Whipple's Castle (71 page)

The barn burned one August because of damp hay—”spontaneous combustion” they called it—and the house was later sold to summer people.

The falling haunted him. The memory had come back at odd times ever since, full of complicated nostalgia. When he couldn't stay away from Lenore Stefan it had returned often—then painful and full of yearning. He had to go to her, to let go, but he could never really let go. He had no right to use her.

“Where did you go off to?” Sally said. She looked at him with curiosity and suspicion.

“I had a memory,” he said.

“I hope you're not such a damned fool you prefer memories to real kisses.”

“What?”

“I said the girl's out of her mind for you, and you just sit there.”

“Who?”

“You nitwit!”

“What do you want me to do?” he said, suddenly exasperated. “I don't know! Maybe I don't feel that way. Who am I to even…Maybe I don't feel that way!”

“Who said you have to be full of moonbeams? I'm thinking of Peggy, not you. I'm a woman, after all. At least I used to be one before I turned into a bloody ancient gnome. She's a young, attractive woman. Why don't you make love to her? You can any time you want to! If there's anything that drives me insane with anger it's when a man won't do what he can do! There's nothing in the world hurts a woman more, that's meaner, that shows her how helpless she is, than a…
limp
man.”

“Maybe she doesn't feel that way,” he said.

“If she don't, things have changed since I was a girl. Maybe they have. God knows I was always a strange critter anyway.” Sally signed. She looked a little defeated, perhaps even embarrassed.

“Listen,” she said. “I've been doing a good deal of thinking on this subject. And of course I'm thinking of you too. I'm thinking of both of you, because I care more for you two people than anything in the world. That don't come halfway to saying it. Maybe I'm a nut. I'm an old ‘maiden' lady voyeur, maybe, who wants to breed Whipples instead of cocker spaniels!” She laughed. “Anyway, you remember what I told you once? Think with your skin—while you've got one. Examine your life with the glands. Instead of all this internal bleeding. You were always so damned sensitive, afraid somebody was going to get hurt. God knows they did get hurt. But you're not being good to Peggy, you know. I think you'll find that a certain kind of violent use of her will please her as much as it will you.”

Sally shut her eyes and moved her head from side to side as though she were very tired, tired to death. “It's taken a good deal of energy to say this, to care enough to say it. I'd like to find out what my own reasons are for saving it. I think I've been cursed by a strange enthusiasm. Cursed by it all my life. I had a child, a girl. She died of cholera infantum when she was four. I was three thousand miles away at the time. You know how long ago that was? She died April 14, 1899, in Essex, Massachusetts. I was in Paris. I was twenty-five years old—about your age. I felt pretty bad. She was Aranpo's child, and he was dead too. I was twenty-five. I wasn't dead.”

Sally stared intently at the print of the carpenters sawing the big beam. “A long time ago. What I mean to say is I was still very much alive.”

Wood looked at her ancient skin, at her cramped, misshapen body. Her trunk was rigid, almost exoskeletal, but the soft, powdery parts of her—her face and forearms—hung limply on the inner bones. Her legs were encased in strong lisle, a weave so hard it shone. She seemed very tired now.

She was looking at him. “Now I'm so old it hardly matters. Why don't I keep my mouth shut? Even my jaw muscles get tired. It's that I ain't dead, I guess. I'd better get on home.” It took her several heaves to get up from the chair. Three or four of them were practice, or aiming heaves, before the real one that brought her to her feet and canes. Again he had those quick shocks of sympathy.

“Be careful,” he said.

She grinned at him. “Be careful,” she said, imitating him. “Be careful. Be careful.”

She met her escort in the hall. Wood almost called out to them to be careful. They got her downstairs all right, and soon Peggy came back, with David following her.

“Okay, boss,” David said to her, and she smiled. “How's it going?” David asked.

“Better,” Wood said.

“Good!” David seemed shy. Then he said, “Where was the fire, anyway? Did you hear it?”

“We couldn't count the whistles,” Peggy said.

“I just wondered. Hank said Horace took off right out straight, and now she doesn't know whether she ought to be worried or not. She won't call up to find out for sure where it is.”

“She wouldn't do that,” Peggy said.

