The Cider House Rules (85 page)

'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.'