The Cider House Rules (15 page)

“If you want to know who your mother is,” Melony said, “all you got to do is look her up. You just look up your file. You could look me up while you were at it. A smart reader like you, Sunshine—it wouldn’t take you much time. And any of it would make more interesting reading than
Jane Eyre.
My file alone is more interesting than that, I’ll bet. And who knows what’s in yours?”

Homer allowed himself to be distracted from the snake. He looked through a hole in the porch floorboards at some passing debris; a broken branch, perhaps, or a man’s boot—maybe a man’s leg—was swept by in the river. When he heard a whistling sound, like a whip, he regretted taking his eyes from the snake; he ducked; Melony was still concentrating on the sky. She was swinging the snake around and around her head, yet her attention was entirely on the sky—not on any sign that appeared there, either, but on a red-shouldered hawk. It hung above the river in that lazy-seeming, spiral soaring of hawks when they are hunting. Melony let the snake sail out over the river, the hawk following it; even before the snake struck the water and started swimming for its life, for shore, the hawk began to dive. The snake didn’t fight the current, it raced with it, trying to find the angle that would bring it safely under the eroded bank or into the tangled bracken.

“Watch this, Sunshine,” Melony said. A long ten yards offshore the hawk seized the swimming snake and carried it, writhing and striking, aloft. “I want to show you something else,” Melony said, already turning her attention from the sky, now that the outcome was clear.

“Right,” said Homer Wells—all eyes, all ears. At first the weight and movement of the snake appeared to make the hawk’s rising a struggle, but the higher the hawk rose, the more easily it flew—as if the higher air had different properties from the air down where the snake had flourished.

“Sunshine!” Melony called impatiently. She led him inside the old building and upstairs to one of the darker bunkrooms. The room smelled as if there might be someone in it—possibly, someone alive—but it was too dark to see either the mice-invaded mattresses or a body. Melony forced open a ragged shutter hanging by one hinge and knelt on a mattress against a wall that the open shutter had brought to light. An old photograph was tacked to the wall, in line with what had once been the head of someone’s bed; the tack had rusted and had bled a rusty path across the sepia tones of the photograph.

Homer had looked at other photographs, in other rooms, though he had neglected this one. The ones he remembered were baby pictures, and pictures of mothers and fathers, he presumed—the kind of family photographs that are always of interest to orphans.

“Come look at this, Sunshine,” Melony said. She was trying to pick the tack loose with her fingernail, but the tack had been stuck there for years. Homer knelt beside Melony on the rotting mattress. It took awhile for him to grasp the content of the photograph; possibly, he was distracted by his awareness that he had not been as physically close to Melony since he’d last been tied to her in the three-legged race.

Once Homer had understood the photograph (at least, he understood its subject, if not its reason for existing), he found it a difficult photograph to go on looking at, especially with Melony so close to him. On the other hand, he suspected he would be accused of cowardice if he looked away. The photograph reflected the cute revisions of reality engineered in many photographic studios at the turn of the century; the picture was edged with fake clouds, with a funereal or reverential mist; the participants in the photograph appeared to be performing their curious act in a very stylish Heaven or Hell.

Homer Wells guessed it was Hell. The participants in the photograph were a leggy young woman and a short pony. The naked woman lay with her long legs spread-eagled on a rug—a wildly confused Persian or Oriental (Homer Wells didn’t know the difference)—and the pony, facing the wrong way, straddled her. His head was bent, as if to drink or to graze, just above the woman’s extensive patch of pubic hair; the pony’s expression was slightly camera-conscious, or ashamed, or possibly just stupid. The pony’s penis looked longer and thicker than Homer Wells’s arm, yet the athletic-looking young woman had contorted her neck and had sufficient strength in her arms and hands to bend the pony’s penis to her mouth. Her cheeks were puffed out, as if she’d held her breath too long; her eyes bulged; yet the woman’s expression remained ambiguous—it was impossible to tell if she was going to burst out laughing or if she was choking to death on the pony’s penis. As for the pony, his shaggy face was full of faked indifference—the placid pose of strained animal dignity.

