John Irving - The Cider House Rules

That was the same night that he saw the lynx on the barren, unplanted hillside-glazed with snow that had thawed and then refrozen into a thick crust. Homer had stepped outside for just a minute; after witnessing the kisses, he desired the bracing air. It was a Canada lynx-a dark, gunmetal gray against the lighter gray of the moonlit snow, its wildcat stench so strong Homer gagged to srnell the thing. Its wildcat sense was keen enough to keep it treading within a single leap's distance of the safety of the woods. The lynx was crossing the brow of the hill when it began to slide; its claws couldn't grip the crust of the snow, and the hill had suddenly grown steeper. The cat moved from the dull moonlight into the sharper light from Nurse Angela's office window; it could not help its sideways descent. It traveled closer to the orphanage than it would ever have chosen to come, its ferocious death smell clashing with the freezing cold. The lynx's helplessness on the ice had rendered its expression both terrified; and resigned; both madness and fatalism were caught in the cat's fierce, yellow eyes and in its involuntary, spitting cough as it slid on, actually bumping against the hospital before its claws could find a purchase on the crusted snow. It spit its rage at Homer Wells, as if Homer had caused its unwilling descent.

Its breath had frozen on its chin whiskers and its tufted ears were beaded with ice. The panicked animal tried to dash up the hill; it was less than halfway up when it began to slide down again, drawn toward the orphanage against its will. When it set out from the bottom of the hill a second time, the lynx was panting; it ran diagonally uphill, slipping but catching itself, and slipping again, finally escaping into the softer snow in the woods- nowhere near where it had meant to go; yet the lynx would accept any route of escape from the dark hospital.

Homer Wells, staring into the woods after the {522} departed lynx, did not imagine that he would ever leave St. Cloud's more easily.

There was a false spring very early that March; all over Maine the river ice buckled under the wet snow, the ponds split apart with gunshots sharp enough to put birds to wing, and the bigger, inland lakes groaned and sang and cracked like boxcars colliding in the station yards.

In the apartment she shared with Lorna in Bath, Melony was awakened by the Kennebec-its ice bending under a foot of slush and giving way with a deep, gonging alarm that caused one of the older women in the boardinghouse to sit up in her bed and howl. Melony was reminded of the nights in her bed in the girls' division in St. Cloud's when the March ice was grinding downriver from Three Mile Falls. She got out of bed and went into Lorna's room to talk, but Lorna was so sleepy that she wouldn't get up; Melony got in bed beside her friend. 'It's just the ice,' Lorna whispered. That was how she and Melony became lovers, listening to the false spring.

'There's just one thing,' Lorna said to Melony. 'If we're gonna be together, you gotta stop lookin' for this Homer character. Either you want me or you want him.'

'I want you,' Melony told Lorna. 'Just don't ever leave me.'

A permanent couple, an orphan's ideal; but Melony wondered where her rage would go. If she stopped looking for Homer Wells, would she stop thinking about him, too?

There was too much snow; the brief thaw never penetrated the frozen ground, and when the temperature dropped and it snowed again, the rivers hardened up fast. An old mill pond, behind the orphanage in St. Cloud's, became a trap for geese. Confused by the thaw, the geese landed on the slush that they mistook for open water; the slush refroze at night and the geese's paddle feet were caught in it. When Homer Wells found the {523} geese, they were frozen statues of their former selves -dusted with the new snow, they were stony guardians of the pond. There was nothing to do but chip them out of the ice and scald them; they were easier to pluck because they were partially frozen. When Mrs. Grogan roasted them-pricking them constantly, to bleed their fat-she retained the sense that she was only warming them up before sending them on their dangerous way.

It was already April by the time the ice broke free in Three Mile Falls and the river overran its banks in St. Cloud's; water filled the basement of the former whore hotel and exerted such a force against the underbeams that the saloon bar with its brass footrail fell through the floor and floated out and away through a bulkhead. The stationm aster saw it go; as obsessed with omens as he was, he slept two nights in a row in his office for fear that the station house was in danger.

Candy was so huge she hardly slept at all. The morning that the hill was bare, Homer Wells tested the ground; he could work a spade almost a foot down before he hit frozen earth-he needed another six inches of thawing before he could plant apple trees, but he dared not wait any longer before making the trip to Heart's Rock to get the trees. He didn't want to be away when Candy delivered.

Olive was surprised to see him, and by his request to trade the Cadillac for one of the pickup trucks to transport the baby trees.

'I want to plant a standard forty-by-forty,' Homer told Olive. 'Half Macs, about ten percent Red Delicious, another ten or fifteen percent Cortlands and Baldwins.'

Olive reminded him to throw in a few Northern Spies, and some Gravensteins-for apple pie. She asked him how Candy was and why she hadn't come with him; he told her Candy was too busy. (Everyone liked her, and the kids just: hung on her.) It would be hard to leave, when the time came, Homer confided to Olive; they were of so much use-they were so needed. And the con-{524} stancy of the demands-'Well, even a day off, like this, is hard to squeeze in,' Homer said.

'You mean you won't spend the night?' Olive asked.

Too busy,' Homer said, 'but we'll both be back in time to put out the bees.'

'That'll be about Mother's Day,' Olive observed.

'Right,' said Homer Wells; he kissed Olive, whose skin was cool and smelled like ash.

Meany Hyde and Herb Fowler helped him load the pickup.

'You gonna plant a whole forty-by-forty by yourself?' Meany asked him. 'You better hope the ground unfreezes.'

'You better hope your back holds out,' Herb Fowler said. 'You better hope your pecker don't fall off.'

'How's Candy?' Big Dot Taft asked Homer. Almost as big as you are, Homer thought.

'Just fine,' he said. 'But busy.'

'I'll bet,' said Debra Pettigrew.

In the furnace room, under the lobster tank, Ray Kendall was building his own torpedo.

'What for?' Homer asked.

'Just to see if I can do it,' Ray said.

'But what will you fire it at?' Homer asked. 'And what will you fire it from?'

'The hard part is the gyroscope,' Ray said. 'It ain't hard to fire it-what's hard is guidin' it.'

'I don't understand,' said Homer Wells.

'Well, look at you,' Ray said. 'You're plantin' an apple orchard at an orphanage. You been there five months, but my daughter's too busy to visit me for a day. I don't understand everythin', either.'

'We'll be back about blossom time,' Homer said guiltily.

'That's a nice time of year,' said Ray.

On the drive back to St. Cloud's, Homer wondered if Ray's coolness, or evasiveness, was intentional. He {525} decided that Ray's message was clear: if you keep things from me, I won't explain myself to you.

'A torpedo!' Candy said to Homer, when he arrived with the baby trees. 'What for?'

'Wait and see,' said Homer Wells.

Dr Larch helped him unload the trees.

'They're kind of scrawny, aren't they?' Larch asked.

'They won't give much fruit for eight or ten years,' Homer said.

Then I doubt I'll get to eat any of it,' said Wilbur Larch.

'Well,' Homer said, 'even before there are apples on the trees, think how the trees will look on the hill.'