The Whistling Season

by Ivan Doig

  Now came our finale. For once Morrie had known not to press luck too far. We had rehearsed only those tunes and this. Turning to the audience, he announced, "We have a confession to make. There is to be singing, after all, this evening. But we of Marias Coulee School are going to ask you to do it. Ah, you say, but you don't know the words?" Stepping over behind his desk, he put up the window-shade map he covered tests with and there were the lyrics on the blackboard in his elegant hand.

  "One last thing," Morrie said as he burnished his harmonica to readiness. "A song is always in search of its thrush. Will my esteemed sister, Rose Llewellyn, please come up and lead the singing?"

  Her cheeks coloring very fetchingly, Rose made her way to the front of the schoolroom. She stood there with poise, a dainty satin vision to melt any heart. Damon and Toby and I grinned with pride, while Father tried to look nonchalant. Going up on his tiptoes, Morrie conducted us into the one-two-three beat again. The massed harmonicas struck up the old loved tune everyone knew, and Rose in a clear, melodic voice sang for all to follow:

  When I see that evening star,

  Then I know that I've come far,

  Through the day, through all plight,

  To the watchfire of the night.

  Our music over, Father and Morrie knew they had to face their own from Taggart. I hung at their side as they approached him while the crowd dispersed, stray hums of harmonicas accompanying most families home.

  "I certainly have never seen anything like that in a school-house before," the school inspector said, looking from Morrie to Father and back again. His eyes gave away nothing.

  Suddenly he reached out and clapped Morrie on the shoulder. "Top mark for initiative." Then swung around to Father and clapped his shoulder twice as hard. "And that Mrs. Llewellyn, what a trouper!"

  ***

  HOW DISTANT AND DISTINCT IT ALL IS, THAT COMET OF nearly half a century ago and Morrie's triumph along with it.

  And how tear-streaked, today, under the scimitar of Sputnik. My eyes well up and there is nothing I can do about it. At my age now, tears should be saved for times of mortality. For the passing of loved ones and constant friends. For any whose life touched a tender spot in my own. I know that with every bone of my being, and it does no good at all today.

  What a sight I must make like this, a man of my position trudging from empty house to plowed field to pothole pond and back again, my cheeks helplessly damp, my fine oxfords and suit pant cuffs filling with dirt. Should anyone come along the road about now—Emil Kratka, who farms this land for me on shares, or one of the other surviving drylanders—I will be seen as the spectacle I am, over this: the death warrant of one-room schools being asked of me, tonight.

  Why can't even the fool thicket that is headed by the appropriations chairman see that the countryside purge of classrooms that is on its way, now that mankind has begun to plow the heavens, is so wrong? Sputnik sails no higher over the heads of Marias Coulee than over those of New York and Pasadena. Yet it is the rural schools that are being declared "behind the times."

  Consolidated schools. That is their war cry. Which is to say, do away with one-room schools and put those students to endlessly riding buses to distant towns. Dormitories on wheels.

  It has crossed my mind that the appropriations chairman may have invested in school buses. Or he may be sincere in his panic that the launching of one satellite has turned Nikita Khrushchev into Albert Einstein. Either way, it amounts to the same. Just yesterday he slammed his fist on my desk and called me an old New Deal hack The man is so dim he did not even recognize the clash of his modifiers. Morrie would have jumped all over him.

  What is being asked, no, demanded of me is not only the forced extinction of the little schools. It will also slowly kill those rural neighborhoods, the ones that have struggled from homestead days on to adapt to dryland Montana in their farming and ranching. (The better to populate Billings and benefit its car dealers, I suppose.) No schoolhouse to send their children to. No schoolhouse for a Saturday-night dance. No school-house for election day; for the Grange meeting; for the 4-H club; for the quilting bee; for the pinochle tournament; for the reading group; for any of the gatherings that are the bloodstream of community.

