Whipple's Castle

by Thomas Williams

  But there had to be some kind of accommodation with them. There had to be. And it was his responsibility to bring this about. Perhaps if he had an animal to keep him company…Or would they then kill it nightly, as they flayed and burned the little puppy? Each time he could not believe their cruelty; knowing in advance what they were going to do to the little dog, he could not believe it, and when they slyly took the friendly, wagging little animal by the loose skin of his back, made a quick slit and ripped down, the pain was bright and fresh each time. Suddenly to have no skin. No skin!

  David skinned his squirrels on a board with a big nail in it. He impaled a squirrel’s head on the nail, cut a slit around the back of the neck and pulled the gray lofted fur, the blue slick skin rolling inside out in the shape of a tube, right off the dark red muscle. He watched David do this with great wonder; it was so foreign to anything he expected of a person, a human, a brother. David might as well have been an armadillo, or an aardvark. But then, why did he expect everyone to be unforeign to him? He was the strange one, battered by and battering all their arrangements, from tables and chairs to flesh and bones. Before the tomcat, Tom, had died or strayed or whatever had happened to him last spring—before he had disappeared, Horace had seen him be cruel beyond belief to chipmunks. David said that it was totally natural, and it would do no good at all to chase Tom, who ran away perplexed that Horace should object to his preparing and eating his food. The chipmunk in the cat’s jaws didn’t struggle, but his black eyes blazed with life. He knew he was in a mouth. When the cat let him go he braced, and arched his skimpy little tail, and defied the cat, who licked his pink chops fiercely and approved. If the chipmunk turned to run, a claw flicked into his side and pulled him back into the sharp teeth again. And again. And finally, after an eternity of hope and despair and little punctures, ate on him. If it was a mouse he’d caught, he ate him head first, crunch crunch, tail and all. Then found the sun and slept a natural sleep.

  David was natural, of course. And Kate was natural, and Wood, and his father and mother. They were all natural. Even poor Peggy was natural. They all slid safely past the hard elbows and horrors of the world, slept deep and woke rested and dry. Even though his father’s leg hurt, he could lie down without terror. Where he was was his property, and he ruled. His father owned oceans of cool air that he could breathe freely out of the dark.

  He shivered in the cold oil of his sweat, and his thin bedclothes crept against his skin. Perhaps someone alive would come to wake him.

  “We will wake you,” sang their thin, gleeful voices. “We will wake you, Hoar-ass.” How they laughed; they made sure to use their immeasurable power. Now they moved, still pretending to be puppets, back into the dark closet. One was Zoster, who always watched to see if Horace forgot and left a foot or a hand or an ear uncovered, then crept up with an expression of high glee on his metal-colored, shiny face, and put his great hollow mouth over whatever part Horace had left exposed. The triangular teeth, like sawteeth, came down just so as not to touch the skin, and Horace could not then snatch his flesh out of that mouth. If it had him over his ear, he heard the click of swallowing and the damp creamy hiss of saliva. Around Zoster was always an aura, the cold earth of a cellar.

  “Hoar-ass, Hoar-ass,” they called. Some were little. The Herpes were nasty and tiny, nasty even to each other. They were the conductors and spectators of his nightmares. They brought him to that point in space, somewhere near the center of orbits, where the smooth roads ran radially from the point of responsibility, where the round tires ran down toward disaster. That dream was in color, and the roads were of smooth green and purple and red rubbery stuff, with fine black wires supporting them. The tires were pure white. And the disaster he was always about to cause would destroy the universe. The universe, all of it. “All because of Horace Sleeper Whipple, Horace Sleeper Whipple,” the Herpes chirped at him, like a flock of evil sparrows. “It’s all your fault, it’s all your fault, your responsibility, your responsibility!” They cried this over and over, as if he didn’t know it!

