Melony, who had hitchhiked from Bath to Ocean View, hitchhiked back on the same day; she'd lost her zeal for apple picking. She retreated, to plan another vacation-or to plead to return to work. Melony went to the pizza bar where everyone went, and she was looking so woebegone that Lorna left the lout she was with at the bar and sat down in the booth opposite her.
'I guess you found him,' Lorna said.
'He's changed,' Melony said; she told Lorna the story. 'It wasn't for me that I felt so bad,' Melony said. 'I mean, I didn't really expect him to run away with me, or anythin' like that. It was just him-he was really better than that, I thought. He was someone I thought was gonna be a hero. I guess that's dumb, but that's what he looked like-like he had hero stuff in him. He seemed so much better than everybody else, but he was just a fake.'
'You don't know everythin' that's happened to him,' Lorna said philosophically; she didn't know Homer Wells, but she had sympathy for sexual entanglements.
Her present sexual entanglement grew impatient at the bar, where he'd been waiting for her; he was a bum named Bob, and he came over to Melony's booth where the two women were holding hands.
'I guess what's the matter with Homer is that he's a man,' Melony observed. 'I only ever met one who didn't let his dong run his life'-she meant Dr. Larch-'and he was an ether addict.' {640}
'Are you with me, or have you gone back to her?' Bob asked Lorna, but he stared at Melony.
'We was just talkin', she was just bein' an old friend,' Melony said.
'I thought you was on vacation,' Bob said to Melony. 'Why don'tcha go somewhere where there's cannibals?'
'Go beat off in a bucket,' Melony told him. 'Go try to fill a pail, go drip in a teaspoon,' she told him, and Bob twisted her arm too sharply-he broke it. Then Bob broke her nose against the Formica tabletop before some of the shipyard workers pulled him off her.
Lorna took her friend to the hospital, and when they'd put the cast on her arm and had set her nose-they set it almost straight-Lorna took Melony back to the women-only boardinghouse, where they both agreed they belonged: together. Lorna moved her things back in while Melony was convalescing. The swelling in her face went down after a few days, and her eyes turned from black to a purplish-green to yellow in about a week.
'The thing is,' Melony said, with her sore face against Lorna's tummy, with Lorna's hand stroking her hair, 'when he was a boy, he had that kind of bravery that's really special-no one could make him just go along with what was goin' on. And now look at him: bangin' a cripple's wife, lyin' to his own son.'
'It's disgusting,' Lorna agreed. 'Why not forget it?' When Melony didn't answer her, Lorna asked, 'How come you're not gonna press charges against Bob?'
'Suppose it works?' Melony asked.
'Pardon me?' Lorna said.
'Suppose they really put Bob in jail, or send him off somewheres?' Melony asked. 'Then when I'm all better, I won't be able to find him.'
'Oh,' Lorna said.
Homer Wells did not recognize the voice that spoke to him from the headlights' glare.
'What you got in the bag, Homer?' asked Mr. Rose. It {641} had been a long drive from the Carolinas, and Mr. Rose's old car creaked and popped with heat and with apparent pain. 'It's nice of you workin' all night to make my house nice for me, Homer,' he said. When he stepped in front of his headlights, his black face was still hard to see, but Homer recognized the way he moved-so slowly, but with a felt potential for moving so fast.
'Mister Rose!' Homer said.
'Mistuh Wells,' said Mr. Rose, smiling. They shook hands, while Homer's heart calmed down. Candy was still hiding in the cider house, and Mr. Rose sensed that Homer wasn't alone. He was peering through the lit kitchen, looking into the shadowy bunkroom, when Candy walked, guiltily, into the light.
'Missus Worthington!' said Mr. Rose.
'Mister Rose,' Candy said, smiling, shaking his hand. 'We're just in time,' she said to Homer, poking him. 'We just this minute got all the bed linen ready,' she told Mr. Rose, but Mr. Rose observed that there was no car or truck-that they had walked to the cider house. Had they carried all the blankets and sheets?
'Just this minute, we got it all folded up, I mean,' Candy said.
Homer Wells thought that Mr. Rose might have seen the light in the apple-mart office when he drove by. 'We were working late in the office,' Homer said, 'and we remembered the linen was down here-all in a heap.'
Mr. Rose nodded and smiled. Then the baby cried. Candy jumped. 'I wrote to Wally 'bout bringin' the daughter,' Mr. Rose explained, as a young woman, about Angel's age, walked into the light with a baby in her arms.
'I haven't seen you since you were a little girl,'Homer Wells told the young woman, who looked at him blankly; it must have been an exhausting trip with a small child.
'My daughter,' Mr. Rose said in introduction. 'And her daughter,' he added. 'Missus Worthington,' said Mr. Rose, {642} introducing her, 'and Homer Wells.'
'Candy,' Candy said, shaking the young woman's hand.
'Homer,' Homer said. He couldn't remember the daughter's name, and so he asked her. She looked a little startled, and looked at her father-as if for clarification, or advice.
'Rose,' Mr. Rose said.
Everyone laughed-the daughter, too. The baby stopped crying and looked with wonder at the laughter. 'No, I mean your first name!' said Homer Wells.
'Rose is her first name,' said Mr. Rose. 'You already heard it.'
'Rose Rose?' Candy asked. The daughter smiled; she didn't look very sure.
'Rose Rose,' said Mr. Rose proudly.
Everyone laughed again; the baby was cheering up, and Candy played with the little girl's fingers. 'And what's her name?' Candy asked Rose Rose. This time, the young woman answered for herself.
'She don't have a name, yet,' Rose Rose replied.
'We're still thinking it out,' said Mr. Rose.
'What a good idea,' said Homer Wells, who knew that too many names were given frivolously, or just temporarily-or, in the cases of John Wilbur and Wilbur Walsh, that they were repeated without imagination.
'The cider house isn't really set up for a baby,' Candy said to Rose Rose. 'If you'd like to come up to the house, I may have some baby things you could use-there's even a playpen in the attic, isn't there, Homer?'
'We don't need nothin',' Mr. Rose said pleasantly. 'Maybe she'll look another day.'
'I could sleep a whole day, I think,' said Rose Rose prettily.
'If you'd like,' Candy told her, 'I could look after the baby for you-so you could sleep.'
'We don't need nothin',' Mr. Rose repeated. 'Not today, anyway,' he said, smiling.{643}
'Want a hand unpacking?' Homer asked him.
'Not today, anyway,' Mr. Rose said. 'What's in the bag, Homer?' he asked when they'd all said good night and Homer and Candy were leaving.
'Apples,' Homer admitted.
'That would be strange,' said Mr. Rose. Homer unzipped the bag and showed him the apples.
'You the apple doctor?' Mr. Rose asked him.
Homer almost said 'Right.'
'He knows,' Homer said to Candy, as they were walking back to the office.
'Of course he knows,' Candy said. 'But what's it matter if we're stopping?'
'I guess it doesn't matter,' Homer said.
'Since you were prepared to tell Wally and Angel,' she said, 'I guess it won't be that hard to really do it.' 'After the harvest,' he said; he took her hand, but when they came near the apple mart and the office light, they dropped hands and walked their separate ways.
'What's the bag for?' Candy asked him, before she kissed him good night.
'It's for me,' said Homer Wells. 'I think it's for me.'
He fell asleep, marveling at what seemed to him to be the extreme control Mr. Rose had of his world-he even controlled the speed at which his daughter's daughter would be named (not to mention, probably, the name itself)! Homer woke up near dawn and took a fountain pen from his night table and used it to write, with a heavy finality, over the penciled number on the back of the photograph of the crew of Opportunity Knocks.
With the dark ink he followed the outline of the pencil; this permanency was reassuring-as if ink, as on a contract, was more binding than pencil. He couldn't have known that Candy was also awake; her stomach was upset, and she was looking for some medicine in her and Wally's bathroom. She also found it necessary to address the subject of the two hundred seventy times she and Homer had made love together since Wally had come {644} home from the war, but Candy honored the finality of this number with less significance than Homer honored it. Instead of writing over the number in ink, Candy used her eraser to remove the evidence from the back of the photograph of her teaching Homer how to swim. Then her stomach calmed and she was able to sleep. It astonished her: how completely relaxed she was at the prospect that after the harvest, her life (as she'd grown used to it) would be over.
Homer Wells didn't try to go back to sleep; he knew his history on the subject of sleep; he knew there was no fighting history. He read an article in The New England Journal of Medicine about antibiotic therapy; he'd followed, for many years, the uses of penicillin and streptomycin. He was less familiar with Aureomycin and Terramycin, but he thought that antibiotics were easy to figure out. He read about the limited usage of neomycin; he made note of the fact that Achromycin and tetracycline were the same. He wrote erythromycin in the margin of the article, several times, until he was sure he knew how to spell it; Dr. Larch had taught him that method of familiarizing himself with something new.
'E-R-Y-T-H-R-0-M-Y-C-I-N,' wrote Homer Wells-the apple doctor, as Mr. Rose had called him. He wrote that in the margin, too. 'The apple doctor.' And just before he got out of bed, he wrote, 'A Bedouin Again.'
In the morning, Candy sent Angel to the cider house to inquire if Rose Rose needed anything for the baby, and that was when Angel fell in love. He was shy with girls his own age; boys his own age, and a little older, always teased him about his name. He thought he was the only Angel in Maine. He was even shy in advance of meeting girls, anticipating when he would have to tell them his name. In Heart's Rock and Heart's Haven, the prettier, more confident girls in his class ignored him; they were interested in the older boys. The girls who appeared to like him were plain, sullen gossips who most enjoyed talking to other girls like themselves, about themselves {645} -or about which boys had said what to whom. Every time Angel spoke to a girl, he knew his remarks were relayed that evening over the telephone to every other neglected girl in his class. The following morning, they would all smirk at him-as if he'd said the same, foolish thing to each of them. And so he learned to keep quiet. He watched the older girls in school; he approved of the ones who did the least amount of talking to their girlfriends. They struck him as more mature, by which he meant that they were actually doing things they would not want their girlfriends to know.
In 195-, girls Angel's age looked forward to dating; boys Angel's age-as in other times-looked forward to doing things.
Mr. Rose's daughter was not only the most exotic young woman Angel had ever seen; if she had a daughter, she must also have done things.
It was cold and damp in the cider house in the mornings; when Angel arrived there, Rose Rose was outside, in the sun, washing Baby Rose in a bucket. The baby was splashing, and Rose Rose was talking to her daughter; she didn't hear Angel walking up to her. Perhaps -since Angel had been brought up more by his father than by his mother-Angel was predisposed to be attracted to a Madonna scene. Rose Rose was only a few years older than Angel-she was so young that her maternity was startling. When she was with her baby, her gestures and her expressions were womanly, and she had a full, womanly figure. She was a little taller than Angel. She had a round, boyish face.
'Good morning,' Angel said, startling Baby Rose in the bucket. Rose Rose wrapped her daughter in a towel and stood up.
'You must be Angel,' she said shyly. She had a fine scar that sliced across the flange of one nostril and her upper lip; it made a nick in her gum, which Angel could see when she parted her lips. Later, he would see that the knife had stopped at the eyetooth and removed it, which {646} accounted for her only partial smile. She would explain to him that the wound had killed the root of the tooth and that the tooth had fallen out later. He was so smitten when he first met her that even the scar was beautiful to him; it was her only apparent flaw.
'I wondered if I could help you get anything for the baby,' Angel said.
'She seem to be teethin',' Rose Rose reported on her daughter. 'She kind of cranky today.'
Mr. Rose came out of the cider house; when he saw Angel, he waved and smiled, and then he walked over and put his arm around the boy. 'How you doin'?' he asked. 'You still growin', I think. I used to carry him on top of my head,' he told Rose Rose. 'He used to grab them apples I couldn't reach,' Mr. Rose explained, punching Angel affectionately on the arm.
'I'm counting on growing a little more,' Angel said-for Rose Rose's benefit. He wouldn't want her to think he had stopped growing; he wanted her to know that he would be taller than she, one day.
He wished he'd worn a shirt; it was not that he wasn't muscular, it was somehow more grown-up to wear a shirt. Then he imagined that she might approve of his summer tan, and so he relaxed about not having a shirt; he put his hands in the hip pockets of his jeans, and he wished he'd worn his baseball cap. It was a Boston Red Sox cap, and he had to get hold of it first thing in the morning if he was going to wear it-otherwise, Candy would wear it. They had been meaning to buy another baseball cap for two summers now; Candy owed him one because she'd admitted to tearing one of the sweat holes in the cap by poking a pencil through it.
Candy worked as a checker during the harvest, and she needed her pencil. This would be the second harvest that Angel would be a checker, and the second summer that he got to drive one of the tractors that hauled the apples out of the orchards.
When Angel told his father that Rose Rose's baby was {647} teething, Homer knew what to do. He sent Angel (with Wally) to town to buy some pacifiers, and then he sent Angel back to the cider house with a package of pacifiers and a fifth of bourbon; Wally drank a very little bourbon from time to time, and the bottle was three-quarters full. Homer showed Angel how to dab whiskey on Baby Rose's gums.
'It numbs the gums,' Angel explained to Rose Rose. He dipped his pinky finger in the whiskey, then he stuck his finger in Baby Rose's tiny mouth. At first, he was afraid he'd gag the baby girl, whose eyes instantly grew large and watery at the bourbon fumes; but then Baby Rose went to work on Angel's finger so ferociously that when he removed his finger to apply more bourbon, the baby cried to have the finger back.
'You gonna make her drunk,' Rose Rose warned.
'No, I won't,' Angel assured her. 'I'm just putting her gums to sleep.'
Rose Rose examined the pacifiers. They were rubber nipples, like the nipple on a baby's bottle, but without the hole and attached to a baby-blue plastic ring that was too big to swallow. The problem with using a regular bottle nipple, Angel Wells explained, was that the baby would keep sucking in air through the hole, and the air would give the baby burping fits or a gassy stomach.
'How come you know so much?' Rose Rose asked Angel, smiling. 'How old are you?'
'I'm almost sixteen,' Angel said. 'How old are you?'
''Bout your age,' she told him.
In the afternoon, when Angel came back to the cider house to see how the teething was going, Baby Rose was not the only Rose with a pacifier stuck in her mouth. Mr. Rose was sitting on the cider house roof, and Angel could see-from a considerable distance, because of the unreal, baby-blue hue of the plastic ring-that he had a pacifier in his mouth.
'Are you teething, too?' Angel called up to him. Mr. Rose {648} removed the pacifier from his mouth slowly-the way he did everything.
'I'm cuttin' out smokin',' said Mr. Rose. 'You got a nipple in your mouth all day, who needs a cigarette?' He stuck the pacifier back in his mouth and grinned at Angel broadly.
In the cider house, Baby Rose had fallen asleep with a pacifier in her mouth and Angel surprised Rose Rose as she was washing her hair. She was bent over the kitchen sink with her back to him; he couldn't see her breasts, although she was bare from the waist up.
'Is that you?' she asked ambiguously, keeping her back turned to him-but not jumping to cover herself.
'Sorry,' Angel said, stepping back outside. 'I should have knocked.' Then she jumped and covered herself, her hair still soapy; she must have thought it was her father.
'I was checking on how the teething was going,' Angel explained.
'It goin' fine,' Rose Rose said. 'You a good doctor. You my hero, for today.' She was smiling her partial smile.
A stream of bright suds from the shampoo ran around her neck and down her chest, over her arms, which she'd folded, with a towel, across her unseen breasts. Angel Wells, smiling, backed so far away from the cider house door that he bumped into the old car, which was parked close enough against the cider house to appear to be helping hold the building up. He heard a tiny pebble come rolling down the cider house roof, but when it hit him on the head-even though he'd had time to steal the baseball cap away from Candy and now wore it at a casual angle, with the visor shading his forehead-the pebble hurt. He looked up at Mr. Rose, who had rolled the pebble in his direction-a perfect shot.
'Gotcha!' Mr. Rose said, smiling.
But it was Rose Rose who'd really gotten him; Angel staggered back to the apple mart and into the fancy house as if he'd been struck by a boulder.{649}
Who was the baby's father? Angel Wells wondered. And where was he? And where was Mrs. Rose? Were Mr. Rose and his daughter all alone?
