The Whistling Season Page 7
So, until right then I had stayed more or less upright in the saddle the same jouncing way Eddie was, both of us loosy-goosy in the seat as we held on to stirrup leather or saddle strings or whatever we could find to grab in the absence of the usual saddle horn. Now, though, when Eddie's horse made another of its spooked tangents toward the far side of the road and Joker was able to close the gap just enough, I dropped down lower than any jockey and grabbed the curved back of the saddle frame in a bear hug with my left arm. I'd be lying if I said the cantle was the most appealing thing I ever hugged in my life. But right then it served its purpose. As one or another of us—probably the natural daredevil, Toby—had discovered in our wrong-end-to races, if you bent over far enough the width of the cantle steadied the base of your chest, and, swooping up hip-pocket-high on a person sitting the normal way in the saddle, it provided something substantial to hug on to. And this move greatly streamlined matters for the horse. With a crouched-over jockey now atop him, albeit one tucked in not the usual direction, Joker gained some more on the skittering steel-gray.
Eddie had his hands full with just his horse; the concept of affection for his saddle cantle must have been beyond him. Yet there I was, clinging secure as a cockleburr on the back of my horse, while the back of his was like a hurricane deck. Worse, surely, was the realization that Joker was steadily sneaking up every time his hard-to-rein steed careened across the road.
By now we were thundering down on the turn marker, the pillar of pails. The view over my shoulder told me what I already knew, that the road was not wide enough for both horses to make the turn at the same time. Here the advantage went back to Eddie. The way the steel-gray rocketed back and forth across our course anyway, Eddie only had to make sure the horse kept going a little farther than usual in its next veer in front of Joker and me, then rein it around hard to loop into the turn. All I could do was to keep us from getting run over by the gray, and try to catch up after the turn somehow. Joker was just far enough behind the other horse that I saw the flash of motion as Eddie set to work on shouldering into our way. He did what riders like the Turleys do on brawny hard-mouthed horses. He resorted to his spurs to enforce his reining.
As Damon and Toby and I could have told him, spurs actually were not the best idea while riding wrong end to. When you think about it, if your heels are in the vicinity of the horse's shoulders where your toes usually are, the rowels of your spurs are going to hit the horse up front toward the withers, rather than where he expects it in the flanks.
Eddie must have jabbed in an off-balance way, too, raking his horse more sharply on the off-shoulder. The big gray animal flinched away from Eddies intended direction and abruptly angled off the opposite way. Straight into the turn pillar.
There was a tinny thunder as the steel-gray breasted through the stack of metal, and it rained lunch pails.
Ducking, I let Joker gallop on past where the pads were clattering down, then tugged hard left on the reins. Joker did not manage to make a sharp turn of it, huffing around like a laborious imitation of a cutting horse, but at least we were eventually turned and headed back down the course toward the finish line. That was more than could be said for our opposition.
What an advantage riding backward in the saddle provided at that moment: I had a perfect view of Eddie bouncing away into the badlands as his horse kept going and going. The claybank formations there north of The Cut gradually fell away into a maze of eroded shapes that in a mile or so reached the Marias River. The runaway steel-gray showed every sign of taking Eddie for a swim.
And Joker raced on, solo, until I checked ahead and saw Verl waving his arms and yelling, "Eddie flubbed the turn! Paul wins!"
Other shouts and hoots and whoops of congratulation filled the air as everyone headed their horses down onto the road for a better look at Eddie's situation. By the time I hauled Joker to a halt and got myself right side around in the saddle, Damon and Toby were beside me, each more giddy than the other over my victory, and we watched together as the steel-gray disappeared behind a mudstone hump. When it emerged on the other side, the saddle on its back was empty.
None of us were as concerned as we maybe should have been. If wolf packs could not do the Turleys in, surely they were impervious to the lesser threat of horses and humans, our line of thinking ran. Still, the entire Marias Coulee school body plunged into the badlands in a loose cavalry charge to the aid of Eddie.
