The Whistling Season (15 page)

This time I passed Morrie on his way from the wagon, dispatched to fetch a box of housewares Rose had insisted he could not get along without. Did Thoreau's luggage include a toasting fork, I wondered as I saw that item poking out of Morrie's box. "Thank goodness it is a small house," he murmured to me in passing, one servant of Rose to another.

It was late in the day, and the day was late in the season. The pewter cast of light that comes ahead of winter crept into the schoolground as I performed the last of my water errands, shadows growing dusky instead of sharp almost as I watched. From the feel of the air, night would bring our first hard frost. The schoolyard seemed phenomenally empty as I crossed it this time. I could distinctly hear my lone soft footsteps on ground
that was stampeded across at each recess. Around at the front of the school where the pump stood next to the flagpole I slung the mop bucket into place under the spout, but for some reason did not step to the pump handle just yet.

I suppose it was the point of life I was at, less than a man but starting to be something more than a boy, that set me aware of everything around, as though Marias Coulee School and its height of flagpole and depth of well were the axis of all that was in sight. I remember thinking Damon and Toby might come around the corner looking for me any minute, and if I wanted this for myself I had better use my eyes for all they were worth. So, there in the dwindling light of the afternoon I tried to take in that world between the manageable horizons. The cutaway bluffs where the Marias River lay low and hidden were the limit of field of vision in one direction. In the other was the edge of the smooth-buttered plain leading to Westwater and the irrigation project. Closer, though, was where I found the longest look into things. Out beyond the play area, there were round rims of shadow on the patch of prairie where the horses we rode to school had eaten the grass down in circles around their picket stakes. Perhaps that pattern drew my eye to what I had viewed every day of my school life but never until then truly registered: the trails in the grass that radiated in as many directions as there were homesteads with children, all converging to that schoolyard spot where I stood unnaturally alone.

Forever and a day could go by, and that feeling will never leave me. Of knowing, in that instant, the central power of that country school in all our fives. It reached beyond those of us answering Morrie's hectic roll call that first day, although we were that clapboard classrooms primary constituents, its rural minnows much in need of schooling. Everyone I could think of had something at stake in the school. For Father, all the years he spent as a mainstay of the school board amounted to his third or fourth or fifth fine of work at once, depending on how strict the count. Along with him, the other men of Marias Coulee had built the snug teacherage with their own hands the summer before, and the graying schoolhouse itself back when the first homesteaders came. The mothers dispatched their hearts and souls out the door every morning as they sent waist-high children to saddle up and ride miles to school. Somehow this one-room school had drawn from somewhere Morris Morgan, walking encyclopedia. Now Rose had arrived on the teacherage scene and dust would never be the same in the vicinity of Marias Coulee School. We all answered, with some part of our fives, to the pull of this small knoll of prospect, this isolated square of schoolground.

There at the waiting pump I could not sort such matters out totally, but even then, I am convinced, began in me some understanding of how much was recorded on that prairie, in those trails leading to the school. How their pattern held together a neighborhood measured in square miles and chimneys as far apart as smoke signals. I would say, if I were asked now, that the mounted troupes of schoolchildren taking their bearing on that schoolhouse on its prairie high spot traveled as trusting and true in their aim as the first makers of roads sighted onto a distant cathedral spire. Yet that is the erasure, those tracks in the grass that have outlined every rural school district of this state for so long, that I am called on to make at the convocation tonight.

"I was about to send a search party," Rose met me with as I lurched in with the heavy bucketful of water. After she put it to immediate use—she could mop a floor while most women were thinking about it—Father reappeared from whatever he had been doing at the wagon and stood inside the doorway surveying the scrubbed teacherage and its fresh occupant. Stowing silk socks in the rude pinewood dresser, Morrie looked more out of
place than ever. Father swallowed, as a man will who has stuck his neck out quite far, then took care of the last of business for the day. "Morrie"—he warily included Rose in his inquisitive glance—"is there anything else within the less-than-infinite power of the school board that we can provide for you?" He checked his jottings. "So far, its curtains, fresh ticking for the mattress, draft excluder, and lamp wicks."

Morrie's answer was swift. "Maid service would be appreciated."

