Cider House Rules

by John Irving

  “Where she get you?” Muddy asked him again.

  “I didn’t think it would take this long,” said Mr. Rose. “It taken all day, but it felt like it was gonna go pretty fast.”

  All the men were standing around him when Homer Wells and Peaches arrived in the Jeep. Mr. Rose had very little left to say when Homer got to him.

  “You breakin’ them rules, too, Homer,” Mr. Rose whispered to him. “Say you know how I feel.”

  “I know how you feel,” said Homer Wells.

  “Right,” said Mr. Rose—grinning.

  The knife had entered in the upper right quadrant, close to the rib margin. Homer knew that a knife moving in an upward direction would give a substantial liver laceration, which would continue to bleed—at a moderate rate—for many hours. Mr. Rose might have stopped bleeding several times, and started again. In most cases, a liver stab wound hemorrhages very slowly.

  Mr. Rose died in Homer’s arms before Candy and Angel arrived at the cider house, but long after his daughter had made good her escape. Mr. Rose had managed to soak the blade of his own knife in his wound, and the last thing he told Homer was that it should be clear to the authorities that he had stabbed himself. If he hadn’t meant to kill himself, why would he have let himself bleed to death from what wasn’t necessarily a mortal wound?

  “My daughter run away,” Mr. Rose told all of them. “And I so sorry that I stuck myself. You better say that what happen. Let me hear you say it!” he raised his voice to them.

  “That what happen,” Muddy said.

  “You kill yourself,” Peaches told him.

  “That what happen,” Black Pan said.

  “You hearin’ this right, Homer?” Mr. Rose asked him.

  That was how Homer reported it, and that was how the death of Mr. Rose was received—the way he wanted it, according to the cider house rules. Rose Rose had broken the rules, of course, but everyone at Ocean View knew the rules Mr. Rose had broken with her.

  At the end of the harvest, on a gray morning with a wild wind blowing in from the ocean, the overhead bulb that hung in the cider house kitchen blinked twice and burned out; the spatter of apple mash on the far wall, near the press and grinder, was cast so somberly in shadows that the dark clots of pomace looked like black leaves that had blown indoors and stuck against the wall in a storm.

  The men were picking up their few things. Homer Wells was there—with the bonus checks—and Angel had come with him to say good-bye to Muddy and Peaches and Black Pan and the rest of them. Wally had made some arrangements with Black Pan to be crew boss the following year. Wally had been right about Mr. Rose being the only one of them who could read well and write at all. Muddy told Angel that he’d always thought the list of rules tacked to the kitchen wall was something to do with the building’s electricity.

  “ ’Cause it was always near the light switch,” Muddy explained. “I thought they was instructions ’bout the lights.”

  The other men, since they couldn’t read at all, never noticed that the list was there.

  “Muddy, if you should happen to see her,” Angel said, when he was saying good-bye.

  “I won’t see her, Angel,” Muddy told the boy. “She long gone.”

  Then they were all long gone. Angel would never see Muddy again, either—or Peaches, or any of the rest of them except Black Pan. It wouldn’t work out, having Black Pan as a crew boss, as Wally would discover; the man was a cook, not a picker, and a boss had to be in the field with the men. Although Black Pan would gather a fair picking crew together, he was never quite in charge of them—in future years, of course, no one would ever be as in charge of a picking crew at Ocean View as Mr. Rose had been. For a while, Wally would try hiring French Canadians; they were, after all, closer to Maine than the Carolinas. But the French Canadian crews were often ill-tempered and alcoholic, and Wally would always be trying to get the French Canadians out of jail.

  One year Wally would hire a commune, but that crew arrived with too many small children. The pregnant women on the ladders made everyone nervous. They left something cooking all day, and started a small fire in the kitchen. And when the men ran the press, they allowed their children to splash about in the vat.

  Wally would finally settle on Jamaicans. They were friendly, nonviolent, and good workers. They brought with them an interesting music and a straightforward but contained passion for beer (and for a little marijuana). They knew how to handle the fruit and they never hurt each other.

  But after Mr. Rose’s last summer at Ocean View, the pickers—whoever they were—would never sit on the cider house roof. It just never occurred to them. And no one would ever put up a list of rules again.

