The Whistling Season

by Ivan Doig

  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.

  "Tobias Milliron."

  Every head in the schoolroom snapped up at her tone. "Perhaps you would like to share with the rest of us what you are so busy confiding to Sigrid."

  "N-n-no, ma'am," Toby replied in all honesty.

  "Do it anyway," Miss Trent commanded.

  Next to me at our desk Carnelia snickered, until she realized that if Toby was nailed for whispering and had to tell what was going on, it meant no race. Up at the blackboard, Damon abruptly turned as pale as the chalk in his fist. He and I traded helpless looks. I didn't dare try to draw Miss Trent's attention away from Toby; she had been eyeing me suspiciously ever since I had turned into a center of attention at every recess.

  Besides, there was the question of whether Miss Trent had it in for the Milliron family.

  Oh, she was punctilious enough toward us in the classroom. Damon was not put on this earth to make life easy for any teacher, but Miss Trent was careful not to keep him after school any more often than any other classroom sinner. In my less obstreperous case, she drilled me on each subject as tonelessly as if going down a menu, and that was that. (The saving grace was that she didn't seem to care much for Carnelia either.) But if Miss Trent had her doubtful side toward us, we were doubly suspicious of her. Damon and I were convinced she was husband-hunting, quite possibly in Father's direction. Pickings were not plentiful in Marias Coulee: a handful of old bachelor homesteaders with not the best habits, a too-long-on-the-shelf widower like Brose Turley, and just a few eminently eligible ones such as Vivian Villard's dad and, naturally, Father. On last year's last day of school, when the entire school board and all the parents were on hand for the graduation of the eighth-graders, Miss Trent had made eyes at Father to the best of her limited ability To our relief, he had not reciprocated. We trusted Father, but you never knew what a school board member could stumble into where a teacher was concerned. Damon and I simply could not countenance the thought of that familiar figure from the classroom
dominating the rest of our hours too. High in the rump, low in the bosom, Miss Trent was rather bunched in the middle, accentuating the scary extent of her limbs. But the worse part was her customary bothered expression, as though she had something stuck in a back tooth. If she was even more out of sorts than usual—peeved at coming across an unmalleable Milliron anywhere she looked, say—Toby truly was in for a hard time from her.

  Clop, clop. She was advancing on him relentlessly. Toby sat there paralyzed with terror that he would be kept after school and miss the race. The rest of us squirmed.

  "Tobias? We're waiting."

  Damon was frantic. But sometimes he got his best ideas while in that state. Behind Miss Trent's back now, he lifted his elbows and flapped them like wings.

  Toby gathered that in and put it all into one grand expulsion of breath: "A man from the University of Chicago is cleaning our chicken house. For free."

  Miss Trent's new expression revealed that she had not anticipated an announcement of that sort, evidently somewhere on the mythic level of the Augean stables. Plainly, though, this was not anything Toby could be making up.

  "That is no excuse for whispering it to your neighbor," she said in not altogether convincing fashion. "You know the penalty, a taste of the ruler."

  With that she gave Toby a swat on the hand and a warning that cured him for the rest of the day.

  "Meet you at The Cut."

  That was the watchword, when all of us piled out of the schoolhouse at the end of that interminable day and sprinted to our saddled horses.

  The usual homeward group of us and the Pronovosts, with the various Drobnys and Stinsons and Miles Calhoun trying to look innocently tacked on, traveled at a just-fast-enough clip to get ourselves out of sight before parents started looking out of windows. We didn't want to wear out my horse. Joker kept flicking his ears at all the patting and rubbing of his mane by so many strangers.

  We came down the gradient from the higher ground at the same time that the Turley bunch galloped in from the north gulch they had circled around to. "The suckers," Damon said to me, confident enough for both of us.

  He had to be, because I wasn't so sure. I remember my heart beating at what felt like twice its normal rate, while the last few preparations for the race seemed to take forever. The excited babble of the gathering—Toby was letting loose everything he'd had to save up all day in school—reached me only dimly. We needed to kill time while the rest of the kids filtered in, and as they gradually popped into sight from every direction, I stared at that waiting stretch of road as though Jokers hoofprints and my shifting shadow had not gone back and forth over it every day of the past seven school years. If Marias Coulee possessed a creek, it instandy would earn promotion to valley. However, as if nature was rehearsing for something larger, the long crease in the land here south from the Marias River more closely resembles a sunken prairie, gentle enough in its gradual vee to attract the first adherents of dryland farming who ever set eyes on it. The neighboring benchlands along the river and the broad Westwater plain extend around it like an upper floor of the earth, and Marias Coulee fits at the base of the geographical stairs, complete with landing: the gumbo hill up from our place breaks off into an eroded claybank area, where the road runs flat and straight for about half a mile before climbing again to the bench country. This was The Cut. It was the ground I had known as long as anything in my life, yet its bare, beaten dirt looked as foreign and forbidding to me at that suspended moment in time as the Sahara.

  Finally the Kratka brothers, the last of us and with the most roundabout route to sneak past nosy parents, came spurring madly in from the river end of the coulee, and Damon got things under way.

  "We have to make it fast, before somebody comes along. Martin? Is Eddie ready to eat dust?"

  For answer, Eddie stomped up to the starting line leading his snorty high-shouldered mount. That horse looked like it could step over the top of Joker and me. The terrible taste of doubt nearly did me in. I must admit, I was within the tip of my tongue of saying uncle, of finding some wild excuse to forfeit the race. But that would doom me at school even worse than losing to Eddie. And the dreams that would beset me—

  I gave Joker a last pat and led him out onto the road beside Eddie's big steel-gray.

