Whipple's Castle

by Thomas Williams

  The brilliant edges of leaves cut his eyes; suddenly his ears popped open, and the buzz and whine of all the woods insects assaulted him with the benevolent violence of an orchestra.

  “Well!” he said. There was his little truck waiting faithfully, but with Horace’s folded clothes on the front seat. He had to go back to Leah.

  Balchers’ Funeral Home was an old Victorian mansion nearly as large and omate as the Whipples’ house. Its smooth modern improvements of paint and siding, and of heavy, somnolent plantings, proved it no residence, however. The chaste sign hung by the walk on a miniature scaffold, lighted at night by small floodlights sunken into the turf.

  He knew Phil Balcher, the son, pretty well. In high school Phil had been one of those quiet, solitary yet unlonesome people everyone knew were destined to grow up and become what they had always intended to become.

  David parked among quite a few other cars in the carefully tended gravel parking lot next to the big house and walked, bearing Horace’s clothes, toward what he took to be the side entrance. The weight of the whiskey had lodged in the back of his head, still working because he felt his imagination to be too free and dangerous, too eager for any new sights he might feed into it. He had to choose Horace’s coffin, for one thing. Should he look at them all, he wondered, ponder this and that advantage, this color against that? Phil would be proud of his wares, he knew.

  Last night he had been too late to see Horace. As he ran through the woods behind the dim beam of his flashlight, he missed a turn in the trail, lost the trail altogether and had to climb slowly toward the reservoir through the ten-year-old blow-down from the 1938 hurricane. When he got to the old air-raid tower, only a few of the vigilantes still hunkered around the place where Horace had died, talking it over, reliving their excitement. None of the men recognized him. They sat around a small fire, the huge pine columns of the tower looming up like a giant’s legs, their rifles and shotguns, the tools of hunters and soldiers, familiar in their hands, in their laps or leaning against their necks. David’s rifle, if he had been armed, would have lain as easily cradled against his own body. He stood at the periphery of the light. The stairs to the tower had rotted, he noticed, in the humidity of the woods. He soon learned that Horace’s body had already been taken away.

  Now Horace was in this building somewhere, embalmed, he supposed, or whatever they did now. It was not a subject that had ever before been of immediacy for him. The side entrance was rigged for deliveries, with a ramp. He opened the wide door and went into a hallway. Gray gun-metal coffins were stacked along one side on brackets made of ordinary galvanized plumbing pipe. He knew he was not in a place for visitors, yet a ghostlike push of momentum made him walk aggressively forward. He would go anywhere, open any door. At the end of the hall was a door with a window of frosted glass, the glass glowing with the antiseptic white of fluorescent light in the place beyond. He would always know that he had read that lucid, clinical light for what it was, known and chosen to enter in order to sear his eyes.

  He pushed the door open and entered the bright room. Color on his left, among whites and the busy chrome of table legs, tubes and faucets, made him turn toward lively reds and oranges. On a table lay a long body, on its back, legs slightly spread. It was Horace’s face there, its crude bones beneath the silent skin, mouth gaped open like a retch so the broad upper teeth were visible. But the whole body was open, from crotch to neck, and the inside of that vessel gleamed as fresh as any meat on display. The insides of the ribs were silvery clean against the rare red meat, the wide columns arching upward toward the slit, tough binding of skin. The chemical reek was not from the body; it came from the walls or ceiling, so strong it seemed to disinfect vision itself. He could not stop the cataloguing, never thought of turning away. There was no heart in the splayed body, no liver or lights, no orts. The gaping mouth seemed to scream silently, the whole body protesting, as though the split chest itself were a toothed mouth. It had been cleaned like a beef, like a sheep, emptied to the neck. There was the pale esophagus cut off, a perfect O. There were the spine’s knuckles, the hollow of belly, the bush of blond hair and the slack penis, the wormy bag of testicles dark as though bruised between the great gray thighs. But it was the red meat, the naked muscles glowing fresh red, that he would take with him like a treasure to ponder over. The scars on legs and arms, the old healed scars, were white basted seams. Below the bulge of brow the eyes were darkly sunken like dried puddles. It was all so silent, that meat. Horace’s big hands, palms up, never closed. Away from the empty place, as they were, they still seemed capable, as did the feet with their working calluses, of human movement. But all was still as a photograph, now merely dead extensions of the red center.

