The Whistling Season (19 page)

Morrie cocked a puzzled look at the writing on my tablet when I went to his desk and handed it to him. "As Shakespeare said, this is Greek to me. How is it supposed to read, Paul?"

"'Fish,'" I said as if the five letters on the paper were the most recognizable thing in the world.

Morrie more closely studied my coinage
of phych.

"
Ph
as in
phlegm,
"
I
came to his aid, "
y
as in
hysterical,
and
ch
as in
charivari.
"

"Well spelled, as always," he said drily, pocketing the piece of paper. "You are not quite finished with your labels, however. One last one for the front of the case. Make it read: Arrowhead collection donated to the Marias Coulee School, 1909, by the Milliron family.'"

Eddie chose just then to snort, visit his nose with a finger, and flick a booger contemptuously onto the floor. Fortunately, Damon was occupied with arranging everything to perfection in the display case and so did not go climbing over desks in hunt of Eddie a second day in a row. And here Toby came charging victoriously in with the wire and pliers to affix the arrowheads in the display case. We would be done in no time now, and as soon as Father ever showed up to admire our handiwork, we could head home and Eddie could sit and stew until he was blue far as we were concerned. What waited for him at home was a matter for my Delphic cave of dreams, later.

Morrie, I noticed, had his big pocket watch out where he could see it on his desk to keep exact time on Eddie's incarceration. Minutes pass more slowly when looked at, so it was some little while before the outside door could be heard opening, the awaited tread at last in the cloakroom, and just in time I dotted the final
i
of the Milliron family label and blew on it to dry the ink. "Here, Tobe, you can show Father. Hold it in both hands so you don't wrinkle it."

Looking down at the masterpiece in his hands, Toby hurried toward the doorway. "Father, look what—" he began, as far as he got before seeing the big boots.

Over Toby's head, Damon and I gaped at Brose Turley as if he were a creature that had fallen down from the moon.

According to the scowl that met our gaze, he had not expected the sight of us either. Under the crinkled hat brim his dark mean eyes shifted from us to Morrie, and then found Eddie at the rear of the room.

"Good afternoon, Mr. Turley." As casual as those words, Morrie moved to stand between the interloper and us. He rumpled Toby's hair, and while his hand was there turned him around like a top and sent him back in our direction. "To what do we owe the pleasure of this visit?"

Brose Turley did not bother to answer. He strode down the aisle toward Eddie, his wolfskin coat brushing the desktops. Eddie seemed to shrink the closer his father came.

I heard Damon and Toby catch their breath, and they must have heard me do the same. But Morrie only called out in the same civil way, "Eddie has fifteen more minutes before I can let him go." Turley halted, shaking his head in disgust. He was directly beneath one of the hanging lamps and I could distinctly see the crisscrossed weather-beaten skin of the back of his neck, as though he slept on a pillow of chicken wire. He was a big
man all the way up from those tromper boots. No wonder wolves or any other living thing I could think of did not stand a chance against him. I was scared to the roots of myself, and even Damon had lost the color in his face. Toby pressed more tightly against the arm I had looped around him and whispered, "Where's Father?"

"He'll be here," I barely found enough resource in myself to whisper back, hoping against hope that he was not out there slaughtered in the dusk, from having tried to head off this death dealer in a wolfskin coat.

Brose Turley turned around the way a statue would, every bulky bit of him in one revolving motion. Ignoring us, he zeroed in on Morrie. "I don't want you keeping my boy after. If he's done something that don't suit, belt him one right then and be done with it."

"Belting people is what has led to all this." Morrie brushed his fingertips across the bruise at his hairline. "Eddie must learn to keep his fists to himself. This is the best kind of penalty to remind him, I think."

"You think" Turley made it sound like that was Morrie's trouble. His voice was sized to the rest of him, but there was an odd clack to it as if it had been out of use a long while. Something about his face was out of kilter, too. It was as if the upper part belonged to one countenance and the lower part to some other. I only figured it out when Turley, still glowering across the ranks of desks at Morrie, opened his mouth to say more. He had false teeth, but just the uppers. The bottom of his mouth was an ugly, sharp ridge of gum fine. From sentence to sentence, the choppers on top gnashed away and then the pink gums below leered out. "You go about this like an educated fool," the voice that came out of that maw was letting Morrie know. "
He
that spareth the rod hateth his son.
I'll take a preacher over a teacher anytime."

