The Cider House Rules (49 page)

In the morning Wally left, halfheartedly, for the university in Orono. The next day, Candy left for Camden Academy. The day before the picking crew arrived at Ocean View, Homer Wells—the tallest and oldest boy at Cape Kenneth High School—attended the first class meeting of Senior Biology. His friend Debra Pettigrew had to lead him to the laboratory; Homer got lost en route and wandered into a class called Wood Shop.

The textbook for Senior Biology was B. A. Bensley’s
Practical Anatomy of the Rabbit;
the text and illustrations were intimidating to the other students, but the book filled Homer Wells with longing. It was a shock for him to realize how much he missed Dr. Larch’s well-worn copy of
Gray’s.
Homer, at first glance, was critical of Bensley; whereas
Gray’s
began with the skeleton, Bensley began with the tissues. But the teacher of the class was no fool; a cadaverous man was Mr. Hood, but he pleased Homer Wells by announcing that he did not intend to follow the text exactly—the class, like
Gray’s,
would begin with the bones. Comforted by what, for him, was routine, Homer relished his first look at the ancient yellowed skeleton of a rabbit. The class was hushed; some students were repulsed. Wait till they get to the urogenital system, thought Homer Wells, his eyes skimming over the perfect bones; but this thought shocked him, too. He realized he was looking forward to getting to the poor rabbit’s urogenital system.

He had a lateral view of the rabbit’s skull; he tested himself with the naming of parts—it was so easy for him: cranial, orbital, nasal, frontal, mandible, maxilla, premaxilla. How well he remembered Clara and the others who had taught him so much!

As for Clara, she was finally put to rest in a place she might not have chosen for herself—the cemetery in St. Cloud’s was in the abandoned part of town. Perhaps this was appropriate, thought Dr. Larch, who supervised Clara’s burial, because Clara herself had been abandoned—and surely she had been more explored and examined than she had ever been loved.

Nurse Edna was shocked to see the departing coffin, but Nurse Angela assured her that none of the orphans had passed away in the night. Mrs. Grogan accompanied Dr. Larch to the cemetery; Larch had asked her to come with him because he knew that Mrs. Grogan enjoyed every opportunity to say her prayer. (There was no minister or priest or rabbi in St. Cloud’s; if holy words were in order, someone from Three Mile Falls came and said them. It was a testimony to Wilbur Larch’s increasing isolationism that he refused to send to Three Mile Falls for anything, and that he preferred Mrs. Grogan—if he was forced to listen to holy words at all.)

It was the first burial that Wilbur Larch had wept over; Mrs. Grogan knew that his tears were not for Clara. Larch wouldn’t have buried Clara if he’d thought that Homer Wells would ever be coming back.

“Well, he’s
wrong,
” Nurse Angela said. “Even a saint can make a mistake. Homer Wells
will
be back. He
belongs
here, like it or not.”

Is it the ether? Dr. Larch wondered. He meant, was it the ether that gave him the sense, increasingly, that he knew everything that was going to happen? For example, he had anticipated the letter that arrived for F. Stone—forwarded from Fuzzy’s P.O. box address. “Is this some sick joke?” Nurse Angela asked, turning the envelope around and around.

“I’ll take that, please,” Dr. Larch said. It was from the board of trustees, as he had expected. That was why they’d wanted those follow-up reports from him and why they’d requested the addresses of the orphans. They were checking up on him, Larch knew.

The letter to Fuzzy began with cordial good wishes; it said that the board knew a great deal about Fuzzy from Dr. Larch, but they wished to know anything further about Fuzzy’s “St. Cloud’s experience”—anything, naturally, that he wanted to “share” with them.

The “St. Cloud’s experience” sounded to Wilbur Larch like a mystical happening. The attached questionnaire made him furious, although he did amuse himself by trying to imagine which of the questions had been conceived by the tedious Dr. Gingrich and which of them had flowed from the chilling mind of Mrs. Goodhall. Dr. Larch also had fun imagining how Homer Wells and Snowy Meadows and Curly Day—and all the others—would answer the silly questionnaire, but he took the immediate business very seriously. He wanted Fuzzy Stone’s answers to the questionnaire to be perfect. He wanted to be sure that the board of trustees would never forget Fuzzy Stone.