  No wonder the tears come. All those years ago, Damon was ultimately right when he supposed what plagued me was nightmare: this is precisely it. I have gone over and over my choices—try to temper what I see as the misbegotten policy of putting road miles on children instead of nurturing their minds, or resign in protest. Unluckily, I am not the resigning kind. And so I can already see the faces of the rural school delegates in Great Falls, a few hours from now, when I pull my prepared remarks from the inside pocket of my suit. Oh, I am a known master at taking the sting out of cuts. "Consolidated schools are an irreversible trend fostered by change in our state and lack of budge in budget chairmen..." my text establishes. "The Department of Public Instruction will propose as a guideline that no child should have to ride a school bus more than an hour and a half each way to attend a consolidated school..." it vows. "Every power of my department will be exerted to see that rural teachers are reassigned to the district of their choice..." it offers. If I know anything, it is how to layer cotton words over hard facts.

  Whatever the twist of fate, I am the product of what I am being made to do away with. If Marias Coulee didn't hold foil session in the school of life, I don't know where it ever is to be found. For all of Morrie's wizardry in catching the heavenly fireball at the height of its magnitude, Halley's comet was not done with us and our educations. Late one afternoon a couple of days later, Walt Stinson on his way home from a trip to town dropped off our mail, along with compliments on Morrie's talk and the harmonica band, which made Father glow in his own right.

  While the two men carried their conversation outside as farmers end up doing, Damon—sports-starved as always—immediately plowed into the newspapers. I was trying to help supper along by taking over the potato-peeling Father had just abandoned when I heard the intake of breath across the room.

  "We have to tell Morrie right away," Damon said in a hushed voice.

  "What," I kidded him, "did Battle-Axe Nelson knock out the Missouri Mangier or somebody?"

  "No. Mark Twain died on comet night."

  20

  "KEEP ME COMPANY TODAY, WHY DON'T YOU THE TWO OF you," Father said out of nowhere the next Saturday morning. "I have to ride over to the Big Ditch, to settle up."

  That sounded tiptop to Damon and me. We hurried through our mush while he went upstairs to deal with Toby, sleeping in. Off somewhere, Rose had the first housekeeping chore of the day cornered, whistling "When I see that evening star" at it until it surrendered.

  "WHY CAN'T I GO?" we heard next, on schedule.

  "Tobe, my man, the boys and I need to make a little speed today, so no riding double," Father's voice carried. "We're not taking any chances with that foot, this far along. You know it's only one more week until the doctor gives you a last looking-over, and you want him to give you a clean bill of health, don't you?"

  "YES, B-B-BUT—"

  Rose flew to the rescue. "Oh, Toby?" she called from the bottom of the stairs. "You can help me ever so much this morning, counting out the knives and forks and spoons when I polish them. Then later I'll help you take Houdini for a swim, how's that?"

  "Rose," we could hear the relief in Father, "you are a peach."

  "I take exception to being compared to anything that grows on a tree," she said back, lightly enough, and whisked off to what she had been doing.

  Father came back into the kitchen grinning for all he was worth. "Don't just sit there with your ears hanging out, you two. Let's go."

  The big grin still was on him as we saddled up and strung out, three abreast, onto the road to the Big Ditch with the morning sun warm on our shoulders. Normally it takes rain to brighten up a dryland farmer, but lately, Father's mood was way ahead of the weather. I couldn't help but wonder about him. Mornings now, he popp
ed into the kitchen almost before Rose and I were putting cocoa to our lips instead of whispers. That was just the start. He went around, these days, with the musing expression of a person caught up in a fresh rhythm of life. On the work of the farm—both farms—it was like New Year's all over again: there was no holding Oliver Milliron from any job that put its head up. This seemed to be another morning when he was setting hall sail into life, dry crops or not.

  The three of us were a picture not seen on these roads anymore. A man above average, a farmer according to the unaccustomed way he sat aboard a saddle horse, with his best hat on and a manner of looking off for castles in the distance. Two boys, deceptively alike in size but in no way anything like twins. Well matched with his spirited pinto Paint, Damon every so often stuck his legs out wide in his stirrups as some thought or another hit him while we went along. I slouched atop Joker not moving an outside muscle, yet tugging and pulling at my latest session with Morrie with everything I had.