Angel went to his room and began to compose a list of names-girls' names. He took some names he liked out of the dictionary, and then he added other names that the dictionary had overlooked. How else do you impress a girl who hasn't been able to think of a name for her baby?
Angel would have been a blessing to St. Cloud's, where the practice of naming the babies was a little worn out. Although Nurse Caroline had contributed her youthful energy to the nearly constant occasion, her rather political choices had. been met with some resistance. She was fond of Karl (for Marx), and Eugene (for Debs), but everyone balked at Friedrich (for Engels), and so she had been reduced to Fred (which she didn't like). Nurse Angela also complained about Norman (for Thomas)- to her it was a name like Wilbur. But it was difficult to know if Angel Wells could have kept his passion for names intact when the task was almost a daily business. Finding a name for Rose Rose's daughter was a devotion quite unexpected-yet it was typical of a boy's first love.
Abby? thought Angel Wells. Alberta? Alexandra? Amanda? Amelia? Antoinette? Audrey? Aurora? 'Aurora Rose,' Angel said aloud. 'God, no,' he said, plunging into the alphabet. The scar on the face of the young woman he loved was so extremely thin, so very fine-Angel imagined that if he could kiss that scar, he could make it disappear; and he began working his way through the B's.
Bathsheba? Beatrice? Bernice? Bianca? Bridget?
Dr. Larch was facing a different problem. The dead patient had come to St. Cloud's without a scrap of identification -she'd brought only her burning infection, her overpowering discharge, her dead but uriexpelled fetus (and several of the instruments she-or someone else- {650} had put into herself in order to expel the fetus), her punctured uterus, her unstoppable fever, her acute peritonitis. She reached Dr. Larch too late for him to save her, yet Larch blamed himself.
'She was alive when she got here,' Larch told Nurse Caroline. 'I'm supposed to be a doctor.' 'Then be one,' Nurse Caroline said, 'and stop being maudlin.'
'I'm too old,' Larch said. 'Someone younger, someone quicker, might have saved her.'
'If that's what you think, maybe you are too old,' Nurse Caroline told him. 'You're not seeing things as they are.'
'As they are,' said Wilbur Larch, who closed himself off in the dispensary. He'd never been good about losing patients, but this one, Nurse Caroline knew, was quite lost when she'd arrived.
'If he can hold himself responsible for a case like that,' Nurse Caroline told Nurse Angela, 'then I think he ought to be replaced-he is too old.'
Nurse Angela agreed. 'It's not that he's incompetent, but once he starts thinking he's incompetent, he's had it.'
Nurse Edna would not contribute to this conversation. She went and stood outside the dispensary door, where she repeated, and repeated, 'You're not too old, you're not incompetent, you're not too old,' but Wilbur Larch could not hear her; he was under ether, and he was traveling. He was far away, in Burma-which he saw almost as clearly as Wally ever saw it, although Larch (even with ether's assistance) could never have imagined such heat. The shade that he saw under the peepul trees was deceiving; it was not really cool there-not at that time of the day that the Burmese refer to as 'when feet are silent.' Larch was observing the missionary Dr. Stone making his rounds. Even the noonday heat would not keep Fuzzy Stone from saving the diarrhetic children.
Wally could have informed Larch's dream with some better detail. How slippery the bamboo leaves were when one was trying to walk uphill-for example. How {651} the sleeping mats were always damp with sweat- how it seemed (to Wally) to be a country of submagistrates, corrupted by the British,-either into being like the British, or into being consumed by their hatred of the British. Wally had once been carried across a plateau shot through with sprouting weeds and befouled with pigshit; on it was a former tennis court, built by someone British. The net was now a magistrate's hammock. The court itself, because of the high fence that enclosed it, was a good place to keep the pigs; the fence, which had once kept tennis balls from being lost in the jungle, now made it more difficult for the leopards to kill the pigs. At that way station, Wally would remember, the magistrate himself had instrumented his urinary tract for him; a kindly round-faced man with patient, steady hands, he had used a long, silver swizzle stick-something else the British had left behind. Although the magistrate's English was poor, Wally had made him understand what the swizzle stick was for.
'British ees crazy,' the Burmese gentleman had said to Wally. 'Yes?'
'Yes, I think so,' Wally had agreed. He hadn't known many British, but some of them seemed crazy to him, and so it seemed a small thing to agree to-and Wally thought it was wise to agree with whoever it was who held the catheter.
The silver swizzle stick was too inflexible for a proper catheter, and the top of the thing was adorned with a kind of heraldic shield, Queen Victoria's stern face presiding (in this one case, she was observing a use of the instrument she adorned that might have shocked her).
'Only British ees crazy enough to make something to stir a drink,' the magistrate said, chuckling. He lubricated the catheter with his own saliva.
Through his tears, Wally tried to laugh.
And in the rounds that Dr. Stone was making, wouldn't many of the diarrhetic children suffer urinary retention, wouldn't Dr. Stone have to relieve their little, {652} distended bladders, and wouldn't his catheter be proper and his method of instrumentation sound? In Wilbur Larch's eyes, which were over Burma, Dr. Stone would be perfect-Fuzzy Stone wouldn't lose a single patient.
Nurse Caroline, understanding that the coincidence of the woman dying without a name would not sit well alongside the recent 'evidence' submitted to the board of trustees, knew it was time for her to write to Homer Wells. While Dr. Larch rested in the dispensary, Nurse Caroline worked with a vengeance over the typewriter in Nurse Angela's office.
'Don't be a hypocrite,' she began. 'I hope you recall how vehemently you were always telling me to leave Cape Kenneth, that my services were more needed here -and you were right. And do you think your services aren't needed here, or that they aren't needed right now? Do you think the apples can't grow without you? Just who do you think the board's going to replace him with if you don't step forward? One of the usual cowards who does what he's told, one of your typically careful, mousy, medical men-a little law-abiding citizen who will be of absolutely NO USE!'
She mailed that letter at the same time she alerted the stationmaster that there was a body at the orphanage; various authorities would have to be sent for. It had been a long time since the stationmaster had seen bodies at the orphanage, but he would never forget the bodies he had seen-not his predecessor, after the sternum shears had opened him up, and certainly never the fetal autopsy from Three Mile Falls.
'A body?' the stationmaster asked. He gripped the sides of the small table where the constant television revealed to him its blurry, fade-in and fade-out images-any of which the stationmaster found preferable to the more vivid picture of those long-ago bodies.
'Someone who didn't want to have a baby,' Nurse Caroline told him. 'She butchered herself, trying to get the baby out. She got to us too late for us to be able to do anything about it.' {653}
Unanswering, and never taking his eyes from the snowy, zigzagging figures on the TV screen, the stationmaster clung to the table as if it were an altar and the television was his god-at least, he knew, he would never see on that television anything resembling what Nurse Caroline described, and so the stationmaster continued to watch the TV instead of looking into Nurse Caroline's eyes.
Carmen? Cecelia? Charity? Claudia? Constance? Cookie? Cordelia? Angel Wells cocked the Red Sox cap at the correct angle; although it was cool in the early morning, he elected not to wear a shirt. Dagmar? he thought. Daisy? Dolores? Dotty?
'Where are you going in my hat?' Candy asked him; she was picking up the breakfast dishes.
'It's my hat,' Angel said, going out the door.
'Love is blind,' Wally said, pushing his wheelchair away from the table.
Does he mean me or Angel? Candy wondered. Homer and Wally were worried about Angel's puppylike infatuation with Rose Rose, but that is all it seemed to Candy: puppylike. Candy knew that Rose Rose had too much experience to allow Angel to get carried away. That wasn't the point, Homer had said. Candy imagined that Rose Rose had more experience in her little finger than… but that wasn't the point, either, Wally had said.
'Well, I hope the point isn't that she's colored,' Candy had said.
'The point is Mister Rose,' Wally had said. The word 'Right!' had been almost visible on Homer's lips. Men want to control everything, Candy thought.
Homer Wells was in the apple-mart office. In the mail there was a letter for him from Dr. Larch, but Homer didn't look through the mail. That was Wally's job; besides, the picking crew had arrived. The harvest would be starting as soon as Homer could get it organized. He {654} looked out the office window and saw his son not wearing any shirt and talking to Big Dot Taft. He opened the screen door and hollered at Angel. 'Hey, it's cold this morning-put on a shirt!' Angel was already walking toward the barns beyond the apple mart.
'I got to warm up the tractor!' he told his father.
'Warm yourself up first!' Homer told him, but the boy was already very warm this morning.
Edith? Angel asked himself. Ernestine? Esmeralda? Eve! he thought.
He bumped into Vernon Lynch, who was glowering over a cup of hot coffee.
'Watch where yer goin',' Vernon told Angel.
'Faith!' Angel said to him. 'Felicia! Francesca! Frederica!'
'Asshole,' said Vernon Lynch.
'No, that's you,' Big Dot Taft told him. 'You're the asshole, Vernon.'
'God, I love the harvest!' Wally said, cruising around the kitchen table, while Candy washed the dishes. 'It's my favorite time.'
'Mine, too,' Candy said, smiling. What she thought was: I have six more weeks to live.
Black Pan, the cook, was back; Candy had to hurry- she had to take Black Pan shopping. A man named Peaches had picked for them before, but not for several years; he was called Peaches because his beard never grew. Also, a man named Muddy was back; no one had seen Muddy for years. He'd been badly knifed at the cider house one night, and Homer had driven him to the hospital in Cape Kenneth. Muddy had taken one hundred twenty-three stitches; Homer Wells thought he'd looked like a kind of experimental sausage.
The man who'd cut him was long gone. That was one of Mr. Rose's rules; Homer guessed it might have been the dominant rule of the cider house. No hurting each other. You cut people to scare them, to show them who's boss, but you don't send people to the hospital. Then the {655} law comes, and everyone at the cider house feels small. The man who'd cut Muddy hadn't been thinking about the community.
'He was really tryin' to cut my ass off, man,' Muddy had said, as if he were surprised.
'He was an amateur,' Mr. Rose had said. 'He long gone now, anyway.'
The rest of the crew, except for Mr. Rose's daughter, hadn't been to Ocean View before. Mr. Rose arranged, with Angel, how Rose Rose and her daughter would spend the day.
'She gonna ride around with you and help you out,' Mr. Rose told Angel. 'She can sit on the fender, or stand behind the seat. She can ride on the trailer, before it full.'
'Sure!'Angel said.
'If she need to take the baby back to the cider house, she can walk,' Mr. Rose said. 'She don't need no special favors.'
'No,' Angel said; it surprised him that Mr. Rose would speak this way about his daughter when she was standing beside him, looking a little embarrassed. Baby Rose-pacifier in place-rode her hip.
'Sometimes Black Pan can look after the baby,' Mr. Rose said, and Rose Rose nodded.
'Candy said she'd look after her, too,' Angel offered.
'No need botherin' Missus Worthington,' said Mr. Rose, and Rose Rose shook her head.
When Angel drove the tractor, he always stood up; if he sat down without a cushion on the seat (and he thought a cushion was for an old man with piles), he couldn't quite see the radiator cap. He was afraid that, if he sat down, the engine might overheat and the radiator would boil over without his noticing it. But most of all, it looked better to drive a tractor standing up.
He was glad he was driving the International Harvester; years ago, Raymond Kendall had built a swivel for the seat. He could let Rose Rose sit down-with or without Baby Rose in her lap-and he could stand a {656} little to one side of the swivel seat and operate the tractor without awkwardness. There was a foot clutch, a foot brake, and a hand throttle. The emergency hand brake was next to Rose Rose's hip; the gearshift was by her knee.
'Why you wear that old baseball cap?' she asked him. 'You got nice eyes, but nobody see 'em. You got nice hair, but nobody see it. And you got one pale forehead 'cause the sun can't find your face. If you didn't wear th at dumb cap, your face would be as brown as your body.'
This implied to Angel, of course, that Rose Rose liked his body being brown, didn't care for his forehead being pale, and had managed-despite the hat-to notice his eyes and hair (and to like them, too).
After filling the trailer with his first load of apples, Angel took a long drink from a water jug in the orchard, twisting the baseball cap backward on his head as he drank. Then he wore it that way, the way a catcher wears a baseball cap-or the way Candy wore it, with the visor tipped over her hair and the back of her neck. Somehow it looked better that way on Candy. When Rose Rose saw Angel wearing the cap that way, she said, 'Now you look real stupid, like you got a ball for a head.'
The next day, Angel let Candy wear the cap.
Baby Rose was sucking the pacifier, like a three-horsepower pump, and Rose Rose smiled at Angel. 'Where's that nice hat?' she asked him.
'I lost it,' he lied.
'Too bad,' she said. 'It was nice.' 'I thought you didn't like that hat,' he said.
'I didn't like that hat on you,' said Rose Rose.
The next day he brought the hat and put it on her head as soon as she was settled into the tractor seat. Rose Rose looked awfully pleased; she wore the hat the same way Angel had worn it-low, over her eyes. Baby Rose looked cross-eyed at the visor.
'You lost it and then you found it, huh?' Rose Rose asked Angel.
'Right,' Angel said.{657}
'You better be careful,' she told him. 'You don't wanna get involved with me.'
But Angel was flattered and encouraged that she'd even noticed his interest-especially since he was unsure how to express his interest.
'How old are you?' he asked her casually, later that day.
''Bout your age, Angel,' was all she said. Baby Rose slumped against her breast; a floppy-brimmed white sailor's hat protected the baby from the sun, but under the brim of the hat, the little girl looked glassy-eyed and exhausted from chomping on the pacifier all day. 'I don't believe you can still be teethin',' Rose Rose said to her daughter. She took hold of the baby-blue plastic ring and pulled the pacifier out of the little girl's mouth; it made a pop like a wine cork, which startled Baby Rose. 'You becomin' an addict,' Rose Rose said, but when Baby Rose started to cry, her mother put the nipple back.
'How do you like the name Gabriella?' Angel asked Rose Rose.
'I never heard it before,' she said.
'How about Ginger?' Angel asked.
'That somethin' you eat,' Rose Rose said.
'Gloria?' Angel asked.
'That nice,' said Rose Rose. 'Who it for?'
'Your baby!' Angel said. 'I've been thinking of names for your baby.' Rose Rose raised the visor of the Boston Red Sox cap and looked into Angel's eyes.
'Why you thinkin' of that?' she asked him.
'Just to be of help,' he said awkwardly. 'Just to help you decide.'
'Decide?' Rose Rose asked.
'To help you make up your mind,' said Angel Wells.
The picker named Peaches was almost as fast as Mr. Rose. He was emptying his canvas bag into a bushel crate, and he interrupted Rose Rose and Angel.
'You countin' me, Angel?' Peaches asked.
'I got you,' Angel said. Sometimes Angel examined the {658} fruit if he didn't know the picker very well-to make sure they weren't bruising it; if they were bruising it, or if there were other signs that they were picking too fast, Angel wouldn't give them the top price for a bushel. But Angel knew Peaches was a good picker, so he just put a number on the list without getting off the tractor to look at the apples. '
'Ain't you a checker?' Peaches asked Angel, then.
'Sure, I got you!' Angel said to him.
'Don't you wanna check me, then? Better make sure I ain't pickin' pears, or somethin',' Peaches said, grinning. Angel went to look over the apples, and that was when Peaches said to him: 'You don't wanna go into the knife business with Mistuh Rose.' Then he walked away, with his bag and his ladder, before Angel could say anything about his apples-which were, of course, perfect.
Back on the tractor, Angel got up his nerve. 'Are you still married to the baby's father?' he asked Rose Rose.
'Wasn't ever married,' she said.
'Are you still together, you and the father?' Angel asked.
'Baby got no father,' Rose Rose said. 'I wasn't ever together.'
'I like Hazel and Heather,' Angel said, after a while. 'They're both names of plants, so they sort of go with Rose.'
'I don't have no plant, I got a little girl,' Rose Rose said, smiling.
'I also like the name Hope,' Angel said.
'Hope ain't no name,' Rose Rose said.
'Iris is nice,' Angel said. 'But it's sort of cute, because it's another flower. Then there's Isadora.'
