Whipple's Castle

by Thomas Williams

  Then he would approach the house, where lamplight dimly gleamed. He walked tensely those last few hundred feet, listening carefully for breathing or the tick of hooves. And once he made the house there was still danger, but of another kind. Perkins Cross, that temperamental genius, would have decided what sort of mood he would assume in order to dominate the room, the evening, the world he had created in which his presence was to be celebrated. Though David saw through this acting, nevertheless Perkins was the master here. He was the adult. He didn’t exactly frighten, but he jarred, he irritated, he demanded a reaction, whether to his anger or his humor. David watched, because he had to, and felt dishonorable when he forced himself to laugh at Perkins’ little jokes. He wanted to say, “Not you, Mr. Cross, but I, I am the most important person here. I will be the future, and the main adventure will be my transformation of your beautiful daughter from a shallow nitwit into a sensitive and lovely girl.”

  He still believed that; it was what got him up the dark hill, got him up in the morning. It was the thought that changed his tender skin from a child’s to a man’s, and let him slide into his frozen sheets at night.

  But there Tucker sat, plastered with lipstick, Joe Cilley’s alphabet-soup name pin grossly skewered to her sweater, reading a pulp magazine, dangling her bobbysocks and saddle shoes over the arm of the Morris chair. She liked—God help him, he was embarrassed for her—True Romance and True Confession. And yet the pure light of the Edison lamp, in cruel chiaroscuro, revealed the smoothness of her skin, her delicate wrists, her black silken hair, her narrow aristocratic nose. It hurt to look at her. She was merely enchanted, and he must somehow break that shoddy spell.

  Weekends he worked with Perkins in the wood lot, sawing four-foot lengths of maple, pin cherry, beech and ash with a two-man crosscut saw—grinding, wearisome work. He kept up, and felt some approval in Perkins. Always just as David felt he couldn’t pull the saw another time, Perkins would stop, set the saw aside, and roll himself a cigarette with fingers trembling from labor. Sometimes Perkins’ face was so wildly red and white David found himself taking care not to look at it.

  He had nowhere Perkins’ brute strength, but he kept up. He couldn’t sink an ax half as far into a tree to make a notch, but he could trim branches well enough, and keep going. Once when they went back to the barn to harness Ernest and Other Horse, he realized that Perkins was trying to disguise a limp, that he had worked too hard in order to impress David—or perhaps not to spoil him for hard work.

  They tossed the stiff black harnesses over the horses and cinched the ancient straps and buckles onto the worn places on the horses’ coats. David watched, helping only when some obvious strap had to be handed over or lifted. Then they walked the big horses out of the barn and over to the wagon, traces swaying like slow pendulums about the thick legs and broad hooves; then came the hesitation of backing, and the ponderous, nervous thud of hooves as the horses felt their way backwards onto the shaft, to the whiffletrees. Other Horse’s black rectum swelled, and out came the huge orange falling biscuits.

  They rode on the flat bed of the wagon around the house and up the logging road to where they had been cutting, and piled the wood between the body stakes, all the while saying very little. Perkins said “Okay” or “That’ll do” whenever some part of their morning’s work was done. Occasionally he would say to Myrna “He works, all right,” grudgingly.

  It was only at night, with his wife and daughter as audience, that he demanded full attention from everybody. Weekdays he spent in his shed, working on his novel or on his model town. Only once did David ever find anything he had written, and he soon began to suspect that the little cardboard town was more important than anything Perkins might write about it. He found the one piece of writing in the library, in a large magazine with a thick cardboard cover. The magazine was called Modernity. Perkins’ article was about Peter the Great, and told how the great Czar (spelled “Tsar” in the article) amused himself as a boy by throwing dogs and servants off the Kremlin walls. Strangely, all the rest of the pages were blank. It had been printed in 1925, before David was born.

