Whipple's Castle

by Thomas Williams

  The road climbed, then for a short relief ran level, then climbed again, so that he had to stand upon his pedals and pump against the achy weakness that crept into his knees—a hint of mortality he knew all about. The asphalt seemed to breathe away his breath as it drew the green heat from the ferns and trees along the road. After a few miles he stopped to rest, not because he was exhausted, but to feel the pleasure of his muscles as they cleared again. He let his bike lean against the springy brush, and stood bemused—slightly dazed by the heat of the sun, looking into the thickness of the green, where blackberries hung shiny as coal upon their sticks among the heavy ferns. It was early in September, and bees hummed over the last of the wild asters. The gravel smell of the shoulder of the road was pleasant where the heat sucked it up, and where the dust had settled on the ferns the two odors mixed—the mineral one seductive as a sneeze, the furry green one rich and forbidding.

  He was not in a hurry. The bees buzzed here with as much intensity as anywhere, and the sweet hot air was as much alive. Where he was, was life enough to let him know he was still in the world. And so he stood, scratching his elbow. A car passed, and shortly afterward a pickup truck, but there were few cars because of gasoline and tire rationing.

  After a while he straightened up his bike and noticed that his suitcase had begun to slide off to the right. No minor adjustments of the clothesline seemed to help, so he undid all the knots and put his suitcase down in the ferns. It was an interesting problem, and while he thought about it he idly opened the snaps of the suitcase and looked inside. On top was his raincoat. He moved the raincoat and looked—pretending that it was a discovery to him—at the .32 caliber Iver Johnson revolver that pressed heavily on his one sport coat. He thought how it would have been a thrill to discover such a real and heavy thing in a suitcase among clothes. Even though he knew it was there, each time he looked at it he got a small surprise. Still thinking of discovery, he cautiously picked it up, opened it and looked at the cylinder to see if it was loaded, although he knew it was. He’d bought it from the Leah High School janitor, for the price of a pint of Schenley’s and a fifth of muscatel. He hadn’t fired any of the real cartridges that came with it because they couldn’t be replaced; none of the hardware stores had ammunition to sell any more. He had found one box of blanks in one store, and these he unloaded, reamed out and reloaded with black powder and lead balls.

  He knew that the smokeless powder in the blank cartridges was too quick to use with balls, and might have caused dangerous pressures in the old gun. His attitude toward this hobby of his was mixed, especially now that he was leaving Leah for the winter. What had guns, even though guns were real, and not exactly toys, to do with the new life he wanted? He aimed the revolver at a tree, then put it carefully back on his sport coat, tied his suitcase on again and continued his long ride.

  Hours later he came into Cascom above the lake, and had to climb, pushing his bike for miles, it seemed to him. The road turned as it climbed the mountain, and came out of big pines into what had once been a field, but now was grown up with small poplars and pin cherries. The road was a corridor between these low walls of thick gray and green. Here, after the deep pines, David felt exposed, trapped by the density of the saplings on either side of him. Soon the road leveled, and he could ride for a while, even though the gravel was at times mushy and difficult. But then the road climbed again, and he found it easier to get off and push. The darkest woods were just before the farm-spruce in impenetrable groves, their branches interlocked, under them only a black crawl space where the passages led, deep in needles, among the trunks and dead lower branches.

  Past a hundred yards of these, with the sky darkening, he came to the farm. It was as it had been described to him; on the left, beneath tall pines and backed up against the granite out-croppings of a steep hill, the house seemed to be in hiding. It had once been a standard colonial farmhouse, but tall bay windows had been added to the front and to a newer wing, and it was painted a dark, barn red. Across the road from it the land opened up around two black, unpainted barns. On that side was a huge field, opening out pie-shaped behind the barns—a whole hill of field. Past the opening the road was immediately enclosed again by the thick spruce, as though it went straight into a black hole.

  No one was in sight, but he’d been hearing a raucous, tinny sound coming from the house, and as he pushed his bike up over the pine needles that were the lawn, he recognized the song “Chattanooga Choo Choo,” the record made by Johnny Mercer.

  Can I afford to board

  Chattanooga Choo Choo?

