The Whistling Season (33 page)

"We're careful with a dollar," Father said, avoiding Morrie's eye.

"G
OTCHA
!" Toby let out, evidently springing a wild deuce on his opponent. "I win again, Damon."

Taggart contemplated the cutthroat card game over in the corner. "Your littlest lad appears to be well on the way to recovery, Oliver."

An alarm bell went off in Morrie and Father and me all at the same time. "Tobias had a perfect record before his accident," Morrie thrust in, true enough as far as it went, "but he has been out for six weeks. Has not the Department of Public Instruction some method of taking a stroke of fate of that sort into account?"

Taggart had to mull that. Finally he allowed, "In an extreme case, and I can see that his may have been one, I am permitted to excuse a student from the grade-wide tests. Perhaps in this one instance—"

By now, Toby's face registered full dismay at the prospect of being left out of anything on his debut back in school. "I can spell and everything," he protested shrilly. "R-h-i-n-o-"

"That will do, Tobe," Father put a fid on that.

"No, no," Taggart persisted. "A go-getting attitude should be rewarded. I'll test him just on the spelling standard, orally. Otherwise, he can have the run of the schoolyard this afternoon. Thank goodness you are on hand to supervise him, eh, Oliver?"

"Thank goodness."

"As to the rest of the school day, all morning is yours to do with, Mr. Morgan." Morrie smiled wanly in response. Taggart busied himself with something in his briefcase, then nicked a deadly look that took us all in. "I simply observe."

 

Marias Coulee School was never quieter than at the start of that day. Nor more decorous. A fresh haircut shined on every boy, the strips of white on the backs of necks practically blinding from the seventh-grade perspective. The girls were tightly braided or ribboned. Clothes that were being saved for an occasion made a surprise appearance: the Kratka brothers echoed one another in plaid shirts obviously fresh from the catalog box, the homemade dresses of the Drobny sisters were a particularly witchy gray. Grover and Adele and Louisa and Alice and Verl and Lily Lee, of the other school board families, bore the same signs of recent ruthless hygiene that my brothers and I did, as scrubbed as new potatoes. Anywhere a person looked in the schoolroom, Damon's canny stops at every homestead along the way to Morrie's yesterday had paid off in style.

In his by-the-book manner, the school inspector was informing us we were not to let his presence distract us in any way whatsoever. "This morning I am merely a fly on the wall." Mine was not the only set of eyes that moved to the swatter hanging on the wall behind Morrie's desk.

"Likewise Mr. Milliron," Taggart officiously swept onward. "He is here to lend a hand as needed." From the row behind me came an involuntary creak of acknowledgment. Father was haphazardly seated in the desk left empty by Eddie Turley.

Now Taggart took the spare chair that usually stood in the cloakroom, squared his briefcase on his lap to write on, uncapped his pen, and called out, "Ready to commence when you are, Mr. Morgan."

Morrie outdid himself that morning. He drilled us through arithmetic like numerary cadets, one grade after another popping to the blackboard to smartly do its sums. Reading period was little short of Shakespearean. Morrie called on Toby as one of those to read aloud, letting off some dangerous steam there. And to stand and recite "Ozymandias," he passed right over me and picked Carnelia. That raised my hackles, until I figured out what he was up to: since she was the oldest girl in school and our desk was near enough to the back of the room, Taggart might be fooled into counting her as an eighth-grader instead of our actual woeful ones. Everything proceeded nicely to geography, which was a constant forest of hands raised to answer. Never had so many known what the capital of Paraguay is. Science of course was our trump card, and Morrie played it with full flourish. Every time I peeked over at Taggart, he was making check marks, hardly frowning at all. I believe all would have ended well if, at the end of that last period of the morning, Milo's hand wasn't still hanging high in the air at the very back of the room.

Morrie hesitated. He'd managed beautifully to camouflage the eighth grade so far, taking answers only from Verl or Martin in the mob of big bodies back there that now included Father, and artfully trying to blend Carnelia in with them. In the best of circumstances, calling on Milo was not a promising proposition.
Don't, don't, don't,
I prayed to Morrie.

Too late. Taggart had noticed the sky-high hand, and Morrie was forced to deal with it. "Milo, something quick, then it's noon hour."

