The Whistling Season (11 page)

I stepped in. "Eddie, we won't tell. It's none of our business."

"How'm I supposed to believe that," he scoffed.

Toby turned the moment. Spitting in his small hand, he then thrust it out toward Eddie's man-size paw.

 

"Work off some of that energy in the haymow, you two." Father was unhitching the horses while Damon and I, who could just as well have been helping him, were busy roughhousing. Toby already was in a footrace to the house with Houdini. It was a wonder the barn rafters were not shaking from the high spirits the two of us were giving off. All the way home from the Big Ditch, behind the backs of the earnest grownups on the dray seat, we'd traded Chessy cat smiles at the thought of it: we had something on Eddie Turley. It didn't even matter that we could never tell anybody. We knew. There was this about it, too: as much as anything, our secret mightily added to the Milliron family repertoire, junior division. From then until the end of time, all Damon would need to do to set Toby and me and himself to laughing would be to cross his eyes and give a meaningful twitch.

Right now my brother the cutup halted in mid-tussle with me and cocked an ear in Father's direction as though he had gone hard of hearing. "Hey? Oh, hay." Somehow I found that uproarious.

Draped in horse harness, Father turned around in that way parents do when they are about to tell you they mean business. But Damon already was scampering up the ladder to the haymow. I thought it prudent to dash over and help Father heft the welter of leather onto the wall pegs. From what I had overheard before we left off Rose and Morrie at the Schrickers', he probably was nearing the limits of his tolerance for one day. His efforts to suggest the Big Ditch to Morrie as a logical site of employment had met polite but undentable resistance. "I find I rather like the solitude of a homestead workday," Morrie said, veteran of several such days. "George keeps coming up with chores for me to do on his mother's place; it's quite remarkable. And should you ever need a hand at anything that is too much for you, Oliver, I have two."

Father was weighing this when Rose burst out:

"Oh, Oliver? I have a favor to ask, the next time you go to town. It's about the dust."

That caused all the Millirons to look over our shoulders, back at the dray's billowing bridal train of dust that every conveyance in Montana dragged after it, seven months of the year. Dust was such a part of our life we had never heard anyone bother to comment on it.

"I take exception to dust," Rose said decisively.

Bewildered, Father cast another look at the chronic brown fogbank we were raising with every turn of the wagon wheels. "I don't quite see what I can do about—"

"In the house, I mean. It would help with the housekeeping ever so much if dust didn't blow in all the time. The next time you're in town, couldn't you bring back some draft excluder?"

"Draft exclu—?" Even though Father liked to read a couple of pages of the dictionary every night for pleasure, it took him a few moments to work that out. "Do you by any chance mean 'weather stripping'?"

"I do, don't I. My poor husband always called it the other." We had not heard the late Mr. Llewellyn mentioned in the last day or two, but here he was again. "The Welsh have such a gift of gab, you know, and—well, it runs in our blood, too, doesn't it, Morrie."

"Like dye," he vouched, and gave her arm one of those pats.

"Surely it would take you no time at all to tack some whatsit, weather stripping, around the doors and windows," Rose persisted to Father. "As I say, it would do wonders for the housekeeping." He knew he was caught; he couldn't be against wonders of housekeeping. Helpfully, Morrie asked how many windows and doors the house had, and given the number, he announced in a feat of lightning calculation that fifty yards of the stuff ought to dustproof our house.

Whoosh. A
cloud of hay cascaded down into the horse stall nearest Father and me, interrupting my reverie and making Father wince.

"Damon! Get a little of it in the manger, can't you?" Father looked in exasperation at the high-priced alfalfa mixed in with the horse manure on the floor of the stall. I was already on my way to the ladder by the time I heard him telling me, "Go up there and regulate the lunatic, while I water the horses."

"My turn," I informed Damon as I popped up into the haymow. Yielding the pitchfork and the field of battle to me, he flopped into the hay like someone keeling over backward into a swimming hole. He sprawled there, arms out, in sheer exuberance at our incredible luck lately, and I could not help grinning along with him as I carefully pitched hay down through the loft hole into the manger.

"Hah! Can you believe it?" he marveled, still unable to get over it. "Old Eddie, in there with the Holy Willies. You must have knocked him into Sunday with that haymaker."

"Damon, don't."

"Don't what? You play yourself down too much. One-Punch Milliron!" He pantomimed a roundhouse swing of such arc and ferocity it rolled him over in the hay. "I tell you, the look on old Eddie when you popped him. No wonder he raced like such a boob, he was still so surprised—"

The silence of the barnyard caught up with him as it had with me. We should have been hearing the sound of the pump as Father filled the horse trough.

Damon scrambled on all fours to peek over the edge of the haymow. I teetered behind him for my own fearful view of below.

Father, holding the skimming bucket for the trough that he had come back to the barn for, stared up at the white-faced pair of us.

"Climb down. Now."

The instinct was to bolt and run, but we knew better. We assembled, in a criminal rank of two, in front of Father. I could not bring myself to look at him and I did not want to look at my squealer brother. Damon stood there stupefied. "It—he—we—"

"By all report, this involves Paul," Father said stonily. "Go to the house, Damon. Now." He turned his attention to me, prisoner in the dock and guilty written all over me. "We need to have a conversation."

He marched me into the grain room, where we could sit on bags of oats for what promised to be a long session. From the direction of the doorway of the barn, telegraphic blurts followed us there.

"Paul was only—he didn't really—"

"Damon," Father roared, "I am telling you one last time. Clear out."

When the vast silence after that satisfied him, he turned to me again. "So. Am I to understand that you popped Eddie Turley first?"

"Yes, sir."

He looked pained. "Paul, for crying out loud. I thought Damon was the pugilism fanatic in this family. I should be able to have my eldest son know when to hold his temper."

"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.