The Whistling Season

by Ivan Doig

  A wiggle of relief ran through the other three of us. Damon could restrain himself no longer. "Uhm, Morrie? Would you like to see my scrapbooks? I have Coach Stagg in them and everything."

  "Damon, I would be honored. But—" He looked to Father to see if perhaps the evening should be closed down.

  Father waved them off to where the scrapbooks lived, our bedroom. "The lot of you, except our fabled contrarian here. Paul, I need your help with a couple of duns."

  My head still spinning from the turn of events Morrie had brought about, I assembled my writing materials. Wordlessly Father passed me the bills of lading that were past due, and I wrote the dunning letters. The kitchen was still except for the skritch of my pen and Father's shuffling of papers, while from upstairs the voice of the sports fiend, Damon, and Morrie's more melodious murmur drifted down. When I set the last letter aside for the ink to dry, I stayed in my chair instead of bolting for upstairs, unsure of the ground I was on with Father.

  After an amount of time that I somehow knew he was measuring in his head, he glanced up from his accounts. Then put his hands on the edge of the table and pushed back a bit, as if trying to add to his perspective on the youngster across the table. "When you and Thucydides finish the woodpile," Father kept his voice down as he began, "we'll call the matter of that race square. All right? That does not mean you are free to go galloping around backwards, ever again. I am not raising the pack of you to be rodeo trick riders."

  "No, sir. I didn't think so."

  "What Morrie said about outdoing the ordinary is entirely valid, but there are ways to do it and still stay in one piece."

  "I'm not against that, Father, honest."

  "Paul. Son." His mouth worked at stifling a swallow. "I don't know how I could get along without you." He scraped his chair back and headed for the stove and coffeepot so that I couldn't see his face. "Now scat. I have to finish up this bookkeeping."

  As I mounted the stairs, my lips silently tried out the two words "contrary warrior" together. Valid, but, according to Father. How was I supposed to put a paradox like that together? Maybe better to be Damon, whom I could hear had passionately worked his way from football to boxing in the scrapbook tour, which I supposed was fitting for the review of my case just concluded.

  "It's funny, the name and all, but know who I liked best, before? Casper—

  —"the Capper, yes, yes, I see it here," Morrie throatily finished for him, doubdess under the strain of keeping up with Damon's enthusiasm. "I swear, headline writers are more ruthless than Cossacks. 'Pug Takes Long Walk Off Short Pier,' indeed."

  Damon would have bristled to be told so, but he had a Shakespearean taste for heroes who came to some gory end or another. The outfielder who fell from the bar car of a train. The fullback who rashly wrestled a sideshow bear. Those unfortunates, I knew from my brother's bedtime tales of them, were there in the album pages with the pugilist under discussion, who by all evidence had thrown a championship fight and ended up dumped off a dock. To me, that did not sound like the kind of contrary warrior a person wanted to be. But Damon, I remembered, had been heartbroken about no longer being able to follow the career of the scrappy Capper, and Morrie was so feelingly providing a wreath of solace I did not want to interrupt.

  "He perhaps did make a misstep, so to speak," Morrie concluded gently. "Before that, he was a boxer nonpareil."

  I knew that meant something like one-of-a-kind. Maybe I just had to take this as a nonpareil night. Damon, though, was dealing wholesale in comparisons, asking keenly, "Could the Capper have beat the Real McCoy, you think?"

  "If bouts were fought on a first-name basis," Morrie was sent to musing, "one would have to think not." His voice had taken on the timbre I recognized from his more soaring disquisitions, and appreciative audience that I had grown to be at the woodpile, I waited outside the bedroom doorway to see where this one would go. "'Casper' versus 'Harry,' that would sound like a first-round knockout for the latter, wouldn't it. But nicknames capture an essence, an augmented personification of the individual." One-Punch Milliron listened to this with care. "No," Morrie was concluding as though he could see the match in some ring beyond this world, "the Capper would have capped the McCoy off, I'm sure of it. Eight rounds, no more."

  What a picture the three of them made as I entered the room. Toby was half sprawled onto the worktable next to the pair hunched over the spread-open scrapbooks, his eyelids desperately heavy. In the lamplight Morrie pensively stroked his mustache as Damon ran a guiding finger through that holy writ of the true sports fan, the fine print, the agate type beneath the story of the event.

