The Cider House Rules

by John Irving

  "You gave her a job!" the fat man cried. "She's a killer!"

  "Then you better keep the fuck out of her way," the foreman told him. "If you get in her way I'll have to fire you--she damn near made me, already."

  The fat man had a broken nose and needed a total of forty-one stitches, thirty-seven in his face and four in his tongue where he had bitten himself.

  The man called Charley was better off in the stitches department. He required only four--to close the wound in his ear. But Melony had cracked two of his ribs by jumping on him; he had received a concussion from having his head stamped on; and his lower back would suffer such repeated muscle spasms that he would be kept off a ladder through the harvest.

  "Holy cow," Charley said to the foreman. "I'd hate to meet the son-of-a-bitch who's her boyfriend."

  "Just keep out of her way," the foreman advised him.

  "Has she still got my belt?" Charley asked the foreman.

  "If you ask her for your belt back, I'll have to fire you. Get yourself a new belt," the foreman said.

  "You won't see me askin' her for nothin'," Charley said. "She didn't say her boyfriend was coming here, did she?" he asked the foreman, but the foreman said that if Melony was looking for her boyfriend, the boyfriend must not have given her any directions; he must have left her. "And God help him if he left her," the foreman said--over and over again.

  "Well," said the woman in the apple mart who had called Melony a tramp. "If you had a woman like that, wouldn't you try to leave her?"

  "In the first place," the foreman said, "I wouldn't ever have a woman like that. And in the second place, if I did have her, I'd never leave her--I wouldn't dare."

  In the cider house at York Farm--somewhere inland from York Harbor, somewhere west of Ogunquit, with several hundred miles of coastline between her and Homer Wells--Melony lay listening to the mice. Sometimes they scurried, sometimes they gnawed. The first mouse bold enough to race across the foot of her mattress was swatted so hard with the buckle end of Charley's belt that it flew across four beds, all in a row, and struck the wall with a soft thud. Melony promptly retrieved it--it was quite dead, its back broken. With the aid of a pencil without a point, Melony was able to prop the dead mouse into a sitting position on her night table, an inverted apple crate, which she then moved to the foot of her bed. It was her belief that the dead mouse might function as a kind of totem, to warn other mice away, and--indeed--no mouse bothered Melony for several hours. She lay in the weak light reading Jane Eyre--the empty, dark orchard ripening all around her.

  She reread, twice, that passage near the end of Chapter Twenty-seven that concludes: "Preconceived opinions, foregone determinations, are all I have at this hour to stand by: there I plant my foot."

  With that she closed the book and turned out the light. Melony lay bravely on her back, her broad nostrils full of the sharp cider-vinegar air--the same air Homer Wells is smelling, she thought. Just before she fell asleep, she whispered--although there were only the mice to hear her--"Good night, Sunshine."

  The next day it rained. It rained from Kennebunkport to Christmas Cove. There was such a strong northeast wind that the flags on the boats moored at the Haven Club, even though they were saturated with rain, pointed to shore, and made a brisk snapping sound as constant as the chafe of Ray Kendall's lobster boat against the old worn-rubber tires that padded his dock.

  Ray would spend the day under the John Deere in Building Number Two; he was, alternately, replacing the tractor's manifold and sleeping. It was the place he slept best: under a large, familiar machine. He was never detected; his legs at times extended from under the vehicle in a posture of such extreme sprawl that he looked dead--run over or crushed. One of the apple workers, startled to see him, would speak out, "Ray? Is that you?" Whereupon, like Dr. Larch brought back from ether, Ray Kendall would wake up and say, "Right here. I'm right here."

  "Some job, huh?" the worried party would inquire.

  "Yup," Ray would say. "Some job, all right."

  The rain came pelting down, the wind so strongly onshore that the gulls moved inland. At York Farm they huddled against the cider house and woke up Melony with their fretting; at Ocean View they squatted together on the tin roof of the cider house, where a crew of scrubbers and painters were at work again.

  Grace Lynch, as usual, had the worst job, scouring the thousand-gallon cider tank; she was kneeling inside the vat, and the sound of her movements in there impressed the others with a kind of furtive energy as if an animal were scrounging for a nest or for its dinner. Meany Hyde had left the cider house on what his wife, Florence, called "another bullshit errand." Meany had determined that the fan belt on the conveyor was loose, and so he removed it and said he was taking it to Ray Kendall to see what Ray could do about it.

