The Whistling Season

by Ivan Doig

  "Interesting," Morrie conceded, or maybe not, "that one implement such as the plow can tame nature that way. And history, for that matter." Rose, I noticed, was watching him apprehensively, evidently having seen her brother consort with history before. One more time he indicated to the Big Ditch and its promised acres. "I would think"—when Morrie thought out loud like this, you somehow could hear an idea taking flight, much the way the wing bones of the whistler swan can be heard sawing the air as it passes low over you—"I would think that in all the centuries for which there are records, people have sought to coax water to their land."

  "Morrie, have you been listening to yourself?" Father was good-natured now in respect to Morrie's thought process. "We're coaxing the wet stuff to Marias Coulee, too, but the sky is our ditch. Now, except for one year, let's see, that would have been '04, our crop yields have been right up there with—"

  Naturally the trio of us being bounced in the back of the wagon were letting most of this go in one ear and out the other. We were excited about visiting the Pronovosts, even though it had been only the day before yesterday since we had last spent time with Izzy and Gabe and Inez. But a taste of what life in a tent was like, a chance to poke around the Big Ditch construction camp with kids our age, one more opportunity for the bunch of us to crow over what had happened to Eddie Turley in the wondrous race—we thought we could not have designed a better holiday.

  Life outdid us again. As our dray lurched into the hurly-burly of the construction camp, Damon was the first to interpret the cloud of canvas looming beyond the encampment of the workers' tents and interrupted the grownups with a yelp:

  "You didn't tell us there's a circus!"

  "Not the kind you're thinking of," Father said over his shoulder as he headed the dray toward a waving foreman at the supply dump. "It's that traveling preacher and his minions. Brother Jubal, he bills himself as. Short for Jubilee, I'd guess." Father leaned in to Rose and Morrie to elaborate. "He finds pretty good pickings at construction camps like this. A fair amount of hangovers and other symptoms of sin after a Saturday night, don't you suppose? Wages here aren't bad"—Father all but underlined this as a hint to Morrie—"and that can't hurt his collection plate any.

  "Speaking of collecting." Father turned his attention to us, poised to leap down into the attractions of the Big Ditch encampment. "I don't want to have to track the pack of you down to poke lunch into you. Behave yourselves at your friends' and be back here at noontime, hear?" We promised, cross our hearts and hope to die, not to be late.

  We jumped down, leaving Rose presiding on the wagon seat like a jaunty figurehead over a cargo wharf, and raced off in search of the Pronovosts. Set loose at the Big Ditch! Whatever Coney Island was, how could it match this? The construction camp more than met our expectations, with swearing teamsters and laboring horses and agitated foremen everywhere, the whole place as loud and dusty as any set of boys could want, and over it all the derrick boom of the steam shovel clanking and whirring as it ate into the prairie. "This beats a circus, doesn't it, Damon?" Toby gave his estimation as we rounded the cook tent and looked for the Pronovosts' house of canvas where Isidor had told us to. Sure enough, ahead was the tent flap open in welcome. But what we could see inside caused all three of us to halt hard. Something was wrong. The Pronovost kids were dressed up.

  It turned out they were doomed to a relative's wedding in town. When Isidor and Gabriel and Inez, spick-and-span and dismayed, poured out to meet us, their mother followed to say she was sorry but they had to leave for Westwater as soon as Mr. Pronovost had the horses hitched. We stood around, two awkward squads, until the Pronovost buckboard drew up. As we were trading glum good-byes, Isidor paused before he vaulted into the wagon and said as if he had been giving it a lot of thought:

  "You want to get yourselves a look at the Holy Willies. They're sure somethin'."

  The buckboard was not even out of sight past the cook tent yet when Damon spoke up: "What about it? We gonna go see?"

  "Father didn't tell us not to, did he," I reasoned.

  "Not that I heard," Toby contributed.

  ***

  "O SINNERS, STOP AND THINK BEFORE YOU FURTHER GO! TURN, and turn now!"

