Whipple's Castle (41 page)

He had taken to turning on his radio late at night, so low no one else in the house could possibly hear it, and from some distant city heard classical music, its clean, deliberate dignity of cadence and sound. He would somehow translate himself through all that distance, through the medium of that clean, intelligent sound, into the great world where he wanted to be. And this journey might be the first step.

He had been taken to Dexter-Benham once, for an interview. Its buildings were Georgian, arranged around a mall on top of a hill under huge elms. The students wore sport coats with leather elbow patches, and white shirts with striped neckties. The headmaster, Mr. Barnes, a tall man with light blue eyes, had shaken his hand and led him into a round office with tall windows, where everything was polished and light. The furniture seemed very old, permanent, and at the same time fragile. Mr. Barnes was very formal in his manner, yet friendly. He told David to call him “Chief,” and through the friendliness David seemed to see the one reservation he wanted to see—that he must do well, that he must perform, that there was no substitute for this. All would be serious, dignified. Rules would be respected and upheld. They would all be men.

As he rode out of Leah, his tin suitcase creaked and crackled as it moved within its bindings of clothesline tied with many doubtful knots. His trunk was being sent on to Dark Hill Farm, where he would live. That had been arranged by his mother, and he didn't worry about it.

He rode east on a narrow asphalt road, past well-kept houses that had once been farmhouses, although on this road the fields grew smaller as the land rose, and the stone walls that had once marked their borders were deep in the woods, submerged in the dark spruce that advanced behind hardwood brush. Dark little houses, then, that stood in clearings small as rooms, and then a few shacks covered roof and sides with tarpaper, some with no windows. These sat in clearings that seemed to have been claimed from the woods by no cutting instruments at all, but trodden out by feet. And then only the dark woods.

The road climbed, then for a short relief ran level, then climbed again, so that he had to stand upon his pedals and pump against the achy weakness that crept into his knees—a hint of mortality he knew all about. The asphalt seemed to breathe away his breath as it drew the green heat from the ferns and trees along the road. After a few miles he stopped to rest, not because he was exhausted, but to feel the pleasure of his muscles as they cleared again. He let his bike lean against the springy brush, and stood bemused—slightly dazed by the heat of the sun, looking into the thickness of the green, where blackberries hung shiny as coal upon their sticks among the heavy ferns. It was early in September, and bees hummed over the last of the wild asters. The gravel smell of the shoulder of the road was pleasant where the heat sucked it up, and where the dust had settled on the ferns the two odors mixed—the mineral one seductive as a sneeze, the furry green one rich and forbidding.

He was not in a hurry. The bees buzzed here with as much intensity as anywhere, and the sweet hot air was as much alive. Where he was, was life enough to let him know he was still in the world. And so he stood, scratching his elbow. A car passed, and shortly afterward a pickup truck, but there were few cars because of gasoline and tire rationing.

After a while he straightened up his bike and noticed that his suitcase had begun to slide off to the right. No minor adjustments of the clothesline seemed to help, so he undid all the knots and put his suitcase down in the ferns. It was an interesting problem, and while he thought about it he idly opened the snaps of the suitcase and looked inside. On top was his raincoat. He moved the raincoat and looked—pretending that it was a discovery to him—at the .32 caliber Iver Johnson revolver that pressed heavily on his one sport coat. He thought how it would have been a thrill to discover such a real and heavy thing in a suitcase among clothes. Even though he knew it was there, each time he looked at it he got a small surprise. Still thinking of discovery, he cautiously picked it up, opened it and looked at the cylinder to see if it was loaded, although he knew it was. He'd bought it from the Leah High School janitor, for the price of a pint of Schenley's and a fifth of muscatel. He hadn't fired any of the real cartridges that came with it because they couldn't be replaced; none of the hardware stores had ammunition to sell any more. He had found one box of blanks in one store, and these he unloaded, reamed out and reloaded with black powder and lead balls.

