The Whistling Season by Ivan Doig Page A

front of his pants in the universal need-to-go gesture. Brose Turley gave him a heavy-browed look, but jerked his head to dismiss his son toward outside. Eddie headed our way.
    "Let's get," I said, even though Damon and Toby needed no urging.
    We made it out of the tent all right, but there was no getting ourselves out of range of Eddie. He was onto us like a staghound on wounded deer. "You damned peepers!" He caught hold of my shoulder and spun me around as if I weighed nothing. "What're you doing here? Come to rub it in?" Looming in on me with his Sunday watered-down pompadour flopping wildly, he looked bigger than he had on horseback.
    "Simmer down," I tried. "Our father's here hauling freight; we just rode along."
    "Yeah, sure. Where's any freight in the preacher's tent?"
    "Lay off, can't you." I tried to sound as tough as I could. It didn't seem to faze Eddie. "We were just curious, is all." From the corner of my eye I could see Damon shifting his weight restlessly, one of his signs of temper. Before I could think of any way to defuse matters, I heard out of my feisty brother:
    "Why're you bothering us, anyway. Don't you have to scoot back in there and get yourself saved?"
    Eddie took a long step toward Damon.
    "Eddie," Toby asked suddenly, short of breath just from thinking about it, "they gonna put you under the water?"
    "Put me where?"
    Damon undertook to set Toby straight. "These aren't baptizers—"
    "Baptists," I said.
    "—these are the ones who throw fits. What about it, Eddie? Thrown any good conniptions? Had any good cases of the jerks?" As if there was any chance his target didn't take his meaning, Damon crossed his eyes, groaned in a reverential way, and went into an open-mouthed spasm of shaking all over.
    Red-faced, Eddie watched Damon's antics, looking as if he would go to pieces any moment. When he did, it was not the way I expected.
    "My old man makes me," he said helplessly, dropping his hands. "Might help get the devil out of me, he says."
    Damon quit jerking. Toby looked Eddie over sympathetically for any signs the devil was on his way out. My own expression, and I should have known better, must have told Eddie I felt sorry for him.
    Our pity or whatever it was fired him up again. His voice went high as he threatened, "If you squirts tell anybody at school I'll—"
    "You'll what?" Damon was on the prod again. "You can't touch Paul, remember?" He balled up one fist, and then the other. I saw him eyeing Eddie's chin speculatively. Even I had managed to land one there at least once, hadn't I? "And maybe you can whip me"—Damon's common sense and courage were arguing out loud with one another—"but you'll know you've been in a scrap."
    I stepped in. "Eddie, we won't tell. It's none of our business."
    "How'm I supposed to believe that," he scoffed.
    Toby turned the moment. Spitting in his small hand, he then thrust it out toward Eddie's man-size paw.
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    "Work off some of that energy in the haymow, you two." Father was unhitching the horses while Damon and I, who could just as well have been helping him, were busy roughhousing. Toby already was in a footrace to the house with Houdini. It was a wonder the barn rafters were not shaking from the high spirits the two of us were giving off. All the way home from the Big Ditch, behind the backs of the earnest grownups on the dray seat, we'd traded Chessy cat smiles at the thought of it: we had something on Eddie Turley. It didn't even matter that we could never tell anybody. We knew. There was this about it, too: as much as anything, our secret mightily added to the Milliron family repertoire, junior division. From then until the end of time, all Damon would need to do to set Toby and me and himself to laughing would be to cross his eyes and give a meaningful twitch.
    Right now my brother the cutup halted in mid-tussle with me and cocked an ear in Father's direction as though he had gone hard of hearing. "Hey? Oh, hay." Somehow I found that