The Whistling Season

by Ivan Doig

  "For openers," Father drew the kind of breath needed for recital, "a state inspector can grade a teacher out of a job. 'Lack of competency.'" He said it like an epitaph Morrie might not want to be buried under. "And worse than that, the Superintendent of Public Instruction can dissolve a school board."

  Morrie, and for that matter Damon and I, gave him a look. Father was nowhere near finished, however. "That's only the half of it. The state can do away with a school, like that." He snapped his fingers.

  "Close the school?" Morrie spoke the shock of all of us.

  Father could recite it all too well. "It takes a 'finding,' they call it, by the state superintendent. But yes, in a worst case, he can take over a school and shut it down if he finds it's not up to the mark. What they do then is skim away the state supplemental appropriation for the school and put it to a dormitory in the nearest town instead—move the kids in there for schooling. They've resorted to that over east in the state, Ingomar and those places. Indian kids, they do it to them wholesale."

  Dormitory. To Damon and me, it sounded like Akatraz.

  "Well, then, Oliver." Morrie tweaked his shirt cuffs as if he and Father were sprucing up to go out and slay the dragon. "You and I had better be at our best for that inspector, hadn't we."

  "Every jot and tittle. Starting with your bona fides."

  "His what?" Rose hurriedly asked, as if it was something that might need sprucing up.

  "Oliver is referring to my educational and occupational particulars, I believe, my dear."

  "Oh, those."

  "The University of Chicago, first and foremost," Father spelled out, "but anything instructional in your days in the leather trade would further enhance your record, wouldn't it?"

  "There were lessons in it, never fear," Morrie said airily, not quite meeting the look from Rose.

  "In other words," Father still was making sure to sound fully like a school board president, "mind your p's and q's with that inspector, and I intend to do the same." He sighed. "Not that it's all up to us. There's also the matter of the Standards."

  "The—?"

  Father bleakly enlightened Morrie. "The standard state tests. To see how the students measure up against all the other schools."

  "Oh dear," Rose said for us all.

  ***

  "If old Inspector gives Morrie any trouble, we can sic Nick and Sam on him," Damon half joked as we crawled into bed.

  "Worse, Eva and Seraphina," I said.

  ***

  A WEEK TIPTOED BY, HOWEVER, AND ANOTHER, AND STILL the Department of Public Instruction bogeyman did not descend on us. Imminent peril has difficulty staying imminent if it doesn't at least show a glimpse of itself. Gradually, Father began to have other things on his mind. All of them had the same meaning: springtime.

  The school came down with it, too. At recess one clear blue day, Grover and I broke out the spongy baseball. (Sam and Nick hung around our first game of catch for a minute or two, then tagged off after Damon to the horseshoe pit and the satisfaction of iron striking iron.) Rabrab was the earliest of the girls to show up in fawn-colored stockings instead of winter's elephantine gray leggings. The air itself changed as robins on their sharp errands hurtled past the schoolroom windows.

  And our kitchen window was free of frost the morning Rose bustled in and huskily asked: "When do you think—?"

  "Won't be long now," I whispered back.

  Sooner than I knew. Father had quit sighing heavily every time the words "plowing on shares" came up, and I suspect was secretly looking forward to it. So, with spring officially on the calendar that coming Sunday and the weather perfectly mild and the moon within a parenthesis width of being full, he rolled out the plow and sharpened the plowshare.

  The whole menagerie of us circulated in the yard of Rose's homestead that sunlit Sunday morning. Rae came over to provide Rose female companionship, and George to hem and haw that he wanted to see how Father's plowing went before he began his own. Luckily, the ground looked less dubious than George did. Thaw had taken the last muddy remnants of snirt, and the bare brown soil now had the thin crust common to dryland farming. A person could never be too sure about the mood of dirt, though. We all watched Father walk out into the field the philosophic way farmers do, and kneel to one knee to lift a handful of earth and rub it between his palm and his thumb as though it were the finest of fabric. He came back wreathed in a smile. "I'd say it's begging to be plowed."

  "Earliest I can remember," one of George's observations as obvious as his beard.

