The Whistling Season

by Ivan Doig

  I knew my way in the dark, step by measured step down the stairs and to the match holder in the kitchen and, in the flare of the struck match, to the lamp on the table. Father always banked the stove for the night by chocking it full of coal, and there were ruby-red embers left for me to feed a crumpled newspaper and sticks of kindling. With everything lit, I took stock of myself.

  It did not require much: I felt like a wreck. Sweet dreams, hooey. Nightly awaits that sweet address/Principality of Sleep/ Happy Land of Forgetfulness—could a poet be any farther wrong than that? If that was the best the grown-up world had to offer on the subject, I would need to construct my own approach to what went on in me when I was not awake. Don't let it get to you, I sermoned myself, although there still was so much leftover ventriloquism in my head that the voice sounded like Eddie Turley telling me to how to best behave around woofs.

  That made me mad—people hanging around in me when I was trying to evict them—but it also triggered the thought that, frazzled though I might be, at least I was better off than anything that met up with Brose Turley by day or night. This and a cup of cocoa when the teakettle began its tune improved my outlook a bit. If the past was any guide, little by little the disturbing dream should cool down into manageable memory. I pulled out Robinson Crusoe and sat to the table to read. It would be nearly an hour yet before the alarm clock went off in Father's room and our household began to muster itself toward what passed for breakfast and then another adventurous schoolday under Morrie.

  I was buried in hermit life on a desert island when the front door creaked open. The wind? When wolves and bloodthirsty wolfers have been roaming the back of your mind, you don't doubt the ability of the wind to turn a door handle.

  Unanchored as I was in all the waters between actuality and imagination, I knew nothing to do but try to stay motionless while I waited for whatever was coming in to come in. One instant the kitchen doorway breathed the cold rush of air from the door opening, and the next there was the whisk of a coat already being taken off.

  "Will you look at us!" the whispered greeting practically pranced in. "At least there are two people in the world up and going."

  Rose. As if she had alit from my dream, before it could quite pull out of the station.

  Rose had a talent for arriving. Just by showing up, she turned the mood of a place around the way a magnet acts on a compass. "I saw your light all the way from George and Rae's," she kept to a speedy whisper as she came over to stand by the stove, rubbing her hands. "One if by land, Paul Revere?"

  "Slept in a hurry, I guess," I alibied my presence at the opened book and glowing lamp. Rose herself seemed to have traded her bed for a lantern. This was her earliest ever at the house.

  She must have read curiosity all over me. "Every mitten in this house needs mending," she provided. "I thought I had better do it before you need to go to school with them on." She peered at me in the lamplight, her brown eyes lively even at this time of day. "The last person I knew who gets up this early was my poor husband. He didn't sleep well either."

  "Nightmares?" I whispered back tensely.

  "Just worries, I would say. There at the last. And then—" Realizing that did not lead in a promising direction, she tempered it with a rapid smile. "We all have off nights," which sounded particularly confidential when whispered in the houseful of sleepers around us. "Morrie tells me you seem to have a lot going on in your head, for someone your age."

  More than she was going to know. Maybe it simply proved that I was green in years, but I was not about to tell a woman she had just spent the night in my dream. "Uh, want some cocoa?"

  Rose started to shake her head, but on second look at me she whispered back, "Yes, I could have some. Let me gather up the mending and I'll join you."

  In a flash she raided the mud room of its mittens and, while she was at it, Toby's much-abused scarf and Father's winter sweater. Putting the pile on the table between us, she got busy with yarn and darning needle and every so often remembered to take a teensy sip of the cocoa I had fixed for her.

  "Well, demonstration day was quite something!" she said as if I had asked. "Plows and more plows. Rae bowled over everyone at the potluck with her, what's that called, rhubarb cobbler?" The wavy curls bobbed on her brow as she moved her head this way and that to take advantage of the lamplight for whatever item she was mending. Her eyes were quick, back and forth between me and her task. "Oh, and did your father report that we met up with the entire other half of your class? The county agent's daughter? Cornelia?"

  "Cornelia. Like in carbuncle?

  "Oh now, tsk. She's not a bad-looking girl."

