The Cider House Rules (67 page)

Its breath had frozen on its chin whiskers and its tufted ears were beaded with ice. The panicked animal tried to dash up the hill; it was less than halfway up when it began to slide down again, drawn toward the orphanage against its will. When it set out from the bottom of the hill a second time, the lynx was panting; it ran diagonally uphill, slipping but catching itself, and slipping again, finally escaping into the softer snow in the woods—nowhere near where it had meant to go; yet the lynx would accept
any
route of escape from the dark hospital.

Homer Wells, staring into the woods after the departed lynx, did not imagine that he would ever leave St. Cloud’s more easily.

There was a false spring very early that March; all over Maine the river ice buckled under the wet snow, the ponds split apart with gunshots sharp enough to put birds to wing, and the bigger, inland lakes groaned and sang and cracked like boxcars colliding in the station yards.

In the apartment she shared with Lorna in Bath, Melony was awakened by the Kennebec—its ice bending under a foot of slush and giving way with a deep, gonging alarm that caused one of the older women in the boardinghouse to sit up in her bed and howl. Melony was reminded of the nights in her bed in the girls’ division in St. Cloud’s when the March ice was grinding downriver from Three Mile Falls. She got out of bed and went into Lorna’s room to talk, but Lorna was so sleepy that she wouldn’t get up; Melony got in bed beside her friend. “It’s just the ice,” Lorna whispered. That was how she and Melony became lovers, listening to the false spring.

“There’s just one thing,” Lorna said to Melony. “If we’re gonna be together, you gotta stop lookin’ for this Homer character. Either you want me or you want him.”

“I want you,” Melony told Lorna. “Just don’t ever leave me.”

A permanent couple, an orphan’s ideal; but Melony wondered where her rage would go. If she stopped looking for Homer Wells, would she stop thinking about him, too?

There was too much snow; the brief thaw never penetrated the frozen ground, and when the temperature dropped and it snowed again, the rivers hardened up fast. An old mill pond, behind the orphanage in St. Cloud’s, became a trap for geese. Confused by the thaw, the geese landed on the slush that they mistook for open water; the slush refroze at night and the geese’s paddle feet were caught in it. When Homer Wells found the geese, they were frozen statues of their former selves—dusted with the new snow, they were stony guardians of the pond. There was nothing to do but chip them out of the ice and scald them; they were easier to pluck because they were partially frozen. When Mrs. Grogan roasted them—pricking them constantly, to bleed their fat—she retained the sense that she was only warming them up before sending them on their dangerous way.

It was already April by the time the ice broke free in Three Mile Falls and the river overran its banks in St. Cloud’s; water filled the basement of the former whore hotel and exerted such a force against the underbeams that the saloon bar with its brass footrail fell through the floor and floated out and away through a bulkhead. The stationmaster saw it go; as obsessed with omens as he was, he slept two nights in a row in his office for fear that the station house was in danger.

Candy was so huge she hardly slept at all. The morning that the hill was bare, Homer Wells tested the ground; he could work a spade almost a foot down before he hit frozen earth—he needed another six inches of thawing before he could plant apple trees, but he dared not wait any longer before making the trip to Heart’s Rock to get the trees. He didn’t want to be away when Candy delivered.

Olive was surprised to see him, and by his request to trade the Cadillac for one of the pickup trucks to transport the baby trees.

“I want to plant a standard forty-by-forty,” Homer told Olive. “Half Macs, about ten percent Red Delicious, another ten or fifteen percent Cortlands and Baldwins.”

Olive reminded him to throw in a few Northern Spies, and some Gravensteins—for apple pie. She asked him how Candy was and why she hadn’t come with him; he told her Candy was too busy. (Everyone liked her, and the kids just hung on her.) It would be hard to leave, when the time came, Homer confided to Olive; they were of so much use—they were so needed. And the constancy of the demands—“Well, even a day off, like this, is hard to squeeze in,” Homer said.

“You mean you won’t spend the night?” Olive asked.

“Too busy,” Homer said, “but we’ll both be back in time to put out the bees.”

“That’ll be about Mother’s Day,” Olive observed.

“Right,” said Homer Wells; he kissed Olive, whose skin was cool and smelled like ash.

Meany Hyde and Herb Fowler helped him load the pickup.

“You gonna plant a whole forty-by-forty by yourself?” Meany asked him. “You better hope the ground unfreezes.”

“You better hope your back holds out,” Herb Fowler said. “You better hope your pecker don’t fall off.”