  Someone gasped. He turned to see Phil Balcher, pale, in a white apron stained pink, staring at him. Phil’s lips moved as he tore the apron off. A string broke, David noticed, clearly understanding Phil’s dismay. He felt his expression turn into the calm friendliness of meeting. A smile signaled itself to his eyes and cheeks—friendly, more than polite. Phil stared in awe.

  “Hi, Phil,” David’s voice said. “I’ve brought the suit and shirt.” He was aware of the meat there on the table, the non-witness.

  “Come!” Phil said, pointing to a door. “Come!”

  Phil looked sick, and David wanted to reassure him. “I guess I came in the wrong door,” he said, walking calmly toward the door Phil had pointed to.

  “I’ve got to wash my hands!” Phil nearly cried. “Wait out there! Danger of disease, you know!”

  Near the door, David noticed another table with chromed legs on casters as large as the wheels of a child’s wagon. A sheet covered the obvious form of a body—the cliff of feet, the heavy mounds of torso and head.

  “Who’s that?” he asked.

  “Wait outside!” Phil’s dismayed voice cried. When David looked again, matter-of-factly, reassuringly, at Horace’s table, Phil stared, horrified. How could he tell Phil it was all right? He himself was gravely calm, nonchalant.

  “This door?” he enquired politely, taking the handle.

  Phil grimaced as he nodded.

  David entered an ordinary office furnished with desks and filing cabinets, calendar, clock, typewriter. He sat in a comfortable old swivel chair; the suit, shirt and ties in his lap. He had brought all three ties, thinking that Phil could choose the one he preferred. He wanted to be considerate of Phil, who was not a bad guy, really.

  Phil came out, frowning. He’d combed his black hair smoothly away from his pale forehead, and he looked somehow lacquered, hair and skin. Even his white shirt and black necktie gleamed. That necktie could never be untied, David was certain. The glassy knot must have been molded into it.

  Phil stared at him. “You were never very close?” he asked.

  “Close?”

  “You and Horace.”

  “You mean just now?” David asked.

  “No, I mean…in life.”

  “Why?”

  “He’s not ready. They did a complete autopsy, you know. They always do in such cases.” Phil was still horrified by what David had so calmly seen, and David observed this with wonder.

  “I’ve seen dead bodies before,” he said. He counted them: three soldiers lying beside the deuce-and-a-half that had been hit by the short round. One arm was several feet away, still looking exactly like an arm and a hand, wrist watch and wedding ring attached. An old lady hit by a car in Seattle, her silver-rimmed glasses in her gray hair as though she had just pushed them up, her pocketbook strap still around her arm. The grammar-school janitor, the only Negro in Leah, lying in the satin sheets of his coffin. A million in the newsreels and movies, blown apart, shot, bumed, starved to death. So why was Phil upset?

  “Here are the clothes. You can pick the necktie you like best,” he said.

  Phil took the clothes and put them on a hanger, the shirt neatly over the suit coat. “You weren’t very close to Horace, then?”

  Phil evidently implie
d that the pile of meat in there was Horace. Why must he say that? Did the son of a bitch want to make him admit something?

  “Are you going to sell me a coffin?”

  “A casket,” Phil said, correcting him. Phil put on his suit coat before he led David into the next room. Here were soft carpets, reddish warm lights, flowers, coffins—caskets—sedately elevated to chest level. Each had a discreet small price tag hanging on one of its handles.

  “What’s the cheapest one?” David asked. He smiled at Phil, the slightest edge of cruelty flickering like a knife in his mind. He thought of the possibilities. He wanted to laugh because Phil was all puckered up in distaste. The possibilities seemed enormously interesting.

