Whipple's Castle (52 page)

But what about Wood? Sometimes she found herself getting almost used to the idea that Wood was fighting. It was terrible, because she would die if Wood were hurt. They all would. Sometimes she would find her mother staring, white with fear. And Peggy would go into long silences, suffering for Wood. No, it couldn't happen. Certain things simply could not happen, not to her family. There had been her father's accident, yes—that was a real thing and it had happened to them, but now he was getting better all the time. Sometimes he walked down the driveway, using canes. And Horace had changed so much. He was so dependable now, and you didn't have to watch out for him all the time. Out of the shadow that was over them all, things seemed little by little to be getting better for them. Cross fingers, knock on wood, pray Dear God Wood and Davy come home all right.

 

On the afternoon of Thursday, April 12, Harvey and Henrietta were waiting for the news. Gene Krupa or somebody was doing something called a “triple paradiddle,” on drums, and they had toned this down while they waited. Suddenly the band music was cut off, and Henrietta began to get up to see if it was something wrong with the radio.

Then came a strange sound to hear over the air, a long, ragged breath. Without introduction the announcer's voice, phlegmy and broken, said, “President Roosevelt is dead.” There were odd peeps and breaks in the voice. “In Warm Springs, Georgia. The President, according to his doctors, suffered…” From the radio came part of a sob, then the total quiet of cutoff, then the voice again, stronger after that blank moment of imposed control, “The President suffered a massive cerebral hemorrhage and…died…at approximately 3:35
P
.
M
.”

It was as though the announcer's sorrowing voice had fallen through her own mouth, and for a moment Henrietta couldn't take a breath. She did not think of herself as the kind who could love a public man, but this sudden emptiness was love torn from her. Suddenly it was that void.

The day was warm, an early rush of spring, and windows in the big room were open. The long curtains folded and unfolded in the breeze that brought in earth smells. She seemed to hear above the spring day the distant boom and crack of the war, and suddenly it was all without direction, pure madness, and all the violence was being done by doubtful little men. Words continued to come from the radio, but nothing much more was known. When the music continued it was muted and funereal.

“Well, goddam!” Harvey said. She looked at him, at that blankness of care.

After a minute or two the telephone rang, and automatically she picked it up. Gordon Ward, Sr.'s, elated voice said, “Harvey! Have you heard? The son of a bitch is dead! Harvey?”

She handed him the phone.

“Yeah, I just heard.” He looked at her somewhat furtively, and said, “Yeah, Gordon. Yeah. Yeah, old Rosenfeld.”

“Go ahead and chortle,” she said. “It's no dirtier now than it's been for all these years.” Tears were running down her face, and as she looked at his furtive grin of collusion with Gordon Ward, she despaired of him, of them all. This was the void left, that people like these waited for.

Horace came into the hall at that moment, and immediately felt the badness. He stopped and stood quietly against the wall, just out of their sight. His father hung up the telephone and began to shout at his mother. “What the hell do you know about it, anyway?”

“Not the vicious slander you get from the likes of Gordon Ward.”

“That man was trying to destroy the country! He was a dictator! He got us in the war to save the Bolshies, and don't forget it! He was a maniac, and how the hell do you know he's even dead? Gordon says they probably carted him off to the funny farm!”

“Shut up,” she said coldly. “You don't know anything now and you never have. You've always preferred plots and rumors to learning.”

“Why, you dumb bitch! Try earning a living in this country!”

“A great man has died. Of course all you can think about is your money. You're a Republican. But he saved this country. Yes, literally saved it, what was good in it, and you small cold people hate him still. You always will, because it's your nature. Go on making things up about him. What was it a while ago? Eleanor gave him syphilis, and she got it from Paul Robeson? All you believe in is selfishness, that's the whole thing, and I figured that out a long, long time ago. You'll never understand
anybody
who wants to help other people. You're rotten, you and all the other Gordon Wards. Your pleasure is to kill goodness. Your faces were made to smirk, and that's all! Oh, I see you all the time, everywhere! Did you ever look at Hitler? You might as well look into the mirror!”

