by John Irving
Olive was her usual kind self regarding the matter; when she saw Vernon Lynch later, she gave Vernon a glare--hard enough for Vernon to feel discomforted by it. He was cleaning the nozzle for the spray gun down at Number Two when Olive cruised past him in the faded pickup. Olive's look was such that Vernon wondered for a moment if he'd been fired, if that look was all the notice he was going to get. But the thought quickly passed, the way thoughts tended to pass through Vernon Lynch. He looked at the muddy tracks left by Olive's pickup and said something typical.
"Suck my dick, you rich bitch," Vernon Lynch said. Then he continued to clean out the spray-gun nozzle.
That night Wally sat on Ray Kendall's dock with Candy and told her what little he knew about St. Cloud's. He didn't know, for example, that there was an apostrophe. He'd not bothered to apply to Harvard; his grades weren't good enough to get him into Bowdoin; the University of Maine, where he was halfheartedly majoring in botany, hadn't taught him a thing about grammar.
"I knew it was an orphanage," Candy said. "That's all I knew."
It was clear to them both that no good excuse could be invented for their being gone overnight, so Wally arranged to borrow Senior's Cadillac; they would have to leave very early in the morning and return in the evening of the same day. Wally told Senior it was the best time of year to explore the coast, and maybe drive a little inland; the coast would have more tourists as the summer progressed, and inland it would get too hot for a comfortable drive.
"I know it's a workday," Wally told Olive. "What's one day matter, Mom? It's just to have a little adventure with Candy--just a day off."
Olive wondered if Wally would ever amount to anything.
Ray Kendall had his own work to worry about. He knew Candy would be happy to take a drive with Wally. Wally was a good driver--if a trifle fast--and the Cadillac, Ray knew better than anyone, was a safe car. Ray did all the work on it.
The night before their trip, Candy and Wally went to bed early, but each of them was awake through the night. Like most truly loving young couples, they found themselves worrying about what effect this experience would have on the other. Wally worried that an abortion would make Candy unhappy, or even uncomfortable with sex. Candy wondered if Wally would feel the same way about her after all this was over.
That same night Wilbur Larch and Homer Wells weren't sleeping either. Larch sat at the typewriter in Nurse Angela's office; through the window, he saw Homer Wells walking around outside, with an oil lamp in the darkness. What is the matter now? Larch wondered, and went to see what Homer was doing.
"I couldn't sleep," Homer told Larch.
"What is it this time?" Dr. Larch asked Homer.
"Maybe it's just an owl," said Homer Wells. The oil lamp didn't project very far into the darkness, and the wind was strong, which was unusual for St. Cloud's. When the wind blew out the lamp, the doctor and his assistant saw that they were backlit by the light shining from the window of Nurse Angela's office. It was the only light for miles around, and it made their shadows gigantic. Larch's shadow reached across the stripped, unplanted plot of ground, up the barren hillside, all the way into the black woods. Homer Wells's shadow touched the dark sky. It was only then that both men noticed: Homer had grown taller than Dr. Larch.
"I'll be damned," Larch muttered, spreading his arms, so that his shadow looked like a magician about to reveal something. Larch flapped his arms like a big bat. "Look!" he said to Homer. "I'm a sorcerer!"
Homer Wells, the sorcerer's apprentice, flapped his arms, too.
The wind was very strong and fresh. The usual density in the air above St. Cloud's had lifted; the stars shone bright and cold; the memory of cigar smoke and sawdust was missing from this new air.
"Feel that wind," said Homer Wells; maybe the wind was keeping him up.
"It's a wind coming from the coast," Wilbur Larch said; he sniffed, deeply, for traces of salt. It was a rare sea breeze, Larch was sure.
Wherever it's from, it's nice, Homer Wells decided.
Both men stood sniffing the wind. Each man thought: What is going to happen to me?
