Whipple's Castle

by Thomas Williams

  Lucifer stood looking at them, and Perkins turned to lead them to the other barn, where the cow and two horses were kept. He turned carefully, and said, “Don’t let him get behind you, or he’ll bunt, and he’s got a head like a rock.”

  Lucifer did follow them a few feet, stopped when Perkins turned toward him, then came on again, walking slowly with his head down. Perkins ran over to a shed and got a two-by-four that was leaning against it, came back and without a word bashed Lucifer across the back. This brought Lucifer’s head up, and he stopped walking forward.

  “Git!” Perkins yelled, bashing him over the shoulders. Lucifer turned and walked diagonally away, keeping one golden eye on Perkins. “If you hit him on the head it just makes him feel good,” Perkins said. “He’s a mean son of a bitch.”

  David was shown the other barn, this one floored, except for the stalls, by generations of cow and horse manure. The cow and the two brown, phlegmatic workhorses paid no attention to them at all. In a small, muddy pen near the barn was a huge pig, surrounded by its bitter odor, and next to the pigpen a chicken coop—or rather a roost, for the chickens were here and there all around the barnyard. On the way back toward the house they stopped and entered the shed where Perkins did his writing. Part of its sloping roof was glass, and in the middle was a huge table covered by very realistic cardboard buildings—stores, houses and churches—representing a small New England town.

  “Exactly to scale!” Perkins said accusingly. “Exact! They’ll never catch me making the sun rise in the west. Look!” He pointed to a little street, with little automobiles in it, cementlike sidewalks, and infinitely perfect little fire hydrants and trash cans. “If a man walks down Main Street to this drugstore, by God I know just how many steps he has to take. Accurate!”

  David was fascinated by the little town. The trees were made of some kind of weed that looked like elm trees. Even the cars were identifiable as to make and year. The store windows were cellophane, behind which tiny but identifiable pieces of merchandise were displayed. Perkins eagerly showed him more of its wonders—a milk bottle not much bigger than a match head, and a perfect little strew of horse manure down the center of a street, with English sparrows small as mites pecking in it. But then there came a clanging from the house, and Myrna’s high, breaky voice calling, “Yoo hoo! Yoo hoo! Everybody! Yoo hoo!” They went back to the house for supper.

  David washed in the bathroom, which the Crosses were proud of because it was tiled, modern, and really worked, and which they deprecated for the same reasons. The water was gravity fed from a spring in the hill behind the house, and heated in the coil and reservoir of the kitchen range. He did catch a whiff of the chocolaty odor of septic tank, but that was probably because the recent heavy rains had flooded the drainfields.

  When he came back the Edison lamp on the dining table was lit, giving a white, slightly muted, pleasing light. Tucker was setting the table with large old plates and heavy silverware, and he stood rather awkwardly, trying to think of something he ought to do rather than watch her.

  “Can I help?” he finally asked.

  “Probably not,” she said, and clanked the silver down on the place mats too hard, a bored, somewhat sullen expression on her face, as though she were imitating some tough doll from the movies. He wanted to forgive her this crudeness, and did forgive her, because she was so trim and neat. There were her young breasts, her narrow waist in the lamplight. If only she wouldn’t imitate crudeness, swinging her hind end like a bored whore. Perhaps he could teach her to be the way he wanted her to be: she would swoon in his arms, melt because of love into the simple yet passionate girl she must be underneath. How could she have that long, pale, aristocratic face, yet still act this way? He decided that she was a prisoner of this act, that the real Tucker might escape from it. It was the act of youth, which he wanted to discard in himself, and its symptoms were the code words, fads and signals of the time.

  “I dropped my eyeball

  Into my highball”

  Tucker sang with a bored look. Her alphabet-soup name pin hung from the heavy sweater she’d put on over her dress—and next to it another name pin he couldn’t read in this light (a hard twinge of jealousy; he’d have to look into that). Her bobbysocks and saddle shoes, the scarlet lipstick put on too thick and too high, so that all of it didn’t move when she moved her lips—these things jarred him too much, and he wondered why, because a few months before they would have seemed, along with, say, fingertip reversible coats, to be the very standard marks of fashion.

