John Irving - The Cider House Rules

'Hey, Herb,' Wally said to him. It was a rainy, latespring day; college was out, and Wally was working alongside Herb in the storage cellar, which was empty in the spring. They were varnishing ladders, and when they finished the ladders, they would start painting the tracks for the conveyors that ran nonstop when the packinghouse was in full operation. Every year, everything was repainted.

'Yup, that's my name,' Herb said. He kept a cigarette so fixedly drooped from his lips that his eyes were always squinted half shut, and he kept his long face tipped up and back so that he could inhale the trail of smoke through his nose.

'Herb, I was wondering,' Wally said. 'If you got a girl pregnant, what would you do about it. Knowing your view,' Wally smartly added, 'about keeping yourself free.' That stole Herb's punch line and probably made Herb cross; he had a rubber half out of his pocket, ready to flip at Wally while delivering his usual remark on the subject, but Wally's saying it for him forced him to arrest the motion of his flipping hand. He never brought the rubber out.

'Who'd you knock up?' Herb asked, instead.

Wally corrected him. 'I didn't say I'd knocked up anybody. I asked you what you'd do- if.'

Herb Fowler disappointed Wally. All he knew about was the same mysterious parking lot in Cape Kenneth- something about a blindfold, a butcher, and five hundred dollars.

'Maybe Meany Hyde would know about it,' Herb added. 'Why don'tcha ask Meany what he'd do if he knocked anybody up?' Herb Fowler smiled at Wally – he was not a nice character-but Wally wouldn't satisfy him; Wally just smiled back.

Meany Hyde was a nice man. He'd grown up with a bunch of older brothers who beat him up and otherwise abused him steadily. His brothers had nicknamed him Meany-probably just to confuse him. Meany was {195} ever-friendly; he had a friendly wife, Florence, who was one of the packinghouse and apple mart women; there had been so many children that Wally couldn't remember all their names, or tell one from the other, and therefore he found it hard to imagine that Meany Hyde even knew what an abortion was.

'Meany listens to everything,' Herb Fowler told Wally. 'Don'tcha ever watch Meany? What's he do, except listen.'

So Wally went to find Meany Hyde. Meany was waxing the press boards for the cider press; he was generally in charge of the cider mill, and because of his nice disposition, he was often in charge of overseeing all the cider house activities-including the dealings with the migrant workers who lived in the cider house during the harvest. Olive made a point of keeping Herb Fowler at a considerable distance from those poor migrant workers: Herb's disposition was not so agreeable.

Wally watched Meany Hyde waxing for a whi le. The sharp but clean odor of the fermented cider and the old cider apples was strongest on a wet day, but Meany seemed to like it; Wally didn't mind it, either.

'Say, Meany,' Wally said, after a while.

'I thought you forgot my name,' Meany said cheerfully.

'Meany, what do you know about abortion?' Wally asked.

'I know it's a sin,' Meany Hyde said, 'and I know Grace Lynch has had one-and in her case, I sympathize with her-if you know what I mean.' Grace Lynch was Vernon Lynch's wife; Wally-and everyone else-knew that Vernori beat her. They had no children; it was rumored that this was the result of Vernon's beating Grace so much that Grace's organs of generation (as Homer Wells knew them) were damaged. Grace was one of the pie women during the harvest and when the apple mart was humming; Wally wondered if she'd be working today. There was lots to do in the {196} orchards on a good day in late spring; but when it was raining, there was just painting and washing, or fixing up the cider house to get it ready for the harvest.

It was just like Meany Hyde to be waxing the press boards too early. Someone would probably tell him to wax them again, just before it was time for the first press. But Meany didn't like painting or washing up, and when it rained, he could kill whole days fussing over his beloved cider press.

'Who do you know needs an abortion, Wally?' Meany Hyde asked.

'A friend of a friend,' Wally said, which would have prompted a rubber from Herb Fowler's pocket, but Meany was nice-he took no pleasure in anyone else's bad luck.

That's a shame, Wally,' Meany said. 'I think you should speak to Grace about it-just don't speak to her when Vernon's around.'

Wally didn't have to be told that. He had often seen the bruises on the backs of Grace Lynch's arms where Vernon had grabbed her and shook her. Once he had seized her by the arms and yanked her toward him, lowering his head in order to butt her in the face. This had happened, Wally knew, because Senior had paid for Grace's dental work (she'd told Senior and Olive that she'd fallen downstairs). Vernon had also beaten up a black man, one of the migrants, in the orchard called Old Trees, several harvests ago. The men had been telling jokes, and the black man had offered a joke of his own. Vernon hadn't liked a black man telling jokes that had anything to do with sex-he'd told Wally, in fact, that black people should be prevented from having sex.

'Or pretty soon,' Vernon had said, 'there'll be too many of them.'

In the Old Trees orchard, Vernon had snapped the man off his ladder, and when the man picked himself off the ground, Vernon held both his arms and butted him in the face over and over again, until Everett Taft, who was {197} one of the foremen, and Ira Titcomb, the beekeeper, had to pull Vernon off. The black man had taken over twenty stitches in his mouth, in his lips, and in his tongue; everyone knew Grace Lynch hadn't lost her teeth falling down any stairs.

It was Vernon who should have had Meany's name, or something worse.

'Wally?' Meany asked him, as he was leaving the cider house. 'Don't tell Grace I told you to ask her.'

So Wally went looking for Grace Lynch. He drove the pickup through the muddy lane that divided the orchard called Frying Pan, because it was in a valley, anc was the hottest to work in, from the orchard called Doris, after someone's wife. He drove to the building called Number Two (it was simply the second building for keeping the larger vehicles; the sprayers were sheltered in Number Two because the building was more isolated, and the sprayers-and the chemicals that went inside them- stank). Vernon Lynch was painting in there; he had a spray gun with a long, needlelike nozzle and he was hosing down the Hardie five-hundred-gallon sprayer with a fresh coat of apple red. Vernon wore a respirator to protect himself from the paint fumes (it was the same mask the men wore when they sprayed the trees), and he wore his foul-weather gear-the complete oilskin suit. Wally somehow knew it was Vernon, although not a single feature of Vernon was visible. Vernon had a way of attacking his work that made his actions unmistakably his, and Wally noticed that Vernon was painting the Hardie as if he were wielding a flamethrower. Wally drove on; he didn't want to ask Vernon where his wife was today. Wally shuddered as he imagined several of Vernon's leering responses.

In the empty, off-season apple mart, three of t he mart women were smoking cigarettes and talking. They didn't have much to do; and when they saw the boss's son coming, they didn't throw down their coffee cups, stamp out their cigarettes and disperse in different directions. They {198} just stepped a little away from one another and smiled at Wally sheepishly.

Florence Hyde, Meany's wife, didn't even pretend to be busy at anything; she dragged on her cigarette, and called out to Wally. 'Hi, honey!'

'Hi, Florence,' Wally said, smiling.

Big Dot Taft, who'd miraculously run a mile, getting stung all the while, the night Senior had dumped Ira Titcomb's bees, put out her cigarette and picked up an empty crate; then she put the crate down and wondered where she'd left her broom. 'Hi, cutey,' Dot said to Wally cheerfully.