When I visit the back corners of my life again after
so long a time, littlest things jump out first. The oilcloth, tiny
blue windmills on white squares, worn to colorless smears at our
four places at the kitchen table. Our father’s pungent coffee, so
strong it was almost ambulatory, which he gulped down from
suppertime until bedtime and then slept serenely as a sphinx.
The pesky wind, the one element we could count on at Marias
Coulee, whistling into some weather-cracked cranny of this
house as if invited in.
That night we were at our accustomed spots around the
table, Toby coloring a battle between pirate ships as fast as his
hand could go while I was at my schoolbook, and Damon, who
should have been at his, absorbed in a secretive game of his own
devising called domino solitaire. At the head of the table, the
presiding sound was the occasional turning of a newspaper page.
One has to imagine our father reading with his finger, down the
column of rarely helpful want ads in the Westwater Gazette that
had come in our week’s gunnysack of mail and provisions, in
his customary search for a colossal but underpriced team of
workhorses, and that inquisitive finger now stubbing to a stop
at one particular heading. To this day I can hear the signal of
amusement that line of type drew out of him. Father had a
short, sniffing way of laughing, as if anything funny had to
prove it to his nose first.
I glanced up from my geography lesson to discover the
newspaper making its way in my direction. Father’s thumb was
crimped down onto the heading of the ad like the holder of a
divining rod striking water. “Paul, better see this. Read it to the
multitude.”
I did so, Damon and Toby halting what they were at to try
to take in those five simple yet confounding words:
Can’t Cook But Doesn’t Bite.
Meal-making was not a joking matter in our household. Father,
though, continued to look pleased as could be and nodded
for me to keep reading aloud.
Housekeeping position sought by widow.
Sound morals, exceptional disposition. No
culinary skills, but A-1 in all other household
tasks. Salary negotiable, but must include
railroad fare to Montana locality; first
year of peerless care for your home thereby
guaranteed. Respond to Boxholder, Box 19,
Lowry Hill Postal Station, Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Minneapolis was a thousand miles to the east, out of immediate
reach even of the circumference of enthusiasm we could
see growing in our father. But his response wasted no time in
trying itself out on the three of us. “Boys? Boys, what would you
think of our getting a housekeeper?”
“Would she do the milking?” asked Damon, ever the cagey
one.
That slowed up Father only for a moment. Delineation of
house chores and barn chores that might be construed as a logical
extension of our domestic upkeep was exactly the sort of
issue he liked to take on. “Astutely put, Damon. I see no reason
why we can’t stipulate that churning the butter begins at the
point of the cow.”
Already keyed up, Toby wanted to know, “Where she gonna
sleep?”
Father was all too ready for this one. “George and Rae have
their spare room going to waste now that the teacher doesn’t
have to board with them.” His enthusiasm really was expanding
in a hurry. Now our relatives, on the homestead next to ours,
were in the market for a lodger, a lack as unbeknownst to them
as our need for a housekeeper had been to us two minutes ago.
“Lowry Hill.” Father had turned back to the boldface little
advertisement as if already in conversation with it. “If I’m not
mistaken, that’s the cream of Minneapolis.”
I hated to point out the obvious, but that chore seemed to
go with being the oldest son of Oliver Milliron.
“Father, we’re pretty much used to the house muss by now.
It’s the cooking part you say you wouldn’t wish on your worst
enemy.”
He knew-we all knew-I had him there.
Damon’s head swiveled, and then Toby’s, to see how he
could possibly deal with this. For miles around, our household
was regarded with something like a low fever of consternation
by every woman worthy of her apron. As homestead life went,
we were relatively prosperous and “bad off,” as it was termed, at
the same time. Prosperity, such as it was, consisted of payments
coming in from the sale of Father’s drayage business back in
Manitowoc, Wisconsin. The “bad off” proportion of our situation
was the year-old grave marker in the Marias Coulee cemetery.
Its inscription, chiseled into all our hearts as well as the
stone, read Florence Milliron, Beloved Wife and Mother (1874-1908).
As much as each of the four of us missed her at other
times, mealtimes were a kind of tribal low point where we contemplated
whatever Father had managed to fight onto the table
this time. “‘Tovers, everyone’s old favorite!” he was apt to announce
desperately as he set before us leftover hash on its way
to becoming leftover stew.
Now he resorted to a lengthy slurp of his infamous coffee
and came up with a response to me, if not exactly a reply:
“These want ads, you know, Paul-there’s always some give
to them. It only takes a little bargaining. If I were a wagering
man, I’d lay money Mrs. Minneapolis there isn’t as shy around
a cookstove as she makes herself out to be.”
“But-” My index finger pinned down the five tablet-bold
words of the heading.
“The woman was in a marriage,” Father patiently overrode
the evidence of the newsprint, “so she had to have functioned
in a kitchen.”
With thirteen-year-old sagacity, I pointed out: “Unless her
husband starved out.”
“Hooey. Every woman can cook. Paul, get out your good
pen and paper.”
