Whipple's Castle Read Online Free

because he had bandages, and couldn’t heal. He’d fallen drunk into the pigpen and was partly eaten by the pigs. Part of an arm, part of a leg. When he died she was a stranger at his funeral, and only years later did she begin to remember little things about him, things he’d done for her when she was four and five years old. He made her a go-devil out of a wooden box and a sled runner, and she ran it down the crust through the buried kitchen garden, through the yellow stalks that stuck up through little round holes in the ice. Once he’d made her a willow whistle that blew like to pierce her eardrums, and a week later it was all dried up and split down past the hole.
    Another part of her life began when she quit high school at sixteen and went to work in order to get out of the house her mother lived in. She didn’t want to quit high school, but she had to get out of that house, and she would always do what she had to do. It was an awful time. Because she wanted to stay in high school so badly she would put up with nearly anything.
    They had lived with Harry Pedigree in his farmhouse on Back Hill, two miles out of town. He was always losing his cows when the TB inspector came, and the house was unpainted, nail-sprung, damp all the way through. It leaned. Harry Pedigree never changed his clothes, never paid his bills until the sheriff made him come to Petty Claims, where his foul mouth and shouting got him fined and talked about time and time again. His land was posted for taxes every year before he got around to redeeming it. He treated her mother like a breechy cow—like an animal that needed to be shown he was a man. Henrietta could still see his yellow teeth as he struck her mother; he seemed to want to hear the flat spank of his hand against her flesh.
    Her mother seemed so old, such an old woman then, with her hair going gray and her belly sticking out as much in front as her behind did in back. Once Henrietta came home around ten at night and found them on the cot in the room off the kitchen, all their clothes on, her mother’s black shoes with the straps, rolled blue stockings, legs blue-white like skim milk on each side of the cot, and his suspenders around his legs, his cracked ankle-high shoes with hay stuck between the heels and soles. Going it, his white hind end pumping on her mother, who just lay there with her dress up, taking it, rolling like a bladder under him.
    She knew they did it, but knowing and seeing were different.
    Sometimes her mother would agree with Henrietta that they should go away from there. But finally it became too obvious that her mother would never go away, and so she quit high school and went to work at Milledge & Cunningham, running a sewing machine. She lived at her father’s cousin’s house in Leah, and had her own room that she paid for. That was another time in her life, and lasted three years, until she was laid off when the orders didn’t come in fast enough. She was nineteen.
    Then came another time in her life, when Harvey Whipple was always after her. All he wanted to do was lay her, but she wouldn’t, and then he began to take her to the Country Club, and he took her home with him, and he took her to the Winter Carnival at his college. Finally he had to have her, so he asked her to marry him. That’s when she surprised him: she told him straight out she’d marry him if he let her finish high school. By then his tongue was hanging so far out he’d have said yes to anything. She finished high school in one year, and that was a good thing, because by graduation time she was so big with Wood they wouldn’t let her attend classes.
    Henrietta laughed out loud, startling her husband. He had rolled his chair into the dining room to his place at the round table, and sat there reading his paper.
    â€œWhat’s so funny?” he said, looking around the paper at her. “If anything’s funny around here, for