The Cider House Rules (89 page)

“Go stay with Wally, Angel,” Candy told the boy. “Go give Baby Rose a ride in the wheelchair. Knock over all the furniture, if you want,” she told him, kissing her son.

“Yeah, you go away,” Rose Rose told Angel.

“Don’t be afraid,” Candy told Rose Rose. “Homer knows what he’s doing. You’re in very safe hands.” She swabbed Rose Rose with the red Merthiolate, while Homer began to show Rose Rose the instruments.

“This is a speculum,” he said to her. “It may feel cold, but it doesn’t hurt. You won’t feel any of this,” he assured her. “These are dilators,” Homer said, but Rose Rose shut her eyes.

“You done this before, ain’t you?” Rose Rose asked him. He had the ether ready.

“Just breathe normally,” he told her. At the first whiff, she opened her eyes and turned her face away from the mask, but Candy put her hands at Rose Rose’s temples and very gently moved her head into the right position. “The first smell is the sharpest,” said Homer Wells.

“Please, have you done this before?” Rose Rose asked him. Her voice was muffled under the mask.

“I’m a good doctor—I really am,” Homer Wells told her. “Just relax, and breathe normally.”

“Don’t be afraid,” Rose Rose heard Candy tell her just before the ether began to take her out of her body.

“I can ride it,” she said. Rose Rose meant a bicycle. Homer watched her wiggle her toes. Rose Rose was getting her first feel of the sand; the beach was warm. The tide was coming in; she felt the water around her ankles. “No big deal,” she murmured. Rose Rose meant the ocean.

Homer Wells, adjusting the speculum until he had a perfect view of the cervix, introduced the first dilator until the os opened like an eye looking back at him. The cervix looked softened and slightly enlarged, and it was bathed in a healthy, clear mucus—it was the most breathtaking pink color that Homer had ever seen. Downstairs, he heard the wheelchair careening through the house—there was a wild and nonstop giggling from Baby Rose.

“Tell them not to get that baby overexcited,” Homer said to Candy, as if she were his nurse of long-standing and he was used to giving her directions and she was used to following them, exactly. He did not let the ruckus (or Candy trying to quiet them down) distract him; he watched the cervix open until it opened wide enough. He chose the curette of the correct size. After the first one, thought Homer Wells, this might get easier. Because he knew now that he couldn’t play God in the worst sense; if he could operate on Rose Rose, how could he refuse to help a stranger? How could he refuse anyone? Only a god makes that kind of decision. I’ll just give them what they want, he thought. An orphan or an abortion.

Homer Wells breathed slowly and regularly; the steadiness of his hand surprised him. He did not even blink when he felt the curette make contact; he did not divert his eye from witnessing the miracle.

For that night, Candy slept in the extra bed in Angel’s room—she wanted to be close by if Rose Rose needed anything, but Rose Rose slept like a rock. The gap left by her missing tooth made a small whistling noise when her lips were parted; it was not at all disturbing, and Candy slept quite soundly, too.

Angel slept downstairs, sharing the big bed with Wally. They stayed awake quite late, talking. Wally told Angel about the time he first fell in love with Candy; although Angel had heard the story before, he listened to it more attentively—now that he thought he had fallen in love with Rose Rose. Wally also told Angel that he must never underestimate the darker necessities of the world where his father had grown up.

“It’s the old story,” Wally said to Angel. “You can get Homer out of Saint Cloud’s, but you can’t get Saint Cloud’s out of Homer. And the thing about being in love,” Wally said to Angel, “is that you can’t force anyone. It’s natural to want someone you love to do what you want, or what you think would be good for them, but you have to let everything happen to them. You can’t interfere with people you love any more than you’re supposed to interfere with people you don’t even know. And that’s hard,” he added, “because you often feel like interfering—you want to be the one who makes the plans.”

“It’s hard to want to protect someone else, and not be able to,” Angel pointed out.

“You can’t protect people, kiddo,” Wally said. “All you can do is love them.”

When he fell asleep, Wally felt the movement of the raft on the Irrawaddy. One of his friendly Burmese rescuers was offering to catheterize him. First he dipped the bamboo shoot in the brown river, then he wiped it dry on one of the strips of silk that bound up his head basket, then he spat on it. “You want to
pees
now?” the Burmese asked Wally.

“No, thank you,” Wally said in his sleep. “No piss now,” he said aloud, which made Angel smile before he fell asleep, too.