  "You watch. She'll marry a banker." Why I said that, I have no idea. But it turned out to be true.

  Rose giggled. "Such powers of prediction. You have blind-sight."

  "I have what?"

  "It's a knack. Some people just know how a matter will turn out, while the rest of us are in the dark."

  "Huh uh. I don't think I want that."

  "I'm not surprised you have it, though," she said, as if that would soothe me.

  I wanted off the topic of me. "Rose?" It was taking me a while to work around to this, especially in whispers. "Can I ask you something? About Morrie?"

  "I'm only in the same family, you realize, not the same make."

  "All right, but how does he know all those things? I mean, how does he put them together like that?" Morrie's latest magic trick with his mouth had come when the fifth grade was listless toward the multiplication table. "When you play a fiddle, you want music to come out, don't you, even though it takes a set of strings that once inhabited the inside of a cat." As usual I held my breath, but at the next recess the schoolyard, that saucer of terrible swift opinion, brimmed with appreciation of catgut having its day in the scheme of things.

  "Morrie is educated up to here." I looked. Rose was holding her hand six inches above her head. "Schooling suited him." Her face had a fixed expression, as if this was not an easy thing to be telling. "When it's that way, the other in the family—" That dangled in the air until she brought it down by tapping Robinson Crusoe where it lay open. "I always have to think twice whether this is about the opera singer or the shipwrecked sailor."

  "Yes, but—" I was trying to find a diplomatic way to say that she was smart in her own style and people kept telling me I was bright enough, for a boy, yet Morrie could run rings around both of us in mental exploits, and at the same time ask her if he secretly practiced at that or what, when Father yawned a greeting to us from the doorway.

  "Look at the time!" he exclaimed, as if Rose and I hadn't been up for hours examining it. "Roust those brothers of yours, Paul; the schoolbell waits for no man."

  This day seemed determined to get off on the wrong foot. What with one thing and another—Damon must have spent fifteen minutes traversing the bed and finding his way into his clothes—we had to ride hard to school and even so, everyone else had gone inside and Morrie was giving the iron triangle a last chorus when we piled out of our saddles.

  Instead of turning back through the doorway, though, he came out to waylay us, and sulking right behind him was Carnelia. This put me on my guard, especially when he shooed Toby and Damon on into the schoolhouse and announced to Carnelia and me that he had an honor in store for us: he was bestowing on us the duty of raising and lowering of the flag.

  She looked as taken aback as I was. This was unheard of. Always, always, the oldest students were the ones who took turns at that high responsibility. Morrie must have decided, not without good reason, that this civic rite was wasted on the current eighth-grade mob. From now on, he proclaimed, flag duty would migrate from grade to grade, starting with our own, which was to say with the discomfited duo of us.

  Carnelia and I had one thought between us: the possible wrath of the hairy mammoths of grade eight descending onto grade seven. But the change of procedure was entirely a teacherly doing rather than ours, a fact we would plead to high heaven in the schoolyar
d if we had to. Duty having blindly singled us out, she and I squared ourselves up in what might have been flag-bearer fashion.

  Then, like a delayed continuation of my bad dream, the door of the boys' outhouse opened and out sauntered Eddie Turley.

  Possibly it irked Morrie that Eddie's preferred start of a schoolday was to go to the toilet, or possibly he saw this as a providential changing of the guard. In either case, we had an immediate conscript into our flag detail. "Eddie propitiously is on hand to show you the ropes." Morrie nailed him before he could slouch into the schoolhouse. "We are running late this morning," he concluded with a telling glance at me, "so I will leave you to it while I take attendance."

  Morrie vanished inside, and the three of us stood like stumps while the empty prairie yawned around us. By his picked-on expression Eddie would have just as soon walloped me as look at me, and likely that held true toward Carnelia, too. Was I going to be in another fistfight before I even set foot in the schoolhouse? Fortunately for once, the one person who was a match for Eddie in candlepower of glower was Carnelia.

  "All right then, Mr. Helpful." Her voice would have jabbed any living thing into action. "How are we supposed to start?"