  The Town Hall bell rang, and he tried to count, but the bells followed one another raggedly, fading or coming on a vagary of the atmosphere harsh and clear. He counted eight or nine clangs, or maybe only seven. He could risk leaving his damp bed for a different discomfort among the people downstairs, where he would become entangled again in all their complications and judgments. A world full of elbows and eyes. But Wood would be down there, maybe, if he hadn’t already left for work. No, of course he would have left for work long ago, and Kate and David would be ready to go to school. A shiver of surprise and fear, and then he remembered that he hadn’t been awakened because he was not going to school today, but to the eye clinic in Northlee. So his mother had let him sleep longer among his monsters.

  Carefully he pulled his head around and uncovered his face to the chilly white air. His brown cold room, lighted down its length by the winter day, was empty, sinister and baldly innocent.

  Henrietta stood in front of the woodstove, the black iron baking of its inner heat. She tipped a lid and looked into the firebox-fluffy gray ash like feathers around the embering center—and added two thin split sticks of maple. Harvey, who was, if anything, merely irritated by the war, would defend this stove’s economy for patriotic reasons. She really didn’t mind too much, but did her part for the war effort with a strange sense of nostalgia. Most of the official directives on how to save and serve were no different from those she had learned as a child in Switches Corners. She saved grease and made lye soap, aged all store-bought toilet soap out of its wrappers to harden it so it would last longer, saved all trimmings of meat for stocks and gravies. Extra fat she saved in tin cans and sold to the butcher at the cash market. This fat was supposedly necessary for explosives, or maybe for greasing gun barrels, or something of that sort. In any case, she had never in her life thrown out perfectly good fat; most of these patriotic gestures were automatic.

  Harvey would have periods when he demanded petty little savings in things, but not from interest in the war effort. One week he would watch the light bulbs, and everyone who left a light on, even to cross the room, would be told to come back and turn it off. Then something else would be the most important. Wood wasn’t being economical with coal; he was using the fire door as an extra draft, or he wasn’t running a big enough fire bed, or he wasn’t keeping the ash pit clean enough. Or they were having meat too often. And then, for a week at a time, Harvey ignored economies, and demanded heat and light.

  Burning coal instead of oil did save money, but she wondered how they were going to manage next winter, when Wood and David (if she could arrange David’s living somewhere in Cascom, near Dexter-Benham) would both be gone. Horace could not be depended upon to take care of a coal fire. For one thing, he was afraid of the basement. She would do it, she supposed, but she sensed a hard little force of rebellion in her mind against such grimy duty. She might very well refuse; in fact, she predicted that she would refuse, and Harvey Whipple would have to think of some alternative. Period.

  Harvey’s alternative would be that David stay in Leah High School and take care of the furnace, but that was out. She was not a pushing, promoting, sacrificing mother, far from it, but David was loafing in Leah High School. He was bored, impatient, and tended more and more to leave the world and go into his private little hobbies and fantasies. Dexter-Benham seemed to be the solution, so she would find the way. If he lived in Cascom, the day-student fee would not be too much, and Harvey would simply have to put up with it.

  In the meantime she stood at the stove, saving vital war materials—in this case little bits of hand soap she had collected in a cup. Now she was melting these little chips down in a quart of water to make soap jelly for shampoo and for washing rayons and underthings. That would save Harvey Whipple twenty or thirty cents, anyway, and he could add that amount to the financial empire he was planning.

  They had enlarged the old kitchen garden into a Victory Garden, and that su
mmer and fall she and Peggy and Kate, with some help from David and Horace, had canned twenty-one quarts of green beans, twelve quarts of wax beans, thirteen quarts of Swiss chard, thirty-five quarts of tomatoes, twelve quarts of sour pickles, eight quarts of cucumber pickles, eight quarts of mustard relish, thirteen quarts of beets—ten sweet and three Harvard-style—fourteen quarts of carrots, five quarts of dandelion greens, ten quarts of raspberries and twenty-odd glasses of raspberry jelly, twenty-five quarts of apples and twenty-eight quarts of corn. And in cool storage in the cellar were cabbages, turnips and potatoes. Last March she had tapped all the maple trees around the house and grounds and boiled down five gallons of syrup. There were the figures, tacked to the bulletin board above the shelves for sugar and coffee ration coupons, bills and household notebooks. Harvey let her do all the household figuring, and he certainly had nothing to complain about. He knew she saved him a lot of money, and when his thrift tantrums came she always had in reserve a stern look that would calm him down considerably.

