Whipple's Castle (11 page)

“The truth,” she said.

“All right.”

She touched him with her shoulder, lightly, deliberately, and he was flattered, and sorry for her. He considered her a casualty, in a way, of the war and its disruptions. This big, complaisant, creamy girl. Maybe he was wrong.

“When can I tell you? Can I see you sometime?” she said. He felt a twinge of shameful caution. Her reputation…But her reputation was a prison, her prison, wasn't it? And beneath this kinder thought was the thrill of her offering—whatever it was she offered him. Shame because it was love, and he thought, saw, a sudden picture of her creamy long thighs. He stopped, and she turned quickly, frightened.

“What's the matter?” she asked. “Oh, I know. I'm sorry.”

“No,” he said quickly. “No, don't think—”

“Oh, what's the use,” she said, more tears over her eyes. One went down her cheek and was absorbed in the rayon of her babushka. He saw it sucked in by the cloth. “Last year nobody thought anything about me, did they? I mean bad things?”

“All right,” he said. He heard authority, that unwanted force, come into his voice. “All right, Susie. What's the truth you want to tell me?” He heard authority and other things in his voice; responsibility, and a sweet, shameful martyrdom too. Part of him resented all this. Perhaps down there inside somewhere was a screech of laughter.

“Something,” she said, and seemed coy all of a sudden. She lost value in his eyes, and the wind seemed to turn colder. He shivered, and wanted to turn and go home. “Can I tell you?” she asked. “Will you believe me?”

“I'll believe you if you want to tell me the truth,” he said coldly.

“If you can get your father's car, I can get a T stamp from my father's tractor ration. He's got plenty of gas. We could go for a ride and talk. I'll tell you the truth.” She seemed desperate. “Would you think of doing that, Wood?”

He was thinking about it. The truth, he thought. As if he didn't know the truth.

“Please,” she said. “I can't talk to anybody else in Leah. There isn't anybody else. Even my father called me a whore.” Her voice turned harsh. “Everybody else is after my big sweet ass.”

He was cold. She smiled at him grimly, sarcastically, and it astounded him. “Is that all I've got to offer
you?”
she asked. “What did I do, scare you to death?”

“Yes,” he said. “No, I scare myself to death. I don't want to treat you badly, Susie.”

“You seem so much older. But just because I said ‘sweet ass' you got all frozen. It's just something I heard. I don't know why I said it. Oh God, I hate this town!”

Then she turned and ran away from him. He watched her run down the sidewalk toward the Town Hall, a little hippily, yet graceful, one hand in a red knit mitten pressed to her face. Her father waited there in his pickup truck, and she opened the door and climbed into the seat. Immediately the truck started off. He felt that she and her father had exchanged no greetings. Her father was evidently ashamed to wait for her at Milledge & Cunningham, under the eyes of all those women.

After supper that evening he went to his room and saw only her stricken face. He saw her in her father's house, nobody saying a word. He went downstairs to the phone in the hall—his mother and father were listening to Gabriel Heatter, so they wouldn't hear—and called her up. Her father answered.

“I'd like to speak to Susie,” Wood said.

“Who the hell is this?”

“Wood Whipple. May I speak to Susie?”

“What do you want?”

“I want to speak to her.”

“Don't get wise with me! I want to know what the hell she's got that you want!”

“Daddy!” he heard in the phone. “Daddy! Daddy! Please!”

A tinny thunk as the receiver hit the box, then crying, then loud breath. “Wood!” Susie said, and there was a man's harsh grunt as her voice fell away, crying. The line was dead.

He was shaking, and full of indignation. Something had to be done. In the living room Gabriel Heatter was over, and his mother had turned the volume down. He went up to his father, who looked up, surprised.

“I want to use the car. Can I?” His father looked at him carefully.

“What for?” his father said, and Wood saw, with surprise of his own, that his father was not going to use his urgency against him. For a moment he thought of this, and didn't speak.

“What for? We haven't many coupons left, you know.”

It was almost as if Wood could see past the sick flesh of his father to the man he vaguely remembered, the man of years ago, to whom he remembered speaking without caution.