  Brother Jubal's deep voice blasted us back a half step as we approached the rear of the big tent. One thing about a sermon-izer of his sort, though: if you were undecided about some precept of his, another would be along in a moment. Shortly he was thundering, "We must learn the only happy lesson there is! Not to fight against Providence!" and we slipped in.

  Isidor had not been kidding. The congregation, the Holy Willies as he called them, were on their feet swaying as if the wind of heaven was sweeping through them. Every eye was fixed on Brother Jubal, up on the spacious platform that strenuous religion required. "Wow," Damon breathed, dragging a toe appreciatively as we crept forward. I saw what he meant. The floor of the tent was covered with straw, in the event that any of the worshippers were so stricken with spirit that they would need to get down and roll around. The hopeful three of us found the lee side of a big tent pole and clustered there.

  "The Bible!" Brother Jubal was shouting as he brandished that item. "I ask you, brothers and sisters, the one question that shall be asked at the gates of salvation: what use have you made of this powerful book? If you can only answer that you have held it over your head to stop a nosebleed—well, then, I'll tell you, friends, you are in everlasting trouble."

  As he restlessly paced and stopped and pivoted, I kept trying to think who Brother Jubal reminded me of. When he spun into profile in one of his pirouettes with the Bible, I figured it out: although not so old and not so paunchy, he was a spitting image of William Jennings Bryan, whom Father would have voted for in every presidential election forever and practically did. Same Roman brow, same coal-chunk eyes. Similar undertaker suit and scrawny tie. I would say Brother Jubal outdid W.J.B. in acrobatic ability, though. On the balls of his feet for as long as we had been watching, abruptly he was across that platform in a flash, pulling up just short of a small table with a pitcher and a glass on it, as he trumpeted: "From homing to burying, cradle to grave, the Bible is your only ticket out of Hell!" Toby had timidly slipped his hand in mine, something he hadn't done in a long while.

  Pausing there to deposit the Good Book—somehow his pause seemed as loud as his preachment, and the congregation didn't lose any of its sway—Brother Jubal picked up the pitcher and glass and poured.

  Damon whispered in my ear: "I bet you it's panther piss." Whether or not the pitcher held that notorious local brand of moonshine, Brother Jubal resorted to it for a good, long swig.

  Swiping the back of his hand across his mouth in a manly way, the sweating preacher seemed to be suddenly reminded of something.

  "Our hymn! We have not yet lifted our voices," although he certainly had. As one, the crowd snapped the song sheets in their hands taut.

  Disappointed as the three of us were that the preaching had not yet led to any holy rolling, we always liked music. Damon gave the other two of us a grin and tapped his toe like a square-dance fiddler, and Toby giggled. Then Brother Jubal's voice all but swept our hair back again, as he led off the singing in a roaring bass:

  Let us fight the holy fight

  On the wild Montana bench—

  Here the congregation chorused in:

  Lord, oh Lord, lend us might!

  "Paul, look, there's—"

  "Toby, shhh, I'm trying to listen."

  In operatic fashion, Brother Jubal swelled his chest and sang on:

  With a coyote for a bugler

  And the Big Ditch for a trench—

  "Damon, Paul—"

  "Toby, it can wait until this is over."

  Damon took the more direct approach of lightly squeezing Toby's lips together like a duck's bill, a reminder we used on each other when someone was gabbing too much.

  Lord—

  Toby managed to get himself undamped from Damon's fingers.

  "B-b-b
ut, over there—"

  —oh Lord—

  Damon and I at last looked over to where our pesky brother was pointing, at the back of the tent across from us. To a raw-boned pair of figures whose shaggy heads stuck out over everybody else's bowed ones. Brose Turley and Eddie.

  —lend us might!

  The sight of them took all the fooling around out of Damon, and the power of thought out of me. Brose Turley had the music up almost to his nose, gnashing away in some semblance to singing. For his part, Eddie didn't seem to be paying much attention to the song sheet. Gawking around the tent in bored fashion, it was only a matter of time before he spotted us, and he did so now. He blinked and looked again, and it was still us. We could see him whispering urgently into his father's ear, even automatically clutching the front of his pants in the universal need-to-go gesture. Brose Turley gave him a heavy-browed look, but jerked his head to dismiss his son toward outside. Eddie headed our way.