  "I couldn't believe it when he lost to Ned Wolger, that time. Look at the round-by-round, the Capper was winning almost all—"

  Damon became aware I was there. He swiftly looked around at me, his hand groping toward another scrapbook. His voice broke a little as he said, "Paul, I just put the World Series in. Want to see?"

  He knew that baseball was the one sport I cared anything about. I figured I might as well thaw; Damon was going to be my brother forever, no matter what. "Sure."

  But before I joined them at the scrapbooks, there was the matter of Morrie coming over tonight to act as my advocate. I had no idea how to thank him enough. "Morrie, I—"

  "It's all right, Paul, you may have to return the favor sometime." His forefinger took its turn at the fine print of life, alighting into the lineup of the world champion Pittsburgh Pirates. "Honus Wagner, the Flying Dutchman, now there's an ominous nickname if there ever was one."

  6

  WHEN I CAME DOWNSTAIRS IN THE MORNING, FRESH FROM a dreamless night, I could tell there still was something on Father's mind. Hoping it wasn't me, I dropped to my place at the table to try to fade into the routine of breakfast.

  No breakfast was in sight.

  "The time has come, Paul," Father said with determination, one warrior to another. "I am going to have it out with Rose on the cooking."

  "Really?"

  "Watch and see."

  I ran back upstairs to shake Damon and Toby awake.

  By the time they were more or less dressed and had spilled out onto the stairs to take a grandstand seat with me, here came the customary brisk knock.

  We watched avidly as Father let Rose in and, just like that, was rewarded with, "Isn't this a morning to remember? Oliver, I have decided I am going to tackle the kitchen."

  "You are?" Father sounded like someone who had hit the jackpot. Damon, always our hungriest of the hungry, showed Toby and me his fingers crossed for luck.

  "Absolutely," Rose vowed. "There is not a shelf in there that doesn't need scouring down."

  She bustled by Father, the curls on her forehead giving a little flip as she sighted us perched on the stair treads. "Toby, Damon, Paul, good morning, good morning, and good morning. My, aren't you the early birds on a Saturday!" The lunch sack that barely would have fed a chickadee went to its accustomed place, off came her coat, and we knew it was only a matter of seconds before she would be whistling into her day's work and for all intents and purposes incommunicado. Damon groaned and Toby twitched. Father cast a harried glance up at us and cut her off halfway along the hall.

  "The kitchen. That brings up something. I wanted to have a word with you."

  "Certainly, Oliver."

  "Ah, Rose? I—the boys and I," he shamelessly resorted to, "rather hoped that you might lend us a hand with the cooking. Naturally there could be an adjustment in wages."

  Rose appeared mystified. "Did my advertisement contain a misprint?"

  "No, no. We all got a rise from 'can't cook but doesn't bite,' believe me. It's just that we assumed the first part was as much a jest as the second part."

  "Alas," Rose emitted, one of the few people in the modern world who could say that word and seem to mean it, "it was not."

  "Can't cook at all?" Desperation was entering Father's voice. "How can that be?"

  "I was never taught it. Housekeeping, yes, every wrinkle.
I entered household service on Lowry Hill when I was just a slip of a girl, but was never on a kitchen staff. And even if I had been assigned to kitchen duty, there are obstacles."

  "Such as?"

  "Eggs," she confided. "I can't stand the sight of them."

  "What, eggs? But you gather them every day!"

  "They're still in their shells then, aren't they. It's the yolks that get me. And the runny stuff, what's it called, egg white. Ugh."

  Floundering fatally before our very eyes, Father did make one last try at grasping Rose's cookery-free existence:

  "But you were a married woman—how on earth did you and Mr. Llewellyn eat?"

  "Out."

  Twenty-four hours later, the still disconsolate crew of us pushed our spoons around in mush that was even less appetizing on Sunday than the other mornings of the week. Our fate stretched ahead of us, plate by usual dismal plate, into infinity now that we knew Rose honestly meant "Can't Cook." Father had to use the last card in his sleeve to cheer us up at all. "Gather up your long faces," he directed. "I have a load for the Big Ditch and you're all riding along; you can see your friends. Then Rae is feeding us dinner, although I can't imagine where she got the notion we need a square meal, can you?"