"Yeah, I was just wondering. All this going on, when we gonna get to practice for comet night?"

"Comet night?" Taggart spoke for the first time all morning. "Did I hear right? The comet is there every night. Surely these students know Halley's comet has arrived?"

"Absolutely they do," Morrie said in a hurry. "We have been working on a school function to commemorate the event, tomorrow evening. Inspired by the science of the matter, naturally." I darted a glance over my shoulder toward Father. He looked pained, and not just from hard sitting in a schoolboy desk.

Taggart did not take the bait on the word
science.
His narrow eyes narrowed further. "You have been able to spare time during school hours to work on hoopla for the comet? We shall see." The school inspector rose out of his chair and advanced to the front of the room, unbuckling the flaps of his briefcase as he came. He reached in and began pulling out sheafs of printed paper. These he dropped on Morrie's desk, one, two, three, until there were eight stacks.

Every one of us in every grade knew what those were.

The Standards.

 

The men spent the noon hour in the schoolhouse readying things for the afternoon-long tests, while we ate lunch in the schoolyard. Over by the teetertotter, a crowd was clustered around the spectacle of Toby's big toe. Letting Tobe have his moment, I parked myself on the front steps of the schoolhouse along with Damon and a majority of the sixth grade.

On every mind was the boggling fact that the school could be shut down if it did not come up to standards, whatever those were.

"They sure are out to get us," Isidor observed.

"By a mile," Miles affirmed.

Grover took a bite of a sandwich that looked twice as thick as and three times more tasty than mine or Damons. He asked me between chews, "What's
dormitory
from?"

"Umm, give me a minute." On either side of me, the Drobny brothers supported me with silent attention. I thought back to my translation of
Noli excitare canes dormientes,
quite plainly "
Do not disturb the canines that are asleep
" to me, although Morrie truncated it to "
Let sleeping dogs lie.
" "'Sleep.' A place of sleeping."

Nick Drobny sounded baffled. "They want to send us all the way to town to sleep?"

"No, the dormitory is where we'd live while we go to school, dunce," said Rabrab.

Damon wasn't saying anything. That meant he was really worried.

Lily Lee reported in a quavering voice, "We'd get to come home weekends, my father says."

"Weekends aren't much, in that kind of setup," Sam Drobny summed it up for us all.

We filed to our seats for the afternoon with rare lack of conversation. Standard tests were relatively new in the educational scheme of things then, and those of us on the receiving end were not sure what we were in for. All too soon Morrie and Father were passing out test papers and giving low-voiced instructions to the grades at the front of the room while the school inspector himself did the same at the back. I watched Carl and Milo and Martin and to a lesser extent Verl confront the long sheets of questions Taggart was inflicting on them. Blood rushed to heads. Hearts very nearly stopped. Urgent inquiries were put to Taggart as to how much time they had for their answers. Days apparently would not have been too much.

When he had untangled from the eighth grade and it became apparent to him that Carnelia and I, quiet as kittens, were a principality unto ourselves, Taggart bent over the pair of us and said in a low tone, "This is highly unusual, one class so small in a school this size. Are there others of you, out sick?"

"We're it," Carnelia mourned, and I nodded abjectly.

Taggart frowned. "I see. Something like this can skew the standards. I will need to count you as anomalous, and parcel the testing of the two of you for a truer picture of your standing. We'll begin with you, young lady. You are to write a three-hundred-word essay to demonstrate meaning and knowledge of a scientific topic, by luck of the draw." Taggart randomly yanked out a test paper. "Astronomy." He started to hand her the sheet, then pulled it back to peer at the heading. "No, wait, my error. I apologize, young miss." He looked at Carnelia with a bit of pity. "Your topic is agronomy." Carnelia did her injured princess imitation, just as if she didn't know more about the gospel of deep plowing than any other schoolgirl in America, and began writing.

"And this lad"—he looked at me like a hangman trying to do his job well—"we'll need to examine on penmanship."

