The Cider House Rules (38 page)

He loved Meany Hyde's wife, Florence—and the other women who spent the summer making the apple mart and the cider house ready for the harvest. He loved Big Dot Taft, although the jiggle in the backs of her arms reminded him of Melony (whom he never thought about, not even when he heard that she had left St. Cloud's). He liked Big Dot Taft's kid sister, Debra Pettigrew, who was his own age, and pretty, although there was something determined about her chubbiness that suggested she had the capacity for one day becoming as big as Big Dot.

Big Dot's husband, Everett Taft, showed Homer all about mowing. You mowed the rows between the trees twice a summer; then you raked and hayed the rows; then you baled the hay and sold it to the dairy farm in Kenneth Corners. You used the loose hay for mulch around the younger trees. At Ocean View, everything was used.

Homer liked Ira Titcomb, the beekeeper and the {305} husband of Irene of the wondrous burn scar: it was Ira who explained to Homer about the bees. They like at least sixty-five degrees, no wind, no hail, no frost,' Ira said. 'A bee lives about thirty days and does more work than some men do all their lives—1 ain't sayin' who. All honey is,' said Ira Titcomb, 'is fuel for bees.'

Homer learned that bees prefer dandelions to apple blossoms, which was why you mowed the dandelions down just before you brought the bees into the orchard. He learned why there had to be more than one kind of tree in an orchard, for cross-pollinating—the bees had to carry the pollen from one kind of tree to another. He learned it should be nighttime when you put the hives out in the orchard; at night the bees were asleep and you could close the little screen door at the slat at the bottom of the box that contained the hive; when you carried the hives, the bees woke up but they couldn't get out. The hives were light when they were carried off the flatbed trailer and distributed through the orchards, but they were heavy with honey when they had to be picked up and loaded back on the trailer a week later. Sometimes a hive could be too heavy to lift alone. If the hives were jostled, the bees inside began to hum; you could feel them stirring through the wood. If honey had leaked through the slats, a lone bee might get gobbed up in the leaking honey, and that was the only way you could get stung.

Once when Homer hugged a hive to his chest, and carefully walked it to the flatbed's edge, he felt a vibration against the taut boards containing the hive; even in the cool night air, the boards were warm; the activity of the hive generated heat—like an infection, Homer thought suddenly. He recalled the taut belly of the woman he had saved from convulsions. He thought of the activity in the uterus as producing both a heat and a hardness to the abdomen. How many abdomens had Homer Wells put his hand on before he was twenty? I prefer apple farming, he thought.

At St. Cloud's, growth was unwanted even when it {306} was delivered—and the process of birth was often interrupted. Now he was engaged in the business of growing things. What he loved about the life at Ocean View was how everything was of use and that everything was wanted.

He even thought he loved Vernon Lynch, although he'd been told how Vernon beat his wife and Grace Lynch had a way of looking at Homer that did alarm him. He could not tell from her look if it was need or suspicion or simply curiosity that he saw—Grace gave out the kind of look you go on feeling after you've stopped looking back.

Vernon Lynch showed Homer how to spray. It was appropriate that Vernon Lynch was in charge of the pesticides, of extermination.

'As soon as there's leaves, there's trouble,' Vernon told him. That's in April. You start sprayin' in April and you don't stop till the end of August, when you're ready to start pickin'. You spray every week or ten days. You spray for scab and you spray for insects. We got two sprayers here, one's a Hardie and one's a Bean, and both of them hold five hundred gallons. You wear the respirator because you don't want to breathe the shit, and the respirator don't do you no good if it don't fit tight.' Saying this, Vernon Lynch tightened the respirator around Homer's head: Homer could feel his temples pound. 'If you don't keep washin' out the cloth in the mask, you could choke,' Vernon said. He cupped his hand over Homer's mouth and nose; Homer experienced airlessness. 'And keep your hair covered if you don't want to go bald.' Vernon's hand remained clamped over Homer's mouth and nose. 'And keep the goggles on if you don't want to go blind,' he added. Homer considered struggling, decided to conserve his strength, contemplated fainting, wondered if it was true or just an expression that lungs exploded. 'If you got what they call an open wound, like a cut, and the shit gets in there, you could get sterile,' said Vernon Lynch. 'That means no more {307} nasty hard-ons.' Homer tapped his shoulder and waved to Vernon, as if he were signaling something too complicated to be communicated by normal means. I can't breathe! Hello! I can't breathe! Hello out there!

