Whipple's Castle (70 page)

He turned shy, and looked away. “I was thinking how you've grown up,” he said.

“I've caught up to you.”

“Peggy, you've passed me. I haven't even been to college.”

“No, I haven't!” She didn't know if her outburst was from anger or from fear of crying.

“Peggy,” he said. She heard his concern, then watched it change. Slowly it submerged into his usual immobility. She wondered if she considered herself worthy of him because he had been crippled. If he hadn't been so maimed he would of course belong to someone like Lois Potter. Did she think she could sneak into his life because of what a machine gun had done to him?

“I'm sorry,” she said.

“You're sorry?” He seemed genuinely surprised. “What have you ever done to be sorry about?”

“I wish I could get mad,” she said. Maybe she was getting angry. He kept making her breathless, knocking the wind out of her. Maybe he was the one who ought to wake up and see what was going on. “You sit there,” she said. “You
sit
there.” Now, that didn't make sense. She had too much pride to tell him the truth right out straight, no matter what had happened. But what kind of pride was that? It was the pride that didn't want him to treat her with kindness—not that goddam
kindness!

“You're angry,” he said.

“Well, don't say you don't blame me or something!”

“Peggy, I don't think I can explain what happened to me last night.”

She saw the pain, but that wasn't exactly what she had been talking about. He'd knocked the wind out of her again. Maybe he would always be able to do that. How could she explain that she wanted to be a woman to him?

“You tried to kill yourself!” she said. She almost added,
“I can't use you dead!”
She was selfish, why not? He couldn't use her, either, if he were dead. She had to get to him, right next to him. They had to burn up together so she could cure that death thing. “I'm not a little girl any more!” she said.

“I can see that,” he said, smiling a little. Icicles touched her waist, and then her breasts. For a moment she was burning up, confused. She'd put her hands on her stomach, and it embarrassed her terribly that he might know why. He just looked at her and she had gone all to pieces.

Outside, the leaves streamed and glittered in the wind. The curtains made their graceful but frantic swirls against the dark carved window frames. The fire whistle had been windily calling, hoarse and urgent, but it was so distant in this wind it might have been calling from another town, or even another country. It was such a distant urgency, so far away it might have even come from another time. Another brush fire, she supposed, in this dry year. Although this morning's dew had been deceptively heavy, the wind had blown it all away. She listened, but it was impossible to count the number of whistles.

 

Wood looked at her as she turned away toward the window. She gave him a strangely sinful feeling, like the memory of stolen looks at girls in childhood. Maybe it had something to do with a time long ago when for one shocking second he'd seen Peggy Mudd naked. He'd nearly forgotten about it. She was only a child. He'd been hunting partridge up by the reservoir, and coming suddenly upon the sugarhouse he'd stepped to a window and looked in. She stood in a washtub next to the sink, shining wet and naked, so smoothly pure, unmarked by body hair. He'd fled at once.

The two images slid into place: little Peggy and the little girl murdered by freezing, a ghost function of his missing eye, impossible diplopia. He put his hand to his eye, and as if he'd touched her, she spoke. “What is it? What is it?” She leaned over him, her warmth on his face and on the back of his hand. “Do you hurt or something, Wood?” Firmly she took his hand down from his eye, and looked into his head. He shut his eye tight, trying to keep her from that scene. “What's the matter? What's the matter?” she cried. “Stop it, Wood!” She pulled his face against her—muscle and softness, the presence of bone and the flutter of her heart. In that mustard-colored room her warmth could only bleed before the cold noneye, the flame-green intent that should not ever touch her.

It was so dangerous he couldn't move.

