The Whistling Season (36 page)

We lined out across the road, and when Father said "Go!" three sets of boot heels made firm contact with horses' ribs. We built up to a gallop. I still say, the back of a running horse is the most wonderful place to be when you are the age Damon and I were then. Under me Jokers mane flew in the wind, flag of its breed, as I bent low over his neck. Stride by stride with us, Damon was jockeyed onto Paint as if glued there. Father was giving us a run for our money, but the way grownups do, he jounced up and down in his stirrups more than the other two of us combined. The section-fine road gravitated toward us hoofbeat upon hoofbeat.

Damon rode to win, and did. Joker and I pushed him at it, but did not battle Paint and him hoof and tooth as we did Eddie Turley and the steel-gray horse that time. Somewhere along the line that school year—maybe while reading about Fabius Cunctator, the great delayer—it had occurred to me to save some victory, now and then, for when it really counted. I made sure to come in ahead of Father, though.

"Morrie was right," the words jostled out of Father once we reached the section-fine road and dropped down to a canter. "Tribe of daredevils on horseback, the pair of you. And pretty quick you'll have Tobe kiyi-ing along with you again. What's a father to do?"

What he did was to turn in at the cemetery. "Since we happen to be passing," he said with a try at nonchalance that did not even come close. "This won't take long."

Damon looked at me, and I was as startled as he was. We had not done this for some time now. In fact, not since Aunt Eunice was laid to rest, if that's what it could be called.

The prairie offered Marias Coulee a slight knoll for its burials, and our horses grunted at this next unlooked-for exertion and took it slow. On the path in, a killdeer zigzagged in front of us, pitiably dragging one wing in the old trick to draw us away from its nest. The grass on the graves moved in the wind, giving the cemetery an odd liveliness. Father leading, we rode single file now so the horses would not step on the graves. Damon appeared uneasy at our slow parade through the tombstones, and marble and granite standing in ranks have never been the pleasantest sight to me either. The patience of stones. How they await us.

Mother's grave marker stood at the far end of a row. There we swung down from our saddles.

Looking determined, Father went over the grave in a caretakerly way, ridding it of dandelions and wild mustard and brushing a bit of lichen off Mother's epitaph. Damon and I stood back, uncertain. Whatever this was about, Father seemed to want no help.

After awhile he straightened up and stood beside the grave, on one foot and then the other. I could see spasms in his cheek. He always chewed an inside corner of his mouth that way when he was anywhere near Mother's grave.

Suddenly he was saying, "Damon and Paul—I have something to get off my chest. Don't say anything until I finish up, all right?"

This did not sound all right at all, but Damon and I blinked agreement.

Father put his face in his hands, as if avoiding the sight of the tombstone in front of us, then slowly dropped them. His voice shook with the effort of getting the words out.

"I've tried like everything to not let it happen, but I've fallen for Rose. Maybe it took for her to be with us in the house all the time while Tobe was laid up. Maybe I'm just slow. But there's no getting around it anymore, I'm in love with her, hopeless as a—" almost too late, he caught himself from saying
schoolboy
to the two of us—"colt."

I don't know what registered on Damon as he stared slack-jawed at our father, but I was seeing the countenance of the man who had taken the giant step west, with all he possessed, in that Great Northern Railway emigrant car. Oliver Milliron drawn by deepest desires to embark from the known world to territory beyond knowing.

Father took another difficult breath. "I'm going to get my courage up and ask Rose to marry me. I brought you here to the hardest place in the world to say that. To see if I could."

Not even the wind made a sound after that. The spell of silence gave Father a chance to compose himself somewhat.

"Well, what do you think about this?" He scanned our faces anxiously. "Rose in the family will be different than it was with Mother."

"I'll say," I said. I had to. Damon uncharacteristically did not seem to trust his voice.

Father shot me a look.

"A lot more whistling."

There was a long pause while Father's face tried to make up its mind, so to speak. Gradually the sniffing sound that announced laughter came. I would not have said my remark warranted it, but Father laughed until tears came.

"M
ORRIE
?
YOU'LL BE OUR UNCLE AS WELL AS OUR TEACHER
next year, won't you."

