The Whistling Season

by Ivan Doig

Like an invalid, Eddie uncertainly lifted himself up out of his desk. He bit his lip and kept his eyes down, away from all of ours. One shuffling step after another, he trailed after the blunt back of his father and walked out of the schoolroom to a life of skinning dead creatures.

  Morrie crashed a fist down on his desk. All of us sat motionless, in roomwide paralysis.

  At last he caught a breath and said in a low voice:

  "Everyone, never forget what you've seen here today."

  At recess, Milo blustered that he wished it had happened to him, but even he looked a little green around the gills from what had been witnessed.

  "Some birthday for Eddie," Grover observed.

  "By a mile," Miles agreed.

  "What's the old so-and-so gonna make Eddie do, you suppose?" Verl pondered.

  "Housework," Rabrab trilled. "Can't you just see Eddie in an apron?"

  "The old man is gonna put him to tending the trap line," said Isidor the realist. "He'll have Eddie peeling pelts off his catch till he can't see straight."

  "Why couldn't he just leave him alone until the end of school?" Marta voiced the thought in many minds.

  Slowly but surely the verdict worked out by the Marias Coulee schoolyard court of justice was that Eddie, leaver of bruises on the majority of us, perhaps did not deserve fond remembrance, but no one deserved Brose Turley.

  Riding home, neither Damon nor I said anything until we came to The Cut. All at once I heard out of him, with a crestfallen note in his voice: "You're so lucky, Paul."

  "Why? What's the matter?"

  "I never did get to punch Eddie."

  19

  MORRIE WAS LOW FOR DAYS AFTER THAT. I WOULD POP into the schoolhouse early as usual, primed to the tips of my ears for Latin, and he would grunt to himself over my translations and then stick me off in some netherworld such as the ablative case while he graded papers and looked morose.

  It was the morning I was nailing through the thicket of prepositional attachment to pronouns but never to nouns—what were the Romans thinking, putting something like pax vobiscum in the same language with cum laude?— when he finally burst out:

  "Hopeless."

  To say the least, I was startled. "Imperfect," I might have said myself about my ablative efforts so far. Maybe even "inauspicious." But totally without hope? I sent Morrie a hurt look.

  "No, no, not you. Read this." He came down the aisle and skimmed a sheet of tablet paper to me, which proved to be Milo Stoyanov's essay on homestead life.

  In our family there are seven of us, Papa, Mama, Gramma, Katrina that is just little yet, Marija, Ivo, and I. I and Ivo and Marija go to the Marias Coulee school. I ride Roanie and Marija holds on behind but don't like to. Excepting for horses like Roanie and milk cows the animal everybody raises is hogs, a few. Everybody has chores including children. Marija's chore is gather the eggs. Mine is get in wood and empty the slop bucket. The food we eat is mostly deer, antelope, fish, and foul.

  Morrie stared out the window. "Sisyphus. I will trade tasks with Sisyphus, straight across." He stood there snapping his sleeve garters in agitated fashion, all the while muttering. "Why Montana? Why didn't I ship out to Tasmania?"

  I wished the school inspector would walk in the door right then, which at least would have stirred the blood around in Morrie.

  Still with his back to me, all at once he said in a forced voice:

  "There's something you'd better know, Paul. I am handing in my resignation as teacher."

  Shock ran through me from my ears to my toes. This was one thing I had never dreamed of, even on my worst nights. I could only babble back, "You can't."

  The sole sound in the schoolroom for some moments was the plick plick plick of the sleeve garters being beset. From the back, in his tailoring and calfskin shoes, Morrie looked naturally rooted here in a place of learning; but he had spoken those words that I still was trying to get my mind around.

  "I feel I must," he softly answered. "Matters are not turning out commensurate to my endeavors. Not for the first time, I might add."

  He faced around to me now. His deflated attitude alarmed me. How could destiny leak out of a person so fast? "Don't say anything to anyone," I heard him through my daze. "Not even Damon," by which I understood he meant particularly not Damon. "The school does not need more fuss and bother. I'll ride home with the two of you at the end of the day and tell your father first."

