The Whistling Season (28 page)

Father was wild with worry and off-balance, as he always was around anything medical. I am convinced it was the presence of Morrie, someone well dressed who could phrase a pertinent question about metatarsals, that put the green young physician on his metttle. After an examination full of "mmm" and "hmm" he took Father and Morrie aside—Rose and Damon and I right at their heels—and announced that all the toes were broken and significant other bones as well, but possibly things could be made to knit straight.

"'Possibly'?" Morrie spoke the word as if wringing its neck.

The doctor frowned. "There's extreme swelling and the foot is one mass contusion. I just have to do the best I can in feeling out breaks."

He etherized Toby, then began setting bones. We waited in the kitchen. Even after Rose's scourings, to me it still had the faint vinegar presence of Aunt Eunice. I couldn't tell if Father felt it too, but he stood staring wordlessly out the window to where George, lumbago and all, had taken over the plowing. Rae was home fixing food for us. That much of life had to go on. Rose had said she needed some air—she still was pale—and Morrie stepped out with her. Alone with ourselves, Damon and I sat at the table like persons incarcerated. Every so often we traded white-eyed looks; neither one of us had any doubt that our lives had changed along with Toby's. We just didn't know how much.

When the doctor at last was finished, we were allowed to look in on Toby. His left foot, colossally bandaged and splinted, stuck out of the bedding so starkly it was hard to be in the same room with it. Father stared at it, one hard swallow after another bobbing in his throat, then he wheeled on the doctor. "What are we looking at ahead?"

"Mmm, weeks. Maybe a month, maybe two, before he—"

"That's not what I meant," Father spat the words. "Is he going to be crippled?"

For the first time, the doctor sounded gentle. "There's a decent chance he won't be if complications don't set in. He needs to keep that foot in bed, nice and still, for a good long while."

"Can we take him home?"

"I don't see why not. Now might be a good time, before the ether wears off."

***

"R
OSE, I DON'T KNOW HOW I'M GOING TO MANAGE THIS
."

"I do."

Already life was so out of kilter in the household that the four of us were marooned at our kitchen table in the middle of that fine, bright first afternoon of spring. Toby had been installed in Father's bedroom down the hall and was fitfully dozing his way through the after-effects of the ether every time one of us checked on him. It was Father who was stark awake and distraught. With two farms on him, Big Ditch freight staring him in the face, and an injured son who needed day-in, day-out care, clearly more wheels had come off his world that day than he knew how to deal with. If some people thought the Milliron
family was bad off before, they should see us now. No matter how Damon and I tried to sit up straight and show Father we could shoulder our share of things, we still amounted to schoolboys. The more Tobys bedridden circumstances sunk in on me, the deeper my mood went with them. It did not take much figuring out to know I had seen the last of after-school Latin.

Minutes before, Morrie had taken his leave of us, fervently offering, "If there's anything I can do,
anything,
just say the word." The only word presenting itself in any of us at the moment was that doubt-proof "do" from the lips of Rose. It made Father peer across at her as if wondering where she got a monopoly on such certainty. Occupying Toby's spot at the table, she had her elbows planted on the oilcloth and her hands clasped neatly as a locket. I had the feeling this was something I had seen before.

"It sounds like you'll let me off the hook on the 'shares' proposition, then," Father was saying, a whiff of relief in his strained voice, "and that will free me up to—"

"Not enough, it wouldn't." Rose sounded so perfectly reasonable it took the three of us a little time to realize she had no intention of yielding on the plowing arrangement. "You already need to be out of the house on all your other work this time of year," she was laying out to Father nice as pie, "so you are up against being two places at once even if you didn't farm for me, aren't you. Then you may as well, wouldn't you say?"

Rearing back in his chair, Father was about to protest the heartlessness of that—I was, too—when Rose trumped everything. "I'll care for Toby. I'm here all day anyway." She drew a breath as if steeling herself. "Dust will just have to accumulate if it wants to."

"You'd do that? Take this on for us?" Father looked like a man reprieved. "Rose, the boys and I would be grateful beyond—"

"Oh, it's nothing," she said, as if she did this sort of thing every day. "Don't you worry."