  "So what's Ray gonna do with a loose fan belt?" Florence asked Meany. "Order a new one, or take a piece out of that one--right?"

  "I suppose," Meany said warily.

  "And what do you need the conveyor for today?" Florence asked.

  "I'm just takin' it to Ray!" Meany said peevishly.

  "You don't wanna work too much, do you?" Florence said, and Meany shuffled out into the rain; he smiled and winked at Homer Wells as he was climbing into the pickup.

  "I got a lazy husband," Florence said happily.

  "That's better than some other kinds," said Irene Titcomb--and everyone automatically looked in the direction of the thousand-gallon vat where Grace Lynch was feverishly scrubbing.

  Irene and Florence, who had patient, steady hands, were painting the sashes and the window trim in the bedroom wing of the cider house. Homer Wells and Big Dot Taft and Big Dot's kid sister, Debra Pettigrew, were painting the kitchen with broader, more carefree strokes.

  "I hope you don't feel I'm crampin' you," Big Dot said to Debra and Homer. "I ain't your chaperone or nothin'. If you want to make out, just go right ahead."

  Debra Pettigrew looked embarrassed and cross, and Homer smiled shyly. It was funny, he thought, how you have two or three dates with someone--and just kiss them and touch them in a few odd places--and everyone starts talking to you as if you've got doing it on your mind every minute. Homer's mind was much more on Grace Lynch in the vat than it was on Debra Pettigrew, who stood right beside him painting the same wall. When Homer encountered the light switch by the kitchen door, he asked Big Dot Taft if he should just paint all around it or let Florence and Irene, with their smaller brushes, trim it more neatly.

  "Just paint right over it," said Big Dot Taft. "We do this every year. We just make it look new and fresh. We're not tryin' to win no neatness contest."

  By the light switch, there was a tack that pinned a piece of typing paper to the wall--the type itself was very faint, from long exposure to the sunlight that came through the kitchen's curtainless windows. It was some kind of list; the bottom quarter of the page had been torn away; whatever it was, it was incomplete. Homer pulled the tack out of the wall and would have crumpled the paper and tossed it toward the trash barrel if the top line of type hadn't caught his attention.

  CIDER HOUSE RULES

  the top line said.

  What rules? he wondered, reading down the page. The rules were numbered.

  1. Please don't operate the grinder or the press if you've been drinking.

  2. Please don't smoke in bed or use candles.

  3. Please don't go up on the roof if you've been drinking--especially at night.

  4. Please wash out the press cloths the same day or night they are used.

  5. Please remove the rotary screen immediately after you've finished pressing and hose it clean WHEN THE POMACE IS STILL WET ON IT!

  6. Please don't take bottles with you when you go up on the roof.

  7. Please--even if you are very hot (or if you've been drinking)--don't go into the cold-storage room to sleep.

  8. Please give your shopping list to the crew boss by seven o'clock in the morning.

  9. There should be no more
than half a dozen people on the roof at any one time.

  If there were a few more rules, Homer couldn't read them because the page had been ripped off. Homer handed the torn paper to Big Dot Taft.

  "What's all this about the roof?" he asked Debra Pettigrew.

  "You can see the ocean from the roof," Debra said.

  "That ain't it," said Big Dot Taft. "At night you can see the Ferris wheel and the carnival lights in Cape Kenneth."

  "Big deal," said Homer Wells.

  "It's no big deal to me, either," Big Dot Taft said, "but those darkies really like it."

  "They sit up on the roof all night, some nights," Debra Pettigrew said.

  "They get drunk up there and fall off, some nights," Florence Hyde announced from the bedroom wing.

  "They break bottles up there and cut themselves all up," said Irene Titcomb.

  "Well, not every night, they don't," said Big Dot Taft.

  "And one night one of them got so drunk and sweaty, running the press, that he passed out in the cold storage and woke up with pneumonia," Debra Pettigrew said.

  "You don't exactly 'wake up with' pneumonia," said Homer Wells. "It's more complicated than that."

