The Whistling Season Page 9

  "I held it for a week, honest I did. Then Eddie mouthed off too much and I let him have it."

  Father sighed. "Tell me the particulars. Too much'?"

  "He—" I paused.

  "Out with it."

  "—teased me about Rose."

  His face changed. Maybe there was hope for me, I thought at the time. Even then I understood at some level that Father had set himself to ignore whatever might be rumored about a wifeless man employing a single woman in his household. Circumstances had helped out—Rose could be seen perfectly nicely traveling back to her room at George and Rae's after work each day, and her very own brother was on hand as chaperon if the situation required any—but Oliver Milliron, a pillar of Marias Coulee, nonetheless had to occasionally choose what not to hear, surely. He did not seem to mind that for himself. But it evidently had not occurred to him the rest of us might have to face some unpleasant chin music about our housekeeper.

  He studied me. "Not to put too fine a point on this, Paul, but what exactly did Eddie say?"

  I told him, exactly.

  Father made a mouth. "Paltry vocabulary. Son, you have to consider the source, in that kind of situation." Something more than Eddie Turley's lingual ability was troubling him, I could see. "This famous fight of yours. I don't see a mark on you."

  "No, sir."

  "And Eddie?"

  "He's a little marked up."

  New concern flooded into Father's face. "The next time you decide to massacre one of your schoolmates, look at who's at home, will you? Brose Turley isn't to be fooled around with."

  "Father, Eddie wouldn't tell him about me hitting him."

  "Oh? How does he explain 'a little marked up' then?"

  "He'd probably say his horse surprised him and next thing he knew, he was on the ground."

  "And if you were in his position, is that what you would tell me?"

  "Pretty much."

  That drew me a stern look right out of the book of fathers. He proceeded to inform me in his best lecturing tone, "The schoolyard code of honor is not going to save your skin every time," although, I could have pointed out to him, it had been working perfectly fine for me until Damon blabbed. I hoped I was an absolute picture of attention while Father further stipulated: "I want the truth out of you in any case like this ever again, hear?" I nodded vigorously. A lecture wasn't a spanking or extra chores or exile to my room immediately after supper or any other degree of punishment, and it was beginning to look like I was going to get off with a lecture. "I don't want you instigating any more fights, either." Father had reached what seemed to be his final point. "No more of this 'One-Punch' business."

  "No, sir."

  "Is that all understood?"

  "Yes, sir."

  He stood up and started out of the barn, then paused.

  "What's this about a race?"

  That night. Spanked and sent to bed before sundown and lectured to a degree that definitely did constitute punishment, I lay there unstrung at how the world had turned over from that one moment in the hayloft. My mind, my whole being, was questions. Why couldn't Father have been safely out there operating the noisy, rusty pump at the horse trough when Damon's mouth got away from him? And why was it worse, on the Oliver Milliron punishment scale, to beat someone in a horse race than to punch that person in the jaw? For that matter, why was it worse to ride a galloping horse facing one direction instead of the other? ("What, backwards?" I can still hear Father's voice rising.) And what manner of added after-school chore was going to be inflicted on me, tomorrow and beyond? How I hoped it was not going to be the milking. And most of all, why couldn't this whole episode have missed me and afflicted someone else, such as, say, Damon?

  That in the nature of the universe, Rose's spirited quoting from the dictionary echoed all through this, by which things come to be as they are. If this turn of events was a fair sample of that, fate was not anything to look forward to in life.

  Damon and Toby came to bed as if tiptoeing around an invalid. After he climbed in next to me, Damon wriggled for a minute. When he finally managed to say anything, his voice trembled.

  "Paul? Paul, if you want I'll go right down and tell Father the race was all my idea."

  Dragging in an accomplice to my wrong-end-to crime would only spread the misery, not do away with mine. "Just shut up, will you," I said, and rolled over away from him.

  On the list of questions without answers, how, if tears are silent, could I hear Damon begin to cry at that exact instant? Across the bedroom Toby already was sniffling to himself. Dryeyed, I tried to fight off sleep, dreading what dream would come.

