The Whistling Season

“My condition, as I have gingerly explored it, is best called simply amnesia: protraction of recall. Dreams slide over into my memory, in a way that I am helpless to regulate; As well as I can describe it, my dream experiences become something like frescoes on the countless walls of the brain. […] But I never forget a dream. They stay with me like annals of the Arabian nights, except that mine now go far beyond a thousand and one.”

Paul describes one aspect of a personal issue that plagues him throughout: the persistence of troubling dreams that he invariably, permanently remembers upon waking. His dreams involve the individuals in his life in fantastic ways, presenting him with insolvable dilemmas and people performing unpredictable actions. At the same time, this inability to forget dreams makes him an unusually credible narrator of his waking life as well.

“[N]ow it has fallen to me to pronounce the fate of an entire species of schooling, the small prairie arks of education such as the one that was the making of me. […] I have been singled out—my office has been singled out—to deliver the word to teachers and school boards of the one room schools all across the state that there is no place for them in the age of Sputnik.”

The adult Paul muses on the task that lies before him, using hyperbolic language to communicate the stakes of his endeavor. By comparing the time of his childhood to the “age of Sputnik,” he establishes the contrast between the early and mid-20th centuries and marks the rapid pace of progress.

“‘You can't get him within a mile of a wash tub.’

‘Didn't I see a pond?’ The pothole pond father called the Lake District was in the field between our place and Aunt Eunice’s. ‘Perhaps if a stick were tossed in it by the right person, Houdini would give himself a bath.’ The lilting way she said it, it sounded like a rare adventure. She gave me a look with a hint of conspiracy in it. ‘Toby might even volunteer for the chore, do you suppose?’

‘I'll get him on it after school,’ I conceded, although I never like being maneuvered.”

On her first day as the Millirons’ housekeeper, Rose takes charge of virtually every aspect of the home’s processes, with cooking as the sole exception. Bothered by unpleasant smells and filth, Rose determines that the family dog, Houdini, needs cleansing, though she never outright complains about him. Here, she enlists Paul to help her achieve a relatively simple goal. Though he knows she is manipulating him, he feels powerless to prevent it. Throughout, Rose successfully repeats this process, convincing the Milliron men to adhere to her intentions.

“[A]mong all the other exhalations of wonder that our housekeeper provided, Rose was a woman who whistled at her work. About like a ghost would. That is, the sound was just above silence. A least little tangle of air, the lightest music that could pass through the lips, yet with the lingering quality that was inescapable. […] More than once I saw Father stop what he was doing and cock an ear toward some corner of the house a melody was coming from, as if wondering whether the whistling really could be the housekeeping accompaniment on Lowry Hill in Minneapolis.”

Melodic whistling as a soft, pleasant musical background, much like a gentle fragrance, is one of Doig’s frequently used motifs. When Rose works, she whistles in barely audible notes, emitting a pervasive atmosphere of serenity through the house. At the same time, the whistling plants seeds of doubt about Rose’s identity. Oliver cannot help but wonder whether she whistled in her previous jobs.

“I looked up destiny in your big dictionary before going home yesterday, to make sure. ‘One’s lot in life.’ That seemed rather short shrift, so I tried fate, and that was better. […] ‘That in the nature of the universe by which things come to be as they are.’ And so. Call it either, but Morrie buckled down as he did to a nasty chore handed to him by a quirk of fate—well, me—surely is proof that one's destiny can be shouldered in an unceremonious new way that makes up for the old. Wouldn't you say?”

Rose returns to the themes of fate and destiny as she speaks to Oliver and Paul. The essence of her remarks is that forces beyond human intention took charge of her brother’s life, leaving him in a better place. Through her choice of words—“fate—well me”—Rose inadvertently refers to herself as fate. By turning to the dictionary as her authority, Rose aims to make her point on Oliver and Paul’s terms.

“‘The soil can act as its own reservoir? Why then do deserts exist, do you suppose?’

‘As far as I know, deserts are not plowed. […] There's considerable science to dry land farming, don't worry about that. […] What it comes down to is that we get perfectly respectable crops on so-called arid land.’

‘Interesting,’ Morrie conceded or maybe not, ‘that one implement such as the plow contained nature that way and history for that matter.’ […] [W]hen Morrie thought out loud like this, you could hear an idea taking flight, much the way the wing bones of the whistler swan can be heard sawing the air as it passes over you.”