'Whew!' said Rose Rose. 'No name is better than some.'
'Well, how about plain old Jane?' asked Angel Wells, who was getting frustrated. 'Jennifer? Jessica? Jewel? Jill? Joyce? Julia? Justine?'
She touched him. She just put her hand on his hip, which nearly caused him to jackknife the trailer and spill {659} the load. 'Don't never stop,' she told him. 'I never knew there was so many names. Go on,' she said, her hand urging him-it was just a little shove, before she returned her hand to her lap, where Baby Rose sat mesmerized by the tractor's motion and the tractor's sound.
'Katherine? Kathleen? Kirsten? Kitty?' Angel Wells began.
'Go on,' Rose Rose said, her hand grazing his hip again.
'Laura? Laurie? Laverne? Lavinia? Leah? That means “weary,” ' he told her. 'Leslie? Libby? Loretta? Lucy? Mabel? That means “lovable,” ' he told her. 'Malvina? That means “smooth snow,” ' he explained.
'I never livin' where they got snow,' Rose Rose said.
'Maria?' Angel said. 'Marigold? That's another flower. Mavis? That means a “thrush,” it's a kind of bird,' he said.
'Don't tell me what they mean,' Rose Rose instructed him.
'Melissa? Mercedes?' Angel said.
'Ain't that a car?' Rose Rose asked him.
'It's a good car,' Angel said. 'A German car. Very expensive.'
'I seen one, I think,' Rose Rose said. They got a funny bull's eye on the hood.'
'Their insignia,' said Angel Wells.
'Their what?' she asked.
'It's a kind of bull's eye, you're right,' Angel said.
'Say it again,' Rose Rose said.
'Mercedes,' he said.
'It for rich people, ain't it?' Rose Rose asked.
'The car?' he asked.
'The name or the car,' she said.
'Well,' Angel said, 'it's an expensive car, but the name means “Our Lady of Mercies.” '
'Well, fuck it, then,' Rose Rose said. 'Didn't I tell you not to tell me what the names mean?'
'Sorry,' he said.{660}
'How come you never wear a shirt?' she asked him.
'Ain't you never cold?'
Angel shrugged.
'You can go on with them names, any time,' she told him.
After the first four or five days of the harvest, the wind shifted; there was a strong sea breeze off the Atlantic, and the early mornings were especially cold. Angel wore a T-shirt and a sweat shirt over that. One morning, when it was so cold that Rose Rose had left Baby Rose with Candy, Angel saw that she was shivering and he gave her his sweat shirt. She wore it all day. She was still wearing it when Angel went to help with the cider press that night, and for a while they sat on the cider house roof together. Black Pan sat up there with them, and he told them about the time when there'd been an Army installation on the coast, which they could see at night.
'It was a secret weapon,' he told them. 'And your father,' Black Pan told Angel, 'he made up a name for it-he had us all shittin' our pants, we was so scared. It was a kind of wheel, he told us-it sent people to the moon, or somethin'.'
'It was a Ferris wheel,' said Mr. Rose in the darkness. 'It was just a Ferris wheel.'
'Yeah, that what it was!' Black Pan said. 'I seen one, once.'
'But it was somethin' else that used to be out there,' Mr. Rose said dreamily. 'It got used in the war.'
'Yeah,' Black Pan said. They shot it at somebody.'
Watching the lights on the coast, Rose Rose announced: 'I'm movin' to the city.'
'Maybe, when you old enough,' said Mr. Rose.
'Maybe Atlanta,' she said. 'I been in Atlanta,' she told Angel-'at night, too.'
'That was Charleston,'Mr. Rose said. 'Unless you was in Atlanta some other time.'
'You said it was Atlanta,' she told him.
'Maybe I said it was Atlanta,' said Mr. Rose, 'but it was Charleston.' Black Pan laughed.{661}
Rose Rose forgot to give the sweat shirt back, but in the morning, when it was still cold, she was wearing one of Mr. Rose's old sweaters and she handed the sweat shirt back to Angel.
'Got my own clothes, sort of, this mornin',' she told Angel, the baseball cap pulled lower than usual over her eyes. Black Pan was watching after Baby Rose, and it took Angel a while to see that Rose Rose had a black eye-a white person doesn't spot a black eye on a black person right away, but she had a good one.
'He say it okay if I wear your hat, but for you to wear your own shirt,' Rose Rose told Angel. 'I told you,' she said. 'You don't wanna get involved with me.'
After the picking that day, Angel went to the cider house to have a word with Mr. Rose. Angel told Mr. Rose that he meant nothing improper by letting Rose Rose wear his sweat shirt; Angel added that he really liked Mr. Rose's daughter, and so forth. Angel got pretty worked up about it, although Mr. Rose remained a calm, calm man. Of course, Angel (and all the rest of them) had seen Mr. Rose peel and core an apple in about three or four seconds-it was widely presumed that Mr. Rose could bleed a man in half a minute. He could have made the whole mess of a human being look like a series of slight shaving injuries.
'Who told you I beat my daughter, Angel?' Mr. Rose asked gently. Rose Rose had told Angel, of course, but now Angel saw the trap; he was only making trouble for her. Mr. Rose would never allow himself to have any trouble with Angel. Mr. Rose knew the rules: they were the real cider house rules, they were the pickers' rules.
'I just thought you had hit her,' Angel said, backing off.
'Not me,' said Mr. Rose.
Before he put the tractor away, Angel spoke with Rose Rose. He told her that if she was frightened about staying in the cider house, she could always stay with him-that he had an extra bed in his room, or that he could vacate {662} his room and make it into a guest room for her and her baby.
'A guest room?' Rose Rose said; she laughed. She told him he was the nicest man she ever knew. She had such a languid manner, like someone who was used to sleeping while standing up-her heavy limbs as relaxed as if she were underwater. She had a lazy body, yet in her presence Angel felt the same potential for lightning-quick movement that surrounded her father as intimately as someone's scent. Rose Rose gave Angel the shivers.
At supper, his father asked him, 'How are you getting along with Mister Rose?'
'I'm more curious how you're getting along with Rose Rose,' Candy said.
'How he's getting along with the girl is his own business,' Wally said.
'Right,' said Homer Wells, and Wally let it pass.
'How you're getting along with Mister Rose is our business, Angel,' Wally said.
'Because we love you,' Homer said.
'Mister Rose won't hurt me,' Angel told them.
'Of course he won't!' Candy said.
'Mister Rose does what he wants,' Wally said.
'He's got his own rules,' said Homer Wells.
'He beats his daughter,' Angel told them. 'He hit her once, anyway.'
'Don't make that your business, Angel,' Wally told the boy.
'That's right,' Homer said.
'I'll make it my business!' Candy told them. 'If he's beating that girl, he'll hear about it from me.'
'No, he won't,' Wally said.
'Better not,' Homer told her.
'Don't tell me what to do,' she told them, and they were quiet; they both knew better than to try to tell Candy what to do.
'Are you sure it's true, Angel?' Candy asked.
'Almost sure,' the boy said. 'Ninety-nine percent.' {663}
'Make it a hundred percent, Angel, before you say it's true,' his father told him.
'Right,' Angel said as he got up from the table and cleared his dishes.
'Good thing we got all that straightened out,' Wally said when Angel was in the kitchen. 'Good thing we're all such experts at the truth,' he said as Candy got up from the table to clear the dishes. Homer Wells kept sitting where he was.
The next morning Angel learned that Rose Rose had never been in the ocean-that she'd picked citrus in Florida and peaches in Georgia, and she'd driven up the East Coast all the way to Maine, but she'd never stuck so much as her toe in the Atlantic. She'd never even felt the sand.
'That's crazy!' said Angel Wells. 'We'll go to the beach some Sunday.'
'What for?' she said. 'You think I gonna look better with a tan? What would I go to a beach for?'
'To swim!' Angel said. 'The ocean! The salt water!'
'I don't know how to swim,' Rose Rose informed him.
'Oh,' he said. 'Well, you don't have to swim to enjoy the ocean. You don't have to go in over your head.'
'I don't have no bathin' suit,' she said.
'Oh,' Angel said. 'Well, I can get you one. I'll bet one of Candy's would fit you.' Rose Rose looked only mildly surprised. Any bathing suit of Candy's would be a tight fit.
For their lunch break, after Rose Rose had seen how Baby Rose was getting along with Black Pan, Angel drove her to the baby-tree orchard near Cock Hill; they were not picking the baby trees, so there was no one there. You could barely see the ocean. You could see the unnatural end of the horizon, how the sky inexplicably flattened out-and by standing on the tractor, they could distinguish the different tones of blue and gray where the sky bled into the sea. Rose Rose remained unimpressed.{664}
'Come on,' Angel said to her. 'You got to let me take you to see it!' He tugged her by one arm-just fooling around, just an affectionate gesture-but she suddenly cried out; his hand grazed the small of her back as she turned away from him, and when he looked at his hand, he saw her blood.
'It's my period,' she lied. Even a fifteen-year-old boy knows that the blood from anyone's period isn't usually found on the back.
After they kissed for a while, she showed him some of the wounds-not the ones on the backs of her legs, and not the ones on her rump; he had to take her word for those. She showed him only the cuts on her back-they were fine, thread-thin, razorlike cuts; they were extremely deliberate, very careful cuts that would heal completely in a day or two. They were slightly deeper than scratches; they were not intended to leave scars.
'I told you,' she said to Angel, but she still kissed him, hard. 'You shouldn't have no business with me. I ain't really available.'
Angel agreed not to bring up the matter of the cuts with Mr. Rose; that would only make things worse-Rose Rose convinced him of that. And if Angel wanted to take her to the beach-somehow, some Sunday, they should both be as nice to Mr. Rose as they could manage.
The man named Muddy, who'd been reassembled with one hundred twenty-three stitches, had said it the best. What he said once was, 'If old Rose had cut me, I wouldn't of needed one stitch. I would of bled a pint an hour, or even slower, and when it was finally all over it would have looked like someone hadn't used anythin' on me except a stiff toothbrush.'
When Angel was putting the tractor away on Saturday, it was Muddy instead of Peaches who spoke to him.
'You don't wanna get involved with Rose Rose, you know. The knife business ain't your business, Angel,' Muddy said, putting his arm around the boy and giving {665} him a squeeze. Muddy liked Angel; he remembered, fondly, how Angel's father had gotten him to Cape Kenneth Hospital in time.
When there was another night pressing, Angel sat with Rose Rose on the cider house roof and told her all about the ocean: the strange tiredness one feels at the edge of the sea, the weight in the air, the haze in the middle of a summer day, the way the surf softens sharp things. He told her the whole, familiar story. How we love to love things for other people; how we love to have other people love things through our eyes.
But Angel could not keep secret what he imagined was the enormity of Mr. Rose's wrongdoing. He told the whole story to his father, and to Candy and Wally.
'He cut her? He deliberately cut her?' Wally asked Angel.
'No doubt about it,' Angel said. 'I'm a hundred percent sure.'
'I can't imagine how he could do that to his own daughter,' said Homer Wells.
'I can't believe how we're always saying how wonderful it is: that Mister Rose is so in charge of everything,' Candy said, shivering. 'We have to do something about this.'
'We do?' Wally asked.
'Well, we can't do nothing!' Candy told him.
'People do,' Wally said.
'If you speak to him, he'll hurt her more,' Angel told them. 'And she'll know I told you. I want your advice, I don't want you to do anything.'
'I wasn't thinking of speaking to him,' Candy said angrily. 'I was thinking of speaking to the police. You can't carve up your own children!'
'But will it help her-if he gets in trouble?' Homer asked.
'Precisely,' Wally said. 'We're not helping her by going to the police.'
'Or by speaking to him,' Angel said.{666}
'There's always waiting and seeing,' said Homer Wells. For fifteen years, Candy had learned to ignore this.
'I could ask her to stay with us,' Angel suggested. That would get her away from him. I mean, she could just stay here, even after the harvest.'
'But what would she do?' Candy asked.
'There aren't any jobs around,' said Homer Wells. 'Not after the harvest.'
'It's one thing having them pick,' Wally said carefully. 'I mean, everyone accepts them, but they're only migrants-they're transients. They're supposed to move on. I don't think that a colored woman with an illegitimate child is going to be made to feel all that welcome in Maine. Not if she's staying.'
Candy was cross. She said, 'Wally, in all the years I've been here, I've never heard anyone call them niggers, or say anything bad about them. This isn't the South,' she added proudly.
'Come on,' Wally said. 'It only isn't the South because they don't live here. Let one of them actually try to live here and see what they call her.'
'I don't believe that,'Candy said.
'Then you're dumb,' Wally said. 'Isn't she, old boy?' Wally asked Homer.
But Homer Wells was watching Angel. 'Are you in love with Rose Rose, Angel?' Homer asked his son.
'Yes,' Angel said. 'And I think she likes me-at least a little.' He cleared his own dishes and went upstairs to his room.
'He's in love with the girl,' Homer said to Candy and Wally.
'As plain as the nose on your face, old boy,' Wally said. 'Where have you been?' He wheeled himself out on the terrace and took a few turns around the swimming pool.
'What do you think of that?' Homer asked Candy. 'Angel's in love!'
'I hope it makes him more sympathetic to us,' Candy told him. That's what I think about it.' {667}
But Homer Wells was thinking about Mr. Rose. How far would he go? What were his rules?
When Wally wheeled himself back into the house, he told Homer that there was some mail for him in the apple-mart office. 'I keep meaning to bring it up to the house,' Wally told him, 'but I keep forgetting it.'
'Just keep forgetting it,' Homer advised him. 'It's the harvest. Since I don't have time to answer any mail, I might as well not read it.'
Nurse Caroline's letter had also arrived; it was waiting for him with Dr. Larch's letter, and with a letter from Melony.
Melony had returned the questionnaire to Homer. She hadn't filled it out; she'd just been curious, and she'd wanted to look it over more closely. After she'd read it a few times, she could tell-by the nature of the questions-that the board of trustees were, in her opinion, a collection of the usual assholes. 'The guys in suits,' she called them. 'Don't you hate men in suits?' she'd asked Lorna.
'Come on,' Lorna had told her. 'You just hate men, all men.'
'Men in suits, especially,' Melony had said.
Across the questionnaire, which would never be filled out, Melony had written a brief message to Homer Wells.
DEAR SUNSHINE,
I THOUGHT YOU WAS GOING TO BE A HERO.
MY MISTAKE. SORRY FOR HARD TIME.
LOVE, MELONY
Homer Wells would read that, much later that same night, when he couldn't sleep, as usual, and he decided to get up and read his mail. He would read Dr. Larch's letter, and Nurse Caroline's, too, and any doubts that were remaining about the doctor's bag with the initials F.S. engraved in gold had disappeared with the darkness just before dawn.{668}
Homer saw no reason to add irony to their predicament; he decided not to send Melony's response to the questionnaire to Larch or to Nurse Caroline-how would it help them to know that they had turned themselves in when they might have gone on for another few years? He sent a single, short note, addressed to them both. The note was simple and mathematical.
1. I AM NOT A DOCTOR.
2. I BELIEVE THE FETUS HAS A SOUL.
3. I'M SORRY.
'Sorry?' said Wilbur Larch, when Nurse Caroline read him the note. 'He says he's sorry?'
'Of course, he isn't a doctor,' Nurse Angela admitted. There'd always be something he'd think he didn't know; he'd always be thinking he was going to make an amateur mistake.'
'That's why he'd be a good doctor,' said Dr. Larch. 'Doctors who think they know everything are the ones who make the most amateur mistakes, That's how a good doctor should be thinking: that there's always something he doesn't know, that he can always kill someone.'
'We're in for it, now,' Nurse Edna said.
'He believes the fetus has a soul, does he?' Larch asked. 'Fine. He believes that a creature that lives like a fish has a soul-and what sort of soul does he believe those of us walking around have? He should believe in what he can see! If he's going to play God and tell us who's got a soul, he should take care of the souls who can talk back to him!' He was ranting.
Then Nurse Angela said, 'So. We wait and see.'
'Not me,' said Wilbur Larch. 'Homer can wait and see,' he said, 'but not me.'