David turned to go. Before he reached the door they heard, distinctly this time, the two short whistles that meant the fire was out. Downstairs the telephone began to ring.

“I've got to take Sally back home,” David said. “You take good care of Wood, Peggy. Make him happy.”

“I'll try,” Peggy said.

The ringing of the telephone quieted as David shut the door. Wood had been noticing that everyone rather carefully shut the door upon the two of them. Peggy was blushing, rose and dark gold, at what, he didn't know.

“Well,” he said.

“Yes?” She turned to him, still smiling and blushing, glowing with some interior idea. Confused, he hopped back to his chair and arranged himself on it, pulling his robe together and draping it over his stump. She came and sat near him on the arm of his easy chair.

“Do you think I'd mind seeing that?” she said, pointing at his leg.

“It's not pretty.”

“I've seen it already, and I saw where your eye used to be. I touched that place. It didn't bother me at all.”

He heard that confession of love; but would the court accept it?

There was Sally's advice, the “violent use” he might make of Peggy. Peggy Mudd! Suddenly he was so shy and nervous he couldn't speak. He turned toward the windows, the main arched window with the narrow arched lights on each side. The curtains swirled before the dry windy day, bright as the light beyond them. In each gust the maple leaves glittered and hissed furiously. She was watching him, and he held back the visions of that violent use. She was still that skinny little girl-child, almost a baby, who had the sniffles every winter. It had been her mother he had often thought about in his early fantasies, never the child. When he had stepped to the window of the sugarhouse it was the mother that had made his throat thick and dry, the older woman who had in fact once looked at him in an appraising way. Just a glance, but it had been enough to set him vibrating for days when he was sixteen.

“Are you all right, Wood?” Peggy said close to his ear.

He had told Sally he couldn't stand being a witness to what he saw, but of course he had always been more than a witness. Peggy's cool hands slid along his jaws, to his throat, pulled his collar open and began to massage the tense muscles at the base of his neck. “Do you like that?” she asked in a low, hollow voice. Her hands moved. “Do you like it, Wood? If you don't I'll stop, but you looked like a knot.”

“Yes,” he said.

“See? You're getting softer. You're untangling.”

“Oh, sure,” he said.

“Don't scoff. I'll untangle you. You let me stay with you and I'll untangle you. I feel sort of powerful all of a sudden. You know what my zoology instructor said once? He said mammals like to touch each other. Did you ever think of that? I mean it's one common characteristic of mammals—they enjoy touching each other.”

“Yes, I can see that,” he said. Then knives flashed in his mind. Meat thermometers, dull greasy metal. No, not greasy, but dulled by constant autoclaving, racking; the anonymous handiness of things kept in use.

“Relax, now,” she whispered, her lips at his ear. Her hair touched his cheek. “You're tangled up again. Don't go away from me like that.” Her hands came back to his skin, and the knives were gone. “There. See? I can tell,” she said.

It was true. He could have groaned with relief. She would stay with him, do anything to help him. Perhaps someday he could let go in her presence, but that would be some other time. In the meanwhile his gratitude welled up and was held. That control had been too long in the making. He was singular in this world; they needed him calm, with all his wits about him. She needed him. Who would protect them? Who would protect her? His men were dying! He must protect them against themselves, the killers of children.

“Wood! Wood!” she called.

Slowly he came back to the brown room. The curtains belled out, spilling wind, revealing all the wild energy in the maple leaves. At least not human. But her arms were. She had pulled him back again. When would he be safe enough to reveal his gratitude? He must let go and fall. But he was all cockeyed, asymmetrical, awkward. He would land on his head and break his neck, or somebody's neck. He would kick out a foot that wasn't there any more, get clubbed by a beam on his blind side.

She was crying because of him. With much effort he unclenched his dangerous fists and smoothed her hair away from her forehead. How round her forehead was! He had never noticed that roundness before, and the wonder of it calmed him, he had no idea how. It was a marvel. All right, it was a marvel. She liked his touch; like a cat she moved into his touch.

“Peggy,” he said, being careful of this calmness.

“What?” she said.

“I think I want you to stay with me. I mean I appreciate it very much.”

“It's all I want to do,” she said.

