Whipple's Castle (2 page)

“Horace come back here!”

He had to stop. He turned to see his father's face—white, black across the eyes where the power was. The island of force that was his father in his chair was blurred by tears, prismatic and shattered.

“Shut the front door and pick up all that crap that came out of the umbrella stand!”

He had to do it.

 

When Horace came back through the living room, so obviously trying to be careful, to walk softly, Harvey tried to make himself smile at the boy, to do something like putting out a hand, or to thank him for getting the aspirin on a stormy night. But then he thought: Who could answer a smile, or any friendly thing, after having been treated like that? And so he watched as Horace went through the dining-room archway toward the kitchen. Then he took three aspirin dry and swallowed until they let go of the back of his tongue, leaving their little trail of taste.

 

When Horace came into the long, dark kitchen, he startled his mother. He always startled people; they always looked up at him with open, surprised faces that turned nervous and slightly shifty in the eyes, because they were thinking what was the matter with him. And how they could protect themselves.

“Horace, what's the matter?” his mother asked.

He had no answer, and she no longer expected one, although her eyes, behind her thick glasses for far-sightedness, were wide, and always seemed to be asking. They moved upon a different axis than the rest of her face; they moved too far each way, too quickly. Without her glasses her blue eyes were darker. She was small and strong, and when she took his arm to lead him safely around the table where plates and glasses were stacked, he knew she was thinking he might break them. She took off his mackinaw and hung it on the clothes bar over the black woodstove, and sat him down next to the heat. Drops of water fell and bounced furiously on the stove before they burned into vapor that had a dry, cisterny smell.

“Did you see anybody downstreet?” she asked.

He knew she thought of them seeing her son who had stolen the money from the school lockers.

“Mr. and Mrs. Trask, and Prudence.”

“That's all?”

“Nobody else was in the store.”

“Were the snowplows out?”

“Yeah.”

“Oh, Horace!” she said, and put her dish-soaked warm hand on his neck. She had so often asked her son what the matter was that this question had become her standard greeting to him. Something was always the matter.

Nearly everyone in Leah knew something was wrong with Horace Whipple, but many of the theories about him were irreconcilable, mutually exclusive, paradoxical. He was too big for his age, but so were others. In school he pushed Mabel Andrews' head down on the drinking fountain and broke her tooth: why did he do it? “Why did you do it, Horace?” his mother had asked him, but he couldn't answer. When he became upset his long, rounded face turned dull and immobile, and his eyes grew so still she felt that no beating, no prodding of any kind could change his expression. He would just go farther and farther away, though his body might skittishly quiver, as it had one time she slapped him. His coarse blond hair quivered that time, and she would never forget the way he'd brought his head up again, as if to wait for the next blow.

When he was in first grade a little boy called him “Horse” because the little boy really thought his name was Horse, and the name remained with him—no one's choice; an accident. He broke windows with his elbows, but did he want to break them? His very desk in school, a desk made of cast iron and hardwood that had supported generations of violent children, broke. Miss Colchester, who had been his teacher in the fifth grade, said, “He has a way of leaning on things so that their very weakest places are under stress.” He was not a stupid boy, nor was he mean, but after he broke Mabel Andrews' tooth, no one could blame her mother for calling it mean. Mabel knew it was love, and she had been scared, almost hysterical afterwards.

If Horace's brother Wood was making a model airplane, Horse was not allowed to enter Wood's room. If his brother David was in his room, handloading black powder cartridges, it was the same. If his sister Kate had discovered a bolt of cloth in the attic and was transforming her room into an Arab tent, Horace was not allowed. In the kitchen he was carefully watched, and at the Whipples'round dining table, the chairs were always arranged so that Horace's arc of space was several degrees wider than the others'.

Was he simply awkward? He walked and ran with powerful grace. In school he was very good in mathematics and general science; things like leverage, gear directions, speeds and ratios, strangely enough, were transparently simple for him. Why, then, in laboratory period, did he break the wooden arm over the fulcrum?