  "One thing about an open winter," Father said as if he had been through a hundred such seasons, "a person can get into the field. How about giving me a hand with the moldboard? I'm going to go for broke and set the blade in the deepest notch."

  The scene is etched forever in me. With spring flirting on the tattered arm of winter that fine morning, the women chatted bareheaded in the sun and the men grunted and clattered things as they adjusted the cut of the plow. Damon and I also served, standing and waiting. We had helped to harness up and there the team of big horses stood, hitched to the riding plow. Father had instructed Damon to hold the reins—Snapper and Blue were the most patient horses there ever were, but reins still had to be held—and he self-consciously grinned at me with the mass of horse might in his hands. With my loftier organizational skills, I was entrusted with the toolbox and the oilcan and the water jug and other sundries that would become a small depot for Father as soon as he singled out some mysterious spot at the edge of the field for it. Only Toby was exempt from agricultural duty, and he was busy manhandling Houdini and trying to keep track of his hat. We passed hats along as we outgrew them, and as another mark of spring Toby had graduated to Damons old but still nice one, although it was big on him and he kept running out from under it in his jousts with the dog. I made a mental note to stuff a folded ribbon of newspaper under the hatband for him when we got home. I knew it was my imagination, but clear as anything I could hear Aunt Eunice saying, "Poor tyke, has to go around in a hand-me-down that fits on his head like a bowl."

  Morrie showed up. I knew he would. How could he not? He had topped off the school week with a whirlwind session on the vernal equinox, and here it was, about to guide the plow.

  Toby and Houdini nearly collided with him as they romped past with a yelp and a happy growl. I called after Tobe to take it easy, but hat and tail were disappearing around the plow on their next orbit. "Living proof that perpetual motion is possible," Morrie remarked. Father and George greeted Morrie to the extent their wrench work under the plow would let them, and he wisely joined Rae and Rose. I knew he and Rose had made up, but it struck me this was the first time he had set foot on the homestead since the day she moved in. Perhaps because of that, they gave each other long, serious smiles before saying anything.

  "You're looking lovely for a toiler of the soil," he at last arrived at, and backed it up with a kiss on her cheek.

  She linked her arm through his. "Who would ever have thought it?"

  "Not I, obviously." Morrie gazed at Rose's field as if trying to read a map in a forgotten language.

  "Oh, it's a dream come true." Turning her head my direction, she laughed and wrinkled her nose for celebrating anything nocturnal around me. "If you'll pardon my saying—"

  Toby's scream ripped through us all.

  18

  FIRST I SAW THE HAT, WHERE IT HAD ROLLED BENEATH Blue's belly. Toby must have tried to swoop it out, stepping too close in under the horse's flank at that unluckiest moment when Blue resettled a rear hoof. The toe of his shoe pinned under the hoof with nearly a ton of horse atop it, Toby stood shrieking for his life on the other side of the workhorses from us all, out of reach. Houdini's frenzy of barking did not move Blue, trained to stand still no matter what.

  Damon turned out to be the savior. By the time any of us could bolt to Toby's aid, Damon tugged on the reins just enough to make the team of horses back up a step or two. The instant Toby's foot was freed he keeled to the
ground, howling out his pain. Morrie reached him first, scooping the broken-looking boy away from any more hooves. He cradled Toby there in the bare dirt of the farmyard, and I flew in on my knees to grab Houdini and keep the agitated dog from wallowing Toby.

  "Tobe! Tobe!" By then Father had leaped the tongue of the plow and surged to us. Rose was there in a flash, too, looking nearly as stricken as Toby did. Damon's pale face hovered in next; past him, I could see that the reins were in George's mitt of a hand now. Rae was the most practical one of the bunch of us, twirling her handkerchief into a tight twist of cloth and making Toby clamp it like a bridle bit between his teeth: "Bite down on this, Toby, you hear me? It'll help against the hurt. Bite as hard as you can, that's the boy, bite it good." As he gritted down on the rolled handkerchief his sobbing was muted, but he still quivered from the pain.

  All of us were aware of the blood darkening the leather of his shoe.

  Morrie looked sallow and somber and—I had never seen this on him before—helpless as he tried to hold Toby in some way that would ease the agony. Father had to make our decisions, and his voice came choked but definite as he did so. "We need to get him in the house here. Old bedding." Rose and Rae rushed toward the door. "Damon, run to our place and saddle Joker for Paul. Jump to it."