  I’ve got my fare,

  And fust a nickel to spare

  —sang the nasal voice. The record was being played too fast, and the voice sounded somewhat like an angry squirrel.

  He leaned his bike against the side porch—no track seemed to go to the front door—and went up the steps. He couldn’t help seeing, through the bay window, some violent motion in the room. He looked, feeling himself to be a spy. Inside was a young girl in a blue dress, with long dark hair, who jitterbugged with no partner, and made all the expert shakes and squirms and twirls of that dance, her bobby socks flashing as she kicked and twirled. On her rather long, pale face was the standard, expert miming of ecstasy that jitterbugging seemed to demand.

  To David it would have been somewhat shameful to be caught like that, so he wasn’t sure he ought to disturb her. He decided that she probably wouldn’t hear his knock anyway above the noise, and decided to wait until the record ended.

  When it did, and the girl had moved out of sight, he clumped his feet on the porch and knocked. He heard her stop cranking the Victrola, listen, then crank a few more times, hard, before she came to the door.

  “Well, well,” she said, and looked him up and down, her eyebrows raised. Her pale face was long and delicate, with a long thin nose and a wide, thin-lipped mouth scarlet with lipstick. Her eyes were gray-green. He thought she was beautiful. In spite of the jitterbugging—which he knew how to do, but had learned only because it was a way to get to put one’s arms around girls—she seemed very upper-class and intellectual-looking.

  “Well,” she said. She pursed her lips and shrugged her shoulders, as if to say Not bad, but nothing too special. “Come in. Perk and Myrna are down in the barn.”

  That was devastating, that she called her parents by their first names. He became desperately aware that he hadn’t said anything yet.

  “You’re Tucker,” he said.

  “Me Tucker. You David,” she said.

  He knew he should go along at once with this Tarzan business, but he couldn’t, because he didn’t want her to act this way.

  “Well, come on in, don’t just stand there with your face hanging out,” she said, and backed slowly away from him, beckoning with her hands.

  Thunder sounded; it seemed to hit the hill behind the house and roll down upon them and past them as it broke into pieces. Tucker went to the Victrola and put another record on—”String of Pearls”—and came up to him to dance.

  “Don’t tell me you don’t dance,” she said, and put her left arm on his shoulder. She wore perfume that smelled a little bit like spoiled oranges. As he put his arm around her back, above her narrow waist, her dark hair brushed his cheek and he looked down into her clear, hard little eyes. Her dress had exaggerated shoulders, and it was of a blue, woven material that moved in its weave under his fingers. He had trouble beginning with the rhythm, but then began to do well, for him, and after she had twirled by herself and come back to him he brought her up against him tight, the whole line of her body against him.

  “Hey! Down, boy!” she said. “You like to squeeze, huh?”

  She was a little hard, a little too aggressively muscular against him, but he was ready to forgive that. He didn’t like girls who were too doughy and limp, anyway.

  When the record ended, loud, eccentric scratching began. He wanted to hold her, yet he wanted to get his balance. He hadn’t even had time to look around t
he place before he had the girl in his arms, and that was too soon. He wanted it to happen, but it should happen according to his schedule, not someone else’s.

  The problem was solved by a dog, who appeared in the doorway with all of his teeth showing, his snarls at that pitch near strangulation that meant nothing but business. “Meet Heinz,” Tucker said calmly. “Thirty-seven varieties.”

  Heinz was a big brownish-blackish animal, with thick, wiry hair, who looked somewhat like an oversized Airedale, yet had softly hanging hound-dog ears. Though he still communicated the intent to kill, the wolf in him was gradually receding. David could tell that the hound in him was taking over, because the madness in his eyes was just a little put on; he was thinking too much.

  Tucker had been watching, and he could feel her interest in the situation like a small piece of ice against his skin. She introduced the two of them. Heinz had to go through the motions of wariness and warning, but David could see that he was coming around. He growled too threateningly to really mean it, and allowed his hound ears to be rumpled.