He sat at the typewriter in Nurse Angela's office; he wrote this simple, mathematical note to Homer Wells.
1. YOU KNOW EVERYTHING I KNOW, PLUS WHAT YOU'VE TAUGHT YOURSELF. YOU'RE A {669} BETTER DOCTOR THAN I AM-AND YOU KNOW IT.
2. YOU THINK WHAT I DO IS PLAYING GOD, BUT YOU PRESUME YOU KNOW WHAT GOD WANTS. DO YOU THINK THAT'S NOT PLAYING GOD?
3. I AM NOT SORRY-NOT FOR ANYTHING I'VE DONE (ONE ABORTION I DID NOT PERFORM IS THE ONLY ONE I'M SORRY FOR). I'M NOT EVEN SORRY THAT I LOVE YOU.
Then Dr. Larch walked to the railroad station and waited for the train; he wanted to see the note sent on its way. Later, the stationmaster whom Larch rarely acknowledged admitted he was surprised that Larch spoke to him; but because Larch spoke after the train had gone, the stationmaster thought that Larch might have been addressing the departed train.
'Good-bye,' Dr. Larch said. He walked back up the hill to the orphanage. Mrs. Grogan asked him if he wanted some tea, but Dr. Larch told her that he felt too tired for tea; he wanted to lie down.
Nurse Caroline and Nurse Edna were picking apples, and Larch went a little way up the hill to speak to them. 'You're too old to pick apples, Edna,' Larch told her. 'Let Caroline and the children do it.' He then walked a short distance with Nurse Caroline, back toward the orphanage. 'If I had to be anything,' he told her, 'I'd probably be a socialist, but I don't want to be anything.'
Then he went into the dispensary and closed the door. Despite the harvest weather, it was still warm enough to have the window open during the day; he closed the window, too. It was a new, full can of ether; perhaps he jabbed the safety pin too roughly into the can, or else he wiggled it around too impatiently. The ether dripped onto the face mask more freely than usual; his hand kept slipping off the cone before he could get enough to satisfy himself. He turned a little toward the wall; that way, the {670} edge of the windowsill maintained contact with the mask over his mouth and nose after his fingers relaxed their grip. There was just enough pressure from the windowsill to hold the cone in place.
This time he traveled to Paris; how lively it was there, at the end of World War I. The young doctor was constantly embraced by the natives. He remembered sitting with an American soldier-an amputee-in a cafe; all the patrons bought them Cognac. The soldier put out his cigar in a snifter of Cognac that he couldn't finish- not if he intended to stand on his crutches, with his one leg-and Wilbur Larch breathed deeply of that aroma. That was how Paris smelled-like Cognac and ash.
That, and like perfume. Larch had walked the soldier home-he'd been a good doctor, even there, even then. He was a third crutch to the drunken man, he was the man's missing leg. That was when the woman had accosted them. She was a whore, quite clearly, and she was quite young, and quite pregnant; Larch, who didn't understand French very well, assumed that she wanted an abortion. He was trying to tell her that she was too late, that she'd have to go through with having this baby, when he suddenly understood that she was asking only what a whore is usually asking.
'Plaisir d'amour?'she asked them. The amputated soldier was passing out in Larch's arms; it was to Larch alone that the woman was offering 'the pleasure of love.'
'Non, merci,' Wilbur Larch mumbled. But the soldier collapsed; Larch needed the pregnant prostitute to help carry him. When they delivered the soldier to his room, the woman renewed her offer to Wilbur Larch. He had to hold her at arm's length to keep her away from him-and still she would slip through his grasp and push her firm belly into him.
'Plaisir d 'amour!' she said.
'Non, non!' he told her; he had to wave his arms to keep her away. One hand, swinging back and forth beside the bed, knocked over the ether can with the loose pin. {671} Slowly, the puddle developed on the linoleum floor; it spread under the bed, and all around him. The strength of the fumes overpowered him-the woman in Paris had smelled very strongly, too. Her perfume was strong, and stronger still was the effluvia of her trade. By the time Larch moved his face away from the windowsill and the cone fell, he was already gagging.
'Princes of Maine!' He tried to call for them, but he didn't make a sound. 'Kings of New England!' He thought he was summoning them, but no one could hear him, and the French woman lay down beside him and snuggled her heavy belly against him. She hugged him so tightly that he couldn't breathe, and her flavorful, tangy aroma made the tears run down his cheeks. He thought he was vomiting; he was.
'Plaisir d'amour,' she whispered.
'Oui, merci,' he said, giving in to her. 'Out, merci.'
The cause of death would be respiratory failure, due to aspiration of vomit, which would lead to cardiac arrest. The board of trustees-in light of the evidence submitted against him-would privately call it a suicide; the man was about to be disgraced, they told themselves. But those who knew him and understood his ether habit would say that it was the kind of accident a tired man would have. Certainly, Mrs. Grogan knew-and Nurse Angela, and Nurse Edna, and Nurse Caroline knew, too-that he was not a man 'about to be disgraced'; rather, he was a man about to be no longer of use. And a man of use, Wilbur Larch had thought, was all that he was born to be.
Nurse Edna, who for some time would remain almost speechless, found his body. The dispensary door was not a perfect seal, and she thought that the odor was especially strong and that Dr. Larch had been in there longer than usual.
Mrs. Grogan, who hoped he'd gone to a better world, read, in the voice of a troubled thrush, a quavering passage of Jane Eyre to the girls' division.{672}
An orphan loves and needs routine, the women reminded each other.
Nurse Caroline, who was tough as nails and found Dickens a sentimental bore, had a firm grasp of the language; she read aloud an almost hearty passage of David Copper field to the boys' division. But she found herself broken by the prospect of the expected benediction.
It was Nurse Angela who said it all, according to the rules.
'Let us be happy for Doctor Larch,' she said to the attentive children. 'Doctor Larch has found a family. 'Good night, Doctor Larch,' Nurse Angela said.
'Good night, Doctor Larch!' the children called.
'Good night, Wilbur!' Nurse Edna managed to say, while Nurse Angela summoned her strength for the usual refrain, and Nurse Caroline, who hoped the evening wind would dry her tears, marched down the hill to the railroad station-once again to inform the frightened stationmaster that there was a body in St. Cloud's.
That Sunday at Ocean View was an Indian summer day, and Homer Wells was fishing. Not real fishing: Homer was trying to find out more about the relationship between Mr. Rose and his daughter. The two men sat on the cider house roof-for the most part, they weren't talking. Not talking too much, Homer assumed, was the only way to go fishing with Mr. Rose.
Below them, Angel was trying to teach Rose Rose how to ride a bicycle. Homer had offered to drive Rose Rose and Angel to the beach (and to drive back and pick them up at some designated hour), but it mattered to Angel that he and Rose Rose were independent-to be driven to the beach only emphasized that he was still waiting to be old enough to get his driver's license. The beach was too far to walk to, and Homer wouldn't allow Angel to hitchhike; but it was only a four- or five-mile ride on a bike, and the road was mostly flat.
Mr. Rose observed the lesson placidly, but Homer {673} grew anxious for Rose Rose to succeed on the bicycle; he knew how much preparation had gone into the proposed trip-how Angel had fussed over both his own and Candy's bicycles, and how Angel had discussed (with Candy) which of Candy's bathing suits would be the most suitable for Rose Rose. Together, they had chosen an emerald green one-it had one pink, spiraled, barber-pole stripe, and Candy was sure the suit would fit Rose Rose better than it fit her; it had always been too loose in the bust and in the hips for Candy.
'It's the kind of thing you're supposed to learn when you're a little kid, I guess,' Homer Wells observed of the bicycle lesson. Angel would run alongside the wobbly bicycle, which Rose Rose struggled to ride. After the bike was moving at a comfortable speed, Angel would release his hold on it. Rose Rose would either not pedal-hugging the bike until it simply ran out of speed and topipled-or else she would pedal furiously, but without guidance. She seemed unable to balance the bicycle and pedal it at the same time. And her hands appeared frozen on the handlebars; for her to balance, and pedal, and steer simultaneously looked, increasingly, like a distant miracle.
'Can you ride one?' Mr. Rose asked Homer.
'I never tried,' said Homer Wells. 'I'd probably have a little trouble,' he admitted; it looked easy enough to him. There were no bicycles at the orphanage; the children might have used them to ride away. The only bicycle in St. Cloud's was the stationmaster's, and he rarely rode it.
'I never tried, either,' said Mr. Rose. He watched his daughter careen over a slight hill; she shrieked., the bike jackknifed, she fell-and Angel Wells ran to her, to help her up.
A line of men sat with their backs against the cider house wall; some were drinking coffee, some were drinking beer, but all of them watched the bicycle lesson. Some were encouraging-and as vocal as local fans, rooting at a sporting event-and others watched the procedure as placidly as Mr. Rose.{674}
It had been going on for a while, and the applause- what there'd been of it-grew spottier and more random.
'Don't give up,' Angel said to Rose Rose.
'I not givin' up,' Rose Rose said. 'Did I say I was givin' up?' 'You remember what you said to me, once, about the rules?' Homer asked Mr. Rose.
'What rules?' Mr. Rose asked.
'You know, those rules I put up every year in the cider house,' Homer said. 'And you mentioned that you had other rules-your own rules for living here.'
'Yeah, those rules,' said Mr. Rose.
'I thought you meant that your rules were about not hurting each other-I thought they were about being careful,' Homer said. 'Sort of like my rules, too, I guess.'
'Say what you mean, Homer,' said Mr. Rose.
'Is someone getting hurt?' Homer asked. 'I mean, this year-is there some kind of trouble?'
Rose Rose was up on the bicycle; her look was grim; both she and Angel were sweating. It appeared to Homer that Rose Rose was jouncing on the seat too hard, almost intentionally hurting herself; or else she was treating herself so roughly in order to give herself the intensity she needed to master the machine. She wobbled off a knoll, out of sight behind some apple trees, and Angel sprinted after her.
'Why don't they just walk?' the picker named Peaches asked. 'They coulda been there by now.'
'Why don't someone take 'em in some car?' another man asked.
'They wanna do it they own way,' Muddy said. There was a little laughter about that.
'Show some respect,' said Mr. Rose. Homer thought Mr. Rose was speaking to him, but he was speaking to the men, who stopped laughing. 'Pretty soon, that bicycle gonna break,' Mr. Rose said to Homer.
Rose Rose was wearing a pair of blue jeans, some {675} heavy work shoes and a white T-shirt; because she was sweating, the outline and the colors of the emerald-green and pink bathing suit were visible through her shirt.
'Imagine her learnin' to swim,' said Mr. Rose.
Homer Wells felt bad for Angel, but another subject weighed more heavily on his mind.
'About someone being hurt,' Homer said. 'About the rules.'
Mr Rose reached into his pocket, slowly, and Homer half expected to see the knife, but it was not the knife that Mr. Rose removed from his pocket and very gently placed in Homer's hand-it was the burned-down nub of a candle. It was what was left of the candle Candy had lit for their lovemaking in the cider house. In her panic-when she thought it was Wally who had caught them there-she had forgotten it.
Homer closed his fingers around the candle, and Mr. Rose patted his hand.
'That 'gainst the rules, ain't it?' Mr. Rose asked Homer.
Black Pan was baking corn bread and the smell rose from the cider house and hung deliriously over the roof, which was warming in the late-morning sun; pretty soon, it would be uncomfortably hot on the roof.
'Ain't that bread ready to eat yet?' Peaches hollered into the kitchen.
'No it ain't,' Black Pan said from inside the cider house. 'And pipe down, or you wake the baby.'
'Shit,' Peaches said. Black Pan came outside and kicked Peaches-not terribly hard-where he was leaning against the cider house wall.
'When that bread ready, you won't call it “shit”, will you?' Black Pan asked him.
'I wasn't callin' nothin' “shit”, man-I was just sayin' it,' Peaches said.
'Just pipe down,' Black Pan said. He observed the bicycle lesson. 'How it comin' with that?' he asked.
'They tryin' hard,' Muddy said.{676}
'They inventin' a new sport,' Peaches said, and everyone laughed.
'Show some respect,' said Mr. Rose, and everyone piped down. Black Pan went back inside the cider house.
'What you bet he burns the bread?' Peaches asked quietly.
'If he burns it, it 'cause he took the time to kick your ass,' Muddy told him.
The bicycle was broken; either the rear wheel wouldn't turn, or else the chain was jammed in the wheel.
'There's another bicycle,' Angel told Rose Rose. 'You try that one, while I fix this one.' But while he fixed Candy's bicycle, Rose Rose had to suffer with a boy's bicycle, so that in addition to her troubles, she slipped and hurt her crotch against the crossbar. Homer was actually worried about how hard a fall she had, and he asked her if she was all right.
'It just like a cramp,' she called to him, but she remained bent over until Angel managed to get Candy's bicycle running again.
'It looks hopeless,' Homer confided to Mr. Rose.
'What about them rules?' Mr. Rose asked him. Homer put the candle in his pocket. He and Mr. Rose regarded each other-it was almost a contest, the way they looked at each other.
'I'm worried about your daughter,' said Homer Wells, after a while. Together they watched Rose Rose fall off the bicycle again.
'Don't worry about her,' said Mr. Rose.
'She looks unhappy, sometimes,' Homer said.
'She ain't unhappy,' Mr. Rose said.
'Are you worried about her?' Homer asked him.
'Once you start worryin', you can worry 'bout anybody, can't you?' said Mr. Rose.
It appeared to Homer Wells that her fall against the crossbar was still giving Rose Rose some pain because she stood for a while with her hands on her knees and her {677} head down (as if her stomach hurt her) each time she fell off the bicycle.
Homer and Mr. Rose missed the moment when she gave up. They just noticed that she was running off, in the direction of the orchard called Frying Pan, and that Angel was running after her; both bicycles were left behind.
'That's too bad,' Homer said. They would have had a good time at the beach. Maybe I can convince them to let me drive them there.'
'Leave 'em alone,' said Mr. Rose; the way Homer heard it, it was more of a command than a suggestion. They don't have to go to no beach,' Mr. Rose said, more mildly. 'They just young, they not sure how to have a good time,' he said. 'Just think what might happen at the beach. They might get drowned. Or some people might not like seein' a white boy with a colored girl-and they both in bathin' suits. It better they don't go nowhere,' Mr. Rose concluded. That was the end of that subject, because then Mr. Rose asked, 'Are you happy, Homer?'
'Am I happy?' said Homer Wells.
'Why you repeat every single thing?' Mr. Rose asked him.
'I don't know,' Homer said. 'I'm happy, sometimes,' he said cautiously.
'That good,' said Mr. Rose. 'And Mistuh and Missus Worthington-are they happy?'
'I think they're pretty happy, most of the time,' Homer told him.
'That good,' said Mr. Rose.
Peaches, who'd had a few beers, approached Angel's bicycle warily, as if the machine were dangerous even when it was lying on the ground.
'Careful it don't bite you,' Muddy warned him. Peaches mounted the bike and grinned at the men.
'How do it start?' he asked them, and they all laughed.
Muddy got up from against the wall and went over to Candy's bicycle.
'I have you a race,' he said to Peaches.{678}
'Yeah,' said Black Pan, in the cider house door. 'We see which one of you falls down first.'
'Mine ain't got no middle,' Muddy observed of Candy's bike.
'That make it go faster,' Peaches said. He tried to move Angel's bike forward, as if his feet were paddles.
'You ain't ridin' that thing, you fuckin' it,' one of the men said, and everyone laughed. Black Pan ran up behind Peaches and started pushing him faster.
'Cut that shit out!' Peaches cried, but Black Pan got the bike rolling so fast that he couldn't keep up with it.
'I can't be in no race if someone don't push me, too,' Muddy said, and two of the men got him rolling faster than Peaches, who had disappeared over a hill into the next field (from which the men could hear him screaming).
'Holy shit!' said Muddy, when he was under way. He pedaled so hard that the front wheel rose off the ground, and then the bicycle rode right out from under him. The men were howling now, and Black Pan picked up Muddy's fallen bicycle; he was the next to try it.
'You gonna try it, too?' Mr. Rose asked Homer.
