The Cider House Rules

by John Irving

  "Ain't you a checker?" Peaches asked Angel, then.

  "Sure, I got you!" Angel said to him.

  "Don't you wanna check me, then? Better make sure I ain't pickin' pears, or somethin'," Peaches said, grinning. Angel went to look over the apples, and that was when Peaches said to him: "You don't wanna go into the knife business with Mistuh Rose." Then he walked away, with his bag and his ladder, before Angel could say anything about his apples--which were, of course, perfect.

  Back on the tractor, Angel got up his nerve. "Are you still married to the baby's father?" he asked Rose Rose.

  "Wasn't ever married," she said.

  "Are you still together, you and the father?" Angel asked.

  "Baby got no father," Rose Rose said. "I wasn't ever together."

  "I like Hazel and Heather," Angel said, after a while. "They're both names of plants, so they sort of go with Rose."

  "I don't have no plant, I got a little girl," Rose Rose said, smiling.

  "I also like the name Hope," Angel said.

  "Hope ain't no name," Rose Rose said.

  "Iris is nice," Angel said. "But it's sort of cute, because it's another flower. Then there's Isadora."

  "Whew!" said Rose Rose. "No name is better than some."

  "Well, how about plain old Jane?" asked Angel Wells, who was getting frustrated. "Jennifer? Jessica? Jewel? Jill? Joyce? Julia? Justine?"

  She touched him. She just put her hand on his hip, which nearly caused him to jackknife the trailer and spill the load. "Don't never stop," she told him. "I never knew there was so many names. Go on," she said, her hand urging him--it was just a little shove, before she returned her hand to her lap, where Baby Rose sat mesmerized by the tractor's motion and the tractor's sound.

  "Katherine? Kathleen? Kirsten? Kitty?" Angel Wells began.

  "Go on," Rose Rose said, her hand grazing his hip again.

  "Laura? Laurie? Laverne? Lavinia? Leah? That means 'weary,' " he told her. "Leslie? Libby? Loretta? Lucy? Mabel? That means 'lovable,' " he told her. "Malvina? That means 'smooth snow,' " he explained.

  "I never livin' where they got snow," Rose Rose said.

  "Maria?" Angel said. "Marigold? That's another flower. Mavis? That means a 'thrush,' it's a kind of bird," he said.

  "Don't tell me what they mean," Rose Rose instructed him.

  "Melissa? Mercedes?" Angel said.

  "Ain't that a car?" Rose Rose asked him.

  "It's a good car," Angel said. "A German car. Very expensive."

  "I seen one, I think," Rose Rose said. "They got a funny bull's-eye on the hood."

  "Their insignia," said Angel Wells.

  "Their what?" she asked.

  "It's a kind of bull's-eye, you're right," Angel said.

  "Say it again," Rose Rose said.

  "Mercedes," he said.

  "It for rich people, ain't it?" Rose Rose asked.

  "The car?" he asked.

  "The name or the car," she said.

  "Well," Angel said, "it's an expensive car, but the name means 'Our Lady of Mercies.' "

  "Well, fuck it, then," Rose Rose said. "Didn't I tell you not to tell me what the names mean?"

  "Sorry," he said.

  "How come you never wear a shirt?" she asked him. "Ain't you never cold?"

  Angel shrugged.

  "You can go on with them names, any time," she told him.

  After the first four or five days of the harvest, the wind shifted; there was a strong sea breeze off the Atlantic, and the early mornings were especially cold. Angel wore a T-shirt and a sweat shirt over that. One morning, when it was so cold that Rose Rose had left Baby Rose with Candy, Angel saw that she was shivering and he gave her his sweat shirt. She wore it all day. She was still wearing it when Angel went to help with the cider press that night, and for a while they sat on the cider house roof together. Black Pan sat up there with them, and he told them about the time when there'd been an Army installation on the coast, which they could see at night.

  "It was a secret weapon," he told them. "And your father," Black Pan told Angel, "he made up a name for it--he had us all shittin' our pants, we was so scared. It was a kind of wheel, he told us--it sent people to the moon, or somethin'."

  "It was a Ferris wheel," said Mr. Rose in the darkness. "It was just a Ferris wheel."

  "Yeah, that what it was!" Black Pan said. "I seen one, once."