He knew that the smokeless powder in the blank cartridges was too quick to use with balls, and might have caused dangerous pressures in the old gun. His attitude toward this hobby of his was mixed, especially now that he was leaving Leah for the winter. What had guns, even though guns were real, and not exactly toys, to do with the new life he wanted? He aimed the revolver at a tree, then put it carefully back on his sport coat, tied his suitcase on again and continued his long ride.

Hours later he came into Cascom above the lake, and had to climb, pushing his bike for miles, it seemed to him. The road turned as it climbed the mountain, and came out of big pines into what had once been a field, but now was grown up with small poplars and pin cherries. The road was a corridor between these low walls of thick gray and green. Here, after the deep pines, David felt exposed, trapped by the density of the saplings on either side of him. Soon the road leveled, and he could ride for a while, even though the gravel was at times mushy and difficult. But then the road climbed again, and he found it easier to get off and push. The darkest woods were just before the farm-spruce in impenetrable groves, their branches interlocked, under them only a black crawl space where the passages led, deep in needles, among the trunks and dead lower branches.

Past a hundred yards of these, with the sky darkening, he came to the farm. It was as it had been described to him; on the left, beneath tall pines and backed up against the granite out-croppings of a steep hill, the house seemed to be in hiding. It had once been a standard colonial farmhouse, but tall bay windows had been added to the front and to a newer wing, and it was painted a dark, barn red. Across the road from it the land opened up around two black, unpainted barns. On that side was a huge field, opening out pie-shaped behind the barns—a whole hill of field. Past the opening the road was immediately enclosed again by the thick spruce, as though it went straight into a black hole.

No one was in sight, but he'd been hearing a raucous, tinny sound coming from the house, and as he pushed his bike up over the pine needles that were the lawn, he recognized the song “Chattanooga Choo Choo,” the record made by Johnny Mercer.

 

Can I afford to board
Chattanooga Choo Choo?
I've got my fare,
And fust a nickel to spare

 

—sang the nasal voice. The record was being played too fast, and the voice sounded somewhat like an angry squirrel.

He leaned his bike against the side porch—no track seemed to go to the front door—and went up the steps. He couldn't help seeing, through the bay window, some violent motion in the room. He looked, feeling himself to be a spy. Inside was a young girl in a blue dress, with long dark hair, who jitterbugged with no partner, and made all the expert shakes and squirms and twirls of that dance, her bobby socks flashing as she kicked and twirled. On her rather long, pale face was the standard, expert miming of ecstasy that jitterbugging seemed to demand.

To David it would have been somewhat shameful to be caught like that, so he wasn't sure he ought to disturb her. He decided that she probably wouldn't hear his knock anyway above the noise, and decided to wait until the record ended.

When it did, and the girl had moved out of sight, he clumped his feet on the porch and knocked. He heard her stop cranking the Victrola, listen, then crank a few more times, hard, before she came to the door.

“Well, well,” she said, and looked him up and down, her eyebrows raised. Her pale face was long and delicate, with a long thin nose and a wide, thin-lipped mouth scarlet with lipstick. Her eyes were gray-green. He thought she was beautiful. In spite of the jitterbugging—which he knew how to do, but had learned only because it was a way to get to put one's arms around girls—she seemed very upper-class and intellectual-looking.

“Well,” she said. She pursed her lips and shrugged her shoulders, as if to say
Not bad, but nothing too special.
“Come in. Perk and Myrna are down in the barn.”

That was devastating, that she called her parents by their first names. He became desperately aware that he hadn't said anything yet.

“You're Tucker,” he said.

“Me Tucker. You David,” she said.

He knew he should go along at once with this Tarzan business, but he couldn't, because he didn't want her to act this way.

“Well, come on in, don't just stand there with your face hanging out,” she said, and backed slowly away from him, beckoning with her hands.

Thunder sounded; it seemed to hit the hill behind the house and roll down upon them and past them as it broke into pieces. Tucker went to the Victrola and put another record on—”String of Pearls”—and came up to him to dance.

