Whipple's Castle (46 page)

His father sat there a prisoner of his pain and the soft, fat body he must despise. He looked like a melting snowman—if a snowman could quiver so precariously. His father had offered him a great deal, but he couldn't use it. He couldn't think of anything to say. Their history was too full of stalking, still-hunting, avoidance. They had no common jokes, no common ironies.

What if he were to confess how he'd betrayed his friend Stefan? How would he begin? What tone would he assume? If this were a night for confession, why not try?

Because his father would consider that cuckolding a triumph, and it was not a triumph. The world of smut was subtle and was everywhere. No one could be trusted with that knowledge. He'd gone back to Lenore whenever he could get a pass, and though Perrone and Quillen were suspicious, they never knew. Each time he'd curse himself and vow not to go on with it, but he knew where he was going and what he would do. She purred like a cat, and yowled softly in his ear. He couldn't stop hearing that curving, modulant warble in his ear, day and night. He was out of his mind. He would betray helplessness, the most utter helplessness. Now the outfit had gone to Europe, Stefan, God help him, included; Lenore was back in Ohio. At infantry school at Fort Benning he'd received a letter from her every day. At every mail call the blue envelope he dreaded was pressed into his helpless hand. Sheets of blue paper, her round, sincere, half-literate handwriting, the t's dotted with huge circles:
Wood my darling my
dearest lover I lay all night thru dreaming of you in my arms.
He read each letter in a fit of self-disgust, even breaking into sweat.
O Wood sweetheart do you think of “doing it” with me my
handsome “beast.” O my goodness some of the things I say you
could black mail me so burn this!

And he would groan for pity. Pity for her, pity for himself. He never answered, and finally the letters stopped. No, it was a confession he would never make. She sent her pitiful letters out into nowhere. If he could treat any person that way he would take his sin, unalloyed and unabsolved, to the final judgment.

“You don't talk much, do you?” his father said.

“No, I guess I never have.”

“We never talked,” his father said.

There was a hint of sadness—his father's kind, perhaps—a sort of cynical jauntiness, if that was possible. His father had given nothing up, really, and would give nothing up. Nothing would become so painful or so lost it couldn't be mentioned. Wood stretched his own healthy legs toward the fire, calves and thighs pleasurably defining themselves. His father's glass was empty, so he finished his and got up to make them another drink. “Maybe another of these will prime the pump,” he said.

His father's answering smile was knowing, grateful, and Wood yearned to do something for him. He wanted to touch him, but how did one comfort his father? He couldn't figure out how to do it—he couldn't feel how to do it. Something powerful gleamed from that face sick with corpulence. Memories of pride in his father stirred, were still there from long ago. Also fear, but more a sense of residing justice that might or might not have been a child's standard delusion. He turned away, a glass in each hand, conscious of the breadth and strength of his own young body. He was his father's son; he perceived that knowledge in the other person. Though he might never hear pride expressed, they would sit late, drink, and watch the embering fire they had in common.

Dark Hill Farm seemed dark for more reasons than the acres of spruce that surrounded the fields like black dwarves with their arms, even their dead arms, interlocked. The reluctant winter sun was pale as it came across the hill, and the house beneath its grove of pines was dim, lantern-lit. As the winter came on, the floorboards cracked underfoot, almost fractured in the cold. David had to get up before daylight, make his breakfast of cereal and milk by oil lamp, then walk a mile down the dim frozen road to wait with the other townies for the Dexter-Benham station wagon. He waited there by the Jaspers' mailbox with Billy Warren, Harold Pittman and Howard Jasper, all of them cold, stamping, shivering as they waited. Howard Jasper was a freshman, and the other two were sophomores. Howard was small and fragile-looking; they were all scared by Al Roux, the driver, and hoped that if he were going to run the station wagon off the road he would do it before he picked them up, but Howard was often frightened into tears. Sometimes when they got to the academy Al Roux would run the car onto the football field and slew around, laughing past his cigarette and blowing ashes into the defroster fan. Poor Howard would grab David's arm and hide his head in David's side. Billy and Harold would grit their teeth and watch whatever was coming.