Several literary comparisons are contained in this conversation between Morrie, the first speaker, and Oliver, who is a dry land farmer. The unspoken comparison Doig makes is between farming and education, with Oliver holding that a worthy result can come from dry farming (small school education) even as irrigation expands to meet the water needs of more sizeable farming operations (large school districts). Doig also compares Morrie’s fanciful pontifications to swans taking flight. Referring to whistler swans, the author draws in the subtle, transforming influence of Rose, the perpetual whistler, whose presence changes the Milliron home as Morrie’s presence changes the Marias Coulee school children.

“Even then I understood at some level that father had set himself to ignore whatever might be rumored about a wifeless man employing a single woman in his household. […] But Oliver Milliron, a pillar of Marias Coulee, nevertheless had to occasionally choose what not to hear, surely he did not seem to mind that for himself. But it evidently had not occurred to him the rest of us might have to face him and pleasant chin music about our housekeeper.”

Paul describes the impact upon his father of the news that Paul punched the older, larger, thuggish Eddie Turley for making a comment about the Millirons having a young, attractive, single housekeeper. As is characteristic of Oliver, he clearly feels an emotional impact. Paul, as Oliver notes, is his bookish son, the least likely to fight anyone, especially Eddie.

“Out beyond the play area, there were round rims of shadow on the patch of prairie where the horses we rode to school had eaten the grass down in circles around their picket stakes. Perhaps that pattern drew my eye to what I viewed every day of my school life but never until then truly registered: the trails in the grass that radiated in as many directions as there were homesteads with children, all converging to that schoolyard spot where I stood unnaturally alone.

Forever and a day could go by, and that feeling will never leave me. Of knowing, in that instant, the central power of that country school and all our lives.”

Most of Paul's classmates ride horses from their homes to the school each day. As Paul studies the ground where the horses graze during the school day for the first time, he sees a tangible demonstration of the reality of how the school brings together a disparate group of individuals and the whole community. As a person who loves education and schooling already, this recognition cements in Paul’s mind the great importance of public education.

“‘Did your father report that we met up with the entire other half of your class? The county agent’s daughter? Cornelia?’

‘Carnelia. Like in carbuncle. […] You watch. She'll marry a banker.’ Why I said that I have no idea. But it turned out to be true.’

Rose giggled. ‘Such powers of prediction. You have blindsight.’

‘I have what?’

‘It's a knack. Some people just know how a matter will turn out, while the rest of us are in the dark.’”

In this conversation between Rose and Paul, in which Paul correctly predicts that his classmate will one day marry a banker, Rose joyfully tells him that he has blindsight. She explains to him it is a form of intuition that allows him to predict things that will happen that others cannot foretell. Her description proves true in both storylines as Paul ultimately negotiates both with Rose and Morrie about what their futures will be within his family.

“Morrie had been addressing all of us, from big-eyed first-graders to narrow-eyed eighth, yet it was one of those tingling moments when the entire might of learning seemed to have descended into the one-room school specifically for my benefit. True, I'd have been happier if it had been less obtrusively. I felt I had been taken down a peg, maybe several. I still did not know why. But my experience with Morrie thus far was that any mental extravaganza he went to the trouble of staging was worth some reflection.”

This is Paul's deep reflection on Morrie's ability to teach. Having excused Paul from the school spelling bee—which he would have won—Morrie writes upon the blackboard, “ghoti,” and proves that it is a “synphonic”—similar sounding— pronunciation of the word “fish.” Though the lesson is for the whole class, Paul realizes that Morrie has told him not to become complacent or judgmental because language always possesses the ability to teach and surprise. In this, the author compares Morrie to language itself: always evolving and full of surprises.

“The Rembrandt light of memory, finicky and magical and faithful at the same time, as the cheaper tent of nostalgia never is. Much of the work of my life has been to sort instruction from illusion, and, in the endless picture gallery behind the eyes, I have learned to rely on a certain radiance of a detail to bring back the exactitude of a moment. Perhaps it might be the changeling green of a mallard's head in a slant of sun, as back there on Father's pothole Lake District.”

Doig uses this poetic description to open the tenth chapter of the narrative. His meaning is that nostalgic feelings for a period of time do not capture the essence of what occurred the way that clear memories do. He says that focusing on a particular detail of what happened at a specific time and place allows a clearer memory. Doig’s invocation of the painter Rembrandt, who used extreme contrasts of light and darkness in his paintings, evokes the idea that one may precisely summon memories from the past to remind and teach.

“Slight against the prairie around us, she nonetheless seemed where she ought to be, pegged into place in the forthright Marias Coulee dawn. I had to strain to pick out her words over the racket of the pump. ‘—and didn't we just think we had the world by the tail. High living. All the comforts. Money growing on bushes. But put such trifles up against real purpose in life and all you come out with is—’ She halted.

‘Perdition?’ I panted.

‘Paul, you are a mind reader. Blindsight. There is nothing like it.’”