  “I’ve got my fare

  And just a nickel to spare”

  Tucker sang as she danced down the length of the table. When she came around to his side he read the alphabet-soup name pin: Joe Cilley. He would have to meet this Joe Cilley. But in any case he would have her here, in the long winter evenings, even if what he wanted of her remained almost too vague to define. One thing was that she should grow up, and forget all that jazzy high-school stuff. She should be a lady—like, for instance, Ingrid Bergman, or Constance Bennett. And of course she should love him terribly, yet with some constraint, some shyness. They should talk seriously of important things, even of the war; of ideas and ideals. He wasn’t quite sure what ideas, but of the tone of voice, the tolerance and love with which they would converse, he was certain.

  “Hey, blivet-head. You can move now,” she said.

  He stepped back from the table to let her pass, and her strong perfume stung his nose.

  Perkins had come in, and sat in a rocking chair, making little subterranean grunts and complaints. Finally he called, “Myrna! Where do you suppose Old Fornication is? He’s three hours late!”

  Myrna came in from the kitchen. “What?” she said, waving a long wooden spoon.

  “That’s Forneau he means,” Tucker said. “He lives up the road.”

  “He’s crazy,” Perkins said. “He works in the tack factory in Cascom. Anyway, he brings our mail and the paper, when he doesn’t forget. He’s half soused on beer by the time he gets home, anyway.”

  “Tell him what he does with the beer cans,” Tucker said.

  “Oh, let me tell him!” Myma said, turning toward David with a grinning, glowing, trembling face. “Let me tell it!”

  Just then something hard poked into David’s leg, and he jumped. It was Heinz, who had a short, heavy stick in his mouth. Again he poked it into David’s leg.

  “Heinz!” Myrna screamed. Heinz paid no attention, but growled at David and hooked him again with the end of the stick.

  “Heinz! You go away and let me tell it!” Myrna seemed about to burst into tears, but when David tried to push Heinz away he growled louder and shook his head harder. In order to protect his shins, David had to grab hold of the stick, which only caused Heinz to become more aggressive. The stick was dented and wet, and no matter how hard he tried to hold it still, it moved in his hands.

  “Heinz!” Myrna screamed again.

  Perkins had been sitting very still, watching all this with a distant, pensive expression, and finally Tucker said “Hey, Poik,” and motioned toward the dog. Perkins immediately jumped up. With what seemed to David to be just a little too much savagery, he grabbed the stick and wrestled the choking, snarling dog over onto his back. Heinz wouldn’t let go; he still gargled and shook, and by what looked like sheer force got to his feet again. The stick was white with foam, and their wrestling didn’t seem to be a game at all. The dog screamed through his white teeth, Perkins making the same kind of noises. Just when David began to think the two were in a fight to the death, when it seemed they could never stop, Perkins, with a triumphant yell, tore the stick out of Heinz’s foaming mouth and tossed it on the floor behind him. Heinz didn’t look for the stick, he stared at Perkins’ hand, the whites gleaming all around his eyes, too much gum showing above his long teeth. Then he leapt, and Perkins gave him the hand, as if to say “Here, bite me!” In midair Heinz shut his mouth and passed right by. When he landed he cowered as if he had been
whipped. With his thick tail tucked down tight he crawled into a corner, and for a long time he yelped softly, and clicked his teeth.

  Myrna had gone back to the kitchen, and when she came back out, bearing a platter of lamb chops surrounded by browned potatoes, garnished with parsley, she didn’t attempt again to tell him what Fomeau did with his empty beer cans.