  Tucker’s school bus came an hour later than the Dexter-Benham station wagon, and brought her back to the Jaspers’ mailbox an hour earlier, while it was still daylight, so he never saw her except in the evenings. As far as he could tell, she never had any homework at all. He had met Joe Cilley early in September, an ominous meeting during which Joe beat up his brother William as a lesson to David. He’d been at Dark Hill Farm less than a week, when one hot afternoon a wagon full of kids, including Tucker, pulled by a gaunt old horse, came up the road and stopped in front of the house. David had been looking through the books in the library, and when he came out, Tucker called, “Hey, blivet! You want to go swimming?”

  He could see that she wasn’t too interested in having him come, but had to show him to the others. Tucker said, “That’s him.”

  There were four boys about his age, and several smaller boys and girls, who didn’t count. One of the four boys was big and fat. He wore a T-shirt over his breasts and belly, and had a mean, inquiring smile on his soft face. Another was tall and muscular, tanned all over, with a face of sharp edges, and shiny black hair. This one he knew immediately to be his rival, Joe Cilley. The other two boys were friendly and curious—farm boys with tanned faces and hands, and pale chests and legs, gawky and lean.

  Myma had come bustling down upon them, her apron rolled up upon whatever she had been working on. “Oh, isn’t this nice!” she said. “You’ve all come to take David swimming! This is David Whipple. David, this is Joe Cilley and his brother William, and this is Harold Pittman and Billy Warren!”

  He had been right. The dangerous one was Joe Cilley. The fat one was his brother. As Myma said “William,” he thought of “Willy Cilley,” and smiled a little; the fat one saw, and his smile in return was chilling. Joe Cilley’s face didn’t change at all, except for his lower jaw, which moved down a quarter of an inch as he said “Hi,” then moved up again. Harold Pittman and Billy Warren smiled openly and said “Hi.”

  Tucker had either worn her bathing suit under her dungarees that morning, or had changed down at the Cilleys’, or someplace. This seemed dangerous to him; as he looked at her slim legs Joe Cilley’s black little eyes looked straight at him: Watch out. He read this easily, and was a little afraid even as the muscles in his arms, which felt hard and capable after all the woodcutting of the last few days, became taut under his shirt.

  He went back to the house to change into his trunks, and as he undressed, his hands shook just a little bit. But on the way to Diddleneck Pond, Joe paid no attention to him at all, even when they stopped to admire what Romeo Forneau did with all his empty beer cans. The old horse stopped when Joe pulled the reins, stamped and swung his head in irritation, foam flying from the bit. Then David heard a soft, xylophonelike sound coming from the woods—a gentle, many-toned clanking. In silence the children got down from the wagon bed and crossed the stone wall. David followed Harold Pittman and Billy Warren, who without explanation had followed the little children. In a clearing surrounded by spruce, a small maple tree moved in the wind, and from its branches came the metallic music. An old gray ladder leaned against the trunk, and nearly every branch was full of beer cans that had been jammed down over twigs—clusters of the bronze and silver and white cans. There were almost as many cans as leaves.

  “It’s a wonder, ain’t?” Billy Warren said in a hushed voice. The little children stared, and the tree played its music.

  A sharp whistle from the road called them back. As they came across the stone wall they found Tucker and Joe Cilley in an elaborate Hollywood clinch, Tucker’s slender back bent, everything bent. His crude hand lay on her ribs. With a smirk, Joe turned away from her and wiped his mouth with a red bandanna. He didn’t look at David then, but later as they swam in the cold water above the mucky bottom of Diddleneck Pond he suddenly turned on his brother and hit him in the arm, on the back of the he
ad, on the chest, in the kidneys, on the back—vicious short blows that actually echoed from the woods across the pond. Willy didn’t begin to bawl until he had been hit five or six times, the blows had come so suddenly. After Willy had floundered out of the water, black muck on his fat thighs, David looked to find Joe’s eyes hard upon his own. It was a warning. That was the first time they met, and David thought: Okay, but I’ll have her to myself in the long evenings.

  He did, on many of those evenings. They danced to the phonograph, and she let him hold her close, his hand on her waist above the delicate surges of her muscles, her breath on his neck. He’d see stars. But her pose was bored sophistication; he couldn’t get hold of her mind, which seemed as smoothly inaccessible in its perfection of attitude as a jewel, a pearl.