Horace read the whistles at the first signal. Seven long, four short: Main Street to railroad tracks, from Cascom River Bridge to Bank Street intersection. First he tried to find a bicycle, but all the tires were flat. No one seemed to ride any of the bicycles any more. They were all dusty and out of order, so he left them in a pile and ran all the way downstreet, to arrive exhausted and gagging at the busy scene of the fire.

Because he had run in fear, he was sick almost to death. The old Leah pumper blocked Water Street, its engine coughing at idle. Brass valves moved, shiny rods humped like leisurely elbows. Water dripped everywhere down its red enameled sides. Smoke, dark gray and not much of it, flew in long wisps down the street above the heads of the people he pushed through. They let him by, gazing as they were, calmly talking to each other. Down the other way the street was blue and white, shiny with the parade uniforms of the legionnaires. “Hey!” someone yelled at him. The canvas hose bulged, wanting to straighten itself but having to crimp where it twisted through the front doorway. The kitchen windows were broken, and thick smoke tumbled out to be whipped into streamers and rags. He followed the hose. “Hey! You!” they yelled imperiously. Chief Tuttle cut him off and tried to take his arm, but the old man's hands slid off and away. He took a last breath before entering the smoke. The stink of burning cloth, of string, struck his nose even though he wouldn't breathe. His eyes had to shut tight; immediately he collided with wet oilskins and fell into the rush of water. He fell through the parlor toward her room. Glass tinkled at all the windows. With his nose at the baseboard he got part of a breath, and as he got to his feet a fireman brushed past him, oilskins flapping. Then another. He was weaker than he thought; he had forgotten not to breathe. Susie, where was she? He fell, not aware that he was falling until his head hit the floor and the world turned fiat again. Someone had his feet. His head rattled across doorsills, slid on linoleum. The legs of a table became involved with him, then tumbled away. He swung, loose as a rope, into the light. Someone had his arm. He was on his knees, but they smothered him like wrestlers, turned him over too easily against his will and stared down at him from a great height. Their faces circled him, tilting down.

“It's Horace Whipple,” Chief Tuttle said. Someone else knelt down and felt him over. “He's not in bad shape,” that voice said. They all straightened up. “How's the woman?”

“Forget it.”

“Get him across the street.”

They let him stand, but led him firmly across. He stumbled at the curb in front of Futzie's Tavern, where on the sidewalk a mound of gray blankets lay. Near the straps and canvas, beside the kneeling uniformed men, a metal box with a red light on it pumped and wheezed. From the pile of blankets a black hand protruded, shiny and cracked as coal.

 

That evening the Whipples, all except Horace, had gathered in the great hall, around Harvey's broad oak table. Their faces were constrained against the thrill of it all. Each was conscious of his own expression—noncommittal, stopped. Words seemed too clear, too calmly said.

“This will
kill
Horace,” Kate said.

They were silent at the wonder of it. When Wood lit his pipe they were startled by the match. He was still sick, but he wouldn't stay upstairs.

“Poor Susie Davis,” Henrietta said.

“Poor old Sam too,” David said. “What's he going to do now?” All their words were careful; none of them could understand why they were so excitedly pretending to be calm.

“That damned building was insured to the hilt, anyway,” Harvey said.

“How's Horace taking it?” Peggy asked David, who had just come downstairs.

“I don't know.”

“What do you mean?” Henrietta said, getting up.

“He wouldn't let me in, either.”

“I'm going up again!” Henrietta said. They watched her climb the stairs. With a hand on the rail she pulled herself up, limping with tiredness.

At that moment Wood recalled that his shotgun was missing. But it had been missing last night, before this happened. He was confused. It might possibly have been a deliberate act of Horace's toward him; perhaps it had saved his life. Because of course Horace must have the gun. Horace had been fascinated and slightly afraid of it for a long time, had even borrowed it once to try it out up behind the house. Was there anything to worry about right now—that was the question he must examine very carefully. He didn't seem to have enough information, enough data, to make a decision about Horace and the gun. It was as if his long sleep had cut him out of time, away from all of them and their problems, and suddenly all he could think of wanting was peace. Poor Susie—it seemed that she had been lost long ago, in his or in someone else's childhood, an old, old story. It was too late for her. Nothing could be done there. She was dead, she was in peace.