The Whistling Season

by Ivan Doig

  "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.

  Having reached his limit of congratulation, Taggart went back to the list of results. We could scarcely believe his recital. Subject after subject, Marias Coulee School came out at that heady altitude: up to standard.

  Our grins filled the teacherage as the school inspector stuffed his paperwork into his briefcase. He glanced aside at Morrie. "Well done, Mr. Morgan." With a poker face he added, "You evidently majored in something more than high-yinks at Yale." Before going, Taggart turned to Father. "Oliver, if I may see you alone a moment, there are just a few things to go over."

  The two of them stepped outside. There was a dazed silence among Morrie and Damon and me. Toby, fresh as a daisy from his day, began yattering: "That's over, huh? I liked the inspector, didn't you? Hey, what's gonna happen on comet night? Don't I get to know, now that I'm back in school?"

  "No," Damon and I said together, then laughed. "We'd tell you if we could, Tobe," I soothed, "but everyone in school that day has to keep the secret. Only until tomorrow."

  Morrie banged his fist on the table, startling the three of us. Smiling like a madman, he banged it again, in sheer jubilation. "The highest on record,' young scholar," he exulted to me, his proud words my wreath of laurels.

  "Wait till Rose hears," Damon loyally backed that up.

  "Yeah!" Toby contributed.

  "Aw," I said, not knowing what else to say. Luckily we heard the grind of a crank and Taggart's Model T coming to fife; then Father reappeared.

  "There, now," Morrie leaned back in mock grand fashion. "I believe we all acquitted ourselves quite well today, wouldn't you say, Oliver?"

  "A little too much so, in your case," Father said grimly. "You made yourself so popular with Taggart he's coming back for comet night."

  "Oliver, I simply cannot tell you. I gave the students my word. More than that, I pledged on my salivary gland." Father went at him with everything but a crowbar, but he could not get out of Morrie what manner of mysterious performance to brace himself for that next night. Philosophically fiddling with his cufflinks, Morrie kept looking around the teacherage as if drawing resolve from its confines. "You have vowed to keep a secret on some occasion, surely? And knew you had to stand by it, through thick and thin, fire and flood, shipwreck and avalanche?"

  "Damn it, Morrie, I could do without the disaster comparisons. At least promise me this: whatever you and the students are up to, it won't cause Taggart to give us a black mark as a school."

  "It shouldn't."

  "How about upping that to 'I guarantee it won't'?"

  "The public arena is always a risk. That is why it's an arena," Morrie said with the air of an impresario. "The one thing I can assure you of, Oliver, is that our students shall do their best. As, may I point out, they did today."

  Stormily rounding us up to go home, Father glanced down at Damon, standing there smug, then at me, still somewhere up on the moon with my test score, and lastly at Toby, pouting at the other two of us for not letting him in on the secret either. He shook his h
ead and said, "They'd better."

  ***

  THE COMET OWNED HALF THE SKY, THAT NEXT NIGHT, WHEN all of Marias Coulee gathered at the schoolhouse. People oohed and ahhed as they climbed down from their wagons, dusk giving way to dark but Halley's phenomenon shedding so much light the night had its own subdued shadows.

  I admit, I had mixed feelings about sharing my messenger from the deepest reaches of morning, mine and Rose's, with so many others. As Morrie had said it would, the comet's brightness now equaled that of the North Star; what a thought, that the known sky had a sudden new lodestar. But the most astounding thing about the comet by far was the monstrous tail. In its first few weeks, Halley's comet grew into the shape of a colossal shuttlecock its feathers of light flying behind. Now the trading cloud of light had spread out and arched, curving across the ceding of the sky. That mysterious Stardust of the comet was transparent enough that the constellations beyond could be glimpsed, and this seemed the most magical thing yet, that you could read the other stars through it.

  Our bunch stopped for a last look before filing into the schoolhouse. The whole lot of us had come in style in George and Rae's big buckboard—Rose and Rae in their finery, three boys scrubbed and polished for the second time in a row, Father and George stuffed into suits generally brought out for marrying and burying. Clustered there with our heads tipped back, we looked like Sunday visitors to a planetarium. We only lacked Aunt Eunice to recite something baleful to us about stargazing.

