The Whistling Season (2 page)

After hearing out Toby's feverish recitation, Isidor, who did most of the talking for the three of them, granted: "Pretty dag-gone good, it sounds like." I noticed he gave his younger brother, Gabriel, a strong look, the button-your-lip kind I recognized because I had given Damon enough of them. But from where she was perched behind Isidor's saddle, small Inez piped up:

"Is she gonna be your new ma?"

Instantly Damon reddened, and Toby, mouth open, for once failed to find anything to say.

I spoke up. "Housekeepers are all as old as the hills, aren't they, Damon."

The bunch of us clucked our horses along faster. To Toby's dismay, Miss Trent already was banging on the iron triangle that served as a bell by the time we got the horses picketed to graze out back of the school. Miss Trent was death on whisperers, so his news needed to stay sealed tight in him until morning recess. Then, though, he burst into the schoolyard in full voice.

"—all the way from Minnieapples!" he concluded on a high note to a ready audience of the Stoyanov brothers and the two sets of Drobny twins and gangly Verl Fletcher and his shy sister Lily Lee. At the edge of his following, Inez Pronovost listened to it all again breathlessly.

"She gonna make your beds?"

"Who's in charge of spankings, then—your pa or her?"

"Will she bring one of those featherdust things along with, you think?"

As the questions flew, Toby fended as best he could, all the while trying to gravitate toward the rival contingent at the other end of the schoolground, consisting of the Johannsons and the Myrdals and Eddie Turley, and gather them into his oration about the wonderful imminence of our housekeeper. Worried, I tried to keep an eye on the factions while Grover Stinson and I played catch with Grover's ancient soft-as-a-sock baseball, as the pair of us evidently were going to do throughout every recess until our throwing arms dropped off. Damon was busy taking on Isidor and Gabriel at horseshoe pitching. The clangs as he hit ringers meant he was on a streak hardly anything could interrupt. The littler kids chugged around amid the rest of us in their own games of tag and such. At the moment, peace reigned. All it would take for the schoolyard to erupt, though, would be for Toby to draw a few of the bunch trailing him with intrigued questions into range of the other group. For it was the hallmark of a Marias Coulee recess that the Slavs and the
Swedes never got along together, and Eddie Turley didn't get along with anybody.

I will say for Miss Trent, whenever Milo Stoyanov and Martin Myrdal or the Johannson brothers and the Drobny male twins or some other combination blew up and went at each other, she would wade in and sort them out but good. However, plenty of fisticuffs and taunts and general incitement could take place by the time she ever managed to reach the scene, and those of us who a minute before were neutrality personified might abruptly find ourselves on one side or the other, right in it. Has it ever been any different, from Eton on down? Over the years in that sanguinary schoolyard I'd traded bloody noses with both Milo and Martin, and Damon naturally had more than his share of tussles with each. But ever since we had become motherless, that had all changed. Some invisible spell of sympathy or charity or at least lenience had been dropped over us, granting us something like noncombatant status in the grudge fights. Neither Damon nor I was particularly comfortable with this unsought absolution—it had a whiff of pity-the-poor-orphans to it—and Toby was too young to grasp it, but the schoolyard community's unspoken agreement to spare us in the nationality brawls did have its advantages.

Here was where my worry came in. I somehow sensed that Toby's innocent bragging about our acquisition of a housekeeper might poke a hole in the spell and render us fit for combat again before we quite knew it.

Tobe's always considerable luck was holding, though, as I watched him scoot free from his first audience, cross the schoolyard at a high run, and start in successfully on the taller forest of the Scandinavian boys and overgrown Eddie.

Until Carnelia Craig emerged from the girls' outhouse.

Carnelia always spent a good deal of recess time enthroned
in there, probably to spare herself from the childish hurlyburly of the schoolyard. By a fluke of fate, with nearly two years of Marias Coulee classroom yet to be endured, she already was the oldest girl in school, and it showed. The front of her dress was growing distinct points, and her attitude was already fully formed: life had unfairly deposited Carnelia Craig among unruly peasants such as us instead of putting her in charge of, say, Russia. Admittedly, her family was of a different cut than any of the rest of ours because her father was employed by the state of Montana. He was the county agent, working out of the nearby Marias River agricultural experiment station, and her mother had taught homemaker courses before Carnelia deigned to be born. So, the Craigs were up there a bit on such social scale as we had. And in a strange way, I frequently felt I comprehended more of Carnelia's lofty approach to life, jaded as it was, than I did of my father's latest castles in the air. The reason for that was all too simple. She and I were oldest enemies.