He couldn't tell them because he had already acted, and the disaster had already occurred—the splintering, the always amazed groans and laughter of his classmates. But he had seen the pure, clean power of the lever, and acted upon it. He had perceived too quickly that he might lift the world; only afterwards, when it was too late, did he find that he had no place on which to stand.

Henrietta had been standing abstractedly, her hand still on Horace's neck. She felt the cords like ropes leading into his shoulders. When she was a little girl she had lived on a hill farm in Switches Comers—a place now all fallen in and grown up with trees—and she had a heifer she had to take care of. In a way she grew to love the gawky animal, yet it was always a terrible bother and responsibility. In it she had felt the same skittish strength that never seemed to yield willingly, yet did yield because of need. She could feel its brute push against the bucket when she fed it, and sometimes when it shied it would bang its bony head against a stanchion so hard, she feared it, and feared for it. Yet it never seemed to feel a blow.

“Will you get me some wood, dear?” she said. “And call them for supper?”

When he stood up she kept her hand on him, to guide him a little, and he knew it; she was afraid he would touch the stove.

“You've got a bad bump on the back of your head. Where did that come from?”

“I backed into a tree outside,” he said. He had long ago given up trying to explain his accidents in any rational way. He merely told the truth, or part of it.

“But why would you back into a tree?” She did care, he knew; her voice grew breathy, and her large eyes moved back and forth as though asking him “Why?”

He shrugged, wondering, now he thought of it, if he might have got that bump from the underside of his father's table.

“Oh, Horace,” she said, and turned away.

He went out into the unheated shed to get the wood, an armful of split ash that he picked up all at once. He didn't bother to pile it a stick at a time into his arm, and so he skinned his knuckles, trying to worm his hand through the splintery pile. He came back into the heat and let the wood rumble into the woodbox.

“Don't shut the cover!” his mother said quickly, and then he saw that the wood came over the top of the woodbox so that the cover wouldn't have been able to close tight. But he wouldn't have broken the hinges; he knew he wouldn't have insisted that the cover close all the way.

“I wouldn't break it,” he said, feeling self-pity clog his voice.

“I know you wouldn't mean to, dear. I know that.” She turned her back to him and made precise adjustments of the pile of napkins and silverware.

“Tell them to get ready,” his mother said.

He went up the narrow back stairs that turned so that his shoulders rubbed the wallpaper. This part of the house was dark and narrow, made originally for servants. Sometimes they had a sort of servant, Peggy Mudd, a girl Kate's age who lived most of the time with her mother in the old sugarhouse up in the woods. Sometimes Peggy stayed over with them, and Horace liked that, because he liked her very much. She was dark and bony, and his father said she was ugly as sin. He wished she were here now, so that he could knock on her door and ask her to get ready for supper, the way she usually knocked on his door and asked him to get ready for supper. She usually wore some dress he had seen on Kate, and on Peggy the dress would turn homely and easy.

He went through the empty servants' rooms, carefully turning on wall switches that let him go in light across a room or down the hall; then, at the end, he turned on one switch at the same time he snapped off another, so that they made the same sound, and his path was lighted but his back trail dark. This part of the house was unheated, and beneath the old red carpeting, the floors creaked as he walked.

Then he came through a door into the part of the second floor where everything was larger, and the first door on the left was Kate's. She was thirteen, barely, but he had never said to her, “You're only thirteen, and I'm fourteen.” Her door was closed, and he knocked.

“Who is it?” she said angrily from deep inside somewhere.

“It's Horace. Supper's nearly ready.”

“Don't come in, Horsie! Do not enter!”

“Well, supper's nearly ready.”

“Thanks for the great news. Now take a powder.”

“I don't care what you're doing!” he shouted at the varnished door. She didn't answer, and he went on to David's door.

He hit the door with his fist, once, and yelled, “Supper's ready!”

David, as usual, surprised him. The door opened immediately and David's face was right next to his—on it a mock expression of horror and surprise.

