Whipple's Castle

by Thomas Williams

  In February, that gray, frozen month, the lambs came due. Snow lay three feet deep, and the banks along the road, plowed for the town by Romeo Forneau, were as high as David’s head. A path one shovel wide came down from the house, cut through the banks and deltaed out among the sheds and barns, a diagram of chores.

  On alternate nights he found himself sleeping, by what reasoning or tacit agreement on his part he could not quite follow or remember, on a cot in the barn loft just above what Myrna Cross called “The Maternity Ward.” His revolver under his pillow, his head beneath the covers against the barn’s vast darkness of rafter and purlin, cobweb and rat run, the rich heat of the ewes rose up around him and made him sweat. Every two hours an alarm clock woke him, and he lit an oil lantern and climbed down to the ewes, where they skittishly bumped their horns and rumps against the bars.

  If one of the ewes did not move away, but stood stiffly, neck extended, hooves spread, then he would take down the bottle of linseed oil, the sharp hunting knife, and attend a birth. Maybe it was Lucifer’s long legs that had got onto those lambs; a lamb’s forefeet had to come out neatly beneath its nose, and too often these did not. He had to arrange things, even push back, sometimes, against the force of birth. Sometimes it was necessary to cut the ewe’s taut perineum, sometimes to kill a lamb, cut it off piecemeal in order to save its twin or its mother. For these major disasters he called for help by ringing an iron triangle that hung outside the barn door. No matter what occurred, the ewe would never make a sound, except for long breaths, her hind feet set in the brown dirt floor.

  Not all of the ewes had names—there were too many of them—but two of them were always spoken of by name because their mothers had died when they were born, and they had been raised, until weaned, in the house on baby bottles. One was Grace, who died of the same mysterious complaint her mother died of—a kind of weakness in the attachment of the womb, which caused her to bleed to death. Her lamb was called “Harold.” Myma called him—”Here, Harold”—and he would see the bottle and come at her, his soft, stupid eyes gleaming, and butt her with accurate, primal force, all greedy appetite.

  Grace had died late in the morning, while he was at Dexter-Benham. It had been a typical day—chapel in the morning, the boys’ proud, polite and breaking voices singing of the Holy Trinity, their button-down shirts white, their ties conservatively striped, their faces clean in the morning light. David looked like one of them. In English class they politely discussed, with Mr. Barkham, who looked like one of them a few years older, Gray’s “Elegy.” In science class they watched a radiometer turn in the sunlight. David studied in one of his friends’ rooms, not with the other townies, who studied in the library. It always seemed unnatural to his friends that he didn’t live at school. Sometimes at night, they told him, they put a penny in the floor master’s light socket, and every time he changed the fuse, he blew it out again himself.

  Then David came back to the farm, up the long hill in the heavy darkness among the trees. He felt like an explorer in his thin foreign clothes, and when he reached the house he reluctantly took off his white shirt, Ivy League jacket and regimental-striped tie and carefully hung them in his closet.

  The Crosses had nearly finished butchering Grace. By the time he’d changed into dungarees, rubber boots and his canvas mackinaw, all that could be used of her, including the intestines which would be used for sutures, was packaged and ready to be picked up and taken to the freezer in the village.

  The other orphan was Amantha, who waited until it was David’s shift to try to have her twins.

  He awoke in his damp blankets before the alarm clock rang, thinking he’d heard voices. It was, by the clock’s dim green face, nearly one in the morning. With an arm aching from sleep he pushed down the alarm button before it rang, and fumbled for the lantem.

  A giggle, not made by any sheep, came from below, and he knew it was Tucker. Wild thoughts: had she come sneaking down to see him? Would she think it a great joke to come creeping upon him, then, after startling him, to slide softly under the covers with him? He didn’t move, but the ewes stamped and bumped below. There seemed to be a nervous increase in their rising warmth, in the oily smell of wool. Tucker would climb the ladder and slide her thin hands coolly down his chest, and her hair would cover his face as she slipped lightly into his bed. She giggled again, and this time reality, another sound, pierced him; cold damp shame at his wishfulness. Joe Cilley’s chuckle climbed over hers, a dry, unbroken sound calculated not to show too much amusement, the standard noise he made whenever something of the sort was called for. Now David knew where these cruel noises came from—the bay next to the ewes’ pen, where hay was kept.

