The Whistling Season (20 page)

"For crying out loud, Mor—" I burst out before remembering I was still technically under the rules of the schoolday. "Mr. Morgan," this time it came out of me singsong, I was enunciating so carefully, "it's practically winter."

"I don't see any snow," he pointed out maddeningly.

"You know what I mean. Snakes shouldn't be around. What if Brose Turley put the thing there?"

"What if it's mere coincidence?" Morrie weighed the rattle in his hand a moment more, then stuck it back in the desk drawer. "What if the unfortunate serpent simply was attracted by the heat of the house? We mustn't jump to conclusions," he chided, although it didn't seem to me to require much of a hop to reach a good one here. He stroked his mustache appreciatively as if a thought had just arrived to him by way of it. "Incidentally, Paul, don't tell him so just yet, but your father's method works like a charm. A barrel stave is first-rate for slaying a snake."

A snake, I remained convinced, that ought to have been holed up in its den that time of year.

That night, rattlesnakes drove wolves out of my dreams. I was my usual wreck by the time Rose showed up.

"Another off night, Paul?" How could she tell even before she set foot into the kitchen? Quick as a wraith, she was over to the stove to warm her hands and whisper: "I know just the prescription to take your mind from it. Three tubs of water."

I'd forgotten washday had devolved to Saturday now that she was in command of Morries housekeeping as well as ours. "Help me carry the wash water, pretty please," she set out the terms in her melodious low murmur, "then I'll leave you to your book," although for once I did not want to be left to that. I put my coat on, each of us grabbed a handle of washtub number one, and we crept from the house so as not to wake its Saturday sleepers.

In the start of daybreak we could see just well enough on the path to the pump. Out around us, the barn and other outbuildings loomed as if they were growing with the eastern light. Down at the corral, the horses gazed toward us through little fogs of their breath. I was mad at the weather again, another snowless morning that did not know the meaning of winter. The wind had not even started up yet, practically unheard of for Marias Coulee. Rose breathed in as if taking the air in the Alps. "How my poor husband loved mornings like this," she exulted, somehow managing to do it in the same veiled voice she had used in the kitchen. "I can just see him. He would be up and out at the crack of dawn, getting his miles in. Then he would gather me to go out to breakfast and—"

"His miles? On foot?" It was enough to make me gasp. If Damon and Toby and I couldn't saddle up Paint, Queenie, and Joker to go someplace farther than the neighbors within easy sight of us, we didn't go.

"A goodly distance, let's just say," Rose hastened to correct herself. "But every single morning, if the weather wasn't throwing a fit." As she chatted on, we could have been mistaken for leisurely strollers on a boulevard except for the galvanized tub between us. Ever since that first predawn conference of ours in the kitchen, several days ago now, it seemed natural to be at this. It intrigued me that in these circumstances Rose's experiences seeped from her, episode by episode, as if they wanted out. Like my dreams.

I listened assiduously as usual as she finished up the particular reminiscence brought on by the feel of this morning, about poor Mr. Llewellyn coming home from one of his constitutionals in the grip of a policeman unwilling to believe that a person would be out that early merely for exercise. "Imagine, that policeman would not even trust me to identify my own husband," she came to the end of the story as we reached the pump. "I had to ring up Morrie to come over and—"

"Rose, you don't have to whisper out here."

"Oh, right."

I voluntarily did the pumping so she could save her energy for conversation. "Such times as the three of us had together," she mused. It was a rare moment of Rose at rest as she stood there, hands quietly pocketed. Slight against the great prairie around us, she nonetheless seemed where she ought to be, pegged into place in the forthright Marias Coulee dawn. I had to strain to pick out her words over the racket of the pump, "—and didn't we just think we had the world by the tail. High living. All the comforts. Money growing on bushes. But put such trifles up against real purpose in life and all you come out with is—" She halted.

"Perdition?" I panted.

"Paul, you are a mind reader. Blindsight. There is nothing like it."

Perdition sounded pretty good to me, out there on the clammy pump handle. The matter at the moment, though, was salvation, namely Morrie's. Rose seemed not to have a care in the world, chatting away as we started back to the house with the heavy tub, but my mind was going back and forth furiously over the dangers represented by Brose Turley Twice now Morrie had made me promise not to say a word to Father in that regard. But he hadn't said anything about not telling Rose, had he? Halfway up the path we set the tub down to rest for a minute.