  Some days are all ups and downs. October was drawing to an end with nice, clear weather, but the wind was practicing for winter as we bunched on the wagon seat next to Father in our caps and coats. Then when the dray crested onto the Westwater plain there was the insatiable steam shovel, and the hubbub of the construction camp, but where Brother Jubal's tent should have been, there was only the leftover strew of straw from the muscular worshipping. Damon said something under his breath, which drew him a sharp warning nudge from me. But Father didn't hear, and only instructed us to keep an eye on the time while we were visiting the Pronovosts and, need he add, stay out of trouble.

  At the sight of us, the Pronovost kids practically tore through the front wall of their tent to race out and give us the news. Gabriel and Inez impatiently jigged in place waiting for Isidor to summon the words. Drawing himself up to his skinny best, Isidor said for the ages:

  "You hear yet? Teacher run off with that preacher."

  Toby looked puzzled. Damon and I grinned tentatively, waiting for the rest of Isidor's joke.

  However, Isidor made the quick cross over the center of his chest that meant he was serious. "Pa's foreman seen 'em get on the train together yesterday with their suitcases. Kissin', too. If that don't count as runnin' off, I don't know what does."

  It is the kind of bulletin that still freezes my heart. A teacher erased from the school year. The casualty reports that come to my office sometimes are as awful as can be. Car slid on black ice. Or caught in the blizzard, or the teacherage caught fire in the night. Other times they're simply bad enough. Death in the family or taken ill. Each time my department rushes the files of availables to the beleaguered rural school board, but any gap in the seam of a school year is troubling to me. A one-room school and its solitary teacher must exist on something approaching matrimonial terms, for better and for worse, and back there when Isidor's words were registering on us, I instantaneously missed Adelaide Trent even though I had never liked her. The confused mix on the faces of Toby and Damon said the same for them. All of us were far too young to know the weather of the heart that caused her to flee off with a Bible-thumping spieler. But we understood that Marias Coulee had been jilted.

  Isidor was mustering the remainder of his report. "Seen her here a couple of Sundays in a row. We figured she was just here for the singin'. Guess not."

  Two minutes later, Father looked around in surprise at the three of us screeching to a halt. Damon and I let Toby tell it; he was going to anyway.

  "Miss Trent loped!"

  "Did she." Father's eyebrows lifted commensurately. "That must have been a memorable change from her usual gait."

  "Father, Toby means 'eloped,'" I said.

  "Hopped on the train with that sky pilot," Damon elaborated.

  Father sat down on the tailgate of the dray.

  "Let me try to catch up here," he said. "Addie Trent has landed a man? And quit the country with him, just like that?"

  We three nodded in unison.

  "Destiny strikes again," he said wearily.

  7

  "GOOD MORNING, YOUNG SCHOLARS."

  Three dozen sets of schoolchild ears took a considerable moment to adjust to that form of address. Until then, our day was always started with Miss Trent's all-purpose "Children, hush." After a ticktock of contemplating the unexpected new source of articulation at the front of the classroom, all of Marias Coulee school raggedly chorused back to Morris Morgan:

  "Good morning, teacher."

  Morrie gave a bit of a bow, his crisp white shirt so maximally washed and starched and ironed by Rose that I thought I could hear it crackle. Not that I dared hope it counted for much, but at least the school had gained sartorially in the swap of baggy Miss Trent—Sister Jubal now?—for this exemplar of tailoring. Morrie stood before us like an emissary from those farthest places in our books, where prime ministers attired themselves in tweed and vest and a tie as prominent as a chin napkin. Topped off in this case with the imperial mustache, of course.

  While I sat there fidgeting, the collective gaze of the schoolroom rested solidly on the figure at the front of the room. In it, I know from experience at both ends of a classroom, were measures of doubt, awe, trepidation, hope, something approaching dread and something approximating adoration—the ingredients of every first sighting of a teacher by those whose fate it is to sit and be taught. Morrie fingered a piece of chalk as he gazed back at the legion of us. My case of the fidgets grew worse. Hours on the woodpile instructed me about a good many of his mannerisms, and I could tell he was rubbing up one of his gigantic thoughts, genie-in-the-lamp style, from that chalk.

