The Cider House Rules (61 page)

They made him a captain and gave him what he called “easy work.”

“Always be suspicious of easy work,” Dr. Wilbur Larch once said to Homer Wells.

Wally had won the best-name-for-a-plane competition at Fort Meade; now he finally got to use it; he got to name his own plane.
Opportunity Knocks,
he called it. The painted fist under the inscription looked very authoritative. It would later puzzle Candy and Homer Wells that the name was not
Knocks Once
(or
Twice
), but just
Knocks.

He flew the India–China route, over the Himalayas—over Burma. He carried gasoline and bombs and artillery and rifles and ammunition and clothing and aircraft engines and spare parts and food to China; he brought military personnel back to India. It was a seven-hour, round-trip flight—about five hundred miles. For six of the hours he wore an oxygen mask—they had to fly so high. Over the mountains they flew high because of the mountains; over the jungles they flew high because of the Japanese. The Himalayas have the most vicious air currents in the world.

When he left Assam, the temperature was a hundred and ten degrees, Fahrenheit. It was like Texas, Wally would think. They wore just their shorts and socks.

The heavily loaded transports needed to climb to fifteen thousand feet in thirty-five minutes; that was when they reached the first mountain pass.

At nine thousand feet, Wally put on his pants. At fourteen thousand, he put on the fleece-lined suit. It was twenty degrees below zero up there. In the monsoon weather, they flew mostly on instrument.

They called that aerial route “the lifeline”; they called it flying “over the hump.”

Here were the headlines on the Fourth of July:

YANKS WRECK RAIL BRIDGE IN BURMA
CHINESE ROUT JAPS IN HUPEH PROVINCE

Here is what Wally wrote to Candy, and to Homer. Wally was getting lazy; he sent the same limerick to both:

There was a young man of Bombay

Who fashioned a cunt out of clay,

But the heat of his prick

Turned it into a brick,

And chafed all his foreskin away.

That summer of 194_ the public interest in keeping use of the shore lights to a minimum forced the temporary closing of the Cape Kenneth Drive-In Theater, which Homer Wells did not feel as a tragic loss. Since he would have had no choice but to attend the movies with Candy
and
Debra Pettigrew, he was grateful to the war effort for sparing him that awkwardness.

Mr. Rose informed Olive that he would be unable to provide a worthwhile picking crew for the harvest. “Considering the men who are gone,” he wrote. “And the travel. I mean the gas rationing.”

“Then we’ve spruced up the cider house for nothing,” Homer said to Olive.

“Nothing is ever improved for nothing, Homer,” she said. The Yankee justification for hard work in the summer months is both desperate and undone by the rare pleasure of that fleeting season.

Homer Wells—nurses’ aide and orchardman—was mowing in the rows between the trees when the news came to him. On a sweltering June day, he was driving the International Harvester and he had his eye on the sickle bar; he didn’t want to snag a stump or a fallen branch; for that reason he didn’t see the green van, which was trying to head him off. He almost ran into it. Because the tractor was running—and the mower blades, too—he didn’t hear what Candy was yelling when she jumped out of the van and ran to him. Olive was driving, her face a stone.

“Shot down!” Candy was screaming, when Homer finally shut off the ignition. “He was shot down—over Burma!”

“Over Burma,” said Homer Wells. He dismounted from the tractor and held the sobbing girl in his arms. The tractor was shut off but the engine still knocked, and then shuddered, and then throbbed; its heat made the air shimmer. Maybe, thought Homer Wells, the air is always shimmering over Burma.

9
Over Burma

Two weeks after Wally’s plane was shot down, Captain Worthington and the crew of
Opportunity Knocks
were still listed as missing.

A plane making the same run had noted that approximately one square mile of the Burmese jungle, roughly halfway between India and China, had been consumed by fire—presumably caused by the exploding plane; the cargo was identified as jeep engines, spare parts, and gasoline. There was no evidence of the crew; the jungle was dense in that area and believed to be unpopulated.

A spokesman for the U.S. Army Air Forces paid a personal visit to Olive and told her that there was some reason to be optimistic. That the plane obviously had not exploded in the air meant that the crew might have had time to bail out. What would have happened afterward was anyone’s guess.