  Along with the lamb chops, which tasted more strongly of mutton than any he’d ever had before, they had the vegetable called lambs’ quarters, which David found good enough—something like spinach, but it left a coating on the inside of the mouth like the tallow of venison. All the food seemed dark with flavor, and rich. Perkins and Myrna had a glass of yellowish wine, and David and Tucker had raw milk which came from the Warren farm.

  “We’re eating Alice,” Myrna said, wiping a little grease from her chin.

  “Look,” Perkins said, “do we have to go into it?” Tucker, too, had stopped eating, and looked disgustedly at her mother.

  “I raised Alice on a bottle,” Myrna said. “She used to come and bunt me all the time because she thought I was her mother. One time she bunted me so hard I sat on the butter.”

  “Well, let’s forget it for now, okay?” Perkins said. He looked at David. “Always we’ve got to have names for the animals, so I’ve got to butcher our goddam friends.”

  “Alice B. Toklas,” Myrna said.

  “The pig is Gertrude Stein,” Tucker said.

  “And the rooster is Tristan Tzara, and I’ve got to cut his goddam head off tomorrow or the next day.”

  “One horse is Ernest,” Tucker said.

  “The gelding!” Perkins shouted, and laughed. He didn’t mind this; later David found that Ernest Hemingway had publicly insulted Perkins, before Tucker was born, when he and Myma had lived in Paris.

  “The other horse is called Other Horse,” Tucker said.

  “They’ve all got names—all of them,” Perkins said, and began morosely to eat again. David wanted to ask what Forneau did with the empty beer cans, yet somehow he was almost afraid to know. And who was Alice B. Toklas, whose flesh they ate? Gertrude Stein—he had heard the name, but who was she, with her crumpled ears and bitter smell? It seemed this whole day had been too full of hints and shreds of information, so many small parts, with ominous larger parts unexplained, and that nearly everything had almost fit his preconceptions—his daydreams, even. They had so nearly fit his daydreams that this day had in it too many of the quick shifts of meaning, expected yet still too startling, of a nightmare.

  When they had finished eating, and got up from the table, he was for a moment dizzy. As the lamp moved, and the walls and the tall highboy leaned in toward him, he wondered if it weren’t a terrible error for him to have come away from his home, his room with all its comforting relics of his childhood, his brother and his sister, whom he understood so easily. The small wave of homesickness was physical; he tasted mutton. Then it went away. He would decide how to cope with whatever came.

  But that night as he went to sleep, when the groaning old house had ceased to startle him with its deep complaints, and the pines sighing above his window had become merely pines in the wind, the houses and people and animals moved and changed places with each other. His revolver, so powerful it lived, rested in his suitcase beneath his bed. He had left his home, and in one long day ridden strange roads, seen the ewe hump and set her hooves under Lucifer’s demonic penetration—Lucifer, who now prowled the darkness below, his brainless golden eyes shining like flashlights. And somewhere close by lay the young, smooth new girl he had held in his arms, her sides white, her hair black silk, her belly tender and forbidden; yet now was she forbidden, that he could think of her lying full naked up and down his body? Under the sheet. He thought for a moment of masturbating, dreaming of his entering her. She was like the sweet pain of his tooth when he worried it out a long time ago, when he was a little boy. But there were too many other things, things that he didn’t understand, that hid in the dark places. He let the sweet, gumlike pain flicker over him and through him, deep little shocks along his bones, until he went to sleep.

  That was his first day away from home, from his family’s great house in Leah. He had been so tired he could not stay awake long enough to think about that day, and he had to leave all his questions circling in the air, out of order. But in his dreams they seemed to be answered, and answered wrong. He woke in the morning with a deep feeling of their having been answered, that he knew much more than he did. It seemed that he had known them all long ago—Lucifer, Heinz, Perkins, even Forneau, whom he’d never seen. And Myma too, long ago before all the crabbed emotions in the world swarmed across her face at once. And Tucker before she had lost the pure, straight dignity of a child.