  But whatever it was, Morrie managed to stow it for the time being. "The day's first lesson," he sent the hearts of Marias Coulee school down and just as swiftly up, "is for me, to learn your names." He whirled to the blackboard as gracefully as if ice-skating. "In exchange, here is mine." My pride in my penmanship leaked away with every swiftly stroked letter of his name; he wrote an exquisite hand, worthy of copperplate.

  "So." Quick as the word, he turned to us again. "If you will please stand one by one and announce yourselves, I can acquaint names with faces. Let's start here with this handsome fellow at the end at the front row."

  Shy with this mighty honor, Josef Kratka barely managed to find the floor with his feet and blurt his name. The other first-graders wobbled up one after the other, as little different from one another as ducklings. Then the second grade, where differentiation took hold. Inez Pronovost popped to her feet like a girl cadet, but Sigrid Peterson barely surfaced to deliver her accented syllables. Hot-eyed Emil Kratka rapped out his name as if challenging anyone to deny it. There was the faintest ghost of a smile on Morrie as Toby reared up and enthusiastically identified himself.

  "Sally Emrich, teacher sir," the school's leading fussbudget led off primly for the third grade. Maybe this first schoolday under the unlikely generalship of Morrie was marching in place, but even I had to admit it had not fallen on its face yet.

  From the moment Father talked himself into the idea and set about coaxing the other school board members into it as well, I was apprehensive about the whole notion of Morrie being tapped to finish out the school year. For one thing, most of that year remained ahead, and all across those months it would take only one lapse on the order of those four-foot sticks of firewood to make a laughingstock of him—and, by extension, of the Millirons. For another, he had never taught school a day in his life, up until now.

  "Oh, how funny!" Rose said when Father broached the job to Morrie.

  "I am rather out of practice at submitting a job application," Morrie said nervously. He looked at Rose as if she ought to back him up in this. "The leather trade, that was all in the family—"

 
"Gone, every trace of it," Rose sounded the sad note for him.

  "It's of no matter," Father skipped over that, "we want someone in that classroom with knowledge running out his ears, not commerce. Morrie, why so coy? The job of teacher would fit you like those kid gloves you used to have dealings in."

  Rose, at least, seemed persuaded by that reasoning. "If Oliver gives his word for you—"

  "Oliver, you are all too readily casting me in a role with the heroic echoes of antiquity," Morrie mused." 'Gladly would he learn, and gladly teach.' I am not sure I have the capacity to play that dual part."

  Any other time, Father might have dusted off Chaucer himself and parried with the further description of that book-laden pilgrim to Canterbury: "But all be that he was a philosopher/Yet had he but little gold in coffer." Instead he clapped Morrie on the shoulder. TU just need to run this by a few people."

  The emergency session of the Marias Coulee school board precipitated by the elopement of Adelaide Trent was called to order in our kitchen that same night. As we'd expected, Damon and Toby and I were shooed off to our room, and just as inevitably we took our usual perches at the head of the stairs to overhear. Right away Joe Fletcher wondered out loud why a man of Morrie's sort was unmoored from any previous career:

  "He isn't a bughouse case, is he?"

  "No more so than thee or me, Joe," Father attested. "Make the mistake of arguing with him sometime and you'll wish he wasn't so sane."

  Walt Stinson voiced the next suspicion. "Then how about tonsil paint? Is he in the habit?"

  Father warded that off stoutly. "From everything I can see, he leaves the bottle strictly alone."

  I could have told them Morrie's intoxication with the brew of knowledge was the real worry. Schoolchildren are quick as sharks to scent something amiss with a teacher, and if he rambled off too far into his excursions of thought in the classroom—well, the three of us there on the stairs would be pining for the old days in the schoolyard when the only topic we heard about was Rose. More than any razzing at recess, though, what bothered me about the prospect of Morrie as our teacher was what it could do to him. If he was branded as ridiculous, it would not stop with the student body of Marias Coulee. People were not a bad lot generally, in what opinion I had been able to form at that age, but there were always some who could drive a nail through a butterfly, too.