55 pages • 1 hour read
Ivan DoigThe Whistling Season
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2006A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Content Warning: This section of the guide references the source text’s description of animal cruelty.
While driving past Marais Coulee, where he grew up, Paul Milliron recalls the evening in the fall of 1909—48 years earlier—when his father, Oliver, discovered an advertisement in the Westwater Gazette from a widow seeking housekeeping work in Montana. Although the advertisement is clear about its subject’s inability to cook, Oliver decides to respond, assuming that this potential housekeeper cannot possibly mean what she says. The proposal surprises his sons, though they recognize the domestic difficulties they have experienced since their mother’s death.
At the end of the chapter, Paul reflects broadly on the defining moments of his and his brothers’ childhoods. He muses on the task that waits for him in Great Falls—communicating to representatives of rural areas that their small schools must close—and reflects on what will be lost as a result.
Chapter 2 Summary
Paul and his brothers ride their horses to school the next morning. They realize all the other students will hear and comment on their attempt to hire a housekeeper. Paul describes the responses of the various groups of young people among the 36 students in eight grades who shared the same classroom.
When Paul wakes up on Sunday morning, his brother Damon, who shares his bed, tells him he has been restless. Bad dreams are a frequent occurrence for Paul, but he believes they are more complicated than simple nightmares. As on other Sundays, the Millirons visit George and Rae Schricker for lunch: the one meal of the week they can count on, as their widowed father is a terrible cook. While the brothers enjoy the food Rae provides, they must endure Aunt Eunice, George’s mother. She criticizes Paul and Damon, though she adores Toby. Aunt Eunice warns Paul that heavy burdens lie ahead in his life and cautions Oliver against hiring a housekeeper. She concludes her pronouncements, as always, by predicting her imminent death.
The following Friday, Rose Llewellyn’s letter arrives from Minneapolis. She is interested in being the Millirons’ housekeeper if Oliver can increase the salary and give her an advance to buy her train ticket. Oliver accepts these terms.
Paul remembers these events while standing on his father’s land. The recent launch of Sputnik has caused the lay members of his department to believe small schools must consolidate to provide the sort of education needed to compete with the Russians.
Chapter 3 Summary
The Millirons meet Rose at the Westwater train station. She is well-dressed, pretty, and very petite. A handsome well-dressed young man helps her off the train. Rose walks up to Oliver, shakes his hand, and introduces herself to the boys. Quickly, Rose goes back to the young man and brings him to Oliver. She introduces him as Morris Morgan her brother. She asks if Oliver can help her redeem Morrie’s hat which he used as surety for his train ticket. As they ride to Marias Coulee, they discuss what Morrie will do. He wants to remain in the area if he can find work.
Rose surprises the Millirons the next morning by arriving early and touring the house, wordlessly evaluating the domestic situation. The Millirons are anxious to ask if she can cook even though she has said she cannot and avoids all their references to cooking. She agrees to milk cows and gather eggs. Paul shows her how to gather water from the pump outside so that she can begin washing clothes.
At school, Rose is the topic of conversation among the students. Paul punches Eddie Turley in the jaw. An eighth grader who has flunked twice, Eddie is a bully and the largest boy in the school. Damon separates his brother and negotiates with Eddie to have a race rather than a fistfight. The race will be on horseback riding “wrong in to,” or backward (49). Damon decrees the race will take place the following Friday after school. Paul commits Toby to secrecy and feels surprised when all the other children keep the race a secret as well.
Rose, striving to understand what is off limits to her, asks what she can do in Oliver’s room. She learns that Florence, his wife, died the previous year. Rose says her husband died only a few months earlier.
Chapter 4 Summary
On Friday, Rose shows up at the house with Morrie, whom she has enlisted to clean the chicken house. Morrie announces that the physical labor he has done has set him on a new path. Oliver tries to interest Morrie in seeking leather work in Westwater, though Morrie says he is not interested in returning to that profession. He mentions that he is a graduate of the University of Chicago.
At school, the children chatter about the race. When confronted about why he is whispering, Toby tells Miss Trent, the teacher, that a graduate from the University of Chicago is cleaning their chicken house. At the appointed hour all the students arrive at the cut, a geographical landmark providing an ideal out-and-back race course. It is clear to Paul and Damon that Eddie has not practiced riding backward. When the race starts, Eddie cannot guide his horse, causing it to wave back and forth across the track and continue running straight past the turnaround until it dumps him off, leaving Paul the clear winner.
That night, Paul dreams that all the students come to his desk with sweet pastries. He still thinks about this as Rose arrives and announces her recognition that she is precisely where she should be. Overhearing that Oliver is going to the Big Ditch, the massive irrigation earthwork near Westwater, Rose asks if she and Morrie can ride along.
Chapter 5 Summary
Rose and Morrie are astonished by the huge steam shovel at the Big Ditch. Morrie and Oliver debate the virtues of irrigation and dry land farming. Oliver lets his three boys visit their school friends, making them promise they will return by noon. When they discover their friends are going to a relative’s wedding, the three brothers decide instead to go to a tent revival conducted by the traveling evangelist Brother Jubal. Inside the tent, Toby spots Eddie and his father in the congregation. When the boys leave, Eddie confronts them outside. He makes them promise to keep his attendance a secret from the other students.