  20

  In October, just as the leaves turned, when the last few tomatoes no one could possibly find a use for were overripe and rotting in the garden, Henrietta was pulling up cornstalks and putting them on the compost pile. She happened to see something brown moving down by the end of the driveway, past the barberry hedge. She looked again, squeezing her eyes, then pushed her glasses away from the always sensitive grooves they made in the bridge of her nose. There was a tall man, a soldier, and she wondered why he turned from the road and came walking up their driveway, a bulging canvas suitcase in his hand.

  A soldier, she thought. What is that soldier coming here for? The day was bright, the light hard, and leaves blew past her eyes as she watched him. The maples were red and gold, and here came this soldier, out of place on their street. He waved. Suddenly she recognized him by his gesture as she hadn’t by his face, and it was her child in the dangerous foreign clothing. Wood, her firstborn, who had shed all of his need for her, piece by piece, and now came back, big as a man in clothes she hadn’t chosen for him. He set down his bag and came toward her over the grass, smiling, all blurred by her tears. Gold glinted from his uniform and from his hat, from the leaves, from the odd imperfect lenses of her tears.

  “Goodness!” she said. “Wood?”

  He reached her and put his arms around her, and for a moment she felt as if she had walked up to the side of a house. He was so unexpectedly big. The gold buttons and bars of his uniform jacket wavered and shone. She leaned back and her eyes focused again. His face was different. It was older and smoother and harder, more muscular and handsome. His chin was hardened by the even shadow of his shaven beard, and his throat was reddish and hard. She stared at the strange devices upon his chest; suddenly she recognized in gold the crossed rifles. Rifles. He wore the insignia of his new calling.

  “Oh, come in,” she said. “Come in and see your father.” Wood had said something. What had he said? He looked down at her for a moment.

  “I’ll get my bag,” he said. She still held him, but now she remembered to let him go, and he strode away. She wiped her hands hard on her smock.

  He came back to her and they walked toward the kitchen door. “I’m sorry I had to surprise you,” he said. “I tried to call but I couldn’t get off the train until Boston, and then it didn’t seem worth the money.”

  “You wrote it might be next week.”

  “Yeah, they…” His hesitation struck her with worry.

  “They what?”

  “They’re just speeding things up a little.”

  “Speeding up?”

  “Well, not very much,” he said, and held the door for her. She didn’t understand, but before she would ask him about it he must meet his father.

  “Harvey!” she called as they came through the dining room. “Wood’s home! Look who’s here!”

  As the wheelchair turned, his tortured white face came around, grimacing. “Oh,” he said. “You caught me at a…At a bad time hello Wood.” The words slurred. “Sorry,” he said. A glass half full of whiskey sat next to his adding machine. “So sorry, really. Don’t feel good.” He tried to shake it off. “So he’s a shavetail! I can see that. R.O.T.C., y’know.” An agonized expression, the teeth bared; he tried to shake
it off, to be sober. “Don’t do this often, Wood. Lieutenant. Honest. True, Hank? True? True? Feel better later. I mean it, so glad. Happy. Proud.”

  He turned his face away with a jerk, as if from a blow. Wood took a step toward him and stopped. “Dad,” he said.

  “See you later. Don’t feel good. You understand. Hanky, wheel the guts out of here, will you?”

  Something made her look to Wood, and he nodded, serious and concerned. She wheeled Harvey into their bedroom and shut the door behind them. He raised himself from his wheelchair, shaking and sweating, then awkwardly rolled over onto the bed. She loosened his shirt and pants and took the pencils, pen and matches from his shirt pocket. “Do you want something over you?” she asked him.

  His eyes were open, staring at her with an intensity she first thought was rage, or vindictiveness. She braced, waiting, but nothing else happened. He stared. Whatever words moiled in his head didn’t come out. He stared for a while, then blinked several times before his plump white hand gestured for hers. She let the hand take hers, conscious of her calloused hard hand, a rock in the soft white.