The Cider House Rules (77 page)

Angel laughed. Homer laughed, too.

“So how’d you manage it?” Angel asked his father, after a while.

“I waited until I thought they were all asleep, and then I tried to keep the bed quiet,” Homer said. “But you’ve got no idea how long it can take twelve or fifteen boys to fall asleep!”

They both laughed some more.

“There was one other kid who was old enough to know about it,” Homer confided. “I think he was just beginning to experiment with playing with himself—I think the first time that he actually did it, he didn’t have any idea what would happen. And when he actually squirted—when he ejaculated, you know—he thought he’d hurt himself. In the dark, he probably thought he was bleeding!”

This story was a complete fiction, but Angel Wells loved it; he laughed in a very worldly way, which encouraged his father to go on.

“Well, he was so worried—he kept asking me to turn on the light, he said something had broken inside him,” Homer said.

“Broken?” Angel said, and they both howled.

“Yes!” Homer said. “And when I turned on the light and he got a look at himself, he said, ‘Oh, God, it went off!’—as if he were talking about a gun, and he’d just shot himself with it!”

Father and son laughed over that for a while.

Then Homer said, more seriously, “Of course I tried to explain it all to him. It was hard to make him understand that he hadn’t done anything wrong—because it’s natural; it’s perfectly healthy and normal, but these things have a way of getting distorted.”

Angel was quiet now; perhaps he saw the reason for the story.

“But just imagine me trying to explain to this kid—he was quite a bit younger than you are—that it was only natural that he would have feelings about girls, and about sex, long before he would have the opportunity to have anything to do with girls. Or to actually have sex,” Homer added. He had truly labored the point into submission, and he paused to see how his son was taking it in; Angel, who had a long stalk of grass in his mouth, lay on his back staring at the sprawling trunk of the huge tree.

They were quiet for a while, and then Homer said: “Is there anything you’d like to ask me—about anything?”

Angel gave a short laugh; then he paused. “Yes,” Angel said to his father. “I wonder why you don’t have a girlfriend—why you don’t even seem interested.”

This was not the question Homer had expected, following his birds-and-bees invitation, but after a few seconds he realized that the question should have been anticipated and that some reasonable answer was doubtlessly pressing more on Angel’s mind than any truths regarding masturbation.

“I had a girlfriend, in Saint Cloud’s,” Homer said. “She was kind of rough on me. She was something of a bully. Older than me, and at the time, she was stronger than me!” he said, laughing.

“No kidding,” Angel said; he wasn’t laughing; he had rolled over on his elbows and was watching his father intently.

“Well, we weren’t very much alike,” Homer said. “It was one of those cases of the sex happening before there was a friendship, or there really being no friendship—and, after a short while, there wasn’t any more sex, either. After that, I’m not sure what the relationship was.”

“It was a sort of bad way to start, you mean?” Angel asked.

“Right,” his father said.

“So what happened after that?” Angel asked.

“I met Wally and Candy,” Homer said carefully. “I guess I would have married Candy—if she hadn’t married Wally. She was almost my girlfriend, for about five minutes. That was when Wally was in the war, when we wondered if he was still alive,” Homer said quickly. “I’ve always been so close to Wally and Candy, and then—once I had you—I started to feel that I already had everything I wanted.”

Angel Wells rolled over on his back, gazing up the trunk of the tree. “So you still kind of like Candy?” he asked. “You’re not interested in anybody else?”

“Kind of,” said Homer Wells. “Have you met anybody you’re interested in?” he asked, hoping to change the subject.

“Nobody who’d be interested in me,” his son said. “I mean, the girls I think about are all too old to even look at me.”

“That will change,” Homer said, poking Angel in the ribs; the boy doubled up his knees and rolled on his side, poking back at his father. “Pretty soon,” Homer said, “the girls are going to stand in line to look at you.” He grabbed Angel in a headlock and they started wrestling. Wrestling with Angel was one way Homer could keep in close physical contact with the boy—long after Angel had grown self-conscious about being hugged and kissed, in public. A fifteen-year-old boy doesn’t want his father draped all over him, but wrestling was perfectly respectable; that was still allowed. They were wrestling so hard, and laughing—and breathing so heavily—that they did not hear Vernon Lynch approach them.

