The Whistling Season (24 page)

 

What a matchless morning of school that was. And what an ordeal that afternoon turned into.

The first hint came when, out of nowhere, Morrie nailed Damon for gawking off into space while he should have had his nose into geography. "I will see you after school, young man," he levied, just like that. There was a malicious grin or two from the direction of the eighth grade, but Carnelia and I and Damon's sixth-grade classmates were dumbfounded. Academically, Damon frequently lived in midair; why pick him off, today of all days?

Damon's face fell a mile at this hair-trigger sentencing. Hardly any time later, it was followed by Verl Fletcher's after Morrie singled him out for sharpening his pencil with a jackknife
at his desk instead of at the wood box. "No open jackknives around a desktop, that is the rule. You can keep Damon company, after."

Restlessness rippled through the schoolroom like waves of wind through wheat. A teacher on a discipline rampage can be a fearsome thing; every student ever born knows that. But we never expected that kind of behavior from Morrie. Nonetheless he seemed to go out of his way to pick fault with us that afternoon, scanning mercilessly into one grade after another as grammar period ground along and then a spelling test. Casualties piled up fast. Sam Drobny was caught with his eyes not entirely on his own spelling paper. Five minutes later, Morrie said Nick might as well join his brother after school, it seemed to run in the family. Perhaps to be even-handed among nationalities, Morrie shortly gigged Peter Myrdal, the youngest of the Swede clan but also the biggest fifth-grader imaginable, for making a face at Sam and Nick.

By now it was noticeable that our instructor had declared war on the race of boys. If I wasn't mistaken, Rabrab began to look somewhat miffed at not qualifying to represent the girls in the army of detention. I could not figure it out, this rash of petty infractions. Something hideous had come over Morrie. I'd read
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,
but I thought Robert Louis Stevenson made that up.

There are times when you just know that whatever can go wrong next is about to. I hunched at my desk trying to will against it, through body language and telepathy and nearly semaphore to try to warn the innocent up there in the second row, but here it came.

"Toby!" Morrie's voice crackled. "Do you really think this is the time and place for whispering?"

"M-m-maybe not."

"You can stay after and decide definitively," the verdict was dropped on him.

Amazing. Like the Drobnys, the Millirons could practically hold a family reunion after school. Somehow lesson work stuttered on, with Morrie still on the prowl and everybody else on edge.

Then, with not more than ten minutes to go until school would let out, the terrible words:

"Eddie Turley. Attitude. After school."

Damon and Toby and I whirled around in our seats, aghast.

At first I thought Eddie was going to faint. But a Turley probably did not know how. Instead, he surged halfway up out of his desk as if about to make a break for freedom, then gulped mightily and sagged back into his seat again. Morrie had delivered the words like bullets, and for the life of me I could not see why. Attitude! Eddie's dopey sneer at the world was as natural to him as breathing; why convict him for his facial muscles, particularly when he'd inherited those from Brose Turley? This clinched it for me. Morrie had turned suicidal.

When school at last let out, while everyone else had fled to their horses and the after-school contingent disconsolately stayed planted at their desks, Morrie showed not a care. Unlike me. Even though I knew Brose Turley was nowhere in our vicinity, piling up pelts in the distant snows of the Rockies, the back of my neck felt like it had something creeping up on it. Eddie looked as dicey as I felt, with the same confused expression on him as the time I slugged him.

Looking the prisoners over, Morrie absently stroked his lip as if the mustache were still there. "Numerous as you are," he observed as though he had nothing to do with that, "I believe we are going to have a work detail. The cloakroom can always stand a tidying. Eddie, I'll ask you to fill the inkwells and then
sit out your time at your desk, but the rest of you assemble out there, please."

I didn't like the looks of this. How was I supposed to bone up on declensions with my supposed Latin tutor running a chain gang of sulking boys? I went up to Morrie.

"Uhm, you seem to have your hands full. Shall I just go home and we start Latin tomorrow afternoon?"

"Not at all.
Exercitus ad Galliam iter faciet, philologe novissime—
the army will march toward Gaul, young scholar. Never fear. First, though, I'm going to appropriate you for the work detail"—I gaped at him in dismay, and he simply looked back at me coolly—"and then we can proceed to declensions."

