The Whistling Season (6 page)

"Does the reservoir hold good hot water?" she inquired of Father, and, studiously not looking our way, he said he guessed so.

Hot water! We were capable of that ourselves. Rose glided on past every foodstuff and utensil we possessed with no more than a glance, seeming to be an absolute tourist in this part of the house. The one item she did pause over lay stretched beside the kitchen stove.

"Houdini, if I recall. Whose claim to fame is—?"

Turning in that direction, Father asked in a confidential tone, "Houdini, what do you think of William Howard Taft as president?"

The dog's ears went up. He pushed himself up by his front legs, let out a howl, then rolled over and played dead.

"Quite the performance," Rose had to admit, though still eyeing him with the professional housekeeper's suspicion of a sizable hair-shedding animal.

"Wait till you see him catch a jackrabbit," Toby told her.

"Father?" By now the clock was in my favor, and I used it ruthlessly. "Look at the time. Hadn't we better think about something to eat?"

"Ah." Plainly he had not anticipated dealing with this issue this soon. But even more plainly, the rest of us were voting with our stomachs. Taking a deep breath, he squared around to Rose and began: "We haven't had breakfast yet and wondered if—"

"Oh, I never touch it, thanks very much anyway" With that she disappeared out to the roughed-in front porch known as the mud room to continue her assessment of the household.

Damon called despairingly to her departing back, "Around here, it's always mush."

Father gave us a defensive look and turned to the cookstove. He fired up his coffee first, then began boiling up oatmeal as we glumly watched. Rose soon was back in from whatever she had been in search of. "Wash day," she said decisively, donning an apron as deftly as a magician wielding a cape. "That would be a start."

"Paul's your man when it comes to water," Father informed her, not without a glint of retribution as he set aside my oatmeal bowl and nodded me toward the pump in the yard. Indeed I was in charge of the water bucket, doing the dishes, and Saturday-night baths. With a groan, I got up from the table to help Rose with the wash water.

I showed her the trick of operating the pump by wetting the leather piston with a couple of quick half strokes, then the long downstrokes that brought water gushing. She and I hefted the full washtub onto the stove to heat, then went back out to fill the rinse tub. As she worked the pump handle, our new upholder of upkeep said only loud enough for me to hear:

"Mind you, this is merely a suggestion. But wash day could include Houdini."

"Doesn't work," I told her crossly, still out of sorts from lack of food. "You can't get him within a mile of a washtub."

"Didn't I see a pond?" The pothole pond Father called the Lake District was in the field between our place and Aunt
Eunice's. "Perhaps if a stick were tossed in it by the right person, Houdini would give himself a bath." The lilting way she said it, it sounded like a rare adventure. She gave me a look with a hint of conspiracy in it. "Toby might even volunteer for the chore, do you suppose?"

"I'll get him on it after school," I conceded, although I never liked being maneuvered.

My mind was mainly on breakfast, and as soon as we had the wash water going, I tore into my bowl of oatmeal, which by then was turning gluey. As I spooned the stuff into me and Father slapped together cheese sandwiches for our lunch at school, Rose swooped through time after time, either half buried under a mound of our bedding in her arms or hefting a heaped dirty-clothes basket on a practiced hip. Toby was upstairs in pursuit of his shoes, but Damon, I could tell, was awaiting his chance for something. When Rose disappeared again in search of any more fabric to wash, he whispered urgently across the kitchen: "Aren't you going to ask her?"

Startled, but not so much so he didn't remember to keep to a whisper in answering, Father fired back "Young man, I would like to handle this my own way, if you don't mind. When I think the time is right, naturally I'll put it to her about the cooking—"

"No, no, the milking!"

"Ah, that. Clever of you to think of it, Damon."

When Rose sailed into the room again under another billow of sheets to be washed, Father began laying out to her the logical connection between the churn and the origin of the milk, therefore—

"I rather thought this might come up," Rose interrupted him. "It's been a while, but I can milk a cow." She studied Father for a moment. "Are there any other duties that come under the Montana definition of housekeeping?"