  ***

  "What now?" Morrie had warily eyed the unsohcited piece of tablet paper I slipped onto his desk, no doubt remembering the phych episode.

  "Working on my numerals." Latin was back to its natural existence, after school, and there were just the two of us.

  "You'll end up more Roman than the Romans," he said as if that was a prospect not altogether to be desired. Still, he was in an unbeatable mood ever since the roaring success of the school inspection and comet night. And Father, carried away by it all, had promised somehow to raise his teaching wage next year. I knew I was interrupting the peace, but I had to bring this up.

  Morrie put aside the Shakespeare he had been reading and peered at my block printing:

  MARK TWAIN

  MDCCCXXXV-MCMX

  Swiftly, Morrie looked up at me. "The report unfortunately is not exaggerated this time," he had started school off, the day after Damon spied the news. "A great man has passed, apparently with a comet as a pallbearer. But let us examine 'apparently.'" From there, he again went through the sermon about portents being mere coincidences, flukes from the counting house of chance, and so on. The next thing we knew, we were up to our ears in arithmetic. Obviously he was surprised now to find me voluntary trooping back into numbers, and in Latin at that. Nonetheless he scanned my effort:

  "Let's see, eighteen thirty-five to nineteen ten, yes, correctly rendered. Well done one more time, philologe novissime." That "young scholar" commendation from him was not what I was after, however.

  "Morrie? That's seventy-five years, on the nose. Back to you-know-what, last time."

  He moaned. "I would have made a good Tasmanian, I know I would have." Then an exceedingly level look intended to set me straight came my way. "Don't go superstitious on me, Paul, you of all people. There can be more than one coincidence in a set of circumstances, surely you see that? What is drawn from those is merely a matter of assigning meanings." He flapped a hand at my sheet of paper. "In this case they amount to a chance set of dates when someone famous was born and, sadly, now has died. No more and no less."

  He was not telling me anything I didn't know; my dreams had never met a coincidence they didn't greedily invite in. But awake or asleep, there are times when something chews on meanings for everything it can get out of them. I couldn't help it, whatever Morrie said about flukes. The sky-written parenthesis of fact that Mark Twain came into this world with the previous appearance of Halley's comet and departed it with this one made a person think.

  "There the thing goes," Damon spoke up as the road brought us out to the Big Ditch.

  His eyes always were the quickest. It took Father and me a few moments to register what looked like a distant structure creeping ever so slightly. The steam shovel was being walked across the plain to Westwater and a railroad flatcar there. In its wake, it had left canals and lateral ditches. Already flowing in those was the irrigation water; the regulated rain, in one way of looking at it. Could I have known, even then, how much the future would favor projects such as the Westwater one? Even when the sky relented on our dryland farms and gave the fields a dousing, as it finally would do that spring, it would not be enough. It would never really be enough. Yet dryland life of one kind or another has persisted in parts of Montana like ours, from that day to this. Plow steel dries out slowest of all.

  Damon and I wandered the remains of the construction camp while Father was in the office tent settling up. Nearly all the other tents were down, as gone as Brother Jubal's. The Pronovosts had already moved theirs to the agricultural extension station where their father was doing some firebreak plowing until school let out for the year.

  "Gonna miss them next year," Damon said soberly.

  "I know. But Gros Ventre isn't the other end of the world." Isidor and Gabriel and Inez had given us the news that over the summer, their family was moving to the town at the foot of the mountains. "Maybe we'll catch up with them again."

  "Yeah, maybe."

  Father came out of the office tent wearing the look of a man with a good deal of cash in his pocket. It seemed to me we were likely to need it. If the bookkeeping of the Millirons had trouble staying ahead of itself when Father had only one homestead on his hands, what was it going to be like now that he was stretched to Rose's as well, in a dry time?

