The Cider House Rules (84 page)

“He was really tryin’ to cut my ass off, man,” Muddy had said, as if he were surprised.

“He was an amateur,” Mr. Rose had said. “He long gone now, anyway.”

The rest of the crew, except for Mr. Rose’s daughter, hadn’t been to Ocean View before. Mr. Rose arranged, with Angel, how Rose Rose and her daughter would spend the day.

“She gonna ride around with you and help you out,” Mr. Rose told Angel. “She can sit on the fender, or stand behind the seat. She can ride on the trailer, before it full.”

“Sure!” Angel said.

“If she need to take the baby back to the cider house, she can walk,” Mr. Rose said. “She don’t need no special favors.”

“No,” Angel said; it surprised him that Mr. Rose would speak this way about his daughter when she was standing beside him, looking a little embarrassed. Baby Rose—pacifier in place—rode her hip.

“Sometimes Black Pan can look after the baby,” Mr. Rose said, and Rose Rose nodded.

“Candy said she’d look after her, too,” Angel offered.

“No need botherin’ Missus Worthington,” said Mr. Rose, and Rose Rose shook her head.

When Angel drove the tractor, he always stood up; if he sat down without a cushion on the seat (and he thought a cushion was for an old man with piles), he couldn’t quite see the radiator cap. He was afraid that, if he sat down, the engine might overheat and the radiator would boil over without his noticing it. But most of all, it looked better to drive a tractor standing up.

He was glad he was driving the International Harvester; years ago, Raymond Kendall had built a swivel for the seat. He could let Rose Rose sit down—with or without Baby Rose in her lap—and he could stand a little to one side of the swivel seat and operate the tractor without awkwardness. There was a foot clutch, a foot brake, and a hand throttle. The emergency hand brake was next to Rose Rose’s hip; the gearshift was by her knee.

“Why you wear that old baseball cap?” she asked him. “You got nice eyes, but nobody see ’em. You got nice hair, but nobody see it. And you got one pale forehead ’cause the sun can’t find your face. If you didn’t wear that dumb cap, your face would be as brown as your body.”

This implied to Angel, of course, that Rose Rose liked his body being brown, didn’t care for his forehead being pale, and had managed—despite the hat—to notice his eyes and hair (and to like them, too).

After filling the trailer with his first load of apples, Angel took a long drink from a water jug in the orchard, twisting the baseball cap backward on his head as he drank. Then he wore it that way, the way a catcher wears a baseball cap—or the way Candy wore it, with the visor tipped over her hair and the back of her neck. Somehow it looked better that way on Candy. When Rose Rose saw Angel wearing the cap that way, she said, “Now you look real stupid, like you got a ball for a head.”

The next day, Angel let Candy wear the cap.

Baby Rose was sucking the pacifier, like a three-horsepower pump, and Rose Rose smiled at Angel. “Where’s that nice hat?” she asked him.

“I lost it,” he lied.

“Too bad,” she said. “It was nice.”

“I thought you didn’t like that hat,” he said.

“I didn’t like that hat on
you,
” said Rose Rose.

The next day he brought the hat and put it on her head as soon as she was settled into the tractor seat. Rose Rose looked awfully pleased; she wore the hat the same way Angel had worn it—low, over her eyes. Baby Rose looked cross-eyed at the visor.

“You lost it and then you found it, huh?” Rose Rose asked Angel.

“Right,” Angel said.

“You better be careful,” she told him. “You don’t wanna get involved with me.”

But Angel was flattered and encouraged that she’d even noticed his interest—especially since he was unsure how to express his interest.

“How old
are
you?” he asked her casually, later that day.

“ ’Bout your age, Angel,” was all she said. Baby Rose slumped against her breast; a floppy-brimmed white sailor’s hat protected the baby from the sun, but under the brim of the hat, the little girl looked glassy-eyed and exhausted from chomping on the pacifier all day. “I don’t believe you can still be teethin’,” Rose Rose said to her daughter. She took hold of the baby-blue plastic ring and pulled the pacifier out of the little girl’s mouth; it made a
pop
like a wine cork, which startled Baby Rose. “You becomin’ an addict,” Rose Rose said, but when Baby Rose started to cry, her mother put the nipple back.

“How do you like the name Gabriella?” Angel asked Rose Rose.

“I never heard it before,” she said.

“How about Ginger?” Angel asked.

“That somethin’ you eat,” Rose Rose said.

“Gloria?” Angel asked.

“That nice,” said Rose Rose. “Who it for?”