There were five questions. Every single one of them was based upon the incorrect assumption that every child must have been at least five or six years old before he—or she—was adopted. This and other stupidities convinced Wilbur Larch that Dr. Gingrich and Mrs. Goodhall were going to be easy adversaries.

1. Was your life at St. Cloud’s properly supervised? (Please include in your answer if you ever felt that your treatment was especially affectionate, or especially instructive; we would certainly want to hear if you felt your treatment was ever abusive.)

2. Did you receive adequate medical attention at St. Cloud’s?

3. Were you adequately prepared for your new life in a foster home, and do you feel your foster home was carefully and correctly chosen?

4. Would you suggest any possible improvements in the methods and management of St. Cloud’s? (Specifically, would you feel things might have gone more smoothly for you if there had been a more youthful, energetic staff in residence—or perhaps, simply a larger staff?)

5. Was any attempt made to integrate the daily life of the orphanage with the life of the surrounding community?

“
What
community?” screamed Wilbur Larch. He stood at the window in Nurse Angela’s office and stared at the bleak hillside where Wally had wanted to plant apple trees. Why hadn’t they come back and planted the stupid trees, even if all that business was just to please me? Larch wondered.

“What
community
?” he howled.

Oh yes, he thought, I could have asked the stationmaster to offer them religious instruction—to speak to them about the terrifying chaos of homeless souls hovering in every niche of the sky. I could have asked that worthy gentleman to display his underwear catalogues, too.

I could have asked the family of child beaters from Three Mile Falls to come once a week and give lessons. I could have detained a few of the women having abortions and asked them to reveal, to all of us, why they didn’t want to have children at that particular moment in their lives; or I could have invited a few of the mothers back—they could have explained to the children why they were left here!
That
would have been instructive! Oh God, thought Wilbur Larch, what a
community
we could have been—if only I’d been more youthful, more
energetic
!

Oh yes, I have made some mistakes, he thought; and for a black hour or two, he remembered some of them. If only I knew how to build a breathing machine, he thought—if only I could have come up with a different set of lungs for Fuzzy.

And maybe Homer Wells will tell them that he was not “adequately prepared” for his first view of the fetus on the hill. And had there been a way to prepare Homer for Three Mile Falls, for the Drapers of Waterville, or for the Winkles being swept away? What was my choice? wondered Wilbur Larch. I suppose that I could have
not
apprenticed him.

“We are put on this earth to be of use,” Wilbur Larch (as Fuzzy Stone) wrote to the board of trustees. “It is better to
do
than to criticize,” wrote that young idealist, Fuzzy Stone. “It is better to do anything than to stand idly by.” You tell ’em, Fuzzy! thought Dr. Larch.

And so Fuzzy Stone told the board of trustees that the hospital at St. Cloud’s was a model of the form. “It was Larch who made me want to be a doctor,” Fuzzy wrote. “That old guy, Larch—he’s an inspiration. You talk about energy: the guy is as full of pep as a teen-ager.

“You better be careful about sending any young people to St. Cloud’s—old Larch will work them so hard, they’ll get sick. They’ll get so tired out, they’ll retire in a month!

“And you think those old nurses don’t do a day’s work? Let me tell you, when Nurse Angela is pitching for stickball, you’d think you were competing in an Olympic event. You talk about
affectionate—
that’s them, all right. They’re always hugging and kissing you, but they know how to shake some sense into you, too.

“You talk about
supervised,
” Fuzzy Stone wrote. “Did you ever find out that you were being watched by owls? That’s Nurse Edna and Nurse Angela—they’re
owls,
they don’t miss a thing. And some of the girls used to say that Mrs. Grogan knew what they did before they did it—before they even knew they were
going
to do it!

“And you talk about
community,
” wrote Fuzzy Stone. “St. Cloud’s was something special. Why, I remember people would get off the train and walk up the hill just to look the place over—it must have been because we were such a model community, for that area. I just remember these people, coming and going, coming and going—they were just there to look us over, as if we were one of the marvels of Maine.”

One of the marvels of Maine? thought Wilbur Larch, struggling to get control of himself. A stray puff of wind blew in the open window in Nurse Angela’s office, carrying some of the black smoke from the incinerator with it; the smoke brought Larch nearer to his senses. I’d better stop, he thought. I don’t want to get carried away.

