by John Irving
"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 wife 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 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."
"Okay," George would say.
"Sure," Mr. Rose would say, "everythin's 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 mess, eight or ten gallons of cider and the pomace flying everywhere. The men at the press wore 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 I 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 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.
There were no movements wasted in what movement there was to be seen by Mr. Rose--a quality that Homer Wells had formerly associated only with Dr. Larch; surely Dr. Larch had other, quite different qualities, as did Mr. Rose.
Back at the apple mart, the harvest appeared at a momentary standstill, held up by the rain, which Big Dot Taft and the mart women watched sourly from their assembly-line positions along the conveyor tracks in the packing line.
No one seemed very excited by the cider Homer brought. It was very bland, as the first cider usually is, and too watery--composed, typically, of early Macs and Gravensteins. You don't get a good cider until October, Meany Hyde had told Homer, and Mr. Rose had confirmed this with a solemn nod. A good cider needs some of those last-picked apples--Golden Delicious and Winter Banana, and the Baldwins or Russets, too.
"Cider's got no smoke before October," said Big Dot Taft, inhaling her cigarette listlessly.
Homer Wells, listening to Big Dot Taft, felt like her voice--dulled. Wally was away, Candy was away, and the anatomy of a rabbit was, after Clara, no challenge; the migrants, whom he'd so eagerly anticipated, were just plain hard workers; life was just a job. He had grown up without notic
ing when? Was there nothing remarkable in the transition?
They had four days of good picking weather at Ocean View before Meany Hyde said there would be a night press and Mr. Rose again invited Homer to come to the cider house and "get the feel of it." Homer had a quiet dinner with Mrs. Worthington and only after he'd helped her wash the dishes did he say he thought he'd go to the cider house and see if he could help with the pressing; he knew they would have been hard at work for two or three hours.
"What a good worker you are, Homer!" Olive told him appreciatively.
Homer Wells shrugged. It was a cold, clear night, the very best weather for McIntosh apples--warm, sunny days, and cold nights. It was not so cold that Homer couldn't smell the apples as he walked to the cider house, and it was not so dark that he needed to keep on the dirt road; he could go overland. Because he was not on the road, he was able to approach the cider house unobserved.
For a while he stood outside the range of the lights blazing in the mill room and listened to the sounds of the men working the press, and talking, and laughing--and the murmur of the men who were talking and laughing on the cider house roof. Homer Wells listened for a long time, but he realized that when the men were not making an effort to be understood by a white person, he couldn't understand them at all--not even Mr. Rose, whose clear voice appeared to punctuate the other voices with calm but emphatic interjections.
They were also pressing cider at York Farm that night, but Melony wasn't interested; she wasn't trying to understand either the process or the lingo. The crew boss, Rather, had made it clear to her that the men resented her working the press, or even bottling; it cut into their extra pay. Melony was tired from the picking, anyway. She lay on her bed in the bunkroom of the cider house, reading Jane Eyre; there was a man asleep at the far end of the bunkroom, but Melony's reading light didn't disturb him--he had drunk too much beer, which was all that Rather allowed the men to drink. The beer was kept in the cold-storage room, right next to the mill, and the men were drinking and talking together while they ran the press.
The friendly woman named Sandra, who was Rather's wife, was sitting on a bed not far from Melony, trying to mend a zipper on a pair of one of the men's trousers. The man's name was Sammy and he had only one pair of trousers; every so often he'd wander in from the mill room to see how Sandra's work was progressing--an overlarge, ballooning pair of undershorts hanging almost to his knobby knees, his legs below the knees like tough little vines.
Sandra's mother, whom everyone called Ma and who cooked plain but large meals for the crew, lay in a big lump on the bed next to Sandra, more than her share of blankets piled on top of her--she was always cold, but it was the only thing she complained about.
Sammy came into the bunkroom, sipping a beer and bringing with him the apple-mash odor of the mill room; the splatter from the press dotted his bare legs.
"Legs like that, no wonder you want your pants back," Sandra said.
"What are my chances?" Sammy asked.
"One, your zipper is jammed. Two, you tore it off your pants," Sandra said.
"What you in such a hurry with your zipper for?" Ma asked, without moving from her lumped position.
"Shit," Sammy said. He went back to the press. Every once in a while the grinder caught on something--a thick stem or a congestion of seeds--and it made a noise like a circular saw gagging on a knot. When that happened, Ma would say, "There goes somebody's hand." Or, "There goes somebody's whole head. Drunk too much beer and fell in."
Over it all, Melony managed to read. She wasn't being antisocial, in her view. The two women were nice to her once they realized she was not after any of the men. The men were respectful of her work--and of the mark upon her that was made by the missing boyfriend. Although they teased her, they meant her no harm.
She had lied, successfully, to one of the men, and the lie, as she knew it would, had gotten around. The man was named Wednesday, for no reason that was ever explained to Melony--and she wasn't interested enough to ask. Wednesday had asked her too many questions about the particular Ocean View she was looking for and the boyfriend she was trying to find.
She had snagged her ladder in a loaded tree and was trying to ease it free without shaking any apples to the ground; Wednesday was helping her, when Melony said, "Pretty tight pants I'm wearing, wouldn't you say?"
