Whipple's Castle (77 page)

He took Horace's clothes to his truck. Kate had driven him out at noon to retrieve it and get some clothes appropriate for Susie's funeral. She had been subdued, thinking hard all the time. He wondered if she noticed, as he did, the sharpness of color and light.

“You knew Susie pretty well, didn't you?” she had said.

“You know I went out with her a few times.”

“Yes,” she said. “You must be very sad.”

“I am, Katie.”

“I don't know who I'm crying about. It's all so mixed up.”

“Gordon too,” he said.

“Yes, it's all horrible.” She glanced at him and her eyes were glossy with tears. “Davy? Maybe we can begin talking about it sometime.”

That was about all they said. He always felt good with Kate, and he thought of telling her that, but by then they had arrived at the cabin, where she let him off.

Now the little truck started at the touch of his foot, feeling like freedom. He fully intended to take Horace's clothes to Balchers' Funeral Home, and then on the way back stop at the police station and pick up Wood's shotgun. But he didn't drive toward Balchers' Funeral Home at all, he drove to the lake, made himself a drink and stood on the dock, watching the lively blue waves, feeling the slightly nippy wind across his face. “Essentially,” he said to the lake, the blue sky, the lovely pulsing of the weather, “David Whipple is procrastinating. He chooses this nice place to be.”

But it was not his right to choose, so he had another drink, his eyes becoming a little spastic, he noticed. The blue lake was too piercingly, beautifully blue. He must go back to Leah, to that mortician's lair. How many funerals a day were sufficient unto the Lord? Tomorrow would be Gordon Ward's, Wednesday Horace's. No mass ceremonies in Leah, at least for the time being. So he drove back toward the town, feeling the close embrace of Leah as though he drove toward a dense cloud, deeper and deeper into it. Not a storm cloud, but a foglike miasma of knowledge and relationships. Even the clarity of vision dimmed in that direction, and he thought of it as a place, now, where one avoided eyes. At every crossroad he wanted to turn the little Ford's wheel and climb toward hills and freedom, stop maybe at a little store and buy a beer to sip. But he went on, because he had to.

Then he came to a gravel road leading off to the right. It was familiar in a startling way; he had passed it all summer with no twinge of recognition at all, as though time past were a different landscape altogether. It was the road to Dark Hill Farm he'd first climbed when he was sixteen. This sudden recognition seemed to be a sign, so he turned and began the long climb. It had been five years since he'd taken this road, and it seemed narrower, the trees larger. The way seemed too short, and he passed the old landmarks too quickly on his way—the millpond, Cilley's mailbox, unmarked lesser crossroads. Above the last, steepest hill the saplings had grown in diameter, and beyond the saplings the thick groves of spruce were still impenetrable, soft green cliffs imprisoning the road. Then he came to the clearing of the farm. His engine had heated up a little, so he stopped to let it idle as he looked around at the house and barns. His act of stopping declared him, as much as he wanted to be declared, a visitor to this place he had run from long ago.

A subtle feeling of unuse emanated from the barns and barnyard. The fields beyond had been hayed this summer, but something ragged about the edges of things, the earth not trodden enough where it should have been along the paths to chores, gave him some courage. Perhaps no one was here at all. He had no nostalgia about this place that he could detect; it had been one of the few times in his life when absolutely everything he'd done had been inadequate. Memory could usually salvage something or other from a time or place, but here all had been loss and frustration. Maybe he should carefully hold onto that time, and examine it well. He had played mooncalf to Tucker Cross; that should remain a warning. And he had run away after having come too close to murder. Did Lucifer still skulk about the gray barns, or had he died of internal ruptures? David could feel in his hands the sting of the two-by-four, and in his chest the deep, free breath of murder.