  She stirred the soap emulsion with a long, enameled spoon, and when all the pieces had melted she set the pan on the sideboard to cool. Horace ought to be up by now. He hated to go to bed and he hated to get up. No one could understand him. He wasn’t stupid; even Mr. Skelton said he wasn’t stupid. And he wasn’t unfeeling—he worshiped Wood. He was going to take Wood’s leaving very hard, and she had explained this to David and Kate before they’d left for school. Both had looked away, perplexed, possibly a little ashamed of their indifference. But what could they do about it?

  “We love Horace,” Kate said. “He’s our brother, after all. Don’t we, Davy?” And David, pursing his lips judiciously, nodded.

  “Oh, that’s easy to say!” she said angrily, and when Kate’s face fell she was sorry she’d said it. God knew, a girl Kate’s age had enough problems without having to be responsible for a crazy brother. Crazy? She squeezed the dishtowel in her hands. Was he mental? Of course she’d thought about that, even though any child’s eccentricities came on slowly over the years and tended to seem natural for him, and thus natural to his mother. But suddenly she really wondered if he were certifiable in any way. Stealing that money, not to have it but to punish those he stole it from, and throwing it away! And from men, really, not boys any longer. Gordon Ward was now a man, in the Army, and that was getting dangerous. The police had to speak to Wood about Horace, and thank God, Chief Tuttle was the DeMolay adviser and knew Wood so well. Sooner or later Horace would be too old to be protected as a child, and there wouldn’t be anyone around to protect him.

  She was afraid for him. This great house, in which they all lived like mice, not in its style, or with the money to impress its dark paneling and excessive spaces; it was no home to Horace. He was afraid of it. None of them really dominated its life, which seemed ancient, rich, made for De Oestrises. Of course Harvey’s family was related, but his had been the poorer branch of the family, and they had all migrated to the cities to work for other people. All except Harvey. The Whipples and De Oestrises on that side had all moved away, and seldom came to Leah. And the only rich De Oestris left was Sally. Harvey’s two brothers were in Boston and New York, and his sister lived in Pasadena, a continent away. But he had to live in this haunted castle and scheme like a miser while she worried about the plumbing freezing up, and saved scraps of hand soap, and Horace shivered with fear of the long hallways and the high ceilings occasionally hung with bats.

  Before the accident Harvey used to amuse himself with the bats. He’d stand on a table, and as they swooped by he’d swat them out of the air with a rolled newspaper. Their mouse bodies would hit the wall and drop like little black cloths to the floor. They had weird, nasty little faces. God, you’d look at their evil little faces and think about them for days. David used to shoot them off the moldings with his BB gun, and at least there weren’t too many left.

  There were mice too, of a lineage older than theirs, no doubt. Old Tom had kept them in check pretty well—at least he made them somewhat more cautious, so they hadn’t crossed the corner of your eye like dim motes as they fled from one comer to another. They would have to get another cat. She would feed the first stray that came along, hoping for a good mouser.

  She had been putting away the silverware, and now hung the dishtowel on its bar. The soap was cooling, but it wasn’t cool enough for a glass jar yet.

  Horace stood in the dining-room doorway. She tried to look at him slowly, unstartled. He had put on the clothes she had asked him to wear—a white shirt and his dark green gabardine pants—so she wouldn’t have to chide him about that and send him back to his room to change. His head drooped, and he looked very tired, stooped in the shoulders.

  “Are you hungry?” she asked.

  “Sort of,” he said.

  “Didn’t you sleep well?” When she put her hand on his forehead he submitted stolidly, his eyes downcast. His head was hard, wooden beneath her hand.

  “I guess so,” he said.