  She was afraid of the dark, and for this he was grateful. His own marginal fear of the dark of course disappeared when he was with her—darkness became so easily then the soft setting of his daydreams, in which he could have taken on a werewolf, a bear, any monster large enough to warrant his dreamed-of reward. It was because of her fear of the dark that she let him walk her down the hill sometimes after supper. She hated to be home. In love with lights and dancing, as she was, she hated the farm, the sheep, the reasons for having to live there. She had vicious fights with her father when he wanted her to help with the chores. Her voice would turn flat and mean, and David would try to protect the vision of Tucker he thought to be possible.

  They would walk together down the hill to the crossroads, where, in December, they skated with the other kids around a bonfire on the millpond. From Joe Cilley he expected violence at any moment, and again one night on the ice Joe beat Willy up; another lesson. David had never seen anyone hit so hard. Joe’s fists would have broken boards. He leaped straight upon Willy, skates flashing in the firelight, and knocked him down flat upon the ice with one blow to the shoulder. Using his fists and arms like hammers, he beat upon his screaming brother’s head, arms, back, until the screams turned really desperate. Then he stopped, and Willy, who at fifteen was as big as a man, ran crying home upon his skates, right across the road, his weak ankles bending nearly flat.

  Joe didn’t bother to watch his brother run home, and David saw his face, then, above the fire. His black hair shone. Set into the smooth plane of his face were four black holes, all about the same size—his eyes and the holes of his nostrils. His nose was very small and sharp. Sometimes he seemed unreal, a character from a movie in which a man could be as brilliantly cold and cruel as he wanted to be. When Joe hit there was no hesitation at all, no caution, none of the involuntary mercy that kept most people from hurting each other. Except toward his brother, he wasn’t really mean. He bullied no one else, but when he hit, even in play, he hit too hard, and no one ever dared to challenge him.

  And Tucker was so frail. David was afraid he would hurt her, brutalize her in some dark and violent way he hardly dared to think about.

  As for Willy, he tried his revenge several times, jumping David from behind and trying to crush him. Joe watched these episodes coolly. David always managed to get out from under and pin Willy, and finally he said, “Look, you tub of lard, it appears that I’m stronger than you, so why don’t you lay off?” He never hit Willy, and he often wondered why, thinking that perhaps it was fear of Joe. He wasn’t really certain of this at all, and this possibly dishonorable indecision was added to all the others, brutal or merely irritating, that surrounded his days and nights.

  Sometimes after skating, Joe would consent to walk Tucker home, and David would walk ahead of them.

  “You keep on the road, now, David,” Joe would call, “and make some noise, because I ain’t looking where I’m going.” And Tucker would laugh for him, a delicate, ladylike chime so beautifully cruel that even in his pain David had to admire its skill. If Joe decided not to walk her home she would have David walk next to her, and he was not too proud to put his arm around her. Once, just before they reached the house, he turned and tried to kiss her. She punched him painfully in the stomach and said, “Down, Rover, down, boy.”

  Perhaps that was the first time a certain small question flicked past his consciousness: what was he doing here? In his cold bed that night as he shivered and waited for the sheets to warm he looked carefully at his idea of himself. Just how had he come to accept this degradation?

  At Dexter-Benham, once the wild ride in the station wagon was over, and the sensation of sliding rear wheels had faded into only a small trace of anxiety, the days were sober and neat. He was good at what he was good at—sports and subjects other than math. In grammar school he had developed, out of the void, a system based upon three rather than ten, and although he understood the decimal system in principle, in any sort of stress he reverted to what he called his “tricimal” system, in which, for example, seventy-three became for purposes of common interchange twenty threes plus three threes plus one plus three, or, twenty-four threes plus one. He was aware of the cumbersomeness of his system, but it was the one native to his blood.