“How’s Candy?” Big Dot Taft asked Homer. Almost as big as you are, Homer thought.

“Just fine,” he said. “But busy.”

“I’ll bet,” said Debra Pettigrew.

In the furnace room, under the lobster tank, Ray Kendall was building his own torpedo.

“What for?” Homer asked.

“Just to see if I can do it,” Ray said.

“But what will you fire it at?” Homer asked. “And what will you fire it from?”

“The hard part is the gyroscope,” Ray said. “It ain’t hard to fire it—what’s hard is
guidin’
it.”

“I don’t understand,” said Homer Wells.

“Well, look at you,” Ray said. “You’re plantin’ an apple orchard at an orphanage. You been there five months, but my daughter’s too busy to visit me for a day. I don’t understand everythin’, either.”

“We’ll be back about blossom time,” Homer said guiltily.

“That’s a nice time of year,” said Ray.

On the drive back to St. Cloud’s, Homer wondered if Ray’s coolness, or evasiveness, was intentional. He decided that Ray’s message was clear: if you keep things from me, I won’t explain myself to you.

“A torpedo!” Candy said to Homer, when he arrived with the baby trees. “What for?”

“Wait and see,” said Homer Wells.

Dr. Larch helped him unload the trees.

“They’re kind of scrawny, aren’t they?” Larch asked.

“They won’t give much fruit for eight or ten years,” Homer said.

“Then I doubt I’ll get to eat any of it,” said Wilbur Larch.

“Well,” Homer said, “even before there are apples on the trees, think how the trees will look on the hill.”

“They’ll look scrawny,” said Wilbur Larch.

Near the top of the hill the ground was still frozen; Homer couldn’t work his spade down far enough. And at the bottom, the holes he dug filled with water—the runoff from the snow that was still melting in the woods. Because he would have to wait to plant the trees, he worried about the roots mildewing, or getting savaged by mice—but mainly he was peeved that he could not control, exactly, the calendar of his life. He’d wanted to plant the trees before Candy delivered. He wanted the hillside entirely planted when the baby was born.

“What did I do to you to make you so compulsively neat?” asked Wilbur Larch.

“Surgery is neat,” said Homer Wells.

It was the middle of April before Homer could dig the holes and plant the forty-by-forty orchard—which he did in three days, his back so stiff at night that he slept as restlessly and uncomfortably as Candy, tossing and turning with her. It was the first warm night of the spring; they were much too hot under the winter-weight blanket; when Candy broke water, they both, for a second, confused the puddle with their sweat.

Homer helped her to the hospital entrance of the boys’ division. Nurse Edna prepared Candy while Homer went to talk to Dr. Larch, who was waiting in Nurse Angela’s office.

“
I
deliver this one,” Larch said. “There are certain advantages to detachment. Fathers are a bother in the delivery room. If you want to be there, just mind your own business.”

“Right,” said Homer Wells. He was fidgeting, uncharacteristically, and Dr. Larch smiled at him.

Nurse Edna was with Candy, while Nurse Angela scrubbed for Dr. Larch. Homer had already put his mask on when he heard a commotion from the boys’ sleeping room. He left the mask on when he went to investigate. One of the John Larches or the Wilbur Walshes had got up and gone outside to pee against a trash barrel—with considerable noise. This in turn had disturbed a large raccoon, busy at the trash, and the coon had startled the peeing orphan into wetting his pajamas. Homer tried to sort this out, calmly; he wanted to get back to the delivery room.

“Peeing indoors is better, at night,” he observed to the room at large. “Candy’s having her baby, now.”

“What’s she havin’?” one of the boys asked.

“Either a boy or a girl,” said Homer Wells.

“What will you name it?” another one asked.

“Nurse Angela named me,” Homer said.

“Me, too!” several of them said.

“If it’s a girl, I’m naming her Angela,” said Homer Wells.

“And if it’s a boy?”

“If it’s a boy, I’ll name him Angel,” Homer said. “That’s really just Angela without the last A.”

“Angel?” someone asked.

“Right,” said Homer Wells and kissed them all good night.

As he was leaving, someone asked him, “And will you leave it here?”

“No,” mumbled Homer Wells, having pulled his mask back up.

“What?” the orphans shouted.

“No,” Homer said more clearly, pulling down the mask.

It was hot in the delivery room. The warm weather had been unexpected; because no one had put the screens on, Larch refused to open any windows.

