After the harvest at York Farm, the foreman asked Melony to stay on to help with the mousing. 'We have to get the mice before the ground freezes, or else they'll have the run of the orchards all winter,' the foreman explained. The men used poison oats and poison corn, scattering the poison around the trees and putting it in the pine mice tunnels.
Poor mice, thought Melony, but she tried mousing for a few days. When she saw a pine mouse tunnel, she tried to conceal it; she never put any poison in it. And she only pretended to scatter the oats and corn around the trees; she didn't like the way the poison smelled. She would dump it into the dirt road and fill her bag with sand and gravel and scatter that instead.
'Have a nice winter, mice,' she whispered to them.
It began to get very cold in the cider house; they gave her a wood-burning stove, which Melony vented through a window in the bunkroom; the stove kept the toilet from freezing. The morning the outdoor shower was frozen was the morning Melony decided to move on. She only briefly regretted not being able to stay and save more mice.
'If you're lookin' for another orchard,' the foreman warned her, 'you won't find any that's hirin' in the winter.'
'I'd like a city job for the winter,' Melony told him.
'What city?' the foreman asked. Melony shrugged. She had securely strapped up her small bundle of things in {411} Charley's belt; the sleeves of Mrs. Grogan's coat reached only halfway down her forearms, and the coat was an especially tight fit across the shoulders and the hips- even so, Melony managed to look comfortable in it. 'There's no real cities in Maine,' the foreman told her.
'It won't take much of a city to be a city for me,' Melony said. He watched her walk to the same part of the road where he'd called good-bye to her before. It was that time of year when the trees are bare and the sky looks like lead, and underfoot the ground feels more unyielding every day-yet it's too early for snow, or else there's a freak storm and the snow doesn't last. For some reason the foreman felt a strong desire to leave with Melony; he surprised himself by muttering out loud, 'I hope it snows soon.'
'What?' one of the apple-mart women said.
'So long!' the foreman called to Melony, but she didn't answer him.
'Good riddance,' said one of the women in the mart.
'The slut,' another one said.
'What makes her a slut?' the foreman asked sharply.
'Who you seen her sleepin' with?'
'She's just a tramp,' one of them said.
'At least she's interesting,' the foreman snapped. The women regarded him for a moment before one of them spoke up.
'Got a crush on her, do you?' she asked.
'I'll bet you wish you was that boyfriend she's lookin' for,' another woman said, which drew a teasing sort of laughter from all the mart women.
'It's not that!' the foreman snapped. 'I hope she never finds that boyfriend-for his sake!' the foreman said. 'And for hers,' he added.
The woman whose fat husband had tried to rape Melony turned away from this conversation. She opened the large, communal thermos on the table next to the cash register; but when she tried to pour herself some coffee, none came out. What came out instead was {412} poison oats and poison corn. If Melony had actually meant to poison any of them, she would have been more restrained in the proportions. It was clearly just a message, and the apple-mart women regarded it as silently as if they were trying to read bones.
'You see what I mean?' the foreman asked them. He picked up an apple from a display basket on the counter and took a healthy chomp; the apple had been left out in the cold so long that it was partially frozen, and so mealy in the foreman's mouth that he instantly spat it out.
It was very cold on the road to the coast, but the walking warmed Melony up; also, since there was no traffic, she had no choice about walking. When she reached the coastal highway, she didn't have to wait long for a ride. A pale but jolly boy driving a panel truck stopped for her.
'Yarmouth Paint and Shellac, at your service,' the boy said to Melony; he was a little younger than Homer Wells, and-in Melony's opinion-not nearly so worldlylooking. The truck reeked of wood-stain smells and of varnish and creosote. 'I'm a wood-treatment expert,' the boy said to her proudly.
At best, a salesman, Melony thought; more likely, a delivery boy. She smiled tightly, not showing her chipped teeth. The boy fidgeted, awaiting some form of greeting from her. I can make anyone nervous in less than a minute, Melony thought.
'Uh, where you goin'?' the boy asked her-the panel truck sloshing along.
The city,' Melony said.
'What city?' the boy said.
Now Melony allowed her lips to part with her smile- the worried boy now staring at the troubled history of her mouth.
'You tell me,' Melony said.
I gotta go to Bath,' the boy said nervously. Melony stared at him as if he'd said he had to have a bath.
'Bath,' she repeated.
'It's a city, sort of,' the wood-treatment expert told her. {413}
It was Clara's city! Dr. Larch or Homer Wells could have told Melony-old Clara had come to St. Cloud's from Bath! But Melony didn't know that, and wouldn't have cared; her relationship to Clara had been unpleasantly envious. Homer Wells knew Clara more intimately than he knew Melony. It might have interested Melony that Bath would put her much closer to Ocean View than she'd been at York Farm-that there might even be residents of Bath who would have heard of an Ocean View Orchards; there were certainly many Bath residents who could have directed her to Heart's Haven or to Heart's Rock.
'You wanna go to Bath?' the boy asked her cautiously.
Again Melony showed him her damaged teeth; she was displaying less of a smile than of the manner in which a dog might show its hackles. 'Right,' she said.
Wally came home for Thanksgiving; Candy had been home for several weekends in the early fall, but Homer had not known how to initiate seeing her without Wally. Wally was surprised that Homer and Candy hadn't seen each other; and, from Candy's embarrassment with Wally's surprise, Homer detected that she had been equally troubled about initiating a meeting with him. But the turkey had to be basted every fifteen minutes, the table had to be set, and Olive was too obviously enjoying having a full house again-there was no time to feel awkward.
Raymond Kendall had shared a Thanksgiving dinner with the Worthingtons before, but never without Senior's semi-presence; Ray went through a few minutes of struggling to be overly polite before he relaxed and talked shop with Olive.
'Dad acts like he's having a date,' Candy said to Olive in the kitchen.
'I'm flattered,' Olive said, squeezing Candy's arm and laughing. But that was the end of any further nonsense.
Homer volunteered to carve the turkey. He did such a {414} good job that Olive said, 'You should be a surgeon, Homer!'
Wally laughed; Candy looked at her plate, or at her hands in her lap, and Ray Kendall said, The boy's just good with his hands. If you've got good hands, once you do a thing your hands won't forget how.'
'That's like you, Ray,' Olive said, which moved the attention away from Homer's work with the knife; he carved every bit of meat off the bones as quickly as possible.
Wally talked about the war. He said he'd thought about dropping out of college to go to flying school. 'So if there is a war-if we get into it, I mean-then I'll already know how to fly.'
'You'll do no such thing,' Olive said to him.
'Why would you want to do such a thing?' Candy asked him. 'I think you're being selfish.'
'What do you mean, selfish?' Wally asked. 'A war is for your country, it's serving your country!'
'To you, it's an adventure,' Candy said. That's what's selfish about it.'
'You'll do no such thing, anyway,' Olive repeated.
'I was too young to go to the last war,' Ray said, 'and if there's another one, I'll be too old.'
'Lucky you!' Olive said.
'That's right,' Candy said.
Ray shrugged. 'I don't know,' he said. 'I wanted to go to the last one. I tried to lie about my age, but someone told on me.'
'Now you know better,'Olive said.
'I'm not so sure of that,' Ray said. 'If there's a new one, there'll be lots of new weapons-they're buildin' stuff you can't even imagine.'
'I try to imagine it,' Wally said. 'I imagine the war all the time.'
'Except the dying, Wally,' Olive Worthington said, carrying the turkey carcass out to the kitchen. 'I don't think you've imagined the dying.' {415}
'Right,' said Homer Wells, who imagined the dying all the time. Candy looked at him and smiled.
'You should have called me on the weekends, Homer,' she said.
'Yeah, why didn't you?' Wally asked him. Too busy with Debra Pettigrew, that's why.' Homer just shook his head.
'Too busy with the practical anatomy of the rabbit!' Olive called from the kitchen.
'The what?' Wally said.
But Olive was wrong. It had taken Homer only about three weeks of Senior Biology to realize that he knew more about the particular animal under scrutiny and its relation to human anatomy than did his cadaverous teacher, Mr. Hood.
It was, as Wilbur Larch could have guessed, the urogenital system that revealed Mr. Hood's deficiencies in comparison to the experience of young Dr. Wells. In discussing the three stages of specialization of the uterus, Mr. Hood became confused. The intrauterine life of the rabbit embryo is only thirty days; between five to eight young are born. In keeping with the primitive nature of the little animal, the rabbit has two complete uteri- the structure of the organ at this stage is called uterus duplex. The structure of the organ in the human female, which Homer Wells knew very well-wherein two uterine tubes open into a single uterine cavity-is called uterus simplex. The third stage of uterine structure falls between the two-a partially fused condition existing in some mammals (sheep, for example); it is called uterus bicornis.
Poor Mr. Hood, attempting to reveal the secrets of the uterus upon the chalky blackboard, confused his duplex with his bicornis; he called a sheep a rabbit (and vice versa). It was a smaller error than if he'd imagined the human female had two complete uteri and had spread this misinformation to the class, but it was an error; Homer Wells caught it. It was the first time he had been {416} put in a position of correcting an authority. 'An orphan is especially uncomfortable and insecure in such a position,' wrote Dr. Wilbur Larch.
'Excuse me, sir?'said Homer Wells.
'Yes, Homer?' said Mr. Hood. His gauntness, in a certain light, made him appear as exposed as the many rabbit cadavers lying open on the students' laboratory tables. He looked skinned, almost ready for labeling. A kind but weary patience was in his eyes; they were the man's only alert features.
'It's the other way around, sir,' said Homer Wells.
'Pardon me?' said Mr. Hood.
'The rabbit has two complete uteri, the rabbit is uterus duplex-not the sheep, sir,' Homer said. 'The sheep's uterus is partially fused together, it's almost one-the sheep is uterus bicornis.'
The class waited. Mr. Hood blinked; for a moment, he looked like a lizard regarding a fly, but he suddenly retreated. 'Isn't that what I said?' he asked, smiling.
'No,' the class murmured, 'you said it the other way around.'
'Well, it's my mistake, then,' Mr. Hood said almost cheerfully. 'I meant it just the way you said it, Homer,' he said.
'Maybe I misunderstood you, sir,' Homer said, but the class murmured, 'No, you got it right.'
The short boy named Bucky, with whom Homer had to share his rabbit cadaver, nudged Homer in the ribs. 'How come you know all about cunts?' he asked Homer.
'Search me,' said Homer Wells. He had learned that phrase from Debra Pettigrew. It was the one game they played. He would ask her something she couldn't answer. She would say 'Search me.' And Homer Wells, saying 'Okay,' would begin to search her. 'Not therel' Debra would cry, pushing his hand away, but laughing. Always laughing, but always pushing his hand away. There was no way Homer Wells would gain admittance to the uterus simplex of Debra Pettigrew. {417}
'Not unless I ask her to marry me,' he told Wally, when they were back together in W ally's bedroom, Thanksgiving night.
'I wouldn't go that far, old boy,' Wally said.
Homer didn't tell Wally about embarrassing Mr. Hood, or how the man seemed changed by the incident. If Mr. Hood had always been cadaverous, now there was an insomnia about his presence, too-as if he were not only dead but also working too hard; staying up late; boning up on his rabbit anatomy; trying to keep all the uteri straight. His tiredness made him slightly less cadaverous, but only because exhaustion is a life-sign; it is at least a form of being human. Mr. Hood began to look as if he were waiting for his retirement, hoping that he could get there.
Where have I seen that look before? wondered Homer Wells.
Nurse Angela or Nurse Edna, or even Mrs. Grogan, could have reminded him; they were all familiar with that look-that strained combination of exhaustion and expectation, that fierce contradiction between grim anxiety and childlike faith. For years that look had penetrated even the most innocent expressions of Wilbur Larch; lately, Nurse Angela and Nurse Edna, and even Mrs. Grogan, had recognized the look in their own expressions.
'What are we waiting for?' Nurse Edna asked Nurse Angela one morning. There was an aura of something pending, some form of inevitable change. These good women were as insulted by the now-famous Goodhall-Gingrich questionnaire as they felt sure Dr. Larch had been; Larch did seem unusually cheered by the remarks of the former Snowy Meadows; the board had thought Snowy's response was so praiseworthy that they'd sent it along for Dr. Larch to see.
To the question of being 'properly supervised,' Snowy said that: Dr. Larch and the nurses never let him; out of their sight. To the question regarding whether or not the {418} medical attention was 'adequate,' Snowy Meadows advised the board to 'just ask Fuzzy Stone.' In Snowy's opinion, Dr. Larch had breathed for Fuzzy. 'You never heard a worse set of lungs,' said Snowy Meadows, 'but old Larch just hooked the kid up to a real life-saver.' And to the question of whether or not the foster home was 'carefully and correctly chosen,' Snowy Meadows claimed that Dr. Larch was a genius at this delicate guesswork. 'How could the guy have known that I was going to fit right in with a furniture family? Well, I'm telling you, he did know,' Snowy Meadows (now Robert Marsh) wrote to the board. 'You know, private property, the world of personal possessions-that doesn't mean the world to everybody. But let me tell you,' Snowy Meadows said, 'furniture means the world to an orphan.'
'One of you must have dropped that boy on his head,' Wilbur Larch said to Nurse Edna and to Nurse Angela, although they could tell he was very pleased by Snowy's remarks.