“Your baby!” Angel said. “I’ve been thinking of names for your baby.” Rose Rose raised the visor of the Boston Red Sox cap and looked into Angel’s eyes.

“Why you thinkin’ of that?” she asked him.

“Just to be of help,” he said awkwardly. “Just to help you decide.”

“Decide?” Rose Rose asked.

“To help you make up your mind,” said Angel Wells.

The picker named Peaches was almost as fast as Mr. Rose. He was emptying his canvas bag into a bushel crate, and he interrupted Rose Rose and Angel.

“You countin’ me, Angel?” Peaches asked.

“I got you,” Angel said. Sometimes Angel examined the fruit if he didn’t know the picker very well—to make sure they weren’t bruising it; if they were bruising it, or if there were other signs that they were picking too fast, Angel wouldn’t give them the top price for a bushel. But Angel knew Peaches was a good picker, so he just put a number on the list without getting off the tractor to look at the apples.

“Ain’t you a checker?” Peaches asked Angel, then.

“Sure, I got you!” Angel said to him.

“Don’t you wanna check me, then? Better make sure I ain’t pickin’ pears, or somethin’,” Peaches said, grinning. Angel went to look over the apples, and that was when Peaches said to him: “You don’t wanna go into the knife business with Mistuh Rose.” Then he walked away, with his bag and his ladder, before Angel could say anything about his apples—which were, of course, perfect.

Back on the tractor, Angel got up his nerve. “Are you still married to the baby’s father?” he asked Rose Rose.

“Wasn’t ever married,” she said.

“Are you still together, you and the father?” Angel asked.

“Baby got no father,” Rose Rose said. “I wasn’t ever
together.
”

“I like Hazel and Heather,” Angel said, after a while. “They’re both names of plants, so they sort of go with Rose.”

“I don’t have no plant, I got a little girl,” Rose Rose said, smiling.

“I also like the name Hope,” Angel said.

“Hope ain’t no name,” Rose Rose said.

“Iris is nice,” Angel said. “But it’s sort of cute, because it’s another flower. Then there’s Isadora.”

“Whew!” said Rose Rose. “No name is better than some.”

“Well, how about plain old Jane?” asked Angel Wells, who was getting frustrated. “Jennifer? Jessica? Jewel? Jill? Joyce? Julia? Justine?”

She touched him. She just put her hand on his hip, which nearly caused him to jackknife the trailer and spill the load. “Don’t never stop,” she told him. “I never knew there was so many names. Go on,” she said, her hand urging him—it was just a little shove, before she returned her hand to her lap, where Baby Rose sat mesmerized by the tractor’s motion and the tractor’s sound.

“Katherine? Kathleen? Kirsten? Kitty?” Angel Wells began.

“Go on,” Rose Rose said, her hand grazing his hip again.

“Laura? Laurie? Laverne? Lavinia? Leah? That means ‘weary,’ ” he told her. “Leslie? Libby? Loretta? Lucy? Mabel? That means ‘lovable,’ ” he told her. “Malvina? That means ‘smooth snow,’ ” he explained.

“I never livin’ where they got snow,” Rose Rose said.

“Maria?” Angel said. “Marigold? That’s another flower. Mavis? That means a ‘thrush,’ it’s a kind of bird,” he said.

“Don’t tell me what they mean,” Rose Rose instructed him.

“Melissa? Mercedes?” Angel said.

“Ain’t that a car?” Rose Rose asked him.

“It’s a good car,” Angel said. “A German car. Very expensive.”

“I seen one, I think,” Rose Rose said. “They got a funny bull’s-eye on the hood.”

“Their insignia,” said Angel Wells.

“Their what?” she asked.

“It’s a kind of bull’s-eye, you’re right,” Angel said.

“Say it again,” Rose Rose said.

“Mercedes,” he said.

“It for rich people, ain’t it?” Rose Rose asked.

“The car?” he asked.

“The name or the car,” she said.

“Well,” Angel said, “it’s an expensive car, but the name means ‘Our Lady of Mercies.’ ”

“Well, fuck it, then,” Rose Rose said. “Didn’t I tell you not to tell me what the names mean?”

“Sorry,” he said.

“How come you never wear a shirt?” she asked him. “Ain’t you never cold?”

Angel shrugged.

“You can go on with them names, any time,” she told him.

