brother. In the strictest sense, Damon and I saw eye to eye. He had caught up to me in height, validating—in his own mind, at least—his passion for every kind of sports over my bookish-ness. Now he had me in a lassolike arm hold across my chest, and if I hadn't been so mad, it should have occurred to me what I was in for from Eddie if even Damon could so easily handle me. Our faces nearly touched as we traded savage whispers.

  "Have you gone crazy? He's too much for you."

  "I don't care. I'm through taking it about the housekeeper."

  "What'd he say?"

  "He asked me if she fed us from her tit for breakfast."

  "Why didn't you hit him harder?"

  "Thanks all to hell, Damon."

  Suddenly everyone became aware of a sound like a woodpecker on glass. Miss Trent was rapping on a schoolroom window, trying to see what the excitement was. She came outside on these occasions only if fists were already flying. With long practice, all of us in the schoolyard dissolved from the scene of the fracas but stayed within range of catcall.

  Eddie was staring blue murder at me, and for that matter, Damon. He had the right pedigree for it. Ambrose Turley hunted wolves and coyotes for a livelihood, and he and Eddie lived not much better than beasts themselves in a ramshackle place on the Marias River bottomland. People went out of their way to leave Brose Turley alone as he scavenged the countryside setting traps and collecting pelts. His nearly man-size son looked perfectly capable of collecting mine.

  Damon was undaunted. "Let me," he insisted in my ear. "I'll get him off the notion of beating the jelly out of you, all right?"

  "Thanks all to hell again. How—"

  "Don't worry, it'll work slick."

  With that, Damon already was strutting toward the Turley faction to parley. "Just Paul and Eddie—the rest of us keep our noses out," he negotiated with Martin Myrdal and Carl Johannson, eighth-graders who were Eddie's most sizable lieutenants. The Swede boys cast hard looks to where the Drobny brothers and the Stoyanovs, Milo and Ivo, were close behind me, but also on our side of the matter was Verl Fletcher, an eighth-grader like them who was all long arms and knuckles. "We don't mind watching Paul get what he's got coming," Martin finally sealed the bargain.

  That quick, Damon sprung terms on Eddie. "No fighting it out. You're so much bigger than Paul it isn't fair. He'll take you on, but another way. Loser has to leave the other one alone the rest of the school year."

  Eddie could not believe what he was hearing. He sputtered, "He hit me first!"

  "That evens up for the time you hit Grover, and that time with Milo, and how many times has he done it to you, Martin?" Everybody knew Damon could have kept on naming off schoolyard victims who had felt a clout out of nowhere from Eddie Turley, including most of the girls.

  It sunk in on Eddie that this was not the jury to complain to about unfair treatment. He switched to bravado. "I ain't scared of no Milliron. You name it, I'll clean up on him."

  "Paul will race you," Damon stayed in charge. "Horseback."

  Eddie sneered. "That the best you can do? Any sissy can sit on a horse."

  Damon had him where he wanted him. With a wicked grin he specified:

  "Wrong end to."

  Which one of us had come up with riding backward in the saddle in our constant races with each other I can't really prove, but my money would be on Damon. It broke the monotony of the ride to and from school. For a few years there, in good weather my gamesman brother and I pretty much rode daily doub
les against each other. Whoever lost in the first gallop only had to say "Wrong end to, this time" and off we shot again, crazy jockeys clinging atop the horse's hindquarters. Now that the bulk of age is on me, I can barely imagine ever being that nimble in the saddle—shucking out of the stirrups, scooting up and around on the seat of our pants, and ending up reseated as if we were going one direction and the horse the other—or that my roan Joker or Damon's pinto Paint put up with it. We didn't race wrong-end-to as much after Toby started going to school with us, as he didn't need any encouragement in the direction of breaking his neck. But every so often, when the three of us would reach the stretch of the road to school that couldn't be seen from any house, one or the other could not resist flinging the challenge, and the Milliron cavalry would be flying down the road, back pockets first.

