Whipple's Castle (19 page)

Now it was daylight. A gray winter day. Tiny cracks of light crept down the interstices of his covers to his eyes. A dreary day that would come with its hesitant light to the walls of the house and stop, leaving off at the windows so the house still ruled its inner places. A cold day with the sky one chilly gray cloud. It was a particular day, he remembered now—it was the day his mother would take him on the bus to Northlee and have his eyes examined for glasses so he would be able to see all the tiny distant things again, and read the writing on the blackboard without having to sit in the front row in sight of everyone—even then squinting and pondering the chalky fragments of words upon the board.

Strange how he could see Leverah so clearly, even to the whiskers of her mustache, all down the length of his room—this without looking at her. It was another proof he didn't need that she was of his mind. Or rather a proof he couldn't use. The geometry of his fear was beyond his power to solve, but there must be a system to it, a way to make syllogisms out of it. Once in plain geometry Mr. Collins said they were using a system based upon logic rather than measurement. He would need an even more complicated system, and there must be one somewhere, either invented or waiting for invention, to solve Leverah and the others—the scaled ones, the hairless ones. There must be a solution, because he had never been told that he must die, and if he couldn't solve it he would not be able to go on living. Some night he would die of fear; their coldness and cruelty would enter his body like frost, and he would die.

He was not afraid so much of real bullies, though they did sometimes come after him, or waylay him—Keith Joubert, Junior Stevens and that bunch. With them he feared more what they might make him do to them. He couldn't trust his strength because he broke even what he didn't want to break, and hurt those he loved. He saw Mabel Andrews' tooth lying in the water fountain, her very tooth, forever broken from her, a jewel not ever again to be part of her prettiness, and her howling, gapped face turned toward him, a reflection of his brutishness.

When they heard him think this, they smiled and moved stiff as puppets from his darkest closet. Now they dared him even in daylight. If only he had the warning system he had planned in such desperate detail. He would have a little contact switch on the end of a cord connected to a dry cell beneath his bed. Lamp cord would lead from it, beneath his door, beneath the hall carpet down to Wood's room. When they had him immobilized he would ring for Wood to come and banish them. He never dared suggest this to Wood, because in Wood's presence he was out of danger, and therefore somewhat ashamed of his fear. His whole life, his whole metabolism changed when Wood was there; his brain worked differently, his heart beat slower, and each breath seemed to take more oxygen from the air. Then, too,
they
had implied that they were his secret alone, that there was some certain danger not only to him but to his family if his knowledge of them were to be shared.

But there had to be some kind of accommodation with them. There had to be. And it was his responsibility to bring this about. Perhaps if he had an animal to keep him company…Or would they then kill it nightly, as they flayed and burned the little puppy? Each time he could not believe their cruelty; knowing in advance what they were going to do to the little dog, he could not believe it, and when they slyly took the friendly, wagging little animal by the loose skin of his back, made a quick slit and ripped down, the pain was bright and fresh each time. Suddenly to have no skin. No skin!

David skinned his squirrels on a board with a big nail in it. He impaled a squirrel's head on the nail, cut a slit around the back of the neck and pulled the gray lofted fur, the blue slick skin rolling inside out in the shape of a tube, right off the dark red muscle. He watched David do this with great wonder; it was so foreign to anything he expected of a person, a human, a brother. David might as well have been an armadillo, or an aardvark. But then, why did he expect everyone to be unforeign to him? He was the strange one, battered by and battering all their arrangements, from tables and chairs to flesh and bones. Before the tomcat, Tom, had died or strayed or whatever had happened to him last spring—before he had disappeared, Horace had seen him be cruel beyond belief to chipmunks. David said that it was totally natural, and it would do no good at all to chase Tom, who ran away perplexed that Horace should object to his preparing and eating his food. The chipmunk in the cat's jaws didn't struggle, but his black eyes blazed with life. He knew he was in a mouth. When the cat let him go he braced, and arched his skimpy little tail, and defied the cat, who licked his pink chops fiercely and approved. If the chipmunk turned to run, a claw flicked into his side and pulled him back into the sharp teeth again. And again. And finally, after an eternity of hope and despair and little punctures, ate on him. If it was a mouse he'd caught, he ate him head first, crunch crunch, tail and all. Then found the sun and slept a natural sleep.