  It had begun to rain. Perkins and Myrna Cross came up on the porch, both dressed in yellow oilskins, and stamped and whooshed some of the water off them before they came in, their oilskins ballooning and sliding off over their arms. David’s first impression of them was one of weight and substance, and it was true that neither was small. Perkins, whom he had been told was a writer, was a tall, violently freckled man, with a high, tenor voice that could turn hard as glass. Myma was a plump, plain woman whose graying hair fell like a yoke over her shoulders. Her dress was black, with white piping, and it was somehow over-simple—one that might have been worn in the early 1800s by a girl of twelve.

  Perkins affected a Western, ranchy look, with a checked cotton flannel shirt, Bull Durham tag hanging from a breast pocket, and Levis.

  Myrna wiped some water from her face, using the back of her chubby hand, and with her face shining and wet came up to David.

  “This must be David Whipple, then!” she said in a voice that seemed too glad. She smiled, yet her smile moved, as though something were running around underneath it, trying to get loose. Parts of it would fade, and then come back into a smile again, all this happening very fast. “We’ve heard what a fine young man you are!” Because of the unfocused quality of her expression he couldn’t tell how she meant this.

  “He can even dance,” Tucker said, and at this Perkins looked stern.

  “Can you handle an ax?”

  “I think so,” David said.

  “You think so? Can you split wood and not your shins?”

  “My mother cooks on a woodstove,” David said. This, to David’s surprise, seemed to impress Perkins very much—almost to overawe him, because he immediately became conciliatory, his tone of accusation gone.

  “Hey!” he said. “Let’s show this young man where he’s going to live. You hungry? What the hell time is it? How about some grub, Myrna?”

  The room they were in was called the library. On unfinished shelves all around it, even above and below the windows, were, they told him, a thousand books. The furniture consisted of several Morris chairs with marble-topped tables next to them on which stood oil mantle lamps—machines he was going to have to learn to run—the chest-high Victrola and a potbellied stove that was meticulously blacked and polished. Its brass trim shone too, and David appreciated how much work had gone into that job. When he commented upon it Tucker looked at him disgustedly, and Perkins assumed a rather complicated expression, which seemed to approve and yet be terribly bothered at the same time. Tucker, David later found, had been forced to clean and polish the stove, and so it was still a touchy subject among them. With this first error of his constraining him, he was shown the rest of the house.

  The living room was long and narrow; the bay window took up the whole front end of it, and at one end was a dining area with a long harvest table dominated by a huge highboy that tilted ominously forward, suggesting that sometime it might crash over onto the table, smashing dishes and lamps and heads.

  They went upstairs, where he was shown his bedroom, a small neat room with a high old-fashioned metal bed, a desk, chair and lamp. The one window looked across the yard beneath the high branches of the pines; the view stopped where the road entered the black spruce.

  “Your suitcase!” Myrna suddenly shouted, so loudly she might have been calling to someone a hundred yards away. David jumped, but neither Tucker nor Perkins seemed to notice anything strange at all; they might have been deaf.

  “It’s all right,” David said nervously. “It’s tin, so it won’t leak.” Again he felt he’d said something wrong. Myrna gave no sign of response, and never mentioned the suitcase again.

  They went downstairs, and he was shown, by lamplight, the earth cellar, where eggs lay in crocks under water glass. Everything that could possibly be preserved in jars was preserved—meat, berries, vegetables, even a green vegetable he’d never heard of before, called lambs’ quarters. There were all sorts of mushrooms, some looking like sea plants and animals, with strange, meaty tentacles that seemed to suck against the glass. The cellar smelled of earth, but also of cool, tangy things like horse radish and crushed potato skin. In another, deeper cellar room a half-carcass of a sheep hung on a mean-looking hook between damp, sawdust-leaking boards. Behind the boards, Perkins proudly told him, were thousands of pounds of ice he’d cut himself on Diddle-neck Pond.

  “Some of that ice is from the year before last,” Perkins said. “That’s how cold it is down here. The only thing we have to import is the goddam mail!” Then he added in an irritated voice, “And milk, damn it. Our goddam cow—”

  “Martha,” Myrna said, and Perkins scowled at her.

  “Our goddam cow went dry on us. Got to get her freshened up, or whatever it is. I don’t understand cows, and I don’t like cows. There’s always some damn thing going wrong with their plumbing.”

