Whipple's Castle (44 page)

After rehearsal she came up High Street in the dusk of the clear day; the sun was gone, and darkness seemed to flow along the ground, past tree trunks, flowers, hedges, the sides of houses-like dimming fog, while the sky above was still clear daylight, still bright blue. She had always come home this way, but now she wouldn't go on past the big house to the woods road, she would go right up to the house, let it loom with all its strength and warmth, its turrets and battlements, right over her head. Up in the woods the little sugarhouse was all alone, dark and damp. She'd gone up to see it once, in the summer, and it had grown so small and dingy she wondered how anyone could have considered it home. It had smelled of earth, and the door was stuck so firmly to its jamb she'd had to take an old leaf spring that was lying there and pry it open.

The oil stove had rusted in the places where the enamel had cracked off that time her mother had nearly burned them out. Bluish, fuzzy mold had taken over the fleece slippers her mother had left in the closet-place. The little Christmas tree was a brown skeleton, pitiful with ribbons and balls, standing in a soft bed of its own needles. Mice had been everywhere, and their little dashes lay scattered all over the sink and table, the stove top, in the coffee mugs, the soap dish, the spoons and on the blades of table knives. Her father's deer rifle was rusty, and she took it with her so David could clean it. When she left the little house she jammed the warped door back shut again. Sadness had come in waves.

As it did now, only now it seemed more the happy anticipations that came in waves above an old sadness. She came toward the Whipples' house that would be full of light and human voices. Kate and Horace, Mr. and Mrs. Whipple would be there, and almost as reassuring and important would be their lives and their problems going on, going on, surely and independently of her. Yet she was allowed, and given a place at their table.

The house rose up, lights in windows. She went in through the kitchen, into that busy place. Kate and Mrs. Whipple were getting supper; something steamed on the black warm presence of the woodstove, and dishes warmed on the reservoir.

“Peggy!” Kate said.

“I'll be right down,” she said, and ran up the back stairs to take her music and her books to her room. There had been something a little more imperative and excited than usual in Kate's voice. Even in the tempo of the kitchen's bustle, somehow. Mrs. Whipple had been beating something in a bowl—beating (was it all imagination?) faster than usual, her shoulders hunched a little more. What was it? She washed quickly and came back down.

Now Kate had changed—she was very calm and matter-of-fact. But different, still. Some kind of pressure, some excitement glowed behind her perfect calm, behind the always startling beauty of her face.

“What is it?”

“What's what?” Kate said, turning away and pretending to straighten the pile of plates.

“You're acting funny.”

“Me?”

“Now, Kate,” Mrs. Whipple said, smiling. She was obviously in on it.

“Oh, Peggy,” Kate said. “The plates aren't on yet. Would you put them on? I've got to grease the biscuit pans.”

Mystified, half trying not to believe anything was going on, Peggy picked up the pile of warm plates, took them into the dining room and began to place them around the table. Kate and Mrs. Whipple came in and seemed to be watching her, and when she got around so her back was to the living-room arch, big warm hands came from behind and covered her eyes.

“Who is it? Who is it?” Kate shouted.

Horace? David back from the farm at Cascom? Not Mr. Whipple. The hands, warm and dry, never moved, but there was a low laugh, a man's, and from farther back Horace's pleased bark.

Wood.

She put her hands over those warm hands and nodded her head because she couldn't quite say his name. Tears were coming out of her eyes, and she had to take a quick, deep breath.

“Why, Peggy,” Wood said, concerned and it seemed to her pleased and amused. No, different than that. He turned her around and there he was, looking down at her, happy to see her.

“Hey, hey,” he said to her tears, and picked her up, his hands like great warm slings cupping her rib cage, his fingers on her spine. “You're growing up!” he said. She came up toward his strong face, his dark hair and eyes, as though she were his equal in height. Yet her feet dangled like a child's, and she didn't dare put her hands on his shoulders, though it seemed powerfully the thing to do, for balance, for some demand of the playfulness of the moment; perhaps it was fear of doing something too grownup, when she was only a child. Fear, yes, of something too momentous and gigantic, an impending sacred fusion; she loved him too much, she would catch fire, she would die, she did not love him as a child. But the child judged still.