Next, Taggart tiptoed up to Toby and took him out to the supply room for his private spelling bee. Whatever the quality of the spelling, the high little voice sounded confident. After that, the skritch of all of us writing was the only sound in the schoolhouse for a long while. Toby and Father were excused to the schoolyard, and busy as I was copying Palmer-method whorls and creating salutations, I looked out a number of times to see one happy boy being pushed in the swing. At least Toby now was out of the picture as an instrument of the school's fate. That left only all the rest of us.

Each half hour, Taggart and Morrie administered some fresh test to us until we came to the last hour of the day. Looking out over the spent faces, Taggart assured us we were very nearly
there, only grammar and reading comprehension to go. "For most, that is," he added. "The others shall take an achievement test."

Morrie frowned. "Achievement'?"

"A departmental term," the school inspector saw he had to translate. "A vocabulary standard, for your upper grades. To measure verbal facility at a significant developmental age."

A fleeting look of panic passed over Morrie. "By 'upper,' you include—"

"Eighth grade, of course"—Taggart swung his head around and eyed the overgrown aggregation at the rear of the room, which stared cowlike back at him—"and the age bracket is inclusive to the sixth." The entire sixth grade, nobody's fools, squirmed at the notion of being lumped in with the eighth. Carnelia and I, the taken-for-granted grade between, tried to look like an even smaller sliver of the student body than we already were.

Taggart passed out the vocabulary test, a sheaf in itself, and presided over us. Among the combined three grades, winces went off like fireflies as people encountered words they had never seen before in their lives. Through most of the allotted hour, student after student did what they could with the stiff exam and ultimately signaled surrender by handing it in to the inspector.

Eventually everyone was done but me. I was aware of Damon casting worried looks in my direction. Carnelia fidgeted impatiently beside me. I didn't care. I had fallen in love with the test sheets. There it was, language in all its intrigues, its riddles and clues. The ins and outs of prefixes and suffixes. The conspirings of syllables. The tics of personality of words met for the first time.
Look to the root,
Morries dictum drummed steadily in me. Almost anywhere I gazed on the exam pages, English rinsed itself off into Latin.
Vulpine
brought the clever face of a fox into my mind.
Corpulent
necessarily meant something about a body,
likely a fat one. On and on, the cave voices of vocabulary coming to me, and when I had been through every question, I went back over each a couple of times, refining any guesses.

Finally Taggart told the others they could go outside to wait. At the absolute last, when he checked his watch and called "Time," he collected my test with a look at me as if I must be a total dolt to have taken that long.

It was over. Morrie turned loose the weary three dozen of us, looking considerably done in himself, and the school inspector established himself at the big desk at the front of the room to score the tests.

Father came herding Toby in our direction as Morrie and Damon and I walked somberly to the teacherage to wait for Taggart's verdict. "Give me a day of farming over keeping up with Tobe anytime," he stated. "How did the tests go?"

Morrie thrust his hands to the bottoms of his pockets and hunched up as if he were in a hailstorm.

I just shrugged.

"Tough old tests," Damon at least was definitive. "Especially that last thing."

It took more than an hour for Taggart to show up. Those slitted eyes showed nothing as he stepped into the teacherage. Toby and Damon were back at acey-deucey, and I was sitting at the table doodling Roman numerals onto the tablet Morrie had loaned me while he and Father sat across from each other and looked bleak. "You will receive the official report within a week," Taggart said, "but I can tell you in a preliminary fashion what it will contain." He glanced around at the three sets of schoolboy ears in the room.

"They can't be got rid of," Father justified our presence to Taggart. "Believe me, I've tried. Go ahead, we're ready for our medicine, aren't we, Morrie."
"Vocabulary," Taggart reeled off from one of his perpetual pieces of paper. "The sixth grade, I am pleased to report, is very much up to standard." Morrie looked simultaneously relieved and apprehensive. Taggart gave him a metallic gaze. "And your seventh grade rescues your eighth grade."

Suddenly the inspectors eyes were on me. "One test score was the highest on record. This lad bears watching. He'll know every word there is." One word I did not know at that moment was
daedelian,
which takes its name from the maze-maker in Greek myth and implies unpredictability of a particularly intricate sort. Not terribly many years from then, in a daedelian turn of events, school inspector Harry Taggart would be answering to Paul Milliron, the state's new Superintendent of Public Instruction.