But just to be fair, the board sent Larch Curly Day's slightly less enthusiastic response to the questionnaire. Roy Rinfret of Boothbay was seething with resentment. 'I was no more prepared to be adopted by druggists than was prepared to have my belly-cord cut,' wrote Roy 'Curly' Rinfret. 'The most beautiful couple in the world walked off with someone who didn't even need or want to be adopted, and I got nabbed by druggists!' Curly complained. 'You call it being supervised when little children are stumbling over dead bodies?' Curly Day asked the board. 'Imagine this: on the day I find a dead man in the grass, the couple of my dreams adopts someone else, Dr. Larch tells me that an orphanage is not a pet store, and shortly thereafter, two druggists hire me to work in their drugstore for free-and you call that being adopted!'
'Why, that ungrateful little snot!' said Nurse Angela. 'Why, Curly Day, aren't you ashamed?' Nurse Edna asked the indifferent air. {419}
'If that boy were here,' Nurse Angela said, 'I'd take him over my knee, I would!'
And why hasn't our Homer Wells filled out the questionnaire? the women wondered.
Speaking of 'ungrateful,' thought Wilbur Larch, although he held his tongue.
Nurse Angela did not hold hers. She wrote directly to Homer Wells, which would have irritated Dr. Larch if he'd known. Nurse Angela came right to the point. 'That questionnaire is the least you can do,' she wrote Homer. 'We all could use a little support. Just because you're having the time of your life (I suppose), don't you dare forget how to be of use-don't you forget where you belong. And if you happen to run into any young doctors or nurses who would be sympathetic to our situation, think you know that you'd better recommend us to them-and them to us. We're not getting any younger, you know.'
My dear Homer [wrote Dr. Larch, in the next day's mail], It's come to my attention that the board of trustees is attempting to communicate with several former residents of St. Cloud's in the form of a ridiculous questionnaire. Answer it as you see fit, but please do answer it. And you must be prepared for some other, more troubling correspondence from them. It was necessary for me to be frank with them regarding the health of the orphans. Although I saw no reason to tell them I had 'lost' Fuzzy Stone to a respiratory ailment -what good would that admission do Fuzzy? -I did tell the board about your heart. I felt that if anything ever happened to me, there should be someone who knew. I do apologize for not telling you about your condition. I am telling you now because, reconsidering the matter, I would never want you to hear about your heart from someone else first. Now, DON'I BE: ALARMED! I would not even describe your heart as a condition, the condition is so slight; {420} you had a fairly substantial heart murmur as a small child, but this had almost entirely disappeared when I last checked you-in your sleep; you wouldn't remember-and I have delayed even mentioning your heart to you for fear of worrying you needlessly. (Such worrying might aggravate the condition.) You have (or had) a pulmonary valve stenosis, but PLEASE DON'I WORRY! It is nothing, or next to nothing. If you're interested in more details, I can provide them. For now, I just didn't want you being upset by some fool thing you might hear from that fool board of trustees. Aside from avoiding any situation of extreme stress or extreme exertion, I want you to know that you can almost certainly lead a normal life.
A normal life? thought Homer Wells. I am a Bedouin with a heart condition and Dr. Larch is telling me I can lead a normal life? I am in love with my best-and only-friend's girlfriend, but is that what Larch would call 'extreme stress'? And what was Melony to me if not 'extreme exertion'?
Whenever Homer Wells thought of Melony (which was not often), he missed her; then he was angry at himself. Why should I miss her? he wondered. He tried not to think about St. Cloud's; the longer he stayed away, the more extreme life there appeared to him-yet when he thought of it, he missed it, too. And Nurse Angela and Nurse Edna and Mrs. Grogan and Dr. Larch, he missed them all. He was angry at himself for that, too; there were absolutely no signals from his heart to tell him that the life at St. Cloud's was the life he wanted.
He liked the life at Ocean View. He wanted Candy, and some life with her. When she went back to Camden, he tried not to think about her; and since he could not think of Wally without thinking of Candy, he was relieved when Wally went back to Orono-although he had missed Wally all that fall.
'When an orphan is depressed,' wrote Wilbur Larch, {421} 'he is attracted to telling lies. A lie is at least a vigorous enterprise, it keeps you on your toes by making you suddenly responsible for what happens because of it. You must be alert to lie, and stay alert to keep your lie a secret. Orphans are not the masters of their fates; they are the last to believe you if you tell them that other people are also not in charge of theirs.
'When you lie, it makes you feel in charge of your life. Telling lies is very seductive to orphans. I know,' Dr. Larch wrote. 'I know because I tell them, too. I love to lie. When you lie, you feel as if you have cheated fate-your own, and everybody else's.'
And so Homer Wells answered the questionnaire; he sang a hymn of praise to St. Cloud's. He mentioned the 'restoration' of the abandoned buildings of St. Cloud's as one of the many attempts made 'to integrate the daily life of the orphanage with the life of the surrounding community.' He also lied to Nurse Angela, but it was just a little lie- one of those that are intended to make other people feel better. He wrote to her that he had lost the original questionnaire-which was the only reason he had been so tardy in returning it. Perhaps the board would be kind enough to send him another? (When he received the second questionnaire from the board, he would know it was time to send the one he had so arduously filled out-that way he would appear to have filled it out spontaneously, off the top of his head.)
He wrote with feigned calmness to Dr. Larch. He would appreciate further details regarding his pulmonary valve stenosis. Did Dr. Larch think it necessary, for example, for Homer to have monthly checkups? (Dr. Larch would think it unnecessary, of course.) And were there signs of trouble that Homer himself might detect; were there ways that he could listen for his perhapsreturning murmur? (Calm yourself, Dr. Larch would advise; that was the best thing-staying calm.)
In an effort to calm himself, Homer tacked the extra questionnaire-which he did not fill out-to the wall {422} of Wally's room, right by the light switch, so that the questions regarding life at St. Cloud's occupied a position of ignored authority quite similar to the page of rules that were yearly tacked up in the cider house. As Homer came and went, he regarded those questions he had answered with such able lies-for example, it was quite a kick for him to contemplate 'any possible improvements in the methods and management of St. Cloud's' each time he entered and left Wally's room.
At night, now, Homer's insomnia kept time to a new music; the winter branches of the picked apple trees rattling against each other in the early December wind made a brittle click-clack sound. Lying in his bed-a moonlight the color of bone starkly outlining his hands folded on his chest-Homer Wells thought the trees might be trying to shake the snow off their branches, in advance of the snow itself.
Perhaps the trees knew that a war was coming, too, but Olive Worthington didn't think about it. She had heard the orchard's winter rattle for many years; she had seen the winter branches bare, then lacy with snow, and then bare again. The coastal winds gave the brittle orchard such a shaking that the clashing trees resembled frozen soldiers in all the postures of saber-rattling, but Olive had heard so many years of this season that she never knew a war was coming. If the trees seemed especially naked to her that December, she thought it was because she faced her first winter without Senior.
'Grown-ups don't look for signs in the familiar,' noted Dr. Wilbur Larch in A Brief History of St. Cloud's, 'but an orphan is always looking for signs.'
Homer Wells, at Wally's window, searched the skeletal orchard for the future-his own, mainly, but Candy's too, and Wally's. Dr. Larch's future was certainly out there, in those winter branches-even Melony's future. And what future would there be for the Lord's work? wondered Homer Wells. {423}
The war that was about to be did not announce itself in signs at St. Cloud's; both the familiar and the unfamiliar were muted there by ritual and by custom. A pregnancy terminated in a birth or in an abortion; an orphan was adopted or was waiting to be adopted. When there was a dry and snowless cold, the loose sawdust irritated the eyes and the noses and the throats of St. Cloud's; only briefly, when the snow lay newly fallen, was the sawdust gone from the air. When there was a thaw, the snow melted down and the matted sawdust srnelled like wet fur; when there was a freeze, the sawdust reappeared -dry again, somehow on top of the old snow-and again the eyes itched, the noses ran, and the throats could never quite clear themselves of it.
'Let us be happy for Smoky Fields,' Dr. Larch announced in the boys' division. 'Smoky Fields has found a family. Good night, Smoky.'
'Good night, Thmoky!' said David Copperfield.
'G'night!' young Steerforth cried.
Good night, you little food hoarder, Nurse Angela thought. Whoever took him, she knew, would soon learn to lock the refrigerator.
In the December morning, at the window where Melony once allowed the world to pass both with and without comment, Mary Agnes Cork watched the women walking uphill from the train station. They don't look pregnant, Mary Agnes thought.
On the bleak hill where Wally Worthington once imagined apple trees, young Copperfield attempted to steer a cardboard carton through the first, wet snow. The carton had once contained four hundred sterile vulval pads; Copperfield knew this because he had unpacked the carton-and he had placed young Steerforth in the carton, at the bottom of the hill. Near the top, he was beginning to realize his mistake. Not only had dragging Steerforth uphill been difficult, but also the boy's weight-in addition to the wetness of the snow-had turned the bottom of the carton soggy. Copperfield won-{424} dered if his make-do sled would even slide-if he ever managed to get the mess to the top.
'Good night, Smoky!' Steerforth was singing.
'Thut up, thupid,' David Copperfield said.
Dr. Larch was very tired. He was resting in the dispensary. The gray, winter light turned the white walls gray and for a moment Larch wondered what time of day it was-and what time of year. From now on, he was thinking, let everything I do be for a reason. Let me make no wasted moves.
In his mind's eye he saw the correct angle at which the vaginal speculum allowed him a perfect view of the cervix. Whose cervix? he wondered. Even in his ether sleep the thumb and index finger of his right hand tightened the screw that held the jaws of the speculum in place, and he saw the astonishing blondness of the little clump of pubic hair caught in the hairs of his own wrist. It was so blond he had nearly missed seeing it against his own pale skin. When he shook his wrist, the little clump was so light that it floated in the air. In his ether swoon his left hand reached for it, just missing it. Oh yes-her cervix, thought Wilbur Larch. What was her name?
'She has a toy name,' Larch said aloud. 'Candy!' he remembered. Then he laughed. Nurse Edna, passing the dispensary, held her breath and listened to the laughter. But even when she didn't breathe, the fumes made her old eyes water. That and the sawdust. That and the orphans-some of them made her eyes water, too.
She opened the door at the hospital entrance to let some fresh air into the hall. On the hill she watched a cardboard carton make an unsteady descent; she knew that sterile vulval pads had been in the carton, but she wasn't sure what was in the carton now. Something heavy, because the carton's descent was clumsy and irregular. At times it picked up speed, sliding almost smoothly, but always some rock or bare patch in the slushy snow would jar it off-course and slow it down. The first small body to roll out of the carton and make its {425} way downhill was Steerforth's; she recognized his overlarge mittens and the ski hat that always covered his eyes. For a while he tumbled almost as fast as the carton, but a large patch of bare, frozen ground finally stopped him. Nurse Edna watched him climb back uphill for one of his mittens.
The second, larger body to be propelled from the carton was obviously David Copperfield's; he rolled free with a large, soggy piece of the carton in both his; hands. The carton appeared to disintegrate in flight.
'Thit!' Copperfield cried. At least, Nurse Edna thought, young Copperfield's profanities were improved by his lisp.
'Close that door,' said Dr. Larch, in the hall behind Nurse Edna.
'I was just trying to get some fresh air,' Nurse Edna said pointedly.
'You could have fooled me,' said Wilbur Larch. 'I thought you were trying to freeze the unborn.'
Maybe that will be the way of the future, Nurse Edna thought-wondering what future ways there would be.
In the December swimming pool the raft that Senior Worthington used to ride still floated, windblown from one end of the pool to the other, breaking up the lacy fringes of ice that formed and reformed around the edges. Olive and Homer had drained out a third of the pool's water, to leave room for rainfall ancl snow melt.
Senior's cold raft, only partially deflated by the falling temperature, still charged around the swimming pool like a riderless horse; it galloped wherever the wind urged it. Every day Olive watched the raft out the kitchen window, and Homer wondered when she would suggest getting rid of it.
One weekend Candy came home from Camden, and Homer's confusion regarding what he should do about her mounted. Friday was a bad, indecisive day. He went {426} early to Senior Biology, hoping to persuade Mr. Hood either to let him have his own rabbit for dissection or to assign him a lab partner other than that boy Bucky. Bucky managed to mangle the rabbit's innards whenever he handled them, and Homer found the oaf's constant fixation with everything's reproductive system both silly and maddening. Bucky had lately seized on the fact that marsupials have paired vaginas.
'Twin twats! Can you believe it?' Bucky asked Homer.
'Right,' said Homer Wells.
'Is that all you can say?' Bucky asked. 'Don't you get it? If you was a hamster, you could fuck another hamster with your buddy!'
'Why would I want to do that?' Homer asked.
'Two cunts!' Bucky said enthusiastically. 'You got no imagination.'
'I doubt that even the hamsters are interested in what you suggest,' said Homer Wells.
'That's what I mean, stupid,' Bucky said. 'What a waste-to give two twats to a hamster! You ever seen 'em run on them little wheels? They're crazy! Wouldn't you be crazy if you knew the girl of your dreams had two twats and she still wasn't interested?'
'The girl of my dreams,' said Homer Wells.