“I'm fourteen!” she said.

“Fourteen!” he said wonderingly, and put her down. “My goodness, everybody's growing up. Except me. I feel younger every day.”

“Sure!” Horace said. “Oh, sure!”

“We're all growing up,” Kate said. “We can't stop it.”

Then they were all quiet. They had heard the glee in Kate's voice, but it had changed to something else and become sad. With one unformulated intent they looked at Mrs. Whipple.

“And I'm grown-up already, is that it?” she said, smiling sadly. “Well, it's not much of a time to grow up in.”

“It's no time,” Kate said. “David said that. The war and all. He said…” She stopped, and looked at her mother. Then they all looked at Wood, handsome and straight in his uniform.

“I wish David were here,” Kate said.

They sat down to supper without Mr. Whipple, who wasn't feeling good. Wood told them that he had almost a month before he had to go back. As he said this, time began with an almost tangible lurch to move forward.

Everybody mashed his potatoes, clink, clink. The seconds passed, the minutes passed. Horace made a potato pool and poured his gravy in it—white chicken gravy. The platter of roast chicken, country-style the way Wood liked it, had no bones in it. Wood liked the white meat, with cheese and bread-and-butter pickles, olives, canned beet greens with vinegar. He'd gone downtown that afternoon and bought some beer, so he and Mrs. Whipple drank beer. Kate had a juice glass of it, but said it was bitter. Peggy couldn't stand the smell of it, close, but she liked the smell of it from farther away. She liked Wood drinking it, the man drinking beer and eating his supper.

He wore his uniform shirt with his tie off—the crossed gold rifles on one side of the collar, the gold bar on the other. Mrs. Whipple said wasn't he young to be an officer, and Wood said maybe a little, but they wanted young officers in the infantry. Horace said why did they call it infantry—was it like infants? Wood said yes, it came from that word, because they had to be young. They needed young men because the old ones couldn't stand the marches and the running. Mrs. Whipple, looking unhappy, nodded her head.

“My captain in basic training was only twenty-four,” Wood said.

“It was illegal for you to buy this beer,” Mrs. Whipple said. “You're not even twenty, much less twenty-one.”

“That's crazy,” Kate said.

Wood shrugged. “In Phenix City you could buy anything.”

Peggy watched them talk. Clear light rose from the tablecloth to shine upon their faces. A glint from a piece of silverware touched Wood's cheek. Next to Wood, Horace seemed random and unformed, not quite a complete person yet. Kate was so alive she gave off a kind of glow, almost like vibrations, that everybody had to be aware of. Her light brown hair—honey-colored, or maybe almost the color of light toast, or of the clean sand at the beach on Cascom Lake—fell lively and even about her face.

Horace grinned at Wood, big teeth with slots between them, grinning, yet his pale sunken eyes might as easily have been crying if you looked at them alone. He told Wood that he could go down cellar now.

“You've got over your fear, then,” Wood said.

“No, it's just different.”

“That's wonderful, anyway,” Wood said.

“I sweat like a pig!”

“How did you make yourself do it?”

“It's funny. I've got to think right.” Horace blushed, and looked quickly around the table.

“Think right?” Kate said.

“Yeah, I've got to think right.”

“Like what?” Kate said.

“Well, I think of…” Horace blushed some more, and grinned so hard it must have hurt his cheeks. “I think of Susie Davis, as a matter of fact.”

“And that works?” Wood said.

“That does the trick?” Kate said.

Wood gave Kate a quick look, for some reason, but then appeared satisfied with what he'd seen.

“Horace is sweet on Susie,” Kate said.

“That's all right!” Horace said, nearly shouting. “Maybe I am!”

“That's all right, Horsie,” Kate said. “That's all right. Susie's nice. She's awfully nice.”

“Okay,” Horace said.

“Horace has changed a lot,” Mrs. Whipple said to Wood. Horace nodded. “He wasn't too good right after you left, for a while,” she added. Horace nodded. Wood looked closely at Horace, as if he might read those changes in his face.

“I take care of the furnace now,” Horace said proudly.

