The Cider House Rules (90 page)

“You know a lot about knives?” Angel asked her.

“From my father,” she said. “He show me everythin’.”

Angel moved and sat on the bed next to her, but Rose Rose regarded him neutrally. “I told you,” she began patiently. “You don’t wanna have no business with me—I could never tell you nothin’ about me. You don’t wanna know ’bout me, believe me.”

“But I love you,” Angel pleaded with her.

After she kissed him—and she allowed him to touch her breasts—she said, “Angel. Lovin’ someone don’t always make no difference.”

Then Baby Rose woke up, and Rose Rose had to attend to her daughter. “You know what I namin’ her?” she asked Angel. “Candy,” Rose Rose said. “That who she is—she a Candy.”

In the morning, on the downhill side of the harvest, everyone got up early, but no one got up earlier than Rose Rose. Angel, who had more or less been imagining that he was guarding the house all night, noticed that Rose Rose and her daughter had gone. Angel and Homer got in the Jeep and drove out to the cider house before breakfast—but there was nowhere they could go that morning that Rose Rose hadn’t been to ahead of them. The men were up and looking restless, and Mr. Rose was already maintaining his stoical sitting position in the grass in front of the cider house—the blanket completely covering him, except for his face.

“You too late,” Mr. Rose said to them. “She long gone.”

Angel ran and looked in the cider house, but there was no sign of Rose Rose or her daughter.

“She gone with her thumb, she say,” Mr. Rose told Homer and Angel. He made the hitchhiking sign—his bare hand emerging from the blanket only for a second before it went back into hiding.

“I didn’t hurt her,” Mr. Rose went on. “I didn’t touch her, Homer,” he said. “I just love her, was all. I just wanna see her—one more time.”

“I’m sorry for your troubles,” Homer Wells told the man, but Angel ran off to find Muddy.

“She say to tell you you was the nicest,” Muddy told the boy. “She say to tell your dad he a hero, and that you was the nicest.”

“She didn’t say where she was going?”

“She don’t know where she goin’, Angel,” Muddy told him. “She just know she gotta go.”

“But she could have stayed with us!” Angel said. “With me,” he added.

“I know she thought about it,” Muddy said. “You better think about it, too.”

“I
have
thought about it—I think about it all the time,” Angel said angrily.

“I don’t think you old enough to think about it, Angel,” Muddy said gently.

“I loved her!” the boy said.

“She know,” Muddy said. “She know who she is, too, but she also know you don’t know who you is, yet.”

Looking for her and thinking about her would help Angel to know that. He and Candy would drive south along the coast for an hour; then they would drive north, for two. They knew that even Rose Rose would know enough about Maine not to go inland. And they knew that a young black woman with a baby in her arms would be quite exotic among the hitchhikers of Maine; she certainly would have less trouble than Melony getting a ride—and Melony always got rides.

Mr. Rose would maintain his almost Buddhist position; he made it through lunch without moving, but in the afternoon he asked Black Pan to bring him some water, and when the men were through picking that day, he called Muddy over to him. Muddy was very frightened, but he approached Mr. Rose and stood at a distance of about six feet from him.

“Where your knife, Muddy?” Mr. Rose asked him. “You lose it?”

“I didn’t lose it,” Muddy told him. “But I can’t find it,” he added.

“It around, you mean?” Mr. Rose asked him. “It around somewhere, but you don’t know where.”

“I don’t know where it is,” Muddy admitted.

“Never do you no good, anyway—do it?” Mr. Rose asked him.

“I never could use it,” Muddy admitted. It was a cold and sunless late afternoon, but Muddy was sweating; he held his hands at his sides as if his hands were dead fish.

“Where she get the knife, Muddy?” Mr. Rose asked.

“What knife?” Muddy asked him.

“It look like your knife—what I seen of it,” said Mr. Rose.

“I gave it to her,” Muddy admitted.

“Thank you for doin’ that, Muddy,” Mr. Rose said. “If she gone with her thumb, I glad she got a knife with her.”

“Peaches!” Muddy screamed. “Go get Homer!” Peaches came out of the cider house and stared at Mr. Rose, who didn’t move a muscle; Mr. Rose didn’t look at Peaches at all. “Black Pan!” Muddy screamed, as Peaches went running off to get Homer Wells. Black Pan came out of the cider house and he and Muddy got down on their knees and peered at Mr. Rose together.

“You all stay calm,” Mr. Rose advised them. “You too late,” he told them. “No one gonna catch her now. She had all day to get away,” Mr. Rose said proudly.

“Where she get you?” Muddy asked Mr. Rose, but neither he nor Black Pan dared to poke around under the blanket. They just watched Mr. Rose’s eyes and his dry lips.

“She good with that knife—she better with it than
you
ever be!” Mr. Rose said to Muddy.

“I know she good,” Muddy said.

“She almost the best,” said Mr. Rose. “And who taught her?” he asked them.

“You did,” they told him.

“That right,” said Mr. Rose. “That why she almost as good as me.” Very slowly, without exposing any of himself—keeping himself completely under the blanket, except for his face—Mr. Rose rolled over on his side and tucked his knees up to his chest. “I real tired of sittin’ up,” he told Muddy and Black Pan. “I gettin’ sleepy.”

“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.