For some moments the other three of us sat there taking up space. Somewhere beyond etiquette and just short of moral imperative, something more needed to be said in a situation like this. I knew it and squirmed with it; Damon knew it and kicked the table leg with it; most of all Father knew it and had to summon the words from down around his shoetops. "We'll figure out some way to sweeten your wages a bit."

Rose waved her hand as if that were inconsequential. However, she did not turn it down.

"That leaves nights," Damon spoke what I was thinking.

"I'll be night nurse, of course." Father went to work on that with a frown. "We'll have to rig up something for me to sleep on, in there with him."

"Father?" I saw no need to let anything this hopeless go on. "You're quite a sound sleeper."

About three heartbeats after that, Rose offered, "Oliver? I can stay over. With Toby. At night."

By the expression on Father, the reprieve seemed to have been yanked back halfway. I watched him glance at Damon and me and then toward the hallway in the pattern that sent boys upstairs, then give up on it. The issue was quite clear, whether or not the two of us were there to gawp at it. A man and a woman, unsanctioned by wedlock, under the same roof night after night, all of that. Father already had shrugged off plenty of community opinion where Rose was concerned. How much shrugging did he have left in him for something of this nature?

Now he mauled the edge of the oilcloth with a thumb while he tried to find the right words to put together, and finally he hunched forward to the table. "That's an even more generous
offer, and I appreciate it, Rose. But I don't think it's a good idea for you to be—"

Damon and I were looking at each other.

"I'll go," I said after a moment.

"I could, I guess." He nibbled his lip at the thought.

"You couldn't either," I scoffed. "You'd sleep through breakfast. You'd sleep through
school?

"Go where?" Father asked in exasperation. "What are you two running off at the mouth about?"

"To Aunt Eu—to Rose's house, to sleep. We can haul Toby's bunk down to your bedroom, so she can be in there with him. You can have my place, with Damon." I saw Damon undergo a fleeting seizure at the prospect of sleeping with Father, snorer supreme, but heroically suppress it.

Matters were getting away from Father faster than he could see them coming. He opened his mouth to speak, but I beat him to it. "Why wouldn't that work?" I asked, as if all this was reasonable as moves on a checkerboard, which was pretty much the way I thought of it at the time.

"Everybody has to sleep someplace," Damon clinched the matter.

"There now, you see?" Rose opened her clasped hands as if this solution had been concealed in there all the time. "Don't you worry," she told Father again. I wondered why he didn't seem reassured at hearing it a second time.

 

"—and then, Tobe, you and I were on this kind of teetertotter, only it was a sawhorse and we were on each end of a giant stick of firewood, and one of us would go down and the other would go way, way up, high as the top of the house, and we kept seesawing like that, higher and higher, until we heard somebody say, 'You boys have won the teetertotter prize!'"

Sanitizing my dreams for Toby took some doing; it was good training later on for writing my Department of Public Instruction annual reports. What really occurred in that dream was that I was on the teetertotter alone and it went up and down on its own in a manner that mystified me and the voice had called out, "Paul Milliron, you are going to break your fool neck." My amended version did the trick for Toby, who wriggled in excitement against his pile of pillows and let out, "Wow, Paul."

"And do you know who it was?"

"Aunt Eunice?"

"You guessed it. And she had a whole wheelbarrow of candy for us—"

"Taffy, I bet."

"Uhm, fudge, more like." In my dream it was firewood and Aunt Eunice was belaboring me that she wanted every stick sawed to the exact length of a rat-tail comb. "Anyway, here she came, big as life, and told us, 'Dig right in.' Damon was there, too"—I raised my voice on this part so it would carry to the kitchen, where he was bent over his geography book; the specter of the inspector, as Father called it, had even him doing homework—"and Aunt Eunice not only fed us fudge until we were about to bust but took all three of us on her lap at once. How, I don't know."

Abruptly Toby's lower lip pooched out. "I miss her."