After the first four or five days of the harvest, the wind shifted; there was a strong sea breeze off the Atlantic, and the early mornings were especially cold. Angel wore a T-shirt and a sweat shirt over that. One morning, when it was so cold that Rose Rose had left Baby Rose with Candy, Angel saw that she was shivering and he gave her his sweat shirt. She wore it all day. She was still wearing it when Angel went to help with the cider press that night, and for a while they sat on the cider house roof together. Black Pan sat up there with them, and he told them about the time when there’d been an Army installation on the coast, which they could see at night.

“It was a secret weapon,” he told them. “And your father,” Black Pan told Angel, “he made up a name for it—he had us all shittin’ our pants, we was so scared. It was a kind of wheel, he told us—it sent people to the moon, or somethin’.”

“It was a Ferris wheel,” said Mr. Rose in the darkness. “It was just a Ferris wheel.”

“Yeah, that what it was!” Black Pan said. “I seen one, once.”

“But it was somethin’ else that used to be out there,” Mr. Rose said dreamily. “It got used in the war.”

“Yeah,” Black Pan said. “They shot it at somebody.”

Watching the lights on the coast, Rose Rose announced: “I’m movin’ to the city.”

“Maybe, when you old enough,” said Mr. Rose.

“Maybe Atlanta,” she said. “I been in Atlanta,” she told Angel—“at night, too.”

“That was Charleston,” Mr. Rose said. “Unless you was in Atlanta some other time.”

“You said it was Atlanta,” she told him.

“Maybe I
said
it was Atlanta,” said Mr. Rose, “but it was Charleston.” Black Pan laughed.

Rose Rose forgot to give the sweat shirt back, but in the morning, when it was still cold, she was wearing one of Mr. Rose’s old sweaters and she handed the sweat shirt back to Angel.

“Got my own clothes, sort of, this mornin’,” she told Angel, the baseball cap pulled lower than usual over her eyes. Black Pan was watching after Baby Rose, and it took Angel a while to see that Rose Rose had a black eye—a white person doesn’t spot a black eye on a black person right away, but she had a good one.

“He say it okay if I wear your hat, but for you to wear your own shirt,” Rose Rose told Angel. “I told you,” she said. “You don’t wanna get involved with me.”

After the picking that day, Angel went to the cider house to have a word with Mr. Rose. Angel told Mr. Rose that he meant nothing improper by letting Rose Rose wear his sweat shirt; Angel added that he really liked Mr. Rose’s daughter, and so forth. Angel got pretty worked up about it, although Mr. Rose remained a calm, calm man. Of course, Angel (and all the rest of them) had seen Mr. Rose peel and core an apple in about three or four seconds—it was widely presumed that Mr. Rose could bleed a man in half a minute. He could have made the whole mess of a human being look like a series of slight shaving injuries.

“Who told you I beat my daughter, Angel?” Mr. Rose asked gently. Rose Rose had told Angel, of course, but now Angel saw the trap; he was only making trouble for her. Mr. Rose would never allow himself to have any trouble with Angel. Mr. Rose knew the rules: they were the
real
cider house rules, they were the pickers’ rules.

“I just thought you had hit her,” Angel said, backing off.

“Not me,” said Mr. Rose.

Before he put the tractor away, Angel spoke with Rose Rose. He told her that if she was frightened about staying in the cider house, she could always stay with him—that he had an extra bed in his room, or that he could vacate his room and make it into a guest room for her and her baby.

“A guest room?” Rose Rose said; she laughed. She told him he was the nicest man she ever knew. She had such a languid manner, like someone who was used to sleeping while standing up—her heavy limbs as relaxed as if she were underwater. She had a lazy body, yet in her presence Angel felt the same potential for lightning-quick movement that surrounded her father as intimately as someone’s scent. Rose Rose gave Angel the shivers.

At supper, his father asked him, “How are you getting along with Mister Rose?”

“I’m more curious how you’re getting along with Rose Rose,” Candy said.

“How he’s getting along with the girl is his own business,” Wally said.

“Right,” said Homer Wells, and Wally let it pass.

“How you’re getting along with Mister Rose is our business, Angel,” Wally said.

“Because we love you,” Homer said.

“Mister Rose won’t hurt me,” Angel told them.

“Of course he won’t!” Candy said.

“Mister Rose does what he wants,” Wally said.

“He’s got his own rules,” said Homer Wells.

“He beats his daughter,” Angel told them. “He hit her once, anyway.”

“Don’t make that your business, Angel,” Wally told the boy.

“That’s right,” Homer said.

“I’ll make it
my
business!” Candy told them. “If he’s beating that girl, he’ll hear about it from me.”

“No, he won’t,” Wally said.

“Better not,” Homer told her.