John Irving: The Cider House Rules

His second foster family responded differently to Homer's lack of sound-his stiff-upper-lip and bite-thebullet-while-just-lying-there placidity. His second foster family beat the baby so regularly that they managed to get some appropriately babylike noise out of him. Homer's crying saved him.

If he'd proven himself to be stalwart at resisting tears, now when he saw that tears and howls and shrieks seemed to be what his foster family most desired of him, he tried to be of use and gave, with his whole heart, the lustiest wails he could deliver. He had been such a creature of contentment, Dr. Larch was surprised to learn that the new baby from St. Cloud's was disturbing the peace in the fortunately small and nearby town of Three Mile Falls. It's fortunate that Three Mile Falls was small, because the stories of Homer's cries were the center of the area's gossip for several weeks; and it's fortunate that Three Mile Falls was nearby, because the stories found their way to St. Cloud's and to Nurse Angela and Nurse Edna, who had cornered the gossip market in all those river, wood, and paper towns. When they heard the tales of how their Homer Wells was keeping Three Mile Falls {21} awake until the small hours, and how he would wake up the town before it was light, the nurses' good memories did not forsake them; they went straight to St. Larch. 'That's not my Homer!' Nurse Angela cried.

'He's not a natural at crying, Wilbur,' Nurse Edna said-taking every opportunity she had to pronounce that name so dear to her heart: Wilbur! It always made Nurse Angela cross with her (whenever Nurse Edna indulged her desire to call Dr. Larch a Wilbur to his face;.

'Doctor Larch,' Nurse Angela said, with pointed and excessive formality, 'if Homer Wells is waking up Three Mile Falls, that family you let have him must be burning that boy with their cigarettes.'

They weren't that kind of family. That was a favorite fantasy of Nurse Angela's-she hated smoking; just the look of a cigarette dangling from anyone's mouth made her remember a French-speaking Indian who'd come to see her father about digging a well and had stuck his cigarette in one of her cat's faces, burning its nose!-the cat, an especially friendly spayed female, had jumped up in the Indian's lap. That cat had been named Bandit – she'd had the classic masked face of a raccoon. Nurse Angela had restrained herself from naming any of the orphans after Bandit-she thought of Bandit as a girl's name.

But the family from Three Mile Falls were not sadists of a very known kind. An older man and his younger wife lived with his grown-up children of a previous marriage; the young wife wanted a child of her own, but she couldn't get pregnant. Everyone in the family thought it would be nice for the young wife to have her own baby. What no one mentioned was that one of the grown-up children from the previous marriage had had a baby, illegitimately, and she hadn't cared for it very well, and the baby had cried and cried and cried. Everyone complained about the baby crying, night and day, and one morning the grown-up daughter had simply taken her {22} baby and gone. She left only this note behind:

I'M SICK OF HEARING FROM ALL OF YOU ABOUT HOW MUCH MY BABY CRIES. I GUESS IF I GO YOU WONT MISS THE CRYING OR ME EITHER.

But they did miss the crying-everyone missed that wonderful, bawling baby and the dear, dim-witted daughter who had taken it away.

'Be sure nice to have a baby crying around here again,' someone in the family had remarked, and so they went and got themselves a baby from St. Cloud's.

They were the wrong family to be given a baby who wouldn't cry. Homer's silence was such a disappointment to them that they took it as a kind of affront and challenged each other to discover who among them could make the baby cry first; after first they progressed to loudest, after loudest came longest.

They first made him cry by not feeding him, but they made him cry loudest by hurting him; this usually meant pinching him or punching him, but there was ample evidence that the baby had been bitten, too. They made him cry longest by frightening him; they discovered that startling babies was the best way to frighten them. They must have been very accomplished at achieving the loudest and longest in order to have made Homer Wells's crying a legend in Three Mile Falls. It was especially hard to hear anyr thing in Three Mile Falls-not to mention how hard it was to make a legend out of anything there.

The falls themselves made such a steady roar that Three Mile Falls was the perfect town for murder; no one there could hear ashotor ascream. If you murdered someone in Three Mile Falls and threw the body in the river at the falls, the body couldn't possibly be stopped (or even slowed down, not to mention found) until it went three miles downriver to St. Cloud's. It was therefore all the more remarkable that the whole town heard the kind of crying Homer Wells made. {23}

It took Nurse Angela and Nurse Edna about a year before Homer Wells stopped waking up with a scream or letting out a wail whenever someone crossed his field of vision, or whenever he heard a human sound, even a chair being dragged across the floor, or even a bed creak, a window shut, a door open. Every sight and sound connected with a human being who might possibly be headed in Homer's direction produced a high, stammering shout and such tearful blubbering that anyone visiting the boys' division would have thought that the orphanage was, in fairy-tale fashion, a torture shop, a prison of child molestation and abuse beyond imagining.

'Homer, Homer,' Dr. Larch would say soothingly- while the boy burned scarlet and refilled his lungs. 'Homer, you're going to get us investigated for murder! You're going to get us shut down.'

Poor Nurse Edna and poor Nurse Angela were probably more permanently scarred by the family from Three Mile Falls than Homer Wells was, and the good and the great St. Larch never fully recovered from the incident. He had met the family; he'd interviewed them all-and been horribly wrong about them; and he'd seen them all again on the day he went to Three Mile Falls to bring Homer Wells back to St. Cloud's.

What Dr. Larch would always remember was the fright in all of their expresions when he'd marched into their house and taken Homer up in his arms. The fear in their faces would haunt Dr. Larch forever, the epitome of everything he could never understand about the great ambiguity in the feelings people had for children. There was the human body, which was so clearly designed to want babies-and then there was the human mind, which was so confused about the matter. Sometimes the mind didn't want the babies, but sometimes the mind was so perverse that it made other people have babies they knew they didn't want. For whom was this insisting done? Dr. Larch wondered. For whom did some minds {24} insist that babies, even clearly unwanted ones, must be brought, screaming, into the world?

And when other minds thought they wanted babies but then couldn't (or wouldn't) take proper care of them…well, what were these minds thinking? When Dr. Larch's mind ran away with him on the subject, it was always the fear in those faces of the family from Three Mile Falls that he saw, and Homer Wells's legendary howl that he heard. The fear in that family was fixed in St. Larch's vision; no one, he believed, who had seen such fear should ever make a woman have a baby she didn't want to have. 'NO ONE!' Dr. Larch wrote in his journal. 'Not even someone from the Ramses Paper Company!'

If you had an ounce of sanity, you would not speak against abortion to Dr. Wilbur Larch-or you would suffer every detail there was to know about the six weeks Homer Wells spent with the family from Three Mile Falls. This was Larch's only way of discussing the issue (which was not even open to debate with him). He was an obstetrician, but when he was asked-and when it was safe-he was an abortionist, too.