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"Rose is her first name," said Mr. Rose. "You already heard it."
"Rose Rose?" Candy asked. The daughter smiled; she didn't look
very sure.
"Rose Rose," said Mr. Rose proudly.
Everyone laughed again; the baby was cheering up, and Candy played with the little girl's fingers. "And what's her name?" Candy asked Rose Rose. This time, the young woman answered for herself.
"She don't have a name, yet," Rose Rose replied.
"We're still thinking it out," said Mr. Rose.
"What a good idea," said Homer Wells, who knew that too many names were given frivolously, or just temporarily--or, in the cases of John Wilbur and Wilbur Walsh, that they were repeated without imagination.
"The cider house isn't really set up for a baby," Candy said to Rose Rose. "If you'd like to come up to the house, I may have some baby things you could use--there's even a playpen in the attic, isn't there, Homer?"
"We don't need nothin'," Mr. Rose said pleasantly. "Maybe she'll look another day."
"I could sleep a whole day, I think," said Rose Rose prettily.
"If you'd like," Candy told her, "I could look after the baby for you--so you could sleep."
"We don't need nothin'," Mr. Rose repeated. "Not today, anyway," he said, smiling.
"Want a hand unpacking?" Homer asked him.
"Not today, anyway," Mr. Rose said. "What's in the bag, Homer?" he asked when they'd all said good night and Homer and Candy were leaving.
"Apples," Homer admitted.
"That would be strange," said Mr. Rose. Homer unzipped the bag and showed him the apples.
"You the apple doctor?" Mr. Rose asked him.
Homer almost said "Right."
"He knows," Homer said to Candy, as they were walking back to the office.
"Of course he knows," Candy said. "But what's it matter if we're stopping?"
"I guess it doesn't matter," Homer said.
"Since you were prepared to tell Wally and Angel," she said, "I guess it won't be that hard to really do it."
"After the harvest," he said; he took her hand, but when they came near the apple mart and the office light, they dropped hands and walked their separate ways.
"What's the bag for?" Candy asked him, before she kissed him good night.
"It's for me," said Homer Wells. "I think it's for me."
He fell asleep, marveling at what seemed to him to be the extreme control Mr. Rose had of his world--he even controlled the speed at which his daughter's daughter would be named (not to mention, probably, the name itself)! Homer woke up near dawn and took a fountain pen from his night table and used it to write, with a heavy finality, over the penciled number on the back of the photograph of the crew of Opportunity Knocks.
With the dark ink he followed the outline of the pencil; this permanency was reassuring--as if ink, as on a contract, was more binding than pencil. He couldn't have known that Candy was also awake; her stomach was upset, and she was looking for some medicine in her and Wally's bathroom. She also found it necessary to address the subject of the two hundred seventy times she and Homer had made love together since Wally had come home from the war, but Candy honored the finality of this number with less significance than Homer honored it. Instead of writing over the number in ink, Candy used her eraser to remove the evidence from the back of the photograph of her teaching Homer how to swim. Then her stomach calmed and she was able to sleep. It astonished her: how completely relaxed she was at the prospect that after the harvest, her life (as she'd grown used to it) would be over.
Homer Wells didn't try to go back to sleep; he knew his history on the subject of sleep; he knew there was no fighting history. He read an article in The New England Journal of Medicine about antibiotic therapy; he'd followed, for many years, the uses of penicillin and streptomycin. He was less familiar with Aureomycin and Terramycin, but he thought that antibiotics were easy to figure out. He read about the limited usage of neomycin; he made note of the fact that Achromycin and tetracycline were the same. He wrote erythromycin in the margin of the article, several times, until he was sure he knew how to spell it; Dr. Larch had taught him that method of familiarizing himself with something new.
"E-R-Y-T-H-R-O-M-Y-C-I-N," wrote Homer Wells--the apple doctor, as Mr. Rose had called him. He wrote that in the margin, too. "The apple doctor." And just before he got out of bed, he wrote, "A Bedouin Again."