5
Homer Breaks a Promise
The stationmaster at St. Cloud's was a lonely, unattractive man--a victim of mail-order catalogues and of an especially crackpot mail-order religion. The latter, whose publication took an almost comic book form, was delivered monthly; the last month's issue, for example, had a cover illustration of a skeleton in soldier's clothes flying on a winged zebra over a battlefield that vaguely resembled the trenches of World War I. The other mail-order catalogues were of a more standard variety, but the stationmaster was such a victim of his superstitions that his dreams frequently confused the images of his mail-order religious material with the household gadgets, nursing bras, folding chairs, and giant zucchinis he saw advertised in the catalogues.
Thus it was not unusual for him to be awakened in a night terror by a vision of coffins levitating from a picture-perfect garden--the prize-winning vegetables taking flight with the corpses. There was one catalogue devoted entirely to fishing equipment; the stationmaster's cadavers were often seen in waders or carrying rods and nets; and then there were the undergarment catalogues, advertising bras and girdles. The flying dead in bras and girdles especially frightened the stationmaster.
The most particularly crackpot aspect of the mail-order religion was its insistence on the presence of the growing numbers of the restless, homeless, unsaved dead; in areas of the world more populated than St. Cloud's, the stationmaster imagined that these luckless souls were crowding the sky. The arrival of Dr. Larch's "Clara" fitted ominously into the stationmaster's pattern of night terrors and contributed to his especially stricken appearance upon the arrival of every new train--although Larch had assured the moron that there would be no new bodies arriving for at least a year or two.
To the stationmaster, the notion of Judgment Day was as tangible as the weather. He hated the first train of the morning the most. It was the milk train; and in any weather, the heavy cans were covered with a cold sweat. The empty cans, which were put on the train, produced a kind of death knell, a hollow bonging noise, as they tapped the wooden station platform or were handed up the iron stairs. The first train of the morning was the mail train, too; although the stationmaster was eager for new catalogues, he never lost his fear of the mail--of what might be coming his way: if not another cadaver, sloshing in embalming fluid, then the monthly warning from the mail-order religion that Judgment Day was at hand (always sooner than it was last expected, and always with more terrifying verve). The stationmaster lived to be shocked.
A hole in a tomato could cause him to escalate his predawn bouts of feverish prayer; dead animals (of whatever cause) made him tremble--he believed the creatures' souls clogged the air he needed to breathe or were capable of invading his body. (They were certainly capable of contributing to his sleeplessness, for the stationmaster was as veteran an insomniac as Wilbur Larch and Homer Wells and was without the benefit of ether, youth, or education.)
This time it was the wind that awakened him, he was sure; something like a bat was blown off-course and struck his house. He was convinced that a flying animal had died violently against his wall and that its rabid soul was circling around outside, seeking entry. Then the wind made a moaning sound as it funneled through the spokes of the stationmaster's bicycle. A sudden gust knocked the bicycle off its kickstand; it clattered on the brick path, its little thumb bell dinging feebly--as if one of the world's restless souls had failed in an attempt to steal it. The stationmaster sat up in bed and screamed.
He had been advised in the monthly mail-order religious publication that screaming was of some, if not certain, protection against homeless souls. Indeed, the stationmaster's scream was not without effect; its shrillness dislodged a pigeon from the eaves of the house, and (since no pigeon desires to fly at night) the bird hopped and scrabbled its way noisily across the stationmaster's roof looking for a quieter corner. The stationmaste
r lay on his back, staring straight up at his roof; he expected the wandering soul to descend at any moment upon him. The pigeon's coo was the cry of another tortured sinner, the stationmaster was sure. He got up and stared out of his bedroom window, his nightlight weakly illuminating the small plot he had recently tilled for his vegetable garden. The freshly turned earth shocked him; he mistook it for a ready grave. It gave him such a turn that he quickly dressed himself and tramped outside.
