The Cider House Rules (6 page)

In the long ride north, Homer worried that Billy Winkle might pinch his pecker, too. He watched the houses disappear, and the farm animals; other cars and trucks were gone from the roads. Soon it was just a road, a single road—most often, it ran alongside water; the water ran fast. Ahead of them—for hours, it seemed—loomed a mountain that had snow on the top, although it was July. The mountain had an Indian name.

“That’s where we’re going, Homer!” Grant Winkle told the boy. “Just under all that snow, there’s a lake.”

“The moose are crazy about the lake,” Billy told Homer, “and you’ll be crazy about the lake, too.”

Homer didn’t doubt it. It was an adventure. Dr. Larch had told him he didn’t have to stay.

The Winkles stopped for the night before it got dark. Between the single road and the rushing water, they pitched a tent with three rooms in it. They lit a cookstove in one of the rooms, and Billy did one hundred sit-ups in another room (Homer held her feet) while Grant caught some brook trout. It was such a cool evening, there weren’t any bugs; they kept the lamps running long after dark, with the tent flaps open. Grant and Billy told adventure stories. (In his journal, Dr. Larch would later write, “What the hell else would they tell?”)

Grant told about the sixty-year-old lawyer who had hired them to show him a bear giving birth. Billy showed Homer her bear scars. And then there was the man who had asked the Winkles to cast him adrift at sea in a small boat—with only one oar. This man had been interested in the sensation of survival. He wanted to see if he could find his way back to land, but he wanted the Winkles to observe him and rescue him if he was getting into real trouble. The trick to that was not letting the man know he was being observed. At night—when the fool fell asleep and drifted farther out to sea—the Winkles would cautiously tow him toward shore. But in the morning—once, even within sight of land—the man always found a way to get lost again. They finally had to rescue him when they caught him drinking salt water; he’d been so disappointed, he gave them several bad checks before he finally paid his adventure fee.

“Adventure fee” was Billy’s name for it.

Homer thought it might make his would-be adoptive parents self-conscious if he told them any stories about life at St. Cloud’s—or worse, about Thanksgiving in Waterville. He felt he had to contribute something to the campfire spirit of this present adventure, but the only good stories he knew were
Great Expectations
and
David Copperfield.
Dr. Larch had let him take the copy of
Great Expectations
with him; it was Homer’s favorite of the two. Homer asked the Winkles if he could read them a little of his favorite story. Of course, they said, they’d love it; they’d never been read to, not that they could remember. Homer was a little nervous; as many times as he’d read
Great Expectations,
he’d never read aloud to an audience before.

But he was wonderful! He even mastered what he guessed was Joe Gargery’s accent, and by the time he got to the part where Mr. Wopsle cries out, “ ‘No!’ with the feeble malice of a tired man,” Homer sensed he had found the proper voice for the whole tale—he felt he might also have discovered his first talent. Unfortunately, talented though he was, his reading put the Winkles fast asleep. Homer kept reading by himself, through the end of Chapter 7. Maybe it’s not my reading, Homer thought; maybe it’s the Winkles—all her sit-ups, all his trout-catching, all the fierce rigor of the indisputably great outdoors.

Homer attempted to arrange the Winkles’ sleeping bag—a huge, single bag—comfortably around them. He blew out the lamps. He went to his own room in the vast tent and crawled into his own sleeping bag. He lay with his head by the open tent flap; he could see the stars; he could hear the nearby crashing water. It did not remind him of Three Mile Falls, because the stream here was so different from that river. It was just as fast, but it ran through a deep, narrow gorge—sparkling clean, round-bouldered, with glossy pools where Grant had caught the trout. It was not unpleasant imagining further adventures with the Winkles, but Homer had more trouble imagining a moose. Exactly how big would a moose be? Bigger than the Winkles?

Homer exhibited no mistrust, and certainly no fear, of the Winkles. He felt for them only a detached wariness—he was sure they weren’t dangerous but they were of a slightly altered species. He fell asleep confusing the Winkles, in his child’s mind, with moose. In the morning he woke up to the sound of what he was sure
were
moose—only to discover that it was the Winkles in the tent room next to his. The Winkles appeared to greet the morning vigorously. Although Homer had never heard human beings make love, or moose mate, he knew perfectly well that the Winkles were mating. If Dr. Larch had been present, he might have drawn new conclusions concerning the Winkles’ inability to produce offspring. He would have concluded that the violent athleticism of their coupling simply destroyed, or scared to death, every available egg and sperm.