  There we stood, at the line scratched in the dirt. Eddie always wore one of Brose Turley's old hats that seemed to have been fashioned out of the dried skin of some major beast. I pulled my mail-order Junior Stetson lower over my eyes and tried to concentrate on the road ahead. The racetrack, to call it that, stretched from the starting line to a single marker, distant and shining, in the middle of the road. Here was where the genius of Damon came in. At his insistence, the course was a loop, to the far end of The Cut and back.

  "Flat-out, here to there," Martin Myrdal understandably had tried to hold out for when the two sides were negotiating the ground rules. A horse the size of the steel-gray could build a lot of velocity when simply aimed straight ahead.

  Damon was pitiless. "What, Eddie can't steer that cayuse of his around any kind of a corner?"

  "I'll race your squirt brother around in circles, if that's what it takes," Eddie blurted, snapping up the bait.

  Most of us carried small lard pails as lunch buckets, and Damon and Martin now had stacked several of those, with a rock in each for stability, until they made a silver pillar. I understood why Damon demanded the momentum-breaking marker, but I still fretted about it. Rounding it, if the horses were close together, would be no easy stunt. On the other hand, if the steel-gray was half a dozen horse-lengths ahead of Joker by then, traffic at the marker was going to be the least of my problems, wasn't it.

  Damon and Martin stepped forth to hold the bridles of our horses. Verl Fletcher had been picked to be the race caller because he was the one eighth-grader other than Eddie who wasn't a Swede or a Slav.

  "Everybody back, give 'em room," he directed, and there was a collective groan of saddle leather as thirty horseback schoolchildren moved off into the badland cutbanks on either side to spectate.

  "Riders up," Verl called.

  Eddie was watching me from the corner of his eye and I was doing the same to him. It hit me: he wanted me to be the first to get up there backward in the saddle, so he could see how. I planted myself like a post until Verl said to us, "You gonna ride em or walk em?"

  Eddie lost patience, stuck his other foot than usual into the stirrup, and with a mighty grunt heaved himself upward toward his horse's rump, barely clearing the peril of the saddle horn as he wishboned over, then felt around behind him like a blind man for the reins Martin was attempting to hand to him. I swung into my saddle the right way, took control of Joker's reins, then shucked the stirrups and scooted around on my fanny so that I too was established in the leather basin of the saddle wrong-end-to. Eddie glared across at me as if I had just shaken a ballet tutu in his face.

  Damon, though, rose on tiptoe beside Joker's mane to ecstatically whisper up to me, "He hasn't practiced! The dope! Can you believe it?"

  "Damon, that horse of his doesn't need any practice," I whispered back.

  "You worry too much."

  "Gonna give you a count of three," Verl let us know.

  Those next moments have stayed with me with the clarity of a clock face. My belt buckle brushed against the cantle of the saddle as I leaned in the direction of Joker's flanks. The reins were wrapped double around my right hand, held as far behind me as I could reach so as not to tug on the bit of the bridle differently than Joker was used to.

  "One," Verl chanted.

  There was not a sound from the entire mounted legion of Marias Coulee School, from either Eddie's adherents or mine. Clans of centaurs must have watched with similar appraisal when match races were run in the groves of Peloponnesus.

  "Two."

  Joker's tensed ears were sharpened to a point now, and probably mine were too.

  "Three, SPUR 'EM!"

  Eddie was the only one dressed for th
at, sporting a pair of silver jinglebobs, sharp as can openers, that likely were everyday equipment in the Turley family business of encouraging saddle horses to run down wolves. The first jab of those spurs commanded the steel-gray's attention, definitely. But not quite as Eddie had intended. The big horse hurtled into action shying right and left, fishtailing down the road as it tried to figure out the wishes of the unbalanced rider on its back. Nor was Eddie the master of handling reins behind his back yet. Joker and I managed a perfectly nice, orderly start when I pressed my shoe heels against his rib cage and gave the reins the flick he recognized, but it didn't do us any immediate good. Whatever lane of the road we tried, there was a wall of gray horse in our way, one instant the veering rump of the thing, the next practically a sideways view of Eddie as he tried simultaneously to stay upright and to saw his horse's head around to the right direction with that reversed grip on the reins. Over the hoofbeats and horse snorts I could hear cheering and shouts of equestrian advice from the onlookers up in their vantage points in the badlands, but none of it registered long enough to last. When I wasn't having to keep an eye on Eddie's galloping wrestle with his horse, I was aware only of the road flying at uncommon speed beneath me. It is surprising how near the hard ground seems when there is only a horse's tail between you and it.

  Time whirled away like our dust. As well as I could judge ahead over my shoulder, we were about to reach the halfway point of The Cut. By that stage of the race the steel-gray had covered at least twice as much road as Joker and I, but we were able to catch up to within a length every time it made one of its sideways veers. Apparently that grizzled mass of horseflesh could hurl along like this all day long. I didn't have time to think of it then, but Morrie's point about the preponderate role of momentum in life was unfortunately holding true so far.

  I collected my wits, at least those that hadn't been shaken out of me by the jolts that come from riding backwards in the saddle. It was time to make the one maneuver I was capable of. Then or never, and maybe it already was too late. Damon had worked this out with me. "Don't let him see how to use the cantle until you have to," my brother the race promoter had counseled. "Pretty good chance old Eddie won't have brains enough to figure it out for himself first."