“Wood!” he heard her call from outside. “Wood!” She seemed to have more than a small power of warmth. Her heart beat against him like the heart of a bird whose warm wings enfolded him. As long as they could not subdue that strong idea, all would be precariously safe. But it was Peggy, and he knew she was not a prisoner; she was here in his room, holding his head in her arms as fiercely as one holds a contested basketball. A peculiar sight, signifying that perhaps this was not Auschwitz, Maidanek, Sibibor, Chelmno, Wolzek, Treblinka. Leah; so it was Leah. The cold ones waited everywhere for their chance at power.
Vernich-tungslager
in Russian or in English would smell as sweet. Or in Chinese or Japanese. The nasty little two-legged things, indifferent or deadly, had come down into him by that ageless diffusion of characteristics. He opened his eye to a crack of sun, a flash like a strobe light illuminating the familiar cold room, the tower legs and barbed wire outside that strangely borrowed window.

She still called to him, caring for him. There was that power, and he came back to her, his face pressed against her body. He heard the little gurglings inside her, and the light thud of her heart. Her smooth arms slid around his head and neck, searching for better ways to hold onto him. So he came back into the August afternoon.

It was the first time they hadn't meticulously continued. Always before they went all the way until the screaming stopped and the Test Person was comatose or dead.

Peggy was scared, and he tried to comfort her.

“Where did you go?” she kept asking him. “Where did you go, Wood?”

“Nowhere,” he said. “I've been right here with you all the time.” She held his face in her hands, making him look at her.

“Wood! I'm sorry, but I love you so much you can't do that. You had a sort of fit, and you mustn't do that!”

“No, I really didn't have the fit that time. You kept me from having it, Peggy.” That was true, perhaps.

“You've got to tell me what's the matter,” she said in that nervous, serious voice that comes straight down to a hard question. He was fascinated by the montage of Peggy's child face upon this woman's. The wide mouth, the high, Indian cheekbones, the even darkness of skin. The other girl had looked almost sickly around the eyes, but this woman's were clear and demanding. This woman was, however, Margaret Marcia Mudd. The lovely flesh, though it cradled old memories and fears, had changed so much. He touched her hipbones, now subtly sheathed where once they had been starved, canted, it had seemed, like the edges of a dish.

They were poised there, looking straight at each other, Peggy's hands on his shoulders, when a clatter and unintelligible voices approached the door. Peggy went to open it, and in the door appeared Sally De Oestris, supported gingerly by David and Henrietta. She got her canes straightened out and came on in, seeming to look up and out from her bent spine. “What's all this they tell me?” she demanded.

“Now, Sally,” Henrietta said, cautioning her.

“He looks all right,” Sally said. “Peggy, how is he?”

“I think he's much better. Physically.”

“Oh yeah? Physically. Well now, as I'm the nearest to going where he had a mind to go last night, I'd like to talk to him alone. You can go wash your face or something, Peggy, while I talk to him.” She shooed them all out. “I'll have to ask you for that chair, Wood.”

He gave her the chair and sat on the edge of his bed. His stump tingled. All his joints felt slow and old, as if filled with heavy grease.

“So you tried to step out,” she said. “Is the reason a secret? They tell me you didn't bother to leave a note.”

“Maybe it was an accident,” he said.

“Puh!”

“All right, Sally.”

“I'm not what you'd call a curious old woman. I used to be a curious young woman, but my curiosity rewarded me with too much knowledge. I thought, presumptuous as it might sound, that I could help.” She gleamed brightly, and though she sat erect—she had to sit erect—her knees were spread awkwardly for balance. She held her canes in one hand, her blotched, arthritic fingers flattened against the crooks. Her fingers seemed to articulate only at their first joints. It was hard to think of that wizened, softly wrinkled face as having been young. It seemed to him that Sally had been just as old as this for as long as he had been alive. Just old, a state that everyone a decade or so older than yourself had entered. But Sally had been nearly fifty years old when he was born. From all the myths and rumors about her, she had lived quite a life by then.

“Well?” she said.

“I don't think I'd know how to talk about it.”

“What I don't see is why you're in such a bloody hurry. You'll be dead soon enough as it is. Even if you live as long as this old bag of bones, you'll look back and your life will seem short. Too short.”

“Yes, I suppose so,” he said. He was afraid for Sally, and guilty because he had made death the subject of this day. She would have to get back down the stairs without his help, and he trusted no one else to keep her from falling. His hip joints tingled for her fragile old bones—another form of the anxiety, familiar as a scream laid lightly on the nerves.

