Free Whipple's Castle by Thomas Williams Page A

how the Leah crowd roared when the batboy pretended he couldn’t lift the big bat, and called to a friend of his to help him drag it off the field! The sun, how it pressed like a friend on his back!

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    A hundred yards away from the Whipples’ house, through the falling snow, over an outcropping of ledge, its glacial tilt now masked and softened, through low, brushy hardwoods and a grove of tall white pine was the old sugarhouse, which once stood in the middle of a great forest of maples that extended all the way up to the town reservoir. Now only a few dying maples remained among the evergreens, gnarled, falling, split so their own offspring grew in the interstices of their squat trunks and further broke them down. The sugarhouse was rotten too, for its wood, deep beneath the pines, was always damp. Pine needles thatched the tarpaper-and-tin roof, and now the snow bundled and hushed the little building. The orange light of a kerosene lamp gleamed in a small window, one of whose lights was the outlet for a stovepipe which then turned, below the narrow eave, and cocked up at an angle, rusty and wet. Nearby, a dead 1927 Ford ton-and-a-half truck sank slowly into the earth—engine-less, tire-less, its grease licked clean by rain, with only a random wink of black paint against its general red rust. Its tires had been eaten to the wires by porcupines, and its wooden bed had wilted down among the axles. Near the dead truck was a small outhouse; all the other junk—pans with holes worn into their bottoms, a one-lunger saw engine with a crack in its water jacket, cans, barrel hoops, a barely recognizable mattress—all was now covered by the snow that still sifted through the pines.
    The sugarhouse, and the short woods road that led to it, were owned by Harvey Whipple, and many people in Leah wondered why he let Bert Mudd squat on it and turn it into a typical squatter’s junkyard. Harvey wasn’t telling, however, so the question had more or less faded out; Leah was full of such unanswered questions. Bert was now in the Army somewhere, with a San Francisco APO number. Harvey had received one letter from him saying that he was surely going to get killed, and wouldn’t Harvey say that Bert worked on his “fram” and was needed at home in a civilian capacity to help produce needed and precious food for the war effort. Harvey had never answered the letter.
    Bert’s daughter, Peggy, who was now alone in the sugarhouse, reading by the oil lamp, had received a V-mail letter from him too:
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    Dear Margaret you are my daugter and I want to say your father is in terrible danger they are shooting at me and shelling me something awful I cant tell you where I am at the censor would cut it out but it is just awful love your father,
    Pvt. Bertram H. Mudd
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    The lamp was smoking, a finger of yellow rising too high at one end of the wick, and Peggy turned it down. As the light dimmed, it was as if the room were a fist that closed upon her. She was afraid; she was too tender, all of a sudden, for a world in which people deliberately tried to kill, in which her father cried out like a baby. Every once in a while she would suddenly shiver with this fear, and feel for a while that she couldn’t bear it. Once she had heard an ambulance scream down Bank Street, and burst into tears, not knowing who it was for, or what had happened, and said out loud “I don’t want anybody to hurt!” before she realized what she had said; and then she’d thought: But that happens all the time, and I know it. I’ve even seen people hurt each other; I’ve seen men hurt my mother.
    But she was not always so vulnerable, because she couldn’t afford to be. At thirteen Peggy had come to realize that both her father and her mother could not remember things, or didn’t bother to remember things. Neither of them ever finished anything. And then one day when she saw her mother forget that she was