After school it was again dark when they were let off, sometimes on cloudy days so dark David would have to stare above him at the faint radiance of the sky, following that in order to keep on the road. He was quite often afraid. Too many new and unsettling things were happening to him, and his life seemed to be a series of anxious waits for danger, real or not. He was ashamed because he was unable to destroy in his mind whatever evil shapes, animal or man or monster, lurked beneath the perpetual night of the spruce. He didn't dare take his revolver to school with him because he had no certain place to hide it during those bright, official hours. In the daylight his fear dimmed, but always the dark hill waited, and at the end of the hill the presence of Lucifer transformed every shade of darkness, perceived only from the corners of his eyes, into a softly moving force.

Then he would approach the house, where lamplight dimly gleamed. He walked tensely those last few hundred feet, listening carefully for breathing or the tick of hooves. And once he made the house there was still danger, but of another kind. Perkins Cross, that temperamental genius, would have decided what sort of mood he would assume in order to dominate the room, the evening, the world he had created in which his presence was to be celebrated. Though David saw through this acting, nevertheless Perkins was the master here. He was the adult. He didn't exactly frighten, but he jarred, he irritated, he demanded a reaction, whether to his anger or his humor. David watched, because he had to, and felt dishonorable when he forced himself to laugh at Perkins' little jokes. He wanted to say, “Not you, Mr. Cross, but I, I am the most important person here. I will be the future, and the main adventure will be my transformation of your beautiful daughter from a shallow nitwit into a sensitive and lovely girl.”

He still believed that; it was what got him up the dark hill, got him up in the morning. It was the thought that changed his tender skin from a child's to a man's, and let him slide into his frozen sheets at night.

But there Tucker sat, plastered with lipstick, Joe Cilley's alphabet-soup name pin grossly skewered to her sweater, reading a pulp magazine, dangling her bobbysocks and saddle shoes over the arm of the Morris chair. She liked—God help him, he was embarrassed for her—
True Romance
and
True Confession.
And yet the pure light of the Edison lamp, in cruel chiaroscuro, revealed the smoothness of her skin, her delicate wrists, her black silken hair, her narrow aristocratic nose. It hurt to look at her. She was merely enchanted, and he must somehow break that shoddy spell.

Weekends he worked with Perkins in the wood lot, sawing four-foot lengths of maple, pin cherry, beech and ash with a two-man crosscut saw—grinding, wearisome work. He kept up, and felt some approval in Perkins. Always just as David felt he couldn't pull the saw another time, Perkins would stop, set the saw aside, and roll himself a cigarette with fingers trembling from labor. Sometimes Perkins' face was so wildly red and white David found himself taking care not to look at it.

He had nowhere Perkins' brute strength, but he kept up. He couldn't sink an ax half as far into a tree to make a notch, but he could trim branches well enough, and keep going. Once when they went back to the barn to harness Ernest and Other Horse, he realized that Perkins was trying to disguise a limp, that he had worked too hard in order to impress David—or perhaps not to spoil him for hard work.

They tossed the stiff black harnesses over the horses and cinched the ancient straps and buckles onto the worn places on the horses' coats. David watched, helping only when some obvious strap had to be handed over or lifted. Then they walked the big horses out of the barn and over to the wagon, traces swaying like slow pendulums about the thick legs and broad hooves; then came the hesitation of backing, and the ponderous, nervous thud of hooves as the horses felt their way backwards onto the shaft, to the whiffletrees. Other Horse's black rectum swelled, and out came the huge orange falling biscuits.

They rode on the flat bed of the wagon around the house and up the logging road to where they had been cutting, and piled the wood between the body stakes, all the while saying very little. Perkins said “Okay” or “That'll do” whenever some part of their morning's work was done. Occasionally he would say to Myrna “He works, all right,” grudgingly.

It was only at night, with his wife and daughter as audience, that he demanded full attention from everybody. Weekdays he spent in his shed, working on his novel or on his model town. Only once did David ever find anything he had written, and he soon began to suspect that the little cardboard town was more important than anything Perkins might write about it. He found the one piece of writing in the library, in a large magazine with a thick cardboard cover. The magazine was called
Modernity.
Perkins' article was about Peter the Great, and told how the great Czar (spelled “Tsar” in the article) amused himself as a boy by throwing dogs and servants off the Kremlin walls. Strangely, all the rest of the pages were blank. It had been printed in 1925, before David was born.