  In future years, the only person who ever sat on the cider house roof was Angel Wells, who would do it because he liked that particular view of the ocean, and because he wanted to remember that November day in 195_, after Muddy and the rest of them had left, and his father turned to him (they were alone at the cider house) and said, “How about sitting on the roof for a while with me? It’s time you knew the whole story.”

  “Another little story?” Angel asked.

  “I said the whole story,” said Homer Wells.

  And although it was a cold day, that November, and the wind off the sea was briny and raw, father and son sat on that roof a long time. It was, after all, a long story, and Angel would ask a lot of questions.

  Candy, who drove by the cider house and saw them sitting up there, was worried about how cold they must be. But she didn’t interrupt them; she just kept driving. She hoped the truth would keep them warm. She drove to the barn nearest the apple mart and got Everett Taft to help her put the canvas canopy on the Jeep. Then she went and got Wally out of the office.

  “Where are we going?” Wally asked her. She bundled him up in a blanket, as if she were taking him to the Arctic Circle. “We must be going north,” he said, when she didn’t answer him.

  “My father’s dock,” she told him. Wally knew that Ray Kendall’s dock, and everything else belonging to Ray, had been blown over land and sea; he kept quiet. The ugly little carhop restaurant that Bucky Bean had manufactured was closed for the season; they were alone. Candy drove the Jeep through the empty parking lot and out to a rocky embankment that served as a seawall against the waves in Heart’s Haven Harbor. She stopped as near to the ocean’s edge as she dared to, near the old pilings of what had been her father’s dock—where she and Wally had spent so many evenings, so long ago.

  Then, since this wasn’t wheelchair terrain, she carried Wally about ten yards, over the rocks and the sand, and sat him down on a relatively smooth and flat shelf of the jagged coastline. She wrapped Wally’s legs in the blanket and then she sat down behind him and straddled him with her legs—as a way of keeping them both warm. They sat facing Europe in this position, like riders on a sled about to plunge downhill.

  “This is fun,” Wally said. She stuck her chin over his shoulder; their cheeks were touching; she hugged him around his arms and his chest, and she squeezed his withered hips with her legs.

  “I love you, Wally,” Candy said, beginning her story.

  In late November, in the mousing season, the board of trustees at St. Cloud’s approved the appointment of Dr. F. Stone as obstetrician-in-residence and the new director of the orphanage—having met the zealous missionary in the board’s chambers in Portland, the birthplace of the late Wilbur Larch. Dr. Stone, who appeared a little tired from his Asian journeying and from what he described as “a touch of something dysenteric,” made the correct impression on the board. His manner was somber, his hair was graying and cropped in an almost military fashion (“Hindu barbers,” he apologized, showing a mild sense of humor; actually, Candy had cut his hair). Homer Wells was carelessly shaven, clean but tousled in his dress—both at ease and impatient with strangers, in the manner (the board thought) of a man with urgent business who was not in the least vain about his appearance; he hadn’t the time. The board also approved of Dr.
Stone’s medical and religious credentials—the latter, in the estimation of the devout Mrs. Goodhall, would give to Dr. Stone’s authority in St. Cloud’s a “balance” that she noted had been missing in Dr. Larch.

  Dr. Gingrich was excited to note the contortions registered on Mrs. Goodhall’s face during the entire meeting with young Dr. Stone, who did not recognize Gingrich and Goodhall from his brief glimpse of them in the off-season, Ogunquit hotel. Dr. Gingrich found a comforting familiarity in the young man’s face, although he would never associate the glow of a missionary with the sorrowful longing he had seen on the face of the lover. Perhaps Mrs. Goodhall’s tic affected her vision—she did not recognize the young man from the hotel, either—or else her mind would never grasp the possibility that a man devoted to children could also be a man with a practicing sexual life.

  To Homer Wells, Mrs. Goodhall and Dr. Gingrich were not special enough to remember; the peevish miseries compounded in their expressions were not unique. And the way that Homer looked when he was with Candy was not the way he looked most of the time.