David was natural, of course. And Kate was natural, and Wood, and his father and mother. They were all natural. Even poor Peggy was natural. They all slid safely past the hard elbows and horrors of the world, slept deep and woke rested and dry. Even though his father's leg hurt, he could lie down without terror. Where he was was his property, and he ruled. His father owned oceans of cool air that he could breathe freely out of the dark.

He shivered in the cold oil of his sweat, and his thin bedclothes crept against his skin. Perhaps someone alive would come to wake him.

“We will wake you,” sang their thin, gleeful voices. “We will wake you, Hoar-ass.” How they laughed; they made sure to use their immeasurable power. Now they moved, still pretending to be puppets, back into the dark closet. One was Zoster, who always watched to see if Horace forgot and left a foot or a hand or an ear uncovered, then crept up with an expression of high glee on his metal-colored, shiny face, and put his great hollow mouth over whatever part Horace had left exposed. The triangular teeth, like sawteeth, came down just so as not to touch the skin, and Horace could not then snatch his flesh out of that mouth. If it had him over his ear, he heard the click of swallowing and the damp creamy hiss of saliva. Around Zoster was always an aura, the cold earth of a cellar.

“Hoar-ass, Hoar-ass,” they called. Some were little. The Herpes were nasty and tiny, nasty even to each other. They were the conductors and spectators of his nightmares. They brought him to that point in space, somewhere near the center of orbits, where the smooth roads ran radially from the point of responsibility, where the round tires ran down toward disaster. That dream was in color, and the roads were of smooth green and purple and red rubbery stuff, with fine black wires supporting them. The tires were pure white. And the disaster he was always about to cause would destroy the universe. The universe, all of it. “All because of Horace Sleeper Whipple, Horace Sleeper Whipple,” the Herpes chirped at him, like a flock of evil sparrows. “It's all your fault, it's all your fault, your responsibility, your responsibility!” They cried this over and over, as if he didn't know it!

The Town Hall bell rang, and he tried to count, but the bells followed one another raggedly, fading or coming on a vagary of the atmosphere harsh and clear. He counted eight or nine clangs, or maybe only seven. He could risk leaving his damp bed for a different discomfort among the people downstairs, where he would become entangled again in all their complications and judgments. A world full of elbows and eyes. But Wood would be down there, maybe, if he hadn't already left for work. No, of course he would have left for work long ago, and Kate and David would be ready to go to school. A shiver of surprise and fear, and then he remembered that he hadn't been awakened because he was not going to school today, but to the eye clinic in Northlee. So his mother had let him sleep longer among his monsters.

Carefully he pulled his head around and uncovered his face to the chilly white air. His brown cold room, lighted down its length by the winter day, was empty, sinister and baldly innocent.

 

Henrietta stood in front of the woodstove, the black iron baking of its inner heat. She tipped a lid and looked into the firebox-fluffy gray ash like feathers around the embering center—and added two thin split sticks of maple. Harvey, who was, if anything, merely irritated by the war, would defend this stove's economy for patriotic reasons. She really didn't mind too much, but did her part for the war effort with a strange sense of nostalgia. Most of the official directives on how to save and serve were no different from those she had learned as a child in Switches Corners. She saved grease and made lye soap, aged all store-bought toilet soap out of its wrappers to harden it so it would last longer, saved all trimmings of meat for stocks and gravies. Extra fat she saved in tin cans and sold to the butcher at the cash market. This fat was supposedly necessary for explosives, or maybe for greasing gun barrels, or something of that sort. In any case, she had never in her life thrown out perfectly good fat; most of these patriotic gestures were automatic.

