Whipple's Castle (47 page)

He did, on many of those evenings. They danced to the phonograph, and she let him hold her close, his hand on her waist above the delicate surges of her muscles, her breath on his neck. He'd see stars. But her pose was bored sophistication; he couldn't get hold of her mind, which seemed as smoothly inaccessible in its perfection of attitude as a jewel, a pearl.

She was afraid of the dark, and for this he was grateful. His own marginal fear of the dark of course disappeared when he was with her—darkness became so easily then the soft setting of his daydreams, in which he could have taken on a werewolf, a bear, any monster large enough to warrant his dreamed-of reward. It was because of her fear of the dark that she let him walk her down the hill sometimes after supper. She hated to be home. In love with lights and dancing, as she was, she hated the farm, the sheep, the reasons for having to live there. She had vicious fights with her father when he wanted her to help with the chores. Her voice would turn flat and mean, and David would try to protect the vision of Tucker he thought to be possible.

They would walk together down the hill to the crossroads, where, in December, they skated with the other kids around a bonfire on the millpond. From Joe Cilley he expected violence at any moment, and again one night on the ice Joe beat Willy up; another lesson. David had never seen anyone hit so hard. Joe's fists would have broken boards. He leaped straight upon Willy, skates flashing in the firelight, and knocked him down flat upon the ice with one blow to the shoulder. Using his fists and arms like hammers, he beat upon his screaming brother's head, arms, back, until the screams turned really desperate. Then he stopped, and Willy, who at fifteen was as big as a man, ran crying home upon his skates, right across the road, his weak ankles bending nearly flat.

Joe didn't bother to watch his brother run home, and David saw his face, then, above the fire. His black hair shone. Set into the smooth plane of his face were four black holes, all about the same size—his eyes and the holes of his nostrils. His nose was very small and sharp. Sometimes he seemed unreal, a character from a movie in which a man could be as brilliantly cold and cruel as he wanted to be. When Joe hit there was no hesitation at all, no caution, none of the involuntary mercy that kept most people from hurting each other. Except toward his brother, he wasn't really mean. He bullied no one else, but when he hit, even in play, he hit too hard, and no one ever dared to challenge him.

And Tucker was so frail. David was afraid he would hurt her, brutalize her in some dark and violent way he hardly dared to think about.

As for Willy, he tried his revenge several times, jumping David from behind and trying to crush him. Joe watched these episodes coolly. David always managed to get out from under and pin Willy, and finally he said, “Look, you tub of lard, it appears that I'm stronger than you, so why don't you lay off?” He never hit Willy, and he often wondered why, thinking that perhaps it was fear of Joe. He wasn't really certain of this at all, and this possibly dishonorable indecision was added to all the others, brutal or merely irritating, that surrounded his days and nights.

Sometimes after skating, Joe would consent to walk Tucker home, and David would walk ahead of them.

“You keep on the road, now, David,” Joe would call, “and make some noise, because I ain't looking where I'm going.” And Tucker would laugh for him, a delicate, ladylike chime so beautifully cruel that even in his pain David had to admire its skill. If Joe decided not to walk her home she would have David walk next to her, and he was not too proud to put his arm around her. Once, just before they reached the house, he turned and tried to kiss her. She punched him painfully in the stomach and said, “Down, Rover, down, boy.”

Perhaps that was the first time a certain small question flicked past his consciousness: what was he doing here? In his cold bed that night as he shivered and waited for the sheets to warm he looked carefully at his idea of himself. Just how had he come to accept this degradation?

At Dexter-Benham, once the wild ride in the station wagon was over, and the sensation of sliding rear wheels had faded into only a small trace of anxiety, the days were sober and neat. He was good at what he was good at—sports and subjects other than math. In grammar school he had developed, out of the void, a system based upon three rather than ten, and although he understood the decimal system in principle, in any sort of stress he reverted to what he called his “tricimal” system, in which, for example, seventy-three became for purposes of common interchange twenty threes plus three threes plus one plus three, or, twenty-four threes plus one. He was aware of the cumbersomeness of his system, but it was the one native to his blood.