“Lucky pony, huh, Sunshine?” Melony asked him, but Homer Wells felt passing through his limbs a shudder that coincided exactly with his sudden vision of the photographer, the evil manipulator of the woman, the pony, the clouds of Heaven or the smoke of Hell. The mists of nowhere on this earth, at least, Homer imagined. Homer saw, briefly, as fast as a tremble, the darkroom genius who had created this spectacle. What lingered with Homer longer was his vision of the man who had slept on this mattress where he now knelt with Melony in worship of the man’s treasure. This was the picture some woodsman had chosen to wake up with, the portrait of pony and woman somehow substituting itself for the man’s family. This was what caused Homer the sharpest pain; to imagine the tired man in the bunkroom at St. Cloud’s, drawn to this woman and this pony because he knew of no friendlier image—no baby pictures, no mother, no father, no wife, no lover, no brother, no friend.

But in spite of the pain it caused him, Homer Wells found himself unable to turn away from the photograph. With a surprisingly girlish delicacy, Melony was still picking at the rusty tack—in such a considerate way that she never blocked Homer’s view of the picture.

“If I can get the damn thing off the wall,” she said, “I’ll give it to you.”

“I don’t want it,” said Homer Wells, but he wasn’t sure.

“Sure you do,” Melony said. “There’s nothing in it for
me.
I’m not interested in ponies.”

When she finally dug the tack out of the wall, she noticed that she’d broken her nail and torn her cuticle; a fine spatter of her blood newly marred the photograph—quickly drying to a color similar to the streak of rust that ran down the pony’s mane, across the woman’s thigh. Melony stuck the finger with the broken nail in her mouth and handed the photograph to Homer Wells.

Melony allowed her finger to tug a little at her lower lip, pressing it against her lower teeth. “You
get
it, don’t you, Sunshine?” she asked Homer Wells. “You see what the woman’s doing to the pony, right?”

“Right,” said Homer Wells.

“How’d you like me to do to you what that woman is doing to that pony?” Melony asked him. She stuck her finger all the way into her mouth, then, and closed her lips around it, over the second knuckle joint; in this fashion she waited for his answer, but Homer Wells let the question pass. Melony took her wet finger out of her mouth, then, and touched its tip to Homer’s still lips. Homer didn’t move; he knew that if he looked at her finger, his eyes would cross. “If you’d like me to do that to you, Sunshine,” Melony said, “all you’ve got to do is get me my file—get me my records.” She pressed her finger against his lips a little too hard.

“Of course, while you’re looking up the file on me you can look up yourself—if you’re interested,” Melony added. She took her finger away. “Give me your finger, Sunshine,” she said, but Homer Wells, holding the photograph in both hands, decided to let this request pass. “Come on,” Melony coaxed. “I won’t hurt you.” He gave her his left hand, keeping the photograph in his right; he actually extended his closed fist to her so that it was necessary for her to open his hand before she could slip his left index finger into her mouth. “Look at the picture, Sunshine,” she told him; he did as he was told. She tapped his finger against her teeth while she managed to say, “Just get me the file and you know what you’ll get. Just keep the picture and think about it,” Melony said.

What Homer thought was that the anxiety of looking at the photograph with his finger in Melony’s mouth, kneeling beside her on the mattress home of countless mice, would be eternal. But there was such a startling
thump!
on the roof of the building—like a falling body, followed by a lighter thump (as if the body had bounced)—that Melony bit down hard on his finger before he could, instinctively, retrieve it from her mouth. Still on their knees, they lurched into each other’s arms; they hugged each other and held their breath. Homer Wells could feel his heart pound against Melony’s breasts. “What the hell was
that
?” Melony asked.

Homer Wells let the question pass. He was imagining the ghost of the woodsman whose photograph he clutched in his hand, the actual body of the saw-mill laborer landing on the roof, a man with a rusty ripsaw in each hand, a man whose ears would hear, in eternity, only the whine of those lumberyard blades. In that
thump!
of dead weight upon the roof of the abandoned building, Homer himself heard the snarling pitch of those long-ago saws—but what was that sharp, almost human noise he heard singing above the buzz? It was the sound of cries, Homer imagined: the paper-thin wails of the babies on the hill, those first orphans of St. Cloud’s.

His hot cheek felt the flutter of the pulse in Melony’s throat. The lightest, most delicate footsteps seemed to walk the roof—as if the body of the ghost, after his fall, were changing back to spirit.

