The Cider House Rules

by John Irving

  "I know that you disapprove," Dr. Harlow told her, "but rules exist for reasons."

  "Rules exist for reasons," said Homer Wells, uncontrollably; it was such a stupid thing to say, he felt compelled to repeat it. Dr. Harlow stared at him.

  "No doubt you're an abortion expert, too, Wells," Dr. Harlow said.

  "It's not very hard to be an abortion expert," Homer Wells said. "It's a pretty easy thing to do."

  "You think so?" Dr. Harlow asked aggressively.

  "Well, what do I know?" Homer Wells said, shrugging.

  "Yes, what do you know?" Dr. Harlow said.

  "Not much," Nurse Caroline said gruffly; even Dr. Harlow appreciated this. Even Candy smiled. Homer Wells smiled sheepishly, too. You see? I'm getting smarter! That is what he smiled to Nurse Caroline, who viewed him with an expression of condescension that was proper for nurses to exhibit only to nurses' aides. Dr. Harlow seemed to feel that the pecking order he revered was being treated with the reverence that was mandatory from them all. A kind of glaze appeared to coat his face, a texture composed of righteousness and adrenaline. Homer Wells gave himself a brief sensation of pleasure by imagining something that could wake up Dr. Harlow, and humble him. Mr. Rose's knife work might have that effect on Dr. Harlow--Homer imagined Mr. Rose undressing Dr. Harlow with his knife; every article of clothing would be gathered around the doctor's ankles, in strips and tatters, yet on the doctor's naked body there wouldn't be a scratch.

  A month after Wally's plane was shot down, they heard from the crew of Opportunity Knocks.

  "We were halfway to China," the co-pilot wrote, "when the Nips took some potshots. Captain Worthington ordered the crew to bail out."

  The crew chief and the radioman jumped close together; the co-pilot jumped third. The roof of the jungle was so dense that when the first man crashed through it, he could not see the other parachutes. The jungle itself was so thick that the crew chief had to search for the others--it took him seven hours to find the radioman. The rain was so heavy--it made such a din against the broad palm leaves--none of the men heard the plane explode. The atmosphere was so rich with its own scents that the smell of the burning gasoline and the smoke from the fire never reached them. They wondered if the plane had not miraculously recovered itself and flown on. When they looked up, they could not see through the treetops (which everywhere glittered with bright green pigeons).

  In seven hours, the crew chief contacted thirteen leeches of various sizes--which the radioman thoughtfully removed; the crew chief plucked fifteen leeches off the radioman. They found that the best way to remove the leeches was to touch the lighted end of a cigarette to their posterior ends; that way, they would release their contact with the flesh. If you just pulled them, they kept breaking; their strong sucking mouths would remain attached.

  The radioman and the crew chief ate nothing for five days. When it rained--which it did, most of the time--they drank the rainwater that gathered in puddles in the big palm leaves. They were afraid to drink the other water they encountered. In some of the water they thought they saw crocodiles. Because the radioman was afraid of snakes, the crew chief did not point out the snakes he saw; the crew chief was afraid of tigers, and he thought he saw one, once, but the radioman maintained that they only heard a tiger, or several tigers--or the same tiger, several times. The crew chief said that the same tiger followed them for five days.

  The leeches tired them out, they said. Although the roof of the jungle made the pelting rain louder, it did keep the rain from falling directly on the two men; yet the jungle was so saturated that the rain almost constantly dripped on them--and when, for brief intervals, the rain stopped, the roof of the jungle allowed no sunlight to penetrate to the jungle floor, and the raucous birds, silent in the rain, were louder than the rain when they had their opportunities to protest the monsoon.

  The radioman and the crew chief had no idea where Wally and the co-pilot were. On the fifth day they met up with the co-pilot, who had reached a native village only a day ahead of them. He was quite badly drained by the leeches--since he'd been traveling alone, he'd had no one to burn off the leeches he couldn't reach. In the middle of his back, there had been quite a gathering of them, which the natives were skillful at removing. They used a lighted stalk of bamboo, like a cigar. The natives were Burmese, and friendly; although they spoke no English, they made it clear that they had no fondness for the Japanese invasion, and also that they knew the way to China.

