Whipple's Castle by Thomas Williams Page B

mother’s voice had turned from a whisper to a low, lazy, slow sound that purred and went down, down like something going away. Then it was close and startling again: “Jesus Christ! Wait a minute! Take it easy! Shhh!”
    Then, “Phuh!” and the lamp in the other room went out.
    The steel cords of her mother’s bed slowly stretched, and lightened, and then complained loudly and were silent. And then began again to sing secret little words.
    Peggy pushed the blanket up against her ears, and tried to make the singing of the bed into something else—a machine, or a bird calling over and over the same chirping call. If she were not here. If she were safe in the Whipples’ house, in her safe room, it would be Wood, way down in the cellar, guarding them all in the night. Yes, it was Wood, so strong and big, down in the cellar shaking down the coals, building a fire to keep heat flowing through the great house.

4
    Wood Spencer Whipple had decided, by the time he was twelve or thirteen years old, that though the governing principle of the world might not be evil, man’s most powerful urges seemed to lie in that direction. He had been a boy scout and a preceptor of DeMolay, and of his family the only one who ever willingly went to church. He could not help observing how easily any moral law rode the arrogant or cringing shoulders of his contemporaries.
    When he was twelve he saw the newsreels of the Japanese bombing raids on Shanghai, and of the aftermath, where, on paved streets as common as any in his experience, men picked up the still warm and flexible corpses and parts of corpses and heaved them onto tracks. One sharp scene struck him, of the naked body of a girl, smooth belly and thighs and the soft veil between her legs—a slim and rubbery girl—just her lower body and pretty legs as they tossed her upon the other bodies; and then, on top of her, the similarly naked body of a thin young man landed and swayed upon the mass of legs and breasts and guts below, his penis lying aslant like a limp white finger. When the man’s body swayed upon the woman’s body, a sweet pleasure flowed through Wood’s flesh, in the circumstances horrible, perverse, like the pleasure of grinding teeth. Once more he recognized his kinship.
    But he didn’t blame the Boy Scout Oath, or the Ten Commandments, for being untrue to man, and he never directed irony toward the mouthing of these commandments, even when he knew the preacher could never do as he preached.
    That winter, while he waited for his induction notice, he worked in Milledge & Cunningham, sweeping up thread and cuttings, repairing push trucks, pulling and cutting nests of thread from their casters, and fixing V and flat belts on the humming shafts below the sewing tables—shafts that could never be stopped, because to stop one shaft would stop a dozen or more sewing machines. Each machine took power from a V belt and a flat belt, and these were always breaking. His boss, Al Coutermarsh, a thin, tall man of fifty with a blue-veined bald head, had lost his left index finger that fall on a sharp V-belt pulley, and he was glad to find that Wood could handle this job. It was for this that Wood had been given a raise to fifty-five cents an hour, but he told no one in his family the real reason.
    During the noon half-hour he sat on paper-covered rolls of cloth in the basement near the shipping room and ate his lunch with Al Coutermarsh and Beady Palmer, the shipping clerk. Beady was twenty, and had married a woman who already had three children. He was 4-F because of his eyes.
    â€œI’ve never seen the stars,” he said. “I can look right up at them, but I can’t see one goddam star. I can see pictures of stars, but I’ve never seen a real one. That’s the truth.” Beady was small and strong, with a red face hardened but not made ugly by acne. Whenever one of the girls came down to the shipping room for