Whipple's Castle (76 page)

Peggy and Kate were talking quietly, Wood listening, his face carved. Earlier Peggy had called Sally to tell her she was staying over, but told her nothing about Horace.

If Harvey trembled again she couldn't stand it. Her baby was out in the woods.

No, hold on. She was not weak. She might cry but she would not let go. There were the others. Something bad had happened to Kate, she didn't know what it was. Wood was eaten by something he carried in his head. And Horace…

She saw him dead, his skin still and cold as soap. Never again that brute push of need, dense and sensitive, or his spasmodic laughter. Clump, clump, and the crash of an accident, then his apology and sorrow, always clear and real. Primal—that was the word. Atavistic? The baby had had a tail, and he never joked at another's expense. A strange density there. But why must she, even now, coldly search for words? She always wanted the words precise, the prognosis complete. Not Susie Davis, who was warm and generous. Too warm and generous. No, you cold, cold person, you constant thinker. Are your tears real? Are they really and truly real? Yes, they hurt so much.

She hoped Susie had given Horace all of herself. Yes, she did hope that! She wanted them to have been happy, even if for moments.

The night went on into its darkness. The room grew cold and still. They were exhausted, impatient, afraid of what their impatience demanded. At two-thirty Chief Turtle came back, his old face exhausted, and with his exhaustion for apology asked for a shirt or pants or something Horace had recently worn.

“Good God!” Harvey exclaimed. “Good God!”

But she went and got a T-shirt Horace had put in the laundry basket that morning.

“The hound won't hurt him,” Chief Tuttle said to her. “The hound just smells, now. He don't bite at all.”

Rather a dog than those men, she thought. Anything but those men.

When she handed the T-shirt to Chief Tuttle, Harvey jumped up. “No! No!” He found his canes and came staggering toward them. “No! No dogs! Don't give them anything!”

They all stared at him. His eyes were wilder, darker than they had been for a long time, and they had to remember his old energy. In the desperation of his headlong charge toward Chief Tuttle he staggered as though mortally wounded. The old policeman stood with his mouth open, the T-shirt dangling in his hand as if he hadn't quite received it yet.

“All right, now, Harvey,” he said.

“Give me that goddam thing!” Harvey took the T-shirt and threw it on the carpet behind him. “Find him yourselves, you bastards! Play fair! Don't you know how to play fair?” He screamed the words, his cheeks quivering, spray in the air. His ears and lips had turned dark red. “God damn it, this is my house! This is my goddam land, don't you know that? Who asked
me
if all you bastards could come around here with your fucking guns? Hah?” He shoved his wild face up to Chief Turtle's. The old man was grayer than before—gray as the color of his dentures.

“Dad,” Wood said.

“And you have the goddam
nerve
to come in here and ask for a piece of his underwear! The fucking
nerve!
”

“I'm trying to git him back alive. Some different from them others, Harvey.”

“Alive! Alive! Don't give me that
shit!”
Harvey took a step and fell down. Still cursing, he thrashed around trying to get a cane vertical. For a moment he tried to haul himself up on a cane as if climbing a pole, then fell back and began to crawl toward the wall. “Get my feet, you bastards! Wait! Wait! Get my guns, blow their fucking heads off! Clean out the goddam area!”

Wood had come slowly across the room to intercept him, and Harvey bumped into Wood's legs.

He looked up. “What? What?”

“We both feel the same. We all feel the same. Take it easy, now.”

Harvey drew back. He seemed to grow smaller, to constrict like a snake. “Take it easy,” he said slowly, carefully, as though tasting each word. “Take. It. Easy.” His mouth writhed over his choices. Half-words began and were rejected. His hatred seemed to have absorbed all of his desperation. Finally, cold triumph glittering in his eyes, he said, “Go take some pills! Scrag yourself, why don't you?” He listened to what he'd said and then went into a fit that transcended mere emotion. Before their eyes he turned into planes of flesh and color, a strange mass of jerking protoplasm. The three women, instantly using their weight, their warmth, those qualities they didn't have to think before using, fell upon Harvey. They were afraid he'd bite his tongue or dislocate his back.