As long as Angel and Candy weren't around to watch him, Homer thought he would. 'Sure,' Homer said. 'I'm next!' he yelled at Black Pan, who was balancing the bicycle in place, his feet slipping off the pedals; he fell over on his side before he could get moving.
'That was no real turn!' Black Pan said. 'I get another try.'
'Are you going to try it?' Homer asked Mr. Rose.
'Not me,' said Mr. Rose.
'The baby's cryin',' someone said.
'Go pick her up,' said someone else.
'I'll take care of that,' said Mr. Rose to all of them. 'I'll watch the baby-you all play.'
Peaches appeared over the hill; he was walking the bicycle beside him, and he was limping.
'It hit a tree,' he explained. 'It went right at the tree like the tree was its enemy.' {679}
'You supposed to steer it,' Muddy told him.
'It steer itself,' Peaches said. 'It don't listen to me.'
Homer supported Black Pan while the cook mounted Candy's bike a second time. 'Here we go,' Black Pan said with determination, but he kept one arm wrapped around Homer's neck; he had only one hand on the handlebars, and he wasn't pedaling.
'You've got to pedal it, to make it go,' Homer told him.
'You got to push me first,' Black Pan said.
'Somethin' burning!' someone shouted.
'Oh shit, my corn bread!' Black Pan said. He lunged to one side, his arm still around Homer's neck so that Homer fell over with him-on top of the bicycle.
'I told you he was gonna burn that bread,' Peaches told Muddy.
'Give me that bike,' Muddy said, taking Angel's bike away from Peaches.
Two of the men were giving Homer a push.
'I got it, I got it,' Homer told them, so they let go. But he didn't have it. He veered sharply in one direction, then he veered back toward the men, who had to run out of his way; then he jackknifed the bike and went tumbling one way-the bike went another.
Everyone was laughing now. Peaches looked at Homer Wells lying on the ground.
'Sometimes, it don't help if you white!' Peaches told Homer, and everyone howled.
'It help, if you white, most of the time,' said Mr. Rose.
He stood in the cider house door, the smoke from the burning corn bread billowing behind him, his daughter's daughter in his arms-the pacifier a seemingly permanent fixture in her mouth. And after Mr. Rose had spoken, he stuck a pacifier in his mouth, too.
In the heart of the valley that was at the bottom of Frying Pan, where the ocean might be a hundred miles away and no breath from the sea ever reached, Rose Rose was stretched out in the dark grass under a Northern Spy that {680} no one had picked yet. Angel Wells was stretched out beside her. She let her arm loll on his waist; he ran his finger very lightly over her face, following the line of her scar down her nose to her lip. When he got to her lip, she held his hand still and kissed his finger.
She had taken off the work shoes and the blue jeans, but she kept Candy's bathing suit and the T-shirt on.
'Wouldn't of had no fun at no beach, anyway,' she said.
'We'll go another day,' Angel said.
'We won't go nowhere,' she said. They kissed each other for a while. Then Rose Rose said, 'Tell me 'bout it again.' Angel Wells began to describe the ocean, but she interrupted him. 'No, not that part,'she said. 'I don't care'bout no ocean. Tell me 'bout the other part-where we all livin' together in the same house. You and me and my baby and your father and Mistuh and Missus Worthington,' Rose Rose said. 'That the part that get to me,' she said, smiling.
And he began again: about how it was possible. He was sure that his father and Wally and Candy wouldn't object.
'You all crazy,' she told Angel. 'But go on,' she said.
There was plenty of room, Angel assured her.
'Ain't nobody gonna mind 'bout the baby?' she asked him; she shut her eyes; with her eyes shut, she could see what Angel was describing a little better.
That was when Angel Wells became a fiction writer, whether he knew it or not. That's when he learned how to make the make-believe matter to him more than real life mattered to him; that's when he learned how to paint a picture that was not real and never would be real, but in order to be believed at all-even on a sunny Indian summer day-it had to be better made and seem more real than real; it had to sound at least possible. Angel talked all day; he just went on and on and on; he would be a novelist before nightfall. In his story, Rose Rose and everyone else got along famously. No one objected to anything anyone else did. All of it, as they say in Maine, worked out.
Sometimes, Rose Rose cried a little; more often, they {681} just kissed. Only a few times did she interrupt him, usually because she wanted him to repeat something that had seemed especially unlikely to her. 'Hold on a minute,' she'd say to Angel. 'Better go over that again, 'cause I must be slow.'
In the late afternoon, the mosquitoes began to bother them, and it crossed Angel's mind how, some evening, Rose Rose could ask Wally to tell her what the rice paddy mosquitoes were like.
'An Ocean View mosquito isn't anything compared to a Japanese B mosquito,' Wally would have told her, but Angel didn't get to tell Rose Rose this part of the fantasy.
She was starting to stand up when an apparent cramp, or the pain from her fall against the bicycle's crossbar, dropped her to her knees as if she'd been kicked, and Angel caught her around her shoulders.
'You hurt yourself on the bicycle, didn't you?' he asked her.
'I was tryin' to,' she said then.
'What?' he asked her.
'I was tryin'to hurt myself,' Rose Rose told him, 'but I don't think I hurt myself enough.'
'Enough for what?' he asked.
'To lose the baby,' she told him.
'You're pregnant?' Angel asked her.
'Again,' she said. 'Again and again, I guess,' she said. 'Somebody must want me to keep havin' babies.'
'Who?' Angel asked her.
'Never mind,' she told him.
'Someone who's not here?' he asked.
'Oh, he here,' Rose Rose said. 'But never mind.'
'The father is here?' Angel asked.
'The father of this one- yeah, he here,' she said, patting her flat stomach.
'Who is he?' Angel asked.
'Never mind who he is,' she told Angel. 'Tell me that part again-only better make it two babies. Now they me and you, and everybody else, and two babies,' she said. 'Won't we all have fun?' {682}
Angel looked as if she'd slapped him; Rose Rose kissed him and hugged him-and she changed her tone of voice.
'You see?' she whispered to him, holding him tight. 'We wouldn't of had no fun at no beach, Angel.'
'Do you want the baby?' he asked her.
'I want the one I got,' she told him. 'I don't want this other one!' She struck herself as hard as she could when she said 'other'; she bent herself over again; she'd knocked the wind out of herself. She lay in the grass in what Angel could not help observing was a fetal position.
'You wanna love me or help me?' she asked him.
'Both,' he said miserably.
'Ain't no such thing as both,' she said. 'If you smart, you just stick with helpin' me-that easier.'
'You can stay with me,' Angel began-again.
'Don't tell me no more 'bout that!' Rose Rose said angrily. 'Don't tell me no more names for my baby, either. Just plain help me,' she said.
'How?' Angel asked. 'Anything,' he told her.
'Just get me an abortion,' Rose Rose said. 'I don't live 'round here, I don't know nobody to ask, and I got no money.'
Angel thought that the money he'd been saving to buy his first car would probably be enough money for an abortion-he had saved about five hundred dollars-but the problem was that the money was in a savings account, the trustees of which were his father and Candy; Angel couldn't take any money out without their signatures. And when Angel called Herb Fowler at home, the news regarding the abortionist was typically vague.
'There's some old fart named Hood who does 'em,' Herb told Angel. 'He's a retired doctor from Cape Kenneth. But he does the business in his summer house over on Drinkwater. Lucky for you it's still almost summer. I heard he does 'em in the summer house even if it's the middle of the winter.' {683}
'Do you know what it costs?' Angel asked Herb.
'A lot,' Herb said. 'But it don't cost as much as a baby.'
'Thanks, Herb,' Angel said.
'Congratulations,' Herb Fowler told the boy. 'I didn't know your pecker was long enough.'
'It's long enough,' Angel said bravely.
But when Angel looked in the phone book, there was no Dr. Hood among the many Hoods in that part of Maine, and Herb Fowler didn't know the man's first name. Angel knew he couldn't call everyone named Hood and ask, each time, if this was the abortioniSt. Angel also knew he'd have to speak to Candy and his father in order to get the money, and so he didn't delay in telling them the whole story.
'God, what a good boy Angel is!' Wally would say later. 'He never tries to keep anything from anybody. He just comes right out with it-no matter what it is.'
'She wouldn't tell you who the father is?' Homer Wells asked Angel.
'No, she wouldn't,' Angel said.
'Maybe Muddy,' Wally said.
'Probably Peaches,' Candy said.
'What's it matter if she doesn't want to say who the father is? The main thing is she doesn't want the baby,' said Homer Wells. 'The main thing is to get her an abortion.' Wally and Candy were quiet; they wouldn't question Homer's authority on this subject.
'The problem is, how do we know which Hood to call, when the phone book doesn't say which one is the doctor?' Angel asked.
'I know which one it is,' Homer said, 'and he's not a doctor.'
'Herb said he was a retired doctor,' Angel said.
'He's a retired biology teacher,' said Homer Wells, who knew exactly which Mr. Hood it was. Homer also remembered that Mr. Hood had once confused a rabbit's uteri with a sheep's. He wondered how many uteri Mr. Hood imagined women had? And would he be more {684} careful if he knew a woman had only one?
'A biology teacher?' Angel asked.
'Not a very good one, either,' Homer said.
'Herb Fowler has never known shit about anything,' Wally said.
The thought of what Mr. Hood might not know gave Homer Wells the shivers.
'She's not going anywhere near Mister Hood,' Homer said. 'You'll have to take her to Saint Cloud's,' he told Angel.
'But I don't think she wants to have the baby,' Angel said. 'And if she had it, I don't think she'd want to leave it in the orphanage.'
'Angel,' Homer said, 'she doesn't have to have a baby in Saint Cloud's. She can have an abortion there.'
Wally moved the wheelchair back and forth.
Candy said: 'I had an abortion there, once, Angel.'
'You did?' Angel said.
'At the time,' Wally told the boy, 'we thought we'd always be able to have another baby.'
'It was before Wally was hurt-before the war,' Candy began.
'Doctor Larch does it?' Angel asked his father.
'Right,' said Homer Wells. He was thinking that he should put Angel and Rose Rose on a train to St. Cloud's as soon as possible; with all the 'evidence' that had been submitted to the board of trustees, Homer didn't know how much more time Dr. Larch would have to practise.
'I'll call Doctor Larch right now,' Homer said. 'We'll put you and Rose Rose on the next train.'
'Or I could drive them in the Cadillac,' Wally said.
'It's too far for you to drive, Wally,' Homer told him.
'Baby Rose can stay here, with me,' Candy said.
They decided that it would be best if Candy went to the cider house and brought Rose Rose and her baby back to the house. Mr. Rose might give Rose Rose an argument if Angel showed up at night, wanting Rose Rose and the baby to go off with him. {685}
'He won't argue with me,' Candy said. 'I'll just say I've found a lot of old baby clothes, and that Rose Rose and I are going to dress up the baby in everything that fits her.'
'At night?' Wally said. 'For Christ's sake, Mister Rose isn't a fool.'
'I don't care if he believes me,' Candy said. 'I just want to get the girl and her baby out of there.'
'Is there that much of a rush?' Wally asked.
'Yes, I'm afraid there is,' said Homer Wells. He had not told Candy or Wally about Dr. Larch's desire to replace himself, or what revelations and fictions had been delivered to the board. An orphan learns to keep things to himself; an orphan holds things in. What comes out of orphans comes out of them slowly.
When Homer called St. Cloud's, he got Nurse Caroline; in their shock, in their grief, in their mourning for Dr. Larch, they had determined that Nurse Caroline had the sturdiest voice over the phone. And they had all been trying to familiarize themselves with Dr. Larch's plans, for everything, and with his massive A Brief History of St. Cloud's as well. Every time the phone rang, they assumed it was someone from the board of trustees.
'Caroline?' said Homer Wells. 'It's Homer. Let me speak with the old man.'
Nurse Angela and Nurse Edna, and even Mrs. Grogan, would love Homer Wells forever-in spite of his note of denial-but Nurse Caroline was younger than any of them; she did not feel the abiding sweetness for Homer Wells that comes from knowing someone when he's a baby. She felt he had betrayed Larch. And, of course, it was a bad time for him to ask for 'the old man.' When Larch had died, Nurse Angela and Nurse Edna and Mrs. Grogan had said they were not up to calling Homer; Nurse Caroline hadn't wanted to call him.
'What do you want?' Nurse Caroline asked him coldly. 'Or have you changed your mind?'
'There's a friend of my son's,' said Homer Wells. 'She's one of the migrants here. She's already got a baby who's {686} got no father, and now she's going to have another.'
'Then she'll have two,' Nurse Caroline informed him.
'Caroline!' said Homer Wells. 'Cut the shit. I want to talk to the old man.'
'I'd like to talk to him, too,' Nurse Caroline told him, her voice rising. 'Larch is dead, Homer,' she said more quietly.
'Cut the shit,' said Homer Wells; he felt his heart dancing.
'Too much ether,' she said. There's no more Lord's work in Saint Cloud's. If you know someone who needs it, you'll have to do it yourself.'
Then she hung up on him-she really slammed the phone down. His ear rang; he heard the sound of the logs bashing together in the water that swept the Winkles away. His eyes had not stung so sharply since that night in the Drapers' furnace room, in Waterville, when he had dressed himself for his getaway. His throat had not ached so deeply-the pain pushing down, into his lungs-since that night he had yelled across the river, trying to make the Maine woods repeat the name of Fuzzy Stone.
Snowy Meadows had found happiness with the furniture Marshes; good for Snowy, thought Homer Wells. He imagined that the other orphans would have difficulty finding happiness in the furniture business. At times, he admitted, he had been very happy in the apple business. He knew what Larch would have told him: that his happiness was not the point, or that it wasn't as important as his usefulness.
Homer shut his eyes and watched the women getting off the train. They always looked a little lost. He remembered them in the gaslit sleigh-their faces were especially vivid to him when the sled runners would cut through the snow and strike sparks against the ground; how the women had winced at that grating sound. And, briefly, when the town had cared enough to provide a bus service, how isolated the women had seemed in the {687} sealed buses, their faces cloudy behind the fogged glass; through the windows they had appeared to Homer Wells the way the world appeared to them, just before the ether transported them.
And now they walked from the station. Homer saw them marching uphill; there were more of them than he'd remembered. They were an army, advancing on the orphanage hospital, bearing with them a single wound.
Nurse Caroline was tough; but where would Nurse Edna and Nurse Angela go, and what would happen to Mrs. Grogan? worried Homer Wells. He remembered the hatred and contempt in Melony's eyes. If Melony were pregnant, I would help her, he thought. And with that thought he realized that he was willing to play God, a little.
Wilbur Larch would have told him there was no such thing as playing a little God; when you were willing to play God-at all-you played a lot.
Homer Wells was thinking hard when he reached into his pocket and found the burned-down nub of the candle Mr. Rose had returned to him-'That 'gainst the rules, ain't it?' Mr. Rose had asked him.
On his bedside table, between the reading lamp and the telephone, was his battered copy of David Copperfield. Homer didn't have to open the book to know how the story began. ' “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show,”' he recited from memory.
His memory was exceedingly keen. He could recall the different sizes of the ether cones that Larch insisted upon making himself. The apparatus was rudimentary: Larch shaped a cone out of an ordinary huckaback towel; between the layers of the towel were layers of stiff paper to keep the cone from collapsing. At the open tip of the cone was a wad of cotton-to absorb the ether. Crude, but Larch could make one in three minutes; they were different sizes for different faces.{688}
Homer had preferred the ready-made Yankauer mask-a wire-mesh mask, shaped like a soup ladle, wrapped with ten or twelve layers of gauze. It was into the old Yankauer mask on his bedside table that Homer deposited the remains of the cider house candle. He kept change in the mask, and sometimes his watch. Now he peered info it; the mask contained a piece of chewing gum in a faded green wrapper and the tortoiseshell button from his tweed jacket. The gauze in the mask was yellow and dusty, but all the mask needed was fresh gauze. Homer Wells made up his mind; he would be a hero.