"Rose, you better know." Time to go back to whispering. "Morrie is maybe in for it."

"For what now?"

As rapidly as I could spill the words out, I told her the full story. She seemed less surprised about the brass knuckles than I'd expected. In fact, the only thing that seemed to startle her was my conclusion:

"Maybe Morrie ought to go. Leave, I mean," and I had trouble even saying the word. "On out to the Coast or back where you were, or—"

"Oh, I think not," she said quickly. "Life here agrees with both of us."

"It won't be so agreeable if Brose Turley gets hold of him when he's not looking."

"I'll speak to Morrie about being careful, don't you worry." She did her best to settle me down. "But if this Turley person wants him out of his way, he is going about it exactly wrong." One of Rose's patented pauses ensued. Her eyes always widened when she thought deeply. I waited, leaning her direction as a sunflower will follow the sun, for whatever illumination was sure to follow. At last she whispered, as if it were a secret between us, "Morrie can be contrary at times."

***

Aunt Eunice seconded that.

"Give that man bread and roses and he'd eat the petals and go around with the loaf in his buttonhole. Oliver, you have taken leave of your senses in turning the school over to him."

Her pronouncement caused Damon to kick the leg of the dinner table until Rae stopped him with a look. He knew it was against his best interest to contradict Aunt Eunice out loud, but here it came: "Morrie is a hundred times better teacher than old Miss Trent."

I leapt in just as recklessly. "Morrie knows something about almost everything."

"Morrie taught me 'rhinoceros,' Aunt Eunice!" Even Toby felt the need to take issue. "R-h-i-n-o—"

"There, you see? What manner of teacher lets the pupils call him by his first name, answer me that!" Her tiny mouth pursed full of triumph, she looked around at those trying to have a Sunday meal in peace. George was not uttering a peep behind his nest of beard. I was sure Rae felt some allegiance toward Rose, but did it extend to Morrie? That left Father, as usual, in Aunt Eunice's direct line of fire.

"We don't call Morrie that when school is on," I protested.

"And you had better not let me catch you at it if you ever do," Father said. "Exceptional lamb roast, Rae. You boys: less talk, more fork. You were saying, Eunice?"

"The greenest graduate of The Spencerian Academy"—Aunt Eunice's alma mater, needless to say—"could do a better job of it in that school."

Father kept his head down over his plate, but his voice was on the rise. "Eunice, The Spencerian Academy is twelve hundred miles from here. How was I supposed to pluck up a teacher from there overnight?"

"This is the way of the world anymore." Aunt Eunice was
addressing a higher invisible audience, maybe heaven. "Try to give someone the benefit of all one's years on this earth and will they listen? No."

Sitting there hearing Aunt Eunice call down the thunder of her accumulated years, I tried to imagine Morrie and Rose right then. Rose was spending most of every Sunday at the teacherage, and chances were Morrie would be putting dinner on the table for the two of them about now. Probably sparrow hearts and three peas apiece, but brother and sister would gaily tuck in their napkins and converse in spirited tones as usual. I could see it as real as anything, the teacherage a Crusoe isle of calm amid the turbulence of fife—if it did not come under assault by snake, fire, fist, boot, and other weaponry my dreams provided. Was Rose having any luck in making Morrie be wary of Brose Turley? Was luck adequate to that?

I
WOKE UP THE NEXT MORNING WONDERING WHY MY EAR WAS
stuffed with cotton, when I had no memory of an earache. Groggily I lay there, my other ear still pressed to the pillow, trying to figure this out. Usual end-of-night sounds—the wind giving the house a last visit, if nothing else—were absent; the inner works of my ear held only that plugged silence. I rolled over and the other ear was the same, not able to hear a thing. Deaf in both ears? Numbed by the silence, I sat up in bed. How could I have lost my hearing in one night with not even a dream to warn me? Then the bedroom window's blue-silver light of crystalline reflection that was spread over the still form of Damon beside me and Toby across the room registered on me. The cottony stopper on the sounds of the outer world was snow.

 

Morrie opened that schoolday as if the six-inch white blanket outside was nothing out of the ordinary. I noticed, however, that he petted his mustache more than usual.