Homer politely feigned sleep. The Winkles then roused him playfully. Like large dogs, they burst into his room on all fours, tugging at his sleeping bag with their teeth. They were going to swim! they told him. They were such large people, Homer wondered at the sheer abundance of their active flesh. He also wondered how they intended to swim in the raging stream without being bashed against the boulders and swept away. Homer didn’t know how to swim—not even in calm water.

But the Winkles were old hands at outdoor feats of skill, and they were cunning with equipment. They threw a line across the rapids; it was called a survival rope, they told Homer. The rope attached to a rakelike cluster of spikes, which Grant Winkle neatly lodged among the rocks on the far shore of the roaring river; he then strung a second rope to this one, and then a third. These additional ropes were complicated, with metal eyelets and hooks and adjustable safety straps that went around the Winkles themselves and held them tightly at their waists. With the assistance of this truly adventuresome gear, the Winkles were able to bounce, semi-suspended, into the thick of the rapids—where they were tossed about like bathtub toys while remaining safely in the same place, attached to each other and to the so-called survival rope. It was fun for Homer to watch them. The water seemed to swallow them completely at times—streaming sheets of it would engulf them and suck them down. Yet they would emerge in seconds, bouncing, appearing to walk across the churning, rolling foam. They played in midstream like giant, blond otters. Homer was very nearly convinced of their mastery of the elements—at least of water—and felt himself to be on the verge of asking them to let him try the game of showering in the rapids when it occurred to him that they couldn’t hear him. If he’d called out to them—even if he’d screamed—the
whoosh
of the turbid water all around the Winkles would have drowned out any noise he could muster.

He had resolved, therefore, to remain sitting on the shore and watch his would-be adoptive parents play, when the ground began to shake under him. He knew this more from certain badly told stories, in badly written children’s books, than from the felt recognition of the moving ground itself; in those children’s books, when something terrible is about to happen, the ground
always
shakes. He almost chose not to believe it, but the ground was unmistakably trembling; a dull hammering reached his ears.

Homer watched the Winkles more closely, believing them to be in control of everything. The Winkles continued to play in the rapids; they heard nothing, they didn’t feel the ground shake because they weren’t on the ground.

Oh my God, a
moose
is coming! thought Homer Wells. He stood up. He watched his feet hop—all by themselves—on the jumping ground. It is a
herd
of moose! he thought. To add to the hammering sound, Homer now heard sharper noises: cracks, some as startling as pistol shots. He looked at the Winkles and could tell that they’d heard these harsh slaps, too. Whatever it was that was coming, the Winkles were familiar with it; their entire attitude changed—they were no longer playful. They seemed to be struggling, and on their faces (now disappearing in the rushing white froth) their expressions were both knowledgeable and frightened. When they got a second to look (between plunges into the rapids), they looked upstream.

So did Homer—in time to see the log drive when it was about twenty-five yards away. The trees along the shoreline were occasionally snapped off as cleanly as kindling snapped over a knee—by a random log as big as a telephone pole but stouter, hurtling out of the water, striking a boulder and spinning for twenty feet through the air, leveling a patch of forest wherever it crashed and rolled on. The mass of logs, each as big as telephone poles, moved swiftly downstream with a wall of water in front of it. This water was not like the clear water of the river, but muddy with turmoil, clogged with slabs of bark, messy with whole chunks of ground that had been gouged out of the shore. The Ramses Paper Company called it a modest log drive; they said there’d been no more than four hundred, maybe seven hundred logs in that particular drive downriver.

Homer Wells was still running when he reached the road, where he was safe. He turned in time to see the logs surge by. A line from the tent had been attached to the Winkles’ survival rope, and the entire tent and everything in it (Homer’s copy of
Great Expectations,
too) were swept downstream in the pounding flow and charge of logs. The Ramses Paper Company wouldn’t recover Billy and Grant’s bodies for three days; they found them nearly four miles away.