Before we could get there he came limping out from behind the mudstone, shirt torn, hat gone, chin a little bloody, scrapes on every patch of skin that we could see.
"This backwards stuff," he complained as we rode up, "is harder than it looks."
***
I FELT A FOOT TALLER WHEN I FLUNG OPEN THE DOOR TO THE next morning's knock and piped out cheerfully, "Morning, Rose."
"My! You must have got up on the right side of the bed." Pert as a picture herself, she swept in past me, untying her bonnet with one hand and carrying in her other the tiny lunch sack as usual but also a larger bag, doubtless containing more housecleaning weapons. Today the mud room, where we flung overshoes and hung all the seasons of coats and hats and caps and stashed anything else that was loose, was going to meet its match, she had forecast.
Dying to tell her about the race but knowing what particular form of suicide it would be confide something like that to any grownup, I heard myself waffle:
"You know what?"
"No. What?" She paused and peered at me as if to see what kind of spell had come over me.
"I, uh, I had a really good night's sleep."
That was only half of it. My triumph the day before had been earthwide; the person who caught Eddie's horse and deposited the reins into his skinned-up hands as if dropping a penny to a beggar was Carnelia. So, the night's dream had all the schoolkids, led by an unnaturally civil Carnelia, honoring me by marching up to my desk with cakes. Angel food. Pound cake. Forbidden rum cake. Chocolate with vanilla frosting. My stomach was growling with the delicious memory of it.
"I'm glad," said Rose, still giving me a strange look.
"Good morning, Rose." Yawning, Father came down the hall and made his automatic turn toward the kitchen and coffeepot. It was Saturday, so Toby and Damon were sleeping in.
Rose headed him off before he could reach the kitchen doorway. "Oliver? There's something I must tell you."
"Is there." Father had to abandon his line of march, and I filed in by his side, since her tone seemed to merit a full audience.
"It's about what happened yesterday."
My heart skipped a beat.
Father rubbed his chin, trying to think what so distinguished that day from any other of this whirlwind week.
Rose drew in a declamatory breath that Aunt Eunice could have found no fault with, and launched. "I've been thinking about what Morrie said about destiny. That man. After all these years, I still learn all manner of things from him."
"He's an education, that's obvious," Father granted.
"But back to destiny," she persevered. "This." She pointed a finger straight as a pistol barrel at the floor, then up to the wall, then and around and across the ceiling, our eyes hypnotically following the orbit of that finger. "This is where I am meant to be," she declared. "At honest labor, in a household of people with their feet on the ground. All the—the airiness of our life before, Morrie's and mine, this is the cure we needed. After our little talk the other day"—the widower-to-widow one, it went without saying—"I knew I could tell you this. You have done wonders for us by bringing us here, bringing us out of—" The emphatic forefinger had ended up aimed in the accusatory direction of Minneapolis. By now we were used to filling in the blanks in any conversation with Rose, so Father and I both jumped a little when she unexpectedly did it for us: "—perdition!"
We knew in a general way that Rose's life had had hairpin ups and downs—the swanky leather trade before its demise along with poor Mr. Llewellyn, from the sound of it, then back to being a housekeeper on Lowry H
ill—and Morrie must have undergone similar reversals of fortune or he wouldn't be here in Marias Coulee too. Naturally we ascribed it all to bad habits of the pocket-book. It was already clear that, around Rose and Morrie both, income and outgo ran past each other in baffling ways. In a sneaky way, though, I was finding it exciting to try to imagine a level of high living so stratospheric as to be soul-troubling. I could tell that Father similarly was trying to get his imagination around the silk-and-tweed existence our housekeeper and her brother had been too accustomed to, back east in Minneapolis and Chicago, and he wasn't doing much better at it than I was.
