The Whistling Season (39 page)

"Paul, I am naturally concerned about this situation." The gravity in his voice forced me to struggle into a more upright position at my desk and face him straight on. "If word of this were to get back to Chicago—"

He sighed so heavily it catapulted me up even more. Good grief, had I underestimated him again? Could the man somehow read my mind?

"—my old mentors at the university would question my supposed proficiency in the classics." He critically held my homework
up to the light as if that might improve it, while I whooshed a breath of relief. "In my day, I was credited with quite an ability at translation," he continued. "Why then have I not been able to transmit that knack to my prize student? Here, watch."

Abandoning his chair, he whipped off his suit coat—it was almost summerlike in the schoolroom these late spring afternoons—and hung it on the picture hook that held the comet woodcut. Next he pulled his shirt cuffs back a fraction and adjusted his sleeve garters the same minute amount, his version of rolling up his sleeves for blackboard work. I had watched him do this so many times in our Latin sessions together. Never before did the thought accompany it,
Pretty fastidious for a fight fixer.

"Let us consider
Caesar omnia memoria tenebat?
Morrie called over his shoulder as he rapidly chalked the sentence on the board. "You have rendered it, 'Caesar held all things in memory,'" chalking that below in elephantine letters. "I grant you, that is grammatically correct. But how many times have I told you, you needn't be so literal if the meaning can be brought out better another way. Why not say," the chalk flew again and the words emerged white and compact, "'Caesar remembered everything.' It's stronger." He made a fist to show so as he turned to me. "It carries the point more forcefully, yet has a nice, easy ring to it. I am at a loss, Paul, as to why someone with your imagination wouldn't come up with that?"

"Maybe it's because I'm not really good at pseudonyms—I mean, synonyms."

Morrie never so much as blinked.

Shaking his head, he trudged to his desk and sat down in the sad company of my translation homework again. "Substitute words exist for a purpose," he said as if it were a main rule of life, "there are times they fit the context better." I couldn't argue with him on that. Ready-made words such as
impostor
and
fraud
wore out in a hurry in my fit of anger with him, and I had sat there most of the day mentally trying more elaborate ones on him
{prevaricator
and
mountebank
and
casanova
were a few) off the great spelling list of deceit. He was looking back at me in his usual tutorial fashion. "I want you to put that imagination of yours to work on Caesar tonight."

"I'll try," I said listlessly.

"You know, Paul, you seem a bit out of sorts today."

"Spring fever."

"In that case, I know just what to prescribe." Reaching for his edition of Caesar's adventures in Gaul, he pulled up short. He tipped his head to one side. "Is your father stopping by, for some reason?"

That sat me up straight as a rod. "Not that I know of."

"That's funny. I thought I heard—"

Smash!
Morrie hardly had started up out of his desk chair to check outside before window glass shattered and something flew into the room, plummeting into one of the rows of desks between us. A sage hen, the most blundering bird in the world, immediately popped to mind. But the frightening clatter of the thing across the floor said different. The rock spun to a stop against the far wall of the schoolroom.

I was gaping at the broken window, and Morrie was not much better off, when the door crashed open. Pink gums in a furious face, although no sound issued from Brose Turley as he surged into the schoolroom. He was as fast as he was big. He pounced on Morrie, the desk chair going over backward with a thud like something dead. Grappling Morrie up as if he weighed nothing, in an instant Turley had him pinned against the blackboard, a skinning knife an inch from his throat. It all happened before I could get halfway down the aisle toward the two of them, the crystal grains of glass crunching under my helpless feet.

"Stand still, teacher man." As an alternative to having his throat cut, Morrie stayed perfectly motionless. "Don't you get any ideas, boy," Turley spoke to me as if I was the merest kind of an afterthought. "Go put yourself against that wall."

I backed away toward the section of the wall where Morrie's suit coat was hung. If I could reach around to the brass knuckles that I hoped were in the pockets—

A headlock around my windpipe answered that. Eddie's voice nuzzled my ear.

"Daddy just needs to ask him something. Hold still and behave, and nothing much is gonna happen to you." Nothing much? What did that amount to when a knife was loose in the room? I tried to struggle, and Eddie simply squeezed the attempt out of me.