The school's cloakroom was like our mud room at home, the catchall part of the building, only more so. With the nooks and crannies of the supply cabinet along one wall and the overshoe alley beneath the long line of coat hooks and some schoolyard playthings that had been brought in for the winter, it was a room that Rose could have tended to in, oh, three whistled tunes. It didn't require seven boys. It most definitely did not require me.

There I was, though, and I didn't know what else to do but button my lip and get this over with. Morrie handed out brooms to the Drobny twins, and Toby and Peter were given dust cloths, and the others of us were pointed to the supply cabinet. Verl stalked to one end and Damon and I paired off automatically to straighten up shelved materials at the other. Wordlessly we worked shoulder to shoulder. After a while Damon said in a low voice, "Know something funny? You're getting fuzz."

"What? Cut out the kidding."

"No, really, honest. You ought to take a look." He pooched out his own upper lip experimentally while trying to see down his nose. I took the opportunity to pinch his lips together duck-bill style in the silencing treatment. All we needed was for Morrie to keep us
after
after-school, for talking out of turn.

Eventually he strode out from the schoolroom, closing the door behind him, and inspected. The bunch of us stood there in a clump anticipating the worst, given his mood of the afternoon, but he seemed satisfied. He turned to the group with an expression of speculation, looking quite a bit more like the Morrie of this morning.

"There is one further matter I'm going to ask you to attend to," he had us know. "It's Eddie."

All of us shifted glumly, awaiting one more grownup's sermon about the necessity of getting along with someone we knew to be a menace. Verl yawned. Even Toby looked halfhearted. Arms folded, Morrie waited until we had to give him stares of attention. Then he uttered:

"I want you to dogpile him. Right there where he is sitting."

Whatever blue this came out of—and none of us was about to question a chance to get a crack at Eddie, with the authority of a teacher behind it—we immediately were the troops for it. The Drobny brothers' sunken eyes shone. Verl perked up mightily, and Peter gave a happy little hellfire snort that must have come out of his Viking lineage. Damon positively beamed. I have to say, Toby and I balled up our fists in anticipation along with the rest of them.

Morrie shushed us and held us back, saying he needed to write something on the blackboard first and then would give the signal.

While the others gathered at the far end of the cloakroom and buzzed with glee as Damon assigned bodily parts of Eddie as targets for each of them, I edged to the doorway and took a look in. Eddie had his head down on his desk, refusing to look
up as Morrie wrote on the blackboard. The chalked sentence stood out boldly until it seemed to hiccup at the end; I had to strain to make out the final three words. Turning, Morrie saw me and put a finger to his lips.

"All right, boys," he sang out, and in everybody swarmed, all over Eddie. Toby and Peter dove under the desk and grabbed a leg apiece. Eddie's upper parts were submerged under Damon, Sam, and Nick. Verl squashed down on him from behind. I hesitated for about a heartbeat, then joined the pile. Only Eddie's head showed out of the heap of boys. "I'll tell! My father—!" he managed to croak out. One or two of the Drobnys and doubdess Damon got their licks in on him with their elbows and knees before Morrie could hover in, ordering us to hold Eddie still. He opened a cigar box he'd had stashed somewhere and took out a pair of eyeglasses, the everyday kind sold in any mercantile. He fitted the glasses onto the struggling boy.

"I don't want them things," Eddie gagged out. "Get 'em off me!"

"Read the board," Morrie coaxed. "Eddie,
read the board?

Eddie peered there in confusion, batting his eyes furiously. Morrie gave it a few seconds, watching him squint, then replaced the glasses with another pair from the box.

"Eddie, please, read the board."

Eddie stared. Stared some more. At last he slowly recited:

"'My name is Edwin Turley and I can read this—'" He stopped at the much smaller final three words, confused again. Every one of us wrapped across him held firm, but we all had our heads turned toward those blackboard words.

Morrie replaced the glasses with yet another pair.

Swallowing hard, Eddie read off: "'My name is Edwin Turley and I can read this with glasses on.'"

Morrie craned over the pile of us until he was squarely in Eddie's field of vision. "They are called reading glasses, Eddie. They do not need to be worn all the time, do you understand that? Just here at school, perhaps. If you don't want to take them home," he let that sink in, "they can be kept here in your desk."