  "Let's get," I said, even though Damon and Toby needed no urging.

  We made it out of the tent all right, but there was no getting ourselves out of range of Eddie. He was onto us like a staghound on wounded deer. "You damned peepers!" He caught hold of my shoulder and spun me around as if I weighed nothing. "What're you doing here? Come to rub it in?" Looming in on me with his Sunday watered-down pompadour flopping wildly, he looked bigger than he had on horseback.

  "Simmer down," I tried. "Our father's here hauling freight; we just rode along."

  "Yeah, sure. Where's any freight in the preacher's tent?"

  "Lay off, can't you." I tried to sound as tough as I could. It didn't seem to faze Eddie. "We were just curious, is all." From the corner of my eye I could see Damon shifting his weight restlessly, one of his signs of temper. Before I could think of any way to defuse matters, I heard out of my feisty brother:

  "Why're you bothering us, anyway. Don't you have to scoot back in there and get yourself saved?"

  Eddie took a long step toward Damon.

  "Eddie," Toby asked suddenly, short of breath just from thinking about it, "they gonna put you under the water?"

  "Put me where?"

  Damon undertook to set Toby straight. "These aren't baptizers—"

  "Baptists," I said.

  "—these are the ones who throw fits. What about it, Eddie? Thrown any good conniptions? Had any good cases of the jerks?" As if there was any chance his target didn't take his meaning, Damon crossed his eyes, groaned in a reverential way, and went into an open-mouthed spasm of shaking all over.

  Red-faced, Eddie watched Damon's antics, looking as if he would go to pieces any moment. When he did, it was not the way I expected.

  "My old man makes me," he said helplessly, dropping his hands. "Might help get the devil out of me, he says."

  Damon quit jerking. Toby looked Eddie over sympathetically for any signs the devil was on his way out. My own expression, and I should have known better, must have told Eddie I felt sorry for him.

  Our pity or whatever it was fired him up again. His voice went high as he threatened, "If you squirts tell anybody at school I'll—"

  "You'll what?" Damon was on the prod again. "You can't touch Paul, remember?" He balled up one fist, and then the other. I saw him eyeing Eddie's chin speculatively. Even I had managed to land one there at least once, hadn't I? "And maybe you can whip me"—Damon's common sense and courage were arguing out loud with one another—"but you'll know you've been in a scrap."

  I stepped in. "Eddie, we won't tell. It's none of our business."

  "How'm I supposed to believe that," he scoffed.

  Toby turned the moment. Spitting in his small hand, he then thrust it out toward Eddie's man-size paw.

  "Work off some of that energy in the haymow, you two." Father was unhitching the horses while Damon and I, who could just as well have been helping him, were busy roughhousing. Toby already was in a footrace to the house with Houdini. It was a wonder the barn rafters were not shaking from the high spirits the two of us were giving off. All the way home from the Big Ditch, behind the backs of the earnest grownups on the dray seat, we'd traded Chessy cat smiles at the thought of it: we had something on Eddie Turley. It didn't even matter that we could never tell anybody. We knew. There was this about it, too: as much as anything, our secret mightily added to the Milliron family repertoire, junior division. From then until the end of time, all Damon would need to do to set Toby and me and himself to laughing would be to cross his eyes and give a meaningful twitch.

  Right now my brother the cutup halted in mid-tussle with me and cocked an ear in Father's direction as though he had gone hard of hearing. "Hey? Oh, hay." Somehow I found that uproarious.

  Draped in horse harness, Father turned around in that way parents do when they are about to tell you they mean business. But Damon already was scampering up the ladder to the haymow. I thought it prudent to dash over and help Father heft the welter of leather onto the wall pegs. From what I had overheard before we left off Rose and Morrie at the Schrickers', he probably was nearing the limits of his tolerance for one day. His efforts to suggest the Big Ditch to Morrie as a logical site of employment had met polite but undentable resistance. "I find I rather like the solitude of a homestead workday," Morrie said, veteran of several such days. "George keeps coming up with chores for me to do on his mother's place; it's quite remarkable. And should you ever need a hand at anything that is too much for you, Oliver, I have two."