I was afraid Damon might spout out something about that being just like a Holy Willy but Morrie was quick with: "
A
wounded spirit who can bear
? Proverbs 18:14, I believe. There is a lifetime of sermons in that."

Turley looked affronted to have the Bible cited back to him. "I don't know what kind of a hoosier you are, but you and this school of yours don't show me anything. If the law wouldn't get on me about it, I'd pull my boy out of here so fast it'd make your head swim. His next birthday I can do it anyway."

"Until that day, Eddie is a student here, the same as any other." Rather primly, Morrie smoothed the pockets of his suit coat as if to make sure he was as presentable as his argument. I hoped he was not going to bank entirely on manners, although I didn't see what else he could do. Was Father still on the face of the earth, and if so, why wasn't he here lending a hand?

Turley answered Morrie with his back, turning away until the full brunt of him again faced his son.

"You. Get on home."

Awkwardly, Eddie unfolded out of his desk, but stayed standing beside it.

"Daddy?"

Could we have heard right? The word that in the Marias Coulee hard school of adolescence only girls and toddlers used, coming out of the usually sneering lips of Eddie Turley? If Toby happened to giggle—or worse, Damon—I didn't know what might be ignited. But in the pitiful silence Eddie mustered himself and blurted, "Daddy? I, I can't. He has to say. He's the teacher."

Morrie stepped forward. "If you wish to, Eddie, you may go.
You have done well in staying after, and from here on you can stay in at recess and noon hour instead."

As Eddie edged past, his father gave him the same disgruntled look he had in Brother Jubal's tent. He made no move to follow his son. Gradually the hoofbeats of Eddie's horse faded away, and as hard as Damon and Toby and I were listening, we could not bring any sound of Father's team and dray in place of that. Turley seemed to have all the time in the world as he turned toward Morrie. "Now to deal with you, pettygog."

"Eddie is safely on his way," Morrie said calmly, "and that should conclude your business here."

"I'll show you business." Turley jerked his head toward us. "Get rid of these pipsqueaks. What're they doing here anyway?"

That was too much for Damon. "Just working on our arrowheads. We can be here if we want."

Brose Turley singled me out with the unnerving scowl that sucked in the toothless part of his face. "You there, bright boy. Take these other two and go."

"Nothing doing." I am not sure my voice carried elder-brother authority as I wanted it to, but it did the best it could under the circumstances. "We're staying."

Turley leered over at Morrie as if that was a joke to be shared. "If they want to see a fool get what's coming to him, let 'em." He looked as dangerously deliberate as he had been in goading the wolf into the box canyon. He indicated toward the hanging lamp right over his head. "Wouldn't take much to burn this place to the ground."

"It would take a lunatic." Morrie circled out away from us, to the dear area of floor at the front of the schoolroom, as if he was merely taking a philosopher's stroll. "Four of us have just heard who one might be."

Brose Turley grunted. "For now, a good pounding will do." He moved toward Morrie. I knew without even looking that Damon had the pliers ready to throw, and I would do what I could to jump on Turley's back, but the odds were that Turley could handle us like puffballs.

Still looking philosophical, Morrie had been standing with his hands parked in his coat pockets. He pulled them out now, sets of brass knuckles gleaming right and left.

Turley halted. "I'm barehanded."

"Much more metal than this would be needed to bring me up to your weight," Morrie pointed out mildly. He had lifted his arms as high as his midsection and was clinking the knobbed bands of brass together, clenched hand lightly tapping against clenched hand, as if passing the time with a tune until the bout began.

Turley was a man who knew how metal could bite flesh, and he edged back until he was sure he was out of range of Morrie's armored fists.

"I know how to wait," he ground out, the pink gums gnashing into each threatening word. Without so much as a glance at the wide-eyed three of us, he abandoned the schoolhouse.

"Morrie," Damon sounded dazed, "where—?"

