AllFreeNovel
Share Us
" 'Cause it was always near the light switch," Muddy explained. "I thought they was instructions 'bout the lights."
The other men, since they couldn't read at all, never noticed that the list was there.
"Muddy, if you should happen to see her," Angel said, when he was saying good-bye.
"I won't see her, Angel," Muddy told the boy. "She long gone."
Then they were all long gone. Angel would never see Muddy again, either--or Peaches, or any of the rest of them except Black Pan. It wouldn't work out, having Black Pan as a crew boss, as Wally would discover; the man was a cook, not a picker, and a boss had to be in the field with the men. Although Black Pan would gather a fair picking crew together, he was never quite in charge of them--in future years, of course, no one would ever be as in charge of a picking crew at Ocean View as Mr. Rose had been. For a while, Wally would try hiring French Canadians; they were, after all, closer to Maine than the Carolinas. But the French Canadian crews were often ill-tempered and alcoholic, and Wally would always be trying to get the French Canadians out of jail.
One year Wally would hire a commune, but that crew arrived with too many small children. The pregnant women on the ladders made everyone nervous. They left something cooking all day, and started a small fire in the kitchen. And when the men ran the press, they allowed their children to splash about in the vat.
Wally would finally settle on Jamaicans. They were friendly, nonviolent, and good workers. They brought with them an interesting music and a straightforward but contained passion for beer (and for a little marijuana). They knew how to handle the fruit and they never hurt each other.
But after Mr. Rose's last summer at Ocean View, the pickers--whoever they were--would never sit on the cider house roof. It just never occurred to them. And no one would ever put up a list of rules again.
In future years, the only person who ever sat on the cider house roof was Angel Wells, who would do it because he liked that particular view of the ocean, and because he wanted to remember that November day in 195_, after Muddy and the rest of them had left, and his father turned to him (they were alone at the cider house) and said, "How about sitting on the roof for a while with me? It's time you knew the whole story."
"Another little story?" Angel asked.
"I said the whole story," said Homer Wells.
And although it was a cold day, that November, and the wind off the sea was briny and raw, father and son sat on that roof a long time. It was, after all, a long story, and Angel would ask a lot of questions.
Candy, who drove by the cider house and saw them sitting up there, was worried about how cold they must be. But she didn't interrupt them; she just kept driving. She hoped the truth would keep them warm. She drove to the barn nearest the apple mart and got Everett Taft to help her put the canvas canopy on the Jeep. Then she went and got Wally out of the office.
"Where are we going?" Wally asked her. She bundled him up in a blanket, as if she were taking him to the Arctic Circle. "We must be going north," he said, when she didn't answer him
.
"My father's dock," she told him. Wally knew that Ray Kendall's dock, and everything else belonging to Ray, had been blown over land and sea; he kept quiet. The ugly little carhop restaurant that Bucky Bean had manufactured was closed for the season; they were alone. Candy drove the Jeep through the empty parking lot and out to a rocky embankment that served as a seawall against the waves in Heart's Haven Harbor. She stopped as near to the ocean's edge as she dared to, near the old pilings of what had been her father's dock--where she and Wally had spent so many evenings, so long ago.
Then, since this wasn't wheelchair terrain, she carried Wally about ten yards, over the rocks and the sand, and sat him down on a relatively smooth and flat shelf of the jagged coastline. She wrapped Wally's legs in the blanket and then she sat down behind him and straddled him with her legs--as a way of keeping them both warm. They sat facing Europe in this position, like riders on a sled about to plunge downhill.
"This is fun," Wally said. She stuck her chin over his shoulder; their cheeks were touching; she hugged him around his arms and his chest, and she squeezed his withered hips with her legs.
"I love you, Wally," Candy said, beginning her story.