When Homer's knees started to wobble, Vernon ripped the mask off his face—the head strap raking his ears upward and tangling his hair.

'Got the picture?' Vernon asked.

'Right!' Homer called out, his lungs screaming.

He even liked Herb Fowler. He'd been with Herb less than two minutes when the prophylactic sailed his way and struck him in the forehead. All Meany Hyde had said was, 'Hi, Herb, this here is Homer Wells—he's Wally's pal from Saint Cloud's.' And Herb had flipped the rubber at Homer.

'Wouldn't be so many orphans if more people put these on their joints,' Herb said.

Homer Wells had never seen a prophylactic in a commercial wrapper. The ones that Dr. Larch kepi: at the hospital, and distributed to many of the women, in handfuls, were sealed in something plain and seethrough, like wax paper; no brand names adorned them. Dr. Larch was always complaining that he didn't know where all the rubbers were going, but Homer knew that Melony had helped herself on many occasions. It had been Melony, of course, who had introduced Homer to prophylactics.

Herb Fowler's girlfriend, Louise Tobey, was doubtlessly professional in handling Herb's prophylactics. When Homer touched himself, he thought about Squeeze Louise—he imagined her dexterity with a prophylactic, her fast and nimble fingers, the way she held a paint brush and clenched her teeth, slapping the paint on thick on the apple-mart shelves, blowing a lock of her hair off her forehead with a puff of breath that was bitter with cigarettes.

Homer didn't allow himself to masturbate when Candy was on his mind. He lay not touching himself in {308} Wally's room, with Wally breathing deeply and sleeping peacefully beside him. Whenever Homer did imagine that Candy was sleeping beside him, they were never touching each other intimately—they were just holding tightly to each other in a grip of chaste affection. ('Nothing genital,' as Melony used to say.)

Candy smoked, but she was so mannered and exaggerated that she often dropped her cigarette in her lap, jumping up and furiously brushing away the sparks, always laughing.

'Oh, what a clod!' she'd cry. If so, thought Homer Wells, only when you're smoking.

Louise Tobey wolfed in a cigarette; she sucked in a cloud of smoke and blew so little back, Homer wondered where it went. The older apple-mart women were constant smokers (all except Grace Lynch, who had resolved not to part her lips—not for any reason), but Florence and Irene and Big Dot Taft had been smoking so long, they appeared off-handed about it. Only Debra Pettigrew, Dot's kid sister, smoked with Candy's infrequency and awkwardness. Squeeze Louise smoked with a quick, sure violence that Homer imagined must have been inspired by Herb Fowler's rough-and-ready use of rubbers.

In all of Heart's Rock and Heart's Haven—from the briny gurgle of lobstering life to the chlorine security of the Haven Club pool; from the bustle of the making ready in the apple mart to the work in the fields—there was nothing that caused Homer a single, sharp reminder of St. Cloud's, nothing until the first rainy day, when they sent him, with a small crew of scrubbers and painters, to the cider house.

Nothing about the building, from the outside, prepared him. On or in various farm vehicles, he had lumbered past it often—a long, thin, one-story, shed-roofed building in the shape of an arm held at a right angle; in the elbow of the building, where there was a double-door entrance, were the cider mill and the press (the grinder, {309} the pump, the pump engine and the grinder engine, and the thousand-gallon tank).

One wing of the building was studded with refrigeration units; it was a cold-storage room for the cider. In the other wing was a small kitchen, beyond which were extended two long rows of iron hospital-style beds, each with its own blanket and pillow. Mattresses were rolled neatly on each of the more than twenty beds. Sometimes a blanket on wire runners enclosed a bed, or a section of beds, in the semi-privacy that Homer Wells associated with a hospital ward. Unpainted plywood shelves between the beds formed primitive but stable wardrobe closets, which contained those twisted, gooses-necked reading lamps wherever there was the occasional electrical outlet. The furniture was shabby but neat, as if rescued or rejected from hospitals and offices where it had been exposed to relentless but considerate use.

This wing of the cider house had the functional economy of a military barracks, but it had too many personal touches to be institutional. There were curtains, for example, and Homer could tell that they would have been adequate, if faded, at the Worthingtons' diningroom windows—which was where they'd come from. Homer also recognized a particularly exaggerated peacefulness in a few of the flowery landscape paintings and animal portraits that were hung on the plasterboard walls—in such unlikely places (at times, too high; at times, too low) that Homer was sure they'd been hung to hide holes. Maybe boot holes, maybe fist holes, perhaps whole-head holes; there seemed to Homer Wells to radiate from the room a kind of dormitory anger and apprehension he recognized from his nearly twenty years in the boys' division at St. Cloud's.

