Whipple's Castle

by Thomas Williams

  Harvey began to yell from the hall. “Somebody tell me what’s going onl What’s with Wood?”

  Wood’s head lolled from side to side as Kate and Henrietta pushed and pulled on him, that strange dearth place of an eye gleaming pink. Kate tried to slap his cheek, but couldn’t. “Peggy!” she said desperately.

  “Go get a basin of cold water and a washcloth,” Peggy ordered. “Put ice cubes in it.” Kate went to do this and she took Kate’s place. “Horace,” she said, “come help us get him up.” She slapped Wood’s face hard, and his eye opened. His whiskers had stung her hand.

  “Yeah-yeah,” he said, sighing sleepily as his eye slowly closed again.

  “Is he going to be all right?” Henrietta asked. “Peggy? Peggy?”

  “I think so,” she said. “Here, Horace, get under his arm. Get his arm over your neck. Now lift him up.”

  Between them they pulled Wood from the bed, one pajama leg waving empty from above the knee. As they moved him to his desk chair the stump of his left leg banged the desk, giving Peggy such a massive twinge of sympathy pain she stumbled. Horace held them both up for a moment before they got Wood into the chair.

  “Mmm-yeah,” Wood mumbled.

  “What the hell’s going on?” Harvey demanded from the door. He was sweating and shaking from his climb up the stairs.

  “He’ll be all right,” Peggy said, shaking Wood’s head back and forth. She could feel the muscles of his neck tense to fight this motion.

  “Hey,” Wood said.

  “That’s better,” she said. “Stay awake, Wood! You must stay awake!”

  Harvey came into the room. The olive-colored box was crushed in his hand against his cane handle. He balanced himself and tossed the box on the desk. “So that’s it,” he said. “My God.”

  Henrietta was sitting on the bed, her head in her hands. “Why?” she asked. “I can’t understand anything.”

  Wood began to slip out of the chair, but Horace, with a hoarse grunt, leapt back to him and pulled him up straight. “Sit up!” he yelled into Wood’s ear. “Sit up!” His voice was so loud they all looked at him in surprise.

  Kate came in, sloshing the ice water. “Here it is, Peggy! There was only one tray of ice cubes!”

  Peggy took a handful of Wood’s hair, held his head up and placed the icy cloth against his face. “What’re you doing?” Wood said slowly, exhaustedly.

  “See? See? He said something!” Kate said.

  Peggy could feel the stronger and more deliberate force of Wood’s neck muscles now, fighting against her constant manipulation of his head. She knew he would wake up. His breathing was quieter and a little faster. “Someone let Dr. Winston in, when he comes,” she said. She held Wood’s head in her hands, her fingers on his ears and in his hair, now on his strong jaws, feeling the smooth muscles underneath the bristly skin. She wanted to stop jerking him back and forth, to put his face against her breast. His hair was glossy and wet, all mussed and young-looking. While the washcloth soaked in the basin she risked one moment of tenderness and moved her fingers over the shiny skin where his eye had been.

  When she had first entered the room and heard that sick rattle of breath it seemed as though her whole life with the Whipples had been a kind of dull green cone, a corridor of time she’d traveled slowly through to reach this dreadful apex, everything leading down smaller and more vivid to this rendezvous. The Whipples sat and stood around her now, watching her authority with some awe in spite of their apprehension. Death had touched all their faces and made them gray.

  No one had to let Dr. Winston in. He was already there, a tall, stooped man in his fifties who always spoke calmly and always seemed in memory to be moving forward; they had all seen his gaunt face loom toward their beds as he raised his black gladstone bag toward a table or a chair. “Ah,” he said, looking at the crushed green box. Peggy saw him notice the whiskey bottle beneath the bed, next to the straps and hinges of the artificial leg. He looked then at Wood, tapped Wood’s jaw sharply and nodded at the flash of consciousness it caused.

  “Who was it called me?” he asked.

  “I did,” Peggy said.

  He nodded, seeming pleased with her. He looked carefully at the others. “Horace, help me get him to the bathroom. Margaret Mudd, take my bag. The rest of you might as well stay out. We’ve got to wash him out inside and that won’t be pleasant. Henrietta, you make some strong coffee.”