"All right, hoosier," Brose Turley spoke into Morrie's frozen face. "You listen to me now." The knife twitched to suggest what would happen if he didn't. "Why's the year off like it is? We come out of the mountains for fresh grub, and everything's changed," the words tumbled from him in his chomping way of speaking. "Nothing's right, for this time of year." Turley drew a ragged breath and licked his lips, the sentences an obvious ordeal for him. "Grass going brown already. Creeks are low, weather can't make up its mind to rain. The wolves ain't come down to the river bottom yet. I been here my whole life and I never seen that before." He leaned in harder and Morrie winced. I made a strangled protest and Turley's head snapped around for an instant. "Keep hold of that kid, can't you," he rasped to Eddie.

"I've got him," Eddie answered a little resentfully. Maybe it was my imagination, but the pressure of his arm around my neck seemed to have let up a bit since my gurgle.

Brose Turley hung his whiskery contorted face practically atop Morrie's clean-lipped one. "You answer me straight. There's
anybody knows, it ought to be you." He licked his lips again, and I realized it was from fear. He was breathing heavily through his opened mouth, the hard-used teeth atop and the bottom gum line showing like what was under a snake's fangs. I became even more afraid for Morrie. The knife threatened again at the very surface of his throat as Turley demanded to know:

"That comet do this? The world ending in fire?
Is it?
"

Hearing that, I just knew we were sunk. If Brose Turley was crazed with the notion of Judgment Day, the instrument of judgment was apt to be that skinning knife. Three times now I had seen this monster of a man invade this schoolhouse. Surely no one could expect to survive that. Eddie shared my sense of doom in that room, I could tell. He still had me in a clinch to the point of helplessness, but I could feel him trembling, the same as I was. Wide-eyed as could be, we both helplessly watched the white-faced figure rigid against the blackboard.

Pinned there stiff as a dried pelt, how Morrie managed it I will never know. He choked out, "Light is the desire of the universe."

I was thunderstruck. I prayed Morrie would not go on, fatally pedantic, and utter to an unlettered wolf hunter teetering on the brink of insanity, "Or as the Romans would have said,
Lux desiderium universitatis.
"

There was not a movement in the room and the only sound was Eddie's heavy breathing in my ear. At last Brose Turley blurted, "Meaning what?"

Morrie mustered mightily for a person whose toes were barely in contact with the floor. "You carry a lantern when you go into the darkness, don't you? The traveling bodies of the cosmos do the same. The impulse to illumination somehow is written into the heavenly order of things. The sun, stars, they all carry light, that seems to be their mission in being. Are you with me so far?"

"That comet ain't any of those," Turley said ominously.

"It is a celestial body nonetheless," Morrie literally risked his neck in contradicting his interrogator. "One that happens to follow a course we see roughly once in a lifetime."

"Why's it come now, then?" Turley raged. He hulked over Morrie, the knife always ready. "The country burning up along with it!" Bits of spittle flew as he shouted into Morrie's grimacing face. "None of this happened before you showed up. And you and this hoodoo kid, whatever you're up to with ungodly languages. Maybe it'd turn things around if I rid the world of the two of you." At that, Eddie's gripping arm tightened on me, although I couldn't tell if it was voluntary. "Toss what's left of you in the badlands when I get done," his wild-eyed father raved onward. "I know places there, people never would find you."

"Mr. Turley, the world is not ending, believe me," Morrie panted out. "The comet sends us fight, not fire. It's too far away for the earth to feel any heat whatsoever from it—you can see a lantern for miles but you have to be up next to it to catch any warmth, am I right?" He paused infinitesimally in the hope that would sink in, then plunged on. "This area is in a drought, true. The dry spell set in months before the comet showed up—Eddie can tell you, the school has measured the precipitation all winter and there's hardly been any. That is merely a matter of weather, not the heavens on fire." Morrie's voice still was a bit high, but steadying all the time. "The comet, you will see fade as it passes by the Earth. In a couple of weeks it will only look like the flare of a match in the sky. A night soon after that, it will vanish. And then you will never lay eyes on Halley's comet again."

Turley licked his lips, more slowly this time. He eyed Morrie dubiously. "How can you tell the way it's gonna behave?"

