Whipple's Castle (8 page)

She reached over and touched his face, the skin soft, the whiskers in little holes now, where they used to stand hard as cactus. He didn't move; he would never accept a gesture of pity. Soon he was asleep, or pretending to sleep.

 

Harvey Watson Whipple. Whipple the Cripple. The nudge of pain was receding notch by notch, with just the slightest little increase before each notch, at his pulse, like an automobile jack being lowered. He was sure he could sleep, if he had anything to sleep for. But why did he need the rest? The past, where his only happy thoughts could go, was no place for a man's thoughts, but if he didn't sleep, the past would come back to bother him, and tell him that all his triumphant memories were finished, because there was only the past. He would try to get rich, now, but what did that matter, really? What good was it to have money? No, he shouldn't jump to that conclusion; tomorrow those columns of figures would be as fascinating as ever. But now, at night, it was hot sun and bright days that he couldn't help remembering. Always in the daylight. That time: yes, here came a memory of not so long ago. The sun grew over him, over the baseball field, and the clean dust around home plate, the yells of his townspeople behind him, the tense Northlee players who had, for him, shifted their positions radically, and they knew that no matter what they did, he was dangerous. The outfield had gone deep, but the infield didn't know what to do. One player hollered to do this and the coach hollered to do that. Northlee had a new pitcher named Worthington, who had a fast ball, the fastest in the league, and he'd put two of them in a row just outside, and Harvey swung on both, and missed. Two strikes, and then he thought: He's going to do it again, because my bat's too light. I can see his pitches are fast, and I swing too hard, and with this light bat I'm pulling in away from the ball. So he got George Fellows' great heavy bat that seemed to weigh as much as two ordinary bats. He slowly left the box and walked over and deliberately picked the monster out. How Northlee heckled him then! But they were worried. So was he. And on the next pitch Worthington put a fast ball down the outside and that was the last feel they got of it, because it hit a boxcar on the Cotter & Son siding, four hundred feet away. Northlee didn't say much as he loped around the bases, and how the Leah crowd roared when the batboy pretended he couldn't lift the big bat, and called to a friend of his to help him drag it off the field! The sun, how it pressed like a friend on his back!

A hundred yards away from the Whipples' house, through the falling snow, over an outcropping of ledge, its glacial tilt now masked and softened, through low, brushy hardwoods and a grove of tall white pine was the old sugarhouse, which once stood in the middle of a great forest of maples that extended all the way up to the town reservoir. Now only a few dying maples remained among the evergreens, gnarled, falling, split so their own offspring grew in the interstices of their squat trunks and further broke them down. The sugarhouse was rotten too, for its wood, deep beneath the pines, was always damp. Pine needles thatched the tarpaper-and-tin roof, and now the snow bundled and hushed the little building. The orange light of a kerosene lamp gleamed in a small window, one of whose lights was the outlet for a stovepipe which then turned, below the narrow eave, and cocked up at an angle, rusty and wet. Nearby, a dead 1927 Ford ton-and-a-half truck sank slowly into the earth—engine-less, tire-less, its grease licked clean by rain, with only a random wink of black paint against its general red rust. Its tires had been eaten to the wires by porcupines, and its wooden bed had wilted down among the axles. Near the dead truck was a small outhouse; all the other junk—pans with holes worn into their bottoms, a one-lunger saw engine with a crack in its water jacket, cans, barrel hoops, a barely recognizable mattress—all was now covered by the snow that still sifted through the pines.

The sugarhouse, and the short woods road that led to it, were owned by Harvey Whipple, and many people in Leah wondered why he let Bert Mudd squat on it and turn it into a typical squatter's junkyard. Harvey wasn't telling, however, so the question had more or less faded out; Leah was full of such unanswered questions. Bert was now in the Army somewhere, with a San Francisco APO number. Harvey had received one letter from him saying that he was surely going to get killed, and wouldn't Harvey say that Bert worked on his “fram” and was needed at home in a civilian capacity to help produce needed and precious food for the war effort. Harvey had never answered the letter.