The regular Dexter-Benham boys perhaps changed their striped neckties and real Argyle socks a little too often for his taste—sometimes before lunch—and tended to brag rather blatantly of what they had done over vacation late at night in their families' rumpus rooms or in their fathers' Lincoln Continentals. Many of them seemed to be obsessed by Jews; a tall, red-headed boy named McLeod, from Des Moines, whose pride in basketball was to pass the ball so hard at close range no one on his own team could catch it, asked David if Whipple was a Jewish name. David's blank astonishment at the relevance of this question was assumed by several others to be a fine Yankee putdown of McLeod. In any case he began to have certain friends.

After the chaos of Leah High School, his instructors did, at least at first, personify the world of intelligence and logic he desired. His homework had to be done, and it had to be neat and precise. If he began to find in his instructors areas of prejudice or of political rigidity, he only wondered where he'd got his own beliefs. He came to the conclusion that the few and muted dialogues on these subjects between his mother and rather had given him opinions, mostly his mother's because she tended to speak from knowledge. He found to his surprise that his occasional reading of the books she brought home was, in the aggregate, an accomplishment that was astounding to his instructors and his new friends. He was not always sure that his questions wouldn't embarrass his instructors, and he grew careful. Little by little he began to feel that no one on that bright and civilized hill knew or cared what the war was all about. Perhaps they were right, and his baggage of terms such as fascist, democrat, communist, liberal, reactionary, anti-Semite had very little to do with why his country fought the war.

But these qualifications were slow in coming, and the school charmed him and flattered him in many little ways. His friends—Lance Vandenbree, Judson Gay, Hoppy Hopright, Swivelhead Downing and others—with their screwy and even sometimes witty jargon, were set in his mind against the dangerous journey back to Cascom and the nervous weary load of fear and frustration he would carry up the hill into that perpetual night.

On weekends sometimes, at dusk and with the Crosses' blessings, he shot brown rats off the ridgepole of the sheep bam. The Crosses had a whole case of prewar .22 Longs, an inferior cartridge though adequate for rats, and a single-shot Remington .22 rifle. The rats seemed to have an evening trek that took them along the ridgepole, and against the sky they made interesting if gruesome running targets. The rifle cracked and he heard the thunk as the bullets wiped the rats away. At dark he took a paper bag and a flashlight and gathered the dead rats that had tumbled down the roof to the back of the bam. Once, passing the pigpen, he gingerly picked a rat out of the bag by the tail and tossed it into the trough. Gertrude Stein, snorting in the near darkness, swayed obesely up to the trough, and the rat's bones crunched. He buried the others.

Lucifer was part karakul, part Dorset Horn, part some odd mutant spirit that appealed in the darkest way to Perkins Cross. They seemed violent enemies and yet there was an intimacy between them that David couldn't help observing—a kind of equality, as though Lucifer were not quite unhuman. When the proper ewes came in heat and Lucifer was allowed among them, Perkins stood at the door of his writing shed and watched as Lucifer, his scrotum on its narrow strap swinging as wildly as a punching bag, took them one by one whenever they crossed his skewed stare. The ewes dutifully stood for him, and dutifully grew deep-bellied with lambs. These lambs would be born in February, for a special restaurant market—early lambs, hard to keep alive in the coldest part of the year.

When not allowed to rut, Lucifer seemed to take perverse pleasure in bunting and pushing against the side of Perkins' shed, and if Perkins was inside it, he'd grab his lantern and the two-by-four he kept for the purpose, come out cursing, carefully put the lantern down and bash Lucifer across the shoulders. Lucifer ran just out of the light, then turned a dull gold eye on Perkins before moving back into the dark.

David went home for Christmas still puzzled by his new life, aware that he gave vague answers to his family about Cascom and Dexter-Benham. Christmas was strange without Wood, who was in Texas and couldn't get leave to come home. He and Horace put up the tree, and he drove Sally De Oestris on her Christmas rounds. He felt a little like an impostor—that because it was not Wood who chose and set the tree, the tree was not quite real. Christmas seemed an imitation of itself. He came back to Cascom by way of Dexter-Benham, slept overnight in Hoppy Hopright's room, and the next day resumed, by way of Al Roux's careening station wagon, his oddly split existence.