“It's important,” Wood said. “I won't use a quarter of a gallon, I promise.”

“Wood, you're in a state,” his mother said. “What's the matter?”

Wood spoke to his father. “I want to go out to the Davis place and talk to Susie's father. I just called and I think he's beating her up.”

“And you want to go there?”

“Yes.”

“That's jailbait. You know that, don't you?”

“It's a girl that doesn't deserve to get beaten up just because I called her.”

“Well, son of a bitch,” his father said wonderingly. “You've got more guts than brains, I'll say that. Sam Davis is a hell of a man to tangle asses with. Go ahead. Well get the bandages ready.”

“No! Wood!” his mother cried, but he was going. He grabbed his coat and ran out to the garage before his mother could say anything more. The Chevrolet started easily, thank God, and he eased down over the cinders of the shoveled driveway, between the white banks, and out onto High Street. The feeling of relief that he couldn't be stopped gave way to fear of this next absolute thing he had to do. He supposed the most the man could do would be to throw him off the side porch, but he was afraid of Sam Davis—not just the man, but the man in his anger, and what his anger was all about. His daughter more or less declared available. To groups. To conventions—like the sign over the banquet room of the hotel. To football teams. “Shut up,” he said. The car went on toward the Davis farm. Such a short distance.

He turned into the Davis driveway. The dooryard was all bare earth and ice, and in the middle a rusty cultivator had been left out for the winter. A milk can shone silver next to the slanting porch. Plants grew in the kitchen window, olive-colored behind the greasy glass. He stopped, and though the lights were on in the kitchen and parlor, the house was hushed. His feet sounded aggressively heavy on the porch boards. Before he had a chance to knock, the kitchen storm door swung violently open and Sam Davis stood there in undershirt and overalls, a young-looking man with a fuzz of gray on his face, his bare white arms knobbed with short, hard muscles. He seemed ready to jump for Wood's throat, and his eyes actually glittered in the frosty air.

“Can I come in?” Wood said.

“What! What!” Sam Davis said. He almost fell forward, as though he had meant to jump, and changed his mind just too late.

“You the one called a while back?”

“Yes. I'm Wood Whipple.”

Sam Davis moved back an inch or two, and Wood walked past him into the warm kitchen that smelled of supper and kerosene. A dark-haired woman, he couldn't tell her age, sat next to the oil stove in a straight chair. She was wrapped in what looked like a gray blanket—all except for her head and her fragile white hands, which flashed and jerked, machinelike, over her knitting.

“Mrs. Davis?” Wood said. The woman didn't look up at him, but Sam Davis said harshly from behind him, “She ain't Mrs. Davis.”

Wood turned to find a pump shotgun pointed right at the middle of him, right at his belly. He sucked in his breath involuntarily, and had a quick twinge of nausea. The hole in the end of the barrel looked enormous, and he believed for a second he would be shot.

The rigor of Sam Davis' face and hands grew, in that second, and his bumpy muscles grew larger. But the shot didn't come, the blue eyes flickered, and Wood knew that he wasn't about to do anything so foolish.

“You scared, sonny?” Sam Davis asked triumphantly, not knowing that his voice proved that there would be no shot.

“Yes,” Wood said.

“Hah!” Sam Davis said. “I could kill you legal as hell.”

“You have no reason to shoot me,” Wood said.

“Maybe I'll just break a few of your bones for you!” Sam Davis put the shotgun in the corner and came back to stand a foot from Wood, his arms akimbo.

Wood looked down into Sam Davis' rigid, quivering face. Each gray bristle of his week-old beard seemed to point straight at Wood, and the blue eyes were lighter and colder than Susie's, dangerously flat. The man still looked like pure murder.

“I ought to…” he said without opening his teeth. “I ought to tear your balls off.”

“I don't see why you ought to do anything,” Wood said. “I mean no harm to you or Susie.”

“What the hell's your name again?”

“Wood Whipple.”

“You Harvey's boy?”

“Yes.”

“You the one stole the money?”

“No, that was my brother Horace.”