“A horse. My God, a
horse!”
David said. And then he made his voice small and strangled as he shouted this news. He sounded far away. “There's a horse in the hall! Everybody! Believe me! Why don't you believe me?”

“Supper's ready,” Horace said. He began to turn away, intending to go on to Wood's room, but his eyes began to sting, and suddenly, hardly knowing that he was doing it, he swung his arm back violently in a raking blow aimed at David, at the door and everything in general. Not really aimed; David couldn't be hit. His hand smashed into the doorframe, turned cold and dropped to his side.

“Hey!” David said seriously. “What the hell's the matter now?”

“Shut up!” His hand began to hurt badly, but he wouldn't try to flex it. He walked away, seeing pain in the form of little streaks of light, and beyond the pain he imagined David's smooth, confident face, his superior, aristocratic nose and neat blond hair, his square chin that was delicate without being weak. He admired and sometimes feared David, the way a large animal might fear a smaller and more agile one. He could never keep David in focus, never knew quite what David's face signified, or where his hands were.

“Hey, Horse,” David said, coming up behind him. “Hey, old Hoss, now. Didn't mean to get you all het up.”

“Shut up. I hate you.” Horace still walked away.

David said, “Aw, come on, now. Hey, Horace? Is the Whip going to eat with us?”

Horace wouldn't answer, and he heard David go back into his room.

When he knocked on Wood's door, Wood said “Come in,” in a formal, deep voice. Horace opened the door to find him sitting at his desk, reading. Wood was eighteen, and he looked up with a bland, polite expression on his dark, handsome face.

“Come in, Horace,” he said. Along the side of the long room hung some black, wooden airplane models he had made for the armed services, and hadn't yet given to the high-school shop teacher to send away. They would be used to teach servicemen aircraft identification. Wood had graduated from high school and was going into the Army anytime now.

“Please be careful,” he said, then slowly frowned as he looked at Horace's face. He tapped his pipe on the heel of his hand and let the ashes slide neatly into his big ashtray. “That money business bothering you?”

Horace shook his head, then nodded. He loved Wood, and any expression of concern on Wood's austere face made him want to cry. Wood was bigger than his father, and he never got excited or made wisecracks. He thought carefully and spoke slowly. It was Wood Horace cried out for sometimes in the night, and it was Wood who, coming with strength and justice into Horace's room, could banish the dark shapes and let him be tired enough to sleep.

Wood looked at him steadily for a moment, and then said “Sit down,” pointing to his deep easy chair.

“Supper's ready.”

“Well, sit down for a minute anyway. Kate's got to set the table, hasn't she?”

“She hasn't set it yet.”

“Is the Whip going to eat with us?”

“I don't know. I got the aspirin and he cursed me!” These words in a rush, with some tears.

“I know,” Wood said.

“I tripped over the elephant leg, and all David's old marbles rolled out!”

“Why
do
you trip all the time, though?” Wood asked the old question as though he really wanted to know. This time he really seemed as though he wanted to know, and because Horace wanted to tell Wood, but had no answer, he felt the skin of his face congeal, his jaw stiffen with pain. He looked; his eyes received Wood, the room, Wood's trophies and pictures on the walls. His brother waited for an answer. “Uh,” Horace said. “I. Oh!”

Wood waited calmly, but Horace couldn't speak. He tried, but from his frozen jaw came only another plugged, inhuman sound: “Ough!”

“They'll forget all about the money,” Wood said. “You'll grow up and it will all be a thing that happened when you were a kid.” Wood put his pipe in his circular rack and stood up, brushing off his sweater and straightening the open collar of his shirt. “Come on, we've got to wash up.”

Horace went first. Wood, he knew, would follow to make sure he didn't knock anything over. Horace still couldn't speak, and for a crazy moment by the door he felt like reaching up with his painful hand and smashing the airplane model that hung so delicately on three black threads. But why? he asked himself. And who was he asking? He thought he knew who he was, but none of the others would be surprised at all if he broke Wood's airplane.