Cider House Rules

by John Irving

  “Tell them not to get that baby overexcited,” Homer said to Candy, as if she were his nurse of long-standing and he was used to giving her directions and she was used to following them, exactly. He did not let the ruckus (or Candy trying to quiet them down) distract him; he watched the cervix open until it opened wide enough. He chose the curette of the correct size. After the first one, thought Homer Wells, this might get easier. Because he knew now that he couldn’t play God in the worst sense; if he could operate on Rose Rose, how could he refuse to help a stranger? How could he refuse anyone? Only a god makes that kind of decision. I’ll just give them what they want, he thought. An orphan or an abortion.

  Homer Wells breathed slowly and regularly; the steadiness of his hand surprised him. He did not even blink when he felt the curette make contact; he did not divert his eye from witnessing the miracle.

  For that night, Candy slept in the extra bed in Angel’s room—she wanted to be close by if Rose Rose needed anything, but Rose Rose slept like a rock. The gap left by her missing tooth made a small whistling noise when her lips were parted; it was not at all disturbing, and Candy slept quite soundly, too.

  Angel slept downstairs, sharing the big bed with Wally. They stayed awake quite late, talking. Wally told Angel about the time he first fell in love with Candy; although Angel had heard the story before, he listened to it more attentively—now that he thought he had fallen in love with Rose Rose. Wally also told Angel that he must never underestimate the darker necessities of the world where his father had grown up.

  “It’s the old story,” Wally said to Angel. “You can get Homer out of Saint Cloud’s, but you can’t get Saint Cloud’s out of Homer. And the thing