Back on the farm, Damon and Paul climb into the hayloft to pitch hay into the manger below. Damon begins rhapsodizing about Paul’s recent altercations with Eddie, from the fistfight to the horse race. The boys fail to realize that their father can hear them. Sending Damon back to the house, Oliver makes Paul explain what happened. He scolds him and ends up giving him a spanking, which Paul experiences as a grave and perplexing injustice.
It comes to light the next morning that Morrie cut all of Aunt Eunice’s firewood into four-foot lengths, though her wood stove can only handle 16-inch pieces. Morrie must trim the three cords again. Oliver makes Paul assist him as part of his punishment. Morrie asks Paul what he did to earn such retribution and Paul explains it was because of the backward horse race.
That evening, Morrie comes to see Oliver, requesting a newspaper. He engages Oliver in a conversation in which he calls Paul a “contrary warrior,” comparing him to the indigenous Crow men who rode their horses backward into battle to prove their valor. After Morrie goes upstairs to look at Damon’s scrapbooks, Oliver says to Paul, “I don’t know how I could get along without you” (100), as he fights back tears.
Paul overhears the conversation between Morrie and Damon about Casper the Capper, a boxer who intentionally lost a fight and then died at the hands of angry gamblers. Damon expresses disbelief because the Capper was winning the fight until near the end.
Chapters 1-5 Analysis
The first chapters of The Whistling Season introduce Marais Coulee, Montana, as both the site of Paul Milliron’s vividly recalled childhood in a community of homesteaders, and as a rural area that by the mid-20th century is in danger of being left behind as the United States pursues modernization during the Cold War. Even the calendar in his family’s old home is several years out of date. The descriptions of the Marais Coulee of 1957—the present day of the frame narrative—are hazy and allusive compared to the detail with which Paul describes the year 1909-10, beginning with a single October night. While their father reads the newspaper, Paul reflects on his and his brothers’ activities:
That night we were at our accustomed spots around the table, Toby coloring a battle between pirate ships as fast as his hand could go while I was at my schoolbook, and Damon, who should have been at his, absorbed in a secretive game of his own devising called domino solitaire (1).
The details Doig includes—Toby does not simply color, he does so “as fast as his hand could go”; Damon is not daydreaming but engaged in a complicated private game—establishes his narrator as a keen observer and one who, despite his age at the time, is a reliable witness of the events to follow.
Within a few pages, the focal point moves beyond the Milliron family home to encompass the one-room schoolhouse that is one of the central symbols of the novel and the locus of the theme of Seizing All Opportunities for Education. The children of the homesteading community come into focus, as does the theme of The Power of Secrets in the Community. Regardless of their ethnic or family allegiances, the children conceal the plans for the horse race between Paul and Eddie, an act that binds them together when they might otherwise be at odds with each other. Indeed, the race is only revealed after the fact—not by an enemy of Paul’s, but by his brother, Damon, whose enthusiastic reminiscences are overheard by their father. The accidental revelation becomes a turning point for Paul. After being rebuked and physically punished, he “lay [in bed] unstrung at how the world had turned over from that one moment in the hayloft” (90). If a concealed secret has the power to bind people to one another, the telling of that secret has the power to unravel someone’s entire sense of reality.
Moreover, the early sections of The Whistling Season establish The Tension Between Destiny and Chance. Many of the characters discuss this theme directly. Soon after arriving in the rustic setting of Marias Coulee, Rose announces to Oliver Milliron that she has come to the place where she was meant to be. Yet Paul, who lost his mother just a year before Rose arrived, remains skeptical: how can fate appear as a benevolent force when it cuts short the lives of beloved, beautiful individuals? Paul’s resistance to the notion of destiny, at least in its positive sense, arises from the observation that people who believe in fate are those to whom good things happen. Morrie takes a more pragmatic view that destiny is a matter of momentum. Once things start going your way—Morrie says in Chapter 4—you should pursue all the positive possibilities, exactly as Rose does.
The first-person reflections of the adult Paul offer a middle ground between the two positions. Events that seemed random or unconnected in his youth become, with time, a cohesive series, lending themselves to a novelistic form. Because Paul narrates his childhood from an adult perspective, he imbues these scenes with the knowledge of their importance that was inaccessible to him at the time.
While this perspective may imply that Doig ultimately agrees with Rose’s conviction of the power and reality of destiny, the novel suggests instead that destiny may be best apprehended in hindsight and that an individual creates his destiny by piecing together the random events of his own story. In the first several chapters, Morrie comes closest to articulating this view: “I believe destiny is fueled by momentum, Oliver. Once launched upon a fresh turn in life’s path, a person ought not to slack off” (56). To be “launched” on a path suggests some outside intentional agency, but the injunction “not to slack off” belies Morrie’s belief that the intention comes from within himself. Essentially, one sees oneself as having been “launched” in a certain direction only after putting in the work to make a change.
This section also introduces Paul’s chronic issue with troubling and sometimes eerily prescient—dreams: “Naturally Damon,” Paul’s brother and bedmate, “figured that my excursions while asleep were nightmares,” Paul reflects. “It was nothing that simple” (13). From the perspective of adulthood, Paul can enumerate the specific ways his dreams cause him pain in ways that are more complex than terror. On the one hand, the dreams are a source of uncertainty: Paul knows they are coming and cannot prevent them; he knows that they will be troubling but doesn’t know in what way. On the other hand, once the dreams have occurred, Paul cannot forget them. While this situation is difficult for a sensitive 13-year-old, it does lend credibility to his retrospective narration.
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