The Cider House Rules (51 page)

Over it all, Melony managed to read. She wasn’t being antisocial, in her view. The two women were nice to her once they realized she was not after any of the men. The men were respectful of her work—and of the mark upon her that was made by the missing boyfriend. Although they teased her, they meant her no harm.

She had lied, successfully, to one of the men, and the lie, as she knew it would, had gotten around. The man was named Wednesday, for no reason that was ever explained to Melony—and she wasn’t interested enough to ask. Wednesday had asked her too many questions about the particular Ocean View she was looking for and the boyfriend she was trying to find.

She had snagged her ladder in a loaded tree and was trying to ease it free without shaking any apples to the ground; Wednesday was helping her, when Melony said, “Pretty tight pants I’m wearing, wouldn’t you say?”

Wednesday looked at her and said, “Yeah, I would.”

“You can see everything in the pockets, right?” Melony asked.

Wednesday looked again and saw only the odd sickle shape of the partially opened horn-rim barrette; tight and hard against the worn denim, it dug into Melony’s thigh. It was the barrette that Mary Agnes Cork had stolen from Candy, and Melony had stolen for herself. One day, she imagined, her hair might be long enough for the barrette to be of use. Until such a time, she carried it like a pocket knife in her right-thigh pocket.

“What’s that?” Wednesday asked.

“That’s a penis knife,” Melony said.

“A
what
knife?” Wednesday said.

“You heard me,” Melony said. “It’s real small and it’s real sharp—it’s good for just one thing.”

“What’s that?” Wednesday asked.

“It cuts off the end of a penis,” Melony said. “Real fast, real easy—just the end.”

If the picking crew at York Farm had been a knife-carrying crew, someone might have asked Melony to display the penis knife—just as an object of general appreciation among knife-carrying friends. But no one asked; the story appeared to hold. It allied itself with the other stories attached to Melony and solidified the underlying, uneasy feeling among the workers at York Farm: that Melony was no one to mess with. Around Melony, even the beer drinkers behaved.

The only ill effect of the York Farm picking crew drinking beer while they pressed cider was the frequency of their urinating, which Melony objected to only when they peed too near the cider house.

“Hey, I don’t want to hear that!” she’d holler out the window when she could hear anyone pissing. “I don’t want to smell it later, either! Get away from the building. What’s the matter—you afraid of the dark?”

Sandra and Ma liked Melony for that, and they enjoyed the refrain; whenever they heard someone peeing, they would not fail to holler, in unison, “What’s the matter? You afraid of the dark?”

But if everyone tolerated Melony’s hardness, or even appreciated her for it, no one liked her reading at night. She was the only one who read anything, and it took a while for her to realize how unfriendly they thought reading was, how insulted they felt when she did it.

When they finished pressing that night and everyone settled into bed, Melony asked, as usual, if her reading light was going to bother anyone.

“The
light
don’t bother nobody,” Wednesday said.

There were murmurs of consent, and Rather said, “You all remember Cameron?” There was laughter and Rather explained to Melony that Cameron, who had worked at York Farm for years, had been such a baby that he needed a light on, all night, just to sleep.

“He thought animals was gonna eat him if he shut out the light!” Sammy said.

“What animals?” Melony asked.

“Cameron didn’t know,” somebody said.

Melony kept reading
Jane Eyre,
and after a while, Sandra said, “It’s not the
light
that bothers us, Melony.”

“Yeah,” someone said. Melony didn’t get it for a while, but gradually she became aware that they had all rolled toward her in their beds and were watching her sullenly.

“Okay,” she said. “So what bothers you?”

“What you readin’ about, anyway?” Wednesday asked.

“Yeah,” Sammy said. “What’s so special ’bout that book?”

“It’s just a book,” Melony said.

“Pretty big deal that you can read it, huh?” Wednesday asked.

“What?” said Melony.

“Maybe, if you like it so much,” Rather said, “
we
might like it, too.”

“You want me to read to you?” Melony asked.

“Somebody read to me, once,” Sandra said.

“It wasn’t me!” Ma said. “It wasn’t your father, either!”

“I never said it was!” Sandra said.

“I never heard nobody read to nobody,” Sammy said.

“Yeah,” somebody said.

Melony saw that some of the men were propped on their elbows in their beds, waiting. Even Ma turned her great lump around and faced Melony’s bed.

