by John Irving
“He thought animals was gonna eat him if he shut out the light!” Sammy said.
“What animals?” Melony asked.
“Cameron didn’t know,” somebody said.
Melony kept reading Jane Eyre, and after a while, Sandra said, “It’s not the light that bothers us, Melony.”
“Yeah,” someone said. Melony didn’t get it for a while, but gradually she became aware that they had all rolled toward her in their beds and were watching her sullenly.
“Okay,” she said. “So what bothers you?”
“What you readin’ about, anyway?” Wednesday asked.
“Yeah,” Sammy said. “What’s so special ’bout that book?”
“It’s just a book,” Melony said.
“Pretty big deal that you can read it, huh?” Wednesday asked.
“What?” said Melony.
“Maybe, if you like it so much,” Rather said, “we might like it, too.”
“You want me to read to you?” Melony asked.
“Somebody read to me, once,” Sandra said.
“It wasn’t me!” Ma said. “It wasn’t your father, either!”
“I never said it was!” Sandra said.
“I never heard nobody read to nobody,” Sammy said.
“Yeah,” somebody said.
Melony saw that some of the men were propped on their elbows in their beds, waiting. Even Ma turned her great lump around and faced Melony’s bed.
“Quiet, everybody,” Rather said.
For the first time in her life, Melony was afraid. After all her efforts and her hard traveling, she felt she had been returned to the girls’ division without being aware of it; but it wasn’t only that. It was the first time anyone had expected something of her; she knew what Jane Eyre meant to her, but what could it mean to them? She’d read it to children too young to understand half the words, too young to pay attention until the end of a sentence, but they were orphans—prisoners of the routine of being read to aloud; it was the routine that mattered.
Melony was more than halfway in her third or fourth journey through Jane Eyre. She said, “I’m on page two hundred and eight. There’s a lot that’s happened before.”
“Just read it,” Sammy said.
“Maybe I should start at the beginning,” Melony suggested.
“Just read what you readin’ to yourself,” Rather said gently.
Her voice had never trembled before, but Melony began.
“ ‘The wind roared high in the great tree which embowered the gates,’ ” she read.
“What’s ‘embowered’?” Wednesday asked her.
“Like a bower,” Melony said. “Like a thing hanging over you, like for grapes or roses.”
“It’s a kind of bower where the shower is,” Sandra said.
“Oh,” someone said.
“ ‘But the road as far as I could see,’ ” Melony continued, “ ‘to the right hand and left, was all still and solitary . . .’ ”
“What’s that?” Sammy asked.
“Solitary is alone,” Melony said.
“Like solitaire, you know solitaire,” Rather said, and there was an approving murmur.
“Shut up your interruptin’,” Sandra said.
“Well, we got to understand,” Wednesday said.
“Just shut up,” Ma said.
“Read,” Rather said to Melony, and she tried to go on.
“ ‘. . . the road . . . all still and solitary: save for the shadows of clouds crossing it at intervals, as the moon looked out, it was but a long pale line, unvaried by one moving speck,’ ” Melony read.
“Un-what?” someone asked.
“Unvaried means unchanged, not changed,” Melony said.
“I know that,” Wednesday said. “I got that one.”
“Shut up,” Sandra said.
“ ‘A puerile tear,’ ” Melony began, but she stopped. “I don’t know what ‘puerile’ means,” she said. “It’s not important that you know what every word means.”
“Okay,” someone said.
“ ‘A puerile tear dimmed my eye while I looked—a tear of disappointment and impatience: ashamed of it, I wiped it away . . .’ ”
“There, we know what it is, anyway,” Wednesday said.
“ ‘. . . I lingered,’ ” Melony read.
“You what?” Sammy asked.
“Hung around; to linger means to hang around!” Melony said sharply. She began again “ ‘. . . the moon shut herself wholly within her chamber, and drew close her curtain of dense cloud; the night grew dark . . .’ ”
“It’s gettin’ scary now,” Wednesday observed.