  As Damon hurtled into the stubble of the field between Rose's place and ours, Father got a grip on Houdini with one hand and my shoulder with the other. "Get yourself out of those workshoes and put your riding boots on—one horse accident is enough. Then go like blazes to the Big Ditch camp. They have a telephone there. Tell the doctor we don't know how bad this is, but there's a crushed foot involved, understand?" He set me loose and aimed me in the same motion, and I was plunging after Damon's tracks in the field toward home.

  I was too consumed with the responsibility that had been put on me to break down in any way until I was in the saddle and Damon let go of Jokers bridle and reeled out of our way as if letting a charging bull pass. By the time Joker's pounding gallop brought us to the section-line gate, I was crying. I flung myself off and fought the taut wire gate open and danced Joker through. Horses can express surprise, and I felt the tremor of confusion through the stirrups as I reined him toward the Westwater plain instead of the direction of school. We clattered up the long, straight road leading toward the Big Ditch. Somehow amid my weeping I crooned the necessary praises to Joker, over and over telling him, "Good horse, Joker boy, keep it up," as I worked him into a cruel lather. Gates, gates, gates were in our way; there were three more after the first one and I hated each worse than the others. Between those barbwire barriers I rode in what seemed a waking dream, seeing Toby curled like a wounded creature on bloody bedding in Rose's bedroom. In Aunt Eunice's old bed. In the house where I had seen death. I cried until I was out of tears. At last, we topped the rise to the Westwater plain and the snout of the steam shovel stood in sight, the brown cut of the canal ran straight across the prairie ahead, the tents of the construction camp clustered like an oasis.

  Red-eyed and snuffling and shrill, I alarmed the nearest foreman enough that he grabbed onto my saddle strings and ran alongside Joker, heading us to the office tent at the supply dump. He hustled me inside to a hand-crank telephone. He could tell by looking I didn't know how to work it. The crank received some mad twirls from him, then he pulled me in close to the mouthpiece. "Central, there's a boy hurt," he shouted down the line as people did then, "cut me through to the doctor. I'm going to put someone on who'll tell him how to get there."

  ***

  THE DOCTOR FROM TOWN WAS LIKE WESTWATER ITSELF, young and barely dry behind the ears. He bustled in as his Model T gave dying coughs in Rose's yard, and kept delivering abject commiseration to her on the assumption she was Toby's mother. No sooner was that straightened out than it took him somewhat too long to grasp that Father was the homesteader from next door, not simply some tongue-tied farmhand who worked for Morrie. His bedside manner wasn't much better as he clucked to Toby about "that bad horsey." Toby, who had logged more miles on horseback than that shavetail doctor had ever seen, was too terrified to take offense at toddler talk, but Damon and I were outraged for him. It did not help that while the gore was being swabbed off his monstrously swollen purplish foot, Toby yelled bloody murder.

  Father was wild with worry and off-balance, as he always was around anything medical. I am convinced it was the presence of Morrie, someone well dressed who could phrase a pertinent question about metatarsals, that put the green young physician on his metttle. After an examination full of "mmm" and W he took Father and Morrie aside—Rose and Damon and I right at their heels—and announced that all the toes were broken and significant other bones as well, but possibly things could be made to knit straight.

  "'Possibly'?" Morrie spoke the word as if wringing its neck.

  The doctor frowned. "There's extreme swelling and the foot is one mass contusion. I just have to do the best I can in feeling out breaks."

  He etherized Toby, then began setting bones. We waited in the kitchen. Even after Rose's scourings, to me it still had the faint vinegar presence of Aunt Eunice. I couldn't tell if Father felt it too, but he stood staring wordlessly out the window to where George, lumbago and all, had taken over the plowing. Rae was home fixing food for us. That much of life had to go on. Rose had said she needed some air—she still was pale—and Morrie stepped out with her. Alone with ourselves, Damon and I sat at the table like persons incarcerated. Every so often we traded white-eyed looks; neither one of us had any doubt that our lives had changed along with Toby's. We just didn't know how much.