  She knew better than to ask him what was the matter; he would say he didn’t know. Once, just before Harvey’s automobile accident—it must have been just about that time—Horace had tried to explain a nightmare. He must have been nine or ten, and he came screaming into their bedroom, which was then upstairs, next to his. He wanted to sleep with them, but they had both refused this. He cried and screamed and carried on about “the wires,” and Harvey finally had to pry his fingers loose from the headboard of their bed. They had to insist that Horace was too big to sleep with them, and Harvey carried him back to his own bed. They let him keep his door open, and agreed to leave theirs open, but this wasn’t enough. He came back, this time stealthily, and crept in beside his father. Then they really had to insist. Harvey gave him a sharp spank on his bottom. “Dammit!” Harvey said. “You’ve got to sleep in your own bed!”

  “The wires!” Horace said. “They come down the wires!”

  “What comes down the wires?”

  “They do! And then they watch when the tires roll down. But the wires! The wires! They don’t go anyplace! It’s me, mine! I want to sleep in here with you!” He cried and whimpered, but they simply could not approve.

  “I’ll make you more scared of me than you are of the wires!” Harvey finally said, and spanked him hard until he was sullen in his fear, and submitted. In the morning his bed was wet, but it wasn’t urine. He’d curled up into a ball under the covers, and the dampness was his sweat. She’d felt terrible, but punished him with her disapproval. He was simply too old to sleep with them. She explained to him that children don’t sleep with their parents, thinking all the time how unfair it must seem to a child that his parents could sleep together, warm and safe all night, every night, while a child had to sleep all alone in an empty bed in an empty room. He had never asked to sleep with them again.

  “Do you want hot cereal or eggs?” she asked. “How about some nice scrambled eggs?”

  He grimaced. He had once said that eggs were dead chickens. Sometimes he would eat the white, but never the yolk.

  “Wheaties,” he said.

  “That’s all you ever have, Horace. Why don’t you try something else for a change?”

  He shrugged and looked down, sullenly. But he was not a sullen boy; she knew he didn’t want to be. When he cared too much he burst out with it, and his words were exactly his thoughts. He was the strongest-looking of her children, the most…what? Peasant-looking. The crudest-looking, anyway, of all her children, and it was strange that he should have to be the one who suffered most from things inside his head. She would have thought Kate or David more likely to suffer this way, but they didn’t seem to—at least not so that their troubles became known.

  As Horace ate his Wheaties at the kitchen table, she watched him surreptitiously, seeing him eat with no real appetite. He was tired. A tremendous weight of tiredness seemed to press his arms to the table, and he lowered his head to his spoon. Something pressed down upon his broad shoulders, making the strong body of h
er son listless and weak. She feared other things for him—the inevitable question of something physical—some tumor, or growth, or horrible thing in the brain. This thought was small, kept small, but it was the reason for going to the clinic today rather than to a mere optometrist in Leah. They were going to look very closely at more than his eyes.

  Last June, when he’d broken the bone in his arm, Dr. Winston had looked him over carefully and made him do certain little test things with one eye closed and then the other, then both closed, and then both open, and tapped him here and there with a little rubber hammer. He told her he doubted very much if Horace had anything of that sort wrong with him at all.

  “He’s such a big, strapping boy,” Dr. Winston said. “His restraint hasn’t caught up with his momentum.” That was Dr. Winston, though. Old Dr. Bumham could have told him that Horace had always had the same problems, even when he was a very little boy. She thought of the word “congenital.” There had been something peculiar about Horace at birth, and she had almost forgotten about it, then remembered it years later when his odd behavior became too remarkable to ignore. When she got home from the hospital with him, and had a chance to look him over carefully, she found a little raw scar on his coccyx, at the base of his spine. When she asked old Dr. Bumham what it was, he tried to put her off. He was a gruff, even impolite old man who hated like sin to lie. Finally he told her that Horace had been bom with a tail about two inches long. “Not prehensile,” he said. “It’s more common than you’d think—especially in this town!” And he laughed at her concern. “No, Henrietta, it’s fairly common. A slight case of atavism—look that up and it’ll just worry you. Never mind. Anyway, the doctor just snips it off and forgets it.”