The Whistling Season (29 page)

Damon whispered back, "If I have to read him
Heidi
one more time I'm gonna puke."

"Trade with Rose, then. Milk the cow while she does the reading." That shut him up. "Clear out of here, okay?" I shooed him toward Toby's bedroom. "I need to cook."

"Cooking" was a generous description of it, I realize. But with Father in the fields until the end of each day, I had fallen heir to the can opener and the pot of boiling water for potatoes or beans and the ham hocks and beef briskets and anything else that passed for victuals. Dismal as my supper efforts might be, no one seemed to think they were any worse than Father's best.

***

M
ORNINGS NOW, I CROSSED THE FIELD IN THE DARK TO
ward the window glow of our kitchen where I knew Rose was puttering until I arrived, whistling softly to herself. I carried a bull's-eye lantern to find my way across the fresh furrows, a chocolate sea perturbed into long regular waves by Father's plowing and seeding, but in the middle of Rose's field I would put down the lantern for a minute and step away from it until my eyes adjusted to the dark, and then scan the sky. The moon went about its business, the stars were set in place, but search as I would, I could find no sign of a miraculous spark traveling from millions of miles away. Sir Edmund Halley and Morris Morgan said the comet was coming. They had better be right, I thought to myself, and picked up the lantern.

The pertinent morning of this, I was barely through the kitchen door before the faint suggestion of a tune broke off and in its place the whisper: "Is anything up?"

"Rose, that field only was planted last week."

"Ah. I lose track of time. The days are so—" She darted to the stove where the teakettle was going off at an alarming rate. I couldn't tell exactly what description she might have given our daily household situation, but
strewn
came most readily to mind. Still and all, for a situation where she was camped out at our house, amid our bachelor habits all the time, things weren't going as badly as they could have. I'd had sizable second thoughts about the prospect of Rose and Father talking past each other, and Damon and I ineptly trying to referee, around the clock. Except for anything to do with farming, though, the two of them were getting along well enough within the same confines to surprise me.

I ferried our cups from the drainboard and spooned in the cocoa and poured the hot water. When we settled at the table and Rose had taken a hummingbird sip, I whispered the usual: "How'd Tobe do last night?"

"He didn't want to go to sleep." The little knit of consternation was between her eyebrows. "How can one boy come up
with so much to worry about? The latest thing bothering him is that he won't get well in time for the comet."

It indeed was going to be a close race, whether Toby mended before he drove us all crazy. I sighed. "I've told him twenty times we'll chop a hole in the roof if we have to for him to see the damn comet."

When I glanced up after taking a slurp of cocoa, Rose was gazing at me with concern. "You're getting circles under your eyes. Isn't my bed comfortable?"

I mumbled something about not being used to such luxury and hoped she would let it go at that. Not Rose. She gave me a knowing smile, as clinical as it was sympathetic, and here it came. "You miss Latin after school, don't you."

That observation had been made to me so many times by so many different persons I was ready to pull my hair out. Because this was Rose, I merely grimaced and muttered, "After-school is shot until Tobe is himself again, that's all there is to it." I shoved back from the table and said crossly, "I have to wake up the bear den," meaning Father and Damon.

I just about made it to the doorway before the murmur cut me off. "Paul?" I turned around, and there was one of those glints in Rose's eye.

"And so." When she said that, you could never tell where things were heading. "Don't necessarily tell Morrie where you got the idea. But there's always before school."

***

"M
ORRIE? DOES COPULATE MEAN WHAT I THINK IT DOES
? In English, I mean."

The morning I asked that, he had a terrible time keeping a straight face. Between yawns and cups of coffee that would have given Father's a run for its money and trying to prepare for the Department of Public Instruction inspector coming to lop his head off, he was doing his best to administer Latin to me before everyone else showed up for school. At that hour I was chipper as Chanticleer, which probably was no help to a bleary teacher who had to come an hour early every day to unlock the schoolhouse and light the overhead lamps and stoke up the stove and then face me and my translations. Morrie hadn't yet uttered a peep of complaint, however, and now he looked more than passingly interested in my question. "Dare I ask why you ask?"