“Hey, Homer!” Vernon said sharply, kicking at them as they rolled on the ground under the big tree—the way he might, tentatively, attempt to break up a dogfight. When they saw him standing over them, they froze in an awkward embrace—as if they’d been caught doing something they shouldn’t. “If you quit dickin’ around,” Vernon said, “I got a message for you.”

“For me?” said Homer Wells.

“There’s a fat woman who says she knows you. She’s at the mart,” Vernon said. Homer smiled. He knew several fat women at the mart; he assumed that Vernon meant Big Dot Taft or Florence Hyde. Even Squeeze Louise had been putting on weight in recent years.

“I mean a
new
fat woman,” Vernon said. He started walking back to his tractor. “She says she wants to be a picker, and she asked for you. She knows you.”

Homer got slowly to his feet; he’d rolled over a root of the big tree, and the root had hurt him in the ribs. Also, Angel had stuffed grass down the back of his shirt. Angel said to his father, “Oh, a fat woman, huh? I guess you didn’t tell me about the fat woman.” As Homer unbuttoned his shirt to shake out the grass, Angel poked his father’s bare stomach. That was when Angel noticed that his father had aged. He was still a trim man, and strong from all the orchard work he’d done, but just a bit of belly rolled over the belt of his jeans, and his hair, tousled from the wrestling, was more flecked with gray than it was with grass. There was something grim around the corners of Homer’s eyes that Angel had also never noticed before.

“Pop?” Angel asked him softly. “Who’s the woman?” But his father was looking at him in a panic; he started buttoning his shirt askew, and Angel had to help him with it. “It can’t be the bully, can it?” Angel was trying to joke with his father—their manner together was often full of joking; but Homer wouldn’t speak, he wouldn’t even smile. Half a trailer of apple crates still needed to be unloaded, but Homer drove too fast, dumping an occasional crate. They had an empty trailer in no time, and on the way back to the apple mart, Homer took the public road instead of winding through the back orchards. The public road was faster, although Homer had told all the drivers to keep off it whenever they could—to avoid any possible accidents with the beach traffic along that road in the summers.

Children are most impressed with the importance of a moment when they witness a parent breaking the parent’s own rule.

“Do you think it’s her?” Angel shouted to his father. He stood over his father’s shoulders, his hands on the tractor seat, his feet braced against the trailer hitch. “You’ve got to admit, it’s a little exciting,” the boy added, but Homer looked grim.

Homer parked the tractor and trailer by the storage barns, next to the mart. “You can start putting on another load,” he told Angel, but he was not going to get rid of Angel so easily. The boy dogged his footsteps to the apple mart, where Big Dot and Florence and Irene were surrounding the implacable and massive Melony.

“It
is
her, isn’t it?” Angel whispered to his father.

“Hello, Melony,” said Homer Wells. There was not a sound in the still, summer air.

“How you doin’, Sunshine?” Melony asked him.

“Sunshine!” said Big Dot Taft.

Even Angel had to say it out loud. Imagine: his father a “Sunshine”!

But although she had waited years to see him, Melony’s gaze was riveted not on Homer Wells but on Angel. Melony could not take her eyes off the boy. Homer Wells, a pleasant-looking man in his forties, did not very precisely remind Melony of the Homer Wells she had known; rather, it was Angel who struck Melony with a force quite unexpected by her. She had not anticipated being swept off her feet by the near-spitting image of the boy she had known. Poor Angel felt a little wilted by the ruffian eye Melony cast over him, but he was a young gentleman and he smiled appealingly at the stranger.

“There’s no doubt about who
you
are,” Melony said to the boy. “You look more like your father than your father.” Big Dot and the apple-mart ladies were hanging on her every word.

“It’s nice that you see a resemblance,” said Homer Wells, “but my son is adopted.”

Hadn’t Homer Wells learned anything? Through those years of hard knocks, those years of muscle and fat and betrayal and growing decidedly older, could he still not see in Melony’s fierce, sad eyes that she possessed a quality that could never be bullshitted?

“Adopted?” Melony said, her yellow-gray eyes never once leaving Angel. She was disappointed in her oldest friend: that he should, after all these years, still try to deceive her.