  The next morning Eunice Schricker went out to her winter woodpile, pulled out the first stick of fresh stove wood, and found it was four feet long. Every stick in all three perfectly stacked cords was that length.

  "I distinctly remember," Morrie defended when George brought him over that evening for a council on how to deal with the wrath of Aunt Eunice, "I distinctly remember your stipulation of the dimensions, Oliver." He reflected for a moment. "I did think it a custom peculiar to homestead life to store firewood in such length. I supposed it had to do with keeping snow from infiltrating the woodpile."

  There still was a grim set to Father's chin from his session with me the day before, and this firmed it further. "Morrie, the next time you have a supposition of that sort, run it by me, all right?"

  "Mum is madder than a wet hen," George reported, which did not come as particular news to any of us in the Milliron household except Toby. "She wants Morrie off her place, off my place, and probably off yours."

  "She may think so," Father said briskly, "but she'll feel better when she sees the guilty party out there sawing all that wood into sixteen-inch stove chunks." He waited until Morrie inclined his head to attest that he understood the concept of sixteen-inch chunks. "And to perk her up even more," Father meted out further justice while he was at it, "I have just the volunteer to help bring that woodpile down to size. You'll meet Morrie at Eunice's every day after school, won't you, Paul."

  "There is this about it," Rose sympathetically provided in the morning when I told her about my next phase of punishment. "Morrie won't bore you with silence."

  Three cords is a lot of wood when you have to unpile it, drag each piece to the sawhorse, situate it between the crossbucks to hold it into place, find the rhythm of sawing with the person at the other end of the bucksaw, move the saw and cut again, then pile it all back up. Pretty quick I was wishing Father had sentenced me to milking duty instead.

  This time around, Morrie was taking no chances. Before we started, he measured a stick to precisely sixteen inches and cut it off square. He used that and a carpenter's pencil to mark where our saw cut would be for each chunk.

  "Do we have to?" I protested this time-consuming approach. "Stove wood never gets cut that close."

  "From my limited experience with Mrs. Schricker," Morrie maintained, "I conclude that obsessive precision is our only possible defense against her."

  Sure enough, Aunt Eunice descended on us at our labor every day, and sometimes twice a day. The first few of those peckish inspections, we stopped to listen to the list of imprecations that plentifully applied "incompetent" to Morrie and "young ruffian" to me. After that we simply kept sawing.

  The ultimate afternoon, however, she came out to give us a going-over that would have to last us a while, because George was taking her by train to Great Falls to have her teeth seen to. Morrie did not know what we were in for, but this one I recognized as leading into her full Sunday-special "oh well soon I'll be dead" lamentation. Doom enlivened her every utterance as she had us know that the woodpile was the first thing she was going to check on as soon as she got back and so if we knew what was good for us we had better be on the lookout for her return, day after tomorrow. Aunt Eunice was not of a persuasion to cross herself, but her words seemed to do it for her as she delivered her patented sighing finale: "If I'm spared."

  This time Mor
rie had halted our sawing, perhaps to try to put together the connection between our woodpile proficiency and her self-assigned fate. Now he smoothed his mustache thoughtfully and provided, courteous as could be: "You may ease your mind on that score, Mrs. Schricker."

  Accustomed as Aunt Eunice was to mumbled general assurances by George and others that she was sound as a coin, Morrie's frank exercise of predictive powers surprised her. "How so?"

  "If you're dead, we won't expect you."