"Just wondering." I dabbed my finger onto the open page of the Latin collection of readings he had most recently provided me. "Besides, it's right here."

Morrie blanched, then scrambled over to my desk to take a look. "
Navem capere, copulas manus ferreas injecebamus,
" he read aloud hastily, then translated with relief: "To capture the vessel, we threw ropes with grappling irons.' The grappling is not that severe in the English form. But look it up."

By the time I was through doing so, Morrie had banged the triangle for the start of school and everyone was fifing in. This day as others, Toby's desk stayed significantly empty as the rows around it filled, and that absence continued to make itself felt a number of ways between our fellow students and Damon and me. Rabrab made sure to give us each a dramatic dose of pity every time she passed. At the other extreme, Martin Myrdal leered in our direction whenever it occurred to him. Recesses were touchy, because Martin's was not the only tongue in the schoolyard that would like to have got at Damon and me with gossip from home about Rose's nightly presence under our roof. Ah, but with the Drobnys at our sides, we comprised a Slavic splinter state no one wanted to risk hostilities with. So it went, between sympathy and scandal. I caught Eddie Turley looking
at us speculatively a few times, but so far I had managed to stare him down—I didn't want Damon to get into it with him.

"What were you looking up?" Grover whispered as I passed his row on my way back from the dictionary.

"Have to tell you later." I slid into my seat just as Morrie wondered aloud if we happened to know who Archimedes was. Good, it was going to be one of those days. I settled back to digest my morning's Latin, not even particularly minding the existence of Carnelia next to me, and listened to Morrie start in on how you could move the world if you had a lever long enough.

Five minutes into the school day, he was in full spate when the door behind him opened quietly. The visitor was well into the room before Morrie became aware of him, although that was not the case with the rest of Marias Coulee School. A suck of wind went through us all.

"A visitor, do I detect from your faces?" Morrie said resolutely, straightening his tie. More than half expecting the inspector all this while, he turned around.

Brose Turley stood there.

It was nothing like what my dreams had been forecasting all those months. The schoolroom door did not splinter and fly off its hinges. The wolfman of the high country did not come garbed in shaggy winter mackinaw and bloodstained mittens. Far from it. He had materialized there at the front of our schoolroom in everyday trapping attire, which in my first instant of seeing him seemed even more horrible. The heart-destroying boots. The greasy slouch hat made of who knows what. The well-used haft of the skinning knife sheathed at his belt. Brose Turley seemed to be enjoying his school visit; he strutted a few steps closer to our ranks of desks, looking us over as if we were a carnival sideshow.

Like everyone else, I swung around to check on Eddie. The eyeglasses were off, hidden in his desk, and with remarkable presence of mind he was rubbing the telltale place on the bridge of his nose. Had he somehow heard the hoofbeats of the big gray horse when the rest of us didn't, or simply sensed his ogre of a father?

"Mr. Turley good morning." Morrie recovered to the extent of manners, but his voice had a real edge to it. "Do you need to speak with Eddie about something that cannot possibly wait?"

"Lot more than that. I want him home." Brose Turley relished the next words in the pink of his mouth before slowly rolling them out. "From here on." Sparing Eddie nothing, he squinted down the aisle of desks to his alarmed son. "On your feet, boy."

I saw, and I am sure Damon saw, the ever-so-slight motion as Morrie brushed his fingertips along the side pockets of his suit coat. If brass knuckles resided there, this time they did not emerge. Morrie drew himself up and wielded authority. "This has gone far enough. School is in session. You can't just—"

"Look it up, teacher man. This is his birthday. Old enough to leave school, and that's what he's gonna do."

Morrie appeared stunned. We all were. To show Turley he would not let him run a bluff, he strode to his desk and whipped out the student register. His head down, he flipped through until we could tell he had come to the eighth grade's page. After a bit, he looked up at Brose Turley. "Eddie should have some say in this."