  But where was Wally? The co-pilot had landed in a grove of ironwood; and the canes of bamboo that he had to hack his way through were as stout as a man's thigh. The edge of his machete was as dull and round as the back of the blade.

  The Burmese let them know they were not safe to stay and wait for Wally where they were; some of the villagers would lead the co-pilot, the crew chief, and the radioman into China. For that trip, they darkened their skin with mashed peepul berries and tied orchids in their hair; they didn't want to look like white men.

  The trip took twenty days, walking. They traveled two hundred twenty-five miles. They cooked no food; at the end of the journey, their rice was moldy--there was so much rain. The crew chief claimed he was terminally constipated; the co-pilot claimed he was dying of diarrhea. The radioman shat rabbit pellets and carried a low-grade fever for fifteen of the twenty days; he grew a helmet of ringworm. Each man lost about forty pounds.

  When they reached their base in China, they were hospitalized for a week. Then they were flown back to India, where the co-pilot was retained in the hospital for diagnosis and treatment of an amoeba--no one could say what amoeba it was. The crew chief had a colon problem; he was also retained. The radioman (and his ringworm) went back to work. "They took all our gear when they put us in the hospital in China," he wrote to Olive. "When they gave it back to us, it was all lumped together. There was four compasses. There was just three of us, but there was four compasses. One of us jumped out of the plane with Captain Worthington's compass." In the radioman's opinion, it was better to have crashed with the plane than to have landed in that part of Burma without a compass.

  In August of 194_, Burma officially declared war against Great Britain and the United States. Candy told Homer that she needed a new place to sit, to be left alone. The dock made her want to jump off; she'd sat too many times on that dock with Wally. It didn't help that Homer would sit there with her now.

  "I know a place," Homer told her.

  Maybe Olive was right, he thought; maybe they hadn't cleaned the cider house for nothing. When it rained, Candy sat inside and listened to the drops on the tin roof. She wondered if the jungle sounded as loud as that, or louder, and if the sweet rot smell of the cider apples was anything like the stifling decay-in-progress smell of the jungle floor. When the weather was clear, Candy sat on the roof. Some nights she allowed Homer Wells to tell her stories there. Perhaps it was the absence of the Ferris wheel and of Mr. Rose's interpretations of the darkness that prompted Homer Wells to tell Candy everything.

  That summer, Wilbur Larch wrote to the Roosevelts again. He had written to them both so many times under the constellations of ether that he was unsure whether he had actually written to them or had only imagined doing it. He never wrote to one without writing to the other.

  He usually began, "Dear Mr. President," and, "Dear Mrs. Roosevelt," but occasionally he felt more informal and began, "Dear Franklin Delano Roosevelt"; once he even began, "Dear Eleanor."

  That summer he addressed the President quite plainly. "Mr. Roosevelt," he wrote, dispensing with the endearment, "I know that you must be terribly busy with the war, yet I feel such confidence in your humanitarianism--and in your commitment to the poor, to the forgotten, and especially to children . . ." To Mrs. Roosevelt, he wrote: "I know your husband must be very busy, but perhaps you could point out to him a matter of the utmost urgency--for it concerns the rights of women and the plight of the unwanted child . . ."

  The confusing configurations of light that dazzled t
he dispensary ceiling contributed to the strident and incomprehensible manner of the letter.

  "These same people who tell us we must defend the lives of the unborn--they are the same people who seem not so interested in defending anyone but themselves after the accident of birth is complete! These same people who profess their love of the unborn's soul--they don't care to make much of a contribution to the poor, they don't care to offer much assistance to the unwanted or the oppressed! How do they justify such a concern for the fetus and such a lack of concern for unwanted and abused children? They condemn others for the accident of conception; they condemn the poor--as if the poor can help being poor. One way the poor could help themselves would be to be in control of the size of their families. I thought that freedom of choice was obviously democratic--was obviously American!

  "You Roosevelts are national heroes! You are my heroes, anyway. How can you tolerate this country's anti-American, anti-democratic abortion laws?"

  By now Dr. Larch had stopped writing and was ranting in the dispensary. Nurse Edna went to the dispensary door and rattled the frosted-glass panels.