  The regular Dexter-Benham boys perhaps changed their striped neckties and real Argyle socks a little too often for his taste—sometimes before lunch—and tended to brag rather blatantly of what they had done over vacation late at night in their families’ rumpus rooms or in their fathers’ Lincoln Continentals. Many of them seemed to be obsessed by Jews; a tall, red-headed boy named McLeod, from Des Moines, whose pride in basketball was to pass the ball so hard at close range no one on his own team could catch it, asked David if Whipple was a Jewish name. David’s blank astonishment at the relevance of this question was assumed by several others to be a fine Yankee putdown of McLeod. In any case he began to have certain friends.

  After the chaos of Leah High School, his instructors did, at least at first, personify the world of intelligence and logic he desired. His homework had to be done, and it had to be neat and precise. If he began to find in his instructors areas of prejudice or of political rigidity, he only wondered where he’d got his own beliefs. He came to the conclusion that the few and muted dialogues on these subjects between his mother and rather had given him opinions, mostly his mother’s because she tended to speak from knowledge. He found to his surprise that his occasional reading of the books she brought home was, in the aggregate, an accomplishment that was astounding to his instructors and his new friends. He was not always sure that his questions wouldn’t embarrass his instructors, and he grew careful. Little by little he began to feel that no one on that bright and civilized hill knew or cared what the war was all about. Perhaps they were right, and his baggage of terms such as fascist, democrat, communist, liberal, reactionary, anti-Semite had very little to do with why his country fought the war.

  But these qualifications were slow in coming, and the school charmed him and flattered him in many little ways. His friends—Lance Vandenbree, Judson Gay, Hoppy Hopright, Swivelhead Downing and others—with their screwy and even sometimes witty jargon, were set in his mind against the dangerous journey back to Cascom and the nervous weary load of fear and frustration he would carry up the hill into that perpetual night.

  On weekends sometimes, at dusk and with the Crosses’ blessings, he shot brown rats off the ridgepole of the sheep bam. The Crosses had a whole case of prewar .22 Longs, an inferior cartridge though adequate for rats, and a single-shot Remington .22 rifle. The rats seemed to have an evening trek that took them along the ridgepole, and against the sky they made interesting if gruesome running targets. The rifle cracked and he heard the thunk as the bullets wiped the rats away. At dark he took a paper bag and a flashlight and gathered the dead rats that had tumbled down the roof to the back of the bam. Once, passing the pigpen, he gingerly picked a rat out of the bag by the tail and tossed it into the trough. Gertrude Stein, snorting in the near darkness, swayed obesely up to the trough, and the rat’s bones crunched. He buried the others.

  Lucifer was part karakul, part Dorset Horn, part some odd mutant spirit that appealed in the darkest w
ay to Perkins Cross. They seemed violent enemies and yet there was an intimacy between them that David couldn’t help observing—a kind of equality, as though Lucifer were not quite unhuman. When the proper ewes came in heat and Lucifer was allowed among them, Perkins stood at the door of his writing shed and watched as Lucifer, his scrotum on its narrow strap swinging as wildly as a punching bag, took them one by one whenever they crossed his skewed stare. The ewes dutifully stood for him, and dutifully grew deep-bellied with lambs. These lambs would be born in February, for a special restaurant market—early lambs, hard to keep alive in the coldest part of the year.

  When not allowed to rut, Lucifer seemed to take perverse pleasure in bunting and pushing against the side of Perkins’ shed, and if Perkins was inside it, he’d grab his lantern and the two-by-four he kept for the purpose, come out cursing, carefully put the lantern down and bash Lucifer across the shoulders. Lucifer ran just out of the light, then turned a dull gold eye on Perkins before moving back into the dark.

  David went home for Christmas still puzzled by his new life, aware that he gave vague answers to his family about Cascom and Dexter-Benham. Christmas was strange without Wood, who was in Texas and couldn’t get leave to come home. He and Horace put up the tree, and he drove Sally De Oestris on her Christmas rounds. He felt a little like an impostor—that because it was not Wood who chose and set the tree, the tree was not quite real. Christmas seemed an imitation of itself. He came back to Cascom by way of Dexter-Benham, slept overnight in Hoppy Hopright’s room, and the next day resumed, by way of Al Roux’s careening station wagon, his oddly split existence.