"Books as old as the Bible," the answer cascaded out of Morrie. "They tell of the comings and goings of this comet, regular
as clockwork. The ancient Greeks, the Romans, the chronicle of the Battle of Hastings, medieval monks—the record is long. The period between reported sightings is infallibly seventy-five years. That is how Sir Edmund Halley was able to deduce—"

"Shut your gab." Turley seemed to think over the idea of a regular messenger of light from the universe, not the easiest thing for a man constructed of instinct.

"Daddy?"

Eddie's voice startled us all. He sounded as if he was forcing the words through a trap door in his throat, but they came. "Could be the truth. He told us in school the thing in the sky won't come back practically forever. Showed us on the machine"—Eddie meant the orrery—"where it goes. It'd take a while." His mouth was so near to my ear, I could hear the depth of the gulp he took before saying the next. "No need bothering with the teacher and Milliron then, is there, Daddy? End of the world is one thing—dry weather's another." The last sentence quavered out of Eddie almost as if he were whispering it in schooltime. "We got no call to get rid of people just for that."

Nothing happened for some moments, the Turleys holding the two of us like about-to-be-pelted wolves in my worst dream.

"Maybe not."

No two words ever came more grudgingly. Probably Brose Turley did not loathe the schoolhouse pair of us any less, but he had to take a fresh run at it. He sent a lightning glance over his shoulder at his son and me, then back to the sleeve-gartered figure pressed against the blackboard. "Maybe these're just educated fools. Couldn't make anything happen if they tried." He twiddled the knife next to Morrie's Adam's apple one more time for good measure. "For sure it's going away?"

"If the comet does not, Mr. Turley, I will slash my own throat."

Turley gave a strange acknowledging growl. Over his shoulder he ordered, "Bring him over here."

Eddie frogmarched me over.

Brose Turley jerked his head toward the blackboard, and the next thing I knew I was standing plastered against it next to Morrie. Turley backed away from us a couple of steps. He glared from one to the other of us and underlined it with a kind of snort. Evidently by long habit, he wiped the knife on the thigh of his trousers before putting it away. "Wouldn't say anything about this, if I was you two."

Morrie straightened his tie, possibly to make sure his neck was still there. "Fear not, Paul and I know when discretion is the better part of valor," he said as if addressing a question of etiquette, and I wished he didn't talk that way. "
Silentium aureum,
silence is golden, shall be our creed in exchange for your permanent departure from these premises."

Brose Turley's hand moved back to where he had sheathed the knife, hovering there. He took a step toward us and I held my breath. Seconds dragged by as he stared at Morrie, baffled. Then he spun on a booted heel and headed out the door.

Backing toward that doorway on one slow foot after the other, Eddie gave us a last long look—was it beseeching or simply squinty?—and followed his father.

The schoolhouse felt suddenly bigger. A bit of a breeze whisked in through the broken window. It was going to take more than that, though, to revive me. I was so drained I could hardly shove away from the blackboard. I lurched over to the water bucket. Gulped a dipperful, then retched it right back into the slop pad.

Morrie pounded my back with the flat of his hand to help me through the gagging and coughing. I made it to my desk with his support. When I had told him enough times I was allright, he gave me one more pat on the back and went to his own desk, righted the chair, and collapsed into it for a minute. His fine clothes were disheveled and his hair was tousled. I watched him draw heaving breaths that seemed to come all the way from his shoe tops. Finally he squared himself up in his chair. In a scratchy voice he said, "I believe we will adjourn Latin for the day. We have a window to board up, don't we."

My own voice was none too steady, but I had to get the words out if it was the last thing I ever did.

"Morrie? You managed really well. He could have skinned us alive."

After a moment he gave his mustache some strokes, if it had been there. "I may need to have Rose iron my stomach out, but other than that—thank you, Paul. It was nothing."

"No? Maybe not for a fight manager."

His face went as immobile as when Brose Turley's knife was at his neck. Our eyes locked across the rows of desks. If his redoubtable watch had been out on his desk, a good many seconds would have ticked into the stillness. As things were, there was not a sound in the schoolroom until at last Morrie let out wearily: