The Cider House Rules (25 page)

“Hey, Herb,” Wally said to him. It was a rainy, late-spring day; college was out, and Wally was working alongside Herb in the storage cellar, which was empty in the spring. They were varnishing ladders, and when they finished the ladders, they would start painting the tracks for the conveyors that ran nonstop when the packinghouse was in full operation. Every year, everything was repainted.

“Yup, that’s my name,” Herb said. He kept a cigarette so fixedly drooped from his lips that his eyes were always squinted half shut, and he kept his long face tipped up and back so that he could inhale the trail of smoke through his nose.

“Herb, I was wondering,” Wally said. “If you got a girl pregnant, what would you do about it. Knowing your view,” Wally smartly added, “about keeping yourself free.” That stole Herb’s punch line and probably made Herb cross; he had a rubber half out of his pocket, ready to flip at Wally while delivering his usual remark on the subject, but Wally’s saying it for him forced him to arrest the motion of his flipping hand. He never brought the rubber out.

“Who’d you knock up?” Herb asked, instead.

Wally corrected him. “I didn’t say I’d knocked up anybody. I asked you what
you’d
do
—if.
”

Herb Fowler disappointed Wally. All he knew about was the same mysterious parking lot in Cape Kenneth—something about a blindfold, a butcher, and five hundred dollars.

“Maybe Meany Hyde would know about it,” Herb added. “Why don’tcha ask Meany what
he’d
do if
he
knocked anybody up?” Herb Fowler smiled at Wally—he was not a nice character—but Wally wouldn’t satisfy him; Wally just smiled back.

Meany Hyde
was
a nice man. He’d grown up with a bunch of older brothers who beat him up and otherwise abused him steadily. His brothers had nicknamed him Meany—probably just to confuse him. Meany was ever-friendly; he had a friendly wife, Florence, who was one of the packinghouse and apple mart women; there had been so many children that Wally couldn’t remember all their names, or tell one from the other, and therefore he found it hard to imagine that Meany Hyde even knew what an abortion was.

“Meany listens to everything,” Herb Fowler told Wally. “Don’tcha ever watch Meany? What’s he
do,
except listen.”

So Wally went to find Meany Hyde. Meany was waxing the press boards for the cider press; he was generally in charge of the cider mill, and because of his nice disposition, he was often in charge of overseeing all the cider house activities—including the dealings with the migrant workers who lived in the cider house during the harvest. Olive made a point of keeping Herb Fowler at a considerable distance from those poor migrant workers; Herb’s disposition was not so agreeable.

Wally watched Meany Hyde waxing for a while. The sharp but clean odor of the fermented cider and the old cider apples was strongest on a wet day, but Meany seemed to like it; Wally didn’t mind it, either.

“Say, Meany,” Wally said, after a while.

“I thought you forgot my name,” Meany said cheerfully.

“Meany, what do you know about abortion?” Wally asked.

“I know it’s a sin,” Meany Hyde said, “and I know Grace Lynch has had one—and in her case, I sympathize with her—if you know what I mean.”

Grace Lynch was Vernon Lynch’s wife; Wally—and everyone else—knew that Vernon beat her. They had no children; it was rumored that this was the result of Vernon’s beating Grace so much that Grace’s organs of generation (as Homer Wells knew them) were damaged. Grace was one of the pie women during the harvest and when the apple mart was humming; Wally wondered if she’d be working today. There was lots to do in the orchards on a good day in late spring; but when it was raining, there was just painting and washing, or fixing up the cider house to get it ready for the harvest.

It was just like Meany Hyde to be waxing the press boards too early. Someone would probably tell him to wax them again, just before it was time for the first press. But Meany didn’t like painting or washing up, and when it rained, he could kill whole days fussing over his beloved cider press.

“Who do you know needs an abortion, Wally?” Meany Hyde asked.

“A friend of a friend,” Wally said, which would have prompted a rubber from Herb Fowler’s pocket, but Meany was nice—he took no pleasure in anyone else’s bad luck.

“That’s a shame, Wally,” Meany said. “I think you should speak to Grace about it—just don’t speak to her when Vernon’s around.”