  But those were races for fun. The ante was sky-high in the contest with Eddie. "He has that steel-gray, remember," I pointed out to Damon, promoter of all this. Brose Turley, in his occupation of running down wolves, possessed a saddle string of deep-chested, rangy horses, and Eddie rode a grizzled brute of a steed that looked like it could run a gazelle to death.

  "Joker's not bothered, are you, boy" Damon reached over from his own mount and rubbed the mane of my bow-necked sorrel saddle pony. Then held up a fist to me like John L. Sullivan striking a pose, grinning behind it. "One-Punch Milliron. Gonna have to put you in my scrapbook."

  "Bam!" Toby, riding on the other side of me on our way home from school, was even more exultant about the haymaker I got in on Eddie. "You really gave it to him, Paul!"

  I glanced at Damon, and he at me. Ahead of us, down the long gumbo hill toward home, a field of white linen had sprouted in front of our house and Rose could just be seen out there taking sheets off the clothesline. We both reined up, and I reached over and halted Toby's horse as well. "Tobe, listen. You can't tell anybody. Anybody, got that? The fight and the race and all, this has to be a strict secret." I spat in the palm of my hand. His eyes large, Toby did the same and submitted to the first binding handshake of his life.

  Damon set the race—naturally, the whole schoolyard had to be in on it—for Friday after school. As every kid knew, parents somewhat lost track of the clock at the end of the school week, and we had our set of proven tactics to take advantage of that lapse. It was not unusual for an entire pack of us to jaunt off after school to a coyote den someone had discovered, so you could just bet that across Marias Coulee that Friday the excuse for late arrival home would be a mumbled chorus of "looking for coyote pups." Beyond that, the kids with farthest to ride made a flurry of staying-over arrangements. Miles Calhoun would overnight with Grover Stinson, the Kratka boys would become honorary Swedes for a night at the Myrdals'. Lily Lee Fletcher took in Vivian Villard, whose lone small figure on the longest ride home of any of us, five miles, was a daily lesson in bravery. Meanwhile, details such as starting line and finish line and exact interpretation of "wrong end to" were being worked out by Damon and Martin. Edgy as I was about the outcome of the race, a part of me had to admire the level of conniving that went into it.

  And nobody blabbed. That was the incredible thing. I cannot say a word to anyone in my department without it ending up three floors away. But the schoolchildren of Marias Coulee kept as mum as the pillars of Delphi. Oh, Miss Trent knew something was up, definitely. She trooped around the perimeter of the schoolroom in her cloppety shoes even more than usual, suspicion in every jiggle of her bumpy build. Once she even came out at recess to try to figure out what the sudden giggles and excited clusterings were about. Our pact of secrecy resisted her best effort, though. Not even Camélia, who ordinarily would have gone a mile out of her way to tell on me, let out a peep about the race; after all, there was every chance Eddie Turley was going to make me look like the fool of all time. So, that week built and built, two clouds of anticipation in the opposing climate zones of the schoolyard, toward Friday.

  On the home front, so to speak, morning by morning Rose arrived with some new plan of attack on the house. Now that our bedding and underwear and even hankies were as fresh as a garden of lilies—a shrewd boost in our morale—she chose her battles with professional élan. Every stove was scraped out and polished, and every stovepipe emptied of soot, before she moved on to sweeping and scrubbing the floors. The day after that, windows were washed until they sparkled and up went the new curtains that she had prevailed on Father to fetch from town. Offhand miracles occurred, too: lamp chimneys suddenly were clean instead of smoke-darkened; Houdini no longer was a canine disaster area thanks to his pond romps with Toby. I mean it when I say the house positively breathed in a way different from before, for among all the other exhalations of wonder that our housekeeper provided, Rose was a woman who whistled at her work. About like a ghost would. That is, the sound was just above silence. A least little tingle of air, the lightest music that could pass through lips, yet with a lingering quality that was inescapable. There is nothing quite like stepping into a seemingly empty house and hearing the parlor—Rose's tidying was often so swift and silent that the tune was the only sound—softly begin to serenade you with "Down in the valley, valley so low." More than once I saw Father stop what he was doing and cock an ear toward some corner of the house a melody was coming from, as if wondering whether whistling really could be the housekeeping accompaniment on Lowry Hill in Minneapolis.