At the knowledge that the child, one way or another, would be named after her, Nurse Angela wept so hard that Larch insisted that she change her mask. Nurse Edna was too short to reach the sweat on Larch’s forehead; she missed some of it. As the baby’s head emerged, a drop of Larch’s sweat baptized the child squarely on its temple—literally before it was entirely born—and Homer Wells could not help thinking that this was not unlike David Copperfield being born with a caul.

When the shoulders did not follow quickly enough to please Larch, he took the chin and occupit in both hands and drew the infant downward until, in a single, easy, upward motion, he delivered the posterior shoulder first. Homer Wells, biting his lip, nodded his approval as the anterior shoulder—and the rest of the child—followed.

“It’s an Angel!” Nurse Edna announced to Candy, who was still smiling an ether smile. Nurse Angela, who had soaked through another mask, had to turn away.

Only after the placenta was born did Dr. Larch say, as he sometimes did, “Perfect!” Then, as he never before had done, he kissed Candy—albeit through his mask—squarely between her wide-open, out-of-ether eyes.

The next day it snowed, and snowed—an angry April snowstorm, desperate not to relinquish the winter—and Homer looked at his newly planted apple orchard with concern; the frail, snow-covered trees reminded him of the luckless geese who’d made an ill-timed landing in the mill pond.

“Stop worrying about the trees,” said Wilbur Larch. “They’re on their own now.”

So was Angel Wells—eight pounds, seven ounces and neither an orphan nor an abortion.

One week short of May, there was still too much snow in St. Cloud’s for it to be mud season yet. Homer Wells had shaken the individual branches of each of his apple trees; and mouse tracks around one particularly vulnerable-looking Winter Banana had caused him to scatter poison oats and poison corn. Every tree had a metal sleeve around its slender trunk. Deer had already nibbled the row of Macs planted nearest the woods. Homer put out a salt lick for the deer, deeper into the woods, in hopes that the salt would keep them there.

Candy was nursing Angel, whose crusty remnant of an umbilical had fallen off cleanly and whose circumcision had healed. Homer had circumcised his son.

“You need the practice,” Dr. Larch had told him.

“You want me to practice on my son?” Homer had asked.

“May it be the only pain you ever cause him,” Wilbur Larch had replied.

There was still ice on the inside of the windowpanes in the morning. Homer would hold his finger to the pane until his finger was bright red, wet and cold, and then he’d touch Candy with the finger—which woke her up when she was slow to respond to his gentler touching of her stubble. Homer and Candy loved how they fit together in the bed again and how Angel could fit between them when Candy was nursing him, and how Candy’s milk would sometimes wake them both up before Angel’s crying would. They agreed: they had never been happier. So what if the sky, when it was almost May, was still the slate color of February, and still streaked with sleet? So what if the secret they kept in St. Cloud’s could not be kept forever—and was already a secret that half of Heart’s Haven and Heart’s Rock had the sense to figure out for themselves? People from Maine don’t crowd you; they let you come to your senses in your own, good time.

Every two days there was a ritual weighing of Angel Wells, which was always conducted in the dispensary—Nurse Angela keeping the record, Dr. Larch and Homer taking turns at poking Angel’s belly, looking into Angel’s eyes and feeling Angel’s grip. “Admit it,” Nurse Edna said to Candy and Homer at one such weighing-in ceremony. “You like it here.”

That day, in St. Cloud’s, it was thirty-three degrees; the wet snow, with which the morning had begun, had turned to freezing rain. That day, in Heart’s Rock, Olive Worthington had her own secret. Perhaps if Homer and Candy had been more forthcoming to her, Olive would have shared her secret with them; she would have grabbed the phone and called them. But people from Maine don’t like the telephone, a rude invention; especially in the case of important news, a telephone catches you too off-guard. A telegram provides you with a decent, respectful interval in which to gather your senses and respond. Olive sent them her secret in a telegram; that gave everyone a little more time.

Candy would see the telegram first. She was nursing Angel in the girls’ division, to quite an appreciative audience of girl orphans, when Mrs. Grogan brought her the telegram, which one of the lackeys who slaved for the stationmaster had finally gotten around to delivering. The telegram was an obvious shock to Candy, who quite abruptly handed Angel to Mrs. Grogan, although Angel did not appear to be through nursing. It astonished Mrs. Grogan that Candy did not even pause to properly replace her breast in her bra—she just buttoned her blouse over herself and, in spite of the weather, ran outdoors and across to the hospital entrance of the boys’ division.