Wally didn’t have to be told that. He had often seen the bruises on the backs of Grace Lynch’s arms where Vernon had grabbed her and shook her. Once he had seized her by the arms and yanked her toward him, lowering his head in order to butt her in the face. This had happened, Wally knew, because Senior had paid for Grace’s dental work (she’d told Senior and Olive that she’d fallen downstairs). Vernon had also beaten up a black man, one of the migrants, in the orchard called Old Trees, several harvests ago. The men had been telling jokes, and the black man had offered a joke of his own. Vernon hadn’t liked a black man telling jokes that had anything to do with sex—he’d told Wally, in fact, that black people should be prevented from having sex.

“Or pretty soon,” Vernon had said, “there’ll be too many of them.”

In the Old Trees orchard, Vernon had snapped the man off his ladder, and when the man picked himself off the ground, Vernon held both his arms and butted him in the face over and over again, until Everett Taft, who was one of the foremen, and Ira Titcomb, the beekeeper, had to pull Vernon off. The black man had taken over twenty stitches in his mouth, in his lips, and in his tongue; everyone knew Grace Lynch hadn’t lost her teeth falling down any stairs.

It was Vernon who should have had Meany’s name, or something worse.

“Wally?” Meany asked him, as he was leaving the cider house. “Don’t tell Grace
I
told you to ask her.”

So Wally went looking for Grace Lynch. He drove the pickup through the muddy lane that divided the orchard called Frying Pan, because it was in a valley, and was the hottest to work in, from the orchard called Doris, after someone’s wife. He drove to the building called Number Two (it was simply the second building for keeping the larger vehicles; the sprayers were sheltered in Number Two because the building was more isolated, and the sprayers—and the chemicals that went inside them—stank). Vernon Lynch was painting in there; he had a spray gun with a long, needlelike nozzle and he was hosing down the Hardie five-hundred-gallon sprayer with a fresh coat of apple red. Vernon wore a respirator to protect himself from the paint fumes (it was the same mask the men wore when they sprayed the trees), and he wore his foul-weather gear—the complete oilskin suit. Wally somehow knew it was Vernon, although not a single feature of Vernon was visible. Vernon had a way of attacking his work that made his actions unmistakably his, and Wally noticed that Vernon was painting the Hardie as if he were wielding a flamethrower. Wally drove on; he didn’t want to ask Vernon where his wife was today. Wally shuddered as he imagined several of Vernon’s leering responses.

In the empty, off-season apple mart, three of the mart women were smoking cigarettes and talking. They didn’t have much to do; and when they saw the boss’s son coming, they didn’t throw down their coffee cups, stamp out their cigarettes and disperse in different directions. They just stepped a little away from one another and smiled at Wally sheepishly.

Florence Hyde, Meany’s wife, didn’t even pretend to be busy at anything; she dragged on her cigarette, and called out to Wally. “Hi, honey!”

“Hi, Florence,” Wally said, smiling.

Big Dot Taft, who’d miraculously run a mile, getting stung all the while, the night Senior had dumped Ira Titcomb’s bees, put out her cigarette and picked up an empty crate; then she put the crate down and wondered where she’d left her broom. “Hi, cutey,” Dot said to Wally cheerfully.

“What’s new?” Wally asked the women.

“Nothing new here,” said Irene Titcomb, Ira’s wife. She laughed and turned her face away. She was always laughing—and turning away the side of her face with the burn scar, as if she were meeting you for the first time and could keep the scar a secret. The accident had happened years ago, and there couldn’t have been anyone in Heart’s Haven or Heart’s Rock who hadn’t seen Irene Titcomb’s scar and didn’t know the exact details of how she got it.

One night Ira Titcomb had sat out in his yard all night with an oil torch and a shotgun; something had been getting into his hives—probably a bear or a raccoon. Irene had known this was Ira’s plan, yet she was surprised when she woke up, hearing him calling her. He was on the lawn and waving the lit torch under her window; all she saw was the torchlight. He asked her to make him some bacon and eggs, if she wouldn’t mind, because he was so bored waiting for whatever it was he intended to shoot that he’d gotten hungry.

Irene was humming to herself, watching the bacon fry, when Ira came to the kitchen window and tapped on the pane to find out if the food was ready. Irene was unprepared for the vision of Ira in his beekeeper suit, moving out of the darkness and into the faint light from the kitchen window with fire in his hands. She had seen her husband in his beekeeper suit many times, but she hadn’t imagined that he’d be wearing it while he waited to shoot a bear or a coon. She’d never seen the way the suit glowed in firelight, or at night, either.

