by John Irving
This implied to Angel, of course, that Rose Rose liked his body being brown, didn’t care for his forehead being pale, and had managed—despite the hat—to notice his eyes and hair (and to like them, too).
After filling the trailer with his first load of apples, Angel took a long drink from a water jug in the orchard, twisting the baseball cap backward on his head as he drank. Then he wore it that way, the way a catcher wears a baseball cap—or the way Candy wore it, with the visor tipped over her hair and the back of her neck. Somehow it looked better that way on Candy. When Rose Rose saw Angel wearing the cap that way, she said, “Now you look real stupid, like you got a ball for a head.”
The next day, Angel let Candy wear the cap.
Baby Rose was sucking the pacifier, like a three-horsepower pump, and Rose Rose smiled at Angel. “Where’s that nice hat?” she asked him.
“I lost it,” he lied.
“Too bad,” she said. “It was nice.”
“I thought you didn’t like that hat,” he said.
“I didn’t like that hat on you,” said Rose Rose.
The next day he brought the hat and put it on her head as soon as she was settled into the tractor seat. Rose Rose looked awfully pleased; she wore the hat the same way Angel had worn it—low, over her eyes. Baby Rose looked cross-eyed at the visor.
“You lost it and then you found it, huh?” Rose Rose asked Angel.
“Right,” Angel said.
“You better be careful,” she told him. “You don’t wanna get involved with me.”
But Angel was flattered and encouraged that she’d even noticed his interest—especially since he was unsure how to express his interest.
“How old are you?” he asked her casually, later that day.
“ ’Bout your age, Angel,” was all she said. Baby Rose slumped against her breast; a floppy-brimmed white sailor’s hat protected the baby from the sun, but under the brim of the hat, the little girl looked glassy-eyed and exhausted from chomping on the pacifier all day. “I don’t believe you can still be teethin’,” Rose Rose said to her daughter. She took hold of the baby-blue plastic ring and pulled the pacifier out of the little girl’s mouth; it made a pop like a wine cork, which startled Baby Rose. “You becomin’ an addict,” Rose Rose said, but when Baby Rose started to cry, her mother put the nipple back.
“How do you like the name Gabriella?” Angel asked Rose Rose.
“I never heard it before,” she said.
“How about Ginger?” Angel asked.
“That somethin’ you eat,” Rose Rose said.
“Gloria?” Angel asked.
“That nice,” said Rose Rose. “Who it for?”
“Your baby!” Angel said. “I’ve been thinking of names for your baby.” Rose Rose raised the visor of the Boston Red Sox cap and looked into Angel’s eyes.
“Why you thinkin’ of that?” she asked him.
“Just to be of help,” he said awkwardly. “Just to help you decide.”
“Decide?” Rose Rose asked.
“To help you make up your mind,” said Angel Wells.
The picker named Peaches was almost as fast as Mr. Rose. He was emptying his canvas bag into a bushel crate, and he interrupted Rose Rose and Angel.
“You countin’ me, Angel?” Peaches asked.
“I got you,” Angel said. Sometimes Angel examined the fruit if he didn’t know the picker very well—to make sure they weren’t bruising it; if they were bruising it, or if there were other signs that they were picking too fast, Angel wouldn’t give them the top price for a bushel. But Angel knew Peaches was a good picker, so he just put a number on the list without getting off the tractor to look at the apples.
“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 weapo
n,” 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.
“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-t
hree 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!”