“That's wonderful,” Wood said. “That's really wonderful, Horace.” He looked at Horace curiously, and finally said, “Does Susie protect you from those things?”

“No,” Horace said. His face had grown dark and secretive, as if he'd said too much. He peered out furtively, and his eyes touched each of them in turn, seeming to find no one to trust. It was odd, even for Horace, that he would admit that about Susie Davis, yet say nothing else. Peggy had always found him secretive about those things that frightened him, even when she had tried to help him. He was grateful, but he said nothing. He'd get that same dense, watchful look, even begin to sweat. His teeth would clamp and grind, as they did now. Not so she could hear them, but little bulges of muscle came and went along his jaw. It was frightening, even if it was Horace, because the tension in him was too great. His muscles grew, and quivered under his skin. It was not just fright, either, not just shivering. He fought some terrible fight inside himself, seeming to grow unhuman, almost monstrous, right before her eyes.

Then he would come out of it, piece by piece. Something broke, and something snapped, and he'd seem to get his jaw loose, and then maybe an arm, and then his neck would loosen up. She felt so sorry for him, yet there was a kind of triumph too, as he came back to them. He did come back, and then he was Horace again, who was so kind, who wouldn't hurt a fly. She thought that about the fly, then realized it was true.

No one said anything about Horace's trouble. They had all seen it happen to him before, so they went on eating, pretending not to notice. Soon he was eating again too, bite by bite narrowing the edges of his potato pool of chicken gravy.

 

Wood's leave went fast for the first week, but then he began to get restless. He had nothing really to do in Leah. Lois Potter came home from college for the weekend, and they went to the last dance of the season at the Blue Moon, on the lake. She was so proud of his uniform, it made him uneasy. Everything was too smooth and perfect, too moony-spoony. She acted as if she were an actress in the sweet-furlough interlude of a movie, with just the right amount of stiff upper lip for what lay ahead. But she cried when she had to go back, and he felt some of that romance too. It was a real war, and she was a lovely girl. He just didn't love Lois. It made him feel nasty when he admitted this to himself, as if he were a cheat, an impostor (which he was). He could never tell Lois the truth. He'd never be able to. Maybe time would take care of that problem. Maybe he'd get killed; that would solve it, if in a rather drastic fashion.

David hitchhiked from Cascom to see him on the second weekend. He lived, he said, on a farm with slightly crazy people, but it was interesting. He'd never had so much homework in his life, but he guessed he was learning things. The boys who lived at Dexter-Benham had to be in their rooms during study hours at night. In fact they practically locked them in, and they didn't have much else to do. So they really piled the homework on.

David made him talk about the Army, especially about the weapons. Had he fired the .50 caliber machine gun? The bazooka? Yes, he'd fired them all, at one time or another, and taken most of them apart in the dark and put them together again. Had he fired the bazooka at a tank? Yes, at an old hulk of a medium tank that had been hit hundreds of times. They all missed the first time because they were nervous, but then on the second shot they found that a bazooka didn't kick or burn, so they took a careful sight picture and hit the tank. He had to explain to David about the “shaped charge,” the rocket, the use of molten metal as the killer inside the tank. He told him how two colored kids, news vendors about ten years old, had out of curiosity poked around on the bazooka range—this at Camp Wheeler—and found a dud round. Somehow they had tapped it, or dropped it, and it had killed them both.

What had it done to them? David wanted to know.

Wood said he hadn't seen the bodies and hadn't wanted to.

“Just curious,” David said.

“Do you want to get into the war?”

“I don't want to get killed,” David said. “But the war's what's going on, isn't it?”

“It's men getting killed, or being so bored they think goosing each other is high entertainment. Don't be a sucker.”

David was pleased by this. “That doesn't sound like you,” he said. “Well, anyway, maybe it isn't the war. What I want to do, mostly, is grow up.”

“I hope you like it when you get there,” Wood said, and David looked at him again, quickly, pleased and surprised that Wood should say such a thing. For a moment Wood resented this as being slightly patronizing. But then he reconsidered: he had changed a lot in a year, in this last year, and maybe David had a right to be surprised.