After a moment, Father cleared his throat. "Let me try to follow this a little more closely if I can. Yesterday seems to have struck quite a chord with Morrie and you. Am I right that in your minds, Morrie's rather noble gesture of cleaning out the chicken house is somehow tied into a replenished sense of destiny? Happening along the right path at the right time like a good Samaritan, something like that?"
"Exactly!" Rose bunched her hands beneath her apron as if congratulating herself on having cleaned up a nasty chore. Well, I remember thinking, she had a point. If it took something rough to scour away perdition, homestead living ought to do it. "Oliver and Paul," she went on warmly, "I think you know that a chicken house is not the sort of thing Morrie has been used to in life. The woodpile either. Yet he rallied himself to it yesterday when I asked it of him, getting right in there with that shovel, tackling a task that evidently no one else has ever wanted to touch, not even minding that he ended up smelling like—"
This time she didn't finish the sentence. She squared her shoulders to face the conclusion all this had led her to. "I looked up destiny in your big dictionary before going home yesterday, to make sure. 'One's lot in life.' That seemed rather short shrift, so I tried fate, and that was better." Rose took another reciting breath. "That in the nature of the universe by which things come to be as they are.' And so. Call it either, but Morrie buckling down as he did to a nasty chore handed to him by a quirk of fate—well, me—surely is proof that one's destiny can be shouldered in an unceremonious new way that makes up for the old. Wouldn't you say?"
"Just between us, I was simply going to move that chicken coop," Father said. "It's on skids."
"Oh."
"Was there anything else on your mind," Father made sure, the kitchen still beckoning, "before I make my escape?"
"It seems like there was," Rose pondered, "before I got off onto—Yes. The kitchen reminds me. I'm providing food today, aren't I."
At last! We had waited and waited, and Rose Finally had acknowledged our plight, father and traded amazed gazes. There was an unprecedented tingle in me from my dream or all those cakes. At the time would have had to get in line with Kose at the dictionary to look up premonition, yet something or the sort seemed to be crying out tor definition sort seemed to be crying out for definition.
"Food, food, food," Rose was thinking out loud as if trying to remind herself. "It's around here somewhere, I know it is. Ah!" She vanished, but not in the direction of the kitchen. And came back with the larger sack she had brought with her.
"There now," she declared with satisfaction, "I've done my delivery duty, you're my witnesses," our spirits falling with her every word. "Rae sent it over. Lunch for tomorrow, I think she said? I gather that you're all off to the whatsit, the Big Ditch?"
"We are," Father confirmed in his flattest tone and took the lunch sack. Then said with emphasis, "Rae is a culinary treasure," before turning away toward the kitchen.
"Oliver?"
Like someone in a game of grandmother's footsteps, Rose had moved appreciably nearer by the time he faced around to her again. She had on her slightly conspiratorial expression. "Could you stand some passengers? Morrie and I would be awfully interested to see the Big Ditch."
"It's a freight run," Father dismissed the notion. "We'll be on the dray; it rides like a bucking bronco on these roads."
Rose had her second round of ammunition ready. "Morrie has no more fear of freight than he does of a chicken house."
"Somehow I can believe that," Father had to face up to. "All right, I can always use an extra helping of elbow grease in the freight handling. We'll swing by for you about nine."
After he determinedly disappeared through the kitchen doorway, I lingered while Rose was putting on her housecleaning apron and warming up for the day with a barely audible aria of whistling. I no longer could resist asking:
"Rose? Lunch and all. What, ah, what is it you eat?"
Plucking up the minuscule bag, she displayed it to me as if it were the trophy of a hunt. "I always bring a nice slice of rusk." She pulled out what looked like a piece of toast overdone to brittle. "Here, try a bite."
I can still taste it. It was like eating a shingle.