  "But it was somethin' else that used to be out there," Mr. Rose said dreamily. "It got used in the war."

  "Yeah," Black Pan said. "They shot it at somebody."

  Watching the lights on the coast, Rose Rose announced: "I'm movin' to the city."

  "Maybe, when you old enough," said Mr. Rose.

  "Maybe Atlanta," she said. "I been in Atlanta," she told Angel--"at night, too."

  "That was Charleston," Mr. Rose said. "Unless you was in Atlanta some other time."

  "You said it was Atlanta," she told him.

  "Maybe I said it was Atlanta," said Mr. Rose, "but it was Charleston." Black Pan laughed.

  Rose Rose forgot to give the sweat shirt back, but in the morning, when it was still cold, she was wearing one of Mr. Rose's old sweaters and she handed the sweat shirt back to Angel.

  "Got my own clothes, sort of, this mornin'," she told Angel, the baseball cap pulled lower than usual over her eyes. Black Pan was watching after Baby Rose, and it took Angel a while to see that Rose Rose had a black eye--a white person doesn't spot a black eye on a black person right away, but she had a good one.

  "He say it okay if I wear your hat, but for you to wear your own shirt," Rose Rose told Angel. "I told you," she said. "You don't wanna get involved with me."

  After the picking that day, Angel went to the cider house to have a word with Mr. Rose. Angel told Mr. Rose that he meant nothing improper by letting Rose Rose wear his sweat shirt; Angel added that he really liked Mr. Rose's daughter, and so forth. Angel got pretty worked up about it, although Mr. Rose remained a calm, calm man. Of course, Angel (and all the rest of them) had seen Mr. Rose peel and core an apple in about three or four seconds--it was widely presumed that Mr. Rose could bleed a man in half a minute. He could have made the whole mess of a human being look like a series of slight shaving injuries.

  "Who told you I beat my daughter, Angel?" Mr. Rose asked gently. Rose Rose had told Angel, of course, but now Angel saw the trap; he was only making trouble for her. Mr. Rose would never allow himself to have any trouble with Angel. Mr. Rose knew the rules: they were the real cider house rules, they were the pickers' rules.

  "I just thought you had hit her," Angel said, backing off.

  "Not me," said Mr. Rose.

  Before he put the tractor away, Angel spoke with Rose Rose. He told her that if she was frightened about staying in the cider house, she could always stay with him--that he had an extra bed in his room, or that he could vacate his room and make it into a guest room for her and her baby.

  "A guest room?" Rose Rose said; she laughed. She told him he was the nicest man she ever knew. She had such a languid manner, like someone who was used to sleeping while standing up--her heavy limbs as relaxed as if she were underwater. She had a lazy body, yet in her presence Angel felt the same potential for lightning-quick movement that surrounded her father as intimately as someone's scent. Rose Rose gave Angel the shivers.

  At supper, his father asked him, "How are you getting along with Mister Rose?"

  "I'm more curious how you're getting along with Rose Rose," Candy said.

  "How he's getting along with the girl is his own business," Wally said.

  "Right," said Homer Wells, and Wally let it pass.

  "How you're getting along with Mister Rose is our business, Angel," Wally said.

  "Because we love you," Homer said.

  "Mister Rose won't hurt me," Angel told them.

  "Of course he won't!" Candy said.

  "Mister Rose does what he wants," Wally said.

  "He's got his own rules," said Homer Wells.
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  "He beats his daughter," Angel told them. "He hit her once, anyway."

  "Don't make that your business, Angel," Wally told the boy.

  "That's right," Homer said.

  "I'll make it my business!" Candy told them. "If he's beating that girl, he'll hear about it from me."

  "No, he won't," Wally said.

  "Better not," Homer told her.

  "Don't tell me what to do," she told them, and they were quiet; they both knew better than to try to tell Candy what to do.

  "Are you sure it's true, Angel?" Candy asked.

  "Almost sure," the boy said. "Ninety-nine percent."

  "Make it a hundred percent, Angel, before you say it's true," his father told him.

  "Right," Angel said as he got up from the table and cleared his dishes.

  "Good thing we got all that straightened out," Wally said when Angel was in the kitchen. "Good thing we're all such experts at the truth," he said as Candy got up from the table to clear her dishes. Homer Wells kept sitting where he was.