  “Shhhh!” Tucker whispered. Then came a soft breath of hay, a slight sound like sweeping, and they were quiet. They were waiting for the alarm to go off, no doubt, and they would lie still in each other’s arms until he’d looked at the sheep and gone back to sleep. Joe Cilley was eighteen, Tucker seventeen; they were a man and a woman there in the hay, the warmest place they could find on the farm. In the hay. Could Joe Cilley? Would she let him? Did he have her pajama pants down, now, and the soft parts of her open? David shriveled at this danger to her. He seemed to hear huge, raucous laughter bounding about in the silent barn. Scorned, betrayed, cuckolded, he lay breathing hard, seeing that brutish engorgement, and the delicate petals of Tucker’s enthralled body.

  No sound from below. He had to make his inspection even though self-pity, the terrible weakness of betrayal, dragged at him as though a chain were wrapped around each leg. What was he doing here? He pulled the alarm button, let it ring for a second, then shut it off. He lit the lantern, dragged on his pants and mackinaw, stepped into his icy boots and climbed down to the ewes, who began their half-serious dance of fear.

  All but one—Amantha. Her breaths were harsh sighs, and her neck arched and shuddered. He knew immediately that it was Amantha because she was longer and thinner in the body than any of the others, and her gray wool, especially around her neck, formed precise, circular ruffs where the wool split into cracks as well defined as cracks along the grain of wood. She looked much like a picture of Queen Elizabeth in her ruffs, as though someone had superimposed upon that picture in his history book a sheep’s dignified, dull face—the convex forehead-nose, the scalloped horns like thickly curled hair.

  He brought the lantern around to find the beginnings of a breech birth. One hind leg had emerged from the hugely distended black vagina, and he had to pour linseed oil on his hands and place them on the lamb. Part of its rump was visible, glossy as a candied apple; the contractions of Amantha’s sheep flesh pushed against an impossible counterforce. He couldn’t move the lamb. As he probed into Amantha’s warm membranes he found that the visible leg did not belong to the rump he tried to move. There were two lambs in there—a deep-sea vision of two entangled lives. He tried to pull, digging in his heels, but could only bend the lamb’s leg. Amantha’s breaths grew harsh, and her hind hooves made grooves in the dirt. A dark red jelly stained her woolly loins.

  Joe Cilley and Tucker: did they watch and listen from their hot bed in the hay? He jumped up and ran, cartwheeling over the pen bars, to the barn door, grabbed the short piece of reinforcing rod that hung there and beat upon the triangle as hard as he could. Its clangs swarmed in the frosty night. A sheep baaed, an explosive sound that seemed full of panic. Joe Cilley ran past him without a word. Tucker followed, her bathrobe flying. “Oh dear, oh dear!” she said, as though this real emergency had caused in her a more civilized response than usual. David clanged the triangle remorselessly. “Terror, panic, disaster!” he felt his arm proclaim. The steel stung his hand.

  Tucker would have to hope that her parents wouldn’t look into her room. She would have to hide until they came to the barn, then sneak back into bed. It wouldn’t work, David knew. He had seen Perkins and Myrna consider Joe Cilley too many times, and seen Tucker and Perkins fight too many times. Her parents watched her more closely than s
he knew.

  In a few minutes Myma’s voice came clearly from the porch, high, strangely cultured in its fragmented breaks into alto. “Tucker? Tucker?” At first as though she were gently chiding, reminding her daughter of something, then a descent into anger. “Tucker! Tucker!” Then a grating cry with sobs interspersed: “Tucker! Tucker!”

  With great huffs and groans, bathrobe billowing and snow flying, Perkins came charging down the narrow path between the snow. His overshoes were open, full of snow from his having stepped off the path. His high, whiney voice complained and despaired. He, too, yelled “Tucker!” whenever he got his breath.