Father had his nose down in his list. Damon was investigating the flour bin and other kitchen nooks, Toby assisting. I am sure I was the only one who caught the look that passed between Rose and Morrie after he said that. Sisterless as I was, I had nothing to compare it to. But there was a surprising amount of give-and-take in the lift of his brow as he gazed at her and the considering tilt of her head as she returned the gaze for quite an extended moment. Enough to tell me two sexes, even related as closely as possible, must be drastically more to deal with than the male cast of our family. Watching, I could not have foretold whether Rose was going to answer Morrie with bouquet or shrapnel.

"Surely you don't think I would abandon you," came her eventual response. "I'll tend to everything, per usual."

Over his shoulder Father called out, "Damon, quit that, you're going to wear out every drawer in the place." With a quick glance apiece he rounded up Toby and me. "Get your coats on, the lot of you, it's time to break ground for home. The thrill of suppertime awaits as usual. Rose, weren't you going to ride back with us?"

She didn't seem to have heard. Then she roused herself and sent another freighted look Morrie's direction. "I'll stay."

Morrie gauged that response for a moment, then snapped to as if he had just thought of something. "Everyone stay. For supper. I insist."

The Milliron family in its entirety halted in its tracks.

Father was the first to find power of speech.

"You can cook?"

"Certainly." Morrie had shed his jacket and was rolling up his shirt-sleeves. "In bachelor fashion, but an acquaintance of mine was chef for the Harrimans for a time. Rose, you remember Pierre. No? Well, no matter, he showed me a few things about putting together a meal. Now then, I believe that is a haunch of deer out in the coolbox." By now he was rummaging through the sparsely stocked cupboard. "Here we have dried noodles—actually macaroni, but close enough. And onions—a bit desiccated, but they will serve. Venison stroganoff, how does that sound to everybody? I'll just start some water to going and Rose can set the table and—Oliver, why are you putting on your hat? Did I say something amiss?"

"I need some air."

"S
EE
?"
ONLY DAMON'S REAR END WAS VISIBLE AS HE PAWED
among the bison bones at the boulder-strewn base of the cliff. He and Houdini were our best diggers, that next Sunday afternoon. "See, the black ones are chipped different on the sides."

Hard to imagine, something that innocent as the starting point toward one of my worst dreams. But the mind goes its own way at night.

"Beveled, Damon, that angle of edge is called," Morrie told him. "Very discerning of you, though, to notice the difference." Kneeling there, big brown hat pulled low against the wind that followed the river through the Marias bottomland, he looked nearly prayerful as he turned over and over in his cupped palm the dark arrowhead Damon had handed up to him. In the next breath Toby came charging over and, proud as a kitten with its first mouse, presented him the intact bison horn he had just found. Carefully Morrie laid it and Damon's find alongside the lance point I had pried out of the nearby claybank. "They could have used the three of you on digging up Troy," he commended. "Superb specimens, all around."

Our audience clucked a storm of disapproval down at us. I had to laugh. "She doesn't necessarily agree." We had scared up a sage hen when we clambered to the bottom of the buffalo jump, and it strutted nervously on a ledge of rock above us, steadily scolding our presence.

"Didn't know Aunt Eunice was along with us." Damon's wisecrack drifted from where he still was head-down in the boneyard.

"I did not hear that," Morrie maintained, lips twitching. Toby had rambled off again, whistling for Houdini to come help him dig. As if suddenly remembering another dog duty, however, Houdini pointed his nose toward the sage hen, lifted one paw as if ready to advance, and growled way down in his throat. Dimwitted as it was, the plump bird took the hint and whirred off to the top of the precipice above us. I watched the flight in some admiration. It always took hard scrabbling for us to climb back up the tiered cliff face of the buffalo jump, and agile though Morrie could be in a number of ways, he no longer possessed the billy-goat surety of a boy. One more time I wondered if this was such a hot idea of Damon's.

At that moment, though, Morrie seemed as invincibly juvenile as any of us, overjoyed with the treasures we kept unearthing and handing him. This particular rock fall beneath a thrust of the cliff, with its scatter of bones so old they were turning stone color, was our mother lode of arrowheads. How many times over how many centuries had the Blackfoot tribe harvested meat here? What a thing, I thought then and still do, to have the hunting skills to aim a herd of skittish buffalo off the cliff above our heads.