It was crazy enough, in Homer's opinion, that the girl of his dreams had two people who loved her.
And so he went early to Senior Biology to request either a fresh rabbit or a replacement for the obsessed boy named Bucky.
There was a geography class in progress when he got there; and when the class was released, Homer saw that the large maps of the world were still pulled down, covering the blackboard. 'May I just look at the maps for a moment, before my next class?' Homer asked the geography teacher. 'I'll roll them back up for you.'
And so he was left alone with his first accurate view of the world-the whole world, albeit unrealistically flat against a blackboard. After a while he found Maine; he {427} regarded how small it was. After a while he found South Carolina; he stared into South Carolina for a long time, as if the exact whereabouts of Mr. Rose and the other migrants would materialize. He had heard all the talk about Germany, which was easier to find than Maine. He was surprised at the size of England; Charles Dickens had given him the impression of something much bigger.
And the ocean that seemed so vast when you looked at it off Ray Kendall's dock-why, the oceans of the world were even more vast than he'd imagined. Yet St. Cloud's which loomed so large in Homer's life, could not be located on the map of Maine. He was using the geography teacher's magnifying glass when he suddenly realized that the entire class of Senior Biology had filled the seats behind him. Mr. Hood was regarding him strangely.
'Looking for your rabbit, Homer?' Mr. Hood asked. The class enjoyed this joke enormously, and Homer realized he had-at least for that day-lost the opportunity to rid himself of Bucky.
'Look at it this way,' Bucky whispered to him, near the end of class. 'If Debra Pettigrew had two twats, she might let you in one of them. You see the advantages?'
Unfortunately, the idea of paired vaginas troubled Homer throughout his Friday evening date with Debra Pettigrew. There was a Fred Astaire movie in Bath, but that was almost an hour-long drive, each way, and what did Homer Wells know or care about dancing? He had declined several invitations to attend Debra's dancing class with her; if she wanted to see the Fred Astaire movie, Homer thought she could go with someone who was in her dancing class. And it was getting too cold simply to drive to the beach and park there. Olive was generous about letting Homer use the van. Soon there would be gas rationing, and a welcome end, in Homer's opinion, to all this restless driving.
He drove Debra Pettigrew out to the carnival site at Cape Kenneth. In the moonlight, the abandoned, {428} unlighted Ferris wheel stood out like scaffolding for the world's first rocket launch, or like the bones of some species from dinosaur times. Homer tried to tell Debra about the knife work of Mr. Rose, but she had her heart set on Fred Astaire; he knew better than to waste a good story on her when she was sulking. They drove to the Cape Kenneth drive-in, which was 'closed for the season'; they appeared to be reviewing the scenes of a romance that had happened to other people-and not just last summer, but to another generation.
'I don't know what you've got against dancing,' Debra said.
'I don't know, either,' said Homer Wells.
It was still early when he drove Debra to her winter home in Kenneth Corners; the same ferocious dogs of the summer were there, with their coats grown thicker, with their hot breath icing on their muzzles. There had been talk between Debra and Homer, earlier, about using the summer house on Drinkwater Lake for some kind of party; the house would be unheated, and they would have to keep the lights off, or someone might report a breaking and entering; but despite these discomforts, surely there was a thrill in being unchaperoned. Why? wondered Homer Wells. He knew he still wouldn't get to Debra Pettigrew-even if she had two vaginas. With the dull Friday evening they had spent together, and with the dogs' breath crystallizing on the driver'sside window of the van, there was no talk about such a tempting party this night.
'So what are we doing tomorrow night?' Debra asked, sighing.
Homer watched a dog gnaw at his side-view mirror.
'Well, I was going to see Candy-she's home from Camden,' Homer said. 'I haven't seen her on a weekend all fall, and Wally did ask me to look after her.'
'You're going to see her without Wally?' Debra asked.
'Right,' Homer said. The van was so snub-nosed that the dogs could hurl themselves directly against the {429} windshield without having to clamber over the hood. A big dog's paws raked one of the windshield wipers away from the windshield, releasing it with a crack; it looked bent; it wouldn't quite touch the surface of the glass anymore.
'You're going to see her alone,' Debra said.
'Or with her dad,' Homer said.
'Sure,' said Debra Pettigrew, getting out of the van. She left the door open a little too long. A dog with the spade-shaped head of a Doberman charged the open door; it was half in the van, its heavy chest heaving against the passenger-side seat, its frosty muzzle drooling on the gearshift box, when Debra grabbed it by the ear and yanked it back, yelping, out of the van.
'So long,' said Homer Wells softly-after the door had slammed, after he had wiped the dog's frothy slobber off the gearshift knob.
He drove by Kendall's Lobster Pound twice, but there was nothing to tell him whether Candy was home. On the weekends when she came home, she took the train; then Ray drove her back, on Sunday. I'll call her tomorrow-Saturday-Homer thought.
When Candy said that she wanted to see the Fred Astaire movie, Homer had no objections. 'I always wanted to see him,' he said. Bath, after all, was less than an hour away.
On the bridge across the Kennebec River, they could see several big ships in the water and several more in dry dock; the Bath shipyards were sprawled along the shore-a rhythmic hammering and other metal sounds audible even on a Saturday. They were much too early for the movie. They were looking for an Italian restaurant that Ray had told them about-if it was still there; Raymond Kendall hadn't been in Bath in years.
In 194-, especially to an outsider, the city seemed dominated by the shipyards, and by the ships that stood taller than the shipyard buildings, and by the bridge that spanned the Kennebec River. Bath was a workingman's {430} town, as Melony soon discovered.
She found a job in the shipyards and began her winter employment on an assembly line, working with other women-and with an occasional, handicapped man- on the second floor of a factory specializing in movable parts. The movable part to which Melony would devote her energies for the first month of her employment was a hexagonal-shaped sprocket that looked like half a ham, split open lengthwise; Melony did not know the whereabouts of the assembly line that dealt with the other half of the ham. The sprocket arrived on the conveyor belt in front of her, pausing there for exactly forty-five seconds before it was moved on and replaced by a new sprocket. The joint of the sprocket was packed with grease; you could stick your finger in the grease, past the second knuckle. The job was to insert six ball bearings into the grease-packed joint; you pushed each ball bearing into the grease until you felt it hit the bottom; all six fit perfectly. The trick was to get only one hand greasy; a clean hand had an easier time handling the clean ball bearings, which were the size of marbles. The other part of the job was making sure that the six ball bearings were perfect- perfectly round, perfectly smooth; no dents, no jagged metal scraps stuck to them. The odds were that one out of every two hundred ball bearings had something wrong with it; at the end of the day, you turned in the bad ball bearings. If you had a day with no bad ball bearings, the foreman told you that you weren't looking each ball bearing over carefully enough.
You could sit or stand, and Melony tried both positions, alternating them through the day. The belt was too high to make sitting comfortable and too low to make standing any better. Your back hurt in one place when you stood and in another place when you sat. Not only did Melony not know who did what, where, to the other half of the sprocket; she also didn't know what the sprocket was for. What's more, she didn't care. After two weeks, she had the routine down pat: {431}! between twenty-six and twenty-eight seconds to insert the ball bearings and never more than ten seconds to pick six perfect ball bearings. She learned to keep a nest of ball bearings in her lap (when she sat) and in an ashtray (she didn't srnoke) when she stood; that way she always had a ball bearing handy in case she dropped one. She had a twelve-to-fourteen-second rest between sprockets, during which time she could look at the person on her left and at the person on her right, and shut her eyes and count to three or sometimes five. She observed that there were two styles of labor on the line. Some of the workers picked their six perfect ball bearings immediately upon finishing a sprocket; the others waited for the new sprocket to arrive first. Melony found faults with both styles.
The woman next to Melony put it this way: 'Some of us are pickers, some are stickers,' she said.
'I'm not either, or I'm both,' Melony said.
'Well, I think you'll have an easier time of it, dearie, if you make up your mind,' the woman said. Her name was Doris. She had three children; one side of her face was still pretty, but the other was marred by a mole with whiskers in it. In the twelve or fourteen seconds that Doris had between sprockets, she smoked.
On the other side of Melony was an elderly man in a wheelchair. His problem was that he could not pick up the ball bearings that he dropped, and some of them got caught in his lap blanket or in the wheelchair apparatus, which caused him to rattle when he wheeled himself off for his coffee break or for lunch. His name was Walter.
Three or four times a day, Walter would shout, 'Fucking ball bearings!'
Some days, when someone was sick, the assembly line was reassembled and Melony was not pinned between Walter and Doris. Sometimes she got to be next to Troy, who was blind. He felt the ball bearings for perfection and daintily poked them into the thick and unseen grease. He was a little older than Melony; but he had {432} always worked in the shipyards; he'd been blinded in a welding accident, and the shipyards owed him a job for life.
'At least I've got security,' he would say, three or four times a day.
Some days Melony was put next to a girl about her age, a feisty little chick called Lorna.
There's worse jobs,' Lorna said one day.
'Name one,' said Melony.
'Blowing bulldogs,' Lorna said.
'I don't know about that,' Melony said. 'I'll bet every bulldog is different.'
'Then how come every man is the same?' Lorna asked.
Melony decided that she liked Lorna.
Lorna had been married when she was seventeen-'to an older man,' she'd said-but it hadn't worked out. He was a garage mechanic, 'about twenty-one,' Lorna said. 'He just married me 'cause I was the first person he slept with,' Lorna told Melony.
Melony told Lorna that she'd been separated from her boyfriend by 'a rich girl who came between us'; Lorna agreed that this was 'the worst.'
'But I figure one of two things has happened,' Melony said. 'Either he still hasn't fucked her, because she hasn't let him, and so he's figured out what he's missing. Or else she's let him fuck her-in which case, he's figured out what he's missing.'
'Ha! That's right,' Lorna said. She appeared to like Melony.
'I got some friends,' she told Melony. 'We eat pizza, go
to movies, you know.' Melony nodded; she had done
none of those things. Lorna was as thin as Melony was
thick, she showed as much bone as Melony showed flesh;
Lorna was pale and blond, whereas Melony was dark
and darker; Lorna looked frail and she coughed a lot,
whereas Melony looked almost as strong as she was and
her lungs were a set of engines. Yet the women felt they
belonged together.
{433}
When they requested that they be put next to each other on the assembly line, their request was denied. Friendships, especially talkative ones, were considered counterproductive on the line. Thus Melony was allowed to work alongside Lorna only when the line was reassembled on a sick day. Melony was made to endure the crackpot homilies of Doris and the lost ball bearings of Wheelchair Walter, as everyone called him. But the enforced separation from Lorna on the work line only made Melony feel stronger in her attachment; the attachment was mutual. That Saturday they put in for overtime together, and they worked side by side through the afternoon.
At about the time that Candy and Homer Wells were crossing the bridge over the Kennebec and driving into downtown Bath, Lorna dropped a ball bearing down the cleavage of Melony's work shirt. It was their way of getting each other's attention.
'There's a Fred Astaire movie in town,' Lorna said, snapping her chewing gum. 'You wanna see it?'
Although her voice lacked the studied heartiness of Dr. Larch's, Mrs. Grogan did her best to inspire a welcome response to her announcement to the girls' division. 'Let us be happy for Mary Agnes Cork,' she said; there was general sniveling, but Mrs. Grogan pressed on. 'Mary Agnes Cork has found a family. Good night, Mary Agnes!'
There were stifled moans, the sound of someone gagging in her pillow, and a few of the usual, wracking sobs.
'Let us be happy for Mary Agnes Cork!' Mrs. Grogan pleaded.
'Fuck you,' someone said in the darkness.
'It hurts me to hear you say that,' Mrs. Grogan said. 'How that hurts us all. Good night, Mary Agnes!' Mrs Grogan called.
'Good night, Mary Agnes,: one of the smaller ones said.
'Be careful, Agnes!' someone blubbered. {434}
Goodness, yes! thought Mrs. Grogan, the tears running down her cheeks. Yes, be careful.
Larch had assured Mrs. Grogan that the adoptive family was especially good for an older girl like Mary Agnes. They were a young couple who bought and sold and restored antiques; they were too active in their business to look after a small child, but they had lots of energy to share with an older child on the weekends and in the evenings. The young wife had been very close to a kid sister; she was 'devoted to girl talk,' she told Dr. Larch. (Apparently, the kid sister had married a foreigner and was now living abroad.)
And Wilbur Larch had a good feeling for Bath: he'd always maintained a friendly correspondence with the pathologist at Bath Hospital; good old Clara had come from there. And so it seemed perfectly fine to him that Mary Agnes Cork had gone to Bath.
Mary Agnes was attached to her own name, and so they allowed her to keep it, not just the Mary Agnes but the Cork, too. After all they were Callahans; a Cork went with a Callahan, didn't it? It sounded a little modern for Mrs. Grogan's tastes, although she allowed herself to be pleased at the thought that she'd named someone for keeps.
Ted and Patty Callahan wanted Mary Agnes Cork to view them as friends. The first friendly thing the young couple did was to take Mary Agnes to her first movie. They were a robust couple, and in their opinion they lived near enough to the movie theater in Bath to walk; it was a long walk, during which Ted and Patty demonstrated some of the basic differences between a fox-trot and a waltz. The December sidewalk was sloppy, but Ted and Patty wanted to prepare Mary Agnes for some of the dazzle of Fred Astaire.
