The Whistling Season (3 page)

George beamed in relief at us, desperate for any diversion from making conversation with his mother, and we variously mumbled or blurted our greetings back. As Damon beat an immediate retreat to the Chinese checker board kept on the tea table by the window and I edged dutifully toward the far end of the sofa, George said from the corner of his mouth: "No word yet?" I shook my head. He sighed a little, which indicated to me that he. too had been receiving an earful on the subject of our housekeeper.

Right now, though, Aunt Eunice was all sparkle. "Toby, come here by me," she coaxed as if calling a puppy, and next thing, our sunshine boy was groaningly hoisted onto what there was of her knees.

Damon scowled but did not look up from where he was devising across-the-board jumps with his marbles, and I sat there trying to appear congenial. It was part of the Sunday ritual that where the other two of us drew dark mutters from Aunt Eunice about "young roughnecks" and "overgrown noiseboxes," she literally lapped up Toby. Out of her sleeve now came a lace-edged handkerchief, which she put to work on his gingerbread traces. "Poor thing, sent off from home looking like a mudpie."

Toby squirmed adorably while she clucked over him, and I mentally told him to enjoy being doted on while he could. The minute he grew too big for Aunt Eunice's scanty lap, he would be consigned to rogue boyhood with Damon and me.

"And school, dear?" she probed. "How are you getting on at school these days?"

Bless him, Toby thought to look my way before answering, and I twitched my mouth in warning. With effort, he stuck to "I have perfect attendance, same like last year."

With an
oof
Aunt Eunice discharged him from his bony
perch, meanwhile declaring, "What a pity it doesn't run in the family. That father of yours would be late for his own funeral."

"Now, now, Mum," George protested weakly. Damon, thunder on his brow, clattered marbles into place to signal Toby to join him at the checker board. It was up to me to defend Father, seldom a rewarding task: "He had to tend the workhorses, is all."

"As per usual," Aunt Eunice crowed. Now that I had drawn her attention, I could be worked on to the fullest. She lifted her chin as if sighting in on me with it, while her face took on an expression of grim relish. "So, you, Paul—"

"Yes, Aunt Eunice?" I was not going to let her corner me into the cat-and-tongue situation.

"—does that teacher of yours make you learn anything by heart? I always stood first in my class at elocution." Who could doubt it?

"I can say
'The boy stood on the burning deck—
" Damon volunteered with deadly innocence. I shot him a look that said
Don't,
knowing how his version ran:

 

—his feet were covered with blisters.
He tore his pants on a rusty nail
So then he wore his sister's.

 

Luckily, Aunt Eunice wanted no competition. "Your geography and physiology and spelling bees and all that will only carry you so far," she admonished, still intent on me. A Nile of vein stood out on her frail temple as she worked herself up. What was behind such ardor? Rage of age? Life's revenge on the young? Or simply Aunt Eunice's natural vinegar pickling her soul? In any case, something about me that Sunday had set her off. "I know you have your nose in a book all the time, but those are not the only lessons in store for you. When you get out in the world, Paul Milliron, you'll see." Pursing up dramatically, Aunt Eunice delivered in singsong fashion:

 

Life lays its burden on every soul's shoulder,
We each have a cross or a trial to bear.
If we miss it in youth it will come when we're older
And fit us as close as the garments we wear.

 

Not even George knew what to meet that with but abject silence.

Just in time came the bang of the kitchen screen door and further sounds of Father arriving. "Hello, Rae. It smells delicious around here. Brought you a sack of Roundup coal, not that slack stuff. Remind me to take the scuttle out and fill it for you." His theory evidently was that if he bustled enough, it would seem as if he had been here all the while. "Oh, the nourishment is about ready? Give me a minute to freshen up and reacquaint the boys with the washbasin, and we're yours to command."

He stuck his head through the parlor doorway, his face ruddy from shaving and his raven-black hair slicked back the same as ours. "Eunice, my goodness!" he exclaimed, as if surprised to find her there. "Aren't you looking regal today."

