The Whistling Season Read Online Free PDF

been if Houdini had not chosen that moment to get up from his spot by the stove, shake himself vigorously, and plop back down in a settling cloud of dog hair and dust. Father took so long he might have been counting the motes, but eventually he straightened up in his chair, gave a little sigh, and sent the letter across the tabletop in my direction.
    "Paul, get out your pen. We have to draft a telegram of surrender."
    ***
    W HAT A TIRELESS INSTRUCTOR MEMORY IS. DON'T I WISH I could put it on my department's payroll. Its hours are unpredictable, however. Keeping an eye on the time today as I must, I see that the future—with whatever lasting recognition it will attach to October of 1957—is about to pay a visit. I have to make myself go out for a look.
    At least the day itself seems neutral, which does not happen often at Marias Coulee. I think back to the winters here and shiver, and to the dry summers when Father and George and the other homesteaders watched as cloud after cloud dragged across the Rockies and the tufts of rain would catch on the distant peaks and be of no help to their fields. But around me now, the sky could not be more guiltlessly empty. Even the wind has
nothing to say, for once. The only sound anywhere around is at the pothole pond where waterfowl, passing through with the seasons, sometimes alight. Whistler swans, my lifelong favorite, are the maestros, and geese next, but today it is a few dozen mallards that have migrated in and formed a fleet, with much quacking. Some kind of duck event and they have the prairie to themselves for it, except for me and whatever is passing over.
    I search the unmarked blue sky, even though I know the human eye isn't adequate anymore. It is up there more than a hundred miles, the newspapers say. The Russian orbiter, Sputnik, that emulates the moon—and that will have such a tidal pull on our education system. Now that the Soviet Union has sped past this country into space, science will be king, elected by panic. It has already started, in the editorials and legislative rumblings. Those rumblings soon will grow into growls. If I have an enemy in this world, it is the chairman of the appropriations committee. Car dealer from Billings that he is, he knows how many times I have outwitted him. This time, even though it is a borrowed sum for an I.Q. like his, substance of debate is on his side. There will be no mercy on aspects of education that can't be argued as miracle cures in catching up with the Russians in the launching of satellites, such as one-room schools at the thin edges of the counties of Montana. A thousand such schools fall under my jurisdiction.
    I have to catch my breath at this barbwire twist of my career. It is as if the person I thought was me—the Paul Milliron known to the world of education—has been eclipsed by this Russian kettle of gadgetry orbiting overhead. Yes, I was the youngest state superintendent of schools in the nation back when I was first elected—inevitably, "the boy wonder of the West" in the
Time
magazine article—and am now the longest-serving. Yes, I took the schools of Montana through the Depression without such wholesale closings. Yes, my depleted department fended tooth and nail during the Second World War when everything was rationed and teachers evaporated daily into the war effort, and again we never closed schools by swipe of the hand. But now 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 do not know where to turn. There is no help to be had from the governor's office; governors come and go, and the current one has a date with obscurity. No, I have been singled out—my office has been singled out—to deliver the word to the 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. To some extent I know how it