Ira had worn the suit because he’d imagined that his shotgun blast might rip into one of the hives and loose a few bees. He had no intention of scaring his wife, but poor Irene looked out the window and saw what she thought was a flaming white apparition! No doubt
this
was what had been molesting the hives! The ghost of a beekeeper of bygone days! It had probably killed poor Ira and was now coming for her! The frying pan flew up in her hands, splashing the hot bacon grease on her face. Irene was lucky she didn’t blind herself. Oh, those at-home accidents! How they surprise you.

“Whatcha want, big boy?” Big Dot Taft asked Wally. The apple mart women teased and flirted with Wally endlessly; they thought he was gorgeous and a lot of fun, and these three had known him since he was a little boy.

“He wants to take us for a ride!” cried Irene Titcomb, still laughing—her face still turned away.

“Why don’t you take us to a movie, Wally?” Florence Hyde asked him.

“Oh, God, what I wouldn’t do for you, Wally,” Dot Taft said, “if you took me to a movie!”

“Don’t you want to make us happy, Wally?” Florence asked him, whining a little.

“Maybe Wally’s going to
fire
us!” Irene Titcomb shrieked, and that broke up the three of them. Dot Taft roared so loud that Florence Hyde inhaled her cigarette the wrong way and began to cough, which made Dot roar some more.

“Is Grace here today?” Wally asked casually, when the women calmed down.

“Oh, God, he wants Grace!” Dot Taft said. “What’s she got that we haven’t got?”

Bruises, Wally thought. Broken bones, false teeth—certainly genuine aches and pains.

“I just want to ask her something,” Wally said, smiling shyly—his shyness was deliberate; he handled himself very smoothly around the mart women.

“I’ll bet she’ll say ‘No!’ ” Irene Titcomb said, giggling.

“No, everyone says ‘Yes!’ to Wally,” Florence Hyde teased.

Wally allowed the laughter to subside.

Then Dot Taft said, “Grace is cleaning the pie oven.”

“Thank you, ladies,” Wally said, bowing, blowing them kisses, backing away.

“You’re bad, Wally,” Florence Hyde told him. “You just came here to make us jealous.”

“That Grace must have a hot oven,” Dot Taft said, and this started more laughter and coughing.

“Don’t get burned, Wally,” Irene Titcomb called after him, and he left the mart women chattering and smoking at a higher pitch than when he’d found them.

He was not surprised that Grace Lynch had drawn the worst job for a rainy day. The other women sympathized with her, but she was not one of them. She stood apart, as if she were afraid everyone might suddenly turn on her and beat her as badly as Vernon did, as if the beatings she’d already survived had cost her the necessary humor for trading stories equally with Florence and Irene and Dot.

Grace Lynch was much thinner and a little younger than these women; her thinness was unusual among the regular mart women. Even Herb Fowler’s girlfriend (Squeeze Louise) was heftier than Grace, and Dot Taft’s kid sister, Debra Pettigrew—who was fairly regular in pie season, and when the assembly line to the packinghouse was running—even Debra had more flesh on her than Grace had.

And since she had needed new teeth, Grace was even tighter-lipped than usual; there was a grim concentration to the narrow line of her mouth. Wally couldn’t remember ever seeing Grace Lynch laugh—and some form of yucking it up was essential to relieve the boredom of the life of the apple mart women. Grace was simply the cowed dog among them. She didn’t look as if she took any pleasure from eating pie—or from eating anything at all. She didn’t smoke, and in 194_ everyone smoked—even Wally. She was noise-shy and flinched around the machinery.

Wally hoped she was wearing long sleeves so that he wouldn’t have to look at the bruises on her arms, but she was half in one of the deep shelves of the pie oven when Wally found her; she was wearing a long-sleeved shirt, but both sleeves were rolled up above her elbows to spare the shirt some of the oven-black. Wally startled her with her head in the oven, and half her body, too, and Grace made a little cry and banged one of her elbows against the door hinge as she withdrew in too much of a hurry.

“Sorry I scared you, Grace,” Wally said quickly—it was hard to walk up on Grace without making her bump into something. She said nothing; she rubbed one elbow; she folded and unfolded her thin arms, hiding her very slight breasts or, by keeping her arms in constant motion, concealing her bruises. She wouldn’t look Wally in the eye; as poised as Wally was, he always felt a terrific tension when he tried to talk with her; he felt she might suddenly run away from him or throw herself at him—either with her claws out, or kissing him with her tongue stabbing.