Abruptly Morrie had a hand up, signaling silence. From outside came the sound we had been waiting for, the harness jingle of a dray team. Mixed with it, though, were hot words exchanged out there in the growing dark. Then, thank heaven, that drumbeat of a saddle horse's hooves, Brose Turley riding hard into what was left of the dusk.

Morrie had not relaxed one bit, but somehow the brass knuckles had vanished. Speaking low and rapidly, he enlisted us further in the chapter that had just happened. "Damon, Paul,
and need I say, Toby. It would be best if the little tiff between Mr. Turley and myself, just now, were kept between us. Particularly my, ah, persuaders. Agreed?"

Which of my brothers was more distressed at the thought of not being able to regale Father with the whole episode the minute he came in, Toby or Damon? From the stricken look on them, it was impossible to choose. But we had no time to think about any of it. That quick, here was Father in the schoolroom, Brose Turley's footprints barely cool beneath his. The agitation we'd heard outside was spelled out on his face. Plainly he was not expecting to find Morrie still in one piece.

"I see you had a visitor." Father was breathing heavily. "I meant to be here long since, but a wheel rim popped. Did Turley cause you any trouble?"

"
Pff
," Morrie made a dismissive noise. "The man is substantially shallow."

Father sensed that more had gone on here than anyone was letting on. He looked from me to Damon to Toby, and when that was unproductive, he focused back onto Morrie. "You don't want Brose Turley gunning for you."

"Oliver, you are entirely correct, I do not want that."

Then Father said something odd. "Pray for snow." We all looked at him as if his mind had wandered severely. "Brose Turley traps in the timber in winter," he reasoned it out for us. "Eddie lodges with the Johannsons as soon as that happens—he may be tamer without his father around, who knows? Morrie, if you can just put up with Eddie through the winter, this might all go away."

Unusually, Morrie said nothing one way or the other. Somehow Father's presence shouldered the tension out of the schoolroom. He was pressed into admiring the arrowhead display. Then he scooped up Toby. "Tobe, little man, you look like you've had a day." Father swung him up onto his shoulders. "Come on," he directed Damon and me, "it's getting late and Morrie has had a sufficiency of your company for one day. Tobe can ride home on the dray with me; you bring his horse with you."

As Damon and I crossed the schoolyard to the grassy plot where our horses were picketed, it took an uncharacteristically long time for words to catch up with whatever my brother was thinking. At last he fished out, "Boy oh boy, I didn't ever think something like that would happen, did you?"

"I'll say," and now I was the one doubtless sounding a bit dazed. "Imagine, Eddie calling him 'Daddy' right there in front of us."

"No, no! Didn't you see? Brassies on
both knucklesl
Morrie knows how to hit with either hand!"

 

L
ITTLEST THINGS. THE POCK IN THE KITCHEN WINDOW IN
the shape of a star, halfway up; we used that as a mark in cold weather. If the window frosted over as high as that star, the temperature had gone way, way down overnight. A snowstorm generally followed. After Morrie's episode with Brose Turley, I would check as soon as I lit the kitchen lamp each morning, hoping to read winters shivery arrival there on the windowpane. But the weather stayed obstinately mild, with only a dry chill in the air that carried no promise of snow anytime soon.

The last schoolday of that week, in physiology period, Morrie startled everyone by holding up the rattle off a rattlesnake and, as if it was the most natural teaching device to be found in the average schoolroom, illustrated the principle of stimulus and response.

Eddie still was sitting out his sentence, so I could not press the question at recess or noon hour. But when school let out I lagged enough to pass by Morrie's desk and, with no one else around, make sure.

"Wasn't that rattle fresh off the rattler?"

"Top mark for observation, Paul. This morning, actually."

Retrieving the item in question from a desk drawer, he cradled it in one hand in the manner of the gravedigger contemplating the last of poor Yorick. In class I had expected Damon to catch on to the unfaded quality of the segmented tail the same as I did, but he'd reflexively looked away as soon as he realized Morrie was holding up something where blood was involved. And I didn't want Toby fretting about a rattlesnake invading the teacherage. "The reptile greeted me just outside the front door," Morrie was saying as he tapped a fingernail against the horny object. "Remarkable jest of nature, isn't it, the creature carrying toxin at one end and a tocsin at the other."