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"You need the practice," Dr. Larch had told him.
"You want me to practice on my son?" Homer had asked.
"May it be the only pain you ever cause him," Wilbur Larch had replied.
There was still ice on the inside of the windowpanes in the morning. Homer would hold his finger to the pane until his finger was bright red, wet and cold, and then he'd touch Candy with the finger--which woke her up when she was slow to respond to his gentler touching of her stubble. Homer and Candy loved how they fit together in the bed again and how Angel could fit between them when Candy was nursing him, and how Candy's milk would sometimes wake them both up before Angel's crying would. They agreed: they had never been happier. So what if the sky, when it was almost May, was still the slate color of February, and still streaked with sleet? So what if the secret they kept in St. Cloud's could not be kept forever--and was already a secret that half of Heart's Haven and Heart's Rock had the sense to figure out for themselves? People from Maine don't crowd you; they let you come to your senses in your own, good time.
Every two days there was a ritual weighing of Angel Wells, which was always conducted in the dispensary--Nurse Angela keeping the record, Dr. Larch and Homer taking turns at poking Angel's belly, looking into Angel's eyes and feeling Angel's grip. "Admit it," Nurse Edna said to Candy and Homer at one such weighing-in ceremony. "You like it here."
That day, in St. Cloud's, it was thirty-three degrees; the wet snow, with which the morning had begun, had turned to freezing rain. That day, in Heart's Rock, Olive Worthington had her own secret. Perhaps if Homer and Candy had been more forthcoming to her, Olive would have shared her secret with them; she would have grabbed the phone and called them. But people from Maine don't like the telephone, a rude invention; especially in the case of important news, a telephone catches you too off-guard. A telegram provides you with a decent, respectful interval in which to gather your senses and respond. Olive sent them her secret in a telegram; that gave everyone a little more time.
Candy would see the telegram first. She was nursing Angel in the girls' division, to quite an appreciative audience of girl orphans, when Mrs. Grogan brought her the telegram, which one of the lackeys who slaved for the stationmaster had finally gotten around to delivering. The telegram was an obvious shock to Candy, who quite abruptly handed Angel to Mrs. Grogan, although Angel did not appear to be through nursing. It astonished Mrs. Grogan that Candy did not even pause to properly replace her breast in her bra--she just buttoned her blouse over herself and, in spite of the weather, ran outdoors and across to the hospital entrance of the boys' division.
At the time, Homer was asking Dr. Larch if he (Larch) thought that an X ray of his (Homer's) heart might prove instructive to Homer. Wilbur Larch was thinking very carefully about his answer when Candy burst upon them.
Olive Worthington was a Yankee who knew the price of a telegram, the cost of words, yet her enthusiasm for her subject had clearly carried her away; she went far beyond her usual, shorthand self.
WALLY FOUND ALIVE/STOP/
RECOVERING ENCEPHALITIS CEYLON/STOP/
LIBERATED FROM RANGOON BURMA/STOP/
TEMPERATURE NINETY-TWO DEGREES/STOP/
WEIGHT ONE HUNDRED FIVE POUNDS/STOP/
PARALYZED/STOP/
LOVE OLIVE
"A hundred and five pounds," said Homer Wells.
"Alive," Candy whispered.
"Paralyzed," Nurse Angela said.
"Encephalitis," said Wilbur Larch.
"How could his temperature be ninety-two degrees, Wilbur?" Nurse Edna asked.
Dr. Larch didn't know; he wouldn't venture a guess. It was another one of those details--the clarification of which would take quite a long time. For Captain Worthington, who had abandoned his plane over Burma--about ten months ago--the clarification of many such details would take years.
It was raining so heavily when he jumped, it seemed to Wally that his parachute had to push against the rain to open. Yet the roar of the plane was so near, Wally was afraid he'd pulled the cord too soon. He was afraid of the bamboo--he'd heard stories of fliers being impaled by it--but he missed the bamboo and landed in a teak tree, a branch of which separated his shoulder. His head may have hit the trunk, or else the pain in his shoulder caused him to lose consciousness. It was dark when he woke up, and since he couldn't see how far below the ground was, he didn't dare to free himself from the chute cords until morning. Then he gave himself too much morphine--for his shoulder--and lost the syringe in the dark.
In his haste to abandon the plane, he'd not had time to locate a machete; in the morning he spent quite a while cutting through the chute cords--using only the bayonet in his ankle sheath, and having the use of only one strong arm. He was lowering himself to the ground when his dog tags caught on a vine, and because of his bad shoulder he could neither support all his weight with one arm nor free the tags, and so he lost them; the chain cut his neck when the tags came off, and he landed on an old teakwood log what was hidden under the ferns and the dead palm fronds. The log rolled, and he sprained his ankle. When he realized that in the monsoon weather he would never know east from west, that was when he discovered that his compass was gone. He rubbed some sulfa powder on his cut neck.
Wally had no idea where China was; he picked his way by moving through whatever was the least dense. In this way, after three days, he had the impression that the jungle was either thinning out or that he was getting better at picking his way through it. China was east of Wally, but Wally went south; China was up--over the mountains--but Wally sought the valleys. Where Wally was, the valleys ran southwesterly. He was right about one thing: the jungle was thinning out. It was also getting warmer. Every night he climbed a tree and slept in its crotch. The large, twisted trunks of the peepul tree--as gnarled as giant, wooden cables--made the best crotches for sleeping, but Wally wasn't the first creature to figure this out. One night, at eye level, in the crotch of a peepul tree next to him, a leopard was examining itself for ticks. Wally followed the leopard's example, and discovered several. He gave up trying to remove the leeches.
One day he saw a python--a small one, about fifteen feet. It was lying on a rock, swallowing something the approximate size and shape of a beagle. Wally guessed it was a monkey, although he couldn't remember if he had seen any monkeys. He had seen monkeys, of course, but he'd forgotten them; he had a fever. He tried to take his temperature, but the thermometer in his first-aid kit was broken.
The day he saw a tiger swim across a river was the day he began to notice the mosquitoes; the climate was changing. The river with the tiger in it had produced a broader valley; the forest was changing, too. He caught a fish with his hands and ate its liver raw; he cooked frogs as big as cats, but their legs were fishier than the frog legs he remembered. Perhaps it was the lack of garlic.
He ate something that was the consistency of a mango and had no taste whatsoever; the fruit left a musty aftertaste, and for a whole day he vomited and had chills. Then the river where he'd seen the tiger turned into a bigger river; the monsoon water had a powerful current; Wally was encouraged to build a raft. He remembered the rafts he had engineered for travel on Drinkwater Lake, and he cried to think how much harder it was to build a raft with bamboo and vines than with pitch pine and ropes--and stray boards and nails. And how much heavier the green bamboo was, too. It didn't matter that the raft leaked; it barely floated; and if he needed to portage, he knew he couldn't carry it.
He noticed more mosquitoes, especially when the river broadened and the current slowed down, and he just drifted. He had no idea how many days he drifted, or when he first knew for certain that he had a fever; about the time he saw the rice paddies and the
water buffaloes, he would say later. One day he would remember waving to the women in the rice paddies; they looked so surprised to see him.