* * *
This jilted old house and all that it holds, even
empty. If I have learned anything in a lifetime spent overseeing
schools, it is that childhood is the one story that stands by itself
in every soul. As surely as a compass needle knows north, that is
what draws me to these remindful rooms as if the answer I need
by the end of this day is written in the dust that carpets them.
The wrinkled calendar on the parlor wall stops me in my
tracks. It of course has not changed since my last time here.
Nineteen fifty-two. Five years, so quickly passed, since the
Marias Coulee school board begged the vacant old place from
me for a month while they repaired the roof of their teacherage
and I had to come out from the department in Helena to go
over matters with them. What I am startled to see is that the
leaf showing on the calendar-October-somehow stays right
across all the years: that 1909 evening of Paul, get out your good
pen and paper, the lonely teacher’s tacking up of something to
relieve these bare wails so long after that, and my visit now
under such a changed sky of history.
The slyness of calendars should not surprise me, I suppose.
Passing the newly painted one-room school, our school, this
morning as I drove out in my state government car, all at once
I was again at that juncture of time when Damon and Toby and
I, each in our turn, first began to be aware that we were not
quite of our own making and yet did not seem to be simply rewarmed
‘tovers of our elders, either. How could I, who back
there at barely thirteen realized that I must struggle awake every
morning of my life before anyone else in the house to wrest myself
from the grip of my tenacious dreams, be the offspring of
a man who slept solidly as a railroad tie? And Damon, fists-up
Damon, how could he derive from our peaceable mother?
Ready or not, we were being introduced to ourselves, sometimes
in a fashion as hard to follow as our father’s reading finger. Almost
any day in the way stations of childhood we passed back
and forth between, prairie homestead and country school, was
apt to turn into a fresh puzzle piece of life. Something I find
true even yet.
It is Toby, though, large-eyed prairie child that he was,
whom I sensed most as I slowed there at the small old school
with its common room and the bank of windows away from its
weather side. Damon or I perhaps can be imagined taking our
knocks from fate and putting ourselves back into approximately
what we seemed shaped to be, if we had started off on some
other ground of life than that of Marias Coulee. But Toby was
breath and bone of this place, and later today when I must go
into Great Falls to give the county superintendents, rural teachers,
and school boards of Montana’s fifty-six counties my edict,
I know it will be their Tobys, their schoolchildren produced of
this soil and the mad valors of homesteaders such as Oliver
Milliron, that they will plead for.
Chapter Two
The news of our housekeeper-to-be galloped to school
with us that next morning, or rather, charged ahead of Damon
and me in the form of Toby excitedly whacking his heels against
the sides of his put-upon little mare, Queenie.
“I bet she’ll have false teeth, old Mrs. Minneapolis will,”
Damon announced as we rode. “Bet you a black arrowhead she
does.” Before I could say anything he spat in his right hand,
thrust it toward me, and invoked “Spitbath shake,” the most
binding kind there was.
I was not ready to stake anything on this housekeeper matter.
“You know Father doesn’t like for us to bet.”
Damon just grinned.
“Let’s get a move on,” I told him, “before Toby laps us.”
As soon as we topped the long gumbo hill at our end of the
coulee, the other horseback contingents of schoolchildren loped
or lolled into view from their customary directions, each family
cluster as identifiable to us as ourselves in a looking-glass. Toby
by racing ahead had caught up to a dilemma. Should he go tearing
off to as many troupes of schoolcomers as he could reach, or
make straight for the schoolhouse and crow our news to the
whole school at once?
He settled for the Pronovosts, the newcomers who joined us
every morning at the section-line gate.
“Izzy! Gabe! Everybody!” That general salutation was to
Inez, riding double behind Isidor. She was in Toby’s grade and
sweet on him, an entangling alliance he did not quite know
what to do with. “Guess what?”
Whatever capacity for conjecture existed in the three minimally
washed faces turned our way, it surely did not stretch to
the notion of domestic help. The Pronovosts were project
people, although the distinction between those and drylanders
such as us was shrinking fast. Father already was spending less
time on farming and more on hauling wares from the Westwater
railhead to the irrigation project camp nearest us, the one
called the Big Ditch; the father of the Pronovosts drove workhorses
on the gigantic diversion canal under construction there,
that breed of old-time earth-moving teamster called a dirt skinner.
Not just by coincidence, the Pronovost kids were skinny as
greyhounds-a family their size living in a construction camp
tent was never going to be overfed.
After hearing out Toby’s feverish recitation, Isidor, who did
most of the talking for the three of them, granted: “Pretty daggone
good, it sounds like.” I noticed he gave his younger brother,
Gabriel, a strong look, the button-your-lip kind I recognized because
I had given Damon enough of them. But from where she
was perched behind Isidor’s saddle, small Inez piped up:
“Is she gonna be your new ma?”
Instantly Damon reddened, and Toby, mouth open, for once
failed to find anything to say.
I spoke up. “Housekeepers are all as old as the hills, aren’t
they, Damon.”