I am not the giddy sort, but that morning I floated somewhere above the eternal desk shared with Carnelia. Over breakfast
Father had vouched that a snowfall like this one, damp and clinging, was more than sufficient for tracking and trapping, and likely would last in the mountains and foothills until spring. Brose Turley would have to go off to the high country now for his winter harvest of pelts. Eddie himself gave us a sure sign of that when we rode into the schoolyard and there he was, a sneering grin on him for the first time in ages, getting in practice to lodge with the Johannson boys by roughhousing with them.

Mine was not the only case of euphoria left behind by the fat, lazy overnight storm. Morrie found out in a hurry that the first day of real winter substantially altered the classroom climate. Try us every way as he did on arithmetic that morning, there was only one equation on our minds: first snowfall equaled first snowballs, divided by sides. Giving in with grace, he called recess some minutes ahead of time and got out of the way of our stampede to coats, overshoes, and mittens.

Within seconds, Grover and I were pelting each other as happily as we had played baseball catch together in the months previous. Snow always turned Damon into a tundra guerrilla; he plastered Martin Myrdal three times before Martin figured out where those deadly snowballs were sailing in from. Toby's age group exploded softball-sized chunks on one another, giggling all the while. In no time, then, the schoolyard scene was as ordained as one of those medieval clocks where a troupe of figurines march out of one side and drive in the troupe on the other: every male from first grade to eighth was in the middle of the playground madly firing snowballs, and all the girls had wisely withdrawn alongside the schoolhouse to cheer and scold. Skirmishes and ambushes grew into fusillades. Before long there was as much snow being flung through the air as rested on the ground.

Satisfying as the snowball free-for-all was, the god of winter mischief suddenly offered something even better. It came when Nick Drobny, trying to dodge a snowball and at the same time reach down and manufacture his own, slipped and fell flat on his face. The rest of us could not believe our good fortune. Everyone in Nick's vicinity shouted out the opportunity. "Dogpile!"

Knowing what was coming, Nick squealed and tried to scramble onto all fours. He did not quite manage to do so before Miles Calhoun belly-flopped on him, and Izzy landed crisscross atop Miles.

"
Get off me!
" Nick was shrieking—shrieking was one of the best parts of a dogpile—when Anton Kratka and Gabe Pronovost added themselves crosswise onto the others, and Verl Fletcher sailed in on top of them.

This already was a highly promising pile, with Nick struggling with all his might to escape the bottom and everybody atop squirming to squash him into the snow until he gave up. Grover and Damon and I and several others cagily circled the heap, gauging when to join in; a good rule of dogpiling was to end up as far on top as you possibly could. Then something beyond precedent happened. In her usual provocateur fashion, Rabrab Rellis had been on the sidelines dishing out remarks. Abruptly she came loping out, brown-stockinged legs long and scissoring, turned in midair, and slid across the pile of boys on her back, arms wide as if to spread the gospel of dogpile.

Rabrab did not stay there any time at all—that would have been unmitigated scandal—but her teasing flight of passage had a sensational effect on every boy standing there idle. Whooping, roaring, we flung ourselves onto the heap, the whole wet, wooly mass of us rolling and growing like a gigantic snowball, Nick still at the bottom.

In the schoolhouse, the uproar must have sounded like the outbreak of war. Morrie hopped out onto the front step, one
overshoe on and struggling to pull the other one on, to find us laughing like junior madmen. He stopped work on the overshoe and peered at the writhing tangle of us. "Nick? Is this satisfactory with you?"

Nick squeaked out, "Just fine, Mr. Morgan."

Morrie went back inside shaking his head, probably counting the schooldays until spring.

I sometimes wonder if education has its own omens, as the weather does. That day and the next, while the snow was fresh, so was the mood I brought to any school subject, even the ones I already knew by heart. Sitting next to Carnelia as if we were galley slaves perpetually chained to our oar did not even bother me. Then came a change of weather, in more ways than one. As the snow dirtied up and winter went back to being nothing special, a feeling I could not name came over me, although since then I have observed enough students at that age to diagnose my case as pernicious listlessness. Whenever Morrie wasn't drilling us on something the world thought essential to seventh-graders, I drifted into reading of my own or disinterestedly killed off the night's homework right there during school. The only thing I felt a serious need to study was the trajectory of snowballs. And it did not help that Damon and Toby and I came down with one of our periodic fits of tardiness, so that each morning we would gallop in at the absolute last minute and there would be Carnelia waiting like the wrath of Betsy Ross, steaming to get the flag-raising over with.