  I was a mound of distress as school got under way that day. When Carnelia elbowed me and under her breath demanded to know if whatever was wrong with me was something she might catch, I whispered back savagely, "I hope so."

  At the front of the classroom Morrie soldiered on, a bit subdued but still throwing off a good many more sparks than most teachers. But my world had fallen apart. Not merely my world, either. I could not imagine the fate of the school without him up there, bobbing and weaving through the fields of knowledge.

  At recess, the Drobny brothers were just the company I was fit for. We were kicking a gym ball against the back of the schoolhouse, doing our murderous best to bust its seams, when around the corner came a delegation. Headed by Rabrab, the leading lights of the sixth grade were all there, Grover and Miles and Lily Lee and Damon and Isidor and—Damon? He was hanging at the back of them, trying to look inconspicuous, but fading with me.

  Immediately on my guard, I eyed the group up and down. "What's this, the Feed the Cannibals League?"

  "Paul, don't be like that." When she wanted something, Rabrab had a look like the fox coaxing the baby bunny out to play. She had that look now. She glanced at my partners in gymball mayhem. "We need to talk to you without big ears around."

  "Nick and Sam know how to keep a secret, don't you." I whacked the nearest twin on the shoulder in solidarity.

  Rabrab stared the Drobny boys into an oath of silence— they knew a fellow assassin when they saw one—then returned her full sly attention to me. "It's Mr. Morgan. He's down in the dumps about something."

  "Top mark for observation."

  "All right, smarty we all saw it happen. But Mr. Morgan has to get over that. He can't help it if Eddie Turley has a father that would gag a maggot. We decided"—she generously indicated her fellow conspirators, with Damon still laying low at the back of the pack—"he needs something else to occupy his mind."

  "Oh right, Rab. Stamp collecting, maybe?"

  "Nobody asked you to be sarcastic, Paul," Rabrab said, as if I should not try her patience too far. "You remember the Christmas play, don't you?" Mystified as to how Christmas had come into this, I nodded. "We figure the school could have something like that for Halley's when it comes," she spelled matters out for me, her backers nodding like dipsomaniacs. Damn, I thought. If I'd been able to tell Damon about Morrie's mind being made up, everyone could have been spared these shenanigans. "Not exactly a play, maybe," Rabrab still was busily conjuring, "but something. Anything like that would pep up Mr. Morgan—he has comet on the brain."

  "Well then, why don't you troop in there and see what he says?"

  "We think you're the one to."

  I felt caught between. The quick way out was to tell the bunch of them Morrie was finished as our teacher. But he had implored me not to. But if I went in there after recess the way they wanted me to and stood up in front of everybody and said the school would like to put on some kind of something-or-other to mark Halley's comet, what could Morrie do but say, "I regret to inform all of you—"? But this, but that. It was playing me out, juggling those. All I could think to do was to delay; I had just been reading in my primer about the slowpoke general Quintus Fabius Maximus Cunctator, who avoided battles with Hannibal at every opportunity, and it seemed to work for him.

  Accordingly, I squared myself up to Rabrab and the others as if shouldering my duty and wildly procrastinated:

  "Well, gee, I don't know, but I guess I could, only if you let me do this my way. Mor—Mr. Morgan might think we're putting him on the spot if I get up in the middle of school and
ask. It'd be better if I had a chance to talk him into it, off on our own. Just so happens, he's coming over to our place after school."

  "He is?" Damon was outraged I had not told him that.

  ***

  "QUIT PULLING MY LEG, MORRIE." FATHER DUG INTO HIS MEAL with vigor. "You can't quit. This is excellent pork stroganoff, by the way." The one gain of the day was that Morrie had pitched in with me on supper and for once we were eating civilized food. Even Rose took a couple of bites.

  "Oliver, you are not hearing me. I have decided to resign my teaching position."

  "But you can't," Father said around another forkful.

  "Yes, don't tease, Morrie," Rose said, turning to Father. "I am sure I saw nice little green things coming up in my field when I looked out today."

  "Weeds."

  Morrie gazed around the table at the lot of us as if we were a tribe with no ears. "Since when is it impossible for a man to depart a job he did not seek out in the first place? I tell you, I am resigning. Ceasing to be a teacher. Chucking it in."