Upstairs, in the master bedroom, Homer Wells was wide awake. He’d volunteered to have Baby Rose for the night. “Because I’ll be up all night, anyway,” he said. He’d forgotten how much he enjoyed having a baby to look after. Babies reminded Homer of himself; they were always wanting something in the middle of the night. But after he’d given Baby Rose her bottle, the child went back to sleep and left Homer Wells alone again; it was nonetheless a pleasure having the little girl to look at. Her black face in the bed beside him was no bigger than his hand, and occasionally her hands would reach up and her fingers would open and close, grasping at something she saw in her sleep. The presence of another breather in the room reminded Homer Wells of the sleeping quarters in St. Cloud’s, where he had some difficulty imagining the necessary announcement.

“Let us be happy for Doctor Larch,” Homer said softly. “Doctor Larch has found a family. Good night, Doctor Larch.” He tried to imagine which one of them would have said it. He imagined it would have been Nurse Angela, and so it was to her that he sent the letter.

Now that Dr. Larch had died, Mrs. Goodhall’s pleasure at the thought of replacing the old, nonpracticing homosexual was less intense; it did stimulate her, however, to imagine replacing him with that young missionary who had antagonized him so. Dr. Gingrich saw some faint justice appear on the horizon at the thought of replacing Larch with someone who’d clearly driven the old man crazy, but Dr. Gingrich was not so interested in the outcome of the situation in St. Cloud’s as he was fascinated with his secretive study of Mrs. Goodhall’s mind, in which he found such a complex broth of righteous delusion and inspired hatred.

Of course, Dr. Gingrich and the other board members were eager to meet young Dr. Stone, but Dr. Gingrich was particularly eager to observe Mrs. Goodhall at such a meeting. Mrs. Goodhall had developed a tic—whenever someone provided her with unusual pleasure or displeasure, the right side of her face suffered an involuntary muscular contraction. Dr. Gingrich imagined that, upon meeting the missionary doctor, Mrs. Goodhall would enter a phase of nearly constant spasm, and he could not wait to observe this.

“You must stall the board,” Homer wrote to Nurse Angela. “Tell them that your efforts to reach Dr. Stone are hampered by the doctor being in transit between two of the mission’s hospitals in India. Say Assam is one, say New Delhi is the other. Say you don’t expect to be able to communicate with him for a week or more, and that—if he was willing to consider the position at St. Cloud’s—he couldn’t possibly be available before November.”

Homer Wells hoped that this would allow him the time to tell Angel everything, and to be finished with the harvest.

“You’ll have to convince the board that you are competent midwives, in addition to being good nurses, and that you’ll be able to recognize the patients who should be referred to a physician,” Homer wrote to Nurse Angela. “You must forgive me for needing all this time, but perhaps I will seem more believable to the board of trustees if everyone has to wait for me. It takes time to leave Asia.”

He also requested that they send him the available history of Fuzzy Stone, and tell him anything that Larch might have omitted—although Homer could not imagine that St. Larch had left out anything. It was with the shortest possible sentence that Homer told Nurse Angela that he had loved Larch “like a father,” and that they had “nothing to fear from Melony.”

Poor Bob, who had broken her nose and her arm, had plenty to fear from Melony, however, but Bob wasn’t smart enough to be afraid of her. When the cast would come off her arm, and when her nose looked more or less normal again, Melony and Lorna would cruise the old, familiar spots—the pizza bar in Bath, among them—and Bob would have the charmless instinct to annoy them again. Melony would disarm him with her shy smile—the one that humbly revealed her bad teeth to him—and while Bob turned his oafish attention to Lorna, Melony snipped off the top half of his ear with her wire-cutters (the electrician’s common and trusty tool). Then Melony broke several of Bob’s ribs and his nose and beat him unconscious with a chair. She had her heart in the right place, regarding St. Cloud’s, but Melony was an eye-for-an-eye and a tit-for-tat girl.

“My hero,” Lorna called her. It was a touchy word to use around Melony, who had long thought that Homer Wells was made of hero stuff.

Homer was a hero in Rose Rose’s eyes; she spent all of Monday in the bed in Angel’s room, with Candy bringing her baby to her from time to time, and Angel visiting with her every chance he could get.

“You’re going to love this room,” Angel told her.