“Quiet, everybody,” Rather said.

For the first time in her life, Melony was afraid. After all her efforts and her hard traveling, she felt she had been returned to the girls’ division without being aware of it; but it wasn’t only that. It was the first time anyone had expected something of her; she knew what
Jane Eyre
meant to her, but what could it mean to them? She’d read it to children too young to understand half the words, too young to pay attention until the end of a sentence, but they were orphans—prisoners of the routine of being read to aloud; it was the routine that mattered.

Melony was more than halfway in her third or fourth journey through
Jane Eyre.
She said, “I’m on page two hundred and eight. There’s a lot that’s happened before.”

“Just read it,” Sammy said.

“Maybe I should start at the beginning,” Melony suggested.

“Just read what you readin’ to yourself,” Rather said gently.

Her voice had never trembled before, but Melony began.

“ ‘The wind roared high in the great tree which embowered the gates,’ ” she read.

“What’s ‘embowered’?” Wednesday asked her.

“Like a bower,” Melony said. “Like a thing hanging over you, like for grapes or roses.”

“It’s a kind of bower where the shower is,” Sandra said.

“Oh,” someone said.

“ ‘But the road as far as I could see,’ ” Melony continued, “ ‘to the right hand and left, was all still and solitary . . .’ ”

“What’s that?” Sammy asked.

“Solitary is
alone,
” Melony said.

“Like solitaire, you know solitaire,” Rather said, and there was an approving murmur.

“Shut up your interruptin’,” Sandra said.

“Well, we got to understand,” Wednesday said.

“Just shut up,” Ma said.

“Read,” Rather said to Melony, and she tried to go on.

“ ‘. . . the road . . . all still and solitary: save for the shadows of clouds crossing it at intervals, as the moon looked out, it was but a long pale line, unvaried by one moving speck,’ ” Melony read.

“Un-what?” someone asked.

“Unvaried means unchanged, not changed,” Melony said.

“I know that,” Wednesday said. “I got that one.”

“Shut up,” Sandra said.

“ ‘A puerile tear,’ ” Melony began, but she stopped. “I don’t know what ‘puerile’ means,” she said. “It’s not important that you know what every word means.”

“Okay,” someone said.

“ ‘A puerile tear dimmed my eye while I looked—a tear of disappointment and impatience: ashamed of it, I wiped it away . . .’ ”

“There, we know what it is, anyway,” Wednesday said.

“ ‘. . . I lingered,’ ” Melony read.

“You
what
?” Sammy asked.

“Hung around; to linger means to hang around!” Melony said sharply. She began again “ ‘. . . the moon shut herself wholly within her chamber, and drew close her curtain of dense cloud; the night grew dark . . .’ ”

“It’s gettin’ scary now,” Wednesday observed.

“ ‘. . . rain came driving fast on the wind.’ ” Melony had changed “gale” to “wind” without their knowing it. “ ‘I wish he would come! I wish he would come! I exclaimed, seized with hypochondriac foreboding.’ ” Melony stopped with that; tears filled her eyes, and she couldn’t see the words. There was a long silence before anyone spoke.

“
What
was she seized with?” Sammy asked, frightened.

“I don’t know!” Melony said, sobbing. “Some kind of fear, I think.”

They were respectful of Melony’s sobs for a while, and then Sammy said, “I guess it’s some kind of horror story.”

“What you want to read that before you try to sleep?” Rather asked Melony with friendly concern, but Melony lay down on her bed and turned off her reading light.

When all the lights were out, Melony felt Sandra sit on her bed beside her; if it had been Ma, she knew, her bed would have sagged more heavily. “You ask me, you better forget that boyfriend,” Sandra said. “If he didn’t tell you how to find him, he ain’t no good, anyway.” Melony had not felt anyone stroke her temples since Mrs. Grogan in the girls’ division at St. Cloud’s; she realized she missed Mrs. Grogan very much, and for a while this took her mind off Homer Wells.