  “Is he going to be all right?” Henrietta asked.

  “Why, yes, I think so, Henrietta. There might be a chance of pneumonia, but we can take care of that if the time comes. My guess is he took the Veronal quite a few hours back, you see. If it had a mind to kill him, it would have by now.”

  Henrietta shuddered as she drew a breath.

  “Now, now, Henrietta,” he said, “and Harvey. It very well could have been an accident. ‘An accidental overdose,’ we’ll call it for the time being. You understand?”

  Henrietta nodded, shaking her head at the same time. A small squeak of fear escaped her, and she cleared her throat to try to hide it.

  At the foot of Wood’s rumpled bed, Harvey leaned on his canes and stared at the doctor’s face.

  He was wet all through, and bled from a lacework of pricks and scratches across his hands and face. The water, coming from leaves and stalks, stung like acid. Now he crept over the top of a granite outcropping, just above the prickly brush that surrounded it. He had seen Tom twice in the last hour or so—a quick sliding of gray once; the other time what he’d taken for a piece of stone had been carefully watching him until it slid away. In desperation he’d even tried calling to Tom, as though the cat were so stupid he would come toward his betrayer and ask for death. In near-hysteria he’d plunged after the cat, and a maple sapling just too big to swing out of the way had caught him like a club on the forehead, unhinging his knees. Soon after he slipped on a mossy ledge and fell on his knee. A hollow throb worked there, predicting later pain.

  He could see down into the blackberries here. Their leaves were old and slightly shriveled, and the shiny berries were almost ripe. His eyes moved so quickly, in such a frenzy of search he felt their tired muscles pull. Where was the cat? Tom, his old friend—he must shut off that judging brain. Wasn’t it a favor he was doing? Tom had made a terrible misinterpretation.

  If he didn’t calm himself he wouldn’t be able to hit anything with the pistol. When he held it out in front of him, the narrow sights wavered so badly he could hardly find the front blade in the grooves. Deep breaths, he told himself. Now wait awhile and try to listen. The old pistol was inaccurate under the best conditions. There was a tick, and another down in the fuzz of stalks, beneath the gray-green leaves somewhere. He held his breath, feeling movement down there. Something crept, about ten feet away, just barely out of sight. He found a piece of gray next to what must have been an old stump with a white mushroom tray on its side, and tried to find an open corridor in the interstices of stalks and branches. He knew better than to shoot at hair; he should see the whole animal and know what he aimed at, what part he aimed at, but this was the first time he had a chance to shoot at all, so he held the pistol in both hands, steady against the moss, found the blade against that wisp of gray and fired.

  A high yowl of pain and anger proved the gray to be alive. Screaming, Tom rolled out into clear sight. He fought his rear legs, clawing and biting so fiercely he seemed to be two cats at once. Then, as though he’d met a stronger cat and knew it, he tried to escape the force that hurt him. One haunch, pierced and broken, dragged at a splayed, impossible angle. Blood appeared upon the old leaves. When Tom stopped and tried again to fight whatever had him in its jaws, David fired into that gray tangle, knowing all the time he should have waited. He hurt Tom again; the yowl wavered and became lower, more intense, closer, as though it came from David’s own head. The gray bundle convulsed, appeared catlike and then became a ball of ragged blood and hair. David fired again, knowing immediately he’d missed, and again, know
ing he’d missed by more than a foot. Did he have another unspent cartridge in the cylinder? It occurred to him that he might have shot Tom through his sick place, through the cancer, and with this horror he jumped and slid down the jagged ledge into the brush. A branch whipped his face and blinded him, then his eyes opened onto glittery tears and prisms. He hadn’t stopped running and was afraid he’d gone past Tom, but there Tom was, trying to get enough of his legs under him to run away, to drag himself away from David. He cast a yellow glance over his shoulder, knowing from whom he tried to escape. David reached as close as he could, as he dared, and fired into Tom’s body, hurting him badly. A loop of putty-colored intestine picked up dirt and shreds of matter from the ground. The next shot was a heartless empty click, and David fought through the branches, fell to one knee and was forced back by their combined resilient push before he got through to stamp Tom’s head into the punky dirt. He stamped and heel-pounded the head until it was dirty and shapeless. The torn skin slipped off the eyes and jaws. Some time later the cat was dead.