He went downstairs to the kitchen where Angel was pushing Wally around in the wheelchair-it was a game they played when they were both restless. Angel stood on the back of the wheelchair and pushed it, the way you push a scooter; he got the chair going faster and faster-much faster than Wally could make it move by himself. Wally just steered-he kept turning and turning. Wally kept trying to miss the furniture, but despite his skill as a pilot and the good size of the kitchen floor, eventually Angel would get the chair going too fast to control and they'd crash into something. Candy got angry at them for it, but they did it, anyway (especially when she was out of the house). Wally called it 'flying'; most of all, it was something they did when they were bored. Candy had gone to the cider house to get Rose Rose and her baby. Angel and Wally were freewheeling.
When they saw how Homer looked, they stopped.
'What's the matter, old boy?' Wally asked his friend.
Homer knelt by Wally's wheelchair and put his head in Wally's lap.
'Doctor Larch is dead,' he told Wally, who held Homer while he cried. He cried a very short time; in Homer's memory, Curly Day had been the only orphan who ever cried for a long time. When Homer stopped crying, he said to Angel, 'I've got a little story for you-and I'm going to need your help.' {689}
They went outside to the shed where the garden things were kept, and Homer opened one of the quarter-pound ether cans with a safety pin. The fumes made his eyes tear a little; he'd never understood how Larch could like the stuff.
'He got addicted to it,' Homer told his son. 'But he used to have the lightest touch. I've seen patients talking back to him while they were under, and still they didn't feel a thing.'
They took the ether upstairs and Homer told Angel to make up the extra bed in his room-first with the rubber sheet they'd used when Angel had still been in diapers; then the usual sheets (but clean ones) over that.
'For Baby Rose?' Angel asked his father.
'No, not for Baby Rose,' Homer said. When he unpacked the instruments, Angel sat down on the other bed and watched him.
'The water's boiling!' Wally called upstairs.
'You remember how I used to tell you that I was Doctor Larch's helper?' Homer asked Angel.
'Right,' said Angel Wells.
'Well, I got very good-at helping him,' Homer said. 'Very good. I'm not an amateur,' he told his son. 'That's really it-that's the little story,' Homer said, when he'd arranged everything he needed where he could see it; everything looked timeless, everything looked perfect.
'Go on,' Angel Wells told his father. 'Go on with the story.'
Downstairs, in the quiet house, they heard Wally in his wheelchair, rolling from room to room; he was still flying.
Upstairs, Homer Wells was talking to his son while he changed the gauze on the Yankauer mask. He began with that old business about the Lord's work and the Devil's-how, to Wilbur Larch, it was all the work of the Lord.
It startled Candy: how the headlights from her Jeep caught all the men in the starkest silhouettes against the sky; how they were perched in a row, like huge birds, along the cider {690} house roof. She thought that everyone must be up there-but not everyone was. Mr. Rose and his daughter were inside the cider house, and the men were waiting where they'd been told to wait.
When Candy got out of the Jeep, no one spoke to her. There were no lights on in the cider house; if her headlights hadn't exposed the men on the roof, Candy would have thought that everyone had gone to bed.
'Hello!' Candy called up to the roof. 'One day, that whole roof is going to cave in.' It suddenly frightened her: how they wouldn't speak to her. But the men were more frightened than Candy was; the men didn't know what to say-they knew only that what Mr. Rose was doing to his daughter was wrong, and that they were too afraid to do anything about it.
'Muddy?' Candy asked in the darkness.
'Yes, Missus Worthington!' Muddy called down to her.
She went over to the corner of the cider house where the roof dipped closest to the ground; it was where everyone climbed up; an old picking ladder was leaned up against the roof there, but no one on the roof moved to hold the ladder steady for her.
'Peaches?' Candy said.
'Yes, ma'am,' Peaches said.
'Please, someone hold the ladder,' she said. Muddy and Peaches held the ladder, and Black Pan held her hand when she climbed up on the roof. The men made room for her, and she sat down with them.
She could not see very clearly, but she would have known if Rose Rose was there; and if Mr. Rose had been there, Candy knew he would have spoken to her.
The first time she heard the sound from the cider house-it came from directly under her-Candy thought it was the baby, just babbling or rnaybe beginning to cry.
'When your Wally was a boy, it was different-out there,' Black Pan said to her. 'It look like another country then.' His gaze was fixed upon the twinkling coast. {691}
The noise under the cider house roof grew more distinct, and Peaches said, 'Ain't it a pretty night, ma'am?' It was decidedly not a pretty night; it was a darker night than usual, and the sound from the cider house was now comprehensible to her. For a second, she thought she was going to be sick.
'Careful when you stand up, Missus Worthington,' Muddy said to her, but Candy stamped her feet on the roof; then she knelt down and began to beat on the tin with both her hands.
'It's so old a roof, Missus Worthington,' Black Pan said to her. 'You best be careful you don't fall through it.'
'Get me down, get me off,' Candy said to them. Muddy and Peaches took her arms and Black Pan preceded them to the ladder. Even walking down the roof, Candy tried to keep stamping her feet.
Going down the ladder, she called, 'Rose!' She could not say the ridiculous name of 'Rose Rose,' and she couldn't make herself say 'Mister Rose,' either. 'Rose!' she called ambiguously. She wasn't even sure which one she was summoning, but it was Mr. Rose who met her at the cider house door. He was still getting dressed-he was tucking his shirt in and buttoning his trousers. He looked thinner and older to her than he'd looked before, and although he smiled at her, he didn't look into her eyes with his usual confidence-with his usual, polite indifference.
'Don't you speak to me,' Candy told him, but what would he have said? 'Your daughter and her baby are coming with me.' Candy walked by him into the cider house; she felt the tattered rules with her fingers as she found the light.
Rose Rose was sitting up on the bed. She had pulled her blue jeans on, but she hadn't closed them, and she had pulled the T-shirt on, but she held Candy's bathing suit in her lap-she was unfamiliar with wearing it, and she'd not been able to put it on in a hurry. She had found only one of her work shoes, which she held in one hand.{692} The other one was under the bed. Candy found it and put it on the correct foot-Rose Rose wore no socks. Then Candy tied the laces for her, too. Rose Rose just sat on the bed while Candy put on and tied her other shoe.
'You're coming with me. Your baby, too,' Candy told the girl.
'Yes, ma'am,' Rose Rose said.
Candy took the bathing suit from her and used the suit to wipe the tears from Rose Rose's face.
'You're fine, you're just fine,' Candy said to the girl. 'And you're going to feel better. No one's going to hurt you.'
Baby Rose was sound asleep, and Candy was careful not to wake her when she picked her up and handed her to her mother. Rose Rose moved uncertainly and Candy put her arm around her when they walked out of the cider house together. 'You're going to be just fine,' Candy said to Rose Rose; she kissed the young woman on her neck, and Rose Rose, who was sweating, leaned against her.
Mr. Rose was standing in the darkness between the Jeep and the cider house, but the rest of the men still sat on the roof.
'You comin' back,' Mr. Rose said-nothing was raised at the end of his voice; it was not a question.
'I told you not to speak to me,' Candy told him. She helped Rose Rose and her baby into the Jeep.
'I was speakin' to my daughter,' Mr. Rose said with dignity.
But Rose Rose would not answer her father. She sat like a statue of a woman with a baby in her arms while Candy turned the Jeep around and drove away. Before they went into the fancy house together, Rose Rose slumped against Candy and said to her, 'I never could do nothin' about it.'
'Of course you couldn't,' Candy told her.
'He hated the father of the other one,' Rose Rose said. 'He been after me ever since.' {693}
'You're going to be all right now,' Candy told the girl before they went inside; through the windows, they could watch Wally flying back and forth in the house.
'I know my father, Missus Worthington,' Rose Rose whispered. 'He gonna want me back.'
'He can't have you,' Candy told her. 'He can't make you go back to him.'
'He makes his own rules,' said Rose Rose.
'And the father of your beautiful daughter?' Candy asked, holding the door open for Rose Rose and her baby girl. 'Where is he?'
'My father cut him up. He long gone,' Rose Rose said. 'He don't wanna be involved with me no more.'
'And your mother?' Candy asked, as they went in the house.
'She dead,' Rose Rose said.
That was when Wally told Candy that Dr. Larch was dead, too. She would not have known it to look at Homer, who was all business; an orphan learns how to hold back, how to keep things in.
'Are you all right?' Candy asked Homer, while Wally wheeled Baby Rose around the downstairs of the house and Angel took Rose Rose to his room, which was prepared for her.
'I'm a little nervous,' Homer admitted to Candy. 'It's certainly not a matter of technique, and I've got everything I need-I know I can do it. It's just that, to me, it is a living human being. I can't describe to you what it feels like-just to hold the curette, for example. When living tissue is touched, it responds-somehow,' Homer said, but Candy cut him off.
'It may help you to know who the father is,' she said. 'It's Mister Rose. Her father is the father-if that makes it any easier.'
The crisply made-up bed in Angel's childhood room and the gleaming instruments-which were displayed so neatly in the adjacent bed-made Rose Rose both talkative and rigid.{694}
'This don't look like no fun,' the girl said, holding her fists in her lap. 'They took the other one out through the top-not the way she was supposed to come out,' Rose Rose explained. She'd had a Caesarean, Homer Wells could see, perhaps because of her age and her size at the time. But Homer could not quite convince her that this time everything would be much easier. He wouldn't need to take anything 'out through the top.'
'Go stay with Wally, Angel,' Candy told the boy. 'Go give Baby Rose a ride in the wheelchair. Knock over all the furniture, if you want,'she told him, kissing her son.
'Yeah, you go away,' Rose Rose told Angel.
'Don't be afraid,' Candy told Rose Rose. 'Homer knows what he's doing. You're in very safe hands.' She swabbed Rose Rose with the red Merthiolate, while Homer began to show Rose Rose the instruments.
'This is a speculum,'he said to her. 'It may feel cold, but it doesn't hurt. You won't feel any of this,' he assured her. These are dilators,' Homer said, but Rose Rose shut her eyes.
'You done this before, ain't you?' Rose Rose asked him. He had the ether ready.
'Just breathe normally,' he told her. At the first whiff, she opened her eyes and turned her face away from the mask, but Candy put her hands at Rose Rose's temples and very gently moved her head into the right position. The first smell is the sharpest,' said Homer Wells.
'Please, have you done this before?' Rose Rose asked him. Her voice was muffled under the mask.
'I'm a good doctor-I really am,' Homer Wells told her. 'Just relax, and breathe normally.'
'Don't be afraid,' Rose Rose heard Candy tell her just before the ether began to take her out of her body.
'I can ride it,' she said. Rose Rose meant a bicycle. Homer watched her wiggle her toes. Rose Rose was getting her first feel of the sand; the beach was warm. The tide was coming in; she felt the water around her ankles. 'No big deal,' she murmured. Rose Rose meant the ocean.{695}
Homer Wells, adjusting the speculum until he had a perfect view of the cervix, introduced the first dilator until the os opened like an eye looking back at him. The cervix looked softened and slightly enlarged, and it was bathed in a healthy, clear mucus-it was the most breathtaking pink color that Homer had ever seen. Downstairs, he heard the wheelchair careening through the house-there was a wild and nonstop giggling from Baby Rose.
'Tell them not to get that baby overexcited,' Homer said to Candy, as if she were his nurse of long-standing and he was used to giving her directions and she was used to following them, exactly. He did not let the ruckus (or Candy trying to quiet them down) distract him; he watched the cervix open until it opened wide enough. He chose the curette of the correct size. After the first one, thought Homer Wells, this might get easier. Because he knew now that he couldn't play God in the worst sense; if he could operate on Rose Rose, how could he refuse to help a stranger? How could he refuse anyone? Only a god makes that kind of decision. I'll just give them what they want, he thought. An orphan or an abortion.
Homer Wells breathed slowly and regularly; the steadiness of his hand surprised him. He did not even blink when he felt the curette make contact; he did not divert his eyes from witnessing the miracle.
For that night, Candy slept in the extra bed in Angel's room-she wanted to be close by if Rose Rose needed anything, but Rose Rose slept like a rock. The gap left by her missing tooth made a small whistling noise when her lips were parted it was not at all disturbing, and Candy slept quite soundly, too.
Angel slept downstairs, sharing the big bed with Wally. They stayed awake quite late, talking. Wally told Angel about the time he first fell in love with Candy; although Angel had heard the story before, he listened to it more attentively-now that he thought he had fallen {696} in love with Rose Rose. Wally also told Angel that he must never underestimate the darker necessities of the world where his father had grown up.
'It's the old story,' Wally said to Angel. 'You can get Homer out of Saint Cloud's, but you can't get Saint Cloud's out of Homer. And the thing about being in love,' Wally said to Angel, 'is that you can't force anyone. It's natural to want someone you love to do what you want, or what you think would be good for them, but you have to let everything happen to them. You can't interfere with people you love any more than you're supposed to interfere with people you don't even know. And that's hard,' he added, 'because you often feel like interfering -you want to be the one who makes the plans.'
'It's hard to want to protect someone else, and not be able to,' Angel pointed out.
'You can't protect people, kiddo,' Wally said. 'All you can do is love them.'
When he fell asleep, Wally felt the movement of the raft on the Irrawaddy. One of his friendly Burmese rescuers was offering to catheterize him. First he dipped the bamboo shoot in the brown river, then he wiped it dry on one of the strips of silk that bound up his head basket, then he spat on it. 'You want to pees now?' the Burmese asked Wally.
'No, thank you,' Wally said in his sleep. 'No piss now,' he said aloud, which made Angel smile before he fell asleep, too.
Upstairs, in the master bedroom. Homer Wells was wide awake. He'd volunteered to have Baby Rose for the night. 'Because I'll be up all night, anyway,' he said. He'd forgotten how much he enjoyed having a baby to look after. Babies reminded Homer of himself; they were always wanting something in the middle of the night. But after he'd given Baby Rose her bottle, the child went back to sleep and left Homer Wells alone again; it was nonetheless a pleasure having the little girl to look at. Her black face in the bed beside him was no bigger than his {697} hand, and occasionally her hands would reach up and her fingers would open and close, grasping at something she saw in her sleep. The presence of another breather in the room reminded Homer Wells of the sleeping quarters in St. Cloud's, where he had some difficulty imagining the necessary announcement.
'Let us be happy for Doctor Larch,' Homer said softly. 'Doctor Larch has found a family. Good night, Doctor Larch.' He tried to imagine which one of them would have said it. He imagined it would have been Nurse Angela, and so it was to her that he sent the letter.
Now that Dr. Larch had died, Mrs. Goodhall's pleasure at the thought of replacing the old, nonpractising homosexual was less intense; it did stimulate her, however, to imagine replacing him with that young missionary who had antagonized him so. Dr. Gingrich saw some faint justice appear on the horizon at the thought of replacing Larch with someone who'd clearly driven the old man crazy, but Dr. Gingrich was not so interested in the outcome of the situation in St. Cloud's as he was fascinated with his secretive study of Mrs. Goodhall's mind, in which he found such a complex broth of righteous delusion and inspired hatred.
Of course, Dr. Gingrich and the other board members were eager to meet young Dr. Stone, but Dr. Gingrich was particularly eager to observe Mrs. Coodhall at such a meeting. Mrs. Goodhall had developed a tic-whenever someone provided her with unusual pleasure or displeasure, the right side of her face suffered an involuntary muscular contraction. Dr. Gingrich imagined that, upon meeting the missionary doctor, Mrs. Goodhall would enter a phase of nearly constant spasm, and he could not wait to observe this.
'You must stall the board,' Homer wrote to Nurse Angela. 'Tell them that your efforts to reach Dr. Stone are hampered by the doctor being in transit between two of the mission's hospitals in India. Say Assam is one, say New Delhi is the other. Say you don't expect to be able to {698} communicate with him for a week or more, and that-if he was willing to consider the position at St. Cloud's-he couldn't possibly be available before November.'
Homer Wells hoped that this would allow him the time to tell Angel everything, and to be finished with the harveSt.
'You'll have to convince the board that you are competent midwives, in addition to being good nurses, and that you'll be able to recognize the patients who should be referred to a physician,' Homer wrote to Nurse Angela. 'You must forgive me for needing all this time, but perhaps I will seem more believable to the board of trustees if everyone has to wait for me. It takes time to leave Asia.'