  On the matter of abortions, Dr. Stone surprised the board by the adamant conviction he held: that they should be legalized, and that he intended to work through the proper channels toward that end. However, Dr. Stone assured them, as long as abortions were illegal, he would rigorously uphold the law. He believed in rules, and in obeying them, he told the board. They liked the hardship and self-sacrifice that they imagined they could witness in the wrinkles around his dark eyes—and how the fierce Asian sun had blistered his nose and cheeks while he had toiled to save the diarrhetic children. (Actually, he had deliberately sat for too long in front of Candy’s sunlamp.) And—on the religious grounds more comfortable to the board, and to Mrs. Goodhall especially—Dr. Stone said that he himself never would perform abortions, even if they were legalized. “I just couldn’t do it,” he lied calmly. If it ever was legal, of course, he would simply refer the unfortunate woman “to one of those doctors who could, and would.” It was clear that Dr. Stone found “those doctors” not to his liking—that, despite his loyalty to Dr. Larch, Dr. Stone found that particular practice of Larch’s to be an act decidedly against nature.

  It was in large measure indicative of Dr. Stone’s “Christian tolerance” that despite his long-standing disagreement with Dr. Larch on this delicate subject, the young missionary was forgiving of Larch—far more forgiving than the board, by no small portion. “I always prayed for him,” Dr. Stone said of Dr. Larch, his eyes shining. “I still pray for him.” It was an emotional moment, perhaps influenced by the aforementioned “touch of something dysenteric”—and the board was predictably moved by it. Mrs. Goodhall’s tic went wild.

  On the matter of Nurse Caroline’s socialist views, Dr. Stone assured the board that the young woman’s fervor to do the right thing had simply been—in her youth—misguided. He would tell her a few things about the Communist guerrilla activity in Burma that would open her eyes. And Dr. Stone convinced the board that the older nurses, and Mrs. Grogan, had a few more years of good service in them. “It’s all a matter of guidance,” Dr. Stone told the board. Now there was a word that pleased Dr. Gingrich!

  Dr. Stone opened his hands; they were rather roughly callused for the hands of a doctor, Mrs. Goodhall would observe—thinking it charming how this healer of children must have helped with building the huts or planting the gardens or whatever other rough work there’d been to do over there. When he said “guidance,” Homer Wells opened his hands the way a minister received a congregation, thought the board; or the way a good doctor received the precious head of a newborn child, they thought.

  And it was thrilling, after they had interviewed him, how he blessed them as he was leaving them. And how he salaamed to them!

  “Nga sak kin,” said the missionary doctor.

  Oh, what had he said? they all wanted to know. Wally, of course, had taught Homer the correct pronunciation—it being one of the few Burmese things that Wally had ever heard correctly, although he’d never learned what it meant.

  Homer Wells translated the phrase for them—Wally had always thought it was someone’s name. “It means,” Homer told the enraptured board: “May God watch over your soul, which no man may abuse.”

  There were loud murmurs of approval. Mrs. Goodhall said, “All that in such a short phrase!”

  “It’s a remarkable language,” Dr. Stone told them dreamily. “Nga sak kin,” he told them again. He got them all to repeat it after him. He was pleased to imagine them, later, giving this meaningless blessing to each other. It would have pleased him more if he’d ever known what the phrase actually meant. It was the perfect thing for a board of trustees to go around saying to each other: “curried fish balls.”

  “I think I got away with it,” Homer told Wally and Candy and Angel when they were eating a late supper in the house at Ocean View.

  “It doesn’t surprise me,” Wally told his friend. “I have every reason to believe that you can get away with anything.”

  Upstairs, after supper, Angel watched his father pack the old black doctor’s bag—and some other bags, as well.

  “Don’t worry, Pop,” Angel told his father. “You’re going to do just fine.”

  “You’re going to do just fine, too,” Homer told his son. “I’m not worried about that.” Downstairs they heard Candy pushing Wally around in the wheelchair. They were playing the game that Wally and Angel often played—the game Wally called “flying.”

  “Come on,” Wally was saying. “Angel can make it go faster.”

  Candy was laughing. “I’m going as fast as I can,” Candy said.

  “Please stop thinking about the furniture,” Wally told her.

  “Please look after Wally,” Homer said to Angel. “And mind your mother,” he told his son.

