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"I don't know how to swim," Rose Rose informed him.
"Oh," he said. "Well, you don't have to swim to enjoy the ocean. You don't have to go in over your head."
"I don't have no bathin' suit," she said.
"Oh," Angel said. "Well, I can get you one. I'll bet one of Candy's would fit you." Rose Rose looked only mildly surprised. Any bathing suit of Candy's would be a tight fit.
For their lunch break, after Rose Rose had seen how Baby Rose was getting along with Black Pan, Angel drove her to the baby-tree orchard near Cock Hill; they were not picking the baby trees, so there was no one there. You could barely see the ocean. You could see the unnatural end of the horizon, how the sky inexplicably flattened out--and by standing on the tractor, they could distinguish the different tones of blue and gray where the sky bled into the sea. Rose Rose remained unimpressed.
"Come on," Angel said to her. "You got to let me take you to see it!" He tugged her by one arm--just fooling around, just an affectionate gesture--but she suddenly cried out; his hand grazed the small of her back as she turned away from him, and when he looked at his hand, he saw her blood.
"It's my period," she lied. Even a fifteen-year-old boy knows that the blood from anyone's period isn't usually found on the back.
After they kissed for a while, she showed him some of the wounds--not the ones on the backs of her legs, and not the ones on her rump; he had to take her word for those. She showed him only the cuts on her back--they were fine, thread-thin, razorlike cuts; they were extremely deliberate, very careful cuts that would heal completely in a day or two. They were slightly deeper than scratches; they were not intended to leave scars.
"I told you," she said to Angel, but she still kissed him, hard. "You shouldn't have no business with me. I ain't really available."
Angel agreed not to bring up the matter of the cuts with Mr. Rose; that would only make things worse--Rose Rose convinced him of that. And if Angel wanted to take her to the beach--somehow, some Sunday, they should both be as nice to Mr. Rose as they could manage.
The man named Muddy, who'd been reassembled with one hundred twenty-three stitches, had said it the best. What he said once was, "If old Rose had cut me, I wouldn't of needed one stitch. I would of bled a pint an hour, or even slower, and when it was finally all over it would have looked like someone hadn't used anythin' on me except a stiff toothbrush."
When Angel was putting the tractor away on Saturday, it was Muddy instead of Peaches who spoke to him. "You don't wanna get involved with Rose Rose, you know. The knife business ain't your business, Angel," Muddy said, putting his arm around the boy and giving him a squeeze. Muddy liked Angel; he remembered, fondly, how Angel's father had gotten him to Cape Kenneth Hospital in time.
When there was another night pressing, Angel sat with Rose Rose on the cider house roof and told her all about the ocean: the strange tiredness one feels at the edge of the sea, the weight in the air, the haze in the middle of a summer day, the way the surf softens sharp things. He told her the whole, familiar story. How we love to love things for other people; how we love to have other people love things through our eyes.
But Angel could not keep secret what he imagined was the enormity of Mr. Rose's wrongdoing. He told the whole story to his father, and to Candy and Wally.
"He cut her? He deliberately cut her?" Wally asked Angel.
"No doubt about it," Angel said. "I'm a hundred percent sure."
"I can't imagine how he could do that to his own daughter," said Homer Wells.
"I can't believe how we're always saying how wonderful it is: that Mister Rose is so in charge of everything," Candy said, shivering. "We have to do something about this."
"We do?" Wally asked.
"Well, we can't do nothing!" Candy told him.
"People do," Wally said.
"If you speak to him, he'll hurt her more," Angel told them. "And she'll know I told you. I want your advice, I don't want you to do anything."
"I wasn't thinking of speaking to him," Candy said angrily. "I was thinking of speaking to the police. You can't carve up your own children!"
"But will it help her--if he gets in trouble?" Homer asked.
"Precisely," Wally said. "We're not helping her by going to the police."
"Or by speaking to him," Angel said.
"There's always waiting and seeing," said Homer Wells. For fifteen years, Candy had learned to ignore this.
"I could ask her to stay with us," Angel suggested. "That would get her away from him. I mean, she could just stay here, even after the harvest."
"But what would she do?" Candy asked.
"There aren't any jobs around," said Homer Wells. "Not after the harvest."