Father brightened. "Actually, there's another skill allied to all your domestic ones we had hoped to call on. We could even add a bit to your wages if absolutely necessary. It would help like everything, Rose, if you could handle the kitchen—"

"—scraps for the chickens," Rose concluded with a knowing wag of her head. "Inevitable. Poultry are not my favorite creatures and a slop bucket is never pretty, but all right, I can feed the chickens for you and I suppose gather the eggs while I'm at it." Now she peered at Father with mortal seriousness. The top of her head only reached the tip of his chin, but we were to find that there was no shortage of stature in Rose's tone when she spoke up like this. "Oliver, I must tell you—I take exception to pigs."

"Put your mind at rest, we're hog-free," Father said with an expulsion of breath. He noticed the riveted audience of the three of us. "Don't you have a schoolhouse waiting for you?"

"We're going, we're going," I said, reluctant to tear myself away. Damon grabbed up the schoolbooks he had brought home but of course had not opened, Toby pecked Father on the cheek as the other two of us manfully watched the daily goodbye kiss we had outgrown, we chorused a parting to Rose, and off we went.

That October sky was as deceptively clear as this one. Across the crisp grass of autumn, Toby and Damon and I spurred our horses with a verve we hadn't had since before Mother left our lives. Great gains came seldom, in our experience, but we could already count ours up since Rose's arousing knock on the door a mere hour ago. Damon was liberated from the milk pail. I no longer had to ferry our every stitch of clothing to Rae's wash days. And Toby had a name engraved on his heart, as he always needed, and it read
Rose Llewellyn.
All that, plus the fact that the disheveled house was in for the cleaning
of its life. True, we were no better off on the matter of meals yet, but we had to trust that Father would find some way to win Rose over on that.

As we rode to school, the shadows of our horses lively behind us, the world as we knew it in Marias Coulee seemed to shine with fresh promise. The Pronovosts had loyally waited for us at the section-line fence, late as we were, providing us the earliest possible listening audience about the marvels of housekeeping. Father had harnessed his team of workhorses in record time and already could be seen on the haul road to the irrigation project with the dray, waving jauntily to us across the fields. Perhaps most miraculous, the slow song of a saw from the direction of Aunt Eunices place confirmed that Morrie was gainfully employed. He had asked Father, "What exactly is meant by a
cord
of wood?" "Four feet wide, four feet high, and eight feet long, that's a cord," Father recited in surprise. "Intriguing," said Morrie. "I wonder whether Shakespeare was working that in, there in the line '
O, the charity of a penny cord.'
" "I have a hunch he was merely threatening to hang a nobleman," Father responded. "So. Do you know how to use a splitting maul?" In short, on a morning when even those two fussy autodidacts were in tune with the tasks of this earth, every prospect pleased.

But that afternoon at recess, I slugged Eddie Turley.

Damon of all people pulled me off him. Probably more in surprise than charity toward me, the Swede boys held Eddie back as he raged to get at me. Odds were that it was the only punch I would ever land on him, but it had been a good one, a clout to the jaw that knocked him back a step or two. That swing of my fist created an instant sensation in the schoolyard. "That's it, Paul, lay it to him!" Verl Fletcher yelped in encouragement, as if I hadn't just delivered my best. "Ooh, your poor hand," issued from Barbara Rellis, a sixth-grader but already catty. Carnelia's head popped out of the outhouse. I caught sight of Toby in the circle of smaller kids, looking amazed. Everything escalated with the speed of sound. Grover Stinson and Miles Calhoun were talking back to Eddie and his outraged contingent, and since the Swedes happened to be over there on Eddie's side, the Slavs automatically formed up on mine and chimed in. The history-book chapter on the Congress of Vienna had nothing to show us about balances of alliances.

My immediate adversary, however, was not Eddie Turley but my brother. In the strictest sense, Damon and I saw eye to eye. He had caught up to me in height, validating—in his own mind, at least—his passion for every kind of sports over my bookish-ness. Now he had me in a lassolike arm hold across my chest, and if I hadn't been so mad, it should have occurred to me what I was in for from Eddie if even Damon could so easily handle me. Our faces nearly touched as we traded savage whispers.

"Have you gone crazy? He's too much for you."

"I don't care. I'm through taking it about the housekeeper."

"What'd he say?"

"He asked me if she fed us from her tit for breakfast."

"Why didn't you hit him harder?"

"Thanks all to hell, Damon."

Suddenly everyone became aware of a sound like a woodpecker on glass. Miss Trent was rapping on a schoolroom window, trying to see what the excitement was. She came outside on these occasions only if fists were already flying. With long practice, all of us in the schoolyard dissolved from the scene of the fracas but stayed within range of catcall.