During her first few months in Montana, Rose becomes a champion of the notion of destiny, several times voicing the idea that the judgment of the universe has a way of correcting the direction of the human soul. Here she expresses to Paul the notion that the wealth she previously enjoyed prevented her from recognizing those things in life that are most important. She passes over Paul’s double meaning, as he jokingly suggests that the heavy work he is doing for her is a form of divine punishment. Of course, Paul is also a mind reader in the sense that he stands in for the novelist, the creator of minds.

“‘Can't you see the position this puts me in? Here I am, a teacher with a pupil who is already chock full of what I'm supposed to be teaching him. Every minute of that, I'm holding you back from where an ability such as yours ought to be taking you. […] Paul, I've been around prodigies before and you are one. I see nothing to do but skip you past this grade and the next. You are ready for high school.’

‘You can't! I mean, please don't.’”

This argument occurs between Morrie, who wants to send Paul to high school straight out of the seventh grade, and Paul, who does not want to leave the school where he has benefited from such great learning. Symbolically, their debate anticipates the underlying conflict Paul must deal with as the state superintendent: should leaders take children away from an educational setting they love that benefits them and place them in a foreign setting that educators assume has greater educational opportunities?

“Father and I listened slack-jawed while everything raced out of her from there. Opportunity took the lead—‘Who would ever have thought such a chance would come up?’—and was overrun by optimism—‘Really, to think of land and a place of my own after everything was lost!’—and the final relay was achieved by that pair of old reliables, fate and destiny. ‘Oliver and Paul, I absolutely feel I am meant for this! Your letter in answer to my advertisement, the way Morrie and I have fit in to life here, poor Eunice passing away— […] I feel quite on top of things and able to take this step now that I have the house in trim. There, now. What do you say?’”

As typical when Rose works to convince others of something important to her, she spills forth her idea and supports it with a confident argument as if the necessity of her request is self-evident. Paul, as a logical person, picks up on the order of debate elements Rose includes in her reasoning. She concludes fate has stepped in to give her this opportunity, implying it would be a mistake for her to refuse to act on it. Her excitement about this possibility is more comprehensible when the reader learns that she was on the run for her life, came to Montana because of its remoteness, and never expected to have any property, security, or family.

“But before long, Eddie’s furtively fixed-up eyes became just one more trait in our mortal bin of them, along with Vivian’s lisp and Anton’s purple birthmark and Martha's nosebleeds, Rabrab’s slyness and Carnelia’s haughtiness and Milo’s goofiness, Toby's excitability and Damon’s crafty side and my odd accents of mind, Seraphina and Eva’s dark spirit, Lily Lee’s easily hurt feelings, on down through the list of things we learned to simply chalk off as part of one another in one-room life.”

Paul implies that Eddie’s reading glasses have a domesticating impact on him and make him a part of the school population in a way he had not been before. Paul's description of the student body, with each student having peculiarities, belies the underlying reality that Paul conceives of the students of Marias Coulee as an extended family rather than merely a diverse group of children. The concerted effort of the children to pass the state standardized tests followed by their performances during the Comet Night presentation, underscore a shared closeness across eight grade levels that Doig hints would not exist in a large, grade-separate school.

“The isthmus between Rose's eyebrows scrunched into a tiny wrinkle as she reported her perplexity. ‘The ground just sits there. But every time I ask your father how soon he will start plowing my field, he gets a funny look on his face. So, tell me—when does plowing occur?’

‘When you can't see the frost on the ground by the light of the first full moon after the equinox.’

‘Oh.’”

Rose expresses frustration several times when Oliver does not definitively say when he will plow and plant her farmland. Paul's response to her question here is unusual in that it contains a direct, complete answer, which indicates that Paul is parroting what he has heard from other farmers. This is homesteader’s lore in contradistinction to the scholarly insight Paul usually spouts. Historically, since the narrative notes they start plowing on a Sunday, the day in question, March 27, 1910, is Easter Sunday. The establishment of this annual first-planting date is not scientific but comes from The Old Farmer’s Almanac. In this case, George says it was the earliest planting he could remember.

“‘In dealing with the language you must have an organizing principle. Just remember, in translating always work outward from the word to find its best equivalent in English. You must appropriate another sense of the word if necessary—’

Oh, fun, I despaired to myself, now a word could have any number of meanings.”

Morrie, who speaks first here to Paul, criticizes his student for lackluster translations of Latin into English. Invariably, he challenges Paul with principles just beyond the degree of what Paul has attained, summoning him to deeper levels of understanding. In this case, Paul recognizes that language is fluid and one might apprehend a single word differently depending upon who hears it. That principle, which Paul finds so irritating at this moment, is one he uses in the final pages of the book to maneuver the state legislature into giving him the power to save all the small schools in Montana.

