The Whistling Season (7 page)

Damon set the race—naturally, the whole schoolyard had to be in on it—for Friday after school. As every kid knew, parents somewhat lost track of the clock at the end of the school week, and we had our set of proven tactics to take advantage of that lapse. It was not unusual for an entire pack of us to jaunt off after school to a coyote den someone had discovered, so you could just bet that across Marias Coulee that Friday the excuse for late arrival home would be a mumbled chorus of "looking for coyote pups." Beyond that, the kids with farthest to ride made a flurry of staying-over arrangements. Miles Calhoun would overnight with Grover Stinson, the Kratka boys would become honorary Swedes for a night at the Myrdals'. Lily Lee Fletcher took in Vivian Villard, whose lone small figure on the longest ride home of any of us, five miles, was a daily lesson in bravery. Meanwhile, details such as starting line and finish line and exact interpretation of "wrong end to" were being worked out by Damon and Martin. Edgy as I was about the outcome of the race, a part of me had to admire the level of conniving that went into it.

And nobody blabbed. That was the incredible thing. I cannot say a word to anyone in my department without it ending up three floors away. But the schoolchildren of Marias Coulee kept as mum as the pillars of Delphi. Oh, Miss Trent knew something was up, definitely. She trooped around the perimeter of the schoolroom in her cloppety shoes even more than usual, suspicion in every jiggle of her bumpy build. Once she even came out at recess to try to figure out what the sudden giggles and excited clusterings were about. Our pact of secrecy resisted her best effort, though. Not even Camélia, who ordinarily would have gone a mile out of her way to tell on me, let out a peep about the race; after all, there was every chance Eddie Turley was going to make me look like the fool of all time. So, that week built and built, two clouds of anticipation in the opposing climate zones of the schoolyard, toward Friday.

 

On the home front, so to speak, morning by morning Rose arrived with some new plan of attack on the house. Now that our bedding and underwear and even hankies were as fresh as a garden of lilies—a shrewd boost in our morale—she chose her battles with professional élan. Every stove was scraped out and polished, and every stovepipe emptied of soot, before she moved on to sweeping and scrubbing the floors. The day after that, windows were washed until they sparkled and up went the new curtains that she had prevailed on Father to fetch from town.
Offhand miracles occurred, too: lamp chimneys suddenly were clean instead of smoke-darkened; Houdini no longer was a canine disaster area thanks to his pond romps with Toby. I mean it when I say the house positively breathed in a way different from before, for among all the other exhalations of wonder that our housekeeper provided, Rose was a woman who whistled at her work. About like a ghost would. That is, the sound was just above silence. A least little tingle of air, the lightest music that could pass through lips, yet with a lingering quality that was inescapable. There is nothing quite like stepping into a seemingly empty house and hearing the parlor—Rose's tidying was often so swift and silent that the tune was the only sound—softly begin to serenade you with "Down in the valley, valley so low." More than once I saw Father stop what he was doing and cock an ear toward some corner of the house a melody was coming from, as if wondering whether whistling really could be the housekeeping accompaniment on Lowry Hill in Minneapolis.

So, one breezelike song after another on her lips as she cleaned upstairs and down, Rose brightened the house. With the exception of the kitchen. We ate as we had always eaten, haphazardly and dully. Father right then was busier than ever with his hauling sideline, freight for the Big Ditch stacking up at the depot daily. For his part, Damon was so immersed in the scheming for the upcoming race that he didn't badger Father about the cooking situation. Toby went around looking like he was going to burst with our secret at any minute, but he put his energies into learning to whistle like Rose. And my mind was so crammed with scenarios of galloping backward—all that week my dreams featured Eddie Turley jeering at me from a secure perch between the humps of a racing camel—that I was useless for any other purpose.

It snuck up on me, then, when Rose managed to touch a nerve in Father about our mother. At the time, I didn't want to witness it, but I happened to be in the line of fire, clamped to a book at the kitchen table trying to keep my every thought off the race. Father had come in from his day of freighting and was washing up, and Rose had just finished her day's work, too. Although not quite.

"Oh, Oliver?" She veered from her path out the door into the kitchen, her shawl already on. "I need your guidance on one matter." She sounded troubled.

"I can always make a stab at it," came muffled as he finished toweling his face. "What's the topic under discussion?"

"Your room." Rose hesitated. "I need to know what, that is, how much you want done with it."

Father didn't say anything until he'd hung up his towel. "You mean Florence's—my wife's things, I take it."

"Yes. I'm sorry to bring it up, but—"

"It's all right," he replied, although I knew better. "Just sweep and tend to the bedding in there," he told her with a slight catch in his voice. "I'll do any straightening up." He seemed to feel the need to add, "I haven't had the heart to disturb Florence's things. The time will come, but not yet."

Rose nodded, but didn't turn to go yet. With evident effort, she brought out another question:

"May I ask—how long has it been?"

"Last year." Father recognized what lay behind her asking. "And with your husband?"

"This past summer."

"Ah. That recent." Caught in grievers' etiquette, Father asked in return: "Was it sudden?"

"Very." Rose drew a faltering breath. "He—just went."

Father looked over at me as if he wished I didn't have to be in on this, but there I was. My eyes began to sting. I was not
the only one in the room it was happening to, I could tell. Mother's death had been hard for all of us to bear, but we had borne it, because that is what people do. I thought of it as like the cauterizing I had read about Civil War doctors doing when they performed amputations, the fierce burn sealing off the wound. Each of us showed the scar; there was no help for that. Toby did not mope often, but when he did, it ran a mile deep. Damon's temper got away from him more than it had before. As for me, I am told that for a public figure I am an exceptionally interior person, and I can't argue with that; surely I looked at life a lot more warily after it took Mother from us. In Father's case, he had our symptoms to tend to as well as his own. In short, none of us was over Mother's death, but we had adjusted to the extent we could to that missing limb of the family.

Now Father had to find it in himself to finish the exchange with Rose, and he did. "Florence"—his voice struggled, and he gave me another difficult glance—"the boys' mother lasted a few weeks, after complications from a burst appendix."

Rose said how sorry she was to hear those circumstances, and turned to go. Before she did, she looked back at Father in her keen-eyed way, although those eyes were a bit damp. "Thank you. It helps, to know what someone else has been through."

"All right then. Good night, Rose."

"Good night."

F
RIDAY, RACE DAY, IN MY DREAM-TOSSED STATE I OPENED THE
door to Rose's now familiar knock and stood there blinking. Along the line of her right shoulder hovered a startling mustache, like a hairy epaulette.

"Paul!" she exclaimed as if delighted that I still was in existence. "Look who's with me!"

"Uh, morning, Mr. Morgan," I managed.

"Needless formality, Paul, especially at this ungodly hour of the day," he protested as if he had come all the way over to our place on this matter of manners. "Let's make it 'Morrie.'" He stepped from behind Rose and provided me the necessary handshake.

The sound of Morrie's voice brought Father straight out of the kitchen, cup in hand. Before he could get in a word, Rose was combining explanation and congratulation:

"We're in luck, Oliver! I've conscripted Morrie to clean the chicken house. It's really quite—" The way she wrinkled her nose said the rest.

Morrie raised a hand as if to fend off any objection from
Father. "Gratis. A token of thanks for the new lease on life you have provided Rose. And for that matter, me." By now Damon and Toby were charging down from upstairs, all ears. Morrie acknowledged their presence with as much of a smile as could make its way through the mustache. Then sped right on: "Montana seems to agree with me. Hard labor—that is, strenuous exertion such as cording up wood—was just what I needed to draw me out of dwelling on the recent plights of life."

Was? Father was startled by that; we all were. "You worked yourself out of a job already?"

"Three cords of freshly split wood, measured to the inch," Morrie attested, Rose beside him proudly nodding approval of his achievement. "The Parthenon is not built more exactly than Eunice Schricker's winter woodpile." He swung his arms restlessly, evidently ready to tackle more labor. "I believe destiny is fueled by momentum, Oliver. Once launched upon a fresh turn in life's path, a person ought not to slack off." He gazed at his sister as if to give credit where credit was due. "Rose never slacks off."

"Destiny has led you to our chicken coop, has it?" Father said, an uncommon glint in his eye. "Maybe you ought to fortify yourself with a swig of coffee first."

"Gladly," Morrie accepted, missing Rose's shake of her head to warn him off.

Damon and Toby and I were in a dilemma, antsy to reach school and endure through the day until the big race, but reluctant to tear ourselves away from Morrie's debut at shoveling chicken poop. Our compromise was to scamper upstairs to get ready for school and at the same time strain our ears to pick up every word from the coffee klatch in the kitchen.

"What's 'gratis'?" Damon asked me.

"For free."

"Really? The chicken house? Ugh."

"I have to say, our chickens usually don't have such elevated company," Father's voice drifted up. "Isn't there some other trade you want to take up, more on the town side of things? Westwater could use a good glover."

There was a rattle of cup and saucer, which we figured was Morrie putting Father's version of coffee a safe distance away. "By 'glover,' you mean—"

"Work gloves, lady's suede, sled mittens," Father hypothesized. "For someone like you who knows the leather trade, a glove store would seem a natural opportunity. Or were you and Rose and the late Mr. Llewellyn not in retail, before?"

Morrie sounded pensive. "International trade was more our line. When catastrophe came down on us as it did, frankly I lacked the heart to return to that kind of endeavor. I decided to seek something more, well, fundamental. Down to earth. No more of the frippery that we had made our name by. And so, when Rose—" He broke off, in that mannerism he shared with her, as though the rest explained itself without being said. Toby's shoelaces were giving him trouble and I was working on those, while Damon searched everywhere for his belt. As if in accompaniment to our efforts, Morrie suddenly resumed: "I might cite you Santayana—'the world of matter is the absolute reality.' I don't mind telling you, Oliver, I find those words have considerably more meaning here in the West than they did in the ostensible halls of learning."

Rose happened past our bedroom on her way to some chore just then, and giving us a lightning smile that said she knew what we were up to, she paused there with us to listen in on the kitchen colloquy.

"Where did you take your degree, Morrie?" As a proud graduate of Manitowoc Technical School, Father was always interested in educational pedigree.

"Knox."

Hearing that, Rose frowned, and made a move toward the stairway.

"In Illinois? A fine college, I've heard." Father caught on. "Or do you by chance mean 'hard knocks'?"

"A feeble jest, Oliver. I apologize. But it
was
at an Illinois institution—the University of Chicago."

Shaking her head, Rose reversed course from the top of the stairs and went off on her chore.

Damon had stopped what he was doing and his eyes widened. I didn't follow football as he did, but I'd heard of that school's unbeatable teams under its titan of a coach, Amos Alonzo Stagg. Even Toby had absorbed snippets from Damon's constant attention to the teams in his sports scrapbooks. In excited recognition he whispered now, "Damon, the Baboons!"

"The Maroons," Damon hissed back at him. He looked longingly across the room. "I have to show Morrie my football scrapbook."

"Not now, you don't," I told him. "Come on, let's get this day over with."

But I was the one who veered off at the bottom of the stairs to track down Rose whistling up work for herself. Next to where she hung her coat I noticed the itty-bitty sack of lunch she brought every day. Morrie had brought nothing at all. What did these people exist on?

"Morrie better find out where the pond is," I murmured to Rose when I found her. "He's going to smell to high heaven after he spends a day shoveling chicken matter."

Her lips twitched. "Houdini and I will share the secret with him, depend on it."

Father made an appearance in the kitchen doorway. "The last I knew, school still existed. Aren't you characters—"

"We're going," I blurted, Damon and Toby tumbling into line behind me to get out the door.

The ride to school was a blur, my mind on Eddie Turley and his steel-gray horse, while Damon pelted me with last-minute advice and Toby was as wound up as a music box. The schoolyard was a mass of anticipation when we reached it, everyone hanging on outside watching for us even though Miss Trent always wanted us all in our seats by the time she was done beating on the triangle.

It was barely into arithmetic time, when the sixth-graders were at the blackboard working on division problems she was giving them, when Miss Trent wheeled around with surprising quickness for someone of her shambly build.