  Father stopped in mid-chew. "You're serious."

  "As I have been telling you. I am afraid I am out of my element, posing as a teacher." Morrie seemed composed, although he had to blink considerably to maintain that. Across from him, Rose's cheeks were coloring up like the rise of mercury in a thermometer, not a good sign. Gorging ourselves as we watched all this, Damon and I were the only ones not on record, up to this point. My hope was that Father or Rose or both of them together could talk Morrie out of quitting and everyone would brighten up again, and then I could speak my little piece about some kind of a comet commemoration, and Morrie could do with it or not as he chose, and that would be that. In short, all I wanted was a miracle.

  "Out of your element?" Rose sounded incredulous. "You've always been—"

  "Now, now, Rose," Father headed that off. "Please, let me." He swung around to face Morrie. "You can't leave the school in the lurch like this. The inspector might be here any day."

  Morrie was as adamant as Father. "That's precisely the point. What if he had been on hand when that wolf-hunting cretin dragged his son out of school? Wouldn't that have been pretty." He drew in a sharp breath. "Who knows what he might walk in on, if I'm in charge of things."

  "Good grief, Morrie, we don't have time to find another teacher. My fellow school board members will strangle me if we have to tell that inspector we've had another case of turnover. Like it or not, we're stuck with—"

  "FATHER!" issued forth from the bedroom down the hall. "CAN I SHOW MORRIE MY BIG TOE YET?"

  We all swore Toby's voice had grown to the size of Enrico Caruso's during his weeks in bed.

  "Tobe," Father called back to the autocrat of the bedroom, "not until we've finished supper, I told you that."

  Silence. Then: "ARE YOU ABOUT DONE?"

  "Almost." Turning toward Morrie again, Father gave him a strong looking-over before starting in. "I can't ever get a straight line on you." He glanced aside at Rose, who should have known the ins and outs of Morrie if anyone did, but she chose that moment to spear a shred of pork with her fork. Father returned to the Morrie puzzle himself. "I move heaven and earth to land you into the teaching job, which at first you don't at all want. Then you take to it, and by all reports, you're a ring-tailed wonder in the classroom. Now all of a sudden you let Brose Turley buffalo you. Next thing, when we need you to merely be on the premises when the inspector—"

  "I am not 'buffaloed' by Brose Turley," Morrie replied stiffly. "I just do not want to invite any more trouble onto the school. It would be on my conscience, if my methods were to—"

  Rose suddenly put in: "What is it you intend? To pack up from Marias Coulee? I'm just asking."

  "Perhaps I will become a homesteader. That seems to be in fashion around here."

  Rose looked as if she wanted to clobber him one. The rest of us at the table stirred, doing whatever we bodily could to draw off a brother-sister spat. I was restlessly trying to get over the horrible thought that if Morrie went, Latin went, when Damon kicked my chair hard enough to send a jolt up my spine.

  "Ah, Morrie?" Damon's reminder triggered the words out of me rapid-fire. "Remember the Christmas play?"

  "Pull your head out of the clouds, Paul," Father said impatiently. "What does Christmas have to do with anything?"

  "Well, I was thinking—Damon and I were thinking—actually, a whole bunch of us at school were thinking—"

  "Spit it out, we don't have all night," this from Father again.

  "A Halley's comet something-or-other, the school ought to put on some sort of program when it comes, is what we thought. Like at Christmas." I looked hopefully at Morrie, then at Father and Rose, then back to Morrie. Encouragement seemed to be asleep at the switch.

  But Father got hold of the moment. "You are, after all, the one who spouted comet to them until it's running out their ears," he reminded Morrie pointedly. "Just when is the thing due, anyway?"

  Morrie shrugged. "Any night now."

  "Any night?" Father's voice went way up. "That's the best you can predict?"

  "Oliver, Halley's comet travels an elliptical orbit across most of our solar system and arrives to our sight on an approximate schedule of every seventy-five years, it does not pull in on the minute like a train." He brushed a hand through the air as if to erase Father's obvious doubt. "It will come. It always has." Morrie turned his attention to the two of us on the edge of our chairs at the far end of the table. "Paul and Damon, I appreciate the school's wish to celebrate the comet. But even if I were to stay on and preside over that, time is short, and there is not a comet Nativity play."