Another thing he had learned from his mail-order religion was that the souls of the dead cannot invade an active body. You mustn't be caught sleeping, or even standing still; that was the main thing. And so the stationmaster boldly set out for a brisk walk through St. Cloud's. He muttered threateningly at the would-be ghosts he saw everywhere. "Go away," he growled--at this building, at that sound, at every unclear shadow. A dog barked in one house. The stationmaster surprised a raccoon busy with someone's garbage, but live animals didn't bother him; he hissed at the coon and appeared satisfied when the coon hissed back. He chose to stay away from the abandoned buildings where, he remembered, that fat nightmare of a girl from the orphanage had caused so much damage. He knew that in those buildings the lost souls were both numerous and fierce.
He felt safer around the orphanage. Though he was frightened of Dr. Larch, the stationmaster became fairly aggressive in the presence of children and their imagined souls. Like most easily frightened people, the stationmaster was something of a bully when he perceived that he had the upper hand. "Damn kids," he muttered, passing the girls' division. He had trouble thinking of the girls' division without imagining doing terrible things with that great big ruffian-girl--the destroyer, he called her. He'd had more than one night terror regarding her; she was often the model of the many bras and girdles in his dreams. He paused only briefly by the girls' division, sniffing deeply--he thought he might catch some scent of Melony, the building wrecker--but the wind was too strong; the wind was everywhere. It is a Judgment Day wind! he thought, and walked quickly on. He was not going to stand still long enough for some terrible soul to enter him.
He was on the wrong side of the boys' division to see the lighted window in Nurse Angela's office, but he could look over the building, up the hillside, and see the light from the window illuminating the eroded, unplanted hill. He couldn't see where the light was coming from, and this disquieted him; it seemed eerie how a light from nowhere was making the stripped hill glow all the way into the black edge of the woods.
The stationmaster could have wept at his own timidity, but he cursed himself instead; so much of his sleep was lost to fear, and the first train of the morning was such an early train. For most of the year, the train arrived when it was still dark. And those women who were on it, sometimes . . . the stationmaster shuddered. Those women in the loose clothes, always asking where the orphanage was--some of them back the same evening, their faces like ash, the color of so many of the faces in the stationmaster's night terrors. Very nearly, he thought, the color of Clara's face, though the stationmaster didn't know her name. His one look at Clara had been so brief that it was unfair he should be doomed to see her so many times since; and each time, he saw more of her--in his dreams.
When the stationmaster heard what he thought were voices, he looked over the boys' division at the lit hillside above St. Cloud's, and that was when he saw the towering shadows of Wilbur Larch and Homer Wells--stretching, in the case of one, to the woods' dark edge and, in the case of the other, stretching into the sky. The two giant figures flapped their huge, hill-spanning arms; whipped by the wind, the stationmaster caught the word "sorcerer!" It was then he knew that he could walk, or even run, all night--but he would not escape, not this time. The last thought that the stationmaster had was that the time for him, and for all the world, had come.
The next morning, the sea breeze still stirred St. Cloud's. Even Melony noticed it; her usual grouchiness was suspended--she had trouble waking up, although she'd passed a wakeful night. She'd had the impression that all night an animal was prowling the grounds of the girls' division, probably getting into the trash. And she'd been able to observe the two women walking up the hill from the train station in the predawn glow. The women were not speaking to each other--they probably didn't know each other; they had certainly guessed each other's circumstances. The women walked head down. They were both overdressed for the spring; Melony watched the wind press their baggy winter coats against the women's bodies. They don't look pregnant, Melony observed; she reminded herself to be on hand, at her favorite window, to watch the women heading down the hill for the evening train. With what they were giving up, Melony thought, one might expect their returning steps to be lighter; and, after all, they were heading downhill. But every time, the women walked more heavily down the hill than they had walked up it--it appeared they'd been given something to carry away with them. Their gait was quite the contrary from what one might expect in the gait of women who'd been, truly, scraped clean.
Scraped not so clean, maybe, Melony thought. Although Homer Wells had told her nothing, what trouble could exist that Melony couldn't see? Whatever there was that glimmered of wrong, that shone of mistake--of loss, of hope abandoned, of the grim choices that were possible--Melony had an eye expertly trained to see this, and more.
