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"Oh, what a clod!" she'd cry. If so, thought Homer Wells, only when you're smoking.
Louise Tobey wolfed in a cigarette; she sucked in a cloud of smoke and blew so little back, Homer wondered where it went. The older apple-mart women were constant smokers (all except Grace Lynch, who had resolved not to part her lips--not for any reason), but Florence and Irene and Big Dot Taft had been smoking so long, they appeared offhanded about it. Only Debra Pettigrew, Dot's kid sister, smoked with Candy's infrequency and awkwardness. Squeeze Louise smoked with a quick, sure violence that Homer imagined must have been inspired by Herb Fowler's rough-and-ready use of rubbers.
In all of Heart's Rock and Heart's Haven--from the briny gurgle of lobstering life to the chlorine security of the Haven Club pool; from the bustle of the making ready in the apple mart to the work in the fields--there was nothing that caused Homer a single, sharp reminder of St. Cloud's, nothing until the first rainy day, when they sent him, with a small crew of scrubbers and painters, to the cider house.
Nothing about the building, from the outside, prepared him. On or in various farm vehicles, he had lumbered past it often--a long, thin, one-story, shed-roofed building in the shape of an arm held at a right angle; in the elbow of the building, where there was a double-door entrance, were the cider mill and the press (the grinder, the pump, the pump engine and the grinder engine, and the thousand-gallon tank).
One wing of the building was studded with refrigeration units; it was a cold-storage room for the cider. In the other wing was a small kitchen, beyond which were extended two long rows of iron hospital-style beds, each with its own blanket and pillow. Mattresses were rolled neatly on each of the more than twenty beds. Sometimes a blanket on wire runners enclosed a bed, or a section of beds, in the semi-privacy that Homer Wells associated with a hospital ward. Unpainted plywood shelves between the beds formed primitive but stable wardrobe closets, which contained those twisted, goose-necked reading lamps wherever there was the occasional electrical outlet. The furniture was shabby but neat, as if rescued or rejected from hospitals and offices where it had been exposed to relentless but considerate use.
This wing of the cider house had the functional economy of a military barracks, but it had too many personal touches to be institutional. There were curtains, for example, and Homer could tell that they would have been adequate, if faded, at the Worthingtons' dining-room windows--which was where they'd come from. Homer also recognized a particularly exaggerated peacefulness in a few of the flowery landscape paintings and animal portraits that were hung on the plasterboard walls--in such unlikely places (at times, too high; at times, too low) that Homer was sure they'd been hung to hide holes. Maybe boot holes, maybe fist holes, perhaps whole-head holes; there seemed to Homer Wells to radiate from the room a kind of dormitory anger and apprehension he recognized from his nearly twenty years in the boys' division at St. Cloud's.
"What is this place?" he asked Meany Hyde, the rain pelting on the tin roof above them.
"The cider house," said Meany.
"But who sleeps here--who stays here? Do people live here?" Homer asked. It was remarkably clean, yet the atmosphere of use was so prevalent, Homer was reminded of the old bunkrooms in St. Cloud's where the woodsmen and sawyers had dreamed out their exhausted lives.
"It's crew quarters, for the pickers," Meany Hyde said. "Durin' the harvest, the pickers stay here--the migrants."
"It's for the colored folks," said Big Dot Taft, plopping down the mops and pails. "Every year, we make it nice for them. We wash everythin' and we give everythin' a fresh coat of paint."
"I gotta wax the press boards," Meany Hyde said, sliding away from what he thought was the women's work--although Homer and Wally would perform it regularly most rainy days of the summer.
"Negroes?" Homer Wells asked. "The pickers are Negroes?"
"Black as night, some of them," said Florence Hyde. "They're okay."
"They're nice!" called Meany Hyde.
"Some of them are nicer than others," said Big Dot Taft.
"Like other people I know," Irene Titcomb said, giggling, hiding her scar.
"They're nice because Mrs. Worthington is nice to them!" Meany Hyde yelled from the spattered vicinity of the cider press.
The building smelled like vinegar--old cider that had turned. It was a strong smell, but there was nothing stifling or unclean about it.
Debra Pettigrew smiled at Homer over the bucket they were sharing; he cautiously returned her smile while wondering where Wally was working today, in the rain, and imagining Ray Kendall at work. Ray would either be out on the choppy sea in his glistening sou'wester or else working on the wiring of the International Harvester in the building called Number Two.
Grace Lynch was scrubbing the linoleum counters in the kitchen of the cider house; Homer marveled that he had not noticed her there before, that he hadn't even known she was part of their crew. Louise Tobey, sucking a cigarette down to its nub and flicking the butt out the picking crew-quarters' door, remarked that her mop wringer was "out of joint."
"It's jammed, or somethin'," Squeeze Louise said crossly.
"Louise's mop wringer is out of joint," Big Dot Taft said mockingly.
"Poor Louise--jammed your mop wringer, huh?" said Florence Hyde, who laughed, which caused Big Dot Taft to roar.
"Oh, cut it out!" Louise said. She kicked her mop wringer.
"What's going on out there?" called Meany Hyde.
"Louise has got an overworked wringer!" said Big Dot Taft. Homer looked at Louise, who was cross; then he looked at Debra Pettigrew, who blushed.
"Are you overusin' your poor wringer, Louise?" Irene Titcomb asked.
"Louise, you must be stickin' too many mops in your wringer, darlin'," said Florence Hyde.
"Be nice, all of you!" cried Meany Hyde.