  “Right,” said Angel Wells.

  In the constantly changing weather of Maine, especially on cloudy days, the presence of St. Cloud’s could be felt in Heart’s Rock; with a heavy certainty, the air of St. Cloud’s could be distinguished in the trapped stillness that hovered above the water of Drinkwater Lake (like those water bugs, those water walkers, that were nearly constant there). And even in the fog that rolled over those bright, coastal lawns of Heart’s Haven’s well-to-do, there was sometimes in the storm-coming air that leaden, heart-sinking feeling that was the essence of the air of St. Cloud’s.

  Candy and Wally and Angel would go to St. Cloud’s for Christmas, and for the longer of Angel’s school vacations, too; and after Angel had his driver’s license, he was free to visit his father as often as he liked, which was often.

  But when Homer Wells went to St. Cloud’s—even though Wally had offered him a car—Homer took the train. Homer knew he wouldn’t need a car there, and he wanted to arrive the way most of his patients did; he wanted to get the feel of it.

  In late November, there was already snow as the train moved north and inland, and by the time the train reached St. Cloud’s, the blue-cold snow was deeply on the ground and heavily bent the trees. The stationmaster, who hated to leave the television, was shoveling snow off the platform when the train pulled in. The stationmaster thought he recognized Homer Wells, but the stern, black doctor’s bag and the new beard fooled him. Homer had started the beard because it had hurt to shave (after he’d burned his face with the sunlamp), and once the beard had grown for a while, he thought the charge would be suitable. Didn’t a beard go with his new name?

  “Doctor Stone,” Homer said to the stationmaster, introducing himself. “Fuzzy Stone,” he said. “I used to be an orphan here. Now I’m the new doctor.”

  “Oh, I thought you was familiar!” the stationmaster said, bowing as he shook Homer’s hand.

  Only one other passenger had gotten off the train in St. Cloud’s, and Homer Wells had no difficulty imagining what she wanted. She was a thin young woman in a long muskrat coat with a scarf, and a ski hat pulled almost over her eyes, and she hung back on the platform, waiting for Homer
to move away from the stationmaster. It was the doctor’s bag that had caught her attention, and after Homer had arranged for the usual louts to tote his heavier luggage, he started up the hill to the orphanage carrying just the doctor’s bag; the young woman followed him.

  They walked uphill in this fashion, with the woman lagging purposefully behind, until they almost reached the girls’ division. Then Homer stopped walking and waited for her.

  “Is this the way to the orphanage?” the young woman asked him.

  “Right,” said Homer Wells. Since he had grown the beard, he tended to oversmile at people; he imagined that the beard made it hard for people to tell whether he was smiling.

  “Are you the doctor?” the young woman asked him, staring at the snow on both their boots—and, warily, at the doctor’s bag.

  “Yes, I’m Doctor Stone,” he said, taking the woman’s arm and leading her toward the hospital entrance of the boys’ division. “May I help you?” he asked her.

  And so he arrived, as Nurse Edna would say, bringing the Lord’s work with him. Nurse Angela threw her arms around his neck and whispered in his ear. “Oh Homer!” she whispered. “I knew you’d be back!”

  “Call me ‘Fuzzy,’ ” he whispered to her, because he knew that Homer Wells (like Rose Rose) was long gone.

  For several days, Nurse Caroline would be shy with him, but he wouldn’t need more than a few operations and a few deliveries to convince her that he was the real thing. Dr. Stone, even as a name, would be a fitting successor to Dr. Larch. For wasn’t Stone a good, hard, feet-on-the-ground, reliable-sounding sort of name for a physician?

  And Mrs. Grogan would remark that she had not enjoyed being read aloud to so much since those hard-to-remember days of Homer Wells. And it was to everyone’s relief that Fuzzy Stone would exhibit as few symptoms of his former respiratory difficulties as Homer Wells had exhibited signs of a weak and damaged heart.

  Candy and Wally Worthington would throw themselves full tilt into apple farming. Wally would serve two terms as president of the Maine Horticultural Society; Candy would serve a term as director of the New York–New England Apple Institute. And Angel Wells, whom Rose Rose had introduced to love and to imagination, would one day be a novelist.