  "Excuse me," Debra said sulkily.

  "Anyway, nobody pays no attention to them rules," Big Dot Taft said. "Every year Olive writes them up, and every year nobody pays no attention."

  "All the pickin' crews we've ever had are just children," said Florence Hyde. "If Olive didn't go shoppin' for them every day, they'd starve."

  "They never get themselves organized," Irene Titcomb said.

  "One of them got his whole arm caught in the grinder," Big Dot Taft recalled. "Not just his fool hand--his whole arm."

  "Yuck," said Debra Pettigrew.

  "Yuck is what his arm was, all right," said Florence Hyde.

  "How many stitches?" asked Homer Wells.

  "You're really curious, you know that?" Debra Pettigrew asked him.

  "Well, they don't do no harm, except to themselves," said Irene Titcomb philosophically. "What's it matter if they want to drink too much and roll off the roof? Wasn't nobody ever killed here, was there?"

  "Not yet," said Grace Lynch's tight, thin voice, her words strangely amplified because she was speaking from the bottom of the thousand-gallon vat. The combination of the strangeness of her voice and the rareness of her making a contribution of any kind to their conversation made them all silent.

  Everyone was just working away when Wally drove up in the green van with Louise Tobey; he dropped Louise off with her own bucket and brush and asked the rest of them if they needed anything--more brushes? more paint?

  "Just give me a kiss, honey," said Florence Hyde.

  "Just take us to the movies," said Big Dot Taft.

  "Just propose to me, just propose!" cried Irene Titcomb. Everyone was laughing when Wally left. It was almost lunchtime, and everyone knew that Squeeze Louise had come to work particularly late. She usually arrived with Herb Fowler, more or less on time. Louise looked especially pouty this morning, and no one spoke to her for a while.

  "Well, you can be havin' your period, or somethin', and still say good mornin'," said Big Dot Taft after a while.

  "Good mornin'," said Louise Tobey.

  "La-de-da!" said Irene Titcomb. Debra Pettigrew bumped Homer in the side; when he looked at her, she winked. Nothing else happened until Herb Fowler drove by and offered to take everyone to the Drinkwater Road diner for lunch.

  Homer looked at the vat, but Grace Lynch made no appearance over its rim; she just continued her scratching and hissing noises in the vat's bottom. She wouldn't have accepted the invitation, anyway. Homer was thinking he probably should accept it, to get away from Grace Lynch, but he had promised himself to investigate the roof of the cider house--he wanted to find the spot that had glinted to him so mysteriously in the moonlight; and now that he'd heard about the cider house rules and that you could see the ocean--and the Cape Kenneth Ferris wheel!--from the roof, he wanted to climb up there. Even in the rain.

  He went outside with all the others, thinking that Grace Lynch might assume he'd gone with them, and then he told Herb Fowler out in the driveway that he was going to stay. He felt a finger hook him in his blue jeans pocket, one of the front ones, and when Herb and the others had gone, he looked in his pocket and discovered the rubber. The prophylactic's presence in his pocket urged him up on the cider house roof in a hurry.

  His appearance there surprised the gulls, whose sudden and raucous flight surprised him; he had not noticed them huddled on the slope of the roof that faced away from him--and away from the wind. The roof was slippery in the rain; he had to grip the corrugated grooves with both hands and place his feet very close to each other as he climbed. The pitch of the roof was not too steep, or he wouldn't have been able to climb it at all. To his surprise, he found a number of planks--old two-by-fours--nailed to the seaward side of the roof's apex. Benches! he thought. Even at an angle, they were at least more comfortable to sit on than the tin. He sat there in the rain and tried to imagine the pleasure of the view, but the weather was much too stormy for him to be able to see the farthest orchards; the ocean was completely obscured, and he had to imagine where, on a clear night, the Ferris wheel and the carnival lights in Cape Kenneth would be.