Off the Kennebec a damp, chilling wind was blowing and Mary Agnes felt her collarbone ache; when she tried to join the Callahans at dancing, the old injury felt loose, then it throbbed; then it grew numb. The sidewalk was {435} so slippery, she nearly fell-catching her balance on the fender of a dirty green van. Patty brushed her coat off for her. People were outside the movie house, buying tickets in the failing light. On the sliding panel door of the van, Mary Agnes Cork recognized the apple monogram-the W.W., and the OCEAN VIEW. She had first seen this emblem on a Cadillac-there had been a kind of hunger line; she remembered that beautiful girl standing aloof and that beautiful boy passing out the food. They're here! Mary Agnes thought, the beautiful people who took Homer Wells away! Maybe Homer was still with them. Mary Agnes began to look around.
Homer and Candy had not had much luck finding the Italian restaurant that Ray had recommended; they'd found two or three Italian restaurants, each one serving pizza and submarine sandwiches and beer, and each one so overrun with workers from the shipyards that there was no place to sit. They'd eaten some pizza in the van and had arrived at the movie early.
When Homer Wells opened his wallet in front of the ticket booth, he realized that he'd never opened his wallet outdoors-in a winter wind-before. He put his back to the wind, but still the loose bills flapped; Candy cupped her hands on either side of his wallet, as if she were protecting a flame in danger of going out, and that was how she was in a position to catch her own, treasured clump of pubic hair when it blew free from Homer's wallet and caught on the cuff of her coat. They both grabbed for it (Homer letting the wallet fall), but Candy was quicker. Some of the fine, blond hairs may have escaped in the wind but Candy seized the clump tightly-Homer's hand closing immediately on hers.
They stepped away from the ticket booth; a small line moved into the theater past them. Candy continued to hold her pubic hair tightly, and Homer would not let her hand go-he would not let her open her hand to examine what she held; there was no need for that. Candy knew what she held in her hand; she knew it as much from {436} Homer's expression as from the clump of pubic hair itself.
'I'd like to take a walk,' she whispered.
'Right,' said Homer Wells, not letting go of her hand. They turned away from the theater and walked downhill to the Kennebec. Candy faced the river and leaned against Homer Wells.
'Perhaps you're a collector,' she said, as quietly as she could speak and still be heard over the river. 'Perhaps you're a pubic hair collector,' she said. 'You certainly were in a position to be.'
'No,'he said.
'This is pubic hair,' she said, wriggling her tightly clenched fist in his hand. 'And it's mine, right?'
'Right,' said Homer Wells.
'Only mine?' Candy asked. 'You kept only mine?'
'Right,' Homer said.
'Why?' Candy asked. 'Don't lie.'
He had never said the words: I am in love with you. He was unprepared for the struggle involved in saying them. No doubt he misunderstood the unfamiliar weight he felt upon his heart-he must have associated the constriction of that big muscle in his chest with Dr. Larch's recent news; what he felt was only love, but what he thought he felt was his pulmonary valve stenosis. He let go of Candy's hand and put both his hands to his chest. He had seen the sternum shears at work-he knew the autopsy procedure-but never had it been so hard and painful to breathe.
When Candy turned to him and saw his face, she couldn't help it-both her hands opened and grasped his hands, the blond wisp of pubic hair flying free; a current of rough air carried it out over the river and into the darkness.
'Is it your heart?' Candy asked him. 'Oh God, you don't have to say anything-please don't even think about it!'
'My heart,' he said. 'You know about my heart?'
'You know?' she asked. 'Don't worry!' she added fiercely. {437}
'I love you,' Homer Wells croaked, as if he were saying his last words.
'Yes, I know-don't think about it,' Candy said. 'Don't worry about anything. I love you, too.'
'You do?' he asked.
'Yes, yes, and Wally too,' she said. 'I love you and I love Wally-don't worry about it, don't even think about it.'
'How do you know about my heart?' asked Homer Wells.
'We all know about it,' Candy said. 'Olive knows, and Wally knows.'
Hearing this was more convincing to Homer Wells than even the offhand remarks in Dr. Larch's letter; he felt his heart race out of control again.
'Don't think about your heart, Homer!' Candy said, hugging him tightly. 'Don't worry about me, or Wally- or any of it,'
'What am I supposed to think about?' asked Homer Wells.
'Only good things,' Candy told him. When she looked into his eyes, she said suddenly, 'I can't believe that you kept my hair!' But when she saw the intensity of his frown, she said, 'I mean, it's okay-I understand, guess. Don't worry about it, either. It may be peculiar, but it's certainly romantic.'
'Romantic,' said Homer Wells, holding the girl of his dreams-but only holding her. To touch her more must surely be forbidden-by all the rules-and so he tried to accept the ache in his heart as what Dr. Larch would call the common symptoms of a normal life. This is a normal life, he tried to think, holding Candy as both the night fog off the river and the darkness reached over them.
It was not a night that put them in the mood for a musical.
'We can see Fred Astaire dance another time,' Candy said philosophically. {438}
The safety of the familiar drew them toward Raymond Kendall's dock-when they got cold, sitting out there, they could always have some tea with Ray. They drove the van back to Heart's Haven; nobody who knew them saw them come or go.
In the Fred Astaire movie, Mary Agnes Cork ate too much popcorn; her foster family thought that the poor girl was simply overstimulated by her first movie; she could not sit still. She watched the audience more than she watched the dancing; she searched every face in the flickering darkness. It was that pretty girl and that pretty boy she was looking for-and maybe Homer Wells. And so she was unprepared to spot the face in the crowd of the one person she missed most in her narrow world; the sight of that dark, heavy countenance shot such a stab of pain through her old collarbone injury that the popcorn container flew from her hands.
Melony loomed over the sassy blond girl named Lorna -hulking in her seat with the authority of a chronic and cynical moviegoer, looking like a sour critic born to be displeased, although this was her first movie. Even in the projector's gray light, Mary Agnes Cork could not fail to recognize her old brutalizer, the ex-queen and former hit-woman of the girls' division.
'I think you've had enough of that popcorn, sweetheart,' Patty Callahan told Mary Agnes, who appeared to have a kernel of the stuff caught in her throat. And for the rest of the evening's frivolous entertainment, Mary Agnes could not keep her eyes off that most dominant member of the audience; in Mary Agnes Cork's opinion, Melony could have wiped up a dance floor with Fred Astaire, she could have broken every bone in Fred's slender body-she could have paralyzed him after just one waltz.
'Do you see someone you know, dear?' Ted Callahan asked Mary Agnes. He thought the poor girl was so stuffed with popcorn that she couldn't talk.
In the lobby, in the sickly neon light, Mary Agnes {439} walked up to Melony as if a dream led her feet-as if she were captured in the old, violent trance of Melony's authority.
'Hi,'she said.
'You talking to me, kid?' Lorna asked, but Mary Agnes was smiling just at Melony.
'Hi, it's me!' Mary Agnes said.
'So you got out?' Melony said.
'I've been adopted!' said Mary Agnes Cork. Ted and Patty stood a little nervously near her, not wanting to intrude but not wanting to let her very far from their sight, either. This is Ted and Patty,' Mary Agnes said. 'This is rny friend, Melony.'
Melony appeared not to know what to make of the hands extended to her. The tough little broad named Lorna batted her eyes-some of her mascara sticking one of her eyelids in a frozen-open position.
'This is my friend, Lorna,' Melony said awkwardly.
Everyone said Hi! and then stood around. What does the little creep want? Melony was thinking.
And that was when Mary Agnes said, 'Where's Homer?'
'What?' Melony said.
'Homer Wells,' said Mary Agnes. 'Isn't he with you?'
'Why?' Melony asked.
'Those pretty people with the car…' Mary Agnes
began.
'What car?' Melony asked.
'Well, it wasn't the same car, it wasn't the pretty car, but there was the apple on the door-I'll never forget that apple,' Mary Agnes said.
Melony put her big hands heavily on Mary Agnes's shoulders; Mary Agnes felt the weight pressing her into the floor. 'What are you talking about?' Melony asked.
'I saw an old car, but it had that apple on it,' Mary Agnes said. 'I thought they was at the movie, those pretty people-and Homer, too. And when I saw you, I thought he would be here for sure.' {440}
'Where was the car?' Melony asked, her strong thumbs bearing down on both of Mary Agnes's collarbones. 'Show me the car!'
'Is something wrong?' Ted Callahan asked.
'Mind your own business,' Melony said.
But the van was gone. In the damp cold, on the slushy sidewalk, staring at the empty curbstone, Melony said, 'Are you sure it was that apple? It had a double W, and it said Ocean View.'
'That's it,' Mary Agnes said. 'It just wasn't the same car, it was an old van, but I'd know that apple anywhere. You don't forget a thing like that.'
'Oh, shut up,' Melony said tiredly. She stood on the curb, her hands on her hips, her nostrils flared; she was trying to pick up a scent, the way a dog guesses in the air for the history of intrusions upon its territory.
'What is it?' Lorna asked Melony. 'Was your fella here with his rich cunt?'
Ted and Patty Callahan were anxious to take Mary Agnes home, but Melony stopped them as they were leaving. She reached into her tight pocket and produced the horn-rimmed barrette that Mary Agnes had stolen from Candy, which Melony had taken for herself. Melony gave the barrette to Mary Agnes.
'Keep it,' Melony said. 'You took it, it's yours.'
Mary Agnes clutched the barrette as if it were a medal for bravery, for valorous conduct in the only arena that Melony respected.
'I hope I see ya!' Mary Agnes called after Melony, who was stalking away-the escaping Homer Wells might be around the next corner.
'What color was the van?' Melony called.
'Green!' said Mary Agnes. 'I hope I see ya!' she repeated.
'You ever hear of an Ocean View?' Melony yelled back at the Callahans; they hadn't. What are apples to antiques dealers?
'Can I see ya sometime?' Mary Agnes asked Melony. {441}
'I'm at the shipyards,' Melony told the girl. 'If you ever hear of an Ocean View, you can see me.'
'You don't know it was him,' Lorna said to Melony later. They were drinking beer. Melony wasn't talking. 'And you don't know if the rich cunt is still with him.'
They stood on the bank of the foggy Kennebec, near the boarding-house where Lorna lived; when they'd finish a beer, they'd throw the bottle into the river. Melony was good at throwing things into rivers. She kept her face turned up; she was still smelling the wind-as if even that wisp of Candy's pubic hair could not escape her powers of detection.
Homer Wells was also making a deposit in the water. Ploink! said the snails he threw off Ray Kendall's dock; the sea made just the smallest sound in swallowing snails. Ploink! Ploink!
Candy and Homer sat with their backs against opposite corner posts at the end of the dock. If they'd both stretched out their legs to each other, the soles of their feet could have touched, but Candy sat with her knees slightly bent-in a position familiar to Homer Wells from his many views of women in stirrups.
'Is it okay?' Candy asked quietly.
'Is what okay?' he asked.
Tour heart,' she whispered.
How could he tell? 'I guess so,' he said.
'It'll be okay,' she said.
'What will be okay?' asked Homer Wells.
'Everything,' Candy said hurriedly.
'Everything,' repeated Homer Wells. 'Me loving you -that's okay. And you loving me, and Wally-that's okay, too? Right,' he said.
'You have to wait and see,' Candy said. 'For everything -you have to wait and see.'
'Right.'
'I don't know what to do, either,' said Candy helplessly.
'We have to do the right thing,' Homer Wells said. Wally would want to do the right thing, and Dr. Larch {442} was doing what he thought was the right thing, too. If you could be patient enough to wait and see, the right thing must present itself-mustn't it? What else does an orphan do, anyway, but wait and see?
'I can be patient,' said Homer Wells.
Melony could be patient, too. And Ray Kendall, at his window above his dock-he could be patient, too. A mechanic is also patient; a mechanic has to wait for something to break before he can fix it. Ray stared at the distance between his daughter's feet and the feet of Homer Wells; it was not much of a distance, and he had observed his daughter on his dock many times in Wally's arms, and, before that, when Candy and Wally had also sat on that dock with their feet not touching.
They were three good kids, Ray was thinking. But he was a mechanic; he knew better than to interfere. When it breaks, then he would fix it; he felt sorry for them all.
'I can drive you back to school tomorrow,' Homer said.
'My dad can drive me back,' Candy said. 'I think he likes to.'
Olive Worthington looked at the clock on her night table and turned out her reading lamp; Homer never stayed out this late with Debra Pettigrew, she was thinking. Olive had no trouble imagining Candy's attraction to Homer Wells; Olive had the greatest respect for Homer's diligence. She had seen him be a better student -and of the rabbit, of all things!-than Wally had ever been, and she knew he was a reliable and friendly companion, too. Olive fumed to herself. She felt that typical contradiction a parent so often feels: completely on her son's side-she even wanted to warn him, to help his cause-but at the same time Wally could stand to be taught a lesson. Just maybe not this lesson, Olive thought.
'Well, thank goodness, they are three nice people!' she said aloud, her own voice in the empty house surprising her and thoroughly waking her up. Some hot chocolate {443} would be soothing, she thought; and when Homer comes home, he can have some with me.