Morrie peeled Nick Drobny off Eddie's chest. The rest of us untangled and fell back in a half-circle around Eddie's desk. Eddie hadn't said anything, but the glasses still were on him and he was gawking around like a newly hatched owl. Morrie was breathing as hard as any of us. "The rest of you, Eddie's reading glasses are to be a school matter." By which he meant a secret, we knew. "The girls and the others will be let in on it tomorrow. Isn't there some kind of handshake you swear on in the schoolyard?"

"Spitbath," said Toby, demonstrating.

E
DDIE EDGED TOWARD HIS DESK NEXT MORNING, AFTER HIS
usual furlough at the outhouse, and took his seat with every eye in the schoolroom on him. Pausing in the recitation of his expectations of us for the day, Morrie waited with all the aplomb he could muster. Eddie was looking down at his desktop as if it might bite him. Gingerly he lifted it enough to feel around in there and came up with the eyeglasses. He unfolded them sharply, the way you open a jackknife, and for a moment I wondered whether he might snap them in half. However, the earpieces after a couple of tries found his ears, and the lenses bridged his landmark Turley nose; Eddie looked like a collie someone had slipped goggles onto, but he was staring defiantly toward the blackboard as if waiting for Morrie to put up there something worth seeing.

I half expected the schoolroom door to be kicked to splinters and a pink-mouthed wolfer to come charging in to tear Morrie from limb to limb for turning his offspring into a four-eyed sissy. But before long, Eddie's furtively fixed-up eyes became just one more trait in our mortal bin of them, along with Vivian's lisp and Anton's purple birthmark and Marta's nosebleeds, Rabrab's slyness and Carnelia's haughtiness and Milo's goofiness, Toby's excitability and Damon's crafty side and my odd accents of mind, Seraphina and Eva's dark spirit, Lily Lee's easily hurt feelings, on down through the list of things we learned to simply chalk off as part of one another in one-room life. That is to say, it would have taken more than reading glasses to gain Eddie Turley any adherents. ("Now he can see to hit better," Grover muttered at recess.) When it came to his right to work around a calamity that went by the name of a parent, however, the Marias Coulee School instinct in favor of that was as fully tuned as a Stradivarius.

At Latin, the end of that day, a portion of me refused to stick to the nominative and accusative cases of
pluvia—
Morrie still was preoccupied with the rain gauge, poring over a weather service bulletin on hydrography between my written drills on nouns of the first and second declensions—and circled around the meaning of
I want
you to dogpile Eddie
instead. I kept coming out at different places, the more I thought about it. Never in a hundred years would Eddie, on his own, have resorted to something as unmanly as specs; those were for the Grovers and girls of the world. Yet what a tricky gamble Morrie took, in slipping those schoolish lenses onto the son of a man whose living was killing. I knew Morrie's move could not be termed impetuous, because he'd had to give thought to every bit of it beforehand: the various pairs of glasses, the number of boys to subdue Eddie. Was there such a thing as
petuous? A
word that meant thoroughly thinking a matter through, then risking your neck anyway? Morrie glanced up as I migrated between the Latin and English dictionaries. "Declensions are not done with the feet."

"Just looking something up."

But it wasn't there, in either language.

***

The morning after that brought something I never could have prepared for: Rose in tears. Awash in them, from the look of her when she drifted disconsonately in through the kitchen doorway, bonnet drooping from one hand.

"Here, sit down." I leaped out of my chair and provided it for her. My voice was husky but I kept it down, not wanting to panic the whole household. "What happened? Did you hurt yourself on the way over?"

Her soggy whisper could barely be heard. "It's Morrie."

I knew it. Sooner or later, gambling on outmaneuvering Brose Turley would catch up with him. From the way Rose was carrying on, he must have had the heart stomped out of him.

I asked shakily, "How bad—?"

"Just awful," she sniffled. "He is against my buying Eunice's place."

Visions of blood left my imagination, but Rose's gush of tears demanded attention. She dabbed at her eyes with the dishtowel I hurriedly fetched to her. "Oh," she moaned, "why did it have to happen? We've always agreed on matters. And for this, of all things, to come between us." She managed to look up at me, red-eyed. "Can you imagine? One minute we were talking about, I don't know, the weather, and the next we were having a—" Terminology failed her once again.