John Irving - The Cider House Rules

'What a good worker you are, Homer!' Olive told him appreciatively.

Homer Wells shrugged. It was a cold, clear night, the very best weather for Mclntosh apples-warm, sunny days, and cold nights. It was not so cold that Homer couldn't smell the apples as he walked to the cider house, arid it was not so dark that he needed to keep on the dirt road; he could go overland. Because he was not on the road, he was able to approach the cider house unobserved.

For a while he stood outside the range of the lights blazing in the mill room and listened to the sounds of the men working the press, and talking, and laughing- {394} and the murmur of the men who were talking and laughing on the cider house roof. Homer Wells listened for a long time, but he realized that when the men were not making an effort to be understood by a white person, he couldn't understand them at all-not even Mr. Rose, whose clear voice appeared to punctuate the other voices with calm but emphatic interjections.

They were also pressing cider at York Farm that night, but Melony wasn't interested; she wasn't trying to understand either the process or the lingo. The crew boss, Rather, had made it clear to her that the men resented her working the press, or even bottling; it cut into their extra pay. Melony was tired from the picking, anyway. She lay on her bed in the bunkroom of the cider house, reading Jane Eyre; there was a man asleep at the far end of the bunkroom, but Melony's reading light didn't disturb him-he had drunk too much beer, which was all that Rather allowed the men to drink. The beer was kept in the cold-storage room, right next to the mill, and the men were drinking and talking together while they ran the press.

The friendly woman named Sandra, who was Rather's wife, was sitting on a bed not far from Melony, trying to mend a zipper on a pair of one of the men's trousers. The man's name was Sammy and he had only one pair of trousers; every so often he'd wander in from the mill room to see how Sandra's work was progressing-an overlarge, ballooning pair of undershorts hanging almost to his knobby knees, his legs below the knees like tough little vines.

Sandra's mother, whom everyone called Ma and who cooked plain but large meals for the crew, lay in a big lump on the bed next to Sandra, more than her share of blankets piled on top of her-she was always cold, but it was the only thing she complained about.

Sammy came into the bunkroom, sipping a beer and bringing with him the apple-mash odor of the mill room; the splatter from the press dotted his bare legs. {395}

'Legs like that, no wonder you want your pants back,' Sandra said.

'What are my chances?' Sammy asked.

'One, your zipper is jammed. Two, you tore it off your pants,' Sandra said.

'What you in such a hurry with your zipper for?' Ma asked, without moving from her lumped position.

'Shit,' Sammy said. He went back to the press. Every once in a while the grinder caught on something-a thick stem or a congestion of seeds-and it made a noise like a circular saw gagging on a knot. When that happened, Ma would say, 'There goes somebody's hand.' Or, 'There goes somebody's whole head. Drunk too much beer and fell in.'

Over it all, Melony managed to read. She wasn't being antisocial, in her view. The two women were nice to her once they realized she was not after any of the men. The men were respectful of her work-and of the mark upon her that was made by the missing boyfriend. Although they teased her, they meant her no harm.

She had lied, successfully, to one of the men, and the lie, as she knew it would, had gotten around. The man was named Wednesday, for no reason that was ever explained to Melony-and she wasn't interested enough to ask. Wednesday had asked her too many questions about the particular Ocean View she was looking for and the boyfriend she was trying to find.

She had snagged her ladder in a loaded tree and was trying to ease it free without shaking any apples to the ground; Wednesday was helping her, when Melony said, 'Pretty tight pants I'm wearing, wouldn't you say?'

Wednesday looked at her and said, 'Yeah, I would.'

'You can see everything in the pockets, right?' Melony asked.

Wednesday looked again and saw only the odd sickle shape of the partially opened horn-rim barrette; tight and hard against the worn denim, it dug into Melony's thigh. It was the barrette that mary Agnes Cork had {396} stolen from Candy, and Melony had stolen for herself. One day, she imagined, her hair might be long enough for the barrette to be of use. Until such a time, she carried it like a pocket knife in her right-thigh pocket.

'What's that?' Wednesday asked.

'That's a penis knife,' Melony said.

'A what knife?' Wednesday said.

'You heard me,' Melony said. 'It's real small and it's real sharp-it's good for just one thing.'

'What's that?' Wednesday asked.;

'It cuts off the end of a penis,' Melony said. 'Real fast, real easy-just the end.'

If the picking crew at York Farm had been a knifecarrying crew, someone might have asked Melony to display the penis knife-just as an object of general appreciation among knife-carrying friends. But no one asked; the story appeared to hold. It allied itself with the other stories attached to Melony and solidified the underlying, uneasy feeling among the workers at York Farm: that Melony was no one to mess with. Around Melony, even the beer drinkers behaved.

The only ill effect of the York Farm picking crew drinking beer while they pressed cider was the frequency of their urinating, which Melony objected to only when they peed too near the cider house.

'Hey, I don't want to hear that!' she'd holler out the window when she could hear anyone pissing. 'I don't want to smell it later, either! Get away from the building. What's the matter-you afraid of the dark?'

Sandra and Ma liked Melony for that, and they enjoyed the refrain; whenever they heard someone peeing, they would not fail to holler, in unison, 'What's the matter? You afraid of the dark?'

But if everyone tolerated Melony's hardness, or even appreciated her for it, no one liked her reading at night. She was the only one who read anything, and it took a while for her to realize how unfriendly they thought reading was, how insulted they felt when she did it. {397}

When they finished pressing that night and everyone settled into bed, Melony asked, as usual, if her reading light was going to bother anyone.

'The light don't bother nobody,' Wednesday said.

There were murmurs of consent, and Rather said, 'You all remember Cameron?' There was laughter and Rather explained to Melony that Cameron, who had worked at York Farm for years, had been such a baby that he needed a light on, all night, just to sleep.

'He thought animals was gonna eat him if he shut out the light!' Sammy said.

'What animals?' Melony asked.

'Cameron didn't know,' somebody said.

Melony kept reading Jane Eyre, and after a while, Sandra said, 'It's not the light that bothers us, Melony.'

'Yeah,' someone said. Melony didn't get it for a while, but gradually she became aware that they had all rolled toward her in their beds and were watching her sullenly.

'Okay,' she said. 'So what bothers you?'

'What you readin' about, anyway?' Wednesday asked.

'Yeah,' Sammy said. 'What's so special 'bout that book?'

'It's just a book,' Melony said.

'Pretty big deal that you can read it, huh?' Wednesday asked.

'What?' said Melony.

'Maybe, if you like it so much,' Rather said, 'we might like it, too.'

'You want me to read to you?' Melony asked.

'Somebody read to me, once,' Sandra said.

'It wasn't me!' Ma said. 'It wasn't your father, either!'

'I never said it was!' Sandra said.