  The night's skeptic among us, Father gawked as thoroughly as any. At his elbow, Rose teased: "Tell me I didn't hear you wishing for rain tonight."

  "We always need rain, Rose." I knew that what Father wanted was a deluge that would have scared off Harry Taggart from chancing muddy roads. No such luck. The school inspector's Ford flivver could be seen prominently among the gathered wagons.

  "Farming every moment." Rose glanced down from the comet just long enough to bestow a look of mock disapproval on Father. "Rae, is George that bad?"

  "At least."

  "Now, now, Rae," George said complacently, his head at home in the stars.

  The mood of all of us but Father and me could have been bottled and sold as intoxicating spirits. On my mind was the moment I had uttered "the school ought to put on a comet something-or-other." In impetuosity begins responsibility, whatever the Latin for that was. However, Damon was in his element, intrigue. And Toby could barely contain himself since Damon and I relented, just before leaving home, and let him in on comet night; naturally we sealed the secret in him with a spitbath handshake, but even so it was a risk. "You have to pretend, remember, because you didn't get a chance to practice," we told him a dozen times, but with Toby you never knew. I crossed my fingers he wouldn't forget and blurt out what Morrie and the rest of the school were up to. I crossed my other set that students and teacher, all, wouldn't look like fools before comet night was over.

  Everyone piled in to the schoolroom. Homesteaders dressed to their eyeteeth for an event no one could put a name on, the throng crackled with curiosity. Some of the men had helped Morrie set up board benches, and people large and small filled those and all our desks. It was something of a shock to look around that room and see our schoolmates magnified in their parents—a family nose here, an unmistakable set of ears there. I had never noticed before, but the stocky mother and father of the Drobny pair of twins were practically replicas themselves. Trying to take it all in, I spotted Isidor and Gabriel and Inez waving for us to come and sit by them and their parents.

  I felt more than a few eyes on us as our group trooped along the aisle. Rose had not spared the satin, a shimmering Maytime green for tonight. Community amnesty only goes so far. I could tell, from who spoke to us and who didn't, that a pretty housekeeper who had spent nights in the school board president's house did not sit well with some.

  There was enough else to worry about tonight. Morrie was up at his desk fending with Taggart, like a man trying to pet a terrier who might bite. For his part, the school inspector looked as if he was thinking up a test for comet night.

  Father saw to it that we were settled near the back of the room, and then bolted for his school board place of honor in the front row. In two steps he was back. Squatting next to me, he leaned in and whispered across to Rose: "I've been meaning to say. The schoolhouse is spotless. You must have put in quite a Sunday night on it."

  Rose only smiled. She seemed to know something she wasn't telling.

  "May we begin?" the ever-so-familiar voice at the teacher's desk called out. "The comet is on time, which sets the kind of example a schoolteacher likes to see."

  Now the night was Morrie's. In knowing how to cut a figure, he and Rose really were a matched pair. Tonight he could have stood in for a mannequin in a high-class clothier's shop, his tweed suit the definition of dapper and his watch chain hanging resplendent across that vest of paisley. Elegantly he welcomed everyone, and singled out Father and then Joe Fletcher and then Walt Stinson and then our prestigious visitor from the Department of Public Instruction in Helena, and I fretted he was going to get carried away with preliminaries.

  I needn't have. With a suitable air of gravity, Morrie now placed the orrery on his desk where everyone could see it, gave the crank a spin so that all the planets orbited, just one time, and then quietly pointed to the center window that framed Halley's comet and its trail of light.

  "Whatever little else we know about the properties of existence, we map our days and nights by the fires in the heavens," he began in his best voice. "Threads of fight traveling to us across tremendous time show us that the stars hang there, beyond high. Sunlight grants us sustenance of fife as we know it, moonlight clothes us in our own particular fabrics of quest called dreams."

