The Whistling Season Read Free

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.
    As soon as I saw Carnelia halt, turn her head a bit to one side as if hearing something sublime the rest of us had missed, and then aim herself straight toward Toby, I knew the terrain of hostilities ahead. Even Carnelia's family did not have a housekeeper.
    I yelped "Last catch!" to Grover while throwing him the ball and raced over to head off Carnelia.
    Too late. By the time I got there she was practically atop Toby, her hands on her knees in the manner of Florence Nightingale bending over a poor fallen boy, and crooning her first insidious question:
    "Tobias, will she tuck you and Damon and Paul in at night?"
    "Huh uh!" Toby answered with the terrifying honesty of a second-grader. "She's gonna sleep at George and Rae's. I asked."
    "Oh, is she," Carnelia noted for posterity. "Not a live-in, then," she lamented, evidently for Toby's sake and Damon's and mine. I tried to break through the circle around Toby, but Eddie Turley chose that moment to get me in a casual headlock around the neck and I barely managed to croak out, "Pick on somebody your own size, Carnelia!" By now Damon had tumbled to what was impending, and he yelled out in fury, "Carnelia hag, leave him alone!" But he couldn't reach there from the horseshoe pit in time either.
    Carnelia was smart—worse, she was clever—and what she asked next sounded for all the world like a note of concern for the well-being of the Milliron household:
    "But then she'll have to get up ever so early to come over and cook your breakfast, won't she, Tobias?"
    "She can't cook," Toby confided sadly to what was now the entire listening schoolyard. Then he brightened. "But the newspaper says she doesn't bite."
    That did it. We slunk home after that school day with even the Pronovosts barely able to contain their smirks.
    ***
    "Y OU WERE NIGHT-HERDING AGAIN," DAMON MURMURED, AS IF I didn't know.
    By then it was Sunday, and my dream the night before had nothing to do—for a change—with the teasing circle of Hell that the schoolyard had been for him and Toby and me all week long, and everything to do with what lay in wait for us at Sunday dinner.
    "Bad?" I said back in the same low tone he had used. Just out of hearing behind us, Toby romped with our dog, Houdini, both of them hoping for an ill-destined jackrabbit to cross their path. "Worse than usual?"
    Damon considered while he reached for the next pebble of the right size. He was in one of his baseball phases at the time and had to throw rocks at fence posts the whole way along the section-line road to George and Rae's place. He wound up and fired, frowning when he missed the post. "Usual is bad enough, isn't it?"
    Naturally Damon figured that my excursions while asleep were nightmares. It was nothing that simple. I rapidly thought back over this particular nighttime spell and decided against describing it to him in precise detail. I had tried that before. "I keep telling, you, give me a poke when it bothers you that much."
    "Paul, I'm scared to. You're like somebody one of those mesmerers—"
    "Mesmerists."
    "—yeah, like somebody one of those has