Horace heard all this as he stood in the shadow. His father began screaming again, almost desperately, his words tumbling among curses. “Packing Supreme Court! Double cross! How about that? Do you deny, you asshole? How about the NRA? How about AAA? Unconstitutional! How about those half-baked Reds and all their fucking alphabet soup? Christ Almighty, what the hell did that bunch of Jews and Communists save? Stalin's ass, that's what they saved, and we're paying for it!”

Carefully, Horace eased back. His mother was crying, trying to speak but having to sob. “God help us,” she finally said. “Oh, God help us now!”

He stood in hiding against the wall, waiting, cool and ready. His mother rushed past without seeing him and ran up the stairs, still crying. He stayed where he was, calm and steady and unseen, one center of the world upon which they could not descend. He was here, broadcasting that information on the wavelength of his mind so that they should all know, all of them in their holes and foul cellar cracks, that he was neither dead nor incapacitated. And somewhere Wood steadfastly kept that vigil too.

 

First, he is exhausted. He has run too far, too fast, too many times today, uphill, carrying too much—carbine, four grenades, canteen and mess kit, clips of ammo besides those in stock pouches, steel helmet, bayonet knife, entrenching tool, binoculars, map case, first-aid packet, webbed belt, boots, clothing, sweat, crud. As always, he is afraid. Certain secretions have been shot by glands too often for too long into his gaunt body, compounding exhaustion. He runs on nerve, burning. He is twenty years old, a first lieutenant; he has been acting company commander for five days, on the point for more than a month. He is in sorrow, crying the way he has come to cry, with no tears but a piece of clay in the throat he cannot swallow. He has just lost five men, two of them killed outright. Wilcox and Malins, whose dog tags jingle in his pocket, Wilcox's and Malins' jingling together. He knew them well.

What action, what elaboration can help? This is the only activity of men. The dust, the death-gray of battle covering what had been the washed green of this little valley. Cordite, fulminate of mercury, raw flamethrower oil, the flutter of shells, the blindness of war. You can't see anything. You can't see enough. Where is? What coordinates? Where? By sound he has identified what it was, a nine-millimeter Nambu machine gun. One could have looked more closely at the hole in Malms' helmet, but what does it matter? Able Baker Charlie Dog. He is Charlie One. Where does Charlie One think that Nambu is now?

Then he has made a mistake, because a sudden hand comes down as if from the vast sky, from all sides at once, and swats him down out of erectness into the ground as a fly is swatted into a table. He is conscious but with the knowledge that time, that vacuum, has passed unneedful of him. He stares at blue that is wavering now—how can it when it has no reference points? It moves, and in shock he knows that it is part of shock, the reverie of shock. It has happened to him. Shock is the presence of all the nausea of one's life come back at once in an aura, now, of white birds broken and falling. The cold oil of nausea. Ice in the extremities. Pain comes, and is not negotiable. Formal notice of power. Oh, my God.

Third Platoon, his old platoon, has seen him hit. Now good men in their sorrow risk themselves to kill. He does not want them to come across there, and waves them back with his right arm. They see his weakness and do not obey. The Nambu fires short professional bursts, and he is terrified for them, but soon their warm sweat and friendly stench surround him, and he hears from above the execution of the Japanese gunners:
“O-isogi de!
Hayaku, hayaku!”
a Japanese says. This means hurry up, and the irony is lost on Corporal Wilson, who is quick enough as it is.

“
Medic! Medic! Medic!”
Wood hears that old sobbing cry.
“Oh, Christ!”
he hears.
“He's hurtin'! Give him a shot!”
He hears this, hears it even though he is drowning. Then someone cuts at his throat and the suffocation is suddenly gone. He feels the manipulation, feels the leathery resistance of his own skin, and also the pain of the cut. Separate, yet the same. He believes that he is dying, which is not a strange idea at all. He believes in the magnitude of the force that hit him; surely it was great enough to kill a hundred times, a thousand times.

Then nothing. Then he wakes, and time has passed without his attention to any of its details. It is now independent of him, and he is not necessary after all. Morphine-borne, he drifts off into the days.

 

—th Regiment
96th Infantry Division
Naha, Okinawa
7 Juiy, 1945

 

Mr. and Mrs. Harvey W. Whipple

10 High St.

Leah, New Hampshire

Dear Mr. and Mrs. Whipple:

Wood has asked me to write to you and to tell you that he is fine. I have decided that without his consent I will tell you more.