“ ‘. . . rain came driving fast on the wind.’ ” Melony had changed “gale” to “wind” without their knowing it. “ ‘I wish he would come! I wish he would come! I exclaimed, seized with hypochondriac foreboding.’ ” Melony stopped with that; tears filled her eyes, and she couldn’t see the words. There was a long silence before anyone spoke.
“What was she seized with?” Sammy asked, frightened.
“I don’t know!” Melony said, sobbing. “Some kind of fear, I think.”
They were respectful of Melony’s sobs for a while, and then Sammy said, “I guess it’s some kind of horror story.”
“What you want to read that before you try to sleep?” Rather asked Melony with friendly concern, but Melony lay down on her bed and turned off her reading light.
When all the lights were out, Melony felt Sandra sit on her bed beside her; if it had been Ma, she knew, her bed would have sagged more heavily. “You ask me, you better forget that boyfriend,” Sandra said. “If he didn’t tell you how to find him, he ain’t no good, anyway.” Melony had not felt anyone stroke her temples since Mrs. Grogan in the girls’ division at St. Cloud’s; she realized she missed Mrs. Grogan very much, and for a while this took her mind off Homer Wells.
When everyone else was asleep, Melony turned her reading light back on; whatever failure Jane Eyre might be for someone else, it had always worked for Melony—it had helped her—and she felt in need of its help, now. She read another twenty pages, or so, but Homer Wells would not leave her mind. “I must part with you for my whole life,” she read, with horror. “I must begin a new existence amongst strange faces and strange scenes.” The truth of that closed the book for her, forever. She slid the book under her bed in the bunkroom in the cider house at York Farm, where she would leave it. Had she just read the passage from David Copperfield that Homer Wells so loved and repeated to himself as if it were a hopeful prayer, she would have discarded David Copperfield, too. “I have stood aside to see the phantoms of those days go by me.” Fat chance! Melony would have thought. She knew that all the phantoms of those days were attached to her and Homer more securely than their shadows. And so Melony cried herself to sleep—she was not hopeful, yet she was determined, her mind’s eye searching the darkness for Homer Wells.
She could not have seen him that night—he was so well hidden beyond the range of the lights shining from the mill room at Ocean View. Even if he’d sneezed or fallen down, the sound of the grinder and the pump would have concealed his presence. He watched the red-eyed glow of the cigarettes that darted and paused above the roof of the cider house. When he got cold, he went to watch them pressing and to have a little cider and rum.
Mr. Rose seemed glad to see him; he gave Homer a drink with very little cider in it, and together they watched the orchestra of the pump and grinder. A man named Jack, who had a terrible scar across his throat—a hard-to-survive kind of scar—aimed the spout. A man named Orange slapped the racks in place and received the splatter with a wild kind of pride; his name was Orange because he had tried to dye his hair once, and orange was how it turned out—there was no evidence of that color on him now. The rum had made Jack and Orange both savage about their business and defiantly unwary of the flying mess, yet Homer felt that Mr. Rose, who seemed sober, was still in control—the conductor of both the men and the machinery and operating them bo
th at full throttle.
“Let’s try to get out of here by midnight,” Mr. Rose said calmly. Jack choked the flow of pomace to the top rack; Orange levered the press into place.
In the other corner of the mill room, two men whom Homer Wells didn’t know were bottling at high speed. One of the men began to laugh, and his partner started to laugh with him so loudly that Mr. Rose called out to them, “What’s so funny?”
One of the men explained that his cigarette had fallen out of his mouth, into the vat; at this announcement, even Jack and Orange began to laugh, and Homer Wells smiled, but Mr. Rose said quietly, “Then you better fish it out. Nobody wants that muckin’ up the cider.”
The men were quiet, now; just the machinery went on with its sluicing and screaming. “Go on,” Mr. Rose repeated. “Go fish.”
The man with the lost cigarette stared into the thousand-gallon vat; it was only half full, but it was still a swimming pool. He took off his rubber boots, but Mr. Rose said, “Not just the boots. Take off all your clothes, and then go take a shower—and be quick about it. We got work to do.”