Wednesday looked at her and said, "Yeah, I would."
"You can see everything in the pockets, right?" Melony asked.
Wednesday looked again and saw only the odd sickle shape of the partially opened horn-rim barrette; tight and hard against the worn denim, it dug into Melony's thigh. It was the barrette that Mary Agnes Cork had stolen from Candy, and Melony had stolen for herself. One day, she imagined, her hair might be long enough for the barrette to be of use. Until such a time, she carried it like a pocket knife in her right-thigh pocket.
"What's that?" Wednesday asked.
"That's a penis knife," Melony said.
"A what knife?" Wednesday said.
"You heard me," Melony said. "It's real small and it's real sharp--it's good for just one thing."
"What's that?" Wednesday asked.
"It cuts off the end of a penis," Melony said. "Real fast, real easy--just the end."
If the picking crew at York Farm had been a knife-carrying crew, someone might have asked Melony to display the penis knife--just as an object of general appreciation among knife-carrying friends. But no one asked; the story appeared to hold. It allied itself with the other stories attached to Melony and solidified the underlying, uneasy feeling among the workers at York Farm: that Melony was no one to mess with. Around Melony, even the beer drinkers behaved.
The only ill effect of the York Farm picking crew drinking beer while they pressed cider was the frequency of their urinating, which Melony objected to only when they peed too near the cider house.
"Hey, I don't want to hear that!" she'd holler out the window when she could hear anyone pissing. "I don't want to smell it later, either! Get away from the building. What's the matter--you afraid of the dark?"
Sandra and Ma liked Melony for that, and they enjoyed the refrain; whenever they heard someone peeing, they would not fail to holler, in unison, "What's the matter? You afraid of the dark?"
But if everyone tolerated Melony's hardness, or even appreciated her for it, no one liked her reading at night. She was the only one who read anything, and it took a while for her to realize how unfriendly they thought reading was, how insulted they felt when she did it.
When they finished pressing that night and everyone settled into bed, Melony asked, as usual, if her reading light was going to bother anyone.
"The light don't bother nobody," Wednesday said.
There were murmurs of consent, and Rather said, "You all remember Cameron?" There was laughter and Rather explained to Melony that Cameron, who had worked at York Farm for years, had been such a baby that he needed a light on, all night, just to sleep.
"He thought animals was gonna eat him if he shut out the light!" Sammy said.
"What animals?" Melony asked.
"Cameron didn't know," somebody said.
Melony kept reading Jane Eyre, and after a while, Sandra said, "It's not the light that bothers us, Melony."
"Yeah," someone said. Melony didn't get it for a while, but gradually she became aware that they had all rolled toward her in their beds and were watching her sullenly.
"Okay," she said. "So what bothers you?"
"What you readin' about, anyway?" Wednesday asked.
"Yeah," Sammy said. "What's so special 'bout that book?"
"It's just a book," Melony said.
"Pretty big deal that you can read it, huh?" Wednesday asked.
"What?" said Melony.
"Maybe, if you like it so much," Rather said, "we might like it, too."
"You want me to read to you?" Melony asked.
"Somebody read to me, once," Sandra said.
"It wasn't me!" Ma sai
d. "It wasn't your father, either!"
"I never said it was!" Sandra said.
"I never heard nobody read to nobody," Sammy said.
"Yeah," somebody said.
Melony saw that some of the men were propped on their elbows in their beds, waiting. Even Ma turned her great lump around and faced Melony's bed.
"Quiet, everybody," Rather said.
For the first time in her life, Melony was afraid. After all her efforts and her hard traveling, she felt she had been returned to the girls' division without being aware of it; but it wasn't only that. It was the first time anyone had expected something of her; she knew what Jane Eyre meant to her, but what could it mean to them? She'd read it to children too young to understand half the words, too young to pay attention until the end of a sentence, but they were orphans--prisoners of the routine of being read to aloud; it was the routine that mattered.
Melony was more than halfway in her third or fourth journey through Jane Eyre. She said, "I'm on page two hundred and eight. There's a lot that's happened before."
"Just read it," Sammy said.
"Maybe I should start at the beginning," Melony suggested.
"Just read what you readin' to yourself," Rather said gently.
Her voice had never trembled before, but Melony began.
" 'The wind roared high in the great tree which embowered the gates,' " she read.
"What's 'embowered'?" Wednesday asked her.
"Like a bower," Melony said. "Like a thing hanging over you, like for grapes or roses."
"It's a kind of bower where the shower is," Sandra said.
"Oh," someone said.
" 'But the road as far as I could see,' " Melony continued, " 'to the right hand and left, was all still and solitary . . .' "
"What's that?" Sammy asked.
"Solitary is alone," Melony said.
"Like solitaire, you know solitaire," Rather said, and there was an approving murmur.
"Shut up your interruptin'," Sandra said.
"Well, we got to understand," Wednesday said.
"Just shut up," Ma said.
"Read," Rather said to Melony, and she tried to go on.
" '. . . the road . . . all still and solitary: save for the shadows of clouds crossing it at intervals, as the moon looked out, it was but a long pale line, unvaried by one moving speck,' " Melony read.