  Father was weighing this when Rose burst out:

  "Oh, Oliver? I have a favor to ask, the next time you go to town. It's about the dust."

  That caused all the Millirons to look over our shoulders, back at the dray's billowing bridal train of dust that every conveyance in Montana dragged after it, seven months of the year. Dust was such a part of our life we had never heard anyone bother to comment on it.

  "I take exception to dust," Rose said decisively.

  Bewildered, Father cast another look at the chronic brown fogbank we were raising with every turn of the wagon wheels. "I don't quite see what I can do about—"

  "In the house, I mean. It would help with the housekeeping ever so much if dust didn't blow in all the time. The next time you're in town, couldn't you bring back some draft excluder?"

  "Draft exclu—?" Even though Father liked to read a couple of pages of the dictionary every night for pleasure, it took him a few moments to work that out. "Do you by any chance mean 'weather stripping'?"

  "I do, don't I. My poor husband always called it the other." We had not heard the late Mr. Llewellyn mentioned in the last day or two, but here he was again. "The Welsh have such a gift of gab, you know, and—well, it runs in our blood, too, doesn't it, Morrie."

  "Like dye," he vouched, and gave her arm one of those pats.

  "Surely it would take you no time at all to tack some whatsit, weather stripping, around the doors and windows," Rose persisted to Father. "As I say, it would do wonders for the housekeeping." He knew he was caught; he couldn't be against wonders of housekeeping. Helpfully, Morrie asked how many windows and doors the house had, and given the number, he announced in a feat of lightning calculation that fifty yards of the stuff ought to dustproof our house.

  Whoosh. A cloud of hay cascaded down into the horse stall nearest Father and me, interrupting my reverie and making Father wince.

  "Damon! Get a little of it in the manger, can't you?" Father looked in exasperation at the high-priced alfalfa mixed in with the horse manure on the floor of the stall. I was already on my way to the ladder by the time I heard him telling me, "Go up there and regulate the lunatic, while I water the horses."

  "My turn," I informed Damon as I popped up into the haymow. Yielding the pitchfork and the field of battle to me, he flopped into the hay like someone keeling over backward into a swimming hole. He sprawled there, arms out, in sheer exuberance at our incredible luck lately, and I could not help grinning along with him as I carefully pitched hay down through the loft hole into the manger.


  "Hah! Can you believe it?" he marveled, still unable to get over it. "Old Eddie, in there with the Holy Willies. You must have knocked him into Sunday with that haymaker."

  "Damon, don't."

  "Don't what? You play yourself down too much. One-Punch Milliron!" He pantomimed a roundhouse swing of such arc and ferocity it rolled him over in the hay. "I tell you, the look on old Eddie when you popped him. No wonder he raced like such a boob, he was still so surprised—"

  The silence of the barnyard caught up with him as it had with me. We should have been hearing the sound of the pump as Father filled the horse trough.

  Damon scrambled on all fours to peek over the edge of the haymow. I teetered behind him for my own fearful view of below.

  Father, holding the skimming bucket for the trough that he had come back to the barn for, stared up at the white-faced pair of us.

  "Climb down. Now."

  The instinct was to bolt and run, but we knew better. We assembled, in a criminal rank of two, in front of Father. I could not bring myself to look at him and I did not want to look at my squealer brother. Damon stood there stupefied. "It—he—we—"

  "By all report, this involves Paul," Father said stonily. "Go to the house, Damon. Now." He turned his attention to me, prisoner in the dock and guilty written all over me. "We need to have a conversation."

  He marched me into the grain room, where we could sit on bags of oats for what promised to be a long session. From the direction of the doorway of the barn, telegraphic blurts followed us there.

  "Paul was only—he didn't really—"

  "Damon," Father roared, "I am telling you one last time. Clear out."

  When the vast silence after that satisfied him, he turned to me again. "So. Am I to understand that you popped Eddie Turley first?"

  "Yes, sir."

  He looked pained. "Paul, for crying out loud. I thought Damon was the pugilism fanatic in this family. I should be able to have my eldest son know when to hold his temper."