“It takes a ‘finding,’ they call it, by the state superintendent. But yes, in a worst case, he can take over a school and shut it down if he finds it's not up to the mark. What they do then is skim away the state supplementary appropriation for the school and put it to a dormitory in the nearest town instead—move the kids in there for schooling. They've resorted to that over east in the state, Ingomar and those places. Indian kids, they do it to them wholesale.”

Oliver describes the possibility that a poor performance by the Marias Coulee school children on standardized tests could result in the closure of the school. Oliver's reference to Indigenous American children taken from their homes and schooled in dormitories away from their families demonstrates a recognition that this happened in Montana in the 19th and 20th centuries as well as in a multitude of other states with Indigenous populations. As the Superintendent of Public Instruction, Paul recognizes he still possesses this authority. However, instead of using it to shut down schools, he uses it to protect them.

“Brose Turley—or for that matter, Father—would have had to pry my cold dead hands from my desk to withdraw me from a place of learning. […] [A]ny number of us in that classroom felt the same way, and even those among us who are not as keen on school knew that from a parent, this was not right. Yet this trespasser into our schoolhouse had the law on his side, something not even Morrie could remedy.

[…] At last he caught his breath and said in a low voice: ‘Everyone, never forget what you have seen here today.’”

Paul reflects on his thoughts when Eddie’s father takes him from the school on Eddie’s birthday, something the law allows him to do. Morrie, incapable of preventing Eddie’s father from removing him, demands that the students always remember what they saw that day. For the students at that moment, the lesson is that the privilege of their education could be taken away. For Paul, the long-lasting lesson is that the law does not always support, and can impede, the educational welfare of the student.

“‘Is that it, you're sure?’

‘Has to be. There's the water bearer, and there's the centaur,’ I pointed out constellations for her, ‘and see, that one is just as bright but doesn't fit with any of theirs.’ No, it was beyond doubt, this was a traveling star. As soon as our eyes had night sight, we could pick out the faint trailing smudge of light…

[…] ‘Oh, Paul, it's beautiful,’ Rose murmured, my heart dancing to her words. Then she said something odd, her tone wistful. ‘Morrie needs a comet now and then.’”

This is part of the conversation between Paul and Rose when he first sees Halley’s comet and summons her to look at it with him. Morrie prepared them for this unforgettable experience impacting everyone in the community. When Rose says that Morrie needs a comet, she is referring not only to the inspiration of Halley’s comet but also to Casper, her late husband, who was likewise brilliant and temporary. Later the author will compare Morrie to the comet as well.

“Suddenly the inspector's 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 the moment was daedelian, which takes its name from the maze maker in Greek myth and implies unpredictability of a particular intricate sort. Not terribly many years from them, in a daedelian turn of events, school inspector Harry Taggart would be answering to Paul Milliron, the state’s new Superintendent of Public Instruction.”

Doig uses irony in this passage as he has a man, school inspector Harry Taggart, who one day will be Paul's employee, describe Paul's intelligence and say that people should watch for his future achievements. This is a clear example of the author’s use of The Tension Between Destiny and Chance. Like Taggart, Paul ends up with the prerogative to close small schools. Ironically, his transformative experience compels him to keep those institutions open.

“‘I've tried like everything to not let it happen, but I've fallen for Rose. Maybe it took for her to be with us in the house all the time while Tobe was laid up. Maybe I'm just slow. But there's no getting around it anymore, I'm in love with her, hopeless as a—’ almost too late, he caught himself from saying schoolboy to the two of us—‘colt.’”

Oliver speaks to his two older sons, explaining how his feelings for Rose have developed into powerful affection. His emotional outburst, followed by laughter and tears at the grave of his late wife, is rare for Oliver. The irony of Paul’s comment, that his father almost compared himself to a schoolboy, is that his sons—who are instantly defensive when anyone derides her—adore Rose as well. Thus, his sons understand precisely how their father feels toward their potential stepmother.

“‘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.’ […]

‘Mr. Turley, the world is not ending, believe me,’ Maury panted out. […] ‘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.’”

Brose Turley, Eddie’s brutal father, speaks first in this passage, holding a knife to Morrie’s throat. Morrie had been alone in the classroom with Paul, teaching him Latin. A Pentecostal believer, Brose views Halley’s comet as being responsible for the winter-spring drought afflicting Montana and views Morrie as somehow summoning the comet. In this description of the brilliant, slowly disappearing comet, the author compares it to Morrie, who illuminates and challenges the community, only to disappear before the beginning of the next school year.