“What?” the man said. “I ain’t gonna strip and go wash just to go swimmin’ in there!”
“You’re filthy all over,” said Mr. Rose. “Be quick about it.”
“Hey, you can be quick about it,” the man said to Mr. Rose. “You want that butt out of there, you can fish it out yourself.”
It was Orange who spoke to the man.
“What business you in?” Orange asked him.
“Hey, what?” the man asked.
“What business you in, man?” Orange asked.
“Say, you in the apple business, man,” Jack advised the man.
“Say, what?” the man asked.
“Just say you in the apple business, man,” Orange said.
It was at that moment that Mr. Rose took Homer’s arm and said to him, “You got to see the view from the roof, my friend.” The tug at his elbow was firm but gentle. Mr. Rose very gracefully led Homer out of the mill room, then outside by the kitchen door.
“You know what business Mistuh Rose is in, man?” Homer heard Orange asking.
“He in the knife business, man,” he heard Jack say.
“You don’t wanna go in the knife business with Mistuh Rose,” Homer heard Orange say.
“You just stay in the apple business, you do fine, man,” Jack said.
Homer was following Mr. Rose up the ladder to the roof when he heard the shower turn on; it was an inside shower—more private than the shower at York Farm. Except for their cigarettes, the men on the roof were hard to see, but Homer held Mr. Rose’s hand and followed him along the plank on the rooftop until they found two good seats.
“You all know Homer,” Mr. Rose said to the men on the roof. There was a blur of greetings. The man called Hero was up there, and the man called Branches; there was someone named Willy, and two or three people Homer didn’t know, and the old cook whose name was Black Pan. The cook was the shape of a stew pot; it had required some effort for him to gain his perch on the roof.
Someone handed Homer a bottle of beer, but the bottle was warm and full of rum.
“It’s stopped again,” Branches said, and everyone stared toward the sea.
The night-life lights of Cape Kenneth were so low along the horizon that some of the lights themselves were not visible—only the reflections from them, especially when the lights were cast out over the ocean—but the high Ferris wheel blazed brightly. It was holding still, loading new riders, letting off the old.
“Maybe it stop to breathe,” Branches said, and everyone laughed at that.
Someone suggested that it stopped to fart, and everyone laughed louder.
Then Willy said, “When it gets too close to the ground, it has to stop, I think,” and everyone appeared to consider this seriously.
Then the Ferris wheel started again, and the men on the roof of the cider house released a reverential moan.
“There it go again!” Hero said.
“It like a star,” Black Pan, the old cook, said. “It look real cool, but you get too close, it burn you—it hotter than a flame!”
“It’s a Ferris wheel,” said Homer Wells.
“It a what?” Willy said.
“A what wheel?” Branches asked.
“A Ferris wheel,” said Homer Wells. “That’s the Cape Kenneth Carnival, and that’s the Ferris wheel.” Mr. Rose nudged him in the ribs, but Homer didn’t understand. No one spoke for a long time, and when Homer looked at Mr. Rose, Mr. Rose softly shook his head.
“I heard of something’ like that,” Black Pan said. “I think they had one in Charleston.”
“It’s stopped again,” Hero observed.
“It’s letting off passengers—riders,” said Homer Wells. “It’s taking on new riders.”
“People ride that fuckin’ thing?” Branches asked.
“Don’t shit me, Homer,” Hero said.
Again, Homer felt the nudge in his ribs, and Mr. Rose said, mildly, “You all so uneducated—Homer’s havin’ a little fun with you.”
When the bottle of rum passed from man to man, Mr. Rose just passed it along.
“Don’t the name Homer mean nothin’ to you?” Mr. Rose asked the men.
“I think I heard of it,” the cook Black Pan said.
“Homer was the world’s first storyteller!” Mr. Rose announced. The nudge at Homer’s ribs was back, and Mr. Rose said, “Our Homer knows a good story, too.”
“Shit,” someone said after a while.
“What kind of wheel you call it, Homer?” Branches asked.
“A Ferris wheel,” said Homer Wells.
