The Whistling Season Read Free Page B

forth Father's much mulled-over wage offer, and all we had to show for it so far was red ears from the torrent of razzing. I longed for our
phantom correspondent, whoever she proved to be, to materialize as such a model of domestic efficiency that the rest of Marias Coulee would swoon in tribute; but at the same time I harbored doubts that I could not quite put words to. Besides, Father more than once had warned us not to get our hopes up too high, although plainly his were elbowing the moon.
    So, off we went to the lioness's den, two of us longing for this Sunday to be over and Toby impatient for it to start. No sooner had Rae let us in the kitchen door and slipped us an early bite apiece of the gingerbread she had just baked, than the sort of thing Damon and I dreaded was issued to us from the parlor.
    "Is that those boys?" came that voice, snappish as a whip. "Don't they have manners enough to say hello?"
    His face full of smile and gingerbread crumbs, Toby charged in, we two apprehensively trailing after. There Aunt Eunice sat, as if not having bothered to budge from the week before, folded into her spindleback rocking chair, the toes of her antique black shoes barely reaching the floor. George as usual was seated stiffly on the horsehair sofa at the other end of the room. As I look back on it, the Schricker family line contradicted the principle of inherited traits. You would have had to go to their back teeth to find any resemblance between George, his ever-hopeful broad countenance wreathed in companionable reddish beard, and the elderly purse-mouthed wrathy figure, half his size, whom he felt the need to address as "Mum." Sunday-clad in her Victorian lavender dress, crochet hook viciously at work on yet another doily to foist onto Rae—the parlor looked snowed on, so many of its surfaces were covered with this incessant lacework—Aunt Eunice was the obvious victor over any number of challenges of time. Thus far, the twentieth century had had no effect on her except to make her look more like a leftover daguerreotype.
    George beamed in relief at us, desperate for any diversion from making conversation with his mother, and we variously mumbled or blurted our greetings back. As Damon beat an immediate retreat to the Chinese checker board kept on the tea table by the window and I edged dutifully toward the far end of the sofa, George said from the corner of his mouth: "No word yet?" I shook my head. He sighed a little, which indicated to me that he. too had been receiving an earful on the subject of our housekeeper.
    Right now, though, Aunt Eunice was all sparkle. "Toby, come here by me," she coaxed as if calling a puppy, and next thing, our sunshine boy was groaningly hoisted onto what there was of her knees.
    Damon scowled but did not look up from where he was devising across-the-board jumps with his marbles, and I sat there trying to appear congenial. It was part of the Sunday ritual that where the other two of us drew dark mutters from Aunt Eunice about "young roughnecks" and "overgrown noiseboxes," she literally lapped up Toby. Out of her sleeve now came a lace-edged handkerchief, which she put to work on his gingerbread traces. "Poor thing, sent off from home looking like a mudpie."
    Toby squirmed adorably while she clucked over him, and I mentally told him to enjoy being doted on while he could. The minute he grew too big for Aunt Eunice's scanty lap, he would be consigned to rogue boyhood with Damon and me.
    "And school, dear?" she probed. "How are you getting on at school these days?"
    Bless him, Toby thought to look my way before answering, and I twitched my mouth in warning. With effort, he stuck to "I have perfect attendance, same like last year."
    With an
oof
Aunt Eunice discharged him from his bony
perch, meanwhile declaring, "What a pity it doesn't run in the family. That father of yours would be late for his own funeral."
    "Now, now, Mum," George protested weakly. Damon, thunder on his brow,