That would have been a better name for the plane, thought Homer Wells: “
Anyone’s Guess.
” But Homer was supportive of Olive and Candy’s view that Wally was not dead, that he was “just missing.” Privately, Homer and Ray Kendall agreed that there wasn’t much hope for Wally.

“Just suppose he didn’t go down with the plane,” Ray said to Homer, when they were pulling lobster pots. “So then he’s in the middle of the jungle, and what does he do there? He can’t let the Japs find him, and there’s got to be Japs around—they shot down the plane, didn’t they?”

“There could be natives,” said Homer Wells. “Friendly Burmese villagers,” he suggested.

“Or nobody at all,” Ray Kendall said. “Some tigers, and lots of snakes,” he added. “Aw, shit. He shoulda been in a submarine.”

“If your friend survived all the rest,” wrote Wilbur Larch to Homer Wells, “he’s got all the diseases of Asia to worry about—lots of diseases.”

It was horrible to imagine Wally suffering, and not even Homer’s longing for Candy could allow him any comfort with the idea that Wally was already dead; in that case, Homer knew, Candy would always imagine that she loved Wally best. Reality, for orphans, is so often outdistanced by their ideals; if Homer wanted Candy, he wanted her
ideally.
In order for Candy to choose Homer, Wally had to be alive; and because Homer loved Wally, he also wanted Wally’s blessing. Wouldn’t any other way be compromising to them all?

Wilbur Larch was flattered that Homer asked his advice—and on a matter of romantic love, of all things! (“How should I behave with Candy?” Homer had asked.) The old man was used to being such an authority that he found it natural to assume an authoritative voice—“Even regarding a subject he knows nothing about!” Nurse Angela said to Nurse Edna indignantly. Larch was so proud of what he had written Homer that he showed his letter to his old nurses before sending it along.

“Have you forgotten what life is like at St. Cloud’s?” Dr. Larch asked Homer. “Have you drifted so far away from us that you find a life of compromise to be unacceptable? And you, an orphan—of all people. Have you forgotten how to be of use? Don’t think so badly of compromises; we don’t always get to choose the ways we can be of use. You say you love her—then let her use you. It may not be the way you had in mind, but if you love her, you have to give her what she needs—and when she needs it, not necessarily when you think the time is right. And what can she give you of herself? Only what she has left—and if that’s not everything you had in mind, whose fault is that? Are you not going to accept her because she hasn’t got 100 percent of herself to give? Some of her is over Burma—are you going to reject the rest? Are you going to hold out for all or nothing? And do you call that being of use?”

“It’s not very romantic,” Nurse Angela said to Nurse Edna.

“When was Wilbur ever romantic?” Nurse Edna asked.

“Your advice is awfully utilitarian,” Nurse Angela said to Dr. Larch.

“Well, I should hope so!” Dr. Larch said, sealing the letter.

Now Homer had a companion in sleeplessness. He and Candy preferred the night shift at Cape Kenneth Hospital. When there was a lull in their work, they were allowed to doze on the beds in the children’s noncommunicable ward. Homer found that the music of the restless children soothed him—their troubles and pains familiar, their whimpers and outcries and night terrors transporting him beyond his own anxieties. And Candy felt that the drawn, black curtains in the nighttime hospital were suitable for mourning. The prevailing blackout conditions—which she and Homer had to observe in driving to and from the hospital, if it was after dark—were also to Candy’s liking. They used Wally’s Cadillac for these occasions—they were permitted to travel with only parking lights on, and the Cadillac’s parking lights were the brightest. Even so, the dark coastal roads seemed barely lit; they drove at funeral speed. If the stationmaster at St. Cloud’s (formerly, the stationmaster’s assistant) had ever seen them passing, he would have thought again that they were driving a white hearse.

Meany Hyde, whose wife, Florence, was expecting, told Homer that he was sure his new baby would share something of Wally’s soul (if Wally was truly dead)—and if Wally was alive, Meany said, the appearance of the new baby would signify Wally’s escape from Burma. Everett Taft told Homer that his wife, Big Dot, had been plagued by dreams that could only mean that Wally was struggling to communicate with Ocean View. Even Ray Kendall, dividing his underwater attention between his lobsters and his torpedoes, said that he was “reading” his lobster pots, by which he meant that he found the content of the traps hauled from the deep to be worthy of interpretation. Untouched bait was a special sign; if the lobsters (which prefer food that’s truly dead) wouldn’t take the bait, it must mean that the bait was manifesting a living spirit.