Soon after, we sat up to the table and began to do justice to Rae's fried chicken and baking-powder biscuits and milk gravy and compulsory vegetables, with the promise of that gingerbread spurring Damon and Toby and me to clean our loaded plates. Father and George talked crops and weather and horses and the doings of neighbors, the argot that farmers had been speaking since seed time on the Euphrates. For while those generous Sunday noons were presented to our cookless household as rituals with victuals, I am convinced it was the table talk that nourished Father and George in their unforeseen lives as adventurers in homesteading.

"The steam plow is going to be at Stinson's place anyway, why don't you go ahead and break that five acres on your east end? I'll throw in with you; I have that couple of acres of gumbo around the Lake District that needs doing."

"I don't know, though, Oliver. I'm stretched as it is, to handle what I planted this year."

These were not fluff-filled men. High-toned and fanciful as he could be, Father put in staggering days of manual labor, for others as well as himself. I always thought that the world got two for the price of one, when Fathers personality was counted into the earthly mix. One minute he could summarily kill a rattlesnake with a barrel stave, and the next, he might be fashioning out loud a theory of the evolution of the human thumb. In an earlier time, Father would have been the kind to take ship for the farthest places; I can see him as someone like the evercurious naturalist Joseph Banks, sailing around and around the world with Captain Cook. His inborn hunger for a fresh horizon hopelessly mismatched him for the drayage business handed down to him, in a set-in-its-ways Wisconsin city that wasn't even Milwaukee. But one last unexpected unfolding of the American map came to Oliver Milliron's rescue. As the finale of homesteading, the federal government offered a vast wager: western dry land thrown open free for the taking, if you were willing to uproot yourself and invest the requisite years of your life on that remote virgin patch of earth. With Montana singing in his ear, he had piled everything with the name Milliron on it—including Mother and us; I was five at the time, Damon four, and Toby merely a gleam in Father's eye—into an "emigrant car," one of those Great Northern Railway boxcars that held our furniture and dishes wrapped in bedding and a few Wisconsin keepsakes at one end, and pallets for us to sleep on at the other. Astutely, as it proved, a second boxcar brought the best
one of Father's drays that had conveyed beer and meat through the cramped streets of Manitowoc, and his top two teams of workhorses. Marias Coulee awaited us, a promised land needing only agricultural husbandry and rain. Within a year, George and Rae followed from their becalmed life of dairy farming near Eau Claire, equally ready to try a new point of the compass.

"Neither one of you works a field enough," came a certain voice again now, sharp as a pinch. "My place looks like a cat scratched around on it when you're through with your so-called plowing."

And, I must always make myself admit, just as much a homesteader as either of the field-weathered men at that table was Eunice Schricker. George may have thought he was putting two states between him and his mother when he made his move west, but he only managed to transmit Montana fever. In no time at all she too had alit into Marias Coulee, filing her homestead claim on the acreage next to George and Rae's, living on it in her shanty for proving-up purposes, and giving George and our father constant fits as they tried to farm it for her in anything resembling the way she wanted it done.

Sod was comparatively safe ground, so to speak, in these dinner-table contentions. I was hoping that the agricultural trio would stay dug in on dryland plowing until past dessert. But keeping tabs on Aunt Eunice even more than usual this perilous Sunday, I knew from the instant her chin took on that particular lift and she aimed it dead straight at Father, we were in for it.

"Household help always steals," Aunt Eunice announced, as if her opinion had been broadly solicited. "I am surprised someone of your experience of life doesn't know that, Oliver. You watch. This housekeeper of yours, if she ever manifests herself, will be light-fingered. They all are."

Nervously, Toby looked at Father.

"Eunice, please, the poor soul hasn't even set foot across our threshold yet," Father protested. "Besides, as long as it's the dust and the clutter, she's welcome to everything we have."

"Go right ahead and make jokes," Aunt Eunice snapped. "If you end up robbed blind, don't say I didn't tell you."

"I never would," Father said levelly. "Eunice, all I am trying to do is to bring a bit of order out of a houseful of chaos. The boys pitch in as best they can, but they're not laundresses, downstairs maids, seamstresses—"

"—or cooks," Damon contributed.