I didn't. Rather, I didn't have to, for Rose's homestead still held an inordinate amount of its previous occupant as far as I was concerned. How could a woman that tiny linger in every pore of a house? Especially the bedroom, where every night now I crept between the covers like a trespasser in what had been female territory since time immemorial. Rose had done away with Aunt Eunice's doilies on everything, thank heavens, but that whole fussy room still carried an atmosphere of having been crocheted
into existence rather than carpentered. What unnerved me even more was that the place felt occupied by leftovers of existence. It was not simply that death had a dominion at the other end of the house, where I had walked in on Aunt Eunice as she was going cold. No, the immense parade of Eunice Schricker's years still was passing through that borrowed bedroom for me. I had worked it out that she was Toby's exact age the last time Halley's comet flew past Earth, and from there she had gone on to declaim at The Spencerian Academy and then cornered a husband and gave the world George and single-handedly nagged a Wisconsin town and in old age traipsed west to lord herself over Marias Coulee, vociferously crisscrossing other lives all the way. Then came Rose and her jampacked record of life with Morrie and poor late Mr. Llewellyn, next in the gallery of existences that was that restless bedroom. And here I was, tenant of the moment, with the night-heightened destinies and fates of everyone I knew swirling around whatever my own were. A person would need an orrery as big as mankind to keep track of it all.

Needless to say, my dreams went after such thoughts like a wolfer after wolves.

Ragged as my nerve ends were from bunking at Rose's homestead, I did my utmost to stay sunny during my bedside shifts with Toby. He was studying me somberly now in the aftermath of my dream recital.

"You're so lucky, Paul. I just go to sleep, bam."

"You'll grow into dreams when you're bigger, don't worry about that."

He dandled a hand down to the snoozing mound of dog that had become nearly permanent beside his bed. "I think Houdini has dreams sometimes."

"Probably good ones, too," I agreed. "Catching rabbits while he's lying down."

Toby made a face at my mention of lying down. Bed rest was thought to be the cure for everything then. He, however, was the world's most restless patient. Rose was putting the majority of her daytime into keeping him occupied and Father sat with him evenings and Damon and I pitched in after school, and still Toby was like someone confined to a zoo cage. Now he plucked at the bedding and I saw the glisten of tears in his eyes.

"Paul, tell me something. Am I ever gonna get up?"

"Sure you are. You heard the doctor yesterday. Just another couple of weeks yet." Then crutches. Then a long stint of careful footsteps, which did not come naturally to a boy like him. I didn't say any of that.

"I still can't go to school for a while after," he pouted. His face darkened. "It's gonna be awful to flunk a grade. I'd be in the second grade with Josef and Maggie and Alice and Marija, and they're little kids."

I was caught off-guard. Rose and Father were making sure he did the schoolwork sent home to him, and Morrie himself managed to drop by at least a couple of times a week, but evidently all of that did not weigh the same to Toby as classroom lessons. Myself, I would gladly have lain flat on my back for hours on end and let people spoon-feed education into me, if the subject could be Latin.

"For crying out loud, Tobe, what makes you think you're going to flunk? If you need more help with your schoolwork, I can—"

"I'm not there, am I," he screeched, "for the spelling bees and the comet stuff and reading out loud and all the rest, I'
M ABSENT
! I
DON'T HAVE PERFECT ATTENDANCE ANYMORE
, I
DON'T HAVE ANY ATTENDANCE
!"

"Is that what's eating you?" I tousled his hair; he needed a haircut, but he so hated being barbered that none of us had the
heart to give him one. "Morrie is not going to flunk you just because you're not there in the second row every minute, honest. I'll tell you what." I lowered my voice. "I'll get him to show me your grades there in his record book. He's not supposed to," I made this up frantically as I went along, "that's one thing the inspector inspects, whether a teacher blabs grades, but I'll work on Morrie and I bet he'll do it for you. Then I'll tell you if you're flunking or not, how's that? But it can't be anything but a secret, all right?"

Toby attempted to shake his head and nod at the same time, whatever it took to vow secrecy.

"I have to scoot on out of here," I told him, looking at the time. "I won't forget, about Morrie and your grades."

I made a beeline for the kitchen, passing Damon at the table, where he was trying to be invisible behind his geography book. "Your turn," I said under my breath.