That was when Candy—who had finally gotten rid of Bucky Bean—strolled into the apple mart, removed a Gravenstein from a basket on the first display table, took a sharp bite, noticed that no one seemed to be working and walked over to the small crowd.

Since the most natural space for Candy to enter this gathering was between Homer and Angel, she stepped between them; and since her mouth was quite full of the new apple, she was a little embarrassed to speak to the stranger.

“Hi!” she managed to say to Melony, who recognized instantly—in Candy’s face—those few parts of Angel she had failed to locate in her memory of Homer Wells.

“This is Melony,” Homer said to Candy, who had difficulty swallowing—long ago, on the cider house roof, she had heard all about Melony. “This is Missus Worthington,” Homer mumbled to Melony.

“How do you do?” Candy managed to say.

“Missus Worthington?” Melony said, her lynxlike eyes now darting from Angel to Candy, and from Angel to Homer Wells.

That was when Wally wheeled himself out of the office and into the mart.

“Isn’t anybody working today?” he asked, in his friendly way. When he saw there was a stranger, he was polite. “Oh, hello!” he said.

“Hi,” said Melony.

“This is my husband,” Candy said, through lots of apple.

“Your husband?” Melony said.

“This is Mister Worthington,” mumbled Homer Wells.

“Everybody calls me Wally,” Wally said.

“Melony and I were in the orphanage together,” Homer explained.

“Really?” Wally said enthusiastically. “That’s great,” he said. “Get them to show you around. Show her the house, too,” Wally told Homer. “Maybe you’d like to take a swim?” he asked Melony, who, for once in her life, did not know what to say. “Dot?” Wally said to Big Dot Taft. “Get me a count of the number of bushels of Gravs we have in storage. I got a phone order waiting.” He turned the wheelchair very smoothly and started to roll back to the office.

“Meany knows how many we got,” Florence Hyde said. “He was just in there.”

“Then someone get Meany to tell me,” Wally said. “It’s nice to meet you!” he called to Melony. “Please stay for supper.”

Candy almost choked, but she managed a hard swallow.

“Thank you!” Melony called after Wally.

He didn’t need any help going in and out of the office, because Everett Taft had (years ago) taken the threshold off and arranged for the screen door to swing both ways—like a saloon door. Wally could come and go without assistance.

He’s the only hero here, Melony thought, watching the door swing closed behind the wheelchair; she could not control her hands. She wanted to touch Angel, to hug him—she’d wanted to get her hands on Homer Wells for years, but now she didn’t know what she wanted to do to him. If she’d suddenly dropped to all fours, or had crouched into a stance more suitable for a fight, she knew that Homer Wells would be prepared; she noticed he had no control of his hands, either—his fingers were playing pitty-pat against his thighs. Hardest for Melony was to recognize that there was no love for her in his eyes; he looked like a trapped animal—there was no enthusiasm or curiosity about seeing her in any part of him. She thought that if she’d opened her mouth, beginning with the boy—how he was clearly no orphan!—Homer Wells would be at her throat before she could spit out the story.

No one seemed to remember that Melony had come—among other reasons—for a job. Angel said, “Would you like to see the pool first?”

“Well, I don’t swim,” Melony said, “but it would be nice to see it.” She smiled at Homer with such an uncharacteristic warmth—which revealed everything about her bad teeth—that Homer shivered. The apple, from which only one, uncomfortable bite had been taken, hung like a lead weight at the end of Candy’s limp arm.

“I’ll show you the house,” Candy said. “After Angel’s shown you the pool.” She dropped the uneaten apple, then laughed at herself.

“I’ll show you the orchards,” Homer mumbled.

“You don’t have to show me no orchards, Sunshine,” Melony said. “I seen lots of orchards, before.”

“Oh,” he said.

“Sunshine,” Candy said blankly.

Angel poked his father in the back as they were walking toward the house and pool; Angel still thought that this surprise was great and unexpected fun. Homer turned briefly and frowned at his son, which Angel found all the more amusing. While the boy was showing Melony the swimming pool—and making special note of the ramp for Wally’s wheelchair—Candy and Homer awaited her arrival in the kitchen.

“She knows,” Homer said to Candy.

“What?” Candy said. “What does she know?”

“Melony knows everything,” said Homer Wells, in a trance of almost ether intensity.

“How could she?” Candy asked him. “Did you tell her?”