“Do you mind if I rattle on?” Sally asked—really asking it as a question. He shook his head, and she took a breath. “All right. All right,” she said. “I don't think you're afraid of much. Tell me if I'm getting warm. No. Let me tell you about the De Oestrises—a crazy tribe but the world hasn't been exactly destroyed by their presence on it. One branch of the family made its money in mines. Gold mines. I suppose you know something about that. And silver mines and iron mines. That's what I call the Rough Rider branch, the hunters, the Wild and Woolies. The other branch settled down around here and played with stores and mills. That branch wore spectacles and sleeve garters—you know what I mean? They owned land too, but hired somebody else to lumber it. This goes way back, before the log drives on the Connecticut River. Back to the time of Governor Wentworth, and before that.

“The name sounds sort of Dutch, don't it? Sounds like something to do with eggs. In Greek
distros
means gadfly, and in Latin
oestrus
means frenzy, passion. Oestrus in English has to do with the whole cycle of fertility in female mammals. Hell of a name, ain't it? You call yourself a Whipple, but you're really a De Oestris, because the line's dominant over Whipples and Sleepers. Anyway, I know because you're crazy like a De Oestris. I meant to say the line went batty in my generation. Crazy as hoot owls. Now, pardon an old woman—you'll find old women are dippy about blood lines and all that. It's all they've got left to talk about or be proud of. But you had the De Oestris mark on you when you came home from the hospital. The eyes—it's in the eyes. I took one look and there it was. Your mother was such a strong, healthy girl—peaches and cream and raven black hair. She was a country beauty, full of good rich milk and strong as an ox. She was okay. But the De Oestris mark was on every one of her children, the poor girl.” Sally shook her head and sighed.

“Oh, come on, Sally,” he said.

She laughed—a great bellow of laughter that shook her. “Now they'll wonder what in the world we're laughing about,” she said. “Oh, my! Oh, dear! Now tell me why you took all those sleeping pills.”

“Because I can't stand…I couldn't…” He heard his words. They hung in the air while he read them and saw that they hadn't said anything yet. “I couldn't stand being a witness.”

“A witness to what?” She squinted carefully, like a sharpshooter.

“To torture. Murder.” The words were dangerous to say. He looked around for Peggy. Even in his anxiety he found it interesting that he'd looked for Peggy. Where was she? He wondered if she were in any danger; the thought caused a sharp pain in his throat.

“I see. Yes,” Sally said. “Are you going to do it again?”

“I don't know. Maybe not.”

“What about Margaret Mudd?”

“What?” he said, startled. Sally's words had superimposed themselves upon those identical words in his own mind. Maybe Sally was a little magic—like all old people who could still think. That was it, he supposed. You got used to old people being so dim; when one wasn't, it was as strange as hearing a talking dog.

“I said, ‘What about Margaret Mudd?'”

“What about her?” he said defensively.

“Have you discovered she's a woman yet?”

“Well, yes. I know she's growing up.”

“Growing up!” Sally said disgustedly.

He shied away from this talk; it was like glancing away from direct sunlight, turning away from heat. He knew what he was doing. There was a memory that had been flitting around just outside of memory, that he couldn't quite get hold of. Ah. The bam. One of the De Oestrises—his great-uncle Walter—had a farm on the Cascom road where he kept horses. A long time ago Wood had spent a whole afternoon climbing a ladder made of boards nailed to an upright, climbing up through the hay-dusty air toward the great hollow peak, to a tie beam that crossed twenty or thirty feet above the loose hay. Then to fall through all that air and space. Each time was like the first time. No amount of repetition dimmed that lovely giving-way. In the absolute of gravity, falling, falling, his bowels shivery with delicious apprehension at that freedom. While he fell he was in thrall. Then to climb again. Though he visited the farm often when he was a boy, that one afternoon was the only time the level of hay had been just right. When his father was ready to go he had called and called, but Wood took one more fall, then one more, and his father had to come and get him. It wasn't like him to pretend not to hear; maybe that had helped to fix the memory.