  When the doctor at last was finished, we were allowed to look in on Toby. His left foot, colossally bandaged and splinted, stuck out of the bedding so starkly it was hard to be in the same room with it. Father stared at it, one hard swallow after another bobbing in his throat, then he wheeled on the doctor. "What are we looking at ahead?"

  "Mmm, weeks. Maybe a month, maybe two, before he—"

  "That's not what I meant," Father spat the words. "Is he going to be crippled?"

  For the first time, the doctor sounded gentle. "There's a decent chance he won't be if complications don't set in. He needs to keep that foot in bed, nice and still, for a good long while."

  "Can we take him home?"

  "I don't see why not. Now might be a good time, before the ether wears off."

  ***

  "ROSE, I DON'T KNOW HOW I'M GOING TO MANAGE THIS."

  "I do."

  Already life was so out of kilter in the household that the four of us were marooned at our kitchen table in the middle of that fine, bright first afternoon of spring. Toby had been installed in Father's bedroom down the hall and was fitfully dozing his way through the after-effects of the ether every time one of us checked on him. It was Father who was stark awake and distraught. With two farms on him, Big Ditch freight staring him in the face, and an injured son who needed day-in, day-out care, clearly more wheels had come off his world that day than he knew how to deal with. If some people thought the Milliron family was bad off before, they should see us now. No matter how Damon and I tried to sit up straight and show Father we could shoulder our share of things, we still amounted to schoolboys. The more Tobys bedridden circumstances sunk in on me, the deeper my mood went with them. It did not take much figuring out to know I had seen the last of after-school Latin.

  Minutes before, Morrie had taken his leave of us, fervently offering, "If there's anything I can do, anything, just say the word." The only word presenting itself in any of us at the moment was that doubt-proof "do" from the lips of Rose. It made Father peer across at her as if wondering where she got a monopoly on such certainty. Occupying Toby's spot at the table, she had her elbows planted on the oilcloth and her hands clasped neatly as a locket. I had the feeling this was something I had seen before.

  "It sounds like you'll let me off the hook on the 'shares' proposition, then," Father was saying, a whiff of relief in his strained voice, "and that will free
me up to—"

  "Not enough, it wouldn't." Rose sounded so perfectly reasonable it took the three of us a little time to realize she had no intention of yielding on the plowing arrangement. "You already need to be out of the house on all your other work this time of year," she was laying out to Father nice as pie, "so you are up against being two places at once even if you didn't farm for me, aren't you. Then you may as well, wouldn't you say?"

  Rearing back in his chair, Father was about to protest the heartlessness of that—I was, too—when Rose trumped everything. "I'll care for Toby. I'm here all day anyway." She drew a breath as if steeling herself. "Dust will just have to accumulate if it wants to."

  "You'd do that? Take this on for us?" Father looked like a man reprieved. "Rose, the boys and I would be grateful beyond—"

  "Oh, it's nothing," she said, as if she did this sort of thing every day. "Don't you worry."

  For some moments the other three of us sat there taking up space. Somewhere beyond etiquette and just short of moral imperative, something more needed to be said in a situation like this. I knew it and squirmed with it; Damon knew it and kicked the table leg with it; most of all Father knew it and had to summon the words from down around his shoetops. "We'll figure out some way to sweeten your wages a bit."

  Rose waved her hand as if that were inconsequential. However, she did not turn it down.

  "That leaves nights," Damon spoke what I was thinking.

  "I'll be night nurse, of course." Father went to work on that with a frown. "We'll have to rig up something for me to sleep on, in there with him."

  "Father?" I saw no need to let anything this hopeless go on. "You're quite a sound sleeper."

  About three heartbeats after that, Rose offered, "Oliver? I can stay over. With Toby. At night."

  By the expression on Father, the reprieve seemed to have been yanked back halfway. I watched him glance at Damon and me and then toward the hallway in the pattern that sent boys upstairs, then give up on it. The issue was quite clear, whether or not the two of us were there to gawp at it. A man and a woman, unsanctioned by wedlock, under the same roof night after night, all of that. Father already had shrugged off plenty of community opinion where Rose was concerned. How much shrugging did he have left in him for something of this nature?