Homer Wells was fairly calm. He looked upstream, waiting for more of anything; upstream was clearly the direction whatever might come next would come from. After a while, he relaxed; he examined the Winkles’ safari vehicle, which looked naked without the tent and the kitchen equipment. He found some fishing gear, but he didn’t dare to fish; it meant standing too close to the stream. He found some guns, but he had no idea how they worked (he felt comforted that the guns were there, however). He chose the biggest, most dangerous-looking one—a twelve-gauge, double-barrel shotgun—and dragged it around with him.

He was quite hungry by midafternoon, but before it was dark he heard a logging truck coming nearer and nearer; he knew it was a full one because of the straining sound of the gears. It was also a piece of luck (on the order of his not knowing how to swim, and therefore not joining the Winkles in their sport) that the truck was going Homer’s way.

“Saint Cloud’s,” he told the baffled driver, who was impressed with the shotgun.

It was a Ramses Paper Company truck, and Dr. Larch was at first furious to see it pull up to the hospital entrance. “Unless this is an absolute emergency,” he told the smitten Nurse Edna, “I will not do a stitch of work on anyone from that company!” Larch was actually disappointed to see Homer Wells, and alarmed to see the shotgun. Homer had the bewildered expression on his face of the many patients Larch had observed emerging from the spell of ether.

“You didn’t give the Winkles much of a chance, Homer,” Dr. Larch said gravely. Then Homer explained why he’d come back so soon.

“You mean the Winkles are
gone
?” Dr. Larch asked.

“Swept away,” said Homer Wells. “
Whoosh!
”

That was when Wilbur Larch gave up on finding Homer Wells a home. That was when Dr. Larch said that Homer could stay at St. Cloud’s for as long as Homer felt he belonged there. That was when St. Larch said, “Well, then, Homer, I expect you to be of use.”

For Homer Wells, this was easy.
Of use,
he felt, was all that an orphan was born to be.

2
The Lord’s Work

A child of Maine, Wilbur Larch was born in Portland in 186_—the son of a sullen, tidy woman who was among the staff of cooks and housekeepers for a man named Neal Dow, the mayor of Portland and the so-called father of the Maine law that introduced Prohibition to that state. Neal Dow once ran for the presidency as the candidate of the Prohibition Party, but he won barely ten thousand votes—proving that the general voter was wiser than Wilbur Larch’s mother, who worshiped her employer and saw herself more as his co-worker for temperance reform than as his servant (which she was).

Interestingly, Wilbur Larch’s father was a drunk—no small feat in the Portland of Mayor Dow’s day. It was permitted to advertise beer in the shop windows—Scotch ale and bitter beer, which Wilbur Larch’s father consumed copiously; it was necessary, he claimed, to drink these weak brews by the bucketful in order to get a buzz on. To young Wilbur, his father never looked drunk—he never staggered or fell or lay in a stupor, he never shouted or slurred his speech. Rather, he had about him the appearance of one perpetually surprised, of one given to frequent and sudden revelations that would stop him in his tracks, or in midsentence, as if something had just come to him (or had just escaped him) that had preoccupied him for days.

He shook his head a lot, and all his life dispensed this misinformation: that the nineteen-thousand-ton ship the
Great Eastern,
which was built in Portland, was destined to sail the North Atlantic between Europe and Maine. It was the opinion of Wilbur Larch’s father that the two best wharves in Portland Harbor had been built specifically for the
Great Eastern,
that the new and huge hotel in Portland had been built expressly to house the
Great Eastern
’s passengers, and that someone evil or at least corrupt or just plain foolish was responsible for keeping the
Great Eastern
from returning to her home port in Maine.

Wilbur Larch’s father had worked as a lathe operator during the building of the
Great Eastern,
and perhaps the complaining noise of that machinery and the constant buzz he felt from all the beer he consumed had deceived him. The
Great Eastern
had not been built for voyages to and from Portland; she was originally intended for the route to Australia, but the many delays in getting her to sea drove her owners to bankruptcy and she was purchased for use on the North Atlantic route for which she proved unsuitable. She was, in fact, a failure.