But in the kitchen Olive was struck by how the fog, shot through with a cloudy moonlight, made the raft in the swimming pool look quite ghostly. The raft was poised at the side of the pool, half in the water and half out, like a very gray and shadowy photograph of itself. The image disturbed her, and Olive decided she'd had enough of that raft. She put on a pair of boots and a long winter coat over her nightgown. It bothered her that the outdoor patio light was not working; only the underwater lights would turn on, and she was surprised to see that the water in the pool had finally frozen. That was the reason for the raft's arrested position. It was trapped as rigidly as a statue, like a ship seized in an ice floe. Being careful to hold tight to the pool curb, she kicked tentatively at the ice with the heel of her boot, but when she tugged the raft, it would not come free. If I walk out there, I'll fall right through, she thought.
That was when Homer came home. She heard the van in the driveway and she called to him.
'What do you want done with it?' Homer asked Olive about the raft.
'Just get it out,' Olive said to him.
'And then what?' he asked.
'Throw it away,' she said. 'Meanwhile, I'll make you some hot chocolate.'
Homer struggled with the raft. The ice, which would not support all his weight, was hard enough to have a firm grip on the raft. Very cleverly, he eased himself onto the raft, hoping it still had enough air in it so that it wouldn't sink once he broke the bond with the ice. He rocked back and forth on his knees on the raft until he could feel the ice breaking. Then he rocked his way through more of the ice and climbed up on the pool curb and pulled the raft out of the pool after him. Ice still clung to it; it was so heavy, he had to drag it. When he got to the trash barrels, he needed to deflate the raft in {444} order to stuff it in a barrel. The nozzle was rusted shut, and even by jumping with both feet, he couldn't break the tough canvas hide.
He went into the garden shed and found a pair of hedge shears; with the thinner blade, he stabbed a gash in the raft and snipped upward-the stale, rubbery air blasting into his face. It was moist and fetid, and when he tore the hole wider, the smell washed over him- strangely warm in the cold night air, and strangely foul. It was not only the smell of someone's old sneakers left out in the rain; there was also something putrid about it and he couldn't help viewing the slashed object as he might have viewed a ripped intestine. He stuffed the raft into a trash barrel, but when he went into the house for his hot-chocolate reward, the smell remained on his hands even after he had washed them. He stuck his nose into the hollow in the palm of his hand,-the smell was still there. Then he recognized the smell: it was what was left on his hands after he removed the rubber gloves.
'How's Candy?' Olive asked.
'Fine,' said Homer Wells.
They sipped their hot chocolate-like mother and son, both of them were thinking; and, at the same time, not like mother and son, they both thought.
'And how are you?' Olive asked him, after a while.
'Just fine,' said Homer Wells, but what he thought was: I'm going to wait and see.
Wilbur Larch, inhaling and seeing the stars race across the ceiling of the dispensary, knew what a luxury it was; to be able to wait and see. Even if I last, he thought, might get caught; an abortionist believes in odds. He had been in the business too long. What are the odds that someone will blow the whistle before I'm through? the Old man wondered.
Only yesterday he had made a new enemy-a woman in her eighth month who said it was only her fourth. He had to refuse her. When the women were hysterical, he {445} usually could wait them out; if they required firmness, he gave them Nurse Angela; Nurse Edna was better at handholding. In time, they calmed down. If, in his opinion, a woman was simply too late-if he felt he had to refuse to perform the abortion-he usually could convince the woman she would be safe at St. Cloud's; that he would deliver the baby and find it a home, and that this was preferable to the risk involved in a late abortion.
But not this woman. There had been no hysterics. The peacefuiness of a long-standing hatred made the woman almost serene.
'So that's it-you won't do it,' she said.
'I'm sorry,' Dr. Larch said.
'How much do you want?' the woman asked him. 'I can get it.'
'Whatever you can afford to donate to the orpihanage would be appreciated,' Larch said. If you can't afford anything, then everything is free. An abortion is free, delivery is free. A donation is appreciated. If you have nowhere to go, you're welcome to stay here. You don't have long to wait.'
'Just tell me what I have to do,' the woman said. 'Do fuck you? Okay, I'll fuck you.'
'I want you to have this baby and let me find it a home,' Wilbur Larch said. 'That's all I want you to do.'
But the woman had stared right through him. She struggled out of the overstuffed chair in Nurse Angela's office. She regarded the paperweight on Larch's desk; it was a weighted vaginal speculum, but it held down a lot of paper and most of the would-be foster families didn't know what it was. The woman who wanted the late abortion clearly knew what it was; she stared at it as if the sight of it gave her cramps. Then she looked out the window., where (Dr. Larch imagined) she intended to hurl the paperweight.
She picked up the weighted speculum and pointed the jaw of the thing at Larch, as if it were a gun. {446}
'You'll be sorry,' the woman said.
In his ether haze, Wilbur Larch saw the woman point the speculum at him again. How will I be sorry? he wondered.
'I'm sorry,' he said aloud. Nurse Edna, passing in the hall-ever passing-thought, You're forgiven; I forgive you.
It was Sunday, and overcast-as usual. The same Fred Astaire movie that was entertaining the residents of Bath was playing in Orono, and the students at the University of Maine in 194- were not yet so cynical that they failed to enjoy it. Wally went to the movie with some of his friends. During the afternoon matinee, they didn't interrupt the show with the news that interrupted the rest of the world. They allowed Fred Astaire to dance on, and on, and the moviegoers heard the news after the show, when they stepped out of the comforting dark of the theater into the late-afternoon daylight of downtown Orono.
Candy was returning to Camden with her father. Raymond Kendall was especially proud of the radio reception he had engineered for his Chevrolet; it was much clearer reception than was possible, at the time, in a standard car radio, and Ray had made the whiplash antenna himself. Candy and her father heard the news as soon as anyone in Maine heard it, and they heard it loud and clear.
Olive always had the radio on, and so she was one of those people who needed to hear things several times before she really heard them at all. She was baking an apple pie, and simmering applesauce, and only the unusual urgency in the announcer's voice caused her to pay attention to the radio at all.
Homer Wells was in Wally's room, reading David Copperfield and thinking about Heaven-'…that sky above me, where, in the mystery to come, I might yet love her with a love unknown on earth, and tell her what {447} the strife had been within me when I loved her here.' think I would prefer to love Candy here, 'on earth,' Homer Wells was thinking-when Olive interrupted him.
'Homer!' Olive called upstairs. 'Where is Pearl Harbor?'
He was the wrong person to ask; Homer Wells had seen the whole world only once, and briefly-and flat against the blackboard. He'd had difficulty locating South Carolina; not only did he not know where Pearl Harbor was, he also didn't know what it was.
'I don't know!' he called downstairs.
'Well, the Japanese have just bombed it!' Olive called to him.
'You mean, with planes?' asked Homer Wells. 'From the sky?'
'Of course from the sky!' Olive shouted. 'You better come listen to this.'
'Where is Pearl Harbor?' Candy asked her father.
'Ssshh!' said Raymond Kendall. 'If we just listen, maybe they'll say.'
'How could they get away with an attack?' Candy asked.
'Because someone wasn't doing his job,' Ray said.
The first reports were garbled. There was mention of California falling under attack, or even being invaded. Many listeners were confused from the beginning; they thought Pearl Harbor was in California.
'Where is Hawaii?' Mrs. Grogan asked. They were having tea and cookies and listening to the radio, for music, when they'd heard the news.
'Hawaii is in the Pacific,' said Wilbur Larch.
'Oh, that's very far away,' Nurse Edna said.
'Not far enough away,' Dr. Larch said.
'There's going to be another war, isn't there?' Nurse Angela asked.
'I guess it's already started,' said Wilbur Larch, while Wally-to whom this war would mean the most- {448} watched Fred Astaire; Fred just kept dancing and dancing, and Wally thought he could go on watching such a display of grace for hours.
Melony and Lorna were listening to the radio in the parlor of the boardinghouse where Lorna lived. It was a women-only boardinghouse; the women were either quite old or, like Lorna, only recently separated from their husbands. On this Sunday afternoon, most of the women listening to the radio were old.
'We should just bomb Japan,' Melony said. 'No messing around-just blow up the whole country.'
'You know how come Japs got squinty eyes?' Lorna asked. Melony, and all the old women, listened intently. 'Because they masturbate all the time-both the men and the women. They just do it all the time.'
There was either a polite or a stunned silence, or both. In Melony's case, her silence was polite.
'Is this a joke?' she asked her friend respectfully.
'Of course it's a joke!' Lorna cried.
'I don't get it, I guess,' Melony admitted.
'How come Japs got squinty eyes?' Lorna asked. 'Because they masturbate all the time.' She paused.
'That's what I thought you said,' Melony said.
'Because they shut their eyes every time they come!' Lorna said. 'Their eyes get tired from all that opening and closing. That's why they can't open their eyes all the way! Get it?' Lorna asked triumphantly.
Still self-conscious about her teeth, Melony managed a tight-lipped smile. Anyone seeing the old women in the boardinghouse parlor would not have known exactly what filled them with fear and trembling: the news of the attack on Pearl Harbor, or Lorna and Melony.
And young Wally Worthington, who was so itchy to be a hero, danced out on the streets of Orono, where he heard the news. President Roosevelt would call it a 'day of infamy,' but that day meant more than infamy to Wally, whose noble and adventurous heart longed to fly a B-24 Liberator: a heavy bomber, four engines, used for {449} bombing bridges, oil refineries, fuel depots, railroad tracks, and so forth. Somewhere, on that 'day of infamy,' there was a B-24 Liberator bomber waiting for young Wally Worthington to learn how to fly it.
People in Heart's Haven and in Heart's Rock always said that Wally had everything: money, looks, goodness, charm, the girl of his dreams-but he had courage, too, and he had in abundance youth's most dangerous qualities: optimism and restlessness. He would risk everything he had to fly the plane that could carry the bomb within him.
Wally enlisted in the Army Air Corps before Christmas, but they allowed him to spend Christmas at home. It would take the Army Air Corps more than a year to teach Wally the grim arts of aerial warfare.
'By that time,' he told Olive and Candy in the kitchen at Ocean View, 'all the fighting will probably be over. That would be just my luck.'
'That would be lucky,' Olive said. Candy nodded her head.
'Right!' said Homer Wells, from the other room. He was still thinking about being excused from his physical; Dr. Larch's account of Homer's heart history had sufficed. Physical examinations were given only to people who were Class I. Homer Wells was Class IV. According to his family physician, Homer had congenital pulmonic stenosis; Homer's 'family physician' was Dr. Larch, whose letter to the local medical advisory board had been accepted as evidence enough for Homer's deferment- Larch was also a member of the local board.
'I asked her to marry me, but she wouldn't,' Wally told Homer in their shared bedroom. 'She said she'd wait for me, but she wouldn't marry rne. She said she'd be my wife, but not my widow.'
'Is that what you call waiting and seeing?' Homer asked Candy the next day.
'Yes,' Candy said. 'For years I've expected to be married {450} to Wally. You came along second. I have to wait and see about you. And now conies the war. I have to wait and see about the war, too.'
'But you made him a promise,' said Homer Wells.
'Yes,' Candy said. 'Isn't a promise like waiting and seeing? Did you ever make a promise, and mean it-and break it?' Homer Wells's reaction was an involuntary cringe, as sudden and uncontrollable as if Candy had called him 'Sunshine.'
During Christmas dinner, Raymond Kendall, trying to relieve the silence, said, 'I would have chosen submarines.'
'You'd end up feeding lobsters,' Wally said.
'That's okay,' said Ray. They been feeding me.'
'You got a better chance in a plane,' Wally said.
'Yes, a chance,' Candy said scornfully. 'Why would you want to be anywhere where all you get is a chance?'
'Good question,' Olive said crossly. She let the silver serving fork fall to the meat platter with such force that the goose appeared to flinch.
'A chance is enough,' said Homer Wells, who did not immediately recognize the tone in his own voice. 'A chance is all we get, right? In the air, or underwater, or right here, from the minute we're born.' Or from the minute we're not born, he thought; now he recognized his tone of voice-it was Dr. Larch's.
'That's a rather grim philosophy,' Olive said.
'I thought you were studying anatomy,' Wally said to Homer, who looked at Candy, who looked away.
They sent Wally to Fort Meade, Maryland, for the month of January. He was a faithful but terrible letter writer; he wrote his mother, he wrote to Homer and to Candy, and even to Ray, but he never explained anything; if there was a plan to what they were teaching him, Wally either didn't know it or couldn't describe it. He simply wrote in tedious detail about the last thing that had occupied his mind before beginning the letter; this included the pouch he had devised to hang from his bunk bed to separate his shoe polish from his toothpaste {451} and the best-name-for-a-plane competition that dominated the imaginative life of Company A. He was also delighted that a cook sergeant had taught him more limericks than Senior, in his last years, had been able to remember. Every letter Wally wrote, to anyone, included a limerick; Ray liked them, and Homer liked them, but they made Candy angry and Olive was appalled. Candy and Homer showed each other the limericks Wally sent them, until Homer realized that this made Candy even angrier: the limericks Wally chose to send Candy were very mild-mannered compared to the ones Wally sent to Homer. For example, he sent this to Candy:
There was a young lady of Exeter,
So pretty that men craned their necks at her.