Tucker's school bus came an hour later than the Dexter-Benham station wagon, and brought her back to the Jaspers' mailbox an hour earlier, while it was still daylight, so he never saw her except in the evenings. As far as he could tell, she never had any homework at all. He had met Joe Cilley early in September, an ominous meeting during which Joe beat up his brother William as a lesson to David. He'd been at Dark Hill Farm less than a week, when one hot afternoon a wagon full of kids, including Tucker, pulled by a gaunt old horse, came up the road and stopped in front of the house. David had been looking through the books in the library, and when he came out, Tucker called, “Hey, blivet! You want to go swimming?”

He could see that she wasn't too interested in having him come, but had to show him to the others. Tucker said, “That's him.”

There were four boys about his age, and several smaller boys and girls, who didn't count. One of the four boys was big and fat. He wore a T-shirt over his breasts and belly, and had a mean, inquiring smile on his soft face. Another was tall and muscular, tanned all over, with a face of sharp edges, and shiny black hair. This one he knew immediately to be his rival, Joe Cilley. The other two boys were friendly and curious—farm boys with tanned faces and hands, and pale chests and legs, gawky and lean.

Myma had come bustling down upon them, her apron rolled up upon whatever she had been working on. “Oh, isn't this nice!” she said. “You've all come to take David swimming! This is David Whipple. David, this is Joe Cilley and his brother William, and this is Harold Pittman and Billy Warren!”

He had been right. The dangerous one was Joe Cilley. The fat one was his brother. As Myma said “William,” he thought of “Willy Cilley,” and smiled a little; the fat one saw, and his smile in return was chilling. Joe Cilley's face didn't change at all, except for his lower jaw, which moved down a quarter of an inch as he said “Hi,” then moved up again. Harold Pittman and Billy Warren smiled openly and said “Hi.”

Tucker had either worn her bathing suit under her dungarees that morning, or had changed down at the Cilleys', or someplace. This seemed dangerous to him; as he looked at her slim legs Joe Cilley's black little eyes looked straight at him:
Watch out.
He read this easily, and was a little afraid even as the muscles in his arms, which felt hard and capable after all the woodcutting of the last few days, became taut under his shirt.

He went back to the house to change into his trunks, and as he undressed, his hands shook just a little bit. But on the way to Diddleneck Pond, Joe paid no attention to him at all, even when they stopped to admire what Romeo Forneau did with all his empty beer cans. The old horse stopped when Joe pulled the reins, stamped and swung his head in irritation, foam flying from the bit. Then David heard a soft, xylophonelike sound coming from the woods—a gentle, many-toned clanking. In silence the children got down from the wagon bed and crossed the stone wall. David followed Harold Pittman and Billy Warren, who without explanation had followed the little children. In a clearing surrounded by spruce, a small maple tree moved in the wind, and from its branches came the metallic music. An old gray ladder leaned against the trunk, and nearly every branch was full of beer cans that had been jammed down over twigs—clusters of the bronze and silver and white cans. There were almost as many cans as leaves.

“It's a wonder, ain't?” Billy Warren said in a hushed voice. The little children stared, and the tree played its music.

A sharp whistle from the road called them back. As they came across the stone wall they found Tucker and Joe Cilley in an elaborate Hollywood clinch, Tucker's slender back bent, everything bent. His crude hand lay on her ribs. With a smirk, Joe turned away from her and wiped his mouth with a red bandanna. He didn't look at David then, but later as they swam in the cold water above the mucky bottom of Diddleneck Pond he suddenly turned on his brother and hit him in the arm, on the back of the head, on the chest, in the kidneys, on the back—vicious short blows that actually echoed from the woods across the pond. Willy didn't begin to bawl until he had been hit five or six times, the blows had come so suddenly. After Willy had floundered out of the water, black muck on his fat thighs, David looked to find Joe's eyes hard upon his own. It was a warning. That was the first time they met, and David thought: Okay, but I'll have her to myself in the long evenings.