  The packed house was silent, hanging on every word as Morrie swept to the corners of the universe and back. He covered everything from Copernicus to the Mark Twain crack about exaggerated reports of demise, in this case that of the entire human race. When he knew he had gone on long enough, like an acrobat dismounting he returned to the orrery and ever so slowly spun it again, sending off the planets in their stately chase, as he concluded. "The astronomer Johannes Kepler gave us the grand concept of harmony of the spheres"—I had the impression Morrie was speaking directly to me, even though I knew better—"a planetary system of worlds orbiting in orderly agreement. Another harmonious component, discerned by a genius named Edmund Halley two hundred years ago, is manifest in the sky over us at this minute." He gestured to the window that held the cosmic light. "Just once in most of our lifetimes, this comet comes from nowhere and returns to nowhere—but its passage unfailingly strikes a chord somewhere deep in us." He paused. "Harmony can take surprising forms like that. Here beneath the guiding fires of heaven, in the life we pass through, we must imagine our way to our own episodes of stellar harmony. Your schoolchildren, I am proud to say, have done that very thing for this night."

  One after another around the crowded schoolroom we got to our feet, Damon in front of me and Toby in front of him, and Izzy and Gabe and Inie beside us, and down the other aisle Grover with his spectacles glinting and Verl and Vivian managing to be next to each other, and Rabrab looking as if she had swallowed the canary and Carnelia as if rose petals were being scattered for her, and little Josef Kratka scared but reporting for duty, and Milo and Carl and Martin doing their clodhopping best to look civilized, and Nick and Sam and Eva and Seraphina, Miles and Lily Lee, Marta and Peter and Sven and Ivo—every last one of us fifing to the front of the room and assembling in the natural stairsteps of grades one through eight.

  Morrie took his place in front of us, facing us. In back of him I could see Father hunched down in the front row with the other school board members and our school inspector. Nervous as a goose, he scanned the ranks of us. If we were not singers and we were not whistlers, what were we? I knew Father was hoping Morrie had turned us into, oh, maybe a hand-bell choir. There was not a bell in sight.

  Morrie wa
ited a minute for the fidgets to get out of us. He put his right hand up to his mouth. We all nodded our readiness.

  "Ladies and gentlemen," Morrie announced grandly, still facing us, hand at the ready, "I present to you the Marias Coulee School harmonica band."

  Three dozen harmonicas appeared out of pockets. Morrie blew a musical wheeze on his. Every one of us puffed into our own instrument until we more or less found the note. The drone reached an almost paralyzing level. Morrie cut us off with a chop of his nonplaying hand, gave us the beat one, two, three, and in a single combined gust thirty-six harmonicas launched into "O, Eastern Star." Actually, thirty-five, with Toby sometimes remembering to pretend he was playing his and sometimes holding it out to see if he had it right side up.

  The music was ragged around the edges, and to the ears out there in the audience it must have sounded something like being assaulted by an accordion as big as the schoolhouse. We didn't care. We were only trying to be harmonic, not philharmonic. Morrie had drilled us enough and we had practiced enough that we knew we could put the basics of the tune into the air, and beyond that, unanimous effort had to carry the night. Little kids and big, we blew into the homeliest instrument in the world, with the harps of our hearts behind it.

  The moment of danger came when the last aspiring note vibrated in the rafters. Morrie had warned us not to take it hard if the worst happened. Tapping our harmonicas dry, we tensely waited for the audience reaction.

  No one laughed. It only would have taken one. A horselaugh, or a giggle, and our harmony of harmonicas would have been relegated to a cute stunt. Instead, the parents of Marias Coulee pounded out applause for us and shouted out, "More! More!"

  "We were hoping for that word," Morrie said happily, bowing for us all. The next number was more of a miracle yet, at least to me. Milo was our virtuoso on it. The mouth organ was the one scale of life he probably would ever master, and right now he did a solo on "Follow the Drinking Gourd" that wafted sweetly off into the night in search of that spiritual constellation, the rest of us coming in as a hurricane of chorus.