  "Could get out the flag, if you snot noses are gonna do this yet today."

  Carnelia and I of course knew the folded flag was kept in its own special drawer at the cabinet end of the cloakroom. In we went, took it out as if we were handling dynamite and, neither of us quite certain of protocol, carried it between us, each using both hands. Eddie trailed after us in a kind of slinking way that uncomfortably reminded me again of wolves and wolfers.

  "You would be late," Carnelia muttered to me on our stately way to the flagpole, "our first day doing this."

  "Didn't know it was, did I, so save your breath."

  No doubt it was proximity across the compactly folded flag that brought to mind Rose's remark that Carnelia was not bad-looking. Myself, I'd had to keep a constant eye on her for seven years now, and I had never seen her improve measurably. I took a good look to be sure. Same turned-up nose. Same milky complexion. Same eyes like the queen in a deck of cards. Catching me studying her, she snapped: "What do you think you're looking at, frog eyes."

  "Nothing worth mentioning, toad spit. Don't let your side droop."

  At the flagpole, we drew to a halt with the colored wedge of cloth still held between us. It was the splendid new forty-six-star flag, with Oklahoma now in the union. An unquestionable beauty, the fresh-dyed stars and stripes silky in our hands. Now, though, came the question dominating both our minds. Exactly how did a person thread and fasten the glorious thing securely onto the flagpole rope swinging ominously there in the breeze? Oxlike Milo Stoyanov knew the secret, less-than-bright Carl Johannson knew, even Eddie Turley knew. But Eddie was standing there mute as the flagpole, smirking at the pair of us.

  "So, what do you say, Eddie?" I tried prompting him man to man. "Ready to show us how to handle the rope here?"

  "Whyn't you go at it backwards?" he mocked. "Your brain kicks in when it trades places with your butt, don't it?"

  Giving Eddie a look of pure disgust, Carnelia laced into him as only she could. "Think for once in your life, horse nose. We need to get this done or we're all in trouble."

  "Wouldn't be nothing new for me. Might be for you two."

  Eddie Turley was one thing Carnelia and I could agree on. We both knew what an incurable pain in the neck Eddie could be when he wanted to. Panic starting to show in us, she and I faced each other with the breeze-blown rope between us. We had to invent together or else.

  "I think we first of all have to put that through there and then—"

  "No, dummy, that's backwards, we need to—"

  "You're not the boss of everything. Let me—"

  "Will you just not be so grabby and—watch out!"

  It was not clear who had been in main possession of the flag and who hadn't. But there it lay, dumped in the dirt between us.

  The pair of us stood there stricken into stone. Rules of the flag were as stark as Scripture. The flag had to be handled with utmost respect at all times. It had to be folded and unfolded in a prescribed manner. Above all, the flag must never touch the ground. Incalculable consequences blazed up at Carnelia and me from the bright heap of cloth there at our feet. For all we knew, Oklahoma now had to get back in line for statehood.

  "Huh!" Eddie marveled, a foxy grin spreading over his usually vacant face.

  As if our heads were on the same swivel, Carnelia and I shot a look toward the schoolhouse. There were no windows there on its front side and Morrie had closed the doors after him, so no one had seen the seventh grade of Marias Coulee disgrace itself. I snatched up the flag, rubbing the dirt off it onto my pant leg. Her mouth working silently in shock, Carnelia could only bob encouragement to me.

  "Wait'll everybody hears this," Eddie could barely wait to unload on us. "Teacher's pets can't even keep the flag up out of the—"

  My loud humming interrupted him. Carnelia was looking at me as if I had entirely lost my mind, but Eddie sobered up sharply as the tune sunk in on him. Just to be sure, I hummed another line of "Let us fight the holy fight..." in even more vigorous Holy Willy fashion and twitched a little along with it.

  Eddie's face turned beet color. "You said you wouldn't tell!"

  "I won't about that if you won't about this."

  Eye-level on me was the Adam's apple on Eddie, and when I saw it working strongly, I had hope that he was thinking things over. All of a sudden he grabbed the flag from my hands, gritting out, "Here, see?" He sped the rope through the grommets a certain way, fastened it in a blur of fingers, and sent the flag shooting to the top of the pole. Without a word more the three of us headed for the schoolhouse, Carnelia glaring daggers at both Eddie and me.