“Jesus!” Melony said, shoving Homer Wells away from her so forcefully that he fell against the wall. The noise Homer made caused the spirit on the roof to scurry, and to emit a piercing, two-syllable shriek—the easily identified whistle of the red-shouldered hawk.

“Kee-yer!”
the hawk said.

The hawk’s cry was apparently not recognizable to Melony, who screamed, but Homer knew instantly what was on the roof; he rushed down the stairs, across the porch to the wrecked rail. He was in time to see the hawk ascending; this time the snake appeared easier to carry—it hung straight down, as true as a plumb line. It was impossible to know if the hawk had lost control of the snake, or if the bird had dropped the snake intentionally—realizing that this was a sure, if not entirely professional, way to kill it. No matter: the long fall to the roof had clearly finished the snake, and its dead weight was easier to bear away than when it had lived and writhed in the hawk’s talons and had repeatedly struck at the hawk’s breast. Homer noted that the snake was slightly longer and not quite as thick as the pony’s penis.

Melony, out of breath, stood on the porch beside Homer. When the hawk was out of sight, she repeated her promise to him. “Just keep the picture and think about it,” she repeated.

Not that Homer Wells needed any instruction to “think about it.” What a lot he had to think about!

“Adolescence,” wrote Wilbur Larch. “Is it the first time in life we discover that we have something terrible to hide from those who love us?”

For the first time in his life, Homer Wells was hiding something from Dr. Larch—and from Nurse Angela and Nurse Edna. And with the photograph of the pony with its penis in the woman’s mouth, Homer Wells was also hiding his first misgivings concerning St. Larch. With the photograph, he hid his first lust—not only for the woman who gagged on the pony’s amazing instrument but also for the inspired promise Melony had made him. Hidden with the photograph (under his hospital-bed mattress, pinned against the bedsprings) were Homer’s anxieties concerning what he might discover in the so-called files—in the imagined record of his birth at St. Cloud’s. His own mother’s history lay in hiding with that photograph, which Homer found he was more and more drawn to.

He took it out from under the mattress and looked at it three or four times a day; and at night, when he couldn’t sleep, he looked at it in candlelight—a drowsy light in which the woman’s eyes appeared to bulge less violently, a light in the flicker of which Homer imagined he could see the woman’s cheeks actually move. The movement of the candlelight appeared to stir the pony’s mane. One night when he was looking at the picture, he heard John Wilbur wet his bed. More often, Homer looked at the picture to the accompaniment of Fuzzy Stone’s dramatic gasps—the cacophony of lungs, waterwheel and fan seemed appropriate to the woman-and-pony act that Homer Wells so fully memorized and imagined.

Something changed in Homer’s insomnia; Dr. Larch detected the difference, or else it was the deception within him that made Homer Wells conscious of Dr. Larch’s observations of him. When Homer would tiptoe down to Nurse Angela’s office, late at night, it seemed to him that Dr. Larch was
always
at the typewriter—and that he would always notice Homer’s careful movement in the hall.

“Anything I can do for you, Homer?” Dr. Larch would ask.

“Just can’t sleep,” Homer would reply.

“So what’s new?” Dr. Larch would ask.

Did the man write all night? In the daytime, Nurse Angela’s office was busy—it was the only room for interviews and phone calls. It was full of Dr. Larch’s papers, too—his correspondence with other orphanages, with adoption agencies, with prospective parents; his noteworthy (if occasionally facetious) journal, his whatnot diary, which he called
A Brief History of St. Cloud’s.
It was no longer “brief,” and it grew daily—every entry faithfully beginning, “Here in St. Cloud’s . . .” or, “In other parts of the world . . .”

Dr. Larch’s papers also included extensive family histories—but only of the families who adopted the orphans. Contrary to Melony’s belief, no records were kept of the orphans’ actual mothers and fathers. An orphan’s history began with its date of birth—its sex, its length in inches, its weight in pounds, its nurse-given name (if it was a boy) or the name Mrs. Grogan or the girls’ division secretary gave it (if it was a girl). This, with a record of the orphans’ sicknesses and shots, was all there was. A substantially thicker file was kept on the orphans’ adoptive families—knowing what he could about those families was important to Dr. Larch.