  "Wouldn't need to be a play," Damon improvised cagily.

  "No, not at all, huh uh," I fumbled out. "Could be a—" I tried to think of anything sufficiently celestial. Where was blindsight when I needed it, Rose? Across the table from me, she watched me as if I could not fail, the archway of eyebrow that coaxed out unexpected thoughts ready and waiting. The only thing that came to my mind were these mornings of gazing up from the dark in the field to the light of the stars and then trooping in here to this kitchen to the whispery anthem of her whistling. "Music. Could be a music program, couldn't it?" Scratching for words, I came up with: "Harmony of the spheres, you told us about that, Morrie, remember?"

  I was simply reaching desperately. You never knew what little boost would send Morrie's thoughts escalating, though. The next thing any of us knew, he was stroking the precincts of lip where his mustache used to be and musing out loud very much as if he were at the front of the classroom.

  "Actually, there was a rather nice point about harmony that I did not get around to making to the students. That flaming idiot Brose Turley got in the way of it that day and I never—"

  "There now, you see? Comet night, music, that's that," Rose said to us all as if she had neatly bundled up the answers to everything herself. Father looked at her with what might have been startled admiration.

  "And besides music, you could make a talk, that night," Damon was busy reeling Morrie in. "Old Beetlejuice or something." Morrie's latest leap heavenward in the classroom had taken us into constellations, and so the bright star Betelgeuse, there at the hinge of the shoulder of Orion the giant, he had cited as a hinge of the human imagination as well. "Notice how its brighter light draws our attention, and then we see—or think we see—the outline of the giant in the other stars arranged around that point of light. This is called a point of reference, by which we imagine onto the infinite ceiling of the night those expanded figures from our world—here a giant, there an archer, over there the dippers from which they take sips of the liquid darkness—" Damon's promoter instinct was shck as usual. None of us who ever heard Morrie soar off into the sky and its holdings doubted that he could take all of Marias Coulee with him, on any given night.

  Morrie had been listening to Damon as gravely as if he was being enshrined in one of the scrapbooks upstairs. Now he found me with his instructive look and inton
ed, "Arma trado."

  "He throws up his arms," I informed the uninitiated.

  "'I surrender my weapons,'" Morrie corrected severely.

  "That's what I meant."

  Morrie gave his upper lip a final pat, the kind I had learned to recognize as introducing an announcement. "This may be lunacy, on my part. But perhaps I do owe it to the students to mark the comet's appearance. Comet night"—he accorded Rose a wry bow of his head, before turning to Father—"won't be detrimental to the school inspection, I can at least assure you of that. The students are as ready for the inspector as I know how to make them, even if I am not."

  "Morrie, all I ask is that your body be warm and visible to that inspector when he hits the schoolhouse," Father reassured him. "And so"—a locution that had rubbed off Rose onto him—"keep it plain and simple, on comet night. A few songs by the children and a talk from you about the comet and that will do it." Father eyed his newly unresigned school employee across the table. "In other words, spare the budget from harm."

  "Of course," said Morrie, although I noticed he was fiddling with his cufflinks, sometimes a signal that an extravagant notion was on its way from up his sleeve.

  "NOW CAN I, FATHER?"

  "Tobe has the eighth wonder of the world to show you," Father interpreted for Morrie's benefit.

  "EVERYBODY CAN SEE IT AGAIN IF THEY WANT."

  "We're on our way," Father called back, and the bunch of us trooped down the hall to where Toby held court. Any day now—the doctor's predictive powers were on a par with Morrie's for the comet—when the foot stopped being tender, Toby would be eligible for crutches. Until then, his foot was unbandaged, out in the open but within splints. He beamed at us down the length of the bed, as if he hadn't seen most of us twenty times already that day.

  "Morrie, look!" Toby directed, impresario that he was on his pile of pillows.

  Morrie leaned over and his eyebrows shot up in surprise. "Toby, you are an evolutionary pioneer. It may take the rest of humankind ten thousand years to catch up with you."