The Whistling Season (32 page)

"Call me Harry," the man said as they shook hands. "Harry Taggart. School inspector."

It was as if Zeus had appeared in our yard. Father froze. I heard Damon gasp, or maybe it was me.

Actually, Taggart did not look like much. He was a long stick of a man, his bowler hat sitting on him about as it would have on a hat stand. His frowsy mustache made it apparent what an achievement Morrie's had been. But he had slitted eyes, as
though his vision was everlastingly pinched to a point by watching people try tricks. And the bag he carried, now that we had a second look, was a dark leather briefcase bulging with whatever a school inspector inspected with.

The intruder explained, "I asked around town and caught a ride out with the good doctor here, to find your place." Those eyes with their visors of lids flicked across the homestead and Father in his barn clothes as if reserving judgment.

"Yes, well," Father rallied, "we weren't expecting you on a Sunday and—"

"Excuse us," the doctor called over, "we are going in the house for me to examine the patient," and Toby vaulted along ahead of him on the crutches.

"And these are your other lads." Taggart belatedly dispensed handshakes to Damon and me. As if a switch had been nipped, now he sounded hearty. "Ready to tackle the Standards tomorrow, buckos?"

We hated it when that tone of voice was used on us. Not trusting what we might say, Damon and I stood there as soiled as badgers and dug our toes in the yard as though in search of more dirt.

The inspector breezed right back to Father. "First off, I should make sure our records in Helena are up to date." He instantly delved into his briefcase the way a gunfighter went to his holster. "
Marias Coulee School District;
he pulled out an official-looking piece of paper and read off, "
established 1901, Township 28 North,
so on and so on.
Teacher, Adelaide Trent—

Damon couldn't help it. He snickered.

Father dropped a kindly hand on Damon's shoulder and gave a little squeeze meant to carry all the way to the vocal cords. "Miss Trent is no longer with us. That old epidemic, matrimony." Father forced a chuckle. "The school board fortunately found a sterling replacement."

The school inspector frowned.

"This individual's name?" He spread his piece of paperwork onto the skinny hood of the automobile, reached out a fountain pen and scratched Miss Trent into oblivion, and for better or worse, Morrie was entered onto the rolls of the Department of Public Instruction.

Pen still poised, Taggart was saying, "Next there is the matter of this person's—" and I was proud to have enough Latin instinct by then to know the next phrase was going to be
bona fides.

Just then Rose quick-stepped out of the house, water bucket swinging in her hand, headed for the pump. Wearing satin for Sunday, she looked very nice indeed. Our visitor cast a glance at Father as if he thought better of him. Capping his pen and putting it away, Taggart drew himself up formally, tipped his hat, and called, "Good day, Mrs. Milliron."

"She's not—" Father started and stopped.

"Oh, how do you do," Rose said, swerving over. "Actually, I am more properly called Mrs. Llewellyn," she said in the melan-cholically musical fashion we had not heard from her for some time now. "I'm the—" She gestured inclusively around, water bucket and all, a sweep that took in our homestead and hers and the fields and evidently the perimeters of things all the way back to Minneapolis.

"Temporary nurse," Father hastily filled in.

"Neighbor next door," I prompted in the same instant.

"Housekeeper," Rose said, looking at both of us.

Damon saved our skins. In back of Taggart, he frantically pantomimed peering through a magnifying glass, Sherlock Holmes style.

"Ah!" Rose let out. "You must be the school inspector everyone has been so looking forward to." She and he shook hands—hers obviously startled him, being as strong from work as any
man's—and she sped on with the conversation as if she had been waiting months to confide in him. "I five just across the way, so it's nothing for me to pitch in here on the household chores and see to Toby since his awful accident, and Mr. Milliron is so busy with farming and the school affairs and all, so it works out well for everyone concerned. You see—" Here she halted and bit her lip. Taggart leaned toward her from the waist as if to make sure he did see. "My husband is"—Rose gestured off to far horizons again—"gone for an extended period."

"What can exceed neighborliness as a virtue?" Taggart proclaimed to us all as if it might be on tomorrow's test. Rose beamed at him and went off to pump water.

Father had not fully recovered from Rose's transit through the situation before Taggart turned to him again. "Mr. Milliron—may I call you Oliver?"

"Be my guest."