Harvey would have periods when he demanded petty little savings in things, but not from interest in the war effort. One week he would watch the light bulbs, and everyone who left a light on, even to cross the room, would be told to come back and turn it off. Then something else would be the most important. Wood wasn't being economical with coal; he was using the fire door as an extra draft, or he wasn't running a big enough fire bed, or he wasn't keeping the ash pit clean enough. Or they were having meat too often. And then, for a week at a time, Harvey ignored economies, and demanded heat and light.

Burning coal instead of oil did save money, but she wondered how they were going to manage next winter, when Wood and David (if she could arrange David's living somewhere in Cascom, near Dexter-Benham) would both be gone. Horace could not be depended upon to take care of a coal fire. For one thing, he was afraid of the basement. She would do it, she supposed, but she sensed a hard little force of rebellion in her mind against such grimy duty. She might very well refuse; in fact, she predicted that she would refuse, and Harvey Whipple would have to think of some alternative. Period.

Harvey's alternative would be that David stay in Leah High School and take care of the furnace, but that was out. She was not a pushing, promoting, sacrificing mother, far from it, but David was loafing in Leah High School. He was bored, impatient, and tended more and more to leave the world and go into his private little hobbies and fantasies. Dexter-Benham seemed to be the solution, so she would find the way. If he lived in Cascom, the day-student fee would not be too much, and Harvey would simply have to put up with it.

In the meantime she stood at the stove, saving vital war materials—in this case little bits of hand soap she had collected in a cup. Now she was melting these little chips down in a quart of water to make soap jelly for shampoo and for washing rayons and underthings. That would save Harvey Whipple twenty or thirty cents, anyway, and he could add that amount to the financial empire he was planning.

They had enlarged the old kitchen garden into a Victory Garden, and that summer and fall she and Peggy and Kate, with some help from David and Horace, had canned twenty-one quarts of green beans, twelve quarts of wax beans, thirteen quarts of Swiss chard, thirty-five quarts of tomatoes, twelve quarts of sour pickles, eight quarts of cucumber pickles, eight quarts of mustard relish, thirteen quarts of beets—ten sweet and three Harvard-style—fourteen quarts of carrots, five quarts of dandelion greens, ten quarts of raspberries and twenty-odd glasses of raspberry jelly, twenty-five quarts of apples and twenty-eight quarts of corn. And in cool storage in the cellar were cabbages, turnips and potatoes. Last March she had tapped all the maple trees around the house and grounds and boiled down five gallons of syrup. There were the figures, tacked to the bulletin board above the shelves for sugar and coffee ration coupons, bills and household notebooks. Harvey let her do all the household figuring, and he certainly had nothing to complain about. He knew she saved him a lot of money, and when his thrift tantrums came she always had in reserve a stern look that would calm him down considerably.

She stirred the soap emulsion with a long, enameled spoon, and when all the pieces had melted she set the pan on the sideboard to cool. Horace ought to be up by now. He hated to go to bed and he hated to get up. No one could understand him. He wasn't stupid; even Mr. Skelton said he wasn't stupid. And he wasn't unfeeling—he worshiped Wood. He was going to take Wood's leaving very hard, and she had explained this to David and Kate before they'd left for school. Both had looked away, perplexed, possibly a little ashamed of their indifference. But what could they do about it?

“We love Horace,” Kate said. “He's our brother, after all. Don't we, Davy?” And David, pursing his lips judiciously, nodded.

“Oh, that's easy to say!” she said angrily, and when Kate's face fell she was sorry she'd said it. God knew, a girl Kate's age had enough problems without having to be responsible for a crazy brother. Crazy? She squeezed the dishtowel in her hands. Was he mental? Of course she'd thought about that, even though any child's eccentricities came on slowly over the years and tended to seem natural for him, and thus natural to his mother. But suddenly she really wondered if he were
certifiable
in any way. Stealing that money, not to have it but to punish those he stole it from, and throwing it away! And from men, really, not boys any longer. Gordon Ward was now a man, in the Army, and that was getting dangerous. The police had to speak to Wood about Horace, and thank God, Chief Tuttle was the DeMolay adviser and knew Wood so well. Sooner or later Horace would be too old to be protected as a child, and there wouldn't be anyone around to protect him.