Whipple's Castle (9 page)

When would her mother get home? Maybe the snow was too deep, and had drifted in behind the plows. Or maybe whoever her mother went out with wouldn't give her a ride back to High Street.

The book she had been trying to read lay on the oilcloth as if it didn't belong there, seeming to float disdainfully above the cracked fabric. Kate had lent it to her, and told her she had to read it. It was a real book, bound in real cloth, its pages crisp and clean.
Wuthering Heights
was the title of it, and it was dark and scary in its pages, the people always doing mad, unhappy things for reasons she couldn't understand, that she felt the author deliberately withheld from her. It was as if the author hated her, and wanted her to be afraid. She didn't want to go on reading it, because it didn't seem right that a book should make her even unhappier than she already was, but Kate had said she must. She wanted to go to bed, and she would take the book into her room with her. Unopened, it was a part of that other world of intelligence and reason. It was a book. She could look at the outside of it with pleasure, and feel its weight. It had cost nearly two dollars, and it proved there were people in the world somewhere who actually paid money for things like books. But she couldn't read it at night, when she was alone—not that dark story.

She adjusted the stove and lamp as well as she could, and got ready for bed, then took the book and carefully placed it on the chair inside her door before she blew out her lamp. It would sit there like magic, like a visitor, and protect her. All the time she thought this, as her blankets slowly warmed down toward her feet, she knew that her room and door meant nothing, because she had to be responsible for the whole house, for her mother who would probably come home drunk with her overshoes full of snow.

She wished for her room above the Whipples' kitchen; if only she could believe that she was there. Just to be able to go to sleep.

Then she was wide-awake, because the outer door had opened.

“Shhh!”

“Huh?”

“Shhh! You can't come in here!” Her mother's harsh whisper. “My kid's sleeping in there!”

Then the other voice, a man's, trying to whisper, but with a giggle underneath that forced out little oinks with the words: “I won't say nothing.”

“No!”

“Chrissakes I spent more'n five bucks on you tonight.”

“No! Now go on! Git!”

“Took you home through snow up to my ass.”

“No! Now I mean it, Call”

“Aw, come on, honey.”

“Quiet. You'll wake her up, now. Don't make any noise…”

But her mother's voice had turned from a whisper to a low, lazy, slow sound that purred and went down, down like something going away. Then it was close and startling again: “Jesus Christ! Wait a minute! Take it easy! Shhh!”

Then, “Phuh!” and the lamp in the other room went out.

The steel cords of her mother's bed slowly stretched, and lightened, and then complained loudly and were silent. And then began again to sing secret little words.

Peggy pushed the blanket up against her ears, and tried to make the singing of the bed into something else—a machine, or a bird calling over and over the same chirping call. If she were not here. If she were safe in the Whipples' house, in her safe room, it would be Wood, way down in the cellar, guarding them all in the night. Yes, it was Wood, so strong and big, down in the cellar shaking down the coals, building a fire to keep heat flowing through the great house.

Wood Spencer Whipple had decided, by the time he was twelve or thirteen years old, that though the governing principle of the world might not be evil, man's most powerful urges seemed to lie in that direction. He had been a boy scout and a preceptor of DeMolay, and of his family the only one who ever willingly went to church. He could not help observing how easily any moral law rode the arrogant or cringing shoulders of his contemporaries.

When he was twelve he saw the newsreels of the Japanese bombing raids on Shanghai, and of the aftermath, where, on paved streets as common as any in his experience, men picked up the still warm and flexible corpses and parts of corpses and heaved them onto tracks. One sharp scene struck him, of the naked body of a girl, smooth belly and thighs and the soft veil between her legs—a slim and rubbery girl—just her lower body and pretty legs as they tossed her upon the other bodies; and then, on top of her, the similarly naked body of a thin young man landed and swayed upon the mass of legs and breasts and guts below, his penis lying aslant like a limp white finger. When the man's body swayed upon the woman's body, a sweet pleasure flowed through Wood's flesh, in the circumstances horrible, perverse, like the pleasure of grinding teeth. Once more he recognized his kinship.

But he didn't blame the Boy Scout Oath, or the Ten Commandments, for being untrue to man, and he never directed irony toward the mouthing of these commandments, even when he knew the preacher could never do as he preached.