  Dull-witted and sick, he staggered back down through the woods toward the house. His face and hands stung, laced as they were with thorn scratches and punctures. Pale reddish water and seeds were on his palms. His wet pants clung heavily, and he fell over a branch he could easily have avoided. He lay with his face in the rotten leaves, feeling the sticky, sickish water on his thighs. He might as well stay here for a while, one foot hung over the branch that tripped him, shin in pain—the disorganized posture of a corpse. Tom’s body had been splayed thus, horribly out of character for a cat, filthy, ragged and unnatural.

  Let the grubs and newts crawl up his nose and out his ears. The hell with it. The cellar odor of rotting leaves was deep, buried, but contained the peppery bite of toadstool. Fragrant rot. For one thing, he would make a vow: never again consider David Abbott Whipple of adequate talent in the matter of death. Certain decisions simply are not David Abbott Whipple’s to make. Let him flit charmingly among the women, saying clever things and dipping his little wick in the honey, but let him eschew death. Eschew it. Gesundheit. Ave atque vale. He would never consider that subject again.

  He lay there until he grew cold, past shivering. Something walked six- or eight-legged over the back of his neck, and when he moved to brush it off he became aware that he was hungry. He got up, the oil in his joints gummy with cold. His knee throbbed as he trudged out of the woods.

  No one was in the kitchen, so he sneaked up the back stairs and made it to his room without being seen. He put his revolver on his desk; why hadn’t he considered burying it with the cat? Was his oath a lie, then? The fact was, he wanted the revolver. He still wanted that instrument of murder. He would let it lie there in its own darkness, to be considered later.

  He toweled himself off with a dirty shirt and had just changed into dry pants when Kate opened his door without knocking and came running in. “Davy!” she said. “Where have you been all this time?”

  Murdering, he thought, then saw that she had been crying. She came up as if to touch him, then shied back. He put on a clean shirt, and she began to cry. “Wood,” she said in a weak, hilly voice. She was all shiny and disorganized; something odd had happened to the symmetry of her face.

  “What? Wood what?” he said, badly frightened now.

  “He tried…tried to commit suicide.”

  “Tried to?”

  “With pills but they didn’t work, and Peggy got worried so we went up and found him. Dr. Winston came, and oh, goodness, Davy! Everything’s gone wrong!”

  “Is Wood all right now?”

  “He’s all jittery because of the hypodermic and black coffee and all that.” She cried and hiccuped into her hands. She seemed to be blind with her tears, so he led her to his easy chair and pushed her down into it. Finally she got hold of herself and could speak. “Give me a Kleenex or something.”

  He gave her a clean handkerchief and she wiped her face. “I knew you were here because your truck was here, Davy.”

  “How is he now? Is he home?”

  “He’s in his room. He has to sit up, because of his lungs or something. Peggy’s taking care of him. Davy, when we found him he was all pink! My God!”

  “Should I go see him?” David said.

  “What good is anything if he wants to die?”

  “I guess I’d better go see him.”

  “You don’t have to now, Davy. You can wait until he’s better. He’s really shaking now. It hurts to look at him.”

  “Okay, I’ll wait awhile,” he said with shame and relief. He tried to imagine Wood wanting to die, choosing to die. Wood! They all knew he was unhappy. There were the conventional explanations about returning combat veterans and all that, but they didn’t seem to apply. His disfigurements? No, that couldn’t be it, not with Wood. But you never knew what got to people. He wished, suddenly, with a real force that surprised him, that he and Wood could divide those wounds. He’d take either the leg or the eye, whichever bothered Wood the most. Yes, he would, right now. His eyes grew moist, but at what part of that thought? His love and sorrow for his brother, or his own nobility? Both? Every emotion he ever had was just slightly infected.

  “How’s mother taking it?” he said.

  “Quietly. She sort of chirped and then she was quiet.”

  “Dad?”