  David had ceased beating the alarm. He stood like a spectator now, listening to all this family panic. And then, as Tucker’s voice came down from her window, she finally managed to prove that she was hopeless to his fantasies, that within her lovely body his gentle girl did not exist. Perhaps it was her lack of talent. “Whaaat?” she yelled, trying to sound sleepy, interrupted, irritated, bored. “Whaaat?” It was all so patently a lie, such crudely bad acting. In David’s secret mind almost audibly something clicked, and no more strength came to him from any ideal conception of that girl. He began to shiver, and couldn’t stop. Inside the barn Amantha slowly tore herself apart.

  Perkins took one look at Amantha and stamped his foot. Soon Myrna pushed Tucker, sullen and dark around the eyes, into the light. Perkins looked at her, vibrating. “Where’s Joe Cilley?” he said. “I saw something run down the road, Miss. Is that who it was?”

  Tucker didn’t answer.

  “She was covered with hay,” Myrna said.

  “Ah,” Perkins said. “Did you have a roll in the hay, Miss?”

  David didn’t want to witness this.

  Myrna said, with astounding vindictiveness, “Did he get your cherry? Did you give it away?” Her smile seemed at one moment to express pleasure and goodwill, at the next the most vicious hatred.

  “Give what away?” Tucker said.

  “Why, your little maidenhead, dear,” Myrna said. “Don’t you even know the name of the merchandise?”

  “We didn’t go all the way, if that’s what you mean,” Tucker said. Her father took one step and slapped her so hard she fell down. Hoarse blats came from her little mouth.

  The observer asked himself what he was doing here.

  When Tucker stopped bawling they heard Amantha’s breaths. There was nothing to be done for her alive. David waited with her while the Crosses went to change into their clothes, to get the saw, the knives and stones. When they returned, Tucker sullen, the side of her face swelling, they put their hands deep into Amantha’s wool and rolled her onto an old Flexible Flyer. With Myrna holding her on, Perkins and David pulled her over to the shed. Tucker was sent to get more lamps while David helped Perkins remove the cardboard town from the trestle table. “Careful, by God! Now be careful!” Perkins muttered. They lifted the plywood sheet, streets, buildings, cars, trees, horse manure and mosquito-sized sparrows turning vertical, a dizzy great upheaval of that part of the world, and finally set the plywood against the rear wall of the shed. Myrna covered the table with newspapers. Perkins lit the oil space heater, and the metal creaked as it wanned. The block and tackle was arranged, roped to a beam so that it hung next to the table.

  Amantha still took long breaths. The shed leaked air in places, and the amber light moved in the lamp chimneys. When Tucker asked if she could go to bed, her mother said, “You’ll get your little hands in it.” Tucker held out her pale hands, manicured nails enameled bright red.

  David waited, shivering still, for the necessary violence. Amantha’s throat must be cut, she must be hung above the floor, above a tub, and they must take her all apart. This was done. He remembered certain moments, flashes of silence, the pale odor and the reluctant spasm of death. With a sigh, life became meat. Weariness, too, in his own fingers as they pried loose the adamant skin.

  The hide lay on the table like a heavy overcoat someone had taken off and dropped in folds. But the skin had come off with it, and it seemed there must be a living creature, not that pile of meat, who somewhere gibbered in agony. The intestines lay in round piles like casual pillows, the little waves of peristalsis continuing to flow down the silk. Tucker was made to clean the gut, and she cried bitterly as she squeezed an iridescent blue tube as big around as her arm. Blood spotted her gabardine ski pants. On the table lay bundles and clubs of bright red meat and pink fat; in a corner the two dead lambs were stacked like dirty rags. Buckets and washtubs filled with blood, hunks of bone and fat. Tallow climbed David’s arms and made his knife slippery in his hand.

  Heinz pushed through the door, looking as guilty as if he had caused all the mayhem he saw, and before he was chased out he quickly licked at a run of blood. He cringed and bristled almost hysterically, as though the wolf’s hunger and the jackal’s taboos fought each other over all that gore. The jackal won, and he ran whining off into the dark.

  The block and tackle slipped, and Perkins had to catch, in his bare arms, against his shirt, half the bright carcass. He staggered back against his town and crushed whole streets of houses. “What’s the use?” he cried. “What’s the use?” His freckles were like spots of paint, the orange-red of his face clashing with the red of the meat. Just then the shed moved; Lucifer was pushing against it.