In February, that gray, frozen month, the lambs came due. Snow lay three feet deep, and the banks along the road, plowed for the town by Romeo Forneau, were as high as David's head. A path one shovel wide came down from the house, cut through the banks and deltaed out among the sheds and barns, a diagram of chores.

On alternate nights he found himself sleeping, by what reasoning or tacit agreement on his part he could not quite follow or remember, on a cot in the barn loft just above what Myrna Cross called “The Maternity Ward.” His revolver under his pillow, his head beneath the covers against the barn's vast darkness of rafter and purlin, cobweb and rat run, the rich heat of the ewes rose up around him and made him sweat. Every two hours an alarm clock woke him, and he lit an oil lantern and climbed down to the ewes, where they skittishly bumped their horns and rumps against the bars.

If one of the ewes did not move away, but stood stiffly, neck extended, hooves spread, then he would take down the bottle of linseed oil, the sharp hunting knife, and attend a birth. Maybe it was Lucifer's long legs that had got onto those lambs; a lamb's forefeet had to come out neatly beneath its nose, and too often these did not. He had to arrange things, even push back, sometimes, against the force of birth. Sometimes it was necessary to cut the ewe's taut perineum, sometimes to kill a lamb, cut it off piecemeal in order to save its twin or its mother. For these major disasters he called for help by ringing an iron triangle that hung outside the barn door. No matter what occurred, the ewe would never make a sound, except for long breaths, her hind feet set in the brown dirt floor.

Not all of the ewes had names—there were too many of them—but two of them were always spoken of by name because their mothers had died when they were born, and they had been raised, until weaned, in the house on baby bottles. One was Grace, who died of the same mysterious complaint her mother died of—a kind of weakness in the attachment of the womb, which caused her to bleed to death. Her lamb was called “Harold.” Myma called him—”Here, Harold”—and he would see the bottle and come at her, his soft, stupid eyes gleaming, and butt her with accurate, primal force, all greedy appetite.

Grace had died late in the morning, while he was at Dexter-Benham. It had been a typical day—chapel in the morning, the boys' proud, polite and breaking voices singing of the Holy Trinity, their button-down shirts white, their ties conservatively striped, their faces clean in the morning light. David looked like one of them. In English class they politely discussed, with Mr. Barkham, who looked like one of them a few years older, Gray's “Elegy.” In science class they watched a radiometer turn in the sunlight. David studied in one of his friends' rooms, not with the other townies, who studied in the library. It always seemed unnatural to his friends that he didn't live at school. Sometimes at night, they told him, they put a penny in the floor master's light socket, and every time he changed the fuse, he blew it out again himself.

Then David came back to the farm, up the long hill in the heavy darkness among the trees. He felt like an explorer in his thin foreign clothes, and when he reached the house he reluctantly took off his white shirt, Ivy League jacket and regimental-striped tie and carefully hung them in his closet.

The Crosses had nearly finished butchering Grace. By the time he'd changed into dungarees, rubber boots and his canvas mackinaw, all that could be used of her, including the intestines which would be used for sutures, was packaged and ready to be picked up and taken to the freezer in the village.

The other orphan was Amantha, who waited until it was David's shift to try to have her twins.

He awoke in his damp blankets before the alarm clock rang, thinking he'd heard voices. It was, by the clock's dim green face, nearly one in the morning. With an arm aching from sleep he pushed down the alarm button before it rang, and fumbled for the lantem.

A giggle, not made by any sheep, came from below, and he knew it was Tucker. Wild thoughts: had she come sneaking down to see him? Would she think it a great joke to come creeping upon him, then, after startling him, to slide softly under the covers with him? He didn't move, but the ewes stamped and bumped below. There seemed to be a nervous increase in their rising warmth, in the oily smell of wool. Tucker would climb the ladder and slide her thin hands coolly down his chest, and her hair would cover his face as she slipped lightly into his bed. She giggled again, and this time reality, another sound, pierced him; cold damp shame at his wishfulness. Joe Cilley's chuckle climbed over hers, a dry, unbroken sound calculated not to show too much amusement, the standard noise he made whenever something of the sort was called for. Now David knew where these cruel noises came from—the bay next to the ewes' pen, where hay was kept.