  “I don’t know. He came upstairs on his canes and now he’s back downstairs. Horace helped carry Wood around, but Peggy really took charge of the whole thing until Dr. Winston got here.”

  “She would,” he said. “I can see that.”

  “I don’t think he even sees her,” Kate said.

  “Sees her?”

  “I mean she loves him so much.”

  “What’s bothering him, anyway? Have you got any idea, Katie? Is it his leg and eye? I can’t understand it if it’s that.”

  “I don’t know. He’s so unhappy. Nobody knows. Even Dad asked me if I knew.” She looked at him as though her eyes had focused for the first time since she’d entered the room. “Davy? What are all those scratches all over your face?”

  He thought, perhaps too long. “I was hunting and I got caught in a blackberry patch.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Hunting.”

  “I better go see him, Katie. You know I have to.”

  “Yes.” She lay back in the chair, looking exhausted and small. She wore her faded dungarees and an old blue dress shirt he’d given her at the beginning of the summer. Her pretty arms, coming out of the rolled sleeves of his old shirt, showed how slender she really was, compared to him.

  “Hey, kid,” he said. “I bet we’ll get all this straightened out.”

  She stared up toward the moose, but not as though she saw it. “Davy, I thought you were going to show up at the dance last night.”

  “I couldn’t find a clean shirt. They’re all out at the cabin.”

  “Oh.”

  “Did you have a good time?”

  She looked at him, frowning unhappily. “I don’t know. Davy, come back and talk to me, will you? After you see Wood? Can I stay here and wait for you?”

  “Of course you can,” he said, but he thought: Oh, God, what did that shit do to her? He felt sick and responsible. In a way, he didn’t want to hear, just as in one way he didn’t want to have to see Wood.

  He left her in his room and went to the bathroom to see how scratched up he really was. He washed off a few crusty lines of dried blood, but he’d still have explanations (lies) to make if anyone looked at him closely. Then he remembered that he hadn’t taken Tom’s sandbox out. He must get rid of any evidence that there had ever been a cat. Yes, quickly. He went down the back stairs to the kitchen, took the stinking box in his arms, lugged it out across the driveway and dumped the sand in the underbrush. The box he stamped flat and jammed into one of the trash cans. There.

  But his mother was waiting for him in the kitchen, looking as though she knew something. “David, you’ve got to help us,” she said.


  He was relieved, first, then a little frightened and wary. He thought of saying, “I don’t live here, you know. Just visiting, sort of.”

  “It’s about Wood. Your father and I can’t…”

  She was so upset. Her magnified eyes swiveled back and forth in her lenses.

  “I know,” he said. “I’m going to see him now.”

  “See your father too, Davy. Oh!”

  “Don’t cry, now, Hank,” he said. “You just wait and see if we don’t get this all straightened out.” Liar, coward. He patted her shoulder, an easy gesture, and went through the dining room. Strange, knowing what he knew, that he yearned to have his father tell him what to do about Wood.

  His father sat at his oak table, pale and overweight, a glaze of sweat on his forehead. He seemed at first to be reading the newspaper that lay on the table before him, but David saw that his eyes were distant and still.

  “Dave,” he said. His eyes had flicked over and gone back. “God knows you must be closer to him than I ever was. What’s eating him?” When he turned his head he looked old. His hair was sparse, darker and thinner than David had ever noticed before. His eyes were gummy in the whites, with brownish striations radiating out of the irises, as though the irises were slowly melting with age. When David looked away he saw in his mind a different picture of his father—in fact two different pictures, one fatter but more fierce and powerful, one a younger man startlingly like himself. It was the first time he’d ever considered himself to be what his father once was, and the cold hand of age and death brushed over them both.

  “I don’t know, unless it’s his leg and all that.”

  “But Christ, don’t you think I know what it’s like to be a cripple? Whipple the Cripple. For God knows how many years I was in pain all the time and I never tried to scrag myself!”

  “Maybe it’s something else,” David said.

  “Jesus. Don’t you kids think we ever loved you?”

  “Yes, I guess so,” David said. His father seemed a little gross in his looseness of skin and emotion. Long curly hairs grew out of his nose.