  “How about a plain old pine box, Phil? I always liked the shape of a good old coffin. Pardon me—casket. You know, the kind that’s wider at the shoulders? I mean all these here are too round. They all look like Pullman cars—you know what I mean?”

  “We’ve never carried anything like that. You want a metal interior lining to keep out—”

  “To keep out what, Phil? Why do you want to keep anything out?”

  “And a cement vault,” Phil said with no apparent expression. “The vault keeps the turf from sinking. The vault only costs a hundred and fifty dollars, and it’s a good investment.”

  Suddenly David was confused. The possibilities had come jumbling through his mind—all the old, sick undertaker jokes—and he could no longer entertain any of them. It was too late, of course, for poor Phil’s approval, but he would not continue. He would not discuss investment, the etymology of the word. He would invest Horace’s body in a vault that was, or was not, vaulted. He would place his deciding hand upon one of these streamlined, pompously decorated caskets, all of which, upon closer examination, resembled new Buicks. He would not—could not—invest his guilt within the soft satin interiors that looked so comfortable until he felt his own butt cold and dead down in there. The logic of that comfort nauseated him. He would rather take Horace into the woods and dig him a good, deep hole. He and Kate and Peggy would lower him down on ropes, and Wood would say the proper words over his empty brother while Harvey and Henrietta Whipple stood with bowed heads and understanding hearts. Just the family, who would understand why it had been necessary for Horace to blow Gordon Ward’s head into fragments. Sometimes such things were just. But what a gruesome weight of his own murderous failure pressed down upon this vision.

  He grew dizzy, and under the pretext of looking along the bottom of a fat casket lowered his head so the blood could return to it. Mainly he had to get out of here.

  Phil took his arm in a surprisingly strong hand. “I’ll show you what we can do,” he said, and led David out of the showroom, down a carpeted hallway and through a curtained arch. Soft organ music murmured from behind purple curtains, and on a dais in soft pastel lights was an open casket surrounded by cut flowers. The lights were peach-colored, warm as were all the colors of the room. Urns of pastel metal and pastel glass grew lush ferns in all the corners of the raised dais, and the sleeping head of a plump young man lay on a silken pillow at the very center of all the warmth. The still face, eyes closed and hair neatly combed, glowed as though lighted from within by real blood.

  There were murmuring voices behind him, and Phil turned him toward the chairs at the rear of the little theater, where somberly dressed people stood muted or sat with heads bowed. The organ squeaked, high as the smallest mouse above the basal hum of its chords. The soft lights themselves, coming from hidden sources, seemed to press the sweet perfume into his nose and mouth. He looked at his own hand, and it was peach-colored, glowing as waimly as the cheek of the dead young man.

  Standing at the rear of the room, among the live people, was someone he recognized—Mr. Caswell, the mailman. And next to him was Mrs. Caswell, short and bundled by her flesh. She was the main person, the one the others came toward with formal, dipping steps, to touch her hand and move their lips above her. He looked back to the center of the lights. Was that Ben there in the casket, silently glowing? They all glowed in this heady light, everybody. Even Mr. Caswell’s ordinarily pale, skinny face seemed to have fleshed out in the numinous light.

  “See?” Phil said in his ear. “Doesn’t he look well? Do you see how it comforts them to see him for the last time looking well?”

  God, it was Ben, his friend, once the friend he used to fight practically to the death, whose bony strength used to frighten him—strength that came, he always believed, from the ice-sharp will in the skinny body. Maybe it was that will that had kept him alive all these years in the hospital. He turned to Phil, who wouldn’t let him go or let him turn. “Oh,” he said.

  “Straighten your tie and go give your condolences to his mother,” Phil ordered. “Ben was your friend.”

  David turned on him, suddenly furious beyond words. “Who the! How the!” he whispered, choking on the air in his throat. “Who the hell are you?”

  “Shame,” said the just, unctuous voice.