  He was getting soaked and was about to climb down when he saw the knife. It was a big switchblade, the blade end stuck into the two-by-four at the top of the roof alongside him; the handle, which was fake horn, was cracked in two places, and when Homer Wells tried to extract the blade from the wood, the handle broke in two in his hands. That was why it had been left there, apparently. With the handle broken, the knife wouldn't close properly; it wasn't safe to carry that way--and, besides, the blade was rusted. The whole roof was rusted, Homer noticed; there was no single spot shiny enough to have reflected the moonlight back to Wally's window. Then he noticed the broken glass; some larger pieces were caught in the corrugated grooves in the tin. It must have been one of those pieces of glass that caught the moon, Homer thought.

  Beer bottle glass and rum bottle glass, whiskey bottle glass and gin bottle glass, he supposed. He tried to imagine the black men drinking at night on the roof; but the rain had soaked him through, and the wind now thoroughly chilled him. Inching his way back down the roof--to the edge where the ground was the safest jump--he cut his hand, just a small cut, on a piece of glass he didn't see. By the time he went back inside the cider house, the cut was bleeding freely--quite a lot of blood for such a small cut, he thought, and he wondered if perhaps there was a tiny piece of glass still inside the cut. Grace Lynch must have heard him rinsing the wound in the kitchen sink (if she hadn't heard him on the roof). To Homer's surprise, Grace was still in the thousand-gallon vat.

  "Help me," she called to him. "I can't get out."

  It was a lie; she was just trying to draw him to the edge of the tank. But orphans have a gullible nature; orphanage life is plain; by comparison, every lie is sophisticated. Homer Wells, although he approached the rim of the cider vat with trepidation, approached steadily. The quickness of her thin hands, and the wiry strength with which they gripped his wrists, surprised him; he nearly lost his balance--he was almost pulled into the tank, on top of her. Grace Lynch had taken all her clothes off, but the extreme definition of her bones struck Homer more powerfully than anything forbidden in her nakedness. She looked like a starved animal contained in a more or less humane trap; humane, except that it was evident, from her bruises, that her captor beat her regularly and hard. The bruises on her hips and thighs were the largest; the thumbprint bruises on the backs of her arms were the deepest purple hue and there was a yellow-to-green bruise on one of her small breasts that looked especially angry.

  "Let me go," said Homer Wells.

  "I know what they do where you come from!" Grace Lynch cried, tugging on his wrists.

  "Right," said Homer Wells. Systematically, he began to peel back her fingers, but she scrambled nimbly up t
he side of the vat and bit him sharply on the back of his hand. He had to push her, then, and he might have hurt her if they both hadn't heard the splashy arrival of Wally in the green van. Grace Lynch let Homer go and scurried to put on her clothes. Wally sat in the van in the drenching rain and pumped the horn; Homer ran outside to see what he wanted.

  "Get in!" Wally shouted. "We've got to go rescue my stupid father--he's in some kind of trouble at Sanborn's."

  For Homer Wells, who'd grown up in a world without fathers, it was a shock to hear that anyone who had a father would call his father stupid, even if it was true. There was a peck bag of Gravensteins in the passenger seat of the van; Homer held the apples in his lap as Wally drove down Drinkwater Road to Sanborn's General Store. The proprietors, Mildred and Bert Sanborn, were among Senior's oldest friends; he'd been a schoolboy with both of them and had once dated Milly (before he'd met Olive--and before Milly had married Bert).

  Titus Hardware and Plumbing was next door to Sanborn's; Warren Titus, the plumber, was standing on the porch of the general store, not letting anyone inside, when Wally and Homer drove into Heart's Rock.

  "It's a good thing you're here, Wally," Warren said, when the boys ran up to the porch. "Your Dad's got some wild hair across his ass."

  In the store, Homer and Wally saw that Mildred and Bert Sanborn had--for the moment--cornered Senior in a niche of shelves reserved for baking goods; Senior appeared to have littered the floor and much of himself with all the flour and sugar within his reach. His trapped appearance reminded Homer of Grace Lynch.

  "What's the trouble, Pop?" Wally asked his father. Mildred Sanborn gave a sigh of relief to see Wally, but Bert wouldn't take his eyes off Senior.

  "Trouble Pop," Senior said.

  "He got in a rage when he couldn't find the dog food," Bert said to Wally, without looking away from Senior; Bert thoroughly expected Senior to bolt, at any moment, to another part of the store and destroy it.

  "What did you want with dog food, Pop?" Wally asked his father.