"What?" He was caught by surprise, grating the chalk against the blackboard where he was concentrating on tomorrow's history test for the sixth grade. "Ah, that. We shall all have to try to not let it show." Letting me know with a strong glance over his shoulder that I should be more engrossed than I was in translating the twelve labors of Hercules—I was up to number three—he advised, "When you have a chance, look up
avuncular,
so you won't be too disappointed by my failure to match the definition." Chalk still poised, he mused a moment more: "Actually, I suppose step-uncle-in-law would be the cumbersome but apt term. There is no word for that. Where is Shakespeare when we need him?"

The circumference of love depends on the angle you see it from, I learned in the course of that madcap week after Father proposed to Rose.

As soon as he took himself over to the Schrickers and, still nervous and giddy, spilled out the news that he and Rose were getting married, Rae said knowledgably, "Well, of course you are." And George managed, "Good for you." At school, Damon and I ranged through each recess wary of opinions trickling into the schoolyard from parents at home. A few times we had to double up our fists at leers and crude comments, but mostly what reached us—the politics I am in today could learn some civility from the playground kind—was a community sigh of relief at the regularizing of things, finally, under the Milliron roof. The Drobny boys thwacked my shoulder in congratulation until it hurt.

Toby's reaction was the most down-to-earth of all. "Rose, can we still call you Rose?"

 

When she slipped into the house as early as usual the morning after Father popped the question to her, she still was radiant enough to turn a sunflower's head. A bit giddy myself, I watched her stop short in the kitchen doorway, as though the altar were right there. Her dazed smile hung a little crookedly on her while she checked on me across the room, eternal audience of one.

"I pinched myself, first thing when I woke up," she whispered as if I had asked. "To make sure this is really happening to me. It's so much like a dream, don't you think?"

"Cocoa's ready," I dodged off from that.

She came and sat down catercorner from me, scooting into the chair nearest the stove. It dawned on me this would be her place at the table from now on, every mealtime. The place where Mother always sat.

Rose fiddled with her cup, not even taking a perfunctory sip. Crystal ball-gazing into the cocoa, she murmured, "It makes a person wonder, Paul. Am I the right person to take this on?"

Dumb me, I thought she meant things such as breaking eggs and other feats of cooking. "Well, if they turn your stomach too much—"

"I don't know anything about raising boys," her whisper coincided with mine. "Children, I mean—but especially someone else's." The knit line between her eyebrows was deeper than I had ever seen it. There was a glisten in the corners of her eyes, of the sort Father had at the cemetery.

All at once I felt as if I were in the witness chair. Tongue-tied, clumsy, and without direction. When you have been without a mother, how are you supposed to graft your heart to a new one at a moment's notice? I could have pratded out to Rose any number of fancy reassurances, but there still would have been three sets of facts clopping through this house in boys' shoes. Damon tended to be a schemer, that had to be admitted. Toby on his magic carpet of innocent confusion was going to hit things and break bones, that was proven. Then there was me, something like a dream-wrestling monk mumbling in a foreign tongue half the time. Father was another matter—Rose would have to judge that one for herself—but as far as I could see, we three weren't much of a bargain for her to walk in on. Viewed from our side, adventures in the leather trade and perdition and westbound trains to unknown places weren't the most motherly of attributes, either. Yet we were all ending up with each other, as that oldest utterance of destiny had it, for better or worse.

In the end, the most honest thing I could offer Rose Llewellyn was the benefit of the doubt.

"Father's had enough experience at boys for you both, probably," I whispered. Then thought to tag on: "Anyway, Tobe and Damon and I have it in writing that you don't bite."

Rose let out a kind of a hiccup laugh, reheved to have the conversation go in that direction for the moment. "Morrie put that in the advertisement. Funny man." She shook her head slightly. "I'll have to learn to get along without him, more."

I stirred. Habits of a lifetime were a lot to be sawed through by a wedding ring. At the betrothal news Morrie had declared gallantly "I would not want to yield her to anyone but you, Oliver." Why did that remind me of his last-ditch testimonial after Rose insisted on buying Aunt Eunice's homestead?

