Read Online Whipple's Castle by Thomas Williams - Free Book Online Page A

inside his insulting body was a small ember of resentment, because he knew they all thought he was doing quite well by them this evening (for him). No really major fits at all—just one minor sort of skirmish. Maybe old Crip was mellowing a bit, eh? For a second he wanted to grab the huge brass and steel poker out of its holder and slam it beautifully down across the oak table. That would wake them up a little! But he’d have to back up, turn, wheel himself to the fire, and he’d probably fall flat on his face, as he had once before. Of course that time they’d been really terrified to see his smashed, fat, sluglike body writhing horribly all over the hearth. There was a certain satisfaction in that memory. That had been a fit to remember. A fit of lasting interest, you might say.
    But he did nothing. He tried a few pieces of popcorn, and the texture of it—yielding, cottony yet crisp—the taste of the salted butter, was painfully nostalgic of a time of hopefulness. Popcorn. The very name of the stuff was wrong for what he was now—as anachronistic as a continuing fondness for some frivolous food like Cracker Jack.
    Outside the curved panes of the high bay window, the snow still fell, a bounteous, lovely, determined, unending fall. All his life he had loved the snow. He’d even liked to shovel it, to feel his shovel cut the cold, precise silence of it. He envied his sons the icy morning air, blue, white, cold enough to sear the nostrils, and the mist of crystals sifting off at each stroke of the light wooden shovels. And then in the afternoon maybe to take their langlauf skis up to the town reservoir, up a half-mile through the woods in back of the house, and ski down through the trees in snow so light and deep they’d never see their skis, just feel them flex through graceful, leaning turns.
    Soon they could all make their excuses and go up to their rooms. Then poor Horace would have to go alone into his, where he was afraid of the dark. Horace was the only one who might have chosen to stay here in the monster’s presence. Better the known than the unknown, perhaps. Perhaps. It all depended upon the known, however, and nobody knew this better than Harvey Watson Whipple.
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    Henrietta finished in the bathroom first, and lay on her back, staring up toward the ceiling. This was the front parlor, where they had to sleep now. A bathroom had been installed in the closet underneath the first landing of the stairs, and a window had been boarded and plastered over so there would be room for the head of the bed.
    Was the ceiling there at all? Sometimes it was a cloud vaguely seen in the night sky, or a screen with all possible depths upon which she could project whatever had happened to her, or what might happen.
    Her grandfather had an ax he had paid ten dollars for—a great deal of money in those days—and what had made the ax so expensive, she always remembered, and would always wonder why, was that it was made of soft steel. Why would anyone want steel to be soft? Soft steel. All her life, whenever she thought of steel, or even sometimes of trees, this little question hummed close to her mind and hummed away unanswered, and she knew she would never really look for the real answer. Soft steel. Once she had a dream in which the ax, smooth as pearl, double-bitted, with one edge thin and sharp for cutting, the other thick for splitting—the ax slid not to cut, not to split, for her flesh had opened with sinful joy before the sliding blade. She knew the significance of the dream—that was obvious enough—but there were so many other dreams she had forgotten completely, and this one had been dreamed more than twenty-five years ago. There must be more to it, something she couldn’t understand. And perhaps she added to it, in her memories, for it seemed there had been special words she’d either dreamed or made up, new words to describe what parts of her flesh were so