"Oliver, how I would like to proceed," Taggart went on in a fashion that made it plain it was how they were going to proceed, "is to meet with you and the teacher before school tomorrow. To examine the classroom equipment and the physical state of the schoolhouse, that sort of thing. Say an hour ahead of start of class? That's usually ample."

My face fell. That would crowd out Latin.

Father said in not much voice, "I'll be there."

At that moment, Toby spun out of the house. Crutchless.

"I
CAN GO TO SCHOOL
! T
OMORROW
!"

"Hey, wow, Tobe!" Damon congratulated him.

"The more the merrier," Father said, sounding even more peaked. "We'll all see you tomorrow, Harry."

As soon as the Model T was out of sight, the first necessity had to be performed. I was itching to be the one. But on some scale in his own mind Father kept track of these things, and this
was not my turn. "Damon," he said wearily. "Saddle up and go tell Morrie, Judgment Day arrives tomorrow."

 

Rose waited until the last one of us—Toby, bard of the longest-running foot epic since that of Achilles—had the last bite of supper in him before she said it. "And so. I'll need to move back to my place tonight."

Damon and Toby and I looked at each other. This hadn't occurred to us.

Father was a different story. He was behind the fortification of his coffee cup, taking a long, slow drink, before the last of Rose's words were out. When he finally put the cup down, he addressed Toby. "You can climb stairs, tiger, can you?"

"You bet." Too late, Toby realized what he had condemned himself to.

Father looked down the table to Rose now. His expression was harried, not surprising for a day bookended by the arrival of the school inspector and the departure of the presence that had given the household such a lift. He had a little trouble with his voice when he told Rose, "We don't want to seem to be throwing you out. If it's too much of a rush for you to go yet tonight—"

"I'd better." She made sure to share her commiserating smile around to all of us.

An unforgettable twinge went through me. A sense that something major was ending. I knew I was entitled to feel relief at coming home to sleep, out from under the hovering thunderhead of Aunt Eunice, but that was not what I felt. Anticipation of Rose alighting into the kitchen full of whispered cheer again each morning instead of me stumbling in from the field, dream-driven, should have filled me; but that was not it either.

A chair clattered. Father was onto his feet, tugging at
Damon's collar and giving me a look with plenty of pull in it. "We have to wrestle Tobe's bed back upstairs for him."

"I'll get my things together while you're at that," Rose said, just as awkwardly, "and then I'll scoot."

Father paused. "You don't need to run off."

"I'd better," she said once more, and again her smile was carefully equal for each of us but ended with Father. "I thought I'd ride over and see Morrie yet tonight. He may need some bucking up."

***

W
E WERE A MOTLEY CREW ON HORSEBACK THAT NEXT MORNING
. Toby rode double behind me; his foot still was tender enough that he was not supposed to swing up into a stirrup with it, so Father lifted him up behind my saddle and threatened him extensively against falling off or jumping down. By that hour I was bright-eyed as could be, accustomed to riding to school that early for Latin bouts with Morrie, but Damon drooped sleepily on the back of his horse. Father, in his best clothes, looked like an out-of-place pallbearer on top of the pint-size mare Queenie.

Rose had not appeared at the house by the time we left, and that worried me. I'd had the comet to myself that morning, a lonely enough sighting. I could only hope our kitchen sessions would get back to what they were before.

Plainly Father had enough on his mind without us, so on that ride to school we all stayed as close to mute as boys could humanly be. Toby contented himself with snuggling dreamily into my back as he held on to me, as though I were a horseback version of Houdini. The day broke out in pale spring sunshine. I can still see the schoolhouse as it appeared when we rode up out of The Cut, its paint a bit worn from the affections of the
wind, its schoolyard trampled bare, its dawn-caught bank of windows a narrow aperture to sky and prairie. Any inspector from the Department of Public Instruction would have seen a thousand such places. We were about to find out if he had ever seen anything like Morrie.

By the time we were dismounting at the school, the dreaded automobile was tottering over the horizon from the direction of Westwater. That longest day was under way, whether we were ready or not. The schoolhouse did not appear to be. Its windows were not showing any lampshine, which meant Morrie wasn't on hand yet. "Damon, get in there and make sure the chill is off the place," Father directed hurriedly as he hoisted Toby down from behind me. "Stoke the stove up good if you have to. Tobe, now listen. Take it easy on that foot. No running, no rough-housing, got that?" Toby promised, cross his heart, and all but tiptoed across the schoolyard to join Damon inside. In my usual role, elder statesman of the boys, I waited beside Father for the inspector's Model T to pull up next to the flagpole.