Even yet I can't fully account for the depth of passion, of the worst sort, between us. After all, with more than a dozen years apiece in this world, together we amounted to a responsible age, or should have. But Carnelia and I were the entire seventh grade of the Marias Coulee school, as we had been the entire first, second, third, fourth, fifth, and sixth, and there was not a minute of any of it when the pair of us did not resent sitting stuck together there like a two-headed calf until that farthest day when we would graduate from the eighth grade. Until then there would be battle between us, and it was just a matter of choosing new ground for it from time to time.

As soon as I saw Carnelia halt, turn her head a bit to one side as if hearing something sublime the rest of us had missed, and then aim herself straight toward Toby, I knew the terrain of hostilities ahead. Even Carnelia's family did not have a housekeeper.

I yelped "Last catch!" to Grover while throwing him the ball and raced over to head off Carnelia.

Too late. By the time I got there she was practically atop Toby, her hands on her knees in the manner of Florence Nightingale bending over a poor fallen boy, and crooning her first insidious question:

"Tobias, will she tuck you and Damon and Paul in at night?"

"Huh uh!" Toby answered with the terrifying honesty of a second-grader. "She's gonna sleep at George and Rae's. I asked."

"Oh, is she," Carnelia noted for posterity. "Not a live-in, then," she lamented, evidently for Toby's sake and Damon's and mine. I tried to break through the circle around Toby, but Eddie Turley chose that moment to get me in a casual headlock around the neck and I barely managed to croak out, "Pick on somebody your own size, Carnelia!" By now Damon had tumbled to what was impending, and he yelled out in fury, "Carnelia hag, leave him alone!" But he couldn't reach there from the horseshoe pit in time either.

Carnelia was smart—worse, she was clever—and what she asked next sounded for all the world like a note of concern for the well-being of the Milliron household:

"But then she'll have to get up ever so early to come over and cook your breakfast, won't she, Tobias?"

"She can't cook," Toby confided sadly to what was now the entire listening schoolyard. Then he brightened. "But the newspaper says she doesn't bite."

That did it. We slunk home after that school day with even the Pronovosts barely able to contain their smirks.

***

"Y
OU WERE NIGHT-HERDING AGAIN," DAMON MURMURED, AS IF
I didn't know.

By then it was Sunday, and my dream the night before had nothing to do—for a change—with the teasing circle of Hell that the schoolyard had been for him and Toby and me all week long, and everything to do with what lay in wait for us at Sunday dinner.

"Bad?" I said back in the same low tone he had used. Just out of hearing behind us, Toby romped with our dog, Houdini, both of them hoping for an ill-destined jackrabbit to cross their path. "Worse than usual?"

Damon considered while he reached for the next pebble of the right size. He was in one of his baseball phases at the time and had to throw rocks at fence posts the whole way along the section-line road to George and Rae's place. He wound up and fired, frowning when he missed the post. "Usual is bad enough, isn't it?"

Naturally Damon figured that my excursions while asleep were nightmares. It was nothing that simple. I rapidly thought back over this particular nighttime spell and decided against describing it to him in precise detail. I had tried that before. "I keep telling, you, give me a poke when it bothers you that much."

"Paul, I'm scared to. You're like somebody one of those mesmerers—"

"Mesmerists."

"—yeah, like somebody one of those has put to sleep." Hypnosis? Even if I had the knack of administering it to myself, the nocturnal state of my mind was not subject to command.

We trudged on toward the beckoning finger of smoke from the kitchen stovepipe next door—which in homestead terms meant half a mile away—neither of us knowing what more to say. Until Damon, who could all but wink with his voice when he wanted to, intoned:

"Anybody I know? In your big dream?"

I had to laugh. "What do you think?"