She'd not yet set foot outdoors but she could tell something different was in the wind. She could not see the body of the stationmaster; he had fallen in the weeds by the delivery entrance to the boys' division--which was little used; there was a separate delivery entrance for the hospital.
From his window-on-the-world, from Nurse Angela's office, Dr. Larch could not have seen the weeds where the stationmaster lay stiffening, either. And it was not the stationmaster's departed soul that troubled Larch that morning. He'd had other sleepless nights; sea breezes were rare, but he had felt them. There'd been a fight in the girls' division that had required some stitching in one girl's lip and in another girl's eyebrow, but Wilbur Larch wasn't worried about those girls. Homer Wells had done a very neat job with the lip; Larch had handled the eyebrow, which presented more of a problem with permanent scarring.
And the two women who were waiting for their abortions were very early in their respective pregnancies, and--in Nurse Edna's judgment--both seemed robust and sane. And there was an almost cheerful woman from Damariscotta--she'd just begun her contractions, which appeared perfectly normal; she'd had one previous delivery, very routine, and so Larch anticipated no difficulty with her. He was thinking he'd have Homer deliver the Damariscotta woman because it looked straightforward and because the woman, Nurse Angela had said, had taken a particular liking to Homer; she had talked up a storm to him every second he'd been around her.
So what's wrong? thought Wilbur Larch. Or if not wrong, different?
So what if the mail was late and the dining hall said there'd been no milk delivery? Larch didn't know--and wouldn't have cared--that the train station had been more than usually disorganized in the stationmaster's absence; he didn't know that the stationmaster was missing. Wilbur Larch had noticed no disturbance among the souls crowding the sky above St. Cloud's. With the work he felt was his calling, Dr. Larch could not afford too rigorous a contemplation of the soul.
Previous to this morning, Homer Wells had not been presented with an occasion to contemplate the soul. A study of the soul had not been a part of his training. And since there were no windows in the room where Homer conducted his studies of Clara, it was not the stationmaster--or his soul--that suddenly presented itself to Homer Wells.
Dr. Larch had asked Homer to prepare a fetus for an autopsy.
A woman from Three Mile Falls had been stabbed, or she had stabbed herself; this was not unusual in Three Mile Falls but the pregnancy of the woman was nearly full-term--and the possibility of delivering a live baby from the dead woman had been unusual, even for Dr. Larch. He had attempted to rescue the child but the child--or, rather, the embryo, nearly nine months--had not escaped one of the stab wounds. Li
ke its mother, the child (or the fetus, as Dr. Larch preferred) had bled to death. It would have been a boy--that much was clear to Homer Wells, or even to the untrained eye; whatever one called it, it was very nearly a fully developed baby. Dr. Larch had asked Homer to help him determine (more exactly than "bled to death") the source of the fetus's bleeding.
Homer Wells borrowed Dr. Larch's sternum shears before he realized that a pair of heavy scissors was all he needed to open the fetus's sternum. He cut straight up the middle, noticing immediately the slashed pulmonary artery; to his surprise, the wound was less than half an inch away from a wide-open ductus--in the fetus, the ductus arteriosus is half the size of the aorta, but Homer had never looked inside a fetus before; in the born, within ten days, the ductus becomes nothing but a fibrous thread. This change is initiated not by any mystery but by the first breath, which closes the ductus and opens the lungs. In the fetus, the ductus is a shunt--the blood bypasses the lungs on its way to the aorta.
It should not have been a shock for Homer Wells to see the evidence that a fetus has little need for blood in its lungs; a fetus doesn't breathe. Yet Homer was shocked; the stab wound, at the base of the ductus, appeared as a second eye alongside the little opening of the ductus itself. The facts were straightforward enough: the ductus was wide open because this fetus had never taken its first breath.
What was the life of the embryo but a history of development? Homer attached a tiny, needle-nosed clamp to the severed pulmonary artery. He turned to the section in Gray's devoted to the embryo. It was another shock for him to remember that Gray's did not begin with the embryo; it ended with it. The embryo was the last thing considered.