"Where's Morrie?" Father asked me through gritted teeth.

"Brushing up on pedagogical principles," I said as if I knew.

"He'd better be."

Harry Taggart unfolded out of the car, spoke of the weather, shook hands with Father perfunctorily, and headed into the schoolhouse like a man on a mission. Father and I hastened after him, trying not to be obvious about looking around for Morrie.

Inside, the schoolhouse was not exactly dark, but it was a long way from illuminated. Toby was somewhat ghostly as he wriggled this way and that in his desk to see if it still fit him. Damon was over by the stove, but not feeding it; the schoolroom already was toasty as could be. As Taggart squinted around
in the gloom, Father struck a match and pulled down the nearest hanging lamp. "Notice we do not go in for careless expenditure of kerosene," he said piously and lit the wick.

Even with that first lamp, the schoolroom gleamed. By the time Father had them all lit, the place was practically blinding. Clean windows glistened, the scrubbed pine floor was spotless, the blackboard was the pure dark of obsidian—from its shining rows of desks to its perfectly aligned arrowheads in the display case, Marias Coulee School showed the handiwork I recognized with a jolt. The only thing lacking was the lingering echo of Rose's whistling.

"Tidy," Taggart conceded, plopping open his briefcase and snatching out a sheet of paper to make a check mark.

"We do our utmost to keep the vessel of knowledge shipshape," Morrie said from the doorway, causing Father's head to jerk around.

Hand casually out, Morrie advanced toward Taggart, looking as tailor-stitched as when he first stepped off the train. "Kindly pardon my tardiness. I presumed you might like a peek around the premises without the instructional incumbent in the way. Good morning, Oliver, you're looking meditative."

Introductions made, Taggart turned back to Father briefly to ascertain the budgeting for such a level of schoolhouse upkeep, and Morrie took up his station at his desk. I edged over to him and whispered, "We were getting worried. Where were you?"

"Throwing up," he murmured.

Taggart arrived to the desk and got down to business. "Mr. Morgan, I understand you are a replacement teacher. Oliver and his board must have been fortunate indeed to find someone sufficientiy credentialed, on such short notice." By now the inspector had his fountain pen poised, over another drastic-looking piece of paper. "Where did you take your degree?"

"Yale," Morrie answered with towering dignity.

Father's eyes bugged out.

"No!" Taggart nearly dropped his pen and paper. "Why, that's first rate! What, may I ask, was your field of study?"

"Yurisprudence."

I was afraid the school inspector was going to choke. His lips crimped in while his Adam's apple bobbed.

Then came the burst, a guffaw that would have put any of Milo's to shame. "
Yurisprudence at Yale, by yingo,
eh?" he cackled out. "I never—" Finally his fit of laughter broke off into a helpless snort.

Father seized the opportunity. "We'll, ah, all step outside and leave you to your work in peace, Harry."

Taggart gaily waved us out, shaking his head and moving off in the direction of the orrery.

The instant we were safely in the schoolyard, Father pounced. "Morrie, damn it, this isn't vaudeville."

"He laughed, did he not?" Morrie said with the air of someone who had just broken the bank at a casino. "I would say life approximates a stage quite often, and a bit of low humor may not be amiss. How many times, Oliver, do you suppose an inspector for the Department of Public Instruction gets a chance to laugh?"

"And I say play it straight. If anything goes wrong today, he'll have us fried in butter."

"Never fear," Morrie responded. "Come on over to the teacherage; I have coffee lying in wait. I'll tell our inquisitor."

We killed time in the teacherage—Damon kept Toby occupied in a game of acey-deucey the pair of them off in one corner furiously slapping down cards; I sat with Father and Morrie and pined for Latin—until Taggart showed up. He was back to looking official, plunking his bulging briefcase down in front of
him as if not letting it out of his sight. Even then I had professional curiosity about what was in the thing. As serious now as if he had never had a laughing jag in his life, the school inspector stuck to formalities. Pen in hand, he elicited from Morrie the University of Chicago and the leather trade and vague smatterings of his existence before teacherhood. At last satisfied, more or less, with Morrie's qualifications, Taggart turned to Father. "I find that the school is exceptionally equipped, and yet the budget is in good trim. Nicely managed by your school board, Oliver."