"I can just see her." Squinching his face into the approximation of a prune, he mimicked:
'Cat got your tongue, boys?
"

It was like that most Sundays. Once in a great while the Sabbath-day invitation to Father and his omnivorous boys would come from the Samaritan Stinsons, Grover's parents, or from the reliably civic Fletcher family if school board business needed tending to, but standardly we were asked over to our Schricker relatives' for Sunday dinner. The meal itself we always were surpassingly grateful for. Rae Schricker was our mother's cousin, and with the same calm flint-gray eyes and impression marks of amusement at the corners of her lips, she resembled Mother to an extent that sometimes made my throat seize up. Certainly Rae seemed to regard herself as Mother's proxy on earth at the cookstove. Any of us would have had to grant that Mrs. Stinsons mincemeat pie and Mrs. Fletcher's cream puffs could not be bettered anywhere. But Rae operated on the assumption this was our one square meal of the week and tucked ham with yams or fried chicken with mashed potatoes and gravy into us until we wobbled in our chairs. Meanwhile, George in his whiskery way would attempt to preside over the feast with encouraging injunctions of his own: "Oliver, heavens, you're out of coffee already! Toby, here you go, the wishbone!" I say
attempt
because unlike us, George still very much had a mother, right down there at the opposite end of the dinner table. At these Sunday repasts Aunt Eunice, as we boys were forced to address her, ate sparingly as a bird, preferring to peck in our direction.

"Old Aunt YEW-
niss
," Damon now crooned in rhythm to his pitcher's motion, and bopped a post dead-center.

"Go easy," I warned, with a glance toward Toby as he raced Houdini to catch up with us.

"Maybe she won't've heard," Damon muttered to me.

"And maybe the cat will get her tongue for a change," I muttered back. "But I wouldn't count on it."

Father was sending us over first this Sunday noon, as usual. "Tell George and Rae I'll be there in a jiffy," he instructed, his favorite measure of time. It was strange how many last-minute chores in the horse barn demanded his immediate attention when visiting with Eunice Schricker was the other choice. First, though, he had made sure to curry us up, ensuring that we scrubbed behind our ears, slicking our hair down for us with the scented stickum he called "eau de barber," and judiciously working us over with a comb the size of a rat-tail file. It was then that Damon, who hated to have his hair parted, pulled away from under the comb and demanded to know: "How is she our aunt?"

A perfectly sound question, actually. By what genealogical bylaw did we accord aunthood to our mother's cousin's husband's mother? Particularly when she showed no affinity with the human family?

"By circumlocution," Father said, which I resolved to look up. "I want you boys," he tapped Damon with the comb, "to tend to your manners over there. It's good practice for when our general domestication happens."

When, indeed. By mutual instinct, Damon and I had not mentioned to Father the teasing we were taking at school about the nonbiting housekeeper.
("Does she come with a muzzle?" "Is she so old she's a gummer?")
And we were managing to keep a stopper in Toby by telling him over and over that our tormentors were merely jealous. But the housekeeper matter was wearing us down day by day. The letter had gone off to Minneapolis, my best Palmer penmanship setting forth Father's much mulled-over wage offer, and all we had to show for it so far was red ears from the torrent of razzing. I longed for our
phantom correspondent, whoever she proved to be, to materialize as such a model of domestic efficiency that the rest of Marias Coulee would swoon in tribute; but at the same time I harbored doubts that I could not quite put words to. Besides, Father more than once had warned us not to get our hopes up too high, although plainly his were elbowing the moon.

So, off we went to the lioness's den, two of us longing for this Sunday to be over and Toby impatient for it to start. No sooner had Rae let us in the kitchen door and slipped us an early bite apiece of the gingerbread she had just baked, than the sort of thing Damon and I dreaded was issued to us from the parlor.

"Is that those boys?" came that voice, snappish as a whip. "Don't they have manners enough to say hello?"

His face full of smile and gingerbread crumbs, Toby charged in, we two apprehensively trailing after. There Aunt Eunice sat, as if not having bothered to budge from the week before, folded into her spindleback rocking chair, the toes of her antique black shoes barely reaching the floor. George as usual was seated stiffly on the horsehair sofa at the other end of the room. As I look back on it, the Schricker family line contradicted the principle of inherited traits. You would have had to go to their back teeth to find any resemblance between George, his ever-hopeful broad countenance wreathed in companionable reddish beard, and the elderly purse-mouthed wrathy figure, half his size, whom he felt the need to address as "Mum." Sunday-clad in her Victorian lavender dress, crochet hook viciously at work on yet another doily to foist onto Rae—the parlor looked snowed on, so many of its surfaces were covered with this incessant lacework—Aunt Eunice was the obvious victor over any number of challenges of time. Thus far, the twentieth century had had no effect on her except to make her look more like a leftover daguerreotype.