5
THE BIG DITCH, OUR INCIPIENT GRAND CANAL. ROSE AND Morrie were not its usual brand of tourists. Even on a Sunday, the haul road to the construction camp was plumed with dust. Land fever knows no Sabbath. Several speedy surreys passed us by, with Toby and Damon and I making a game of who could be the quickest to identify which of the livery barns in Westwater each was rented from, with their wheel spokes of red or green or white. We could tell by their bull-wool black suits and odd-collared shirts that the surrey passengers were the latest of the Belgian colony drawn a third of the way around the world by the promise of the farm water the Big Ditch would bring. Near the end of our trip there was what Morrie might have called an instance of momentum of the automotive sort. A Model T, not a common sight yet, met up with us, to the hazard of both our dray and the little vehicle bouncing around in the ruts.
I would say Rose took everything in as though this were a spin in the park, if a bumpy one. She wore yet another silky dress, this one the color of her name. Morrie looked more thrown together, in some of George's old work clothes a couple of sizes big for him. Was it cologne, or did he still carry a faint whiff of his chicken-house adventure? I noticed Father glance every so often at this pair of sightseeing passengers and the three of us who had pestered a Big Ditch visit out of him, as if wondering what had happened to the simple business of drayage. But he never had any trouble holding up his end of a conversation, so matters chattered along. Until we topped the gentle rise at the north end of the broad Westwater benchland.
"My!" Rose issued.
"Good heavens!" Morrie let out.
I suppose every person ever born has gasped at meeting up with the latest earth-changing contraption coming over the horizon. But that it is a common moment stitched into fate or destiny or whatever other name Morrie might have put on it has never lessened my memory of seeing that mammoth dragline steam shovel at work on the prairie. Surely the biggest thing to come to the vicinity since the dinosaurs roamed, the long-necked steam shovel was visible from miles off in its digging of the irrigation project's main feeder canal, which was to say the Big Ditch. The raw banks of the canal stretched behind the machine for miles, like the wake of some bewitched ship capable of sailing on solid ground. On our journey toward the monster this day, as Toby gabbed over Rose's shoulder and Damon continued to pepper Morrie with questions about the gridiron exploits of the University of Chicago Maroons and Father was occupied with the reinwork it took to keep the dray out of the most jolting ruts on the haul road, I simply fastened my eyes on the rhythmically digging steam shovel, growing ever closer, until it could be seen that each of its bites into the ground pulled out what must have been at least a wagonload of earth.
My spell was broken by Morrie. When Damon momentarily ran out of either breath or football players, Morrie leaned ahead on the wagon seat to say across to Father:
"Oliver? I am no agriculturist," which was so obvious Rose tittered at it. "But don't I detect somewhat conflicting concepts of farming, between this"—he inclined his head sagely toward the Big Ditch and its incipient network of diversion canals designed to feed water to seventy-five thousand acres of new fields—"and Marias Coulee?"
"I am still stumped," Morrie persisted. Rose, sitting between them, pulled back a bit out of the way of debate. "If it takes all this," he again pointed with the crown of his hat to the miles of hydraulic engineering of the irrigation project, "to grow anything here, why don't you need something comparable for your fields?"
"Our formula is r-a-i-n."
But Morrie knew how to drive a point home when he had to, too. Saying not a word more but lifting his brow inquisitively, he put out his hand as a person would to decide if an umbrella was needed. Not a drop of precipitation had fallen during his and Rose's time in Montana.
Father had to deal with that or fold his cards.
"Dryland fanning stores away rain when it comes," he cited the gospel of his generation of homesteaders. "A man of your astuteness will have noticed how deep the furrows are in Marias Coulee fields, surely? That's to catch runoff and keep it in the ground."
"For a fact? The soil can act as its own reservoir? Why then do deserts exist, do you suppose?"
"As far as I know, deserts are not plowed." Father evidently decided that if Morrie was looking for enlightenment about farming, he was going to receive it. "There's considerable science to dryland farming, don't worry about that. The state has tested it out for years on end; the county agent gives us all the latest from their experiment stations and holds deep-plowing institutes and so on. What it comes down to is that we get perfectly respectable crops on so-called arid land."