In late November, in the mousing season, the board of trustees at St. Cloud's approved the appointment of Dr. F. Stone as obstetrician-in-residence and the new director of the orphanage--having met the zealous missionary in the board's chambers in Portland, the birthplace of the late Wilbur Larch. Dr. Stone, who appeared a little tired from his Asian journeying and from what he described as "a touch of something dysenteric," made the correct impression on the board. His manner was somber, his hair was graying and cropped in an almost military fashion ("Hindu barbers," he apologized, showing a mild sense of humor; actually, Candy had cut his hair). Homer Wells was carelessly shaven, clean but tousled in his dress--both at ease and impatient with strangers, in the manner (the board thought) of a man with urgent business who was not in the least vain about his appearance; he hadn't the time. The board also approved of Dr. Stone's medical and religious credentials--the latter, in the estimation of the devout Mrs. Goodhall, would give to Dr. Stone's authority in St. Cloud's a "balance" that she noted had been missing in Dr. Larch.
Dr. Gingrich was excited to note the contortions registered on Mrs. Goodhall's face during the entire meeting with young Dr. Stone, who did not recognize Gingrich and Goodhall from his brief glimpse of them in the off-season, Ogunquit hotel. Dr. Gingrich found a comforting familiarity in the young man's face, although he would never associate the glow of a missionary with the sorrowful longing he had seen on the face of the lover. Perhaps Mrs. Goodhall's tic affected her vision--she did not recognize the young man from the hotel, either--or else her mind would never grasp the possibility that a man devoted to children could also be a man with a practicing sexual life.
To Homer Wells, Mrs. Goodhall and Dr. Gingrich were not special enough to remember; the peevish miseries compounded in their expressions were not unique. And the way that Homer looked when he was with Candy was not the way he looked most of the time.
On the matter of abortions, Dr. Stone surprised the board by the adamant conviction he held: that they should be legalized, and that he intended to work through the proper channels toward that end. However, Dr. Stone assured them, as long as abortions were illegal, he would rigorously uphold the law. He believed in rules, and in obeying them, he told the board. They liked the hardship and self-sacrifice that they imagined they could witness in the wrinkles around his dark eyes--and how the fierce Asian sun had blistered his nose and cheeks while he had toiled to save the diarrhetic children. (Actually, he had deliberately sat for too long in front of Candy's sunlamp.) And--on the religious grounds more comfortable to the board, and to Mrs. Goodhall especially--Dr. Stone said that he himself never would perform abortions, even if they were legalized. "I just couldn't do it," he lied calmly. If it ever was legal, of course, he would simply refer the unfortunate woman "to one of those doctors who could, and would." It was clear that Dr. Stone found "those doctors" not to his liking--that, despite his loyalty to Dr. Larch, Dr. Stone found that particular practice of Larch's to be an act decidedly against nature.
It was in large measure indicative of Dr. Stone's "Christian tolerance" that despite his long-standing disagreement with Dr. Larch on this delicate subject, the young missionary was forgiving of Larch--far more forgiving than the board, by no small portion. "I always prayed for him," Dr. Stone said of Dr. Larch, his eyes shining. "I still pray for him." It was an emotional moment, perhaps influenced by the aforementioned "touch of something dysenteric"--and the board was predictably moved by it. Mrs. Goodhall's tic went wild.
On the matter of Nurse Caroline's socialist views, Dr. Stone assured the board that the young woman's fervor to do the right thing had simply been--in her youth--misguided. He would tell her a few things about the Communist guerrilla activity in Burma that would open her eyes. And Dr. Stone convinced the board that the older nurses, and Mrs. Grogan, had a few more years of good service in them. "It's all a matter of guidance," Dr. Stone told the board. Now there was a word that pleased Dr. Gingrich!
Dr. Stone opened his hands; they were rather roughly callused for the hands of a doctor, Mrs. Goodhall would observe--thinking it charming how this healer of children must have helped with building the huts or planting the gardens or whatever other rough work there'd been to do over there. When he said "guidance," Homer Wells opened his hands the way a minister received a congregation, thought the board; or the way a good doctor received the precious head of a newborn child, they thought.
And it was thrilling, after they had interviewed him, how he blessed them as he was leaving them. And how he salaamed to them!
"Nga sak kin," said the missionary doctor.
Oh, what had he said? they all wanted to know. Wally, of course, had taught Homer the correct pronunciation--it being one of the few Burmese things that Wally had ever heard correctly, although he'd never learned what it meant.
Homer Wells translated the phrase for them--Wally had always thought it was someone's name. "It means," Homer told the enraptured board: "May God watch over your soul, which no man may abuse."