  The next morning Angel learned that Rose Rose had never been in the ocean--that she'd picked citrus in Florida and peaches in Georgia, and she'd driven up the East Coast all the way to Maine, but she'd never stuck so much as her toe in the Atlantic. She'd never even felt the sand.

  "That's crazy!" said Angel Wells. "We'll go to the beach some Sunday."

  "What for?" she said. "You think I gonna look better with a tan? What would I go to a beach for?"

  "To swim!" Angel said. "The ocean! The salt water!"

  "I don't know how to swim," Rose Rose informed him.

  "Oh," he said. "Well, you don't have to swim to enjoy the ocean. You don't have to go in over your head."

  "I don't have no bathin' suit," she said.

  "Oh," Angel said. "Well, I can get you one. I'll bet one of Candy's would fit you." Rose Rose looked only mildly surprised. Any bathing suit of Candy's would be a tight fit.

  For their lunch break, after Rose Rose had seen how Baby Rose was getting along with Black Pan, Angel drove her to the baby-tree orchard near Cock Hill; they were not picking the baby trees, so there was no one there. You could barely see the ocean. You could see the unnatural end of the horizon, how the sky inexplicably flattened out--and by standing on the tractor, they could distinguish the different tones of blue and gray where the sky bled into the sea. Rose Rose remained unimpressed.

  "Come on," Angel said to her. "You got to let me take you to see it!" He tugged her by one arm--just fooling around, just an affectionate gesture--but she suddenly cried out; his hand grazed the small of her back as she turned away from him, and when he looked at his hand, he saw her blood.

  "It's my period," she lied. Even a fifteen-year-old boy knows that the blood from anyone's period isn't usually found on the back.

  After they kissed for a while, she showed him some of the wounds--not the ones on the backs of her legs, and not the ones on her rump; he had to take her word for those. She showed him only the cuts on her back--they were fine, thread-thin, razorlike cuts; they were extremely deliberate, very careful cuts that would heal completely in a day or two. They were slightly deeper than scratches; they were not intended to leave scars.

  "I told you," she said to Angel, but she still kissed him, hard. "You shouldn't have no business with me. I ain't really available."

  Angel agreed not to bring up the matter of the cuts with Mr. Rose; that would only make things worse--Rose Rose convinced him of that. And if Angel wanted to take her to the beach--somehow, some Sunday, they should both be as nice to Mr. Rose as they could manage.

  The man named Muddy, who'd been reassembled with one hundred twenty-three stitches, had said it the best. What he said once was, "If old Rose had cut me, I wouldn't of needed one stitch. I would of bled a pint an hour, or even slower, and when it was finally all over it would have looked like someone hadn't used anythin' on me except a stiff toothbrush."

  When Angel was putting the tractor away on Saturday, it was Muddy instead of Peaches who spoke to him. "You don't wanna get involved with Rose Rose, you know. The knife business ain't your business, Angel," Muddy said, putting his arm around the boy and giving him a squeeze. Muddy liked Angel; he remembered, fondly, how Angel's father had gotten him to Cape Kenneth Hospital in time.

  When there was another night pressing, Angel sat with Rose Rose on the cider house roof and told her all about the ocean: the strange tiredness one feels at the edge of the sea, the weight in the air, the haze in the middle of a summer day, the way the surf softens sharp things. He told her the whole, familiar story. How we love to love things for other people; how we love to have other people love things through our eyes.

  But Angel could not keep secret what he imagined was the enormity of Mr. Rose's wrongdoing. He told the whole story to his father, and to Candy and Wally.

  "He cut her? He deliberately cut her?" Wally asked Angel.

  "No doubt about it," Angel said. "I'm a hundred percent sure."

  "I can't imagine how he could do that to his own daughter," said Homer Wells.

  "I can't believe how we're always saying how wonderful it is: that Mister Rose is so in charge of everything," Candy said, shivering. "We have to do something about this."

  "We do?" Wally asked.

  "Well, we can't do nothing!" Candy told him.

  "People do," Wally said.

  "If you speak to him, he'll hurt her more," Angel told them. "And she'll know I told you. I want your advice, I don't want you to do anything."

  "I wasn't thinking of speaking to him," Candy said angrily. "I was thinking of speaking to the police. You can't carve up your own children!"

