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"He won't argue with me," Candy said. "I'll just say I've found a lot of old baby clothes, and that Rose Rose and I are going to dress up the baby in everything that fits her."
"At night?" Wally said. "For Christ's sake, Mister Rose isn't a fool."
"I don't care if he believes me," Candy said. "I just want to get the girl and her baby out of there."
"Is there that much of a rush?" Wally asked.
"Yes, I'm afraid there is," said Homer Wells. He had not told Candy or Wally about Dr. Larch's desire to replace himself, or what revelations and fictions had been delivered to the board. An orphan learns to keep things to himself; an orphan holds things in. What comes out of orphans comes out of them slowly.
When Homer called St. Cloud's, he got Nurse Caroline; in their shock, in their grief, in their mourning for Dr. Larch, they had determined that Nurse Caroline had the sturdiest voice over the phone. And they had all been trying to familiarize themselves with Dr. Larch's plans, for everything, and with his massive A Brief History of St. Cloud's as well. Every time the phone rang, they assumed it was someone from the board of trustees.
"Caroline?" said Homer Wells. "It's Homer. Let me speak with the old man."
Nurse Angela and Nurse Edna, and even Mrs. Grogan, would love Homer Wells forever--in spite of his note of denial--but Nurse Caroline was younger than any of them; she did not feel the abiding sweetness for Homer Wells that comes from knowing someone when he's a baby. She felt he had betrayed Larch. And, of course, it was a bad time for him to ask for "the old man." When Larch had died, Nurse Angela and Nurse Edna and Mrs. Grogan had said they were not up to calling Homer; Nurse Caroline hadn't wanted to call him.
"What do you want?" Nurse Caroline asked him coldly. "Or have you changed your mind?"
"There's a friend of my son's," said Homer Wells. "She's one of the migrants here. She's already got a baby who's got no father, and now she's going to have another."
"Then she'll have two," Nurse Caroline informed him.
"Caroline!" said Homer Wells. "Cut the shit. I want to talk to the old man."
"I'd like to talk to him, too," Nurse Caroline told him, her voice rising. "Larch is dead, Homer," she said more quietly.
"Cut the shit," said Homer Wells; he felt his heart dancing.
"Too much ether," she said. "There's no more Lord's work in Saint Cloud's. If you know someone who needs it, you'll have to do it yourself."
Then she hung up on him--she really slammed the phone down. His ear rang; he heard the sound of the logs bashing together in the water that swept the Winkles away. His eyes had not stung so sharply since that night in the Drapers' furnace room, in Waterville, when he had dressed himself for his getaway. His throat had not ached so deeply--the pain pushing down, into his lungs--since that night he had yelled across the river, trying to make the Maine woods repeat the name of Fuzzy Stone.
Snowy Meadows had found happiness with the furniture Marshes; good for Snowy, thought Homer Wells. He imagined that the other orphans would have difficulty finding happiness in the furniture business. At times, he admitted, he had been very happy in the apple business. He knew what Larch would have told him: that his happiness was not the point, or that it wasn't as important as his usefulness.
Homer shut his eyes and watched the women getting off the train. They always looked a little lost. He remembered them in the gaslit sleigh--their faces were especially vivid to him when the sled runners would cut through the snow and strike sparks against the ground; how the women had winced at that grating sound. And, briefly, when the town had cared enough to provide a bus service, how isolated the women had seemed in the sealed buses, their faces cloudy behind the fogged glass; through the windows they had appeared to Homer Wells the way the world appeared to them, just before the ether transported them.
And now they walked from the station. Homer saw them marching uphill; there were more of them than he'd remembered. They were an army, advancing on the orphanage hospital, bearing with them a single wound.
Nurse Caroline was tough; but where would Nurse Edna and Nurse Angela go, and what would happen to Mrs. Grogan? worried Homer Wells. He remembered the hatred and contempt in Melony's eyes. If Melony were pregnant, I would help her, he thought. And with that thought he realized that he was willing to play God, a little.
Wilbur Larch would have told him there was no such thing as playing a little God; when you were willing to play God--at all--you played a lot.
Homer Wells was thinking hard when he reached into his pocket and found the burned-down nub of the candle Mr. Rose had returned to him--"That 'gainst the rules, ain't it?" Mr. Rose had asked him.
On his bedside table, between the reading lamp and the telephone, was his battered copy of David Copperfield. Homer didn't have to open
the book to know how the story began. " 'Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show,' " he recited from memory.
His memory was exceedingly keen. He could recall the different sizes of the ether cones that Larch insisted upon making himself. The apparatus was rudimentary: Larch shaped a cone out of an ordinary huckaback towel; between the layers of the towel were layers of stiff paper to keep the cone from collapsing. At the open tip of the cone was a wad of cotton--to absorb the ether. Crude, but Larch could make one in three minutes; they were different sizes for different faces.
Homer had preferred the ready-made Yankauer mask--a wire-mesh mask, shaped like a soup ladle, wrapped with ten or twelve layers of gauze. It was into the old Yankauer mask on his bedside table that Homer deposited the remains of the cider house candle. He kept change in the mask, and sometimes his watch. Now he peered into it; the mask contained a piece of chewing gum in a faded green wrapper and the tortoiseshell button from his tweed jacket. The gauze in the mask was yellow and dusty, but all the mask needed was fresh gauze. Homer Wells made up his mind; he would be a hero.
He went downstairs to the kitchen where Angel was pushing Wally around in the wheelchair--it was a game they played when they were both restless. Angel stood on the back of the wheelchair and pushed it, the way you push a scooter; he got the chair going faster and faster--much faster than Wally could make it move by himself. Wally just steered--he kept turning and turning. Wally kept trying to miss the furniture, but despite his skill as a pilot and the good size of the kitchen floor, eventually Angel would get the chair going too fast to control and they'd crash into something. Candy got angry at them for it, but they did it, anyway (especially when she was out of the house). Wally called it "flying"; most of all, it was something they did when they were bored. Candy had gone to the cider house to get Rose Rose and her baby. Angel and Wally were freewheeling.
When they saw how Homer looked, they stopped.
"What's the matter, old boy?" Wally asked his friend.
Homer knelt by Wally's wheelchair and put his head in Wally's lap.