Turley shook his head, one wag each direction, like some animal ready in ambush, switching its tail. All eight grades of us stared at the spectacle occurring over our heads, so silly and savagely sad at the same time. There was fear in the room, and there was hatred. Brose Turley—or for that matter, Father—would
have had to pry my cold, dead hands from my desk to withdraw me from a place of learning. Damon, Grover, Isidor, Gabe, Verl, Vivian, Carnelia, Rabrab, Miles, Lily Lee, any number of us in that classroom felt the same way, and even those among us who were not as keen on school knew that from a parent, this was not right. Yet this trespasser into our schoolhouse had the law on his side, something not even Morrie could remedy.

He was trying common sense on the situation. "For heavens sake, be reasonable," he implored Turley. "It's only a matter of weeks until the end of school. Eddie can graduate—"

"He's doing that this damn minute." Turley made a swipe at the air; it couldn't be called a beckoning gesture, only a signal of impatience. "Come on here, you. Don't make me have to tell you again."

Like an invalid, Eddie uncertainly lifted himself up out of his desk. He bit his lip and kept his eyes down, away from all of ours. One shuffling step after another, he trailed after the blunt back of his father and walked out of the schoolroom to a life of skinning dead creatures.

Morrie crashed a fist down on his desk. All of us sat motionless, in roomwide paralysis.

At last he caught a breath and said in a low voice:

"Everyone, never forget what you've seen here today."

 

At recess, Milo blustered that he wished it had happened to him, but even he looked a little green around the gills from what had been witnessed.

"Some birthday for Eddie," Grover observed.

"By a mile," Miles agreed.

"What's the old so-and-so gonna make Eddie do, you suppose?" Verl pondered.

"Housework," Rabrab trilled. "Can't you just see Eddie in an apron?"

"The old man is gonna put him to tending the trap line," said Isidor the realist. "He'll have Eddie peeling pelts off his catch till he can't see straight."

"Why couldn't he just leave him alone until the end of school?" Marta voiced the thought in many minds.

Slowly but surely the verdict worked out by the Marias Coulee schoolyard court of justice was that Eddie, leaver of bruises on the majority of us, perhaps did not deserve fond remembrance, but no one deserved Brose Turley.

Riding home, neither Damon nor I said anything until we came to The Cut. All at once I heard out of him, with a crestfallen note in his voice: "You're so lucky, Paul."

"Why? What's the matter?"

"I never did get to punch Eddie."

M
ORRIE WAS LOW FOR DAYS AFTER THAT. I WOULD POP
into the schoolhouse early as usual, primed to the tips of my ears for Latin, and he would grunt to himself over my translations and then stick me off in some netherworld such as the ablative case while he graded papers and looked morose.

It was the morning I was nailing through the thicket of prepositional attachment to pronouns but never to nouns—what were the Romans thinking, putting something like
pax vobiscum
in the same language with
cum laude
?— when he finally burst out:

"Hopeless."

To say the least, I was startled. "Imperfect," I might have said myself about my ablative efforts so far. Maybe even "inauspicious." But totally without hope? I sent Morrie a hurt look.

"No, no, not you. Read this." He came down the aisle and skimmed a sheet of tablet paper to me, which proved to be Milo Stoyanov's essay on homestead life.

 

In our family there are seven of us, Papa, Mama, Gramma, Katrina that is just little yet, Marija, Ivo, and I. I and
Ivo and Marija go to the Marias Coulee school. I ride Roanie and Marija holds on behind but don't like to. Excepting for horses like Roanie and milk cows the animal everybody raises is hogs, a few. Everybody has chores including children. Marija's chore is gather the eggs. Mine is get in wood and empty the slop bucket. The food we eat is mostly deer, antelope, fish, and foul.

 

Morrie stared out the window. "Sisyphus. I will trade tasks with Sisyphus, straight across." He stood there snapping his sleeve garters in agitated fashion, all the while muttering. "Why Montana? Why didn't I ship out to Tasmania?"

I wished the school inspector would walk in the door right then, which at least would have stirred the blood around in Morrie.

Still with his back to me, all at once he said in a forced voice:

"There's something you'd better know, Paul. I am handing in my resignation as teacher."

Shock ran through me from my ears to my toes. This was one thing I had never dreamed of, even on my worst nights. I could only babble back, "You can't."