Whipple's Castle (42 page)

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.

Lucifer stood looking at them, and Perkins turned to lead them to the other barn, where the cow and two horses were kept. He turned carefully, and said, “Don't let him get behind you, or he'll bunt, and he's got a head like a rock.”

Lucifer did follow them a few feet, stopped when Perkins turned toward him, then came on again, walking slowly with his head down. Perkins ran over to a shed and got a two-by-four that was leaning against it, came back and without a word bashed Lucifer across the back. This brought Lucifer's head up, and he stopped walking forward.

“Git!” Perkins yelled, bashing him over the shoulders. Lucifer turned and walked diagonally away, keeping one golden eye on Perkins. “If you hit him on the head it just makes him feel good,” Perkins said. “He's a mean son of a bitch.”

David was shown the other barn, this one floored, except for the stalls, by generations of cow and horse manure. The cow and the two brown, phlegmatic workhorses paid no attention to them at all. In a small, muddy pen near the barn was a huge pig, surrounded by its bitter odor, and next to the pigpen a chicken coop—or rather a roost, for the chickens were here and there all around the barnyard. On the way back toward the house they stopped and entered the shed where Perkins did his writing. Part of its sloping roof was glass, and in the middle was a huge table covered by very realistic cardboard buildings—stores, houses and churches—representing a small New England town.

“Exactly to scale!” Perkins said accusingly. “Exact! They'll never catch
me
making the sun rise in the west. Look!” He pointed to a little street, with little automobiles in it, cementlike sidewalks, and infinitely perfect little fire hydrants and trash cans. “If a man walks down Main Street to this drugstore, by God I know just how many steps he has to take. Accurate!”

David was fascinated by the little town. The trees were made of some kind of weed that looked like elm trees. Even the cars were identifiable as to make and year. The store windows were cellophane, behind which tiny but identifiable pieces of merchandise were displayed. Perkins eagerly showed him more of its wonders—a milk bottle not much bigger than a match head, and a perfect little strew of horse manure down the center of a street, with English sparrows small as mites pecking in it. But then there came a clanging from the house, and Myrna's high, breaky voice calling, “Yoo hoo! Yoo hoo! Everybody! Yoo hoo!” They went back to the house for supper.

David washed in the bathroom, which the Crosses were proud of because it was tiled, modern, and really worked, and which they deprecated for the same reasons. The water was gravity fed from a spring in the hill behind the house, and heated in the coil and reservoir of the kitchen range. He did catch a whiff of the chocolaty odor of septic tank, but that was probably because the recent heavy rains had flooded the drainfields.

When he came back the Edison lamp on the dining table was lit, giving a white, slightly muted, pleasing light. Tucker was setting the table with large old plates and heavy silverware, and he stood rather awkwardly, trying to think of something he ought to do rather than watch her.

“Can I help?” he finally asked.

“Probably not,” she said, and clanked the silver down on the place mats too hard, a bored, somewhat sullen expression on her face, as though she were imitating some tough doll from the movies. He wanted to forgive her this crudeness, and did forgive her, because she was so trim and neat. There were her young breasts, her narrow waist in the lamplight. If only she wouldn't imitate crudeness, swinging her hind end like a bored whore. Perhaps he could teach her to be the way he wanted her to be: she would swoon in his arms, melt because of love into the simple yet passionate girl she must be underneath. How could she have that long, pale, aristocratic face, yet still act this way? He decided that she was a prisoner of this act, that the real Tucker might escape from it. It was the act of youth, which he wanted to discard in himself, and its symptoms were the code words, fads and signals of the time.

 

“
I dropped my eyeball
Into my highball”

 

Tucker sang with a bored look. Her alphabet-soup name pin hung from the heavy sweater she'd put on over her dress—and next to it another name pin he couldn't read in this light (a hard twinge of jealousy; he'd have to look into that). Her bobbysocks and saddle shoes, the scarlet lipstick put on too thick and too high, so that all of it didn't move when she moved her lips—these things jarred him too much, and he wondered why, because a few months before they would have seemed, along with, say, fingertip reversible coats, to be the very standard marks of fashion.

 

“
I've got my fare
And just a nickel to spare”

 

Tucker sang as she danced down the length of the table. When she came around to his side he read the alphabet-soup name pin: Joe Cilley. He would have to meet this Joe Cilley. But in any case he would have her here, in the long winter evenings, even if what he wanted of her remained almost too vague to define. One thing was that she should grow up, and forget all that jazzy high-school stuff. She should be a lady—like, for instance, Ingrid Bergman, or Constance Bennett. And of course she should love him terribly, yet with some constraint, some shyness. They should talk seriously of important things, even of the war; of ideas and ideals. He wasn't quite sure what ideas, but of the tone of voice, the tolerance and love with which they would converse, he was certain.

“Hey, blivet-head. You can move now,” she said.

He stepped back from the table to let her pass, and her strong perfume stung his nose.

Perkins had come in, and sat in a rocking chair, making little subterranean grunts and complaints. Finally he called, “Myrna! Where do you suppose Old Fornication is? He's three hours late!”

Myrna came in from the kitchen. “What?” she said, waving a long wooden spoon.

“That's Forneau he means,” Tucker said. “He lives up the road.”

“He's crazy,” Perkins said. “He works in the tack factory in Cascom. Anyway, he brings our mail and the paper, when he doesn't forget. He's half soused on beer by the time he gets home, anyway.”

“Tell him what he does with the beer cans,” Tucker said.

“Oh, let me tell him!” Myma said, turning toward David with a grinning, glowing, trembling face. “Let me tell it!”

Just then something hard poked into David's leg, and he jumped. It was Heinz, who had a short, heavy stick in his mouth. Again he poked it into David's leg.

“
Heinz!”
Myrna screamed. Heinz paid no attention, but growled at David and hooked him again with the end of the stick.

“Heinz! You go away and let me tell it!” Myrna seemed about to burst into tears, but when David tried to push Heinz away he growled louder and shook his head harder. In order to protect his shins, David had to grab hold of the stick, which only caused Heinz to become more aggressive. The stick was dented and wet, and no matter how hard he tried to hold it still, it moved in his hands.