  So, one breezelike song after another on her lips as she cleaned upstairs and down, Rose brightened the house. With the exception of the kitchen. We ate as we had always eaten, haphazardly and dully. Father right then was busier than ever with his hauling sideline, freight for the Big Ditch stacking up at the depot daily. For his part, Damon was so immersed in the scheming for the upcoming race that he didn't badger Father about the cooking situation. Toby went around looking like he was going to burst with our secret at any minute, but he put his energies into learning to whistle like Rose. And my mind was so crammed with scenarios of galloping backward—all that week my dreams featured Eddie Turley jeering at me from a secure perch between the humps of a racing camel—that I was useless for any other purpose.

  It snuck up on me, then, when Rose managed to touch a nerve in Father about our mother. At the time, I didn't want to witness it, but I happened to be in the line of fire, clamped to a book at the kitchen table trying to keep my every thought off the race. Father had come in from his day of freighting and was washing up, and Rose had just finished her day's work, too. Although not quite.

  "Oh, Oliver?" She veered from her path out the door into the kitchen, her shawl already on. "I need your guidance on one matter." She sounded troubled.

  "I can always make a stab at it," came muffled as he finished toweling his face. "What's the topic under discussion?"

  "Your room." Rose hesitated. "I need to know what, that is, how much you want done with it."

  Father didn't say anything until he'd hung up his towel. "You mean Florence's—my wife's things, I take it."

  "Yes. I'm sorry to bring it up, but—"

  "It's all right," he replied, although I knew better. "Just sweep and tend to the bedding in there," he told her with a slight catch in his voice. "I'll do any straightening up." He seemed to feel the need to add, "I haven't had the heart to disturb Florence's things. The time will come, but not yet."

  Rose nodded, but didn't turn to go yet. With evident effort, she brought out another question:

  "May I ask—how long has it been?"

  "Last year." Father recognized what lay behind her asking. "And with your husband?"

  "This past summer."

  "Ah. That recent." Caught in grievers' etiquette, Father asked in return: "Was it sudden?"

  "Very." Rose drew a faltering breath. "He—just went."

  Father looked over at me as if he wished I didn't have to be in on this, but there I was. My eyes began to sting. I was not the only one in the room it was happening to, I could tell. Mother's death had been hard for all of us to bear, but we had borne
it, because that is what people do. I thought of it as like the cauterizing I had read about Civil War doctors doing when they performed amputations, the fierce burn sealing off the wound. Each of us showed the scar; there was no help for that. Toby did not mope often, but when he did, it ran a mile deep. Damon's temper got away from him more than it had before. As for me, I am told that for a public figure I am an exceptionally interior person, and I can't argue with that; surely I looked at life a lot more warily after it took Mother from us. In Father's case, he had our symptoms to tend to as well as his own. In short, none of us was over Mother's death, but we had adjusted to the extent we could to that missing limb of the family.

  Now Father had to find it in himself to finish the exchange with Rose, and he did. "Florence"—his voice struggled, and he gave me another difficult glance—"the boys' mother lasted a few weeks, after complications from a burst appendix."

  Rose said how sorry she was to hear those circumstances, and turned to go. Before she did, she looked back at Father in her keen-eyed way, although those eyes were a bit damp. "Thank you. It helps, to know what someone else has been through."

  "All right then. Good night, Rose."

  "Good night."

  4

  FRIDAY, RACE DAY, IN MY DREAM-TOSSED STATE I OPENED THE door to Rose's now familiar knock and stood there blinking. Along the line of her right shoulder hovered a startling mustache, like a hairy epaulette.

  "Paul!" she exclaimed as if delighted that I still was in existence. "Look who's with me!"

  "Uh, morning, Mr. Morgan," I managed.

  "Needless formality, Paul, especially at this ungodly hour of the day," he protested as if he had come all the way over to our place on this matter of manners. "Let's make it 'Morrie.'" He stepped from behind Rose and provided me the necessary handshake.