The Whistling Season (12 page)

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 Morrie 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?"

"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."

A wiggle of relief ran through the other three of us. Damon could restrain himself no longer. "Uhm, Morrie? Would you like to see my scrapbooks? I have Coach Stagg in them and everything."

"Damon, I would be honored. But—" He looked to Father to see if perhaps the evening should be closed down.

Father waved them off to where the scrapbooks lived, our bedroom. "The lot of you, except our fabled contrarian here. Paul, I need your help with a couple of duns."

My head still spinning from the turn of events Morrie had brought about, I assembled my writing materials. Wordlessly Father passed me the bills of lading that were past due, and I wrote the dunning letters. The kitchen was still except for the skritch of my pen and Father's shuffling of papers, while from upstairs the voice of the sports fiend, Damon, and Morrie's more melodious murmur drifted down. When I set the last letter aside for the ink to dry, I stayed in my chair instead of bolting for upstairs, unsure of the ground I was on with Father.

After an amount of time that I somehow knew he was measuring in his head, he glanced up from his accounts. Then put his hands on the edge of the table and pushed back a bit, as if trying to add to his perspective on the youngster across the table. "When you and Thucydides finish the woodpile," Father kept his voice down as he began, "we'll call the matter of that race square. All right? That does not mean you are free to go galloping around backwards, ever again. I am not raising the pack of you to be rodeo trick riders."

"No, sir. I didn't think so."

"What Morrie said about outdoing the ordinary is entirely valid, but there are ways to do it and still stay in one piece."

"I'm not against that, Father, honest."

"Paul. Son." His mouth worked at stifling a swallow. "I don't know how I could get along without you." He scraped his chair back and headed for the stove and coffeepot so that I couldn't see his face. "Now scat. I have to finish up this bookkeeping."

As I mounted the stairs, my lips silently tried out the two words "contrary warrior" together.
Valid, but,
according to Father. How was I supposed to put a paradox like that together? Maybe better to be Damon, whom I could hear had passionately worked his way from football to boxing in the scrapbook tour, which I supposed was fitting for the review of my case just concluded.

"It's funny, the name and all, but know who I liked best, before? Casper—

—"the Capper, yes, yes, I see it here," Morrie throatily finished for him, doubdess under the strain of keeping up with Damon's enthusiasm. "I swear, headline writers are more ruthless than Cossacks. 'Pug Takes Long Walk Off Short Pier,' indeed."

Damon would have bristled to be told so, but he had a Shakespearean taste for heroes who came to some gory end or another. The outfielder who fell from the bar car of a train. The fullback who rashly wrestled a sideshow bear. Those unfortunates, I knew from my brother's bedtime tales of them, were there in the album pages with the pugilist under discussion, who by all evidence had thrown a championship fight and ended up dumped off a dock. To me, that did not sound like the kind of contrary warrior a person wanted to be. But Damon, I remembered, had been heartbroken about no longer being able to follow the career of the scrappy Capper, and Morrie was so feelingly providing a wreath of solace I did not want to interrupt.