“You plain crazy,” Rose Rose told him. “But I already love it.”

It was a day that hurt the harvest; Mr. Rose wouldn’t pick and half the men were sore from falling off the bicycles. Homer Wells, who never would master the terrible machine, had a puffy knee and a bruise between his shoulder blades the size of a melon. Peaches refused to go up a ladder; he would load the trailers and pick drops all day. Muddy groaned and complained; he was the only one among them who had actually learned to ride. Black Pan announced that it was a good day for a fast.

Mr. Rose, it appeared, was fasting. He sat outside the cider house in the weak sun, wrapped in a blanket from his bed; he sat Indian-style, not talking to anyone.

“He say he on a pickin’ strike,” Peaches whispered to Muddy, who told Homer that he thought Mr. Rose was on a hunger strike, too—“and every other kind of strike they is.”

“We’ll just have to get along without him,” Homer told the men, but everyone pussyfooted their way past Mr. Rose, who appeared to have enthroned himself in front of the cider house.

“Or else he planted hisself, like a tree,” Peaches said.

Black Pan brought him a cup of coffee and some fresh corn bread, but Mr. Rose wouldn’t touch any of it. Sometimes, he appeared to be gnawing on one of the pacifiers. It was a cool day, and when the faint sun would drift behind the clouds, Mr. Rose would draw the blanket over his head; then he sat cloaked and robed and closed off completely from any of them.

“He like an Indian,” Peaches said. “He don’t make no treaty.”

“He want to see his daughter,” Muddy informed Homer at the end of the day. “That what he say to me—it all he say. Just
see
her. He say he won’t touch her.”

“Tell him he can come to the house and see her there,” Homer Wells told Muddy.

But at suppertime, Muddy came to the kitchen door alone. Candy asked him in, and asked him to eat with them—Rose Rose was sitting with them, at the table—but Muddy was too nervous to stay. “He say he won’t come here,” Muddy told Homer. “He say for her to come to the cider house. He say to tell you they got they own rules. He say you breakin’ the rules, Homer.”

Rose Rose sat so still at the table that she was not even chewing; she wanted to be sure to hear everything Muddy was saying. Angel tried to take her hand, which was cold, but she pulled it away from him and kept both her hands wound up in her napkin, in her lap.

“Muddy,” Wally said, “you tell him that Rose Rose is staying in my house, and that in my house we follow
my
rules. You tell him he’s welcome to come here anytime.”

“He won’t do it,” Muddy said.

“I have to go see him,” Rose Rose said.

“No, you don’t,” Candy told her. “You tell him he sees her here, or nowhere, Muddy,” Candy said.

“Yes, ma’am. I brung the bicycles back,” Muddy said to Angel. “They a little banged up.” Angel went outside to look at the bicycles, and that’s when Muddy handed him the knife.

“You don’t need this, Angel,” Muddy told the boy, “but you give it to Rose Rose. You say I want her to have it. Just so she have one.”

Angel looked at Muddy’s knife; it was a bone-handled jackknife, and part of the bone was chipped. It was one of those jackknives where the blade locks in place when you open it so it can’t close on your fingers. The blade was almost six inches long, which would make it prominent in anyone’s pocket, and over the years it had seen a lot of whetstone; the blade was ground down very thin and the edge was very sharp.

“Don’t you need it, Muddy?” Angel asked him.

“I never knew what to do with it,” Muddy confessed. “I just get in trouble with it.”

“I’ll give it to her,” Angel said.

“You tell her her father say he love her, and he just wanna see her,” Muddy said. “Just
see,
” he repeated.

Angel considered this message; then he said, “I love Rose Rose, you know, Muddy.”

“Sure I know,” Muddy said. “I love her, too. We all love her. Everybody love Rose Rose—that part of her problem.”

“If Mister Rose just wants to see her,” Angel said, “how come you’re giving her your knife?”

“Just so she have one,” Muddy repeated.

Angel gave her the knife when they were sitting in his room after supper.

“It’s from Muddy,” he told her.

“I know who it from,” Rose Rose said. “I know what knife everyone got—I know what they all look like.” Although it was not a switchblade, it made Angel jump to see how quickly she opened the knife using only one hand. “Look what Muddy do,” she said, laughing. “He been sharpenin’ it to death—he wore it half away.” She closed the knife against her hip; her long fingers moved the knife around so quickly that Angel didn’t notice where she put it.