  "But will it help her--if he gets in trouble?" Homer asked.

  "Precisely," Wally said. "We're not helping her by going to the police."

  "Or by speaking to him," Angel said.

  "There's always waiting and seeing," said Homer Wells. For fifteen years, Candy had learned to ignore this.

  "I could ask her to stay with us," Angel suggested. "That would get her away from him. I mean, she could just stay here, even after the harvest."

  "But what would she do?" Candy asked.

  "There aren't any jobs around," said Homer Wells. "Not after the harvest."

  "It's one thing having them pick," Wally said carefully. "I mean, everyone accepts them, but they're only migrants--they're transients. They're supposed to move on. I don't think that a colored woman with an illegitimate child is going to be made to feel all that welcome in Maine. Not if she's staying."

  Candy was cross. She said, "Wally, in all the years I've been here, I've never heard anyone call them niggers, or say anything bad about them. This isn't the South," she added proudly.

  "Come on," Wally said. "It only isn't the South because they don't live here. Let one of them actually try to live here and see what they call her."

  "I don't believe that," Candy said.

  "Then you're dumb," Wally said. "Isn't she, old boy?" Wally asked Homer.

  But Homer Wells was watching Angel. "Are you in love with Rose Rose, Angel?" Homer asked his son.

  "Yes," Angel said. "And I think she likes me--at least a little." He cleared his own dishes and went upstairs to his room.

  "He's in love with the girl," Homer said to Candy and Wally.

  "As plain as the nose on your face, old boy," Wally said. "Where have you been?" He wheeled himself out on the terrace and took a few turns around the swimming pool.

  "What do you think of that?" Homer asked Candy. "Angel's in love!"

  "I hope it makes him more sympathetic to us," Candy told him. "That's what I think about it."

  But Homer Wells was thinking about Mr. Rose. How far would he go? What were his rules?

  When Wally wheeled himself back into the house, he told Homer that there was some mail for him in the apple-mart office. "I keep meaning to bring it up to the house," Wally told him, "but I keep forgetting it."

  "Just keep forgetting it," Homer advise
d him. "It's the harvest. Since I don't have time to answer any mail, I might as well not read it."

  Nurse Caroline's letter had also arrived; it was waiting for him with Dr. Larch's letter, and with a letter from Melony.

  Melony had returned the questionnaire to Homer. She hadn't filled it out; she'd just been curious, and she'd wanted to look it over more closely. After she'd read it a few times, she could tell--by the nature of the questions--that the board of trustees were, in her opinion, a collection of the usual assholes. "The guys in suits," she called them. "Don't you hate men in suits?" she'd asked Lorna.

  "Come on," Lorna had told her. "You just hate men, all men."

  "Men in suits, especially," Melony had said.

  Across the questionnaire, which would never be filled out, Melony had written a brief message to Homer Wells.

  DEAR SUNSHINE,

  I THOUGHT YOU WAS GOING TO BE A HERO. MY MISTAKE. SORRY FOR HARD TIME.

  LOVE, MELONY

  Homer Wells would read that, much later that same night, when he couldn't sleep, as usual, and he decided to get up and read his mail. He would read Dr. Larch's letter, and Nurse Caroline's, too, and any doubts that were remaining about the doctor's bag with the initials F.S. engraved in gold had disappeared with the darkness just before dawn.

  Homer saw no reason to add irony to their predicament; he decided not to send Melony's response to the questionnaire to Larch or to Nurse Caroline--how would it help them to know that they had turned themselves in when they might have gone on for another few years? He sent a single, short note, addressed to them both. The note was simple and mathematical.

  1. I AM NOT A DOCTOR.

  2. I BELIEVE THE FETUS HAS A SOUL.

  3. I'M SORRY.

  "Sorry?" said Wilbur Larch, when Nurse Caroline read him the note. "He says he's sorry?"

  "Of course, he isn't a doctor," Nurse Angela admitted. "There'd always be something he'd think he didn't know; he'd always be thinking he was going to make an amateur mistake."

  "That's why he'd be a good doctor," said Dr. Larch. "Doctors who think they know everything are the ones who make the most amateur mistakes. That's how a good doctor should be thinking: that there's always something he doesn't know, that he can always kill someone."

  "We're in for it, now," Nurse Edna said.