  She and I trooped to our double desk and sat there, both jittery, while Morrie orchestrated lessons among the other grades, gradually making his way to us. However, he said nothing about the inordinate length of time we had been at the flagpole, and merely handed back our essays on Magellan's voyage around the world. "Top marks, both of you."

  Putting the pair of us to penmanship practice, Morrie moved on to the heavy timber of grade eight. Since I was pretty well up on penmanship and the day's other assignments, I stole time that morning to watch him go through his pedagogical paces. That question still intrigued me, of how he managed the mental high jinks he did. I did not solve that, but I discovered something else. Having been around Morrie at his most systematic during our wood-sawing sessions, I knew perfectly well he was scraping through here in the schoolhouse much of the time on nerve and desperation, thumbing into things mere moments ahead of administering the next lesson to some bunch or another in the relentless stairstep system of eight grades in one room. Aplomb counts, however, and here I speak as a public figure whom the newspapers can never resist calling "oracular." Whatever being in charge of "the kid glove end of things" entailed in the prior life of him and Rose and the unfortunate late Mr. Llewellyn, there in the well-trodden aisles between our desks Morris Morgan looked as if composure was a middle he had come by honestly.

  So, on the day of all this Morrie did not bat an eye when the sixth-grade delegation detoured to his desk when all of us clattered in from afternoon recess. Consisting of Lily Lee Fletcher, as earnest as she was quiet, and Miles Calhoun, who had a slow-circling intelligence though you never knew where it would alight, and Rabrab Rellis in her inevitable role of mouthpiece, the group plainly represented a mysteriously broad constituency. Morrie listened level-headed as a judge while Rabrab made her case in feline whispers. Our unexpected teacher was gaining steady adherents in the schoolroom by giving almost any matter a hearing—the one thing Marias Coulee School was united on was scorn for the maxim that children should be seen and not heard—and he was about to win a quantity more. When everyone had settled into their seats, Morrie rose to his feet and announced: "I am reliably informed that due to unforeseen circumstances"—
Miss Trent's abandonment of us—"there has been no spelling bee since, in Rabrab's words, 'practically forever.' That does sound like an unduly long time." The reaction that greeted this was about as if he had thrown handfuls of chocolate bonbons into the room. "Line up, everyone. Alternate grades, is it, each side of the room?"

  Surely by now Morrie knew this was a student body that would rather have a contest than the right number of toes, but even so he was nearly swept aside by the stampede. Grade by grade, desks were rapidly emptied. Carnelia departed ours as if called upon to don a breastplate and lead a crusade to the Holy Land. By habit, I stayed in my seat and pulled out the school's volume of Just So Stories.

  No sooner had everyone else lined up along two sides of the room than I heard: "Squire Milliron?" Morrie's tone of voice could be felt on the skin. "Would you care to join us?"

  I looked up in total surprise, no adequate phrase coming to mind.

  For Carnelia, this was straight from heaven. "Paul can't be in the spelling bee," she reported with relish.

  Morrie cocked his head. "And why is that?"

  Carnelia simply pursed her lips as if the why of it was too obvious to say. Damon knew it should not come from him, and Toby, itching to speak up, was willed into silence by Damon's warning look. Around the room my friends and allies were unsure of my wishes on this, while my adversaries did not know how to hone it against me as much as they might have liked. It was Verl Fletcher from the back of the room who finally piped out, "Because Paul every time beats the pants off the rest of us."

  Morrie's head cocked further sideways. "Does he now. Paul, eleemosynary, please."

  I rattled its dozen letters back to him so fast he blinked. In back of him Carnelia crossed her arms across her chest as if to say, See?

  "Hmm. Try prestidigitation."

  Similarly I flashed through that. By now Morrie was looking at me a bit grimly, as Miss Trent and her predecessors had done before him. "This entire sentence, then." General murmur and a few gasps emanated as he put to me: "Pharoahs were heirs to hieroglyphics."