Eddie was staring blue murder at me, and for that matter, Damon. He had the right pedigree for it. Ambrose Turley
hunted wolves and coyotes for a livelihood, and he and Eddie lived not much better than beasts themselves in a ramshackle place on the Marias River bottomland. People went out of their way to leave Brose Turley alone as he scavenged the countryside setting traps and collecting pelts. His nearly man-size son looked perfectly capable of collecting mine.

Damon was undaunted. "Let me," he insisted in my ear. "I'll get him off the notion of beating the jelly out of you, all right?"

"Thanks all to hell again. How—"

"Don't worry, it'll work slick."

With that, Damon already was strutting toward the Turley faction to parley. "Just Paul and Eddie—the rest of us keep our noses out," he negotiated with Martin Myrdal and Carl Johannson, eighth-graders who were Eddie's most sizable lieutenants. The Swede boys cast hard looks to where the Drobny brothers and the Stoyanovs, Milo and Ivo, were close behind me, but also on our side of the matter was Verl Fletcher, an eighth-grader like them who was all long arms and knuckles. "We don't mind watching Paul get what he's got coming," Martin finally sealed the bargain.

That quick, Damon sprung terms on Eddie. "No fighting it out. You're so much bigger than Paul it isn't fair. He'll take you on, but another way. Loser has to leave the other one alone the rest of the school year."

Eddie could not believe what he was hearing. He sputtered, "He hit me first!"

"That evens up for the time you hit Grover, and that time with Milo, and how many times has he done it to you, Martin?" Everybody knew Damon could have kept on naming off schoolyard victims who had felt a clout out of nowhere from Eddie Turley, including most of the girls.

It sunk in on Eddie that this was not the jury to complain to about unfair treatment. He switched to bravado. "I ain't scared of no Milliron. You name it, I'll clean up on him."

"Paul will race you," Damon stayed in charge. "Horseback."

Eddie sneered. "That the best you can do? Any sissy can sit on a horse."

Damon had him where he wanted him. With a wicked grin he specified:

"Wrong end to."

 

Which one of us had come up with riding backward in the saddle in our constant races with each other I can't really prove, but my money would be on Damon. It broke the monotony of the ride to and from school. For a few years there, in good weather my gamesman brother and I pretty much rode daily doubles against each other. Whoever lost in the first gallop only had to say "Wrong end to, this time" and off we shot again, crazy jockeys clinging atop the horse's hindquarters. Now that the bulk of age is on me, I can barely imagine ever being that nimble in the saddle—shucking out of the stirrups, scooting up and around on the seat of our pants, and ending up reseated as if we were going one direction and the horse the other—or that my roan Joker or Damon's pinto Paint put up with it. We didn't race wrong-end-to as much after Toby started going to school with us, as he didn't need any encouragement in the direction of breaking his neck. But every so often, when the three of us would reach the stretch of the road to school that couldn't be seen from any house, one or the other could not resist flinging the challenge, and the Milliron cavalry would be flying down the road, back pockets first.

But those were races for fun. The ante was sky-high in the contest with Eddie. "He has that steel-gray, remember," I pointed out to Damon, promoter of all this. Brose Turley, in his
occupation of running down wolves, possessed a saddle string of deep-chested, rangy horses, and Eddie rode a grizzled brute of a steed that looked like it could run a gazelle to death.

"Joker's not bothered, are you, boy" Damon reached over from his own mount and rubbed the mane of my bow-necked sorrel saddle pony. Then held up a fist to me like John L. Sullivan striking a pose, grinning behind it. "One-Punch Milliron. Gonna have to put you in my scrapbook."

"Bam!" Toby, riding on the other side of me on our way home from school, was even more exultant about the haymaker I got in on Eddie. "You really gave it to him, Paul!"

I glanced at Damon, and he at me. Ahead of us, down the long gumbo hill toward home, a field of white linen had sprouted in front of our house and Rose could just be seen out there taking sheets off the clothesline. We both reined up, and I reached over and halted Toby's horse as well. "Tobe, listen. You can't tell anybody. Anybody, got that? The fight and the race and all, this has to be a strict secret." I spat in the palm of my hand. His eyes large, Toby did the same and submitted to the first binding handshake of his life.