  "Is it a democratic society that condemns people to the accident of conception?" roared Wilbur Larch. "What are we--monkeys? If you expect people to be responsible for their children, you have to give them the right to choose whether or not to have children. What are you people thinking of? You're not only crazy! You're ogres!" Wilbur Larch was yelling so loudly that Nurse Edna went into the dispensary and shook him.

  "Wilbur, the children can hear you," she told him. "And the mothers. Everyone can hear you."

  "No one hears me," said Dr. Larch. Nurse Edna recognized the involuntary twitching in Wilbur Larch's cheeks and the slackness in his lower lip; the doctor was just emerging from ether. "The President doesn't answer my letters," Larch complained to Nurse Edna.

  "He's very busy," Nurse Edna said. "He may not even get to read your letters."

  "What about Eleanor?" Wilbur Larch asked.

  "What about Eleanor?" Nurse Edna asked.

  "Doesn't she get to read her letters?" Wilbur Larch's tone of voice was whiny, like a child's, and Nurse Edna patted the back of his hand, which was spotted with brown freckles.

  "Missus Roosevelt is very busy, too," Nurse Edna said. "But I'm sure she'll get around to answering you."

  "It's been years," Dr. Larch said quietly, turning his face to the wall. Nurse Edna let him doze in that position for a while. She restrained herself from touching him; she was inclined to brush his hair back from his forehead, in the manner that she often soothed any number of the little ones. Were they all becoming children again? And were they, as Nurse Angela claimed, all becoming the same, all resembling each other, even physically? Anyone visiting St. Cloud's for the first time might suspect that they were all members of the same family.

  Suddenly Nurse Angela surprised her in the dispensary.

  "Well, are we out of it?" she asked Nurse Edna. "What's the trouble? I was sure I ordered a whole case."

  "A case of what?" Nurse Edna asked.

  "Merthiolate--red," Nurse Angela said crossly. "I asked you to get me some red Merthiolate--there's not a drop left in the delivery room."

  "Oh, I forgot!" said Nurse Edna, bursting into tears.

  Wilbur Larch woke up.

  "I know how busy you both are," he said to the Roosevelts, although he gradually recognized Nurse Edna and Nurse Angela--their tired arms held out to him. "My faithful friends," he said, as if he were addressing a vast audience of well-wishers. "My fellow laborers," said Wilbur Larch, as if he were running for reelection--a little tiredly, but no less earnestly seeking the support of his companions who also honored the Lord's work.

  Olive Worthington sat in Wally's room with the lights off; that way, if Homer looked into the house from the outside, he wouldn't see her sitting there. She knew that Homer and Candy were at the cider house, and she tried to tell herself that she did not resent the apparent comfort Homer could give to Candy. (He was powerless to comfort Olive in the slightest; in truth, Homer's presence--given Wally's absence--irritated Olive, and it was testimony to her strength of character that she was able to criticize herself for this irritation; only rarely did she allow her irritation to show.) And she would never have considered Candy unfaithful--not even if Candy had announced to everyone that she was giving Wally up and marrying Homer Wells. It was only that Olive knew Candy: Olive realized that Candy could not give Wally up without giving him up for dead, and Olive would have resented that. He doesn't feel dead! Olive thought. And it isn't Homer's fault that he is here and Wally is there, she reminded herself.

  A mosquito was in the room, and its needlelike whine so disturbed Olive that she forgot why she was keeping Wally's room in darkness; she turned on the lights to hunt for the mosquito. Wouldn't there be terrible mosquitoes where Wally was? The Burmese mosquitoes were speckled (and much larger than the Maine variety).

  Ray Kendall was also alone, but he was only mildly bothered by the mosquitoes. It was a still night, and Ray watched the silent heat lightning violate the blackout conditions along the coast. He was worried about Candy. Raymond Kendall knew how someone else's death could arrest your own life, and he regretted (in advance) how the forward motion of Candy's life might be halted by her losing Wally. "If it was me," Ray said aloud, "I'd take the other fella."

  "The other fella," Ray knew, was more like Ray; it wasn't that Ray preferred Homer Wells to Wally--it was that Ray understood Homer better. Yet Ray did not disrupt a single snail while he sat on his dock; he knew that it took a snail too long to get where it was going.