Soon he became convinced that no one lived in the red house beneath the pines, and the final proof was an empty windowpane in a downstairs window that was so soft a black, so furry and deep, it glowed its emptiness out at him across the pine needles. He drove on past the clearing, wondering why he hadn't merely turned around. It wasn't procrastination any more—he seemed to be looking for something up beyond, where the road went like an open door into the spruces again. It wasn't Diddleneck Pond. At least he didn't think it was. But some little manifestation or other drew him on until he remembered what it was, and the warm afternoon of late summer when he had seen it. Forneau's beer-can tree. Somehow he stopped at exactly the right place, walked a few yards through brush that was now solid leaves and stalks, and found the little maple tree. It was still small, now dead, and some of the rusted cans were immobile on the brittle branches. Most had fallen and begun to disappear into the rotten leaves of all those seasons. He shrugged and turned to go back, and it was then he remembered what he'd seen here—Joe Cilley bending Tucker's frail back as he French-kissed her, his brutal mouth over her delicate one. A beautiful stab of jealousy slid under his ribs, fresh as it had been then. “Ow!” he said happily.

The brilliant edges of leaves cut his eyes; suddenly his ears popped open, and the buzz and whine of all the woods insects assaulted him with the benevolent violence of an orchestra.

“Well!” he said. There was his little truck waiting faithfully, but with Horace's folded clothes on the front seat. He had to go back to Leah.

 

Balchers' Funeral Home was an old Victorian mansion nearly as large and omate as the Whipples' house. Its smooth modern improvements of paint and siding, and of heavy, somnolent plantings, proved it no residence, however. The chaste sign hung by the walk on a miniature scaffold, lighted at night by small floodlights sunken into the turf.

He knew Phil Balcher, the son, pretty well. In high school Phil had been one of those quiet, solitary yet unlonesome people everyone knew were destined to grow up and become what they had always intended to become.

David parked among quite a few other cars in the carefully tended gravel parking lot next to the big house and walked, bearing Horace's clothes, toward what he took to be the side entrance. The weight of the whiskey had lodged in the back of his head, still working because he felt his imagination to be too free and dangerous, too eager for any new sights he might feed into it. He had to choose Horace's coffin, for one thing. Should he look at them all, he wondered, ponder this and that advantage, this color against that? Phil would be proud of his wares, he knew.

Last night he had been too late to see Horace. As he ran through the woods behind the dim beam of his flashlight, he missed a turn in the trail, lost the trail altogether and had to climb slowly toward the reservoir through the ten-year-old blow-down from the 1938 hurricane. When he got to the old air-raid tower, only a few of the vigilantes still hunkered around the place where Horace had died, talking it over, reliving their excitement. None of the men recognized him. They sat around a small fire, the huge pine columns of the tower looming up like a giant's legs, their rifles and shotguns, the tools of hunters and soldiers, familiar in their hands, in their laps or leaning against their necks. David's rifle, if he had been armed, would have lain as easily cradled against his own body. He stood at the periphery of the light. The stairs to the tower had rotted, he noticed, in the humidity of the woods. He soon learned that Horace's body had already been taken away.

Now Horace was in this building somewhere, embalmed, he supposed, or whatever they did now. It was not a subject that had ever before been of immediacy for him. The side entrance was rigged for deliveries, with a ramp. He opened the wide door and went into a hallway. Gray gun-metal coffins were stacked along one side on brackets made of ordinary galvanized plumbing pipe. He knew he was not in a place for visitors, yet a ghostlike push of momentum made him walk aggressively forward. He would go anywhere, open any door. At the end of the hall was a door with a window of frosted glass, the glass glowing with the antiseptic white of fluorescent light in the place beyond. He would always know that he had read that lucid, clinical light for what it was, known and chosen to enter in order to sear his eyes.