He rested in the dispensary after his historical effort. Nurse Edna looked in on him once; Wilbur Larch was one of the marvels of Maine to her, and she was worried about him.

Larch was a little worried himself, when he woke. Where had the time gone? The problem is that I have to
last,
he thought. He could rewrite history but he couldn’t touch time; dates were fixed; time marched at its own pace. Even if he could convince Homer Wells to go to a real medical school, it would take time. It would take a few years for Fuzzy Stone to complete his training. I have to last until Fuzzy is qualified to replace me, thought Wilbur Larch.

He felt like hearing Mrs. Grogan’s prayer again, and so he went to the girls’ division a little early for his usual delivery of
Jane Eyre.
He eavesdropped in the hall on Mrs. Grogan’s prayer; I must ask her if she’d mind saying it to the boys, he thought, then wondered if it would confuse the boys, coming so quickly on the heels of, or just before, the Princes of Maine, Kings of New England benediction. I get confused myself sometimes, Dr. Larch knew.

“Grant us a safe lodging, and a holy rest,” Mrs. Grogan was saying, “and peace at the last.”

Amen, thought Wilbur Larch, the saint of St. Cloud’s, who was seventy-something, and an ether addict, and who felt that he’d come a long way and still had a long way to go.

When Homer Wells read the questionnaire sent him by the St. Cloud’s board of trustees, he did not know exactly what made him anxious. Of course Dr. Larch and the others were getting older, but they were always “older” to him. It did occur to him to wonder what might happen to St. Cloud’s when Dr. Larch was too old, but this thought was so troubling that he tucked the questionnaire and the return envelope to the board into his copy of
Practical Anatomy of the Rabbit.
Besides, it was the day the migrants arrived; it was harvest time at Ocean View, and Homer Wells was busy.

He and Mrs. Worthington met the picking crew at the apple mart, and led them to their quarters in the cider house—more than half the crew had picked at Ocean View before and knew the way, and the crew boss was what Mrs. Worthington called “an old hand.” He looked very young to Homer. It was the first year that Mrs. Worthington dealt directly with the picking crew and their boss; the hiring relationship, by mail, had been one of Senior Worthington’s responsibilities, and Senior had always maintained that if you kept a good crew boss, year after year, all the hiring—and the necessary taking-charge of the crew during the harvest—would be conducted by the boss.

His name was Arthur Rose, and he looked about Wally’s age—just barely older than Homer—although he must have been older; he’d been the crew boss for five or six years. One year Senior Worthington had written to the old man who’d been his crew boss for as long as Olive could remember and Arthur Rose had written back to Senior saying he was going to be the crew boss now—“the old boss,” Arthur Rose had written, “he’s dead tired of traveling.” As it turned out, the old boss was just dead, but Arthur Rose had done a good job. He brought the right number of pickers, and very few of them ever quit, or ran off, or lost more than a day or two of good work because of too much drinking. There seemed to be a firm control over the degree of fighting among them—even when they were accompanied by a woman or two. And when there was an occasional child among them, the child behaved. There were always pickers who fell off ladders, but there’d been no serious injuries. There were always small accidents around the cider press—but that was fast, often late-night work, when the men were tired or drinking a little. And there was the predictable clumsiness or drinking that led to the infrequent accidents involved in the almost ritualistic use of the cider house roof.

Running a farm had given Olive Worthington a warm feeling for the daylight hours and a grave suspicion of the night; the most trouble that people got into, in Olive’s opinion, was trouble that they encountered because they stayed up too late.

Olive had written Arthur Rose of Senior’s death, and told him that the picking-crew responsibility of Ocean View had now fallen to her. She wrote him at the usual address—a P.O. box in a town called Green, South Carolina—and Arthur Rose responded promptly, both with his condolences and with his assurance that the crew would arrive as always, on time and in correct numbers.

He was true to his word. Except when writing his first name on an envelope, or when she annually noted it in his Christmas card (“Happy Holidays, Arthur!”), Olive Worthington never called him Arthur; no one else called him Arthur, either. For reasons that were never explained to Homer Wells but perhaps for a presence of authority that was necessary for a good crew boss to maintain, he was
Mister
Rose to everybody.