“And you know I ain’t religious,” Ray said to Homer.

“Right,” Homer said.

Because Homer Wells had spent many years wondering if his mother would ever return to claim him, if she even thought about him, if she was alive or dead, he was better at accepting Wally’s undefined status than the rest of them were. An orphan understands what it means that someone important is “just missing.” Olive and Candy, mistaking Homer’s composure for indifference, were occasionally short-tempered with him.

“I’m only doing what we all have to do,” he said—reserving special emphasis for Candy. “I’m just waiting and seeing.”

There were few fireworks that Fourth of July; for one thing, they would have violated the blackout conditions, and for another, any simulation of bombs and gunfire would have been disrespectful to those among “our boys” who were facing the real music. In the nighttime hospital at Cape Kenneth, the nurses’ aides conducted a quiet Independence Day celebration, which was interrupted by the hysterics of a woman who demanded an abortion from the young and imperious Dr. Harlow, who believed in obeying the law. “But there is a war!” the woman countered. Her husband was dead; he’d been killed in the Pacific; she had the wire from the War Department to prove it. She was nineteen, and not quite three months pregnant.

“I’ll be glad to speak with her again, when she’s behaving reasonably,” Dr. Harlow told Nurse Caroline.

“Why should she behave reasonably?” Nurse Caroline asked him.

Homer Wells had to trust his instincts regarding Nurse Caroline; besides, she had told him and Candy that she was a socialist. “And I’m not pretty,” she added truthfully. “Therefore, I’m not interested in marriage. In my case, I’d be expected to appear grateful—or, at least, to consider myself lucky.”

The hysterical woman would not be calmed, perhaps because Nurse Caroline’s heart wasn’t in it. “I’m not asking for anything
secret
!” the woman shouted. “Why should I have to have this baby?”

Homer Wells found a piece of paper with columns for laboratory analysis. He wrote the following across the columns:

YOU GO TO ST. CLOUD’S, YOU ASK FOR THE ORPHANAGE.

He gave the piece of paper to Candy, who gave it to Nurse Caroline—who looked at it before she gave it to the woman, who instantly stopped protesting.

When the woman had gone, Nurse Caroline made Homer and Candy accompany her to the dispensary.

“I’ll tell you what I usually do,” Nurse Caroline said, as if she were furious with them. “I perform a perfectly safe dilation without the curettage. I just dilate the cervix. I do this in my kitchen, and I’m very careful. They have to come to the hospital for a completion, of course. Someone might think they tried to do it to themselves, but there’s no infection and nothing’s damaged; they’ve just miscarried. They’ve had the D without the C. All they need is a good scraping. And the bastards have to be accommodating—there’s all the bleeding, and it’s clear the woman’s already lost it.” She paused, and glared at Homer Wells. “You’re an expert about this, too, aren’t you?”

“Right,” Homer said.

“And you know a better way than my way?” she asked.

“Not that much better,” he said. “It’s a complete D and C, and the doctor is a gentleman.”

“A gentleman,” Nurse Caroline said doubtfully. “What’s the gentleman cost?”

“He’s free,” Homer said.

“I’m free, too,” Nurse Caroline said.

“He asks you to make a donation to the orphanage, if you can afford it,” said Homer Wells.

“Why hasn’t he been caught?” Nurse Caroline asked.

“I don’t know,” Homer said. “Maybe people are grateful.”

“People are people,” Nurse Caroline said, in her socialist voice. “You took a stupid chance, telling me. And a more stupid chance telling that woman—you don’t even know her.”

“Yes,” Homer agreed.

“Your doctor isn’t going to last if you keep that up,” Nurse Caroline said.

“Right,” Homer said.

Dr. Harlow found them all in the dispensary; only Candy looked guilty, and therefore he stared at her.

“What are these two experts telling you?” Dr. Harlow asked. He spent a lot of time looking at Candy when he thought no one saw him, but Homer Wells saw him and Nurse Caroline was very sensitive to the longings other women inspired. Candy was tongue-tied, which made her seem more guilty, and Dr. Harlow turned to Nurse Caroline. “You got rid of the hysteric?” he asked her.

“No problem,” Nurse Caroline said.

“I know that you disapprove,” Dr. Harlow told her, “but rules exist for reasons.”