  The man sitting companionably in the saddle between Damon and me as we pointed ourselves home showed no such concern, however. Whatever was on his mind today, it weighed about right to him. I rode beside Father, wishing such peace of mind could be handed around in the family. Dead ahead on our route, so to speak, was the cemetery. I avoided looking toward it. Now that I was no longer in the haunted bed at Rose's place, I didn't want to give Aunt Eunice another opening.

  We weren't far down the road when Father pulled up on his reins, as if a thought had just occurred to him. "How about a bit of a race? If you'll go easy on an old man."

  Damon took a big chance. "We won't do wrong-end-to; will that be easy enough?"

  "Impertinent pup," he said, but was grinning again. "All right, the Milliron derby. From here to the section-line road."

  We lined out across the road, and when Father said "Go!" three sets of boot heels made firm contact with horses' ribs. We built up to a gallop. I still say, the back of a running horse is the most wonderful place to be when you are the age Damon and I were then. Under me Jokers mane flew in the wind, flag of its breed, as I bent low over his neck. Stride by stride with us, Damon was jockeyed onto Paint as if glued there. Father was giving us a run for our money, but the way grownups do, he jounced up and down in his stirrups more than the other two of us combined. The section-fine road gravitated toward us hoofbeat upon hoofbeat.

  Damon rode to win, and did. Joker and I pushed him at it, but did not battle Paint and him hoof and tooth as we did Eddie Turley and the steel-gray horse that time. Somewhere along the line that school year—maybe while reading about Fabius Cunctator, the great delayer—it had occurred to me to save some victory, now and then, for when it really counted. I made sure to come in ahead of Father, though.

  "Morrie was right," the words jostled out of Father once we reached the section-fine road and dropped down to a canter. "Tribe of daredevils on horseback, the pair of you. And pretty quick you'll have Tobe kiyi-ing along with you again. What's a father to do?"

  What he did was to turn in at the cemetery. "Since we happen to be passing," he said with a try at nonchalance that did not even come close. "This won't take long."

  Damon looked at me, and I was as startled as he was. We had not done this for some time now. In fact, not since Aunt Eunice was laid to rest, if that's what it could be called.

  The prairie offered Marias Coulee a slight knoll for its burials, and our horses grunted at this next unlooked-for exertion and took it slow. On the path in, a killdeer zigzagged in front of us, pitiably dragging one wing in the old trick to draw us away from its nest. The grass on the graves moved in the wind, giving the cemetery an odd liveliness. Father leading, we rode single file now
so the horses would not step on the graves. Damon appeared uneasy at our slow parade through the tombstones, and marble and granite standing in ranks have never been the pleasantest sight to me either. The patience of stones. How they await us.

  Mother's grave marker stood at the far end of a row. There we swung down from our saddles.

  Looking determined, Father went over the grave in a caretakerly way, ridding it of dandelions and wild mustard and brushing a bit of lichen off Mother's epitaph. Damon and I stood back, uncertain. Whatever this was about, Father seemed to want no help.

  After awhile he straightened up and stood beside the grave, on one foot and then the other. I could see spasms in his cheek. He always chewed an inside corner of his mouth that way when he was anywhere near Mother's grave.

  Suddenly he was saying, "Damon and Paul—I have something to get off my chest. Don't say anything until I finish up, all right?"

  This did not sound all right at all, but Damon and I blinked agreement.

  Father put his face in his hands, as if avoiding the sight of the tombstone in front of us, then slowly dropped them. His voice shook with the effort of getting the words out.

  "I've tried like everything to not let it happen, but I've fallen for Rose. Maybe it took for her to be with us in the house all the time while Tobe was laid up. Maybe I'm just slow. But there's no getting around it anymore, I'm in love with her, hopeless as a—" almost too late, he caught himself from saying schoolboy to the two of us—"colt."

  I don't know what registered on Damon as he stared slack-jawed at our father, but I was seeing the countenance of the man who had taken the giant step west, with all he possessed, in that Great Northern Railway emigrant car. Oliver Milliron drawn by deepest desires to embark from the known world to territory beyond knowing.