'What is this place?' he asked Meany Hyde, the rain pelting on the tin roof above them.

'The cider house,' said Meany.

'But who
sleeps
here—who stays here? Do people
live
here?' Homer asked. It was remarkably clean, yet the {310} atmosphere of use was so prevalent, Homer was reminded of the old bunkrooms in St. Cloud's where the woodsmen and sawyers had dreamed out their exhausted lives.

'It's crew quarters, for the pickers,' Meany Hyde said. 'Durin' the harvest, the pickers stay here—the migrants.'

'It's for the colored folks,' said Big Dot Taft, plopping down the mops and pails. 'Every year, we make it nice for them. We wash everythin' and we give everythin' a fresh coat of paint.'

'I gotta wax the press boards,' Meany Hyde said, sliding away from what he thought was the women's work —although Homer and Wally would perform it regularly most rainy days of the summer.

'Negroes?' Homer Wells asked. 'The pickers are Negroes?'

'Black as night, some of them,' said Florence Hyde. 'They're okay.'

'They're nice!' called Meany Hyde.

'Some of them are nicer than others,' said Big Dot Taft.

'Like other people I know,' Irene Titcomb said, giggling, hiding her scar.

'They're nice because Mrs. Worthington is nice to them!' Meany Hyde yelled from the spattered vicinity of the cider press.

The building smelled like vinegar—old cider that had turned. It was a strong smell, but there was nothing stifling or unclean about it.

Debra Pettigrew smiled at Homer over the bucket they were sharing; he cautiously returned her smile while wondering where Wally was working today, in the rain, and imagining Ray Kendall at work. Ray would either be out on the choppy sea in his glistening sou'wester or else working on the wiring of the International Harvester in the building called Number Two.

Grace Lynch was scrubbing the linoleum counters in the kitchen of the cider house; Homer marveled that he had not noticed her there before, that he hadn't even {311} known she was part of their crew. Louise Tobey, sucking a cigarette down to its nub and flicking the butt out the picking crew-quarters' door, remarked that her mop wringer was 'out of joint.'

'It's jammed, or somethin',' Squeeze Louise said crossly.

'Louise's mop wringer is out of joint,' Big Dot Taft said mockingly.

'Poor Louise—jammed your mop wringer, huh?' said Florence Hyde, who laughed, which caused Big Dot Taft to roar.

'Oh, cut it out!' Louise said. She kicked her mop wringer.

'What's going on out there?' called Meany Hyde.

'Louise has got an overworked
wringer!
said Big Dot Taft. Homer looked at Louise, who was cross; then he looked at Debra Pettigrew, who blushed.

'Are you overusin' your poor wringer, Louise?' Irene Titcomb asked.

'Louise, you must be stickin' too many mops in your wringer, darlin',' said Florence Hyde.

'Be nice, all of you!' cried Meany Hyde.

'Too much of
one
mop, that's for sure,' said Big Dot Taft. Elven Louise found that funny. When she looked at Homer Wells, he looked away; Debra Pettigrew was watching him, so he looked away from her, too.

When Herb Fowler came by, at the lunch break, he walked into the cider house and said, 'Whew! You can smell niggers in here a whole year later.'

'I think it's just vinegar,' Meany Hyde said.

'You tellin' me you can't smell niggers?' Herb Fowler asked. 'You smell 'em?' Herb asked Louise. She shrugged. 'How about you?' Herb asked Homer. 'Can't you smell 'em?'

'I can smell vinegar, old apples, old cider,' Homer said.

He saw the rubber sailing toward him in time to catch it.

'You know what niggers do with those?' Herb asked him. He flipped another rubber to Louise Tobey, who {312} caught it without the slightest effort—she expected prophylactics to be flying in her direction hourly. 'Show him what a nigger does with it, Louise,' Herb said. The other women were bored; they'd seen this demonstration all their lives; Debra Pettigrew looked nervously at Homer Wells and deliberately away from Louise; Louise herself seemed nervous and bored at the same time. She ripped the rubber out of its wrapper and stuck her index finger in it—her fingernail poked out the rubber, her nail's fine edge next to the nipplelike end.