The Cider House Rules (43 page)

'I can't fire those guys,' the foreman told her. 'They've worked here all their lives.'

'So call the police, then,' Melony said.

'She's threatening you,' the fat man's wife said to the foreman.

'No shit,' Melony said.

The foreman got Melony settled comfortably in the cider house.

'You can stay here, at least until the pickin' crew comes,' he said. 'I don't know if you want to stay here when they're here. Sometimes there's women with them, and sometimes there's kids, but if it's just men, I don't think you want to stay here. They're Negroes.'

'It'll do for now, anyway,' Melony said, looking around.

There were fewer beds than there were in the Worthingtons' cider house, and it was a lot less neat and clean, York Farm was a much smaller, poorer orchard than Ocean View, and there was no one there who cared very much about the style and shape of the quarters for the migrants; York Farm was without an Olive Worthing ton. The vinegar smell was stronger in the York Farm cider house, and behind the press were dried clots of pomace that clung to the wall like apple scab. There was no stove in the kitchen section—just a hot plate, which tended to blow the old fuses. There was one fuse box for the pump and grinder and the low-watt, overhead bulbs; the light in the refrigerator was out, but this at least made the mold less visible.

It was fine for Melony, who had contributed, lastingly, to the history of the many wrecked rooms in both the abandoned and the lived-in buildings of St. Cloud's.

'This Ocean View—the one you're lookin' for?' the {348} foreman asked. 'How come you're lookin' for it?'

'I'm looking for my boyfriend,' Melony told him.

She has a
boyfriend?
the foreman wondered.

He went to see how the men were doing. The fat man, whose wife had accompanied him to the hospital (although she had not spoken to him, and wouldn't for more than three months), sat rather placidly through his stitches, but he grew quite excited when the foreman told him that he'd fixed Melony up in the cider house and had given her a job—at least through the harvest.

'You gave her a job!' the fat man cried. 'She's a killer!'

Then you better keep the fuck out of her way,' the foreman told him. 'If you get in her way I'll have to fire you—she damn near made me, already.'

The fat man had a broken nose and needed a total of forty-one stitches, thirty-seven in his face and four in his tongue where he had bitten himself.

The man called Charley was better off in the stitches department. He required only four—to close the wound in his ear. But Melony had cracked two of his ribs by jumping on him; he had received a concussion from having his head stamped on; and his lower back would suffer such repeated muscle spasms that he would be kept off a ladder through the harvest.

'Holy cow,' Charley said to the foreman. 'I'd hate to meet the son-of-a-bitch who's her
boyfriend.'

'Just keep out of her way,' the foreman advised him.

'Has she still got my belt?' Charley asked the foreman.

'If you ask her for your belt back, I'll have to fire you.

Get yourself a new belt,' the foreman said.

'You won't see me askin' her for nothin',' Charley said. 'She didn't say her boyfriend was coming here, did she?' he asked the foreman, but the foreman said that if Melony was looking for her boyfriend, the boyfriend must not have given her any directions; he must have left her. 'And God help him if he left her,' the foreman said— over and over again.

'Well,' said the woman in the apple mart who had {349} called Melony a tramp. 'If you had a woman like that, wouldn't you try to leave her?'

'In the first place,' the foreman said, 'I wouldn't ever have a woman like that. And in the second place, if I
did
have her, I'd never leave her—I wouldn't dare.'

In the cider house at York Farm—somewhere inland from York Harbor, somewhere west of Ogunquit, with several hundred miles of coastline between her and Homer Wells—Melony lay listening to the mice. Sometimes they scurried, sometimes they gnawed. The first mouse bold enough to race across the foot of her mattress was swatted so hard with the buckle end of Charley's belt that it flew across four beds, all in a row, and struck the wall with a soft thud. Melony promptly retrieved it—it was quite dead, its back broken. With the aid of a pencil without a point, Melony was able to prop the dead mouse into a sitting position on her night table, an inverted apple crate, which she then moved to the foot of her bed. It was her belief that the dead mouse might function as: a kind of totem, to warn other mice away, and indeed— no mouse bothered Melony for several hours. She lay in the weak light: reading
Jane Eyre
—the empty, dark orchard ripening all around her.

She reread, twice, that passage near the end of Chapter Twenty-seven that concludes: 'Preconceived opinions, foregone determinations, are all I haive at this hour to stand by: there I plant my foot.'