The bunch of us clucked our horses along faster. To Toby’s
dismay, Miss Trent already was banging on the iron triangle that
served as a bell by the time we got the horses picketed to graze
out back of the school. Miss Trent was death on whisperers, so
his news needed to stay sealed tight in him until morning recess.
Then, though, he burst into the schoolyard in full voice.
“-all the way from Minnieapples!” he concluded on a high
note to a ready audience of the Stoyanov brothers and the two
sets of Drobny twins and gangly Verl Fletcher and his shy sister
Lily Lee. At the edge of his following, Inez Pronovost listened
to it all again breathlessly.
“She gonna make your beds?”
“Who’s in charge of spankings, then-your pa or her?”
“Will she bring one of those featherdust things along with,
you think?”
As the questions flew, Toby fended as best he could, all the
while trying to gravitate toward the rival contingent at the other
end of the schoolground, consisting of the Johannsons and the
Myrdals and Eddie Turley, and gather them into his oration
about the wonderful imminence of our housekeeper. Worried, I
tried to keep an eye on the factions while Grover Stinson and
I played catch with Grover’s ancient soft-as-a-sock baseball, as
the pair of us evidently were going to do throughout every recess
until our throwing arms dropped off. Damon was busy taking
on Isidor and Gabriel at horseshoe pitching. The clangs as
he hit ringers meant he was on a streak hardly anything could
interrupt. The littler kids chugged around amid the rest of us
in their own games of tag and such. At the moment, peace
reigned. All it would take for the schoolyard to erupt, though,
would be for Toby to draw a few of the bunch trailing him with
intrigued questions into range of the other group. For it was the
hallmark of a Marias Coulee recess that the Slavs and the
Swedes never got along together, and Eddie Turley didn’t get
along with anybody.
I will say for Miss Trent, whenever Milo Stoyanov and
Martin Myrdal or the Johannson brothers and the Drobny male
twins or some other combination blew up and went at each
other, she would wade in and sort them out but good. However,
plenty of fisticuffs and taunts and general incitement could take
place by the time she ever managed to reach the scene, and
those of us who a minute before were neutrality personified
might abruptly find ourselves on one side or the other, right in
it. Has it ever been any different, from Eton on down? Over the
years in that sanguinary schoolyard I’d traded bloody noses with
both Milo and Martin, and Damon naturally had more than his
share of tussles with each. But ever since we had become motherless,
that had all changed. Some invisible spell of sympathy or
charity or at least lenience had been dropped over us, granting
us something like noncombatant status in the grudge fights.
Neither Damon nor I was particularly comfortable with this unsought
absolution-it had a whiff of pity-the-poor-orphans to
it-and Toby was too young to grasp it, but the schoolyard
community’s unspoken agreement to spare us in the nationality
brawls did have its advantages.
Here was where my worry came in. I somehow sensed that
Toby’s innocent bragging about our acquisition of a housekeeper
might poke a hole in the spell and render us fit for combat again
before we quite knew it.
Tobe’s always considerable luck was holding, though, as I
watched him scoot free from his first audience, cross the schoolyard
at a high run, and start in successfully on the taller forest
of the Scandinavian boys and overgrown Eddie.
Until Carnelia Craig emerged from the girls’ outhouse.
Carnelia always spent a good deal of recess time enthroned
in there, probably to spare herself from the childish hurlyburly
of the schoolyard. By a fluke of fate, with nearly two years of
Marias Coulee classroom yet to be endured, she already was the
oldest girl in school, and it showed. The front of her dress was
growing distinct points, and her attitude was already fully
formed: life had unfairly deposited Carnelia Craig among unruly
peasants such as us instead of putting her in charge of, say,
Russia. Admittedly, her family was of a different cut than any
of the rest of ours because her father was employed by the state
of Montana. He was the county agent, working out of the
nearby Marias River agricultural experiment station, and her
mother had taught homemaker courses before Carnelia deigned
to be born. So, the Craigs were up there a bit on such social
scale as we had. And in a strange way, I frequently felt I comprehended
more of Carnelia’s lofty approach to life, jaded as it
was, than I did of my father’s latest castles in the air. The reason
for that was all too simple. She and I were oldest enemies.
Even yet I can’t fully account for the depth of passion, of the
worst sort, between us. After all, with more than a dozen years
apiece in this world, together we amounted to a responsible age,
or should have. But Carnelia and I were the entire seventh grade
of the Marias Coulee school, as we had been the entire first, second,
third, fourth, fifth, and sixth, and there was not a minute
of any of it when the pair of us did not resent sitting stuck together
there like a two-headed calf until that farthest day when
we would graduate from the eighth grade. Until then there
would be battle between us, and it was just a matter of choosing
new ground for it from time to time.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from The Whistling Season
by IVAN DOIG
Copyright © 2006 by Ivan Doig.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
HARCOURT, INC.
Copyright © 2006
Ivan Doig
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-15-101237-7