He pushed the door open and entered the bright room. Color on his left, among whites and the busy chrome of table legs, tubes and faucets, made him turn toward lively reds and oranges. On a table lay a long body, on its back, legs slightly spread. It was Horace's face there, its crude bones beneath the silent skin, mouth gaped open like a retch so the broad upper teeth were visible. But the whole body was open, from crotch to neck, and the inside of that vessel gleamed as fresh as any meat on display. The insides of the ribs were silvery clean against the rare red meat, the wide columns arching upward toward the slit, tough binding of skin. The chemical reek was not from the body; it came from the walls or ceiling, so strong it seemed to disinfect vision itself. He could not stop the cataloguing, never thought of turning away. There was no heart in the splayed body, no liver or lights, no orts. The gaping mouth seemed to scream silently, the whole body protesting, as though the split chest itself were a toothed mouth. It had been cleaned like a beef, like a sheep, emptied to the neck. There was the pale esophagus cut off, a perfect O. There were the spine's knuckles, the hollow of belly, the bush of blond hair and the slack penis, the wormy bag of testicles dark as though bruised between the great gray thighs. But it was the red meat, the naked muscles glowing fresh red, that he would take with him like a treasure to ponder over. The scars on legs and arms, the old healed scars, were white basted seams. Below the bulge of brow the eyes were darkly sunken like dried puddles. It was all so silent, that meat. Horace's big hands, palms up, never closed. Away from the empty place, as they were, they still seemed capable, as did the feet with their working calluses, of human movement. But all was still as a photograph, now merely dead extensions of the red center.

Someone gasped. He turned to see Phil Balcher, pale, in a white apron stained pink, staring at him. Phil's lips moved as he tore the apron off. A string broke, David noticed, clearly understanding Phil's dismay. He felt his expression turn into the calm friendliness of meeting. A smile signaled itself to his eyes and cheeks—friendly, more than polite. Phil stared in awe.

“Hi, Phil,” David's voice said. “I've brought the suit and shirt.” He was aware of the meat there on the table, the non-witness.

“Come!” Phil said, pointing to a door. “Come!”

Phil looked sick, and David wanted to reassure him. “I guess I came in the wrong door,” he said, walking calmly toward the door Phil had pointed to.

“I've got to wash my hands!” Phil nearly cried. “Wait out there! Danger of disease, you know!”

Near the door, David noticed another table with chromed legs on casters as large as the wheels of a child's wagon. A sheet covered the obvious form of a body—the cliff of feet, the heavy mounds of torso and head.

“Who's that?” he asked.

“Wait outside!” Phil's dismayed voice cried. When David looked again, matter-of-factly, reassuringly, at Horace's table, Phil stared, horrified. How could he tell Phil it was all right? He himself was gravely calm, nonchalant.

“This door?” he enquired politely, taking the handle.

Phil grimaced as he nodded.

David entered an ordinary office furnished with desks and filing cabinets, calendar, clock, typewriter. He sat in a comfortable old swivel chair; the suit, shirt and ties in his lap. He had brought all three ties, thinking that Phil could choose the one he preferred. He wanted to be considerate of Phil, who was not a bad guy, really.

Phil came out, frowning. He'd combed his black hair smoothly away from his pale forehead, and he looked somehow lacquered, hair and skin. Even his white shirt and black necktie gleamed. That necktie could never be untied, David was certain. The glassy knot must have been molded into it.

Phil stared at him. “You were never very close?” he asked.

“Close?”

“You and Horace.”

“You mean just now?” David asked.

“No, I mean…in life.”

“Why?”

“He's not ready. They did a complete autopsy, you know. They always do in such cases.” Phil was still horrified by what David had so calmly seen, and David observed this with wonder.

“I've seen dead bodies before,” he said. He counted them: three soldiers lying beside the deuce-and-a-half that had been hit by the short round. One arm was several feet away, still looking exactly like an arm and a hand, wrist watch and wedding ring attached. An old lady hit by a car in Seattle, her silver-rimmed glasses in her gray hair as though she had just pushed them up, her pocketbook strap still around her arm. The grammar-school janitor, the only Negro in Leah, lying in the satin sheets of his coffin. A million in the newsreels and movies, blown apart, shot, bumed, starved to death. So why was Phil upset?

“Here are the clothes. You can pick the necktie you like best,” he said.

Phil took the clothes and put them on a hanger, the shirt neatly over the suit coat. “You weren't very close to Horace, then?”

Phil evidently implied that the pile of meat in there was Horace. Why must he say that? Did the son of a bitch want to make him admit something?

“Are you going to sell me a coffin?”

“A casket,” Phil said, correcting him. Phil put on his suit coat before he led David into the next room. Here were soft carpets, reddish warm lights, flowers, coffins—caskets—sedately elevated to chest level. Each had a discreet small price tag hanging on one of its handles.