One was even so brave
As to take out and wave
The distinguishing mark of his sex at her.
He sent this to Homer Wells:
There was a young lady named Brent
With a cunt of enormous extent
And so deep and so wide,
The acoustics inside
Were so good you could hear when you spent.
Wally sent Ray limericks of a similar kind:
There's an unbroken babe from Toronto
Exceedingly hard to get onto
Rut when you get there
And have parted the hair,
You can fuck her as much as you want to.
God knows what limericks Wally sent to Olive- where does Wally find ones that are decent enough? wondered Homer, who, in the evening after Wally had gone and Candy had gone back to school, lay listening to his heart. It would help, he thought, if he knew what to listen for. {452}
Wally was sent to St. Louis-the Jefferson Barracks, Flight 17, 28th School Squadron. It struck Homer Wells that the Army Air Corps might have modeled itself on Gray's Anatomy-manifesting a steadfast belief in categories and in everything having a name. It was reassuring to Homer Wells; in his mind, this endless categorizing made Wally safer, but Homer couldn't convince Candy of this.
'He's safe one minute, and in another minute he's not safe,' she said, shrugging.
'Look after Homer, look after his heart,' Wally had written her.
'And who's looking after my heart? Yes, I'm still angry,' she wrote him, although he hadn't asked.
But if she was angry with Wally, she was also loyal; she was keeping her promise, about the waiting and seeing. She kissed Homer when she saw him, and when they said good-bye, but she wouldn't encourage him.
'We're just good pals,' she told her father; Ray hadn't asked.
'I can see that,' Ray said.
The work in the orchards was light that winter; pruning was the main job. The men took turns teaching Homer how to prune. 'You make your big cuts in the subfreezing weather,' Meany Hyde told him.
'A tree don't bleed so much when it's cold,' was how Vernon Lynch put it, hacking away.
'There's less chance of an infection when it's cold,' said Herb Fowler, who was not so free with the prophylactics in the winter months, perhaps because he would have needed to take his gloves off to get at them; but Homer felt sure that Herb was being wary ever since Homer had asked him about the holes.
'Are there holes?' Herb had replied. 'Manufacturer's defect, I suppose.'
But later he'd come up to Homer and whispered to him, 'Not all of them's got holes.' {453}
'You have a system?' Homer asked. 'Which ones have holes and which don't?'
'It's not my system,' Herb Fowler said. 'Some got holes, some don't. Manufacturer's defect.'
'Right,' said Homer Wells, but rubbers were rarely flung his way now.
Meany Hyde's wife, Florence, was pregnant again, and all winter Big Dot Taft and Irene Titcomb made jokes about Meany's potency.
'You keep away from me, Meany,' Big Dot would say. I'm not even lettin' you sip my coffee. I think all you gotta do is breathe on somebody and they're pregnant.'
'Well, that's all he did to me!' Florence would say, and Big Dot Taft would roar.
'Dontcha go givin' the men any breathin' lessons, Meany,' Irene Titcomb said.
'Meany can knock you up just by kissin' your ears,' Florence Hyde said proudly, glorying in her pregnancy.
'Gimme some earmuffs,' said Squeeze Louise Tobey. 'Gimme one of them ski hats.'
'Gimme a dozen of Herb's rubbers!' said Irene Titcomb.
No, don't take any, thought Homer Wells. That's probably how she got that way. Homer was staring at Florence Hyde. It was riveting to him to see someone enjoying her pregnancy.
'Honestly, Homer,' said Big Dot Taft, 'ain't you ever seen anyone about to have a baby before?'
'Yes,' said Homer Wells, who looked away. Grace Lynch was staring at him, and he looked away from her, too.
'If I was your age,' Vernon Lynch told Homer, when they were pruning in an orchard called Cock Hill, 'I'd enlist. I'd do what Wally's doing.'
I can't.,' said Homer Wells.
'They don't take orphans?' Vernon asked.
'No,' Homer said. I have a heart defect. Something was born with.' {454}
Vernon Lynch was not a gossip, but that was all that Homer needed to say – the workers at Ocean View not only forgave Homer for not enlisting, they even began to take care of him. They treated him the way Dr. Larch would have liked to see him treated.
'You know, I didn't mean anything,' Herb Fowler told Homer. 'About the manufacturer's defect. I wouldn't have said that if I'd known about your heart.'
'That's okay,' Homer said.
And in the early spring, when it was time to mend the boxes for the beehives, Ira Titcomb rushed to assist Homer, who was struggling with a particularly heavy pallet.
'Don't strain yourself, Jesus!' Ira said.
'I can manage, Ira. I'm stronger than you are,' Homer said, not understanding-at first-Ira's concern.
'I heard your heart's not as strong as the rest of you,' Ira said.
On Mother's Day, Vernon Lynch taught him how to operate the sprayers by himself. He insisted on giving Homer another lecture on the use of the respirator. 'You of all people,' Vernon told him, 'better keep this thing on, and keep it clean.'
'Me of all people,' said Homer Wells.
Even Debra Pettigrew forgave him for his seemingly undefined friendship with Candy. As the weather warmed up, they went parking again, and one night they managed some lingering kisses in the Pettigrews' unoccupied summer house on Drinkwater Lake; the shut-up, cold smell of the house reminded Homer of his first days in the cider house. When his kisses seemed to calm, Debra grew restless; when his kisses seemed too passionate, Debra said, 'Careful! Don't get too excited.' He was a young man with unusual kindness, or else he might have suggested to Debra that nothing she allowed him to do would ever endanger his heart.
It was spring. Wally was sent to Kelly Field-San Antonio, Texas-for Air Corps cadet training (Squadron 2, Flight C), and Melony thought that the time was right for her to hit the road again. {455}
'You're crazy,' Lorna told her. 'The more of a war there is, the more good jobs there are for us. The country needs to build stuff-it don't need to eat more apples.'
So will I see you next winter?' Lorna asked her friend.
'If I don't find Ocean View or Homer Wells,' Melony said.
'So I'll see you next winter, ' Lorna said. 'You're lettin' a man make an asshole out of you.'
That's just what I'm not lettin' him do,' Melony said.
Mrs. Grogan's coat had seen better days, but the bundle of belongings contained within the grasp of Charley's belt had grown substantially. Melony had made money in the shipyards, and she'd treated herself to a few sturdy articles of a workingman's clothing, including a good pair of boots. Lorna gave her a present as she was leaving.
'I used to knit,' Lorna explained. It was a child's woolen mitten – just the left-hand mitten – and too small for Melony, but the colors were very pretty. 'It was gonna be for a baby I never had, 'cause I didn't stay married long enough. I never got the right hand finished.' Melony stared at the mitten, which she held in her hand – the mitten was very heavy; it was full of ball bearings that Lorna had swiped from the shipyards. 'It's a super weapon,' Lorria explained, 'in case you meet anyone who's a bigger asshole than you are!'
The gift brought tears to Melony's eyes, and the women hugged each other good-bye. Melony left EJath without saying good-bye to young Mary Agnes Cork, who would have done anything to please her, who asked all her school friends – and everyone who appeared at Ted and Patty Callahan's to browse the antiques – if any of them had ever heard of an apple orchard called Ocean View. If this knowledge might make Melony her friend, {456} Mary Agnes Cork would never stop inquiring. After Melony left Bath, Lorna realized how much she missed her friend; Lorna discovered that she was asking about Ocean View all the time-as if this inquiry was as necessary and loyal a part of her friendship with Melony as the gift of that woolen weapon.
This meant that now there were three of them, all looking for Homer Wells.
That summer they moved Wally from San Antonio to Coleman, Texas. 'I wish someone would declare war on Texas,' he wrote Homer. That might be some justification for being here.' He claimed he was flying in his undershorts and socks-that was all any of them could stand to wear in such unrelenting heat.
'Where does he think he's going?' Candy complained to Homer. 'Does he expect a perfect climate? He's going to a if or!' Homer sat opposite her on Ray Kendall's dock, the snail population forever influenced by their conversation.
In the cool cement-floor classroom at Cape Kenneth High, Homer would unroll the map of the world; there would rarely be anyone present besides the janitor, who was no better informed about geography than Homer Wells. Homer used the summer solitude to study the places of the world where he thought it would be likely that Wally would go.
Once Mr. Hood surprised him in his studies. Perhaps Mr. Hood was visiting his old classroom out of nostalgia, or perhaps it was time to place an order for the next year's rabbits.
'I suppose you'll be enlisting,' Mr. Hood said to Homer.
'No, sir,' Homer said. 'I've got a bad heart-pulmonary valve stenosis.'
Mr. Hood stared at Homer's chest; Homer knew that the man had eyes for rabbits only-and not very sharp eyes, at that. 'You had a heart murmur, from birth?' Mr. Hood asked. {457}
'Yes, sir,' Homer said.
'And do you still have a murmur?' Mr. Hood asked.
'Not much of one, not anymore,' Homer said.
'That's not such a bad heart, then,' Mr. Hood said encouragingly.
But why would Homer Wells feel that Mr. Hood was an authority? He couldn't keep his uteri straight; he didn't know rabbits from sheep.
Even the migrants were different that harvest-they were both older and younger; the men in their prime had enlisted, except for Mr. Rose.
'Slim pickin's for pickers this year,' he told Olive. 'There's too many fools think the war's more interestin' than pickin' apples.'
'Yes, I know,' Olive said. 'You don't have to tell me about it.'
That harvest there was a woman Mr. Rose called Mama, although she wasn't old enough to be any of their mothers. Her allegiance seemed quite exclusively assigned to Mr. Rose; Homer knew this because the woman did what she wanted to do-she picked a little, when she felt like it or when Mr. Rose suggested it; she cooked a little, but she was not the cook every night, and she was not everyone's cook. Some nights she even sat on the roof, but only when Mr. Rose sat there with her. She was a tall, heavy young woman with a deliberate slowness that made her movements seem copied from Mr. Rose, and she wore a nearly constant smile that was not quite relaxed and not quite smirking-also copied from Mr. Rose.
It surprised Homer that no special sleeping arrangements w ere made regarding the woman; she had her own bed, next to Mr. Rose, but no attempt was made to curtain-off their beds or otherwise construct a little privacy. There was only this: every once in a while, when Homer would drive by the cider house, he would note that everyone except Mr. Rose and his woman was either standing outside the house or sitting on the roof. That {458} must have been their time together, and Mr. Rose must have orchestrated those meetings as deliberately as he appeared to direct everything else.
There was a ban on shore lights by the end of that summer; there was no Ferris wheel to watch at night, no magic lights to call by other names, but these blackout conditions didn't keep the pickers off the roof. They would sit in the dark, looking at the dark, and Mr. Rose would say, 'It used to be over there-it was much higher than this roof, and brighter than all the stars if you hitched the stars all together. It went'round and'round,'Mr. Rose would say, the tall, heavy woman leaning against him, the dark heads above the roofline nodding. 'Now there's stuff out there, under the ocean-stuff with bombs, underwater guns. That stuff knows when there's a light on, and the bombs get drawn to the lights-like metal to them magnets. It happens automatically.'
'There's no people, holding no triggers?' someone asked.
'There's no triggers,' said Mr. Rose. 'Everything automatic. But there's people. They just there to look the stuff over, make sure it work right.'
'There's people out there, under the ocean?' someone asked.
'Sure,' said Mr. Rose. 'Lots of people. They real smart. They got this stuff so they can see you.'
'On land?'
'Sure,' said Mr. Rose. 'They can see you anywhere.'
A kind of communal sighing made the sitters on the roof resemble a chorus resting between numbers. In Wally's bedroom Homer marveled how the world was simultaneously being invented and destroyed.
Nothing marvelous about that, Dr. Larch would have assured him. At St. Cloud's, except for the irritation about sugar stamps and other aspects of the rationing, very little was changed by the war. (Or by what other people once singled out as the Depression, thought Wilbur Larch.) {459}
We are an orphanage; we provide these services; we stay the same-if we're allowed to stay the same, he thought. When he would almost despair, when the ether was too overpowering, when his own age seemed like the last obstacle and the vulnerability of his illegal enterprise was as apparent to him as the silhouettes of the Br trees against the sharp night skies of autumn, Wilbur Larch would save himself with this one thought: I love Homer Wells, and I have saved him from the war.
Homer Wells did not feel saved. Did anyone who was in love and was unsatisfied with how he was loved in return ever feel saved? On the contrary, Homer W ells felt that he'd been singled out for special persecution. What young man-even an orphan-is patient enough to wait and see about love? And if Wilbur Larch had saved Homer Wells from the war, even Dr. Larch was powerless to interfere with Melony.
During the harvest that year, Wally moved again- to Perrin Field in Sherman, Texas (basic training, Company D)-but Melony moved five times. She had enough money; she didn't need to work. She took a job in one orchard after another, leaving as soon as she discovered that no one working there had ever heard of an Ocean View. She worked in an orchard in Harpswell, and in another in Arrowsic; she worked as far north as Rockport, and as far inland as Appleton and Lisbon. She took a side trip to Wiscasset because someone told her there was an Ocean View there; there was, but it was a rooming house. An ice-cream vendor told her he'd seen an Ocean View in Friendship; it turned out to be the name of a resident sailboat. Melony got in a fistfight with a head waiter in a seafood restaurant in South Thomaston because she insisted on asking each of the patrons about Ocean View; she won the fight, but she was fined for creating a disturbance; she was a little low on money when she passed through Boothbay Harbor in early November. The sea was slate gray and white-capped, the pretty boats of summer were in dry dock, the wind had {460} plenty of the coming winter in it; Melony's own pores, as well as the earth's, were closing as tightly as her disappointed heart.