  Aunt Eunice speechless as she traipsed off in retreat was not a sight I had ever expected to witness. It started me wondering, in a fumbling thirteen-year-old way, what other rogue capacities Morris Morgan was masking behind that mustache. Perdition, Rose had said she and he and the late Mr. Llewellyn had wandered into in their fancy-glove way of life. That sounded exciting, but exactly what was it? A far cry from a woodpile, surely, yet Morrie did not seem to mind. True, he still looked like a total misfit around any kind of manual labor, with George's hand-me-down clothes draped on him and the beautiful brown hat showing sweat stains but no sensible downward crimp of the brim to ward off the sun. What was it like to work with such a man? Exasperating and exhilarating, in about equal measure. One minute Morrie would fuss as maddeningly with the woodpile as if he were arranging diamonds (even Toby could have stacked wood in his sleep), and the next he would be off on some mental excursion that took the breath out of me. A curlew foraging with its long-handle bill drew forth Morrie's observations about the adjustable tools of nature Darwin had discerned in the beaks of finches from isle to isle in the Galapagos. The deep-afternoon silence of our homestead dot on the prairie made him wonder aloud why Thoreau, if he wanted a full-fathomed pool of solitude, had never joined the Oregon Trail migration and come west. "Who's 'Thorough'?" I asked, and then and there learned that a person could go through life as a self-appointed inspector of snowstorms. Morrie's mind never rested, although the pair of us on the bucksaw did, more and more often, now that Aunt Eunice was off the property.

  Looking back, I see that it was just as well that Morrie was dosing me with knowledge after school, because school itself had turned confusing. Each day started sour, with me still mad at Damon, which made him miserable, and that left Toby fretting about both of us. The Marias Coulee schoolyard sensed that I was in trouble at home, no doubt because of the wrong-end-to race, and so my celebrity dwindled away before it could get a good start. Besides that, at every recess Eddie Turley hung around squinting suspiciously at Damon and Toby and me even though we had given him our most solemn word, sealed with spit. It didn't help that Miss Trent strangely turned sunny in the schoolhouse, gaily leading us in song sessions instead of recitation period a couple of times that week. Did she have some kind of sixth sense toward the Millirons, I pondered, that brightened her up when any of us went under a cloud?

  One way or another, I sawed away at that long week until, midway through our Friday-afternoon stint on the woodpile, Morrie looked across at me as we pushed and pulled and asked, "What do you dream of, Paul?"

  Was it possible? Did I dare believe my ears? A grownup was asking about my rampaging nocturnal mind. And if ever a dream needed a broader audience, it was this recurrent one of mine. Each stroke of the saw bit with more ferocity as I divulged to Morrie the nightly trance in which I would be walking along a road when a commotion kicked up behind a mudstone formation off to one side, and when I reached there the eroded hill was being circled by a couple of people and a pack of wolves—sometimes the people chased the wolves, then the wolves would chase the people, I took care to explain—and no matter how hard I tried to find a stick to throw at the wolves there never was any stick, and things went on like that until on one pass the wolves and the pair of people vanished around the hill together and when I shouted that I was going to come around there with a stick if all of them didn't quit this, someone's head rolled out from behind the hill, at which point I always woke up.

  I looked across the sawhorse expectantly.

  Morrie appeared boggled. "All I meant, Paul, was what do you dream of becoming when you grow up?"

  My disappointment was massive. Morrie chucked aside the piece of wood we had just cut and set another length into place and marked it before referring back to my dream. "They're working on those in Vienna, I believe. I'm sorry I'm no guide on this, truly. But my own are more the daydream sort."

  One of those. He really was like Father. Provider of moonbeams when I wanted full illumination. Downcast, I leaned into the sawing again. We had only done a couple of strokes when Morrie spoke up again. "I haven't wanted to pry. But what did you commit to earn three cords of punishment?"

  "Nothing much."

  "Something, surely."

  "I wouldn't like for it to get around."

  "Your secret is safe with me."

  "There was a fight at recess—well, not much of a fight, and he's so much bigger than me that we settled it in a horse race that was sort of special, and the way it worked out, I won. And Father came down on me for that." There. The case of injustice was laid out.

  To my surprise, the bucksaw stopped going. At first I thought we had hit a knot in the wood, but no, Morrie was holding us to a halt as he gazed across at me. A fight I had not seen before came into his eyes, the kind of glint that comes off a lightning rod when the sun catches it just right. "Tell me about this fight and 'special' contest of yours."