Bert's daughter, Peggy, who was now alone in the sugarhouse, reading by the oil lamp, had received a V-mail letter from him too:

 

Dear Margaret you are my daugter and I want to say your father is in terrible danger they are shooting at me and shelling me something awful I cant tell you where I am at the censor would cut it out but it is just awful love your father,

Pvt. Bertram H. Mudd

 

The lamp was smoking, a finger of yellow rising too high at one end of the wick, and Peggy turned it down. As the light dimmed, it was as if the room were a fist that closed upon her. She was afraid; she was too tender, all of a sudden, for a world in which people deliberately tried to kill, in which her father cried out like a baby. Every once in a while she would suddenly shiver with this fear, and feel for a while that she couldn't bear it. Once she had heard an ambulance scream down Bank Street, and burst into tears, not knowing who it was for, or what had happened, and said out loud “I don't want anybody to hurt!” before she realized what she had said; and then she'd thought: But that happens all the time, and I know it. I've even seen people hurt each other; I've seen men hurt my mother.

But she was not always so vulnerable, because she couldn't afford to be. At thirteen Peggy had come to realize that both her father and her mother could not remember things, or didn't bother to remember things. Neither of them ever finished anything. And then one day when she saw her mother forget that she was washing out a pair of rayons and throw them out with the water—that day the word “feeble-minded” flashed—she could see the letters spelling it in her mind: “Feeble-minded.” She could not afford to be weak. It was she who saw that the oil barrel was filled, and the oil stove kept reasonably clean and safe, and that some hot water was available in the morning to thaw and prime the pump, and that her mother gave her enough of her father's GI allotment check so they had food in the house, and little things like matches and towels and soap and dishcloths.

It was eleven o'clock, this Saturday night, and her mother hadn't come home. She'd come from work and then left at six with her blue dress on, Peggy's rain hat over her tightly kerchiefed hair, her overshoes buckled up around her rayons and her high heels in a paper bag under her coat. “See you later,” she'd said. As she'd opened the tarpaper-covered door, a light swirl of snow came into the room like the cool touch of a hand. Peggy knew someone was probably waiting for her on High Street in a car.

The lamp continued to smoke, so Peggy lit another one, and let this one's chimney cool before she could trim the wick. The heavy smell of kerosene rose from the lamp, and just the slightest smell of maple syrup leaked from the damp walls of the room. Some of the metal troughs that had once held the syrup and sap had been flattened and nailed to two-by-four studs to make another room; her mother slept here in the kitchen part, which took up most of the little building, and Peggy slept in the small, cold room behind the nailed metal. Soon she would go back there and get into her cotton blankets, and blow out her lamp. She wished her mother would come home so she could put out both lamps and turn down the stove. She didn't trust her mother to do this, especially on a Saturday night.

In spite of her nervousness and fear, she was sleepy and wanted to go to bed. Not here, but in her room at the Whipples', that small, clean room with a window that slid up and down, and had a real window sill. It was always warm in that room because it was right over the kitchen, and she could look down through the little floor register and see the woodstove and the linoleum floor. And there she slept in sheets, on a bed with a carved wooden headboard, and all the Whipples slept in the same great house. She dreamed of being a Whipple herself: “Margaret Whipple,” she said, and tried to make it seem possible, somehow, that perhaps Mr. Whipple was really her father. But then she would look at the photograph her father had sent home from Camp Blanding, Florida, and there she was—the same dark skin, the thin, bony nose and heavy eyebrows, the face bones hard and shiny under the skin. Not that she'd want to look like Kate Whipple; that would frighten her. That would be too much.

Maybe if she went to bed she could pretend she was in the dry, warm bed in the room over the kitchen, with all those people, the Whipples, all of them bigger than life to her—handsome people—in the same house. They always seemed to have bigger things on their minds than any she could have, and even their problems were terribly important. They smiled at her, and were kind to her, and they would be in charge of the great house, so that she wouldn't have to worry about anything, and she could go to sleep so easily. She would pretend to be there, surrounded by their intelligence, in that room where everything worked; all hinges, drawer pulls, switches—everything fit, and everything was clean.

Sometimes in the night she would wake up hearing a harsh metallic clanging from below, from way below, and it was Wood, deep in the cellar, stoking the furnace, keeping them all safe and warm.