She did not recognize the sallow-faced, sulky juvenile who served the ice-cream sodas to the candy-counter customers in Rinfret's Pharmacy, but young Roy Rinfret- the former (and deeply disappointed) Curly Day- recognized Melony in an instant.
'I used to be Curly Day! Remember me?' Curly asked Melony excitedly. He thrust a lot of free candy and chewing gum at her and insisted on treating her to an icecream soda. 'A double scooper, on me,' Curly said; his adoptive parents would have disapproved.
'Boy, you didn't turn out so good,' Melony told him. She meant nothing insulting by this remark; it was a reference to his color, which was pasty, and to his size-he hadn't grown very much. She meant nothing more, but the remark triggered everything that was morose and waiting to be fired in Curly Day.
'You're not kidding; I didn't turn out so good,' he said angrily. 'I got ditched. Homer Wells stole the people I was meant for.'
Melony's teeth were too weak for chewing gum, but she pocketed it, anyway; it would make a nice gift for Lorna. Melony's cavities howled when she sucked hard candy, but she liked it occasionally in spite of this pain -or perhaps because of it-and she had never had an ice-cream soda before.
To demonstrate his loathing for his environment, Curly Day squirted a runny glob of strawberry syrup on the floor-checking, first, to be sure that only Melony could see. He did this as if he were exercising the nozzle before he squirted the stuff on Melony's soda. 'It draws ants,' he explained; Melony doubted there were many ants left in November. 'That's what they're always telling me,' Curly said.' “Don't spill, it draws ants.” ' He squirted the floor a few more times. I'm tryin' to get the ants to carry this place away.' {461}
'You still pissed at Homer Wells?' Melony asked him slyly.
She explained that Curly should simply inquire-of every customer-about Ocean View. Curly had never thought concretely about what he would do or say to Homer Wells if he ever encountered him again; he was resentful, but he was not a vengeful boy and he had a sudden, clear memory of Melony's violence. He became suspicious.
'What do you want to find Homer for?' Curly asked.
'What for?' Melony asked sweetly; it wasn't clear if she had considered it. 'Well, what would you like to find him for, Curly?' she asked.
'Well,' Curly said, struggling. 'I guess I'd just like to see him, and tell him that I was really fucked up by his going off and leaving me there-when I thought I was the one who should be going, instead of him.' When Curly thought about it, he realized he'd just like to see Homer Wells-maybe be his friend, maybe do stuff together. He'd always admired Homer. If he felt a little deserted by him, that was all he felt. He started to cry. Melony used the paper napkin that went with her icecream soda to wipe Curly's tears for him.
'Hey, I know what you mean,' she said nicely, 'I know how you feel. I got left, too, you know. Really, I just miss the guy. I just want to see him.'
Curly's weeping attracted the attention of one of his adoptive parents, Mr. Rinfret, the pharmacist, who was stationed in that end of the store where the serious drugs were dispensed.
I'm from Saint Cloud's,' Melony explained to Mr. Rinfret. 'We were all so close there-whenever we run into each other, it takes a little gettin' used to.' She hugged Curly in a motherly, if somewhat burly way, and Mr. Rinfret allowed them their privacy.
'Try to remember, Curly,' Melony whispered, rocking the boy in her arms as if she were telling him a bedtime story. 'Ocean View, just keep asking about Ocean View.' {462} When she had calmed him down, she gave him Lorna's address in Bath.
On her way back to Bath, Melony hoped that the shipyards would hire her back and that the so-called war effort would keep the stuff on the assembly line changing -that she might look forward to a task somewhat different from the insertion of those ball bearings into that hamlike sprocket. With that thought she removed Lorna's gift mitten from the pocket of Mrs. Grogan's overcoat; she had not yet needed it as a weapon but many nights its presence had comforted her. And it's not been a thoroughly wasted year, Melony reflected warmly, socking the heavy mitten with a painful smack into the palm of her big hand. Now there are four of us looking for you, Sunshine.
They kept Wally in Texas, yet they moved him once more-to Lubbock Flying School (Barracks 12, D3). He would spend November and most of December there, but the Army Air Corps had promised to send him home for Christmas.
'Soon to be in the bosom of my family!' he wrote to Candy, and Homer, and Olive-and even to Ray, who had contributed to the war effort by joining the force of mechanics at the Navy Yard in Kittery; Ray was building torpedoes. He had hired some local boys who were still in school to help him keep his lobster business from sinking, and he worked on the vehicles at Ocean View on the weekends. He enthusiastically demonstrated the gyroscope on Olive's kitchen table to Olive and Homer Wells.
'Before a fella can fathom the torpedo,' Ray liked to say, 'he has to understand the gyroscope.' Homer was interested, Olive was polite-and what's more, thoroughly dependent on Ray; if he didn't fix all the machinery at Ocean View, Olive was convinced that the apples would stop growing.
Candy was cross much of the time-everyone's war {463} effort seen.ed to depress her, although she had volunteered to pitch in herself and had worked some very long hours at Cape Kenneth Hospital as a nurse's aide. She agreed it would be 'indulgent' to go to college, and she'd had no trouble convincing Homer that he should pitch in, too-with his background, he could be a more useful nurse's aide than most.
'Right,' Homer said.
But if Homer had returned to a semi-hospital life against his will, he soon found he felt comfortable there; however, it was at times difficult to withhold his expert opinion on certain subjects and to play the beginner in a role he was disquietingly born to. Even the nurses were condescending to the nurse's aides, and Homer was irritated to see that the doctors were condescending to everyone -most of all, to their patients.
Candy and Homer were not allowed to give shots or medication, but they had more to do than make beds, empty bedpans, give back rubs and baths, and run those errands of friendliness that gave the modern hospital such a constant scuff of feet. They were given deliveryroom duties, for example; Homer was unimpressed with the obstetrical procedure he witnessed. It could not hold a candle to Dr. Larch's work, and in some cases it could not hold a candle to his own. If Dr. Larch had often criticized Homer for his heavy touch with ether, Homer could not imagine how the old man would react to the heavy-handedness that was applied to that inhalation at Cape Kenneth Hospital. In St. Cloud's, Homer had seen many patients who were so lightly etherized that they could converse throughout their own operations; in Cape Kenneth's recovery rooms, the patients struggling to emerge from their ether doses looked bludgeoned-they snored gap-mouthed, with their hands hanging deadweight and the muscles in their cheeks so slack that at times their eyes were pulled half open.
It especially angered Homer to see how they dosed the children-as if the doctors or the anesthetists were so {464} uninformed that they didn't pause to consider the patient's body weight.
One day he sat with Candy on either side of a fiveyear-old boy who was recovering from a tonsillectomy. That was nurses'-aide work: you sat with the patient coming out of ether, especially the children, especially the tonsillectomies-they were often frightened and in pain and nauseous when they woke. Homer claimed they wouldn't be nearly so nauseous if they'd been given a little less ether.
One of the nurses was in the recovery room with them; it was the one they liked-a young, homely girl about their age. Her name was Caroline, and she was nice to the patients and tough to the doctors.
'You know a lot about ether, Homer,' Nurse Caroline said.
'It seems overused to me, in certain cases,' Homer mumbled.
'Hospitals aren't perfect, they're just expected to be,' Nurse Caroline said. 'And doctors aren't perfect, either; they just think they are.'
'Right,' said Homer Wells.
The five-year-old's throat was very sore when he finally woke up, and he went on retching for quite some time before any ice cream would slide down his throat, and stay down. One of the things the nurses' aides did was to be sure that the children, in such condition, didn't choke on their own vomit. Homer explained to Candy that it was very important that the child, in a semietherized state, not aspirate, or inhale, any fluid such as vomit into the lungs.
'Aspirate,' Nurse Caroline said. 'Was your father a doctor, Homer?'
'Not exactly,' said Homer Wells.
It was Nurse Caroline who introduced Homer to young Dr. Harlow, who was in the throes of growing out his bangs; a cowlick persisted in making his forehead look meager; a floppy shelf of straw-colored hair gave Dr. {465} Harlow's eyes the constant anxiousness of someone peering from under the brim of a hat.
'Oh, yes, Wells-our ether expert,' Dr. Efarlow said snidely.
'I grew up in an orphanage,' said Homer Wells. 'I did a lot of helping out around the hospital.'
'But surely you never administered any ether?' said Dr. Harlow.
'Surely not,' lied Homer Wells. As Dr. Larch had discovered with the board of trustees, it was especially gratifying to lie to unlikeable people.
'Don't show off,' Candy told Homer when they were driving back to Heart's Haven together. 'It doesn't become you, and it could get your Doctor Larch in trouble.'
'When did I show off?' Homer asked.
'You really haven't, yet, 'Candy said. 'Just don't, okay?'
Homer sulked.
'And don't sulk,' Candy told him. That doesn't become you, either.'
I'm just waiting and seeing,' said Homer Wells. 'You know how that is.' He let her out at the lobster pound; he usually came in with her and chatted with Ray. But Homer was mistaken to confuse Candy's irritability either with coldness toward him or with anything but the profoundest confusion of her own.
She slammed the door and walked around to his side of the van before he could drive away. She indicated he should roll down his window. Then she leaned inside and kissed him on the mouth, she yanked his hair, hard-with both hands, tilting his head back-and then she bit him, quite sharply, in the throat. She banged her head on the window frame when she pulled herself back from him; her eyes were watery; but no tears spilled to her face.
'Do you think I'm having a good time?' she asked him. 'Do you think I'm teasing you? Do you think I know whether I want you or Wally?' {466}
He drove back to Cape Kenneth Hospital; he needed work more substantial than mousing. It was the Goddamn mousing season again-how he hated handling the poison!
He arrived simultaneously with a sailor slashed up in a knife fight; it had happened where Ray worked-in Kittery Navy Yard-and the sailor's buddies had driven him around in a makeshift tourniquet, running out of gas coupons and getting lost on the way to several hospitals much nearer to the scene of the fight than the one in Cape Kenneth. The gash, into the fleshy web between the sailor's thumb and forefinger, extended nearly to the sailor's wrist. Homer helped Nurse Caroline wash the wound with ordinary white soap and sterile water. Homer could not help himself-he was accustomed to speaking to Nurse Angela and to Nurse Edna in the voice of an authority.
'Take his blood pressure, opposite arm,' he said to Nurse Caroline, 'and put the blood-pressure cuff on over a bandage-to protect the skin,' he added, because Nurse Caroline was staring at him curiously. 'The cuff might have to be on there for a half hour or more,' said Homer Wells.
'I think I can give instructions to Nurse Caroline, if you don't mind,' Dr. Harlow said to Homer; both the doctor and his nurse stared at Homer Wells as if they had witnessed an ordinary animal touched with divine powers -as if they half expected Homer to pass his hand over the profusely bleeding sailor and stop the flow of blood as quickly as the tourniquet stopped it.
'Very neat job, Wells,' Dr. Harlow said. Homer observed the injection of the 0.5 percent Procaine into the wound and the subsequent probing of Dr. Harlow. The knife had entered on the palmar side of the hand, observed Homer Wells. He remembered his Gray's, and he remembered the movie he had seen with Debra Pettigrew: the cavalry officer with the arrow in his hand, the arrow that fortunately missed the branch of the median {467} nerve that goes to the muscles of the thumb. He watched the sailor move his thumb.
Dr. Harlow was looking. There's a rather important branch of the median nerve,' Dr. Harlow said slowly, to the cut-up sailor. 'You're lucky if that's not cut.'
'The knife missed it,' said Homer Wells.
'Yes, it did,' said Dr. Harlow, looking up from the wound. 'How do you know?' he asked Homer Wells, who held up the thumb of his right hand and wiggled it.
'Not only an ether expert, I see,' said Dr. Harlow, still snidely. 'Knows all about muscles, too!'
'Just about that one,' said Homer Wells. 'I used to read Gray's Anatomy-for fun,' he added.
'For fun?' said Dr. Harlow. 'I suppose you know all about blood vessels, then. Why not tell me where all this blood is coming from.'
Homer Wells felt Nurse Caroline brush his hand with her hip; it was surely sympathetic contact-Nurse Caroline didn't care for Dr. Harlow, either. Despite Candy's certain disapproval, Homer couldn't help himself. The blood vessel is a branch of the palmar arch,' he said.
'Very good,' said Dr. Harlow, disappointed. 'And what would you recommend I do about it?'
'Tie it,' said Homer Wells. Three-o chromic.'
'Precisely,' said Dr. Harlow. 'You didn't get that from Gray's.' He pointed out to Homer Wells that the knife had also cut the tendons of the flexor digitorum profundus and the flexor digitorum sublimis. 'And where might they go?' he asked Homer Wells.
'To the index finger,' Homer said.
'Is it necessary to repair both tendons?' asked Dr. Harlow.
'I don't know,' said Homer Wells. 'I don't know a lot about tendons,' he added.