The danger of pure violence had lessened, as if each word were a counter for its lessening force. The yellow of the walls grew more distinct, and behind Wood the knitting needles clicked on. It occurred to him that he was no longer afraid, but that he should be cautious.

Behind the wall a shallow-well pump began to clunk and hiss. A cow bawled in an outshed or barn. Then a nearer sound—the creak of a stair, and Sam Davis jumped past him into the door to the front hall, where there was violent breath and the hard sound of some thing, some animal, hurt—a short, desperate grunt. He came back pulling the big girl by the arm, and slammed her down in a kitchen chair. Her elbow hit the table like a board, and one of her legs swung away from the chair, a polka-dot pajama leg, bare foot, red toenail polish and calluses. She pulled her leg back and spread her faded blue bathrobe over her lap, then put her head on the table and hid her face in her brown hair. The back of her neck was red. She smelled of damp blankets and pillows—Wood smelled that child smell above the kitchen odors.

Sam Davis stood over her. “Listening, were you? Sneaking around listening? Well, you're going to hear a lot, and so am I! I didn't raise no daughter of mine for town pump!”

He turned to Wood. “How many times you had her ass?”

“Never.”

“I bet! I could git you and about ten more in this town for statuary rape, sonny! Clap your ass in jail! You know that? She ain't at the age of consent! You know that?”

“I've never had sexual intercourse with your daughter,” Wood said.

The words seemed to drive Sam Davis mad. Although he didn't come at Wood, he began to scream. “Sexual intercourse! Sexual intercourse! Sexual intercourse!” banging a chair down against the linoleum floor, picking it up like a post-hole digger and jabbing it down so hard Wood half expected it to go through linoleum, floorboards and all.

It was then Wood understood the man's powerlessness, and decided to do something. He never knew why he chose that moment to act. In another man's home, surrounded by that man's people and possessions, what right had he to take on authority? Why should he get away with it? These thoughts came later, when he and Sam Davis were sitting at the table, drinking hard cider. But perhaps at this moment he did perceive the real power of the phrase “sexual intercourse”—clinical words from a vocabulary Sam Davis had always been led to fear and respect. “Statuary rape,” Sam had said, and Wood thought of Susie as the Venus de Milo, or the Winged Victory of Samothrace. She was as still as a statue all through her father's destruction of the chair, which came apart in his hands.

What Wood did was to sit down at the table across from Susie. Sam Davis stared, pieces of the back of the chair in his hands.

“Sit down,” Wood said, and the man did sit down in the one remaining chair, his sharp elbows on the table. The sticks of chair back lay on the table between them all, next to the sugar bowl and the salt and pepper shakers, each of these in the shape of a little outhouse. On one was written, “I'm fulla S.,” and on the other, “I'm fulla P.”

In this silence Susie raised her head and looked at them both, quickly, her face swollen and frightened. Then she hid again.

“Where's her mother?” Wood asked.

“Concord,” Sam Davis said. “She's over to Concord.” Said this way it meant the state mental institution. “Five years she's been over to Concord. Christ! How can a man raise a kid with no mother? I done the best I could.”

“Has Susie told you what happened?”

“I got Chief Turtle's version. He caught the bastards at it.” Sam Davis seemed tired now and sad.

“And you didn't want to prosecute,” Wood said.

“Bad enough already. What good's that?”

“But you were about to shoot me, or break my neck, or something.”

Sam Davis looked at him. Now there were tears of self-pity in his eyes. “Christ, you can't blame a man for getting upset, can you?”

“But you never got Susie's version of what happened?”

“I couldn't git any more upset than I am right now.” He wiped his eyes with a hand that seemed oversized on his naked arm.

“Susie,” Wood said. She didn't move. “Susie?”

She made a raw, bawling sound into her hands, and in between hiccups and noisy breaths, tried to speak.
“Mine
…
brash!”
she said, and tried again. “Gordon nid it! Gordon!”

“That's the son of a bitch she went out with,” Sam Davis said.

“I know,” Wood said.

“Gordon Ward,” Sam Davis said.

“Got me drunk,” Susie said. Then she cried awhile.

“So they ended up in the cemetery behind the Congregational Church,” Sam Davis said, calmly now. “Standing in line.”