With that she closed the book and turned out the light. Melony lay bravely on her back, her broacl nostrils full of the sharp cider-vinegar air—the same air Homer Wells is smelling, she thought. Just before she fell asleep, she whispered—although there were only the mice to hear her—'Good night, Sunshine.'

The next day it rained. It rained from Kennebunkport to Christmas Cove. There was such a strong northeast wind that the flags on the boats moored at the Haven Club, even though they were saturated with rain, pointed to {350} shore, and made a brisk snapping sound as constant as the chafe of Ray Kendall's lobster boat against the old worn-rubber tires that padded his dock.

Ray would spend the day under the John Deere in Building Number Two; he was, alternately, replacing the tractor's manifold and sleeping. It was the place he slept best; under a large, familiar machine. He was never detected; his legs at times extended from under the vehicle in a posture of such extreme sprawl that he looked dead—run over or crushed. One of the apple workers, startled to see him, would speak out, 'Ray? Is that you?' Whereupon, like Dr. Larch brought back from ether, Ray Kendall would wake up and say, 'Right here. I'm right here.'

'Some job, huh?' the worried party would inquire.

'Yup,' Ray would say. 'Some job, all right.'

The rain came pelting down, the wind so strongly onshore that the gulls moved inland. At York Farm they huddled against the cider house and woke up Melony with their fretting; at Ocean View they squatted together on the tin roof of the cider house, where a crew of scrubbers and painters were at work again.

Grace Lynch, as usual, had the worst job, scouring the thousand-gallon cider tank; she was kneeling inside the vat, and the sound of her movements in there impressed the others with a kind of furtive energy as if an animal were scrounging for a nest or for its dinner. Meany Hyde had left the cider house on what his wife, Florence, called 'another bullshit errand.' Meany had determined that the fan belt on the conveyor was loose, and so he removed it and said he was taking it to Ray Kendall to see what Ray could do about it.

'So what's Ray gonna do with a loose fan belt?' Florence asked Meany. 'Order a new one, or take a piece out of that one—right?'

'I suppose,' Meany said warily.

'And what do you need the conveyor for today?' Florence asked. {351}

I'm just takin' it to Ray!' Meany said peevishly.

'You don't wanna work too much, do you?' Florence

said, and Meany shuffled out into the rain; he smiled and

winked at Homer Wells as he was climbing into the

pickup.

'I got a lazy husband,' Florence said happily.

'That's better than some other kinds,' said Irene Titcomb—and everyone automatically looked in the direction of the thousand-gallon vat where Grace' Lynch was feverishly scrubbing.

Irene and Florence, who had patient, steady hands, were painting the sashes and the window trim in the bedroom wing of the cider house. Homer Wells and Big Dot Taft and Big Dot's kid sister, Debra Pettigrew, were painting the kitchen with broader, more carefree strokes.

'I hope you don't feel I'm crampin' you.,' Big Dot said to Debra and Homer. 'I ain't your chaperone or nothin'. If you want to make out, just go right ahead.'

Debra Pettigrew looked embarrassed and cross, and Homer smiled shyly. It was funny, he thought, how you have two or three dates with someone—and just kiss them and touch them in a few odd places—and everyone starts talking to you as if you've got
doing it
on your mind every minute. Homer's mind was much more on Grace Lynch in the vat than it was on Debra Pettigrew, who stood right beside him painting the same wall. When Homer encountered the light switch by the kitchen door, he asked Big Dot Taft if he should just paint all around it or let Florence and Irene, with their smaller brushes, trim it more neatly.

'Just paint right over it,' said Big Dot Taft. 'We do this every year. We just make it look new and fresh. We're not tryin' to win no neatness contest.'

By the light switch, there was a tack that pinned a piece of typing paper to the wall—the type itself was very faint, from long exposure to the sunlight that came through the kitchen's curtainless windows. It was some {352} kind of list; the bottom quarter of the page had been torn away; whatever it was, it was incomplete. Homer pulled the tack out of the wall and would have crumpled the paper and tossed it toward the trash barrel if the top line of type hadn't caught his attention.

CIDER HOUSE RULES

the top line said.

What
rules? he wondered, reading down the page. The rules were numbered.

1 .Please don't operate the grinder or the press if you've been drinking.