That winter, while he waited for his induction notice, he worked in Milledge & Cunningham, sweeping up thread and cuttings, repairing push trucks, pulling and cutting nests of thread from their casters, and fixing V and flat belts on the humming shafts below the sewing tables—shafts that could never be stopped, because to stop one shaft would stop a dozen or more sewing machines. Each machine took power from a V belt and a flat belt, and these were always breaking. His boss, Al Coutermarsh, a thin, tall man of fifty with a blue-veined bald head, had lost his left index finger that fall on a sharp V-belt pulley, and he was glad to find that Wood could handle this job. It was for this that Wood had been given a raise to fifty-five cents an hour, but he told no one in his family the real reason.

During the noon half-hour he sat on paper-covered rolls of cloth in the basement near the shipping room and ate his lunch with Al Coutermarsh and Beady Palmer, the shipping clerk. Beady was twenty, and had married a woman who already had three children. He was 4-F because of his eyes.

“I've never seen the stars,” he said. “I can look right up at them, but I can't see one goddam star. I can see pictures of stars, but I've never seen a real one. That's the truth.” Beady was small and strong, with a red face hardened but not made ugly by acne. Whenever one of the girls came down to the shipping room for something or other, Beady would pleasantly ask for a quick one (“No harm in asking, is there?” he'd say). “No shit, Al, I can't get a driver's license. It's something about lights. Night vision. Something like that. Fow-eff,” he said disgustedly, “and I can't even drive a car. How do you like that?”

“You'd rather go to war?” Al said mildly.

“Sure. Join the Marines. See the world.”

“You'd like to be on Guadalcanal, shooting at the Japs, I suppose,” Al said.

“Slap a Jap,” Beady said. “Join the Marines. Boy, I'd like to strut into the Blue Moon some night with that old dress uniform on. Maybe sergeant stripes, couple of ribbons. Wow.”

“How do you feel about it, Wood?” Al asked.

“I guess it's the only thing to do.”

“Nothing else you one-A guys
can
do,” Beady said.

“It's going to be a long war,” Al said. “I wish you plenty of luck.” He put his sandwich on the open cover of his lunch pail and rolled up one leg of his blue dress pants. Al was a supervisor, and always wore a shirt and tie at work. He held the cloth away from his leg, the stub of his left index finger cocked like a hammer. “Look at those,” he said. In the bloodless ivory of his calf were two blue dents. “Kraut machine gun,” he said.

“Wow!” Beady said. “You got a Purple Heart and everything?”

“I didn't mind that. The gas was the bad part. I've only got one lung.” He looked strange to Wood now—rather dreamy and unlike himself. Wood realized that he had never considered Al as a man who had ever been different, who ever moved in time and once was younger. “Mustard, chlorine, lewisite…That was the hard part. I was glad to get stitched by that Kraut. That was the luckiest thing ever happened to me. Got me out of there with one lung left, anyway. I had a kind of TB, caused by the gas. We had gas masks, but they didn't work too good, and you couldn't see out of the things. I couldn't, anyway. So you were always getting whiffs. One kind smelled like garlic. Lewisite or phosgene. Mustard. I can't remember. Mustard would get on your skin, make it bubble, sort of. Guys went blind. Some went crazy.”

“I just want those dress blues,” Beady said. “Let's forget the war part. That old red stripe down the pants! Wow! I'd go through this town like physic through a goose. There's hundreds of women in this town ain't had it so long they're cross-eyed. I can tell. It drives me crazy. I can smell it. Can't you smell it, Woodie?” Beady's little nose, on the red armor of his face, seemed to twitch. Al smiled tolerantly; he never joined in this kind of talk.

“Can't you smell it, Woodie?” Beady said slyly.

“What does it smell like?” Wood said.

“We got to get this boy laid,” Beady said. “Suppose he goes out and gets himself killed, and never knew what it was? What a terrible tragedy! I can't bear to think of it. No, we got to do something, Al. Seriously.”

Al stood up and closed his lunch pail. “Maybe he's got other things to think about,” he said.

“Other things! What other things? I'll tell you what. I'll set it up with Martha. She's always good for a tumble in the inventory. A little long in the tooth, maybe, but good thighs. What do you think, Al?”

“I think your brain's gone soft,” Al said.

