Cider House Rules
Page 20
Ira had worn the suit because he’d imagined that his shotgun blast might rip into one of the hives and loose a few bees. He had no intention of scaring his wife, but poor Irene looked out the window and saw what she thought was a flaming white apparition! No doubt this was what had been molesting the hives! The ghost of a beekeeper of bygone days! It had probably killed poor Ira and was now coming for her! The frying pan flew up in her hands, splashing the hot bacon grease on her face. Irene was lucky she didn’t blind herself. Oh, those at-home accidents! How they surprise you.
“Whatcha want, big boy?” Big Dot Taft asked Wally. The apple mart women teased and flirted with Wally endlessly; they thought he was gorgeous and a lot of fun, and these three had known him since he was a little boy.
“He wants to take us for a ride!” cried Irene Titcomb, still laughing—her face still turned away.
“Why don’t you take us to a movie, Wally?” Florence Hyde asked him.
“Oh, God, what I wouldn’t do for you, Wally,” Dot Taft said, “if you took me to a movie!”
“Don’t you want to make us happy, Wally?” Florence asked him, whining a little.
“Maybe Wally’s going to fire us!” Irene Titcomb shrieked, and that broke up the three of them. Dot Taft roared so loud that Florence Hyde inhaled her cigarette the wrong way and began to cough, which made Dot roar some more.
“Is Grace here today?” Wally asked casually, when the women calmed down.
“Oh, God, he wants Grace!” Dot Taft said. “What’s she got that we haven’t got?”
Bruises, Wally thought. Broken bones, false teeth—certainly genuine aches and pains.
“I just want to ask her something,” Wally said, smiling shyly—his shyness was deliberate; he handled himself very smoothly around the mart women.
“I’ll bet she’ll say ‘No!’ ” Irene Titcomb said, giggling.
“No, everyone says ‘Yes!’ to Wally,” Florence Hyde teased.
Wally allowed the laughter to subside.
Then Dot Taft said, “Grace is cleaning the pie oven.”
“Thank you, ladies,” Wally said, bowing, blowing them kisses, backing away.
“You’re bad, Wally,” Florence Hyde told him. “You just came here to make us jealous.”
“That Grace must have a hot oven,” Dot Taft said, and this started more laughter and coughing.
“Don’t get burned, Wally,” Irene Titcomb called after him, and he left the mart women chattering and smoking at a higher pitch than when he’d found them.
He was not surprised that Grace Lynch had drawn the worst job for a rainy day. The other women sympathized with her, but she was not one of them. She stood apart, as if she were afraid everyone might suddenly turn on her and beat her as badly as Vernon did, as if the beatings she’d already survived had cost her the necessary humor for trading stories equally with Florence and Irene and Dot.
Grace Lynch was much thinner and a little younger than these women; her thinness was unusual among the regular mart women. Even Herb Fowler’s girlfriend (Squeeze Louise) was heftier than Grace, and Dot Taft’s kid sister, Debra Pettigrew—who was fairly regular in pie season, and when the assembly line to the packinghouse was running—even Debra had more flesh on her than Grace had.
And since she had needed new teeth, Grace was even tighter-lipped than usual; there was a grim concentration to the narrow line of her mouth. Wally couldn’t remember ever seeing Grace Lynch laugh—and some form of yucking it up was essential to relieve the boredom of the life of the apple mart women. Grace was simply the cowed dog among them. She didn’t look as if she took any pleasure from eating pie—or from eating anything at all. She didn’t smoke, and in 194_ everyone smoked—even Wally. She was noise-shy and flinched around the machinery.
Wally hoped she was wearing long sleeves so that he wouldn’t have to look at the bruises on her arms, but she was half in one of the deep shelves of the pie oven when Wally found her; she was wearing a long-sleeved shirt, but both sleeves were rolled up above her elbows to spare the shirt some of the oven-black. Wally startled her with her head in the oven, and half her body, too, and Grace made a little cry and banged one of her elbows against the door hinge as she withdrew in too much of a hurry.
“Sorry I scared you, Grace,” Wally said quickly—it was hard to walk up on Grace without making her bump into something. She said nothing; she rubbed one elbow; she folded and unfolded her thin arms, hiding her very slight breasts or, by keeping her arms in constant motion, concealing her bruises. She wouldn’t look Wally in the eye; as poised as Wally was, he always felt a terrific tension when he tried to talk with her; he felt she might suddenly run away from him or throw herself at him—either with her claws out, or kissing him with her tongue stabbing.