“Don't tell me you don't dance,” she said, and put her left arm on his shoulder. She wore perfume that smelled a little bit like spoiled oranges. As he put his arm around her back, above her narrow waist, her dark hair brushed his cheek and he looked down into her clear, hard little eyes. Her dress had exaggerated shoulders, and it was of a blue, woven material that moved in its weave under his fingers. He had trouble beginning with the rhythm, but then began to do well, for him, and after she had twirled by herself and come back to him he brought her up against him tight, the whole line of her body against him.

“Hey! Down, boy!” she said. “You like to squeeze, huh?”

She was a little hard, a little too aggressively muscular against him, but he was ready to forgive that. He didn't like girls who were too doughy and limp, anyway.

When the record ended, loud, eccentric scratching began. He wanted to hold her, yet he wanted to get his balance. He hadn't even had time to look around the place before he had the girl in his arms, and that was too soon. He wanted it to happen, but it should happen according to his schedule, not someone else's.

The problem was solved by a dog, who appeared in the doorway with all of his teeth showing, his snarls at that pitch near strangulation that meant nothing but business. “Meet Heinz,” Tucker said calmly. “Thirty-seven varieties.”

Heinz was a big brownish-blackish animal, with thick, wiry hair, who looked somewhat like an oversized Airedale, yet had softly hanging hound-dog ears. Though he still communicated the intent to kill, the wolf in him was gradually receding. David could tell that the hound in him was taking over, because the madness in his eyes was just a little put on; he was thinking too much.

Tucker had been watching, and he could feel her interest in the situation like a small piece of ice against his skin. She introduced the two of them. Heinz had to go through the motions of wariness and warning, but David could see that he was coming around. He growled too threateningly to really mean it, and allowed his hound ears to be rumpled.

It had begun to rain. Perkins and Myrna Cross came up on the porch, both dressed in yellow oilskins, and stamped and whooshed some of the water off them before they came in, their oilskins ballooning and sliding off over their arms. David's first impression of them was one of weight and substance, and it was true that neither was small. Perkins, whom he had been told was a writer, was a tall, violently freckled man, with a high, tenor voice that could turn hard as glass. Myma was a plump, plain woman whose graying hair fell like a yoke over her shoulders. Her dress was black, with white piping, and it was somehow over-simple—one that might have been worn in the early 1800s by a girl of twelve.

Perkins affected a Western, ranchy look, with a checked cotton flannel shirt, Bull Durham tag hanging from a breast pocket, and Levis.

Myrna wiped some water from her face, using the back of her chubby hand, and with her face shining and wet came up to David.

“This must be David Whipple, then!” she said in a voice that seemed too glad. She smiled, yet her smile moved, as though something were running around underneath it, trying to get loose. Parts of it would fade, and then come back into a smile again, all this happening very fast. “We've heard what a fine young man you are!” Because of the unfocused quality of her expression he couldn't tell how she meant this.

“He can even dance,” Tucker said, and at this Perkins looked stern.

“Can you handle an ax?”

“I think so,” David said.

“You
think
so? Can you split wood and not your shins?”

“My mother cooks on a woodstove,” David said. This, to David's surprise, seemed to impress Perkins very much—almost to overawe him, because he immediately became conciliatory, his tone of accusation gone.

“Hey!” he said. “Let's show this young man where he's going to live. You hungry? What the hell time is it? How about some grub, Myrna?”

The room they were in was called the library. On unfinished shelves all around it, even above and below the windows, were, they told him, a thousand books. The furniture consisted of several Morris chairs with marble-topped tables next to them on which stood oil mantle lamps—machines he was going to have to learn to run—the chest-high Victrola and a potbellied stove that was meticulously blacked and polished. Its brass trim shone too, and David appreciated how much work had gone into that job. When he commented upon it Tucker looked at him disgustedly, and Perkins assumed a rather complicated expression, which seemed to approve and yet be terribly bothered at the same time. Tucker, David later found, had been forced to clean and polish the stove, and so it was still a touchy subject among them. With this first error of his constraining him, he was shown the rest of the house.