She turned the stove down just a little, thinking that if her mother came home and found the room too cold she would turn the stove up too high and forget it. If she could find just the right level to keep the dark orange flame, so dangerously boiling behind the dim isinglass window—not too high, not too low—her mother might not fool with the stove at all, and there wouldn't be too much danger. Once it had gone out because her mother turned it down too low, and it flooded, and then when her mother threw a match into it, it got so hot the enamel smoked and cracked, the wall behind it began to smoke, and they had to go outside and watch through the door while it decided not to bum the house down. The brown soap on the sink had melted, and the isinglass window turned so black Peggy had to buy some new stove mica, and cut it with a scissors so it would fit.

She trimmed the greasy wick of the lamp, wiped the carbon out of the chimney with a brown paper bag, then set it low for her mother, so she would be able to find a windowlight through the deep snow. It was still snowing, and in the morning she would have to shovel a path to the outhouse and to the pump. When the Whipple boys had finished their driveway and walks they would come shoveling up the road, where she would meet them partway. They would joke and laugh and maybe have a mock snowball fight, and Wood might say, “Have you had breakfast? Come down with us and have some flapjacks—all that shoveling makes you hungry!” She would stick her shovel in the snow and follow them down the crisp path, marching, their shovels over their shoulders like guns, Wood calling out,
“Hup
two three four,
hup
two three four!” Then they would burst into the big, warm kitchen where Mrs. Whipple and Kate were pouring thick yellow batter on the hissing griddle, and the windows would be all steam. “Look what we found in the snow! It's little Peggy from the woods, come to have breakfast with us!” That might be David who said that, and Horace would be so pleased he'd smile at her, and Mrs. Whipple would wipe her hands on her apron and come over to her, smiling, and put her warm hands on Peggy's cold cheeks…

The flame wouldn't do what she wanted it to. She would have to clean the pipe that dripped oil into the pot. Tomorrow she would do this; she would take the copper wire and clean it out. Not tonight, because it would take too long for the stove to cool, and it was too cold a night. She was shivery anyway.

“I'm lonesome for the Whipples!” she said out loud, somewhat surprised to hear her own voice. Her eyes were suddenly wet. She recognized her self-pity, and named it. “But I am!” she said. “I don't care, I am!” She didn't even know why they let her stay in their house. She didn't do any more housework than Mrs. Whipple or Kate. She worked as hard as she could for them, but they didn't really need her. Last year when her mother had pneumonia she stayed in the Whipples' house for a whole week, and got up and went to school with Kate. To walk to school with Kate Whipple! There were girls who came up High Street, the long way, just in case they might meet Kate on the way to school, and arrive with her. If two others walked with Kate, Kate was always in the middle, and the other two always looked as if they were following her—in waiting upon her. Kate was never mean—she didn't have to be. Sometimes she hurt people, but she couldn't help it; everyone was a little frightened by her, and they would do awkward, silly things. Boys would suddenly yell or throw stones at each other, or drop-kick their books, and girls would make horrible faces, or pretend to be imbeciles.

Peggy always wondered, even with a feeling of guilt, why Kate was so nice to her. Guilt because she could see no reason for it. She had done nothing to deserve it, had no talents, no good points about her. If anything, she was a total liability to Kate, and yet Kate always seemed to keep a protective eye on her. All of the Whipples did, for that matter. They might be nasty to each other sometimes, but they were kind to her. If they felt sorry for her, they never sounded quite the way other people did who were sorry for her. They were always kidding around, but not to hurt. Never really to hurt.

The snow swirled under the eave and hissed on the stovepipe at the window, where the pipe went through a hole in a flattened pork and beans can. What if the Whipples were not there at all, and the big house down on the road were empty and cold? She could not stand it. No matter how disorganized her own family became, or how heavy and unfair her own responsibilities, the Whipples were there, alive and warm. To think of that house dark, without their voices in its halls, made her stomach quiver, as if she were falling, and she turned cold with fear. Around her now were only the splattered, makeshift things that never had been finished and never would be repaired. Each damp board, and each half-tacked piece of tarpaper seemed to say to her how makeshift and valueless she and her mother and father were. Nothing in the house was worth a dollar, except maybe her father's old deer rifle that leaned, furry with dust, in the corner by the ice chest.