He wondered if she mistook his inescapable search for the new bruises on her body for a sexual interest; maybe that was part of the problem between them.
“That poor woman is just crazy,” Ray Kendall had told Wally once; maybe that was all.
“Grace?” Wally asked, and Grace trembled. She was squeezing a wad of steel wool so tightly that the dirty suds streaked down one arm and wet the waist of her shirt and the bony hip of her denim work jeans. A single tooth, probably false, appeared out of her mouth and clenched a tiny piece of her lower lip. “Uh, Grace,” Wally said. “I’ve got a problem.”
She stared at him as if this news frightened her more than anything anyone had ever told her. She looked quickly away and said, “I’m cleaning the oven.” Wally thought he might have to grab her to keep her from crawling back in the oven. He suddenly realized that all his secrets—that anyone’s secrets—were entirely safe with Grace Lynch. There was absolutely nothing she dared to say, and no one in her life to tell it to—if she ever got up the courage.
“Candy is pregnant,” Wally said to Grace, who wobbled as if a wind had come up—or the strong ammonia fumes of the oven cleaner had overpowered her. She looked at Wally again with her eyes as round as a rabbit’s.
“I need advice,” Wally said to her. It occurred to him that if Vernon Lynch saw him talking to Grace, Vernon would probably find that just cause for giving Grace another beating. “Please just tell me what you know, Grace,” Wally said.
Grace Lynch spat it out from between her very tight lips. “Saint Cloud’s,” she hissed; it was a loud whisper. Wally thought it was someone’s name—the name of a saint? Or else a kind of nickname for an exceptionally evil abortionist—St. Cloud’s! Grace Lynch, it was clear, had no luck. If she’d been to an abortionist, wouldn’t it have to be the worst abortionist one could imagine?
“I don’t know the doctor’s name,” Grace confided, still whispering and not looking up at Wally anymore—she would never again look up at him. “The place is called Saint Cloud’s, and the doctor’s good—he’s kinda gentle, he makes it okay.” For her, this was virtually a sermon—at least a speech. “But don’t make her go alone—okay, Wally?” Grace said, actually reaching out and touching him—but recoiling the instant she made contact, as if Wally’s skin were hotter than the pie oven when it was fired up.
“No, I won’t make her go alone, of course,” Wally promised her.
“You ask for the orphanage when you get off the train,” Grace said. She climbed back in the oven before he could thank her.
Grace Lynch had gone to St. Cloud’s alone. Vernon hadn’t even known she was going, or he would probably have beaten her for it. Since she’d been gone overnight, he’d beaten her for that, but perhaps it was a lesser beating by his standards.
Grace had arrived in the early evening, just after dark; as was customary, she’d not been housed with the expectant mothers; she’d been so jittery that Dr. Larch’s sedation had not affected her very much and she’d been awake through the night, listening to everything. It had been before Homer’s days as an apprentice, so if Homer had seen her, he would never remember her, and when—one day—Grace Lynch would see Homer Wells, she wouldn’t recognize him.
Still—though Nurse Edna and Nurse Angela had made her feel welcome, and Larch had been, as Grace had told Wally, gentle—Grace Lynch hated to think of St. Cloud’s. It was not so much for her own experience, or because of her own trouble, but because of the atmosphere of the place in the long night she’d stayed awake. The dense air hung like a great weight, the disturbed river smelled like death, the cries of the babies were weirder than the cries of loons—and there were owls, and someone peeing, and someone walking around. There was a far-off machine (the typewriter), and a shout from another building—just one long wail (possibly, that had been Melony).
After Wally had visited with her, Grace balked at finishing the pie oven job. She felt sick to her stomach—it was like the cramps she’d had that time—and she went out to the apple mart and asked the women there if they’d finish the oven for her; she just didn’t feel well, she said. Nobody teased Grace. Big Dot Taft asked her if she’d like a ride home, and Irene Titcomb and Florence Hyde (who had nothing to do, anyway) said they’d tackle the oven “in two shakes,” as they say in Maine. Grace Lynch went to find Olive Worthington; she told Olive she wasn’t feeling well and was going home early.
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 stationmaster 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.