Worse, what if cold feet ran in their family? Maybe I was not much of a diagnostician, but I seemed to be the only one available. "Uhm, Rose," I jittered this out, barely hearable even to myself, T know this is a big step for you, at least that's what people always say. If you're going to have, uh, second thoughts, Father would want you to have them right away now instead of after—"

"No, no, not one little bit," she whispered back insistently. "Paul, your father is a find." Her cheeks colored up. "A surprise, I mean to say. The best ever."

It has always intrigued me: did Rose know what was up, that day of Father's proposal? As soon as he lured Damon and me into the roundabout route to the cemetery, did her whistling change over to Mendelssohn? If so, she hid all sign of it by the time we came galloping back to the homestead. Each time I go over this in my mind, she and Toby are at the pothole pond taking turns flinging a stick, Houdini giving himself a bath a minute by plunging in to fetch. I see her perfectly there yet, in Father's Lake District, apron bright against nature's colors as if she had been thought up in a poem by Wordsworth. "Back the same day, I see," that young Rose of then calls over to us as if males generally did not have such homing instincts. Her arm draws back and she sends the stick sailing again. The Milliron men, for Damon and I felt quite elevated after Father's conference with us, stride abreast to the pond, grinning like fools. I'd have given skin off an elbow to listen in on Father's proposal to Rose, and probably that went double for Damon. We did our duty instead. Before Toby knew what hit him, he had been
swept away from the Lake District on the pretense that the two of us could not possibly snare gophers without him and Houdini. Left alone with each other, a woman who was used to bossing dust around, and a man trying to master emotions he swore he would never have, had to find common ground if they could. Latin was not a hard topic at all compared to romance, from what I could see.

Cold cocoa now brought us to our senses, both a little embarrassed at our kitchen spill of trepidations.

Rose laughed softly. "Do you know, I really am a case this morning. I didn't even think to look at the comet."

"You'll be sorry." I glanced quickly toward the window, but at that time of year, daylight was cutting into the small hours when the comet showed itself. "It's growing a new tail."

"You're a spoofer," she murmured, although she didn't sound sure. "As bad as Morrie sometimes."

"See for yourself tomorrow morning," I whispered airily. "Morrie told us in school what it's about." Tracing a long arc in the oilcloth with my fingernail, I showed her. "Back here at the end of the tad, there's a gas that separates from the comet dust. The sun pulls it away or something, nobody knows. Usually it happens over so many nights people don't really notice. But once in a great whde the comet goes bobtail, and has to grow back. This is one of those times."

***

R
OSE HAD TO TAKE MY WORD FOR IT THAT HALLEY'S COMET
was busily sprouting a new tail, because by nightfall clouds had hidden the sky. When I poked my head out in the last of dark, that next morning, up there was what looked like a vast laundry pile, gray mixed in with white, as if the weather had been saving up and here was the heap. My hopes high, I walked out into
Rose's field a little way to listen for the cry of the curlew at dawn, which is supposed to forecast rain. The curlew could not find its music that morning, but that didn't much worry me. It had to rain sometime, didn't it?

Each dark, cloudy day after that we started off to school convinced we would need our slickers—Father put Toby's on him before swinging him up behind my saddle every morning, and Morrie did the same for him before hoisting him aboard behind Damon for the ride home—and every time we trotted back into the yard as dry as when we had left. Always threatening and not delivering, the aggravating weather kept on like that all week. I thought to myself Friday night,
Damn. It's going to do it to us, isn't it
.

Rose skimmed in on Saturday blissful as she had been lately. Anticipation looked good on her. She was over her case of the flutters, and every morning now we sat jabbering in whispers about her life ahead with us. Without it ever quite being said, she and Father thought it wise to get off to a clean start with Marias Coulee general opinion. They had set the wedding date—the first Sunday after the end of school—not terribly far off but far enough to show they were not being pressed into this by, say, a race with the stork. That all went over my head at the time, naturally. I only knew she was on a cloud of her own, or rather she and Father were. This particular morning, the wavy curls bounced fetchingly on her forehead as she quick-stepped through the kitchen doorway and toward me at the table. "It still looks like rain," she reported in a husky whisper, full of faith. "Maybe today it means it."