2.Please don't smoke in bed or use candles.

3.Please don't go up on the roof if you've been drinking —especially at night.

4.Please wash out the press cloths the same day or night they are used.

5.Please remove the rotary screen immediately after you've finished pressing and hose it clean WHEN THE POMACE IS STILL WET ON IT!

6.Please don't take bottles with you when you go up on the roof.

7.Please—even if you are very hot (or if you've been drinking)—don't go into the cold-storage room to sleep.

8.Please give your shopping list to the crew boss by seven o'clock in the morning.

9.There should be no more than half a dozen people on the roof at any one time.

If there were a few more rules, Homer couldn't read them because the page had been ripped off. Homer handed the torn paper to Big Dot Taft.

'What's all this about the roof?' he asked Debra Pettigrew. {353}

'You can see the ocean from the roof,' Debra said.

'That ain't it,' said Big Dot Taft. 'At night you can see the Ferris wheel and the carnival lights in Cape Kenneth.'

'Big deal,' said Homer Wells.

'It's no big deal to me, either,' Big Dot Taft said, 'but those darkies really like it.'

They sit up on the roof all night, some nights,' Debra Pettigrew said.

They get drunk up there and fall off, some nights,' Florence Hyde announced from the bedroom wing.

They break bottles up there and cut themselves all up,' said Irene Titcomb.

'Well, not every night, they don't,' said Big Dot Taft.

'And one night one of them got so drunk and sweaty, running the press, that he passed out in the cold! storage and woke up with pneumonia,' Debra Pettigrew said.

'You don't exactly “wake up with” pneumonia,' said Homer Weils. 'It's more complicated than that.'

'Excuse
me
,' Debra said sulkily.

'Anyway, nobody pays no attention to them rules,' Big Dot Taft said. 'Every year Olive writes them up, and every year nobody pays no attention.'

'All the pickin' crews we've ever had are just children,' said Florence Hyde. 'If Olive didn't go shoppin' for them everyday, they'd starve.'

They never get themselves organized,' Irene Titcomb said.

'One of them got his whole arm caught in the grinder,' Big Dot Taft recalled. 'Not just his fool hand—his whole arm.'

'Yuck,' said Debra Pettigrew.

'Yuck is what his arm was, all right,' said Florence Hyde.

'How many stitches?' asked Homer Wells.

'You're really curious, you know that?' Debra Pettigrew asked him.

'Well, they don't do no harm, except to themselves,' {354} said Irene Titcomb philosophically. 'What's it matter if they want to drink too much and roll off the roof? Wasn't nobody ever killed here, was there?'

'Not yet,' said Grace Lynch's tight, thin voice, her words strangely amplified because she was speaking from the bottom of the thousand-gallon vat. The combination of the strangeness of her voice and the rareness of her making a contribution of any kind to their conversation made them all silent.

Everyone was just working away when Wally drove up in the green van with Louise Tobey; he dropped Louise off with her own bucket and brush and asked the rest of them if they needed anything—more brushes? more paint?

'Just give me a kiss, honey,' said Florence Hyde.

'Just take us to the movies,' said Big Dot Taft.

'Just propose to me, just propose!' cried Irene Titcomb. Everyone was laughing when Wally left. It was almost lunchtime, and everyone knew that Squeeze Louise had come to work particularly late. She usually arrived with Herb Fowler, more or less on time. Louise looked especially pouty this morning, and no one spoke to her for a while.

'Well, you can be havin' your period, or somethin', and still say good mornin',' said Big Dot Taft after a while.

'Good mornin',' said Louise Tobey.

'La-de-da!' said Irene Titcomb. Debra Pettigrew bumped Homer in the side; when he looked at her, she winked. Nothing else happened until Herb Fowler drove by and offered to take everyone to the Drinkwater Road diner for lunch.

Homer looked at the vat, but Grace Lynch made no appearance over its rim; she just continued her scratching and hissing noises in the vat's bottom. She wouldn't have accepted the invitation, anyway. Homer was thinking he probably should accept it, to get away from Grace Lynch, but he had promised himself to investigate the {355} roof of the cider house—he wanted to find the spot that had glinted to him so mysteriously in the moonlight; and now that he'd heard about the cider house rules and that you could see the ocean—and the Cape Kenneth Ferris wheel!—from the roof, he wanted to climb up there. Even in the rain.