  David tore his arm loose, or was at the last moment let loose, and walked in slow motion toward the quiet group, toward the toothy murmurs of the old man who now leaned over Mrs. Caswell. He waited in line, knowing none of these old people with their soft colors and brittle hair, the women all fat and stooped. When it was his turn, Mrs. Caswell looked up, surprised, and smiled sadly at him. “Why, it’s David Whipple!” she said breathily. There were no tears in her wrinkled, powdery eyes, and suddenly David was on Ben’s side, overcome with grief for Ben. The skinny enemy and friend rode his freakish giraffe of a bike down High Street on the way to school again. David squeezed her white-gloved hand, and she said, “Oh! My arthritis, David!” He let go her hand and saw her count, calculate his tears. “David was Ben’s oldest friend,” she said to the others. Which was probably true. “Go up and see him, David,” she said. “He looks so well. It’s really a blessing. It’s really a blessing. And David, tell your mother how sorry we are about her loss.”

  When he shook Mr. Caswell’s bony hand, as if in shy agreement they avoided each other’s eyes.

  David approached the dais and cast his eyes upon the young waxen stranger. It was not the Ben who meant power and will, but an older, softer person who had somehow been corrupted by the compromising years. David was not moved; he would never let this soft, glowing imitation take Ben’s place in his memory.

  He went home. At supper, unaware, he took meat upon his plate and stared down at the pale red juices. His intent to eat of the murdered flesh twisted in his throat until he had to leave the table.

  The Whipples survived the week of the funerals. Wood and David attended Gordon Ward’s funeral at the Congregational Church. After the ceremony he was bome by the Legion to his grave, the Drum and Bugle Corps bravely executing the slow march in their blue and silver finery. Keith Joubert played taps in the bright, windy day, the silver echoes flying on the wind across the cemetery, around the white church and across the square. Mrs. Ward was either frozen or brave; her husband and her friends surrounded her whenever she had to stand. Harvey did not attend. That afternoon Wood spoke to Gordon, Sr., and later that evening Gordon, Sr., called Harvey on the telephone. They spoke for more than half an hour, and afterward Harvey found it possible to speak to his family again.

  They all attended Horace’s funeral, again at the Congregational Church, Reverend Bledsoe officiating. The pallbearers were David, Wood, John Cotter, Foster Greenwood, Robert Paquette, and Joseph Foss, friends of David’s and Wood’s. After the church ceremony they carried Horace past Gordon’s fresh grave, the slit turf still clearly outlined, to the Whipple plot where people of other centuries, grandparents, great-aunts and -uncles were buried. Horace seemed a strange addition to that ancient company, none of whom he had ever known. Sally De Oestris didn’t walk the hundred yards to the grave, and when the last prayer was over, Peggy picked her up at the church.

  They found themselves—Harvey, Henrietta, Wood, David, Kate, Peggy and Sally—in the gre
at hall of the Whipples’ house. They were all alive, dry-eyed, and in each was the tiny guilt-flutter of relief. Waves of sorrow, that ebb tide, would wash over each of them at unexpected moments. The mother’s breast would suffer the ghost thumps of another’s need. They would close their eyes and be imperiled by visions of Horace as a child crying in pain and embarrassment, such as the time he walked toward them holding his arm above the place where it should not have bent. Henrietta would see his red, roaring face in the hallway, at the cellar door. She would jump to keep his ghost from tearing off hinges. But the tide of memory could only recede.

  The sunlight fell through the high, arched windows in sedate, rather misty columns. The parquet floor, the oriental rugs, the heavy furniture—everything seemed to proclaim its substantiality. Henrietta, feeling the sweet ache of tiredness in her legs, sat down with the rest of them for a moment before seeing to the kitchen. She had nothing to see to there, but it was her place to keep track of. They were all silent for a while.

  “So,” Harvey said at last, and they nodded, or at least breathed an easy breath of assent. They were all still alive. Though death might be the next welcome (Sally thought this, and looked at the young people for better news), all their own complications of fear and desire still operated on this bright September day. Already they had begun to look to themselves and to each other for signs and portents.