“Yeah!” someone said. Everyone laughed.
“A fuckin’ Ferris wheel!” Hero said. “That’s pretty good.”
One of the men Homer didn’t know rolled off the roof. Everyone waited until he was on the ground before they called down to him.
“You all right, asshole?” Black Pan asked.
“Yeah,” the man said, and everyone laughed.
When Mr. Rose heard the shower start up again, he knew that his bottle man had found the cigarette and was washing the cider off himself.
“Willy and Hero, you’re bottlin’ now,” said Mr. Rose.
“I bottled last time,” Hero said.
“Then you gettin’ real good at it,” said Mr. Rose.
“I’ll press for a while,” someone said.
“Jack and Orange are goin’ good,” Mr. Rose said. “We’ll just let them go for a while.”
Homer sensed that he should leave the roof with Mr. Rose. They helped each other with the ladder; on the ground Mr. Rose spoke very seriously to Homer.
“You got to understand,” Mr. Rose whispered. “They don’t want to know what that thing is. What good it do them to know?”
“Okay,” said Homer Wells, who stood a long while out of the range of the lights blazing in the mill room. Now that he was more familiar with their dialect, he could occasionally understand the voices from the roof.
“It’s stopped again,” he heard Branches say.
“Yeah, it takin’ on riders!” someone said, and everyone laughed.
“You know, maybe it’s an army place,” Black Pan said.
“What army?” someone asked.
“We almost at war,” Black Pan said. “I heard that.”
“Shit,” someone said.
“It’s somethin’ for the airplanes to see,” Black Pan said.
“Whose airplanes?” Hero asked.
“There it go again,” Branches said.
Homer Wells walked back through the orchards to the Worthington house; he was touched that Mrs. Worthington had left the light over the stairs on for him, and when he saw the light under her bedroom door, he said, quietly, “Good night, Missus Worthington. I’m back.”
“Good night, Homer,” she said.
He looked out Wally’s window for a while. There was no way, at that distance, that he could witness t
he reaction on the cider house roof when the Ferris wheel in Cape Kenneth was shut off for the night—when all the lights went out with a blink, what did the men on the roof have to say about that? he wondered.
Maybe they thought that the Ferris wheel came from another planet and, when all the lights went out, that it had returned there.
And wouldn’t Fuzzy Stone have loved to see it? thought Homer Wells. And Curly Day, and young Copperfield! And it would have been fun to ride it with Melony—just once, to see what she would have said about it. Dr. Larch wouldn’t be impressed. Was anything a mystery to Dr. Larch?
In the morning, Mr. Rose chose to rest his magic hands between trees; he came up to Homer, who was working as a checker in the orchard called Frying Pan, counting the one-bushel crates before they were loaded on the flatbed trailer and giving every picker credit for each bushel picked.
“I want you to show me that wheel,” Mr. Rose said, smiling.
“The Ferris wheel?” said Homer Wells.
“If you don’t mind showin’ me,” said Mr. Rose. “There just can’t be no talk about it.”
“Right,” Homer said. “We better go soon, before it gets any colder and they close it for the season. I’ll bet it’s pretty cold, riding it now.”
“I don’t know if I want to ride it until I see it,” said Mr. Rose.
“Sure,” said Homer.
Mrs. Worthington let him take the van, but when he picked up Mr. Rose at the cider house, everyone was curious.
“We’ve got to check somethin’ in the far orchard,” Mr. Rose told the men.
“What far orchard he talkin’ about?” Black Pan asked Hero when Homer and Mr. Rose got in the van.
Homer Wells remembered his ride on the Ferris wheel with Wally. It was much colder now, and Mr. Rose was subdued all the way to Cape Kenneth and uncharacteristically drawn into himself as they walked through the carnival together. The summer crowd was gone; some of the carnival events were already closed up tight.
“Don’t be nervous,” Homer said to Mr. Rose. “The Ferris wheel is perfectly safe.”
“I’m not nervous about no wheel,” said Mr. Rose. “You see a lot of people my color around here?”