But now the buffalo were a piece of the past and the Blackfeet nearly so, a remnant people cooped up on the reservation on the other side of the river, and this old killing site was fair
game for boys with a streak of badger. I was happily spitting on a nice light-colored arrowhead I had just discovered, to rub off the dirt, when Morrie held up the coal-black one toward me.

"Paul? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I haven't noticed stone of this sort anywhere in the vicinity."

I paused in the spitbath I was giving to my own arrowhead. At times like this, I savvied Father's mixed emotions about Morrie and his ready erudition. Morrie always was stimulating to have around, but always gets to be a lot.

Still, I had weathered the woodpile sessions with him and come out a bit better for it, hadn't I. "Me neither," I contributed on the origin of the stone, and knowing school was now in session even though it was Sunday, duly looked inquisitive.

"It's obsidian, I swear," he mused. "Which is volcanic." That did make me blink. Our part of Montana had more than enough geography, but I definitely did not know of any local volcanoes. "How does this come to be here?" He bounced the arrowhead gently in his palm as if weighing it. "Care to take an educated guess?"

I gave it some thought. Those contrary warriors that I was an inadvertent honorary member of must have roamed around, to pick fights with enemies. "Some other tribe? In a scrap with the Blackfeet here?"

"Close. I'd say it was trade." Morrie's eyes had that deep light of the past in them. "The Missouri surely was a main route." He gestured off in the direction where the Marias and the countryside's other tributaries met the big river. "And tribes would have come from all points of the plains in pursuit of buffalo. They couldn't fight one another constantly. Every so often they would have had to mount up and resort to commerce." He made even that sound heroic, a foray across the prairie to swap a mysterious dark rock for, what, a buffalo-hide robe? I could feel the hair on the back of my neck come up a little.
All
points of the plains:
without my ever having said a word to him about it, Morrie was conjuring paths beneath the paths that had arrived to my eyes back there at the schoolhouse pump.

Cupping the black arrowhead in his hand again, he looked off appraisingly at the prairie bluffs around us. "With all the crisscrosses possible, this may have been a Mediterranean of a kind." As if Father had invisibly put in his two cents' worth, he gave a slight smile of concession. "Dryland, of course."

"Morrie? On that. They're going to be getting home."

This was the day the latest in deep plowing was being demonstrated at the agricultural experiment station, possibly on the premise that it would give the dryland farmers something to dream about during the long winter, and Father and George had talked Rae into going with them to socialize afterward. Rose, to Toby's temporary dismay, chose to keep Rae company rather than wallow in buffalo bones with us.

Morrie yanked out his watch, then jumped to his feet. "Toby!" he called. "Kindly put back those big bones, please. I am instructed by your father, with Rose concurring, that any part of the buffalo coming home with you has to arrive in your pocket. Damon, good job done."

Damon hated to be called off from digging. On the other hand, archeological triumph was his this day. When Morrie had wanted to borrow a handful of our arrowheads to use in the classroom—heaven only knew what arsenal of lore he had in mind next, after the fletching performance—Damon saw no reason why the school should not have its own collection.

Now my excavation-inclined brother whipped out of his back pocket a flour sack and with the aplomb of a gem dealer scooped our specimens in. Swag bag in hand, Damon looked elated enough to reach the top of the buffalo jump in two
bounds. But he remembered his manners enough to say to Morrie, "Ready?"

"Or not, as the case may be," Morrie acquiesced in a kind of sigh, stepping over the bones of a bison that had plummeted from where we were going.

I worried, but Morrie managed to stay in one piece as we scrambled back atop the cliff to where our horses were tied. Even as he stood there blowing and inhaling, he studied the surroundings. "Extravagant scenery," he declared, and from there on the high river bluffs it truly was. Farthest west, the tips of the Rockies were white with first snow, an iceberg flotilla that seemed to go on forever under the dark blue sky of late afternoon. All the hills in the world were stacked in shades of tan between there and where we stood. Almost at our feet, juniper patches pintoed down the breaks in the rimrock of the bluff, and lower still, wild roses blew gently in the wind. It added to the pleasure of the day, Damon's and Toby's and mine, that our site was showing off for our guest.