The Cider House Rules (48 page)

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. {386}

* * *

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 takingcharge 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 {387} 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 hirn 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.

When Olive introduced him to Homer Wells, that measure of respect was made clear. 'Homer,' Olive said, 'this is Mister Rose. And this is Homer Wells,' Olive added.

'Glad, to know you, Homer,' said Mr. Rose.

'Homer has become my good right hand,' Olive said afffectionately. {388}

'Glad to hear that, Homer!' said Mr. Rose. He shook Homer's hand strongly, although he let go of the hand with unusual quickness. He was no better dressed than the rest of thepickingcrew, and he was slender, like most of them; yet he managed a certain style with shabbiness. If his jacket was dirty and torn, it was a pinstriped suit jacket, a doubled-breasted model that had, in its history, given someone a degree of sharpness, and Mr. Rose wore a real silk necktie for a belt. His shoes were also good, and good shoes were vital for farm work; they were old, but well oiled, resoled, comfortable-looking and in good condition. His socks matched. His suit jacket had a watch pocket, and in it was a gold watch that worked; he regarded the watch naturally and often, as if time were very important to him. He was so clean-shaven helooked as if he might never have needed a shave; his face was a smooth brick of the darkest, unsweetened, bitter chocolate, and in his mouth he expertly moved around a small, bright-white mint, which always surrounded him with a fresh and alert fragrance.

He spoke and moved slowly—modestly, yet deliberately; in both speech and gesture he gave the impression of being humble and contained. Yet, when one observed him standing still and not speaking, he looked extraordinarily fast and sure of himself.

It was a hot, Indian-summer day, and the apple mart was inland enough to miss what little sea breeze there was. Mr. Rose and Mrs. Worthington stood talking among the parked and movingf arm vehicles in the apple-mart lot; the rest of the picking crew waited in their cars—the windows rolled down, an orchestra of black fingers strumming the sides of the cars. There were seventeen pickers and a cook—no women or children this year, to Olive's relief.

'Very nice,'Mr. Rose said, about the flowers in the cider house.

Mrs. Worthington touched the rules she'd tacked to the wall by the kitchen light switch as she was leaving. 'And {389} you'll point out these to everyone, won't you, please?' Olive asked.

'Oh yes, I'm good at rules,' said Mr. Rose, smiling. 'You all come back and watch the first press, Homer,' Mr. Rose said, as Homer held open the van door for Olive. 'I'm sure you got better things to watch—movies and stuff—but if you ever got some time on your hands, you come watch us make a little cider. About a thousand gallons,' he added shyly; he scuffed his feet, as if he were ashamed that he might be bragging. 'All we need is eight hours, and about three hundred bushels of apples,' said Mr. Rose. 'A thousand gallons,' he repeated proudly. On the way back to the apple mart, Olive Worthington said to Homer, 'Mister Rose is a real worker. If the rest of them were like him, they could improve themselves.' Homer didn't understand her tone. Certainly he had heard in her voice admiration, sympathy—and even affection—but there was also in her voice the ice that encases a long-ago and immovable point of view.

Fortunately, for Melony, the picking crew at York Farm included two women and a child; Melony felt safe to stay in the cider house. One of the women was a wüFe and the other woman was the first woman's mother and the cook; the wife picked with the crew, while the old lady looked after the food and the child—who was silent to the point of nonexistence. There was only one shower, and it was outdoors—installed behind the cider house, on a cinder-block platform, under a former grape arbor whose trellises were rotted by the weather. The women showered first, every evening, and they permitted no peeking. The York Farm crew boss was a mild man—it was his
wife
who came along—and he raised no objections to Melony's sharing the cider house with his crew.

His name was Rather; it was a nickname, stemming from the man's laconic habit of remarking during each activity that he'd rather be doing something else. His {390} authority seemed less certain, or at least less electrical, than the authority commanded by Mr. Rose; no one called him
Mister
Rather. He was a steady but not an exceptionally fast picker, yet he always accounted for over a hundred bushels a day; it took Melony just one day to observe that his fellow workers paid Rather a commission. They gave him one bushel for every twenty bushels they picked.

'After all,' Rather explained to Melony, 'I get them the job.' He was fond of saying that his commission, under the circumstances, was 'rather small,' but Rather never suggested that Melony owed him anything. 'After all, I didn't get you your job!' he told her cheerfully.