  "Every time you throw a snail off the dock," Ray teased Homer Wells, "you're making someone start his whole life over."

  "Maybe I'm doing him a favor," said Homer Wells, the orphan. Ray had to admit that he liked that boy.

  The heat lightning was less spectacular from the cider house roof--the sea was not visible even in the brightest flashes. Yet the lightning was more disquieting there; both its distance and its silence reminded Candy and Homer Wells of a war they could not feel or hear. For them, it was a war of far-off flashes.

  "I think he's alive," Candy said to Homer. When they sat together on the roof, they held hands.

  "I think he's dead," said Homer Wells. That was when they both saw the lights go on in Wally's room.

  That night in August, the trees were full, the boughs bent and heavy, and the apples--all but the bright, waxy-green Gravensteins--were a pale green-going-to-pink. The grass in the rows between the trees was knee-high; there would be one more mowing before the harvest. That night there was an owl hooting from the orchard called Cock Hill; Candy and Homer also heard a fox bark from the orchard called Frying Pan.

  "Foxes can climb trees," said Homer Wells.

  "No, they can't," Candy said.

  "Apple trees, anyway," Homer said. "Wally told me."

  "He's alive," Candy whispered.

  In the flash of heat lightning that illuminated her face, Homer saw her tears sparkle; her face was wet and salty when he kissed her. It was a trembling, awkward proposition--kissing on the cider house roof.

  "I love you," said Homer Wells.

  "I love you, too," Candy said. "But he's alive."

  "He isn't," Homer said.

  "I love him," Candy said.

  "I know you do," said Homer Wells. "I love him, too."

  Candy lowered her shoulder and put her head against Homer's chest so that he couldn't kiss her; he held her with one arm while his other hand strayed to her breast, where it stayed.

  "This is so hard," she whispered, but she let his hand stay where it was. There were those distant flashes of light, out to sea, and a warm breeze so faint it barely stirred the apple leaves or Candy's hair.

  Olive, in Wally's room, followed the mosquito from a lampshade (against which she was unable to strike it) to a spot on the white wall above Homer's bed. When she mashed the mosquito with the heel of her hand, the dime-sized spot of blood left
on the wall surprised her--the filthy little creature had been gorging itself. Olive wet her index finger and dabbed at the blood spot, which only made the mess worse. Angry at herself, she got up from Homer's bed, unnecessarily smoothing his untouched pillow; she smoothed Wally's untouched pillow, too; then she turned off the night-table lamp. She paused in the doorway of the empty room to look things over, and turned off the overhead light.

  Homer Wells held Candy around her hips--to help her off the roof. They must have known it was precarious to kiss on top of the cider house; it was more dangerous for them on the ground. They were standing together, arms loosely around each other's waists--his chin touching her forehead (she was shaking her head, No, No, but just a little)--when they both became aware that the lights from Wally's room were out. They leaned against each other as they walked to the cider house, the tall grass clutching at their legs.

  They were careful not to let the screen door bang. Who could have heard it? They preferred the darkness; because they did not reach for the light switch in the kitchen, they never came in contact with the cider house rules that were tacked next to it. Only the palest flashes of the heat lightning showed them the way to the sleeping quarters, where the twin rows of iron beds stood with their harsh springs exposed--the old mattresses rolled in Army barracks fashion at the foot of each bed. They unrolled one.

  It was a bed that had held many transients. The history of the dreams encountered upon that bed was rich. The small moan that caught in the back of Candy's throat was soft and difficult to hear above the iron screeching of the bed's rusted springs; the moan was as delicate in that fermented air as the fluttery touch of Candy's hands, lighting like butterflies upon Homer's shoulders, before he felt her hands grip him hard--her fingers sinking in as she held him tight. The moan that escaped her then was sharper than the grinding bed springs and nearly as loud as Homer's own sound. Oh, this boy whose crying had once been a legend upriver in Three Mile Falls--oh, how he could sound!

  Olive Worthington, rigid in her bed, listened to what she thought was an owl on Cock Hill. What is it hooting about? she thought. She thought of anything that would distract her from her vision of the mosquitoes in the jungles of Burma.