“She's got a motion that can't be described. You ever get seasick, Woodie?”

Al shook his head disgustedly. “Don't believe a word he says,” he said to Wood. “Martha kids around a lot, but that's as far as it goes.”

“How the hell do you know?” Beady said.

“I know what goes on in my own shop,” Al said.

Above them on the sewing floor, the huge electric motors began to turn up, and the rumble of the shafts came down through the wooden uprights. The air itself seemed to darken and grow heavy with the sound, and then the sewing machines began to stitch and drum upon the body of the steady sound, more and more of them, with a rhythm that was unpredictable and frantic.

“Is that what war sounds like?” Wood asked Al.

“What?”

Wood pointed at the ceiling, and his voice became accustomed to the noise, so Al could hear him. “Sound like war?”

“They aren't shooting at you,” Al said. “That makes all the difference.”

But the machines were dangerous to Wood, because he had to fix their belts when they broke. He had a wooden carpenter's tray, with a wooden bail, and in it were staples for V belts, knuckles and pins for flat belts, extra sections of belting, crimping pliers and cutters. When a belt broke upstairs, a little red light would go on near the freight elevator, and a bell that sounded like a bicycle bell would continue to ring until he switched it off.

This afternoon he sat on a box near the elevator, next to the electric-saw table, fixing push trucks. After cleaning the thread from the casters he cut laths on the circular saw and nailed them diagonally onto the push-truck frames to try to stiffen them up a little. These never lasted too long, but anything else he could think of would have taken too much time. A row of ten leaning and half-collapsed trucks waited in line all the way to the scrap cloth bailer, a huge, medieval-looking machine he and Beady used once a week, crushing the scraps down by means of wooden windlasses.

When he looked up he could see through the open-sided elevator shaft into the shipping room, where Beady ratcheted blue steel bands around boxes of finished field jackets, the steel barrel of his felt marking pencil behind one red ear, his head moving slowly from side to side so the blank spaces of his vision would never cover one place too long. Beyond Beady, through the square windows toward the loading platform, the roofs of the railroad tenements were white and cold above their black, un-painted clapboards. The gray winter day seemed to push its drab glitter across the shipping room and into the basement, and when Wood looked down at his work again, the new laths were ghostly against the oily wood of the push truck. Then the overhead light made itself felt again, and he could see. The saw whined and bit as he cut four laths at a time; then it sighed back down again.

This building hummed and creaked for the war; it made no civilian clothes any more—only the green field jackets, some of which would later be sliced by metal fragments and soaked with blood. Perhaps a man would die in one of the jackets Beady just now sealed with steel tape in that big box. Wood, too, would probably wear one of those jackets soon. He had no desire to go into the war, although most of his friends were eager to get into uniform. But there was no alternative. Like this old factory, a five-story cliff of white clapboards, the whole world had changed to war. For a hundred years Milledge & Cunningham had made nothing but work clothes, and now they made nothing but clothes for soldiers.

The war loomed ahead of Wood without glamour, because he knew that once in it he would have to tell other people what to do. It had always been this way with him—in his family because he was the oldest, in school, wherever he had worked—there had always been that short pause before any activity, and then all eyes had turned, evaluating, surreptitious, shirking, upon Wood. “You be captain,” they always said. And half of any possible joy was gone, because he had to be captain, and to teach, and think, and be some kind of example.

He had few memories uncomplicated by responsibility; the fools were always so close to hurting, killing themselves. They always leaped with a weird stupid joy straight toward the machinery, and no one's arm but his own ever seemed to be there to pull them back.

The red light went on, and the little bell rang, as it would three or four times each day. He left the unfinished push truck and picked up his wooden tray. Because he had a repaired truck to bring upstairs, he would take the elevator. At the shaft he switched off the light and bell, then rang the elevator warning bell, waited a moment, and pulled the down rope. The big wheel at the bottom of the shaft turned slowly, and from three stories above, the elevator, big as a room, began to descend along its guides, moving from side to side in its ponderous, limited traverse. A thick wooden deck with its under beams showing, it came slowly down, and as it moved past Wood's face he grasped the up rope, slowed it, and carefully pulled it into neutral at the level of the floor, where it became a strong but quickly stepped corridor into the shipping room.