The Whistling Season (41 page)

Where, far-fetched as it then seemed for young centaurs like us, in the fullness of time Damon and I and even Toby would end up tamed and married, napkined and patriarchal.

Those stand like continental divides in my rumpled mind, yet no more clearly than this. That day, I rode down through The Cut and out onto the section-fine road across Marias Coulee still trying to gather myself, to put on the face—the one that has lasted to this day—behind which I could seal away Rose's past, and Morrie's, for the sake of the next of life for all concerned. The sky was bare blue; it would be the best possible night to say good-bye
to the comet. There was just enough wind to muss Joker's mane now and then. I let Joker have his head most of the way home, until suddenly the reins came alive in my hand and I headed him at a gallop out into the field between Rose's homestead and our own. At the spot where I could see to the pothole pond, I pulled up. There at the Lake District, a flurry had replaced the stillness of the water. A commotion of wings, a dapple of white against the prairie. The swans had come in their seasonal visit. Beautiful as anything, I could hear their whistling.

***

E
VEN WHEN IT STANDS VACANT THE PAST IS NEVER EMPTY.
In these last minutes here, in this house with its kitchen doorway that overheard so many whispered confidences, with its calendar that holds onto Octobers forever, something has found its way into a corner of my mind. A finding, in more ways than one. For it has come to me, amid the many jogs of memory today, that the contingency authority that we so feared from school inspector Harry Taggart, back then, still exists. I cannot even guess how far back from modern times it was last used, but there it stands, I am sure of it, obscurely tucked away in the powers of my office. And so: what if I now were to resort to the political instincts and administrative wiles—and, admittedly and immodestly, the reverse—that have kept me in office all these terms, to freshen up that dusty capacity of the superintendent of public instruction to take charge of a rural school in trouble? And if the appropriations chairman is determined to treat Sputnik like the starter's gun in a race to the school bus, I would have no qualm in issuing a finding that all rural schools in the state thereby are in trouble, would I.

I must not show my hand too soon. First it will require an enabling clause, a phrase, innocent as a pill with the potion deep
in the middle, put before his legislative committee. A housekeeping measure, I will say when I present this; I must make sure to call it that in honor of Rose. Something that can be read more than one way.
Regarding contingent appropriation within the purview of the Department of Public Instruction pursuant to the matter of "findings'...,
perhaps. Or
In matters of appropriation pertaining to rural schools, the Superintendent shall determine....
Some verbose foliage of that sort above the crucial root, so that while the chairman thinks I am fiddling ineffectually with the rural school appropriation funds lingering in my budget, I will be in fact appropriating—yes, taking; glomming onto, in the translation even Morrie approved of—the sole say for the continued existence of those one-room schools. My schools. I can see the slack faces of the chairman and his pack even now, when the matter goes up to the state supreme court and I as the author of the troublesome meaning can quite happily testify that I meant
appropriate
as the verb of possession.

Oh, there is still a touch or two needed to perfect this, some apt stretch of the imagination to do full justice to the chairman and his ilk in the political infighting. The dream kind, that goes in for brass knuckles. That, too, will come, I know it will. As surely as night.

And so my course is clear and my heart is high. When I pull in to Great Falls to the convocation waiting for word from me about the fate of their prairie schools and rise in front of that gathering and toss away my prepared remarks, I can now say to them the best thing in me: that I will sleep on the question appropriately.