'How surprising!' said Dr. Harlow. 'It is only necessary to repair the profundus,' he explained. 'I'm going to use {468} two-o silk. I'll need something finer to bring the edges of the tendon together.'
'Four-o silk,' recommended Homer Wells.
'Very good,' said Dr. Harlow. 'And something to close the palmar fascia?'
'Three-o chromic,' said Homer Wells.
'This boy knows his stitches!' Dr. Harlow said to Nurse Caroline, who was staring intently at Homer Wells.
'Close the skin with four-o silk,' Homer said. 'And then I'd recommend a pressure dressing on the palm-you'll want to curve the fingers a little bit around the dressing.'
'That's called “the position of function,”' Dr. Harlow said.
'I don't know what it's called,' Homer said.
'Were you ever in medical school, Wells?' Dr. Harlow asked him.
'Not exactly,' said Homer Wells.
'Do you plan to go?' Dr. Harlow asked.
'It's not likely,' Homer said. He tried to leave the operating room then, but Dr. Harlow called after him.
'Why aren't you in the service?' he called.
'I've got a heart problem,' Homer said.
'I don't suppose you know what it's called,' said Dr. Harlow.
'Right,' said Homer Wells.
He might have found out about his pulmonary valve stenosis on the spot, if he had only asked; he might have had an X-ray, and an expert reading-he could have learned the truth. But who seeks the truth from unlikable sources?
He went and read some stories to the tonsillectomy patients. They were all dumb stories-children's books didn't impress Homer Wells. But the tonsillectomy patients were not likely to be around long enough to hear David Copperfield or Great Expectations.
Nurse Caroline asked him if he would give a bath and a back rub to the large man recovering from the prostate operation. {469}
'Don't ever underestimate the pleasure of pissing,' the big man told Homer Wells.
'No, sir,' Homer said, rubbing the mountain of flesh until the big man shone a healthy pink.
Olive was not home when Homer returned to Ocean View; it was her time for plane spotting. They used what was called the yacht-watching tower at the Haven Club, but Homer didn't think any planes had been spotted. All the men spotters-most of them Senior's former drinking companions-had the silhouettes of the enemy planes tacked on their lockers; the women brought: the silhouettes home and stuck them on places like the refrigerator door. Olive was a plane spotter for two hours every day.
Homer studied the silhouettes that Olive had on the refrigerator.
I could learn all those, he was thinking. And I can learn everything there is to know about apple farming. But what he already knew, he knew, was near-perfect obstetrical procedure and the far easier procedure-the one that was against the rules.
He thought about rules. That sailor with the slashed hand had not been in a knife fight that was according to anyone's rules. In a fight with Mr. Rose, there would be Mr. Rose's own rules, whatever they were. A knife fight with Mr. Rose would be like being pecked to death by a small bird, thought Homer Wells. Mr. Rose was an artist -he would take just the tip of a nose, just a button or a nipple. The real cider house rules were Mr. Rose's.
And what were the rules at St. Cloud's? What were Larch's rules? Which rules did Dr. Larch observe, which ones did he break, or replace-and with what confidence? Clearly Candy was observing some rules, but whose? And did Wally know what the rules were? And Melony-did Melony obey any rules? wondered Homer Wells.
'Look,' said Lorna. 'There's a war, have you noticed?' {470}
'So what?' said Melony.
'Because he's probably in it, that's so what!' Lorna said. 'Because he either enlisted or he's gonna get drafted.'
Melony shook her head. 'I can't see him in a war, not him. He just doesn't belong there.'
'For Christ's sake,' Lorna said. 'You think everyone in a war belongs there?'
'If he goes, then he'll come back,' Melony said. The ice on the Kennebec in December was not secure; it was a tidal river, it was brackish, and there was open water, gray and choppy, in the middle. But not even Melony could throw a beer bottle as far as the middle of that river in Bath. Her bottle, bouncing off the creaky ice, made a hollow sound and rolled toward the open water it couldn't reach. It disturbed a gull, who got up and walked a short way along the ice, like an old woman holding up a number of cumbersome petticoats above a puddle.
'Not everyone's comin' back from this war-that's all I'm sayin',' Lorna replied.
Wally had trouble coming back from Texas. There were a series of delays, and bad weather; the landing field was closed-when Homer and Candy picked him up in Boston, the first thing he told them was that he had only forty-eight hours. He was still happy, however-'He was still Wally,' Candy would say later-and especially pleased that he'd received his commission.
'Second Lieutenant Worthington!' Wally announced to Olive. Everyone cried, even Ray.
With the gas rationing, they couldn't manage the usual driving around and around. Homer wondered when Wally would want to be alone with Candy and how they would manage it. Surely he wants to manage it, Homer thought. Does she want to, too? he wondered.
For Christmas Eve everyone was together. And Christmas Day there was nowhere to go; Olive was {471} home, and Ray wasn't building torpedoes or pulling lobster traps. And the day after Christmas, Candy and Homer would have to take Wally back to Boston.
Oh, Candy and Wally did plenty of hugging and kissing -everyone could see that. On Christmas night, in Wally's bedroom, Homer realized that he'd been so glad to see Wally that he'd forgotten to notice very much about his second Christmas away from St. Cloud's. He also realized he'd forgotten to send Dr. Larch anything -not even a Christmas card.
'I've got more flying school to get through,' Wally was saying, 'but I think it's going to be India for me.'
'India,' said Homer Wells.
'The Burma run,' said Wally. 'To go from India to China, you got to go over Burma. The Japs are in Burma.'
Homer Wells had studied the maps at Cape Kenneth High. He knew that Burma was mountains, that Burma was jungles. When they shot your plane down, there would be quite a wide range of possible things to land on.
'How are things with Candy?' Homer asked.
'Great!' Wally said. 'Well, I'll see tomorrow,' he added.
Ray went early to build the torpedoes, and Homer observed that Wally left Ocean View at about the same time Ray would be leaving for Kittery. Homer spent the early morning being of little comfort to Olive, 'Forty-eight hours is not what I'd call coming home,' she said. 'He hasn't been here for a year-does he call this a proper visit? Does the Army call it a proper visit?'
Candy and Wally came to pick up Homer before noon. Homer imagined that they had 'managed it.' But how does one know such things, short of asking?
'Do you want me to drive?' Homer asked; he had the window seat, and Candy sat between them.
'Why?'Wally asked.
'Maybe you want to hold hands,' Homer said; Candy looked at him. {472}
'We've already held hands,' Wally said, laughing. 'But thank you, anyway!'
Candy did not look amused, Homer thought.
'So you've done it, you mean?' Homer Wells asked them both.
Candy stared straight ahead, and Wally didn't laugh this time.
'What's that, old boy?' he asked.
'I said, “So you've done it?”-had sex, I mean,' said Homer Wells.
'Jesus, Homer,' said Wally. 'That's a fine thing to ask.'
'Yes, we've done it-had sex,' Candy said, still looking straight ahead.
'I hope you were careful,' Homer said, to both of them. 'I hope you took some precautions.'
'Jesus, Homer!' Wally said.
'Yes, we were careful,' Candy said. Now she stared at him, her look as neutral as possible.
'Well, I'm glad you were careful,' Homer said, speaking directly to Candy. 'You should be careful-having sex with someone who's about to fly over Burma.'
'Burma?' Candy turned to Wally. 'You didn't say where you were going,' she said. 'Is it Burma?'
'I don't know where I'm going,' Wally said irritably. 'Jesus, Homer, what's the matter with you?'
'I love you both,' said Homer Wells. 'If I love you, I've got a right to ask anything I want-I've got a right to know anything I want to know.'
It was, as they say in Maine, a real conversation stopper. They rode almost all the way to Boston in silence, except that Wally said-trying to be funny-'I don't know about you, Homer. You're becoming very philosophical.'
It was a rough good-bye. I love you both, too-you know,' Wally said, in parting.
'I know you do,' Homer said.
On the way home, Candy said to Homer Wells: 'I {473} wouldn't say “philosophical”; I would say eccentric. You're becoming very eccentric, in my opinion. And you don't have a right to know everything about me, whether you love me or not.'
'All you've got to know is, do you really love him?' Homer said. 'Do you love Wally?'
'I've grown up loving Wally,' Candy said. 'I have always loved Wally, and I always will.'
'Fine,' Homer said. That's all there is to it, then.'
'But I don't even know Wally, anymore,' Candy said. 'I know you better, and I love you, too.'
Homer Wells sighed. So we're in for more waiting and seeing, he thought. His feelings were hurt: Wally hadn't once asked him about his heart. What would he have answered, anyway?
Wilbur Larch, who knew that there was absolutely nothing wrong with Homer's heart, wondered where Homer's heart was. Not in St. Cloud's, he feared.
And Wally went to Victorville, California-advanced flying school. U.S. ARMY AIR FORCES-that is what his stationery said. Wally spent several months in Victorville -all the pruning months, as Homer Wells would remember them. Shortly after apple blossom time, when Ira Titcomb's bees had spread their marvelous life energies through the orchards of Ocean View, Wally was sent to India.
The Japanese held Mandalay. Wally dropped his first bombs on the railroad bridge in Myitnge. Tracks and the embankment of the south approach were badly smashed, and the south span of the bridge was destroyed. All aircraft and crews returned safely. Wally also dropped his bombs on the industrial area of Myingyan, but heavy clouds prevented adequate observation of the destruction. In that summer, when Homer Wells was painting the cider house white again, Wally bombed the jetty at Akyab and the Shweli bridge in northern Burma; later he hit the railroad yards at Prome. He contributed to the ten tons of bombs that were dropped on the railroad {474} yards at Shwebo, and to the fires that were left burning in the warehouses at Kawlin and Thanbyuzayat. The most spectacular hits he would remember were in the oil fields in Yenangyat-the sight of those oil derricks ablaze would stay with Wally on his return flight, across the jungles, across the mountains. All aircraft and crews returned safely.
They made him a captain and gave him what he called 'easy work.'
'Always be suspicious of easy work,' Dr. Wilbur Larch once said to Homer Wells.
Wally had won the best-name-for-a plane competition at Fort Meade; now he finally got to use it; he got to name his own plane Opportunity Knocks, he called it. The painted fist under the inscription looked very authoritative. It would later puzzle Candy and Homer Wells that thename was not Knocks Once (or Twice), but just Knocks.
He flew the India-China route, over the Himalayas- over Burma. He carried gasoline and bombs and artillery and rifles and ammunition and clothing and aircraft engines and spare parts and food to China; he brought military personnel back to India. It was a seven-hour, round-trip flight-about five hundred miles. For six of the hours he wore an oxygen mask-they had to fly so high. Over the mountains they flew high because of the mountains; over the jungles they flew high because of the Japanese. The Himalayas have the most vicious air currents in the world.
When he left Assam, the temperature was a hundred and ten degrees, Fahrenheit. It was like Texas, Wally would think. They wore just their shorts and socks.
The heavily loaded transports needed to climb to fifteen thousand feet in thirty-five minutes; that was when they reached the first mountain pass.
At nine thousand feet, Wally put on his pants. At fourteen thousand, he put on the fleece-lined suit. It was twenty degrees below zero up there. In the monsoon weather, they flew mostly on instruments. {475}
They called that aerial route 'the lifeline'; they called it flying 'over the hump.'
Here were the headlines on the Fourth of July:
YANKS WRECK RAIL BRIDGE IN BURMA
CHINESE ROUT JAPS IN HUPEH PROVINCE
Here is what Wally wrote to Candy, and to Homer. Wally was getting lazy; he sent the same limerick to both:
There was a young man of Bombay
Who fashioned a cunt out of clay,
But the heat of his prick
Turned it into a brick,
And chafed all his foreskin away.
That summer of 194- the public interest in keeping use of the shore lights to a minimum forced the temporary closing of the Cape Kenneth Drive-In Theater, which Homer Wells did not feel as a tragic loss. Since he would have had no choice but to attend the movies with Candy and Debra Pettigrew, he was grateful to the war effort for sparing him that awkwardness.
Mr. Rose informed Olive that he would be unable to provide a worthwhile picking crew for the harvest. 'Considering the men who are gone,' he wrote. 'And the travel. I mean the gas rationing.'
'Then we've spruced up the cider house for nothing,' Homer said to Olive.
'Nothing is ever improved for nothing, Homer,' she said. The Yankee justification for hard work in the summer months is both desperate and undone by the rare pleasure of that fleeting season.
Homer Wells-nurses' aide and orchardman-was mowing in the rows between the trees when the news came to him. On a sweltering June day, he was driving the International Harvester and he had his eye on the sickle bar; he didn't want to snag a stump or a fallen branch; for that reason he didn't see the green van, {476} which was trying to head him off. He almost ran into it. Because the tractor was running-and the mower blades, too-he didn't hear what Candy was yelling when she jumped out of the van and ran to him. Olive was driving, her face a stone.
'Shot down!' Candy was screaming, when Homer finally shut off the ignition. 'He was shot down-over Burma!'
'Over Burma,' said Homer Wells. He dismounted from the tractor and held the sobbing girl in his arms. The tractor was shut off but the engine still knocked, and then shuddered, and then throbbed; its heat made the air shimmer. Maybe, thought Homer Wells, the air is always shimmering over Burma. {477}