"—or cooks," Father picked that up gamely. "So if it takes a housekeeper to set us to rights, why on earth shouldn't we get one?" He scanned the table in beleaguered fashion. "Is anyone else going to take mercy on that last Missouri T-bone?"

Rae passed him the final chicken drumstick. "Keep your strength up, Oliver."

Aunt Eunice was not going to be deterred or detoured. "Times change, they say," she uttered as if not believing any of it. And immediately followed up with:

 

Yet, Experience spake,
the old ways are best;
steadfast for steadfast's sake,
passing the eons test.

 

Again, general silence met her spirited recitation.

Aunt Eunice appeared to expect no understanding from this gathering. "Oh, well," she fanned herself with a tiny veined hand, "soon I'll be dead."

That particular utterance of hers never failed to drive an icicle straight through the heart of every male in the room, except Toby. He turned as soulful as a seven-year-old could. Around most of the rest of the table, I could have predicted the responses. George's tone broke slightly as he tried to make the usual hearty assertion, "Mum, you're sound as a dollar." Then Father: if Father nicked himself shaving he thought he was two feet into the grave. Even worse, invocations of mortality, with Mother's memory so raw to him, always turned him as adrift as a castaway. Damon's eyes narrowed; if Aunt Eunice was on her way to the hereafter, it plainly seemed to him to be by a highly roundabout route.

Rae, who had been hearing Aunt Eunice predict imminent demise for years, merely lifted an eyebrow as if interested in the prospect. But then I caught her notice across the table and she turned concerned.

"Paul, you look a bit peaked."

Certainly the inside of my head had gone pale. Against my will, the floodgate of remembrance had been jarred open by Aunt Eunice's icy utterance, and my dream from the night before poured back to me.

Since that time I have had nearly half a century of indelible dreams. People are always telling me they wish they could remember exactly what their dreams were about, but I wonder if they have any idea what that means. Only the few persons closest to me know anything of the quirk that causes the roamings within my sleep to live on in me intact in every incised detail and every echoing syllable. My wife learned, in our first nights together, that my mind does not shut down at midnight; it goes visiting in the neighborhoods of imagination and recapitulation and other nocturnal regions that do not quite have names. Damon could have warned her. Everyone is familiar with the concept known as amnesia: a departure of memory. My condition, as I have gingerly explored it, is best called simply mnesia: protraction of recall. Dreams slide over into my memory, in a way that I am helpless to regulate; as well as I can describe it,
my dream experiences become something like frescoes on the countless walls of the brain. Not that this mental trick will ever win me a job in a sideshow. Except for the acuity I am credited with by my supporters in state government, reward for the right guesses I have made in the administration of education down through the years, there seems to be no other particular power of mind in my mnesiac case. As often as anyone else, I lose track of my fountain pen somewhere between the ink bottle and whatever awaits signature on my desk. But I never forget a dream. They stay with me like annals of the Arabian Nights, except that mine now go far beyond a thousand and one.

So it was with the episode that had everyone at the Sunday table cocking an eye at me now. Dreams—at least mine—are scavenger hunts to anywhere, but I could sort out some of the sources of this one. When we arrived west on the train of emigrant cars and the boxcar next to ours was unloaded at the Westwater siding, out came a casket, empty; we never did know if it represented some settler's pessimism or was merely in shipment or what. The version of it delivered in my dream was not empty, and Mother was missing, and Damon and I and Toby—who did not exist at the time—were by ourselves in the doorway of another boxcar, one so high off the railroad bed we could not figure out how to hop down. Sitting out there supervisory in the buffalo grass was Aunt Eunice in her rocking chair. Father and, for some reason, his fellow school board member Joe Fletcher were laboring to lift the coffin onto the unhitched dray. "They forgot the horses," Damon kept fretting as we toed the brink of the boxcar, wanting to go to the aid of the men. Aunt Eunice was the only person around who could help us down, but she wasn't about to. "Don't let those boys at that," she bossed the men struggling with the casket's brass handles. "They'll drop it."