When everyone else was asleep, Melony turned her reading light back on; whatever failure
Jane Eyre
might be for someone else, it had always worked for Melony—it had helped her—and she felt in need of its help, now. She read another twenty pages, or so, but Homer Wells would not leave her mind. “I must part with you for my whole life,” she read, with horror. “I must begin a new existence amongst strange faces and strange scenes.” The truth of that closed the book for her, forever. She slid the book under her bed in the bunkroom in the cider house at York Farm, where she would leave it. Had she just read the passage from
David Copperfield
that Homer Wells so loved and repeated to himself as if it were a hopeful prayer, she would have discarded
David Copperfield,
too. “I have stood aside to see the phantoms of those days go by me.” Fat chance! Melony would have thought. She knew that all the phantoms of those days were attached to her and Homer more securely than their shadows. And so Melony cried herself to sleep—she was not hopeful, yet she was determined, her mind’s eye searching the darkness for Homer Wells.

She could not have seen him that night—he was so well hidden beyond the range of the lights shining from the mill room at Ocean View. Even if he’d sneezed or fallen down, the sound of the grinder and the pump would have concealed his presence. He watched the red-eyed glow of the cigarettes that darted and paused above the roof of the cider house. When he got cold, he went to watch them pressing and to have a little cider and rum.

Mr. Rose seemed glad to see him; he gave Homer a drink with very little cider in it, and together they watched the orchestra of the pump and grinder. A man named Jack, who had a terrible scar across his throat—a hard-to-survive kind of scar—aimed the spout. A man named Orange slapped the racks in place and received the splatter with a wild kind of pride; his name was Orange because he had tried to dye his hair once, and orange was how it turned out—there was no evidence of that color on him now. The rum had made Jack and Orange both savage about their business and defiantly unwary of the flying mess, yet Homer felt that Mr. Rose, who seemed sober, was still in control—the conductor of both the men and the machinery and operating them both at full throttle.

“Let’s try to get out of here by midnight,” Mr. Rose said calmly. Jack choked the flow of pomace to the top rack; Orange levered the press into place.

In the other corner of the mill room, two men whom Homer Wells didn’t know were bottling at high speed. One of the men began to laugh, and his partner started to laugh with him so loudly that Mr. Rose called out to them, “What’s so funny?”

One of the men explained that his cigarette had fallen out of his mouth, into the vat; at this announcement, even Jack and Orange began to laugh, and Homer Wells smiled, but Mr. Rose said quietly, “Then you better fish it out. Nobody wants that muckin’ up the cider.”

The men were quiet, now; just the machinery went on with its sluicing and screaming. “Go on,” Mr. Rose repeated. “Go fish.”

The man with the lost cigarette stared into the thousand-gallon vat; it was only half full, but it was still a swimming pool. He took off his rubber boots, but Mr. Rose said, “Not just the boots. Take off
all
your clothes, and then go take a shower—and be quick about it. We got work to do.”

“What?” the man said. “I ain’t gonna strip and go wash just to go swimmin’ in there!”

“You’re filthy all over,” said Mr. Rose. “Be quick about it.”

“Hey,
you
can be quick about it,” the man said to Mr. Rose. “You want that butt out of there, you can fish it out yourself.”

It was Orange who spoke to the man.

“What business you in?” Orange asked him.

“Hey,
what
?” the man asked.

“What business you in, man?” Orange asked.

“Say, you in the apple business, man,” Jack advised the man.

“Say,
what
?” the man asked.

“Just say you in the apple business, man,” Orange said.

It was at that moment that Mr. Rose took Homer’s arm and said to him, “You got to see the view from the roof, my friend.” The tug at his elbow was firm but gentle. Mr. Rose very gracefully led Homer out of the mill room, then outside by the kitchen door.

“You know what business Mistuh Rose is in, man?” Homer heard Orange asking.

“He in the knife business, man,” he heard Jack say.

“You don’t wanna go in the knife business with Mistuh Rose,” Homer heard Orange say.

“You just stay in the apple business, you do fine, man,” Jack said.

Homer was following Mr. Rose up the ladder to the roof when he heard the shower turn on; it was an inside shower—more private than the shower at York Farm. Except for their cigarettes, the men on the roof were hard to see, but Homer held Mr. Rose’s hand and followed him along the plank on the rooftop until they found two good seats.

“You all know Homer,” Mr. Rose said to the men on the roof. There was a blur of greetings. The man called Hero was up there, and the man called Branches; there was someone named Willy, and two or three people Homer didn’t know, and the old cook whose name was Black Pan. The cook was the shape of a stew pot; it had required some effort for him to gain his perch on the roof.