  The oilcloth took the beating of its life from sullen elbows that evening after supper. At my accustomed place I sat stonily propping my head with both arms as I pretended to read Ivanhoe to show Father it took more than a woodpile to break my spirit. Damon similarly had his face in his fists as he stared down at his domino solitaire game, not bothering to make any moves. Toby's chubby hands pressed against his cheeks while he idly kicked the air under his chair. We were like the proverbial three monkeys, except all stuck on "hear no evil." Father, going over his Big Ditch freight accounts at his end of the table, occasionally glanced around at us but kept at his bookkeeping. The knock on the door jarred all of us, as if the sound had shaken the table.

  When we scrambled to peek while Father opened the door, Morrie stood there on the porch step. He was holding up a bull's-eye lantern to see by, and I swear, he and Father swept over the part about Diogenes searching the world for an honest man without either of them having to speak a word of it. Instead Morrie broached: "I'm here to borrow a morsel or two of newsprint, if I may. Rose tells me you have an abundance of newspapers."

  I believe what Rose probably said was that we had a surplus of newspapers, but ours was a reading household. Father took the Sunday Denver Post by mail, which with luck arrived the following Thursday or Friday, and the daily Great Falls Leader and the weekly Westwater Gazette, and other people passed along their mail copies of various city papers when they were done with them; it all tended to accumulate. "You're welcome to any Damon hasn't cannibalized," Father offered. Homestead etiquette was taken care of in his next breath. "But come on in and sit a spell first."

  Morrie cast a yearning glance toward the parlor, and followed Father on into the kitchen where the coffee lived.

  Toby and Damon bounced into their spots at the table, practically glistening with readiness for anything that might change the mood of the household, and even I, who already had Morrie as company all those woodpile hours, went way up in spirit at this visit of his. Yet you could never quite be sure of the consequences of having Morrie around—those four-foot-long sticks of firewood, remember—and part of me stayed leery as he leapt into conversation with Father. The weather of Montana versus that of Minneapolis, the scandalous condition of the nation, the curious byways of mankind: they ranged over topics like the veteran talkers they were. The younger three of us swung our attention back and forth between them like onlookers at a tennis match, and I must say I didn't see it coming (although Father didn't either) when Morrie tossed into the mix:

  "Oliver? Do you know the martial history of the Crow Indians?"

&n
bsp; "Somehow it has escaped my notice. Why?"

  "They were the daredevils of the northern plains," Morrie spoke with the lilt he gave to his most soaring notions. "And the boldest of them were their contrary warriors. You have in Paul here a contrary warrior."

  I was petrified. The last thing I needed, around Father, was to be made known as a daredevil of the northern plains.

  But Morrie unstoppably was going on: "I suspect you have your own tribe of them." Damon and Toby tried to look off to distant corners of the room. "You see the parallel between those dauntless young Crow warriors and your own, I trust, Oliver? They rode into battle backwards on their horses."

  Father blinked at this anthropological news. "Why on earth—?"

  "People do these things to transcend the ordinary, I'd say." Morrie made this pronouncement as if it was the most reasonable thing he had ever heard of. "Wouldn't you? To find their own boundaries, of bravery or willpower? To plow a deeper furrow of life, if I may put it that way?"

  "Morrie," Father responded as he drew a slow circle on the oilcloth with his cup, "I know you intend well with this. I simply don't want my children breaking their necks."

  "Every neck I see in this room is intact," Morrie pointed out. "And I believe Paul's adversary agreed to the terms of the race, and came out in one piece."

  "You think I should close the book on this 'contrary warrior' episode of Paul's." Father weighed the matter and sounded dubious to me. I felt as if I didn't dare breathe so as not to tip the balance.

  "I do. Warriors learn from survival. I've spent enough time with Paul under the adverse conditions of the woodpile and Eunice Shricker to rate him a very sobered young combatant."

  It may have been the invoking of Aunt Eunice that gave Father pause about the extent of my punishment. In any case, something flickered in his set expression. After a long moment he said, "I'll take it under advisement. You would have made a good defense attorney, Morrie."