John Irving - The Cider House Rules

Snowy Meadows had found happiness with the furniture Marshes; good for Snowy, thought Homer Wells. He imagined that the other orphans would have difficulty finding happiness in the furniture business. At times, he admitted, he had been very happy in the apple business. He knew what Larch would have told him: that his happiness was not the point, or that it wasn't as important as his usefulness.

Homer shut his eyes and watched the women getting off the train. They always looked a little lost. He remembered them in the gaslit sleigh-their faces were especially vivid to him when the sled runners would cut through the snow and strike sparks against the ground; how the women had winced at that grating sound. And, briefly, when the town had cared enough to provide a bus service, how isolated the women had seemed in the {687} sealed buses, their faces cloudy behind the fogged glass; through the windows they had appeared to Homer Wells the way the world appeared to them, just before the ether transported them.

And now they walked from the station. Homer saw them marching uphill; there were more of them than he'd remembered. They were an army, advancing on the orphanage hospital, bearing with them a single wound.

Nurse Caroline was tough; but where would Nurse Edna and Nurse Angela go, and what would happen to Mrs. Grogan? worried Homer Wells. He remembered the hatred and contempt in Melony's eyes. If Melony were pregnant, I would help her, he thought. And with that thought he realized that he was willing to play God, a little.

Wilbur Larch would have told him there was no such thing as playing a little God; when you were willing to play God-at all-you played a lot.

Homer Wells was thinking hard when he reached into his pocket and found the burned-down nub of the candle Mr. Rose had returned to him-'That 'gainst the rules, ain't it?' Mr. Rose had asked him.

On his bedside table, between the reading lamp and the telephone, was his battered copy of David Copperfield. Homer didn't have to open the book to know how the story began. ' “Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show,”' he recited from memory.

His memory was exceedingly keen. He could recall the different sizes of the ether cones that Larch insisted upon making himself. The apparatus was rudimentary: Larch shaped a cone out of an ordinary huckaback towel; between the layers of the towel were layers of stiff paper to keep the cone from collapsing. At the open tip of the cone was a wad of cotton-to absorb the ether. Crude, but Larch could make one in three minutes; they were different sizes for different faces.{688}

Homer had preferred the ready-made Yankauer mask-a wire-mesh mask, shaped like a soup ladle, wrapped with ten or twelve layers of gauze. It was into the old Yankauer mask on his bedside table that Homer deposited the remains of the cider house candle. He kept change in the mask, and sometimes his watch. Now he peered info it; the mask contained a piece of chewing gum in a faded green wrapper and the tortoiseshell button from his tweed jacket. The gauze in the mask was yellow and dusty, but all the mask needed was fresh gauze. Homer Wells made up his mind; he would be a hero.

He went downstairs to the kitchen where Angel was pushing Wally around in the wheelchair-it was a game they played when they were both restless. Angel stood on the back of the wheelchair and pushed it, the way you push a scooter; he got the chair going faster and faster-much faster than Wally could make it move by himself. Wally just steered-he kept turning and turning. Wally kept trying to miss the furniture, but despite his skill as a pilot and the good size of the kitchen floor, eventually Angel would get the chair going too fast to control and they'd crash into something. Candy got angry at them for it, but they did it, anyway (especially when she was out of the house). Wally called it 'flying'; most of all, it was something they did when they were bored. Candy had gone to the cider house to get Rose Rose and her baby. Angel and Wally were freewheeling.

When they saw how Homer looked, they stopped.

'What's the matter, old boy?' Wally asked his friend.

Homer knelt by Wally's wheelchair and put his head in Wally's lap.

'Doctor Larch is dead,' he told Wally, who held Homer while he cried. He cried a very short time; in Homer's memory, Curly Day had been the only orphan who ever cried for a long time. When Homer stopped crying, he said to Angel, 'I've got a little story for you-and I'm going to need your help.' {689}

They went outside to the shed where the garden things were kept, and Homer opened one of the quarter-pound ether cans with a safety pin. The fumes made his eyes tear a little; he'd never understood how Larch could like the stuff.

'He got addicted to it,' Homer told his son. 'But he used to have the lightest touch. I've seen patients talking back to him while they were under, and still they didn't feel a thing.'

They took the ether upstairs and Homer told Angel to make up the extra bed in his room-first with the rubber sheet they'd used when Angel had still been in diapers; then the usual sheets (but clean ones) over that.

'For Baby Rose?' Angel asked his father.

'No, not for Baby Rose,' Homer said. When he unpacked the instruments, Angel sat down on the other bed and watched him.

'The water's boiling!' Wally called upstairs.

'You remember how I used to tell you that I was Doctor Larch's helper?' Homer asked Angel.

'Right,' said Angel Wells.

'Well, I got very good-at helping him,' Homer said. 'Very good. I'm not an amateur,' he told his son. 'That's really it-that's the little story,' Homer said, when he'd arranged everything he needed where he could see it; everything looked timeless, everything looked perfect.

'Go on,' Angel Wells told his father. 'Go on with the story.'

Downstairs, in the quiet house, they heard Wally in his wheelchair, rolling from room to room; he was still flying.

Upstairs, Homer Wells was talking to his son while he changed the gauze on the Yankauer mask. He began with that old business about the Lord's work and the Devil's-how, to Wilbur Larch, it was all the work of the Lord.

It startled Candy: how the headlights from her Jeep caught all the men in the starkest silhouettes against the sky; how they were perched in a row, like huge birds, along the cider {690} house roof. She thought that everyone must be up there-but not everyone was. Mr. Rose and his daughter were inside the cider house, and the men were waiting where they'd been told to wait.

When Candy got out of the Jeep, no one spoke to her. There were no lights on in the cider house; if her headlights hadn't exposed the men on the roof, Candy would have thought that everyone had gone to bed.

'Hello!' Candy called up to the roof. 'One day, that whole roof is going to cave in.' It suddenly frightened her: how they wouldn't speak to her. But the men were more frightened than Candy was; the men didn't know what to say-they knew only that what Mr. Rose was doing to his daughter was wrong, and that they were too afraid to do anything about it.

'Muddy?' Candy asked in the darkness.

'Yes, Missus Worthington!' Muddy called down to her.

She went over to the corner of the cider house where the roof dipped closest to the ground; it was where everyone climbed up; an old picking ladder was leaned up against the roof there, but no one on the roof moved to hold the ladder steady for her.

'Peaches?' Candy said.

'Yes, ma'am,' Peaches said.

'Please, someone hold the ladder,' she said. Muddy and Peaches held the ladder, and Black Pan held her hand when she climbed up on the roof. The men made room for her, and she sat down with them.