He also requested that they send him the available history of Fuzzy Stone, and tell him anything that Larch might have omitted-although Homer could not imagine that St. Larch had left out anything. It was with the shortest possible sentence that Homer told Nurse Angela that he had loved Larch 'like a father,' and that they had 'nothing to fear from Melony.'
Poor Bob, who had broken her nose and her arm, had plenty to fear from Melony, however, but Bob wasn't smart enough to be afraid of her. When the cast would come off her arm, and when her nose looked more or less normal again, Melony and Lorna would cruise the old, familiar spots-the pizza bar in Bath, among them-and Bob would have the charmless instinct to annoy them again. Melony would disarm him with her shy smile-the one that humbly revealed her bad teeth to him-and while Bob turned his oafish attention to Lorna, Melony snipped off the top half of his ear with her wire-cutters (the electrician's common and trusty tool). Then Melony broke several of Bob's ribs and his nose and beat him unconscious with a chair. She had her heart in the right place, regarding St. Cloud's, but Melony was an eye-for-an-eye and a tit-for-tat girl.
'My hero,' Lorna called her. It was a touchy word to {699} use around Melony, who had long thought that Homer Wells was made of hero stuff.
Homer was a hero in Rose Rose's eyes; she spent all of Monday in the bed in Angel's room, with Candy bringing her baby to her from time to time, and Angel visiting with her every chance he could get.
'You're going to love this room,' Angel told her.
'You plain crazy,' Rose Rose told him. 'But I already love it.'
It was a day that hurt the harvest; Mr. Rose wouldn't pick and half the men were sore from falling off the bicycles. Homer Wells, who never would master the terrible machine, had a puffy knee and a bruise between his shoulder blades the size of a melon. Peaches refused to go up a ladder; he would load the trailers and pick drops all day. Muddy groaned and complained; he was the only one among them who had actually learned to ride. Black Pan announced that it was a good day for a faSt.
Mr. Rose, it appeared, was fasting. He sat outside the cider house in the weak sun, wrapped in a blanket from his bed; he sat Indian-style, not talking to anyone.
'He say he on a pickin' strike,' Peaches whispered to Muddy, who told Homer that he thought Mr. Rose was on a hunger strike, too-'and every other kind of strike there is.'
'We'll just have to get along without him,' Homer told the men, but everyone pussyfooted their way past Mr. Rose, who appeared to have enthroned himself in front of the cider house.
'Or else he planted hisself, like a tree,' Peaches said.
Black Pan brought him a cup of coffee and some fresh corn bread, but Mr. Rose wouldn't touch any of it. Sometimes, he appeared to be gnawing on one of the pacifiers. It was a cool day, and when the faint sun would drift behind the clouds, Mr. Rose would draw the blanket over his head; then he sat cloaked and robed and closed off completely from any of them.{700}
'He like an Indian,' Peaches said. 'He don't make no treaty.'
'He want to see his daughter,' Muddy informed Homer at the end of the day. 'That what he say to me-it all he say. Just see her. He say he won't touch her.'
Tell him he can come to the house and see her there,' Homer Wells told Muddy.
But at suppertime, Muddy came to the kitchen door alone. Candy asked him in, and asked him to eat with them-Rose Rose was sitting with them, at the table- but Muddy was too nervous to stay. 'He say he won't come here,' Muddy told Homer. 'He say for her to come to the cider house. He say to tell you they got they own rules. He say you breakin' the rules, Homer.'
Rose Rose sat so still at the table that she was not even chewing; she wanted to be sure to hear everything Muddy was saying. Angel tried to take her hand, which was cold, but she pulled it away from him and kept both her hands wound up in her napkin, in her lap.
'Muddy,' Wally said, 'you tell him that Rose Rose is staying in my house, and that in my house we follow my rules. You tell him he's welcome to come here anytime.'
'He won't do it,' Muddy said.
'I have to go see him,' Rose Rose said.
'No, you don't,' Candy told her. 'You tell him he sees her here, or nowhere, Muddy,' Candy said.
'Yes, ma'am. I brung the bicycles back,' Muddy said to Angel. 'They a little banged up.' Angel went outside to look at the bicycles and that's when Muddy handed him the knife.
'You don't need this, Angel,' Muddy told the boy, 'but you give it to Rose Rose. You say I want her to have it. Just so she have one.'
Angel looked at Muddy's knife; it was a bone-handled jackknife, and part of the bone was chipped. It was one of those jackknives where the blade locks in place when you open it so it can't close on your fingers. The blade was almost six inches long, which would make it prominent {701} in anyone's pocket, and over the years it had seen a lot of whetstone; the blade was ground down very thin and the edge was very sharp.
'Don't you need it, Muddy?' Angel asked him.
'I never knew what to do with it,' Muddy confessed. 'I just get in trouble with it.'
'I'll give it to her,' Angel said.
'You tell her her father say he love her, and he just wanna see her,' Muddy said. 'Just see,' he repeated.
Angel considered this message; then he said, 'I love Rose Rose, you know, Muddy.' 'Sure I know,' Muddy said. 'I love her, too. We all love her. Everybody love Rose Rose-that part of her problem.'
'If Mister Rose just wants to see her,' Angel said, 'how come you're giving her your knife?'
'Just so she have one,' Muddy repeated.
Angel gave her the knife when they were sitting in his room after supper.
'It's from Muddy,' he told her.
'I know who it from,' Rose Rose said, 'I know what knife everyone got-I know what they all look like.' Although it was not a switchblade, it made Angel jump to see how quickly she opened the knife using only one hand. 'Look what Muddy do,' she said, laughing. 'He been sharpeniri' it to death-he wore it half away.' She closed the knife against her hip; her long fingers moved the knife around so quickly that Angel didn't notice where she put it.
'You know a lot about knives?' Angel asked her.
'From my father,' she said. 'He show me everythin'.'
Angel moved and sat on the bed next to her, but Rose Rose regarded him neutrally. 'I told you,' she began patiently. 'You don't wanna have no business with me-I could never tell you nothin' about me. You don't wanna know 'bout me, believe me.'
'But I love you,' Angel pleaded with her.
After she kissed him-and she allowed him to touch {702} her breasts-she said, 'Angel. Lovin' someone don't always make no difference.'
Then Baby Rose woke up, and Rose Rose had to attend to her daughter. 'You know what I namin' her?' she asked Angel. 'Candy,' Rose Rose said. 'That who she is-she a Candy.'
In the morning, on the downhill side of the harvest, everyone got up early, but no one got up earlier than Rose Rose. Angel, who had more or less been imagining that he was guarding the house all night, noticed that Rose Rose and her daughter had gone. Angel and Homer got in the Jeep and drove out to the cider house before breakfast -but there was nowhere they could go that morning that Rose Rose hadn't been to ahead of them. The men were up and looking restless, and Mr. Rose was already maintaining his stoical sitting position in the grass in front of the cider house-the blanket completely covering him, except for his face.
'You too late,' Mr. Rose said to them. 'She long gone.'
Angel ran and looked in the cider house, but there was no sign of Rose Rose or her daughter.
'She gone with her thumb, she say,' Mr. Rose told Homer and Angel. He made the hitchhiking sign-his bare hand emerging from the blanket only for a second before it went back into hiding.
'I didn't hurt her,' Mr. Rose went on. 'I didn't touch her, Homer,' he said. 'I just love her, was all. I just wanna see her-one more time.'
'I'm sorry for your troubles,' Homer Wells told the man, but Angel ran off to find Muddy.
'She say to tell you you was the nicest,' Muddy told the boy. 'She say to tell your dad he a hero, and that you was the nicest.'
'She didn't say where she was going?'
'She don't know where she goin', Angel,' Muddy told him. 'She just know she gotta go.'
'But she could have stayed with us!' Angel said. 'With me,' he added.{703}
'I know she thought about it,' Muddy said. 'You better think about it, too.'
'I have thought about it-I think about it all the time,' Angel said angrily.
'I don't think you old enough to think about it, Angel,' Muddy said gently.
'I loved her!' the boy said.
'She know,' Muddy said. 'She know who she is, too, but she also know you don't know who you is, yet.'
Looking for her and thinking about her would help Angel to know that. He and Candy would drive south along the coast for an hour; then they would drive north, for two. They knew that even Rose Rose would know enough about Maine not to go inland. And they knew that a young black woman with a baby in her arms would be quite exotic among the hitchhikers of Maine; she certainly would have less trouble than Melony getting a ride-and Melony always got rides.
Mr. Rose would maintain his almost Buddhist position; he made it through lunch without moving, but in the afternoon he asked Black Pan to bring him some water, and when the men were through picking that day, he called Muddy over to him. Muddy was very frightened but he approached Mr. Rose and stood at a distance of about six feet from him.
'Where your knife, Muddy?' Mr. Rose asked him. 'You lose it?'
'I didn't lose it,' Muddy told him. 'But I can't find it,' he added.
'It around, you mean?' Mr. Rose asked him. 'It around somewhere, but you don't know where.'
'I don't know where it is,' Muddy admitted.
'Never do you no good, anyway-do it?' Mr. Rose asked him.
'I never could use it,' Muddy admitted. It was a cold and sunless late afternoon, but Muddy was sweating; he held his hands at his sides as if his hands were dead fish.
'Where she get the knife, Muddy?' Mr. Rose asked.{704}
'What knife?' Muddy asked him.
'It look like your knife-what I seen of it,' said Mr. Rose.
'I gave it to her,' Muddy admitted.
'Thank you for doin'that, Muddy,' Mr. Rose said. 'If she gone with her thumb, I glad she got a knife with her.'
'Peaches!' Muddy screamed. 'Go get Homer!' Peaches came out of the cider house and stared at Mr. Rose, who didn't move a muscle; Mr. Rose didn't look at Peaches at all. 'Black Pan!' Muddy screamed, as Peaches went running off to get Homer Wells. Black Pan came out of the cider house and he and Muddy got down on their knees and peered at Mr. Rose together.
'You all stay calm,' Mr. Rose advised them. 'You too late,' he told them. 'No one gonna catch her now. She had all day to get away,' Mr. Rose said proudly.
'Where she get you?' Muddy asked Mr. Rose, but neither he nor Black Pan dared to poke around under the blanket. They just watched Mr. Rose's eyes and his dry lips.
'She good with that knife-she better with it than you ever be!' Mr. Rose said to Muddy.
'I know she good,' Muddy said.
'She almost the best,' said Mr. Rose. 'And who taught her?' he asked them.
'You did,' they told him.
'That right,' said Mr. Rose. That why she almost as good as me.' Very slowly, without exposing any of himself -keeping himself completely under the blanket, except for his face-Mr. Rose rolled over on his side and tucked his knees up to his chest. 'I real tired of sittin' up,' he told Muddy and Black Pan. 'I gettin' sleepy.'
'Where she get you?' Muddy asked him again.
'I didn't think it would take this long,' said Mr. Rose. 'It taken all day, but it felt like it was gonna go pretty fast.'
All the men were standing around him when Homer Wells and Peaches arrived in the Jeep. Mr. Rose had very little left to say when Homer got to him.{705}
'You breakin' them rules, too, Homer,' Mr. Rose whispered to him. 'Say you know how I feel.'
'I know how you feel,' said Homer Wells.
'Right,' said Mr. Rose-grinning.
The knife had entered in the upper right quadrant, close to the rib margin. Homer knew that a knife moving in an upward direction would give a substantial liver laceration, which would continue to bleed-at a moderate rate-for many hours. Mr. Rose might have stopped bleeding several times, and started again. In most cases, a liver stab wound hemorrhages very slowly.
Mr. Rose died in Homer's arms before Candy and Angel arrived at the cider house, but long after his daughter had made good her escape. Mr. Rose had managed to soak the blade of his own knife in his wound, and the last thing he told Homer was that it should be clear to the authorities that he had stabbed himself. If he hadn't meant to kill himself, why would he have let himself bleed to death from what wasn't necessarily a mortal wound?
'My daughter run away,' Mr. Rose told all of them.
'And I so sorry that I stuck myself. You better say that what happen. Let me hear you say it!' he raised his voice to them.
'That what happen,' Muddy said.
'You kill yourself,' Peaches told him.
'That what happen,' Black Pan said.
'You hearin' this right, Homer?' Mr. Rose asked him.
That was how Homer reported it, and that was how the death of Mr. Rose was received-the way he wanted it, according to the cider house rules. Rose Rose had broken the rules, of course, but everyone at Ocean View knew the rules Mr. Rose had broken with her.
At the end of the harvest, on a gray morning with a wild wind blowing in from the ocean, the overhead bulb that hung in the cider house kitchen blinked twice and burned out; the spatter of apple mash on the far wall, near the press and grinder, was cast so somberly in {706} shadows that the dark clots of pomace looked like black leaves that had blown indoors and stuck against the wall in a storm.
The men were picking up their few things. Homer Wells was there-with the bonus checks-and Angel had come-with him to say good-bye to Muddy and Peaches and Black Pan and the rest of them. Wally had made some arrangements with Black Pan to be crew boss the following year. Wally had been right about Mr. Rose being the only one of them who could read well and write at all. Muddy told Angel that he'd always thought the list of rules tacked to the kitchen wall was something to do with the building's electricity.
''Cause it was always near the light switch,' Muddy explained. 'I thought they was instructions 'bout the lights.'
The other men, since they couldn't read at all, never noticed that the list was there.
'Muddy, if you should happen to see her,' Angel said, when he was saying good-bye.
'I won't see her, Angel,' Muddy told the boy. 'She long gone.'
Then they were all long gone. Angel would never see Muddy again, either-or Peaches, or any of the rest of them except Black Pan. It wouldn't work out, having Black Pan as a crew boss, as Wally would discover; the man was a cook, not a picker, and a boss had to be in the field with the men. Although Black Pan would gather a fair picking crew together, he was never quite in charge of them-in future years, of course, no one would ever be as in charge of a picking crew at Ocean View as Mr. Rose had been. For a while, Wally would try hiring French Canadians; they were, after all, closer to Maine than the Carolinas. But the French Canadian crews were often ill-tempered and alcoholic, and Wally would always be trying to get the French Canadians out of jail.
One year Wally would hire a commune, but that crew {707} arrived with too many small children. The pregnant women on the ladders made everyone nervous. They left something cooking all day, and started a. small fire in the kitchen. And when the men ran the press, they allowed their children to splash about in the vat.
Wally would finally settle on Jamaicans. They were friendly, non-violent, and good workers. They brought with them an interesting music and a straightforward but contained passion for beer (and for a little marijuana). They knew how to handle the fruit and they never hurt each other.
But after Mr. Rose's last summer at Ocean View, the pickers-whoever they were-would never sit on the cider house roof. It just never occurred to them. And no one would ever put up a list of rules again.
In future years the only person who ever sat on the cider house roof was Angel Wells, who would do it because he liked that particular view of the ocean, and because he wanted to remember that November day in 195-, after Muddy and the rest of them had left, and his father turned to him (they were alone at: the cider house) and said, 'How about sitting on the roof for a while with me? It's time you knew the whole story.'
'Another little story?' Angel asked.
'I said the whole story,' said Homer Wells.
And although it was a cold day, that November, and the wind off the sea was briny and raw, father and son sat on that roof a long time. It was, after all, a long story, and Angel would ask a lot of questions.
Candy, who drove by the cider house and saw them sitting up there, was worried about how cold they must be. But she didn't interrupt them; she just kept driving. She hoped the truth would keep them warm. She drove to the barn nearest the apple mart and got Everett Taft to help her put the canvas canopy on the Jeep. Then she went and got Wally out of the office.
'Where are we going?' Wally asked her. She bundled him up in a blanket, as if she were taking him to the {708} Arctic Circle. 'We must be going north,' he said, when she didn't answer him.
'My father's dock,' she told him. Wally knew that Ray Kendall's dock, and everything else belonging to Ray, had been blown over land and sea; he kept quiet. The ugly little carhop restaurant that Bucky Bean had manufactured was closed for the season; they were alone. Candy drove the Jeep through the empty parking lot and out to a rocky embankment that served as a seawall against the waves in Heart's Haven Harbor. She stopped as near to the ocean's edge as she dared to, near the old pilings of what had been her father's dock-where she and Wally had spent so many evenings, so long ago.