  Later, recollected in whatever tranquillity David recognized as it fleeted through his life that spring, his actions at that moment would haunt him, and seem to resound with all sorts of meanings, some more obvious than others, some obscured by shame, perhaps forever.

  Perkins heaved the carcass on the table, then merely sat down, sighing wearily. David took the two-by-four and lantern and went outside. Lucifer took several dainty steps and bumped the shed again. The boards rattled. He backed up and cocked his head, and David hit him across the shoulders. Lucifer seemed surprised; he lowered his head at David. It was that slight challenge, that moment of suggested aggression that turned David loose, that lost him to rage. He brought the two-by-four down in a precise arc, feeling its cold efficiency in his arms, and hurt Lucifer badly. Lucifer turned to run away, but David hit him again, directly across the nose. His head went down and he stumbled as he tried to turn; his face turned, brutal and bland, and the two-by-four caught him straight across his exposed ribs. He managed to get to his feet before the next inevitable descent of the wood, but it got him and he ran away, humping and jerking on three legs. He didn’t stop to show his golden eye.

  David never found out how badly he hurt Lucifer, and it would be some time before he felt shame or responsibility for that fit of rage. The black ram would have been killed if he hadn’t run; that was the bare knowledge David finally possessed.

  That night he packed his trunk and his suitcase. His trunk and bicycle could be picked up later—or not, as far as he was concerned. He had finally answered the question about what he was doing at Dark Hill Farm. In the morning he was ready long before light, and flagged down Romeo Forneau’s Ford.

  “You leavin’ them people?” Forneau asked him as they swayed and slid down the long hill. “Crazy bastards, ain’t they? I hear tell she’s rich as Rockefeller. You know that?”

  “No, I didn’t,” David said.

  Fomeau took him as far as Cascom, and he hitchhiked home from there.

  From his room at Dexter-Benham he could see the little square with the white wooden chapel on one side and the tennis courts on the other. The high elms, evenly spaced, seemed the guardians of the square’s neat formality. His room was small and bright, with a fluorescent lamp at his desk. He didn’t think of the Cross farm very much that spring, and at Dexter-Benham he lost his ideal of learning and of logic slowly and without apparent pain. There were certain rules one broke at one’s peril—smoking was probably the worst crime of all. Infractions of lesser rules were punished too, and the greatest of these was to be late for a meal.

  One March day, a half-hour before lunch, Hoppy Hopright came into David’s room. He was
a tall, lumpy-faced boy with woolly blond hair, and his usually humorous face was now full of anxiety. Something was bothering him very much, and he held a towel over his fly.

  “Oh, Jesus, Dave,” he said, “I did a goddam dumb-ass thing.”

  “What?” David said.

  “If you’ve got a cruel streak in you, you’ll laugh your ass off.”

  “Not me,” David said. “Of course, it depends. What’s the matter?”

  “I don’t want to see hilarity in any form,” Hoppy said. He blushed red, and his forehead was wet. “Oh, I’m a prize idiot!”

  “Well, what is it?” David said. He looked at the towel Hoppy held in front of him.

  “You see, I got this new idea how to jerk off. I no longer recommend it, you understand.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I had this half-pint milk bottle, see, and I was thinking about how the hole was just about the right size?” Hoppy blushed and shook his head. “Jesus, what a brain! Well, to make a long story short, I was wrong.” He removed the towel, and what he revealed didn’t look so much like a half-pint milk bottle as a piece of meat in the form of a half-pint milk bottle. “It’s stuck!” Hoppy said desperately. “I can’t get it off. I’ve been trying to pull the bastard off over an hour! I’m going out of my mind!”

  “What about soap and water?” David said.

  “Christ, I tried that first off. No dice.”

  “Maybe if you used cold water you could shrink it.”

  “I tried that, but it doesn’t want to shrink.” Hoppy groaned. “Christ! Hung up on a milk bottle!”

  Hoppy held the bottle gingerly, and David could see veins, skin, all the parts, but bloated, magnified by the thick glass.