At present he is aboard the hospital ship Alalia, where I visited him this morning. After a long talk with his doctors, they assure me that he will be all right, able to live a normal life. But it will take some time, and at least three, maybe more, operations will be necessary to restore his larynx, his left wrist, and to form a cushion on his left thigh to enable him to bear weight on the necessary prosthesis, or artificial limb, that he will have to wear. His left eye is gone, but all indications are that the right one will have few sympathetic reactions and will be all right. I'm sorry to have to list all these things at once, but in my judgment it is always better that you know.

It might also help to know that Lieutenant Whipple has been awarded the Bronze Star Medal and has been recommended twice for the Silver Star. I am informed that this medal will most certainly be awarded.

On 5 June, while acting company commander, “C” Company, 4th Battalion, he was hit by four machine-gun bullets. It is on record that were it not for the devotion of his men, who took several casualties in order to silence the machine gun and to reach him immediately, he would not have lived. S/Sgt. Daniel P. Furlin performed an emergency tracheotomy that enabled him to breathe. This action most definitely saved his life. S/Sgt. Furlin's home address is 141 Belmont St., Clareville, Ky.

I would like also to say something of our extreme pride in your son, one of our finest young officers. His devotion to the welfare of his men, and their devotion to him, was always manifest. With the strength of character Lieutenant Whipple possesses, I am most certain he will overcome his disabilities and lead a meaningful and productive life.

Sincerely yours,

William H. Halberstadt
Lt. Col, Infantry
A.U.S.

And from there those that lifted eyes could count
Five mountain ranges one behind the other
Under the sunset jar into Vermont.

 

Robert Frost: “Out, Out-”

The war had receded, leaving its scum of unusable knowledge. It was the second week of June, 1948.

Wood sat out at the end of the porch, quietly reading. He hardly ever moved, except to turn pages or to brush away a mosquito, and his calmness seemed unnatural to Henrietta. His quietness was unnerving because it was constant, and although he read all the time, he hardly seemed interested. He just read steadily, carefully, as though studying.

In the fall he had had the last—hopefully the last—operation on his throat, and although his voice was still windy, there was something of voice in it. It was no longer the harsh, painful whisper it had been. But he'd got used to saying very little. When she asked him why he did nothing but read—why he didn't see about going to college, getting on with life—he said “I want to see where I've been,” smiling, but saying nothing more.

He wore a patch over his left eye, where his left eye had been. When she had asked to see his eye, he removed the patch and it was shocking because nothing but skin wrapped his face between his nose and ear, as though the eye itself had been a wound that had healed over with hardly a scar. He had told her in technical language as calmly as a doctor the information relative to his wounds: a nine-millimeter machine-gun bullet at maximum velocity hit his knee squarely. The bullet may have been defective, for it shattered, doing more damage. Parts of that bullet probably struck his left wrist. He was running at the time, stooped over. Another bullet hit his left leg just below the knee. Another bullet grazed his left eye and took away part of the temple; another bullet pierced his larynx.

“I was lucky,” he'd whispered. “I'd done a stupid thing and they had me dead to rights.”

“What was so stupid?”

“It was strange,” he said.

“What was strange?”

“I almost think I knew where that machine gun was.” He looked at her and evidently saw her expression of concern. “Of course I didn't really know where it was. But you get so tired,” he'd said, this in his former scratchy whisper. “You get so tired.”

She stood now, watching him from the bay window of a parlorlike room they hardly ever used, feeling guilty of peeping because she had no real business in that dusty room. He was reading another book about the war, this one by a moderately liberal war correspondent. She had noticed that he carried around with him certain old magazines, which always seemed to be rather casually lying near him. She had picked them up and looked through them, finding immediately those pages he studied. Some were pictures of Hiroshima—a little girl whose back and arm grew bubbly and white. Another had a series of pictures of concentration camps. At Dachau or Belsen husky German girls threw sticklike corpses into a trench. He studied the charnel houses—now cities, even countries, it seemed, of the world. She had looked up from the pictures of Hiroshima and caught his eye. He looked away.