Then, since this wasn't wheelchair terrain, she carried Wally about ten yards, over the rocks and the sand, and sat him down on a relatively smooth and flat shelf of the jagged coastline. She wrapped Wally's legs in the blanket and then she sat down behind him and straddled him with her legs-as a way of keeping them both warm.
They sat facing Europe in this position, like riders on a sled about to plunge downhill.
'This is fun,' Wally said. She stuck her chin over his shoulder; their cheeks were touching; she hugged him around his arms and his chest, and she squeezed his withered hips with her legs.
'I love you, Wally,' Candy said, beginning her story.
In late November, in the mousing season, the board of trustees at St. Cloud's approved the appointment of Dr. F. Stone as obstetrician-in-residence and the new director of the orphanage-having met the zealous missionary in the board's chambers in Portland, the birthplace of the late Wilbur Larch. Dr. Stone, who appeared a little tired from his Asian journeying and from what he described as 'a touch of something dysenteric,' made the correct impression on the board. His manner was somber, his hair was graying and cropped in an almost military fashion ('Hindu barbers,' he apologized, showing {709} a mild sense of humor; actually, Candy had cut his hair). Homer Wells was carelessly shaven, clean but tousled in his dress-both at ease and impatient with strangers, in the manner (the board thought) of a man with urgent business who was not in the least vain about his appearance; he hadn't the time. The board also approved of Dr. Stone's medical and religious credentials-the latter, in the estimation of the devout Mrs. Goodhall, would give to Dr. Stone's authority in St. Cloud's a 'balance' that she noted had been missing in Dr. Larch.
Dr. Gingrich was excited to note the contortions registered on Mrs. GoodhalFs face during the entire meeting with young Dr. Stone, who did not recognize Gingrich and Goodhall from his brief glimpse of them in the offseason, Ogunquit hotel. Dr. Gingrich found a comforting familiarity in the young man's face, although he would never associate the glow of a missionary with the sorrowful longing he had seen on the face of the lover. Perhaps Mrs. Goodhall's tic affected her vision-she did not recognize the young man from the hotel, either -or else her mind would never grasp the possibility that a man devoted to children could also be a man with a practicing sexual life.
To Homer Wells, Mrs. Goodhall and Dr. Gingrich were not special enough to remember; the peevish miseries compounded in their expressions were not unique. And the way that Homer looked when he was with Candy was not the way he looked most of the time.
On the matter of abortions, Dr. Stone surprised the board by the adamant conviction he held: that they should be legalized, and that he intended to work through the proper channels toward that end. However, Dr. Stone assured them, as long as abortions were illegal, he would rigorously uphold the law. He believed in rules, and in obeying them, he told the board. They liked the hardship and self-sacrifice that they imagined they could witness in the wrinkles around his dark eyes-and how the fierce Asian sun had blistered his nose arid cheeks {710} while he had toiled to save the diarrhetic children. (Actually, he had deliberately sat for too long in front of Candy's sunlamp). And-on the religious grounds more comfortable to the board, and to Mrs. Goodhall especially -Dr. Stone said that he himself never would perform abortions, even if they were legalized. 'I just couldn't do it,' he lied calmly. If it ever was legal, of course, he would simply refer the unfortunate woman 'to one of those doctors who could, and would.' It was clear that Dr. Stone found 'those doctors' not to his liking- that, despite his loyalty to Dr. Larch, Dr. Stone found that particular practice of Larch's to be an act decidedly against nature.
It was in large measure indicative of Dr. Stone's 'Christian tolerance' that despite his long-standing disagreement with Dr. Larch on this delicate subject, the young missionary was forgiving of Larch-far more forgiving than the board, by no small portion. 'I always prayed for him,' Dr. Stone said of Dr. Larch, his eyes shining. 'I still pray for him.' It was an emotional moment, perhaps influenced by the aforementioned 'touch of something dysenteric'-and the board was predictably moved by it. Mrs. Goodhall's tic went wild.
On the matter of Nurse Caroline's socialist views, Dr. Stone assured the board that the young woman's fervor to do the right thing had simply been-in her youth- misguided. He would tell her a few things about the Communist guerrilla activity in Burma that would open her eyes. And Dr. Stone convinced the board that the older nurses, and Mrs. Grogan, had a few more years of good service in them. 'It's all a matter of guidance,' Dr. Stone told the board. Now there was a word that pleased Dr. Gingrich!
Dr. Stone opened his hands; they were rather roughly calloused for the hands of a doctor, Mrs. Goodhall would observe-thinking it charming how this healer of children must have helped with building the huts or planting the gardens or whatever other rough work there'd been {711} to do over there. When he said 'guidance,' Homer Wells opened his hands the way a minister received a congregation, thought the board; or the way a good doctor received the precious head of a newborn child, they thought.
And it was thrilling, after they had interviewed him, how he blessed them as he was leaving them. And how he salaamed to them!
'Nga sak kin,' said the missionary doctor.
Oh, what had he said? they all wanted to know. Wally, of course, had taught Homer the correct pronunciation-it being one of the few Burmese things that Wally had ever heard correctly, although he'd never learned what it meant.
Homer Wells translated the phrase for them-Wally had always thought it was someone's name. 'It means,' Homer told the enraptured board: 'May God watch over your soul, which no man may abuse.'
There were loud murmurs of approval. Mrs. Goodhall said, 'All that in such a short phrase!'
'It's a remarkable language,' Dr. Stone told them dreamily. 'Nga sak kin,' he told them again. He got them all to repeat it after him. He was pleased to imagine them, later, giving this meaningless blessing to each other. It would have pleased him more if he'd ever known what the phrase actually meant. It was the perfect thing for a board of trustees to go around saying to each other: 'curried fish balls.'
'I think I got away with it,' Homer told Wally and Candy and Angel when they were eating a late supper in the house at Ocean View.
'It doesn't surprise me,' Wally told his friend. 'I have every reason to believe that you can get away with anything.'
Upstairs, after supper, Angel watched his father pack the old black doctor's bag-and some other bags, as well.
'Don't worry, Pop,' Angel told his father. 'You're going to do just fine.' {712}
'You're going to do just fine, too,' Homer told his son. 'I'm not worried about that.' Downstairs they heard Candy pushing Wally around in the wheelchair. They were playing the game that Wally and Angel often played-the game Wally called 'flying.'
'Come on,' Wally was saying. 'Angel can make it go faster.'
Candy was laughing. 'I'm going as fast as I can,' Candy said.
'Please stop thinking about the furniture,' Wally told her.
'Please look after Wally,' Homer said to Angel. 'And mind your mother,' he told his son.
'Right,'said Angel Wells.
In the constantly changing weather of Maine, especially on cloudy days, the presence of St. Cloud's could be felt in Heart's Rock; with a heavy certainty, the air of St. Cloud's could be distinguished in the trapped stillness that hovered above the water of Drinkwater Lake (like those water bugs, those water walkers, that were nearly constant there). And even in the fog that rolled over those bright, coastal lawns of Heart's Haven's well-to-do, there was sometimes in the storm-coming air that leaden, heart-sinking feeling that was the essence of the air of St. Cloud's.
Candy and Wally and Angel would go to St. Cloud's for Christmas, and for the longer of Angel's school vacations, too; and after Angel had his driver's license, he was free to visit his father as often as he liked, which was often.
But when Homer Wells went to St. Cloud's-even though Wally had offered him a car-Homer took the train. Homer knew he wouldn't need a car there, and he wanted to arrive the way most of his patients did; he wanted to get the feel of it.
In late November, there was already snow as the train moved north and inland, and by the time the train {713} reached St. Cloud's, the blue-cold snow was deeply on the ground and heavily bent the trees. The stationmaster, who hated to leave the television, was shoveling snow off the platform when the train pulled in. The stationmaster thought he recognized Homer Wells, but the stern, black doctor's bag and the new beard fooled him. Homer had started the beard because it had hurt to shave (after he'd burned his face with the sunlamp), and once the beard had grown for a while, he thought the change would be suitable. Didn't: a beard go with his new name?
'Doctor Stone,' Homer said to the stationmaster, introducing himself. 'Fuzzy Stone,' he said. '1 used to be an orphan here. Now I'm the new doctor.'
'Oh, I thought you was familiar!' the stationmaster said, bowing as he shook Homer's hand.
Only one other passenger had gotten off the train in St. Cloud's and Homer Wells had no difficulty imagining what she wanted. She was a thin young woman in a long muskrat coat with a scarf, and a ski hat pulled almost over her eyes, and she hung back on the platform, waiting for Homer to move away from the stationmaster, It was the doctor's bag that had caught her attention, and after Homer had arranged for the usual louts to tote his heavier luggage, he started up the hill to the orphanage carrying just the doctor's bag; the young woman followed him.
They walked uphill in this fashion, with the woman lagging purposefully behind, until they almost reached the girls' division. Then Homer stopped walking and waited for her.
'Is this the way to the orphanage?' the young woman asked him.
'Right,' said Homer Wells. Since he had grown the beard, he tended to oversmile at people; he imagined that the beard made it hard for people to tell whether he was smiling.
'Are you the doctor?' the young woman asked him, staring at the snow on both their boots-and, warily, at the doctor's bag.{714}
'Yes, I'm Doctor Stone,' he said, taking the woman's arm and leading her toward the hospital entrance of the boys' division. 'May I help you?' he asked her.
And so he arrived, as Nurse Edna would say, bringing the Lord's work with him. Nurse Angela threw her arms around his neck and whispered in his ear. 'Oh Homer!' she whispered. 'I knew you'd be back!'
'Call me “Fuzzy,” ' he whispered to her, because he knew that Homer Wells (like Rose Rose) was long gone.
For several days, Nurse Caroline would be shy with him, but he wouldn't need more than a few operations and a few deliveries to convince her that he was the real thing. Dr. Stone, even as a name, would be a fitting successor to Dr. Larch. For wasn't Stone a good, hard, feet-on-the-ground, reliable-sounding sort of name for a physician?
And Mrs. Grogan would remark that she had not enjoyed being read aloud to so much since those hard-toremember days of Homer Wells. And it was to everyone's relief that Fuzzy Stone would exhibit as few symptoms of his former respiratory difficulties as Homer Wells had exhibited signs of a weak and damaged heart.
Candy and Wally Worthington would throw themselves full tilt into apple farming. Wally would serve two terms as president of the Maine Horticultural Society; Candy would serve a term as director of the New York- New England Apple Institute. And Angel Wells, whom Rose Rose had introduced to love and to imagination, would one day be a noveliSt.
'The kid's got fiction in his blood,' Wally would tell Homer Wells.
To Candy, a novelist was also what Homer Wells had become-for a novelist, in Candy's opinion, was also a kind of impostor doctor, but a good doctor nonetheless.
Homer never minded giving up his name-it wasn't his actual name, to begin with-and it was as easy to be a Fuzzy as it was to be a Homer-as easy (or as hard) to be a Stone as it was to be anything else.{715}
When he was tired or plagued with insomnia (or both), he would miss Angel, or he would think of Candy. Sometimes he longed to carry Wally into the surf, or to fly with him. Some nights Homer imagined he would be caught, or he worried about what he would do when Nurse Angela and Nurse Edna were too old for the Lord's work, and for all the other work in St. Cloud's. And how would he ever replace Mrs. Grogan? Sometimes, when he was especially tired, he dreamed that abortions were legal-that they were safe and available, and therefore he could stop performing them (because someone else would do them)-but he was rarely that tired.
And, after a while, he would write to Candy and say that he had become a socialist; or, at least, that he'd become sympathetic to socialist views. Candy understood by this confession that Homer was sleeping with Nurse Caroline, which she also understood would be good for them-that is, this new development was good for Homer and for Nurse Caroline, and it was good for Candy, too.
Homer Wells saw no end to the insights he perceived nightly, in his continuous reading from Jane Eyre, and from David Copperfield and Great Expectations. He would smile to remember how he had once thought Dickens was 'better than' Bronte. When they both gave such huge entertainment and instruction, what did it matter? he thought-and from where comes this childish business of 'better'? If not entertainment, he took continued instruction from Gray's Anatomy.
For a while, he lacked one thing-and he was about to order it when one came unordered to him. 'As if from God,' Mrs. Grogan would say.
The stationmaster sent him the message: there was a body at the railroad station, addressed to Dr. Stone. It was from the hospital in Bath-which had been Dr. Larch's long-standing source for bodies, in the days when he'd ordered them. It was some mistake, Homer Wells was sure, but he went to the railroad to view the body {716} anyway-and to spare the stationmaster any unnecessary agitation.
Homer stood staring at the cadaver (which had been correctly prepared) for such a long time that the stationmaster grew even more anxious. 'I'd just as soon you either take it up the hill, or send it back,' the stationmaster said, but Homer Wells waved the fool off; he wanted peace to look at Melony.
She had requested this use of her body, Lorna had told the pathologist at the Bath hospital. Melony had seen a photograph in the Bath paper, together with an article revealing Dr. Stone's appointment in St. Cloud's. In the event of her death (which was caused by an electrical accident), Melony had instructed Lorna to send her body to Dr. Stone in St. Cloud's. 'I might be of some use to him, finally,' she had told her friend. Of course Homer remembered how Melony had been jealous of Clara.
He would write to Lorna; they would correspond for a while. Lorna would inform him that Melony was 'a relatively happy woman at the time of her accident'; in Lorna's opinion, something to do with how relaxed Melony had become was responsible for her electrocuting herself. 'She was a daydreamer,' Lorna would write. Homer knew that all orphans were daydreamers. 'You was her hero, finally,' Lorna would tell him.
When he viewed her body, he knew he could never use it for a refresher course; he would send to Bath for another cadaver. Melony had been used enough.
'Should I send it back, Doctor?' the stationmaster whispered.
'No, she belongs here,' Homer Wells told him, and so he had Melony brought uphill. It would be essential to keep the sight of her in her present form a secret from Mrs. Grogan. What Homer told them all was that Melony had requested she be buried in St. Cloud's, and so she was-on the hill, under the apple trees, where it was torturously hard to dig a correct hole (the root systems of the trees were everywhere). Finally, a large and {717} deep enough hole was managed, although it was backbreaking labor, and Nurse Caroline said, 'I don't know who she is, but she sure is difficult.'
'She was always that,' said Homer Wells.
('Here in St. Cloud's,' Wilbur Larch had written, 'we learn to love the difficult.')
Mrs. Grogan said her Cardinal Newman over Melony's grave, and Homer said his own prayer (to himself) about her. He had always expected much from Melony. but she had provided him with more than he'd ever expected- she had truly educated him, she had shown him the light. She was more Sunshine than he ever was, he thought. ('Let us be happy for Melony,' he said to himself. 'Melony has found a family.')
But chiefly, for his education, he would peruse (and linger over every word of) A Brief History of St. Cloud's. In this pursuit, he would have Nurse Angela's and Nurse Edna's and Mrs. Grogan's and Nurse Caroline's tireless company, for by this pursuit they would keep Wilbur Larch alive.
Not that everything was clear to Homer: the later entries in A Brief History of St. Cloud's were marred by shorthand inspirations and the whimsy conveyed to Larch through ether. For example, what did Larch mean by 'rhymes with screams!'? And it seemed uncharacteristically harsh of Larch to have written: 'I put the pony's penis in her mouth! I contributed to that!' How could he have thought that? Homer wondered, because Homer never knew how well Dr. Larch had known Mrs. Eames's daughter.
And as he grew older, Homer Wells (alias Fuzzy Stone) would take special comfort in an unexplained revelation he found in the writings of Wilbur Larch.
'Tell Dr. Stone,' Dr. Larch wrote-and this was his very last entry; these were Wilbur's last words: 'There is absolutely nothing wrong with Homer's heart.' Except for the ether, Homer Wells knew there had been very little that was wrong with the heart of Wilbur Larch.{718}
To Nurse Edna, who was in love, and to Nurse Angela, who wasn't (but who had in her wisdom named both Homer Wells and Fuzzy Stone), there was no fault to be found in the hearts of either Dr. Stone or Dr. Larch, who were-if there ever were-Princes of Maine, Kings of New England.