By her third day in the field, she was managing eighty bushels; she also assisted as a bottler with the first cider press. Yet Melony was disappointed; she'd found the time to ask if anyone had heard of Ocean View, and no one had.

Perhaps because he viewed everything with slightly less cynicism than Melony brought to each of her experiences, Homer Wells needed a few days to notice the commission Mr. Rose exacted from his crew. He was the fastest picker among them, without ever appearing to rush—and he never dropped fruit; he never bruised the apples by bumping his canvas picking bucket against the ladder rungs. Mr. Rose could have managed a hundred and ten bushels a day on his own, but—even with his speed— Homer realized that his regular hundred and fifty or hundred and sixty bushels a day were very high. He took as his commission only one bushel out of every forty, but he had a crew of fifteen and no one picked fewer than eighty bushels a day. Mr. Rose would pick a very fast half dozen bushels, then he'd just rest for a while, or else he'd supervise the picking technique of his crew.

'A little slower, George,'he'd say. 'You bruise that fruit, what's it gonna be good for?'

'Just cider,' George would say.

'That's right,' Mr. Rose would say. 'Cider apples is only a nickel a bushel.' {391}

'Okay,' George would say.

'Sure,'Mr. Rose wouldsay, 'everything gonna be okay.' The third day it rained and no one picked; both apples and pickers slip in the rain, and the fruit is more sensitive to bruising.

Homer went to watch Meany Hyde and Mr. Rose conduct the first cider press, which they directed out of range of the splatter. They put two men on the press, and two bottling, and they shifted fresh men into the rotation almost every hour. Meany watched only one thing: whether the racks were stacked crookedly or whether they were right. When the press boards are stacked crookedly, you can lose the press—three bushels of apples in one rness, eight or ten gallons of cider and the pomace flying everywhere. The men at the press won? rubber aprons; the bottlers wore rubber boots. The whine of the grinder reminded Homer Wells of the sounds he had only imagined at St. Cloud's—the saw-mill blades that were ear-splitting in his dreams, and in his insomnia. The pump sucked, the spout disgorged a pulp of seeds and skin and mashed apples, and even worms (if there were worms). It looked like what Nurse Angela calmly called upchuck. From the big tub under the press, the cider whirred through a rotary screen, which strained it into the thousand-gallon vat where, only recently, Grace Lynch had exposed herself to Homer.

In eight hours of no nonsense, they had a thousand gallons. The conveyor tracks rattled the jugs; along, straight into cold storage. A man named Branches was assigned to hose out the vat and rinse off the rotary screen; his name stemmed from his dexterity in the big trees—and his scorn for using a ladder. A man named Hero washed the press cloths; Meany Hyde told Homer that the man had been a kind of hero, once. That's all heard. He's been comin' here for years, but he was a hero. Just once,' Meany added, as if there might be more shame attached to the rarity of the man's heroism than there was glory to be sung for his moment in the sun.

'I'll bet you was bored,' Mr. Rose said to Homer, who {392} lied—who said it had been interesting; eight hours of hanging around a cider mill are several hours in excess of interesting. 'You got to come at night to get the real feel of it,' Mr. Rose confided. This was just a rainy-day press. When you pick all day and press all night, then you get
the feel
of it.' He winked at Homer, assuming he'd managed to make some secret life instantly clear; then he handed Homer a cup of cider. Homer had been sipping cider all day, but the cup was offered solemnly—some pledge about pressing cider at night was being made on the spot—and so Homer took the cup and drank. His eyes watered instantly; the cider was so strongly laced with rum that Homer felt his face flush and his stomach glow. Without further acknowledgment, Mr. Rose took back the cup and offered the remaining swallows to the man called Branches, who bolted it down without needing to make the slightest adjustment on the spray nozzle of his hose.

When Homer Wells was loading some cider jugs into the van, he saw the cup make its way between Meany Hyde and the man called Hero—all of it under the calm supervision of Mr. Rose, who had not revealed the source of the rum to anyone. The phrase 'a gift for concealment' occurred to Homer Wells in regard to Mr. Rose; Homer had no idea where such a phrase had come from, unless it was Charles Dickens or Charlotte Bronte—he doubted he had encountered it in
Gray's Anatomy
or in Bensley's
Practical Anatomy of the Rabbit.