  The wood-burning furnace, Perkins told him, was in a separate cellar altogether, so the earth cellar would stay cool. “We’ll be cutting wood. You sure you know how to split wood?”

  “I like to split wood,” David said, and then, tentatively, he tried to make a little joke. “I just don’t like to carry it.”

  “Well, you better get over that,” Perkins said seriously, and David could think of nothing at all to say; again the ensuing silence seemed to have a heavy, unspeakable meaning.

  When they came up into daylight again, they went into the big kitchen with its black range and water-heating coils, heavy slate sinks and zinc-covered counters. Here Myrna took on more authority, and rather gaily, as if she knew that Perkins wouldn’t interrupt her here, showed David her collection of herbs, many of them grown in her own herb garden.

  “Smell!” she ordered him, holding a small jar under his nose. It smelled like the brown ointment he’d once had to smear on his hand after a firecracker had printed blood blisters all over his palm and fingers. Another jar smelled like the inside of his father’s car when it was new. “That’s one I don’t know the name of,” Myrna said, “but doesn’t it smell funny?”

  He agreed. He considered telling her it smelled like the inside of a new car, but by now he’d come to feel that they either didn’t hear him, or that they resented his venturing anything more than yes or no.

  “I can’t find it in any book! So! You know what we think?” She cocked her head like a gray-haired bird, her arch, tremulous smile flickering at him. He shook his head.

  “We think it’s a varietal—a sort of freak! It looks like partridgeberry, but the fruit is bluish! Isn’t that interesting?”

  “Very interesting,” he said, playing it safe.

  When the rain stopped, and his only slightly damp belongings had been arranged in his room and its small closet, Perkins took him on a tour of the barns. Heinz accompanied them this time, but he wouldn’t actually go into the barns. He stood rigid in the doorways, with his tail stiffly curled down between his legs, and gave out low howls, so
soft and hollow they seemed to come from somewhere inside David’s own head. Tucker had come down after them, and as she came up behind Heinz she gave him a little push. He screamed, turned with his paws kicking up straw and manure, and nearly knocked her over on his way out.

  “What’s the matter with him?” David asked.

  “He’s afraid of the animals,” Perkins said.

  “Especially he’s afraid of Lucifer. Lucifer chases him all over the place,” Tucker said.

  “Lucifer?”

  “You’ll see him,” Perkins said. “Just don’t let him get behind you.”

  “He’s a black ram, but he looks more like a goat,” Tucker said.

  “He’s a beautiful goddam animal,” Perkins said. “The only thing is, he’s got too damn much karakul in him.”

  They stood in the wide doorway of the first barn, on hard earth, scattered hay and sheep droppings—little messes of blackberries. David’s eyes had adjusted to the gloom inside, and in the light from the high door and from between the shrunken boards, he could make out a high, hay-filled loft at one end, and a platform that ran along the length of the barn. Below were pens of various sizes, with all the gates open, and in them and beside them dim, woolly things lay or moved, skittish and sullen, like prisoners, blatting now and then for no apparent reason.

  Something bigger moved, back in a corner, and the ewes stamped nervously, then several of them stampeded away from whatever it was, swirled at the wooden bars and came out the pen door, hysterical blats issuing from their sober faces. The faces never changed; they might have been carved from gray-black stone. The ewes stopped in front of them and stamped their feet, and Lucifer, his black curly horns and hair shining like coal, pranced on his long legs out behind them. He paid no attention to the three people, but in the light of the doorway mounted one of the immobilized ewes. His bright red penis, bright as blood, stabbed past the dingleberries, in and out of the black folds of the ewe. Neither sheep changed expression at all, although it seemed to David that the gnarled horn and curved bone of their faces had been carved into such violent immobility they must have been aware of pain and death. He watched—there was nothing else to see—and out of the corners of his eyes saw Tucker and her father watching Lucifer’s gaunt spasms over the stolid ewe. He was embarrassed, yet because there was nothing else to see, nowhere to turn that wouldn’t put him face to face with another witness to the act, he had to watch until Lucifer uncurled his forelegs and let the ewe run back into the darkness.