Wood and Chief Tuttle could only watch while the three women pinned Harvey to the floor. Peggy held his legs, Kate and Henrietta his arms and head. Soon he became very still, and his eyes opened, but they saw that Harvey's eyes hadn't opened upon this room, or their faces. His heart calmed and his breaths became regular and countable, but he stared at a world that was evidently more tolerable than theirs. Chief Tuttle helped get him to a couch, where his body relaxed comfortably. His eyes wouldn't close. The others watched him without having to diagnose his retreat.

“Harvey!” Henrietta said.

His eyes were empty.

“Harvey Whipple!” Henrietta said in anger. “Wake up! What do you think you're doing?” She pinched his soft cheek hard, jiggling his head, but the eyes didn't care.

They turned at a small noise from the dining room. David, new scratches and welts across his smooth cheeks, stared gravely at them all and got ready to speak. He cleared his throat. “Ahem,” he said. “Horace.” He cleared his throat again, but of course they all had received that message—all except, possibly, Harvey Whipple. “Horace,” David began again, but before he could add the next word his mouth turned down at the comers into the irreversible spasm of a child and he began to bawl.

He turned away, then turned back to them in consternation, unable to control his sounds. When he managed to get his tongue and throat under control it was only for the one word. “Dead!” he shouted, and ran past them and up the stairs.

The greatest temptation of the new day, David perceived, was to see himself as the dramatic center of this life. How young he was, how it proved him in the great world he had entered, to stand bowed before all this death yet be so vividly, so luxuriously strong and alive. The autumn air was sweet, the edges of clouds or of houses, telephone wires, whatever cut the blue, cut with such honed sharpness he wanted to cry out for the joy of seeing. In the clear air on the hills surrounding Leah, ledge and spruce, maple and birch were so fine in all their striatums, their dapplings, he felt he might have seen a wasp land on a leaf three miles away.

And even his sorrow, when the eyes closed like lead and his throat burned because he could not undo time and make the young people alive, as he was…See? How kind, how full of sorrow he considered himself to be. Were his tears beautifully his tears for his own compassion? Alone in the woods, Horace had died slowly from the buckshot wounds.

In the dingy Baptist Church, at Susie's funeral, David sat with Wood and his mother upon the varnished benches. Nails had started from the lath racks that held the back-broken hymnals. The minister was an old man about to retire, and he spoke in a cracked, weepy voice one knew was his only voice—the same voice for breakfast or for baptism—to Susie's aunt and cousins. “Our dear one, called home to Thy mysterious will, Lord, in the bloom of youth, on the verge of life…” David felt the old man's weariness and fear. The relatives sat wooden-shouldered. Sam Davis was a prisoner between two husky cousins who were not about to let the old drunk mess things up. The two-toned, brown-enameled coffin was closed, the flowers lush yet somehow minimal, penurious.

His eyes hurt from their avidity. The cut flowers were mashed together thick as cake; their perfume was the smell of death in Leah. Dead inside the eternal darkness of the coffin was a body he had made love to. David Whipple was now connected in deep ways to death itself. Her midnight-blue eyes were cold and closed, the cream of her flesh faded into clay. Yet he was alive and could remember her warmth. Then came, with the memory of her kind, quirky smile, sorrow he had to believe was real. Or almost could believe was real. No danger of her being knocked up now, was there? How could he stop his vile brain, its parade of freakish questions?

An old lady in a shiny black dress, rigid as a soldier, played the organ. From the rear of its jigsawed, varnished box came the rowing clunk of the bellows lever. Chords sighed and whined together with the remoteness of utter familiarity. When they were asked to pray, David looked from his slightly bowed head at Sam Davis' back. Sam was limp within his blue suit; the husky cousins were holding him up. They would have to carry Sam out like a pedestal clock.

David's mother wiped tears from her face. One hand held her glasses wrapped in tissue, the other stayed at her eyes and cheeks. Wood sat at her other side, the inorganic crease angular across his left knee at the hinge of his steel and plastic leg. David knew the funeral was over when Wood's hand made the cocking movement that locked his leg. He got up with the others then, and they walked out of the heaviness of the church into clear daylight, yellow and green. The relatives would go to the grave, and they would go home.

David drove. When they came to Bank Street Wood asked to be let off at Sally's, where Peggy was. Sally seemed to have taken the news well, but she was an old, old woman, and Peggy wanted to stay with her. Kate was at home with Harvey. He'd let them put him to bed, but hadn't spoken a word since his fit of the night before. He had retired. He was calm; he ate, he drank, he went to the bathroom. Dr. Winston's opinion was that he was taking a vacation.

When they reached home, David decided to have a drink. He couldn't go on vacation at the moment because he had something he had to do. The state had lost interest in the body of Horace Whipple, and also in Wood's shotgun. But before he began his round of errands he would have a drink. He went to the refrigerator and got ice cubes, amazed by their glimmer and sparkle, diamond-hard and blue. In the glass their refractions were miraculous, the tiny rainbows winking from the edges of prisms. The amber whiskey whispered down through the ice, then swirled ropily in the water before it joined that other liquid. If he was kidding himself, he was kidding himself, but…He spoke to the kitchen. “If I kid myself, why then I kid myself; a foolish rationality is the monster of small love.” No, no, wait a minute, cat-killer, lover boy. He took a drink and immediately felt the alien presence in his brain—would it be good to him, or not? Would it help him go to Horace's room, where he must find the suit Horace would spend eternity in? Too late not to find out: he swigged the whiskey down and went up the narrow back stairs, wary as a thief.

Horace's door opened upon the room that was so uncluttered Horace might have moved into it yesterday. The room was a mirror image of David's own, and he saw himself in it removed, purified of his possessions. The bed was made, a little lumpy in places beneath the brown spread, but neither sloppy nor meticulous. The fireplace was never used. Dust was all it contained, a gray powder over the andirons and bricks. Old carbon, generations old, had turned silvery with dust. No books or papers were out of shelves or drawers; they were sealed by disuse into their places. Horace's alarm clock, on his bed table, still ticked. Strange, because Horace had been gone from this room for how many hours? That tick seemed all of Horace that was left here, because this had never really been Horace's room. He'd never had a room the way the rest of them had rooms. He'd slept here, or tried to sleep here. Now no more. Now he really slept. He was no more here than anywhere.
Even than in my memory,
David thought. Was that true? No, but the memory was inadequate, and couldn't stay. But Horace was a force, a needful push crowding him, shoving him off balance. He could even see himself resenting that force as it slowly decayed. Light was dusty across the threadbare rug, a lonely north light thin as whey.

The room was too silent. It was the clock. It had stopped! It nonticked, antiticked, pulled him with a force like vacuum toward it.
Say something!
The clock said 3:31. Its black face and green numerals stared without pulse like a dead animal.
Little Ben
was printed above the hand shaft. He wondered with dread and sorrow if Horace had ever read those words; it was, in small, the kind of question he had never asked Horace.

All this time he knew that Horace, if he had been the survivor, would have been adequate in his sorrow.

This room was ominous, as though it still contained the ghosts of Horace's fright. The yellow-browns of ceiling and paneling were different, colder than the other rooms—maybe because of the northern light coming down dimly through the thickest of the trees. He had to remember what a warm, bright day it was outside. He had never been alone in this room before. Horace had been here alive the few times he had ever come here. The wallpaper was the same pattern of small flowers as on his room's walls, but here it seemed to writhe, the thorns and stalks crowding the faded blossoms. No pictures hung across the wide spaces, only one oval mirror with silvery old glass like a passage of vision back through its fadings into the past.

He shivered, yet something reminiscent of duty kept him from hurrying out of here. It was too late to exorcise Horace's ghosts. Perhaps he had now inherited them. Perhaps Horace and Susie walked innocent and free in the Elysian Fields, hand in hand, without fear or degradation. Perhaps, shit.

He should not indulge himself in that tone, not here in this empty shrine. With panic a cool touch at the small of his back he went to the first of the two closets. It was the right one; he wouldn't have to open the door to the other. Horace's dark suit fell from the wire hanger into his hands, the hanger bending like a willow branch to let it fall. As he took the cloth from the deep closet it was as though he pulled it from hands, little fowl-cold claws that tried to keep it back. He shut the door quickly and went to the bureau to find a white shirt. He found a shirt all right, but now he had to find a necktie. The closets again. Why were the closets so hard to look into? If he opened that door would there be a mouth as big as a wagon wheel waiting for his hand? Even so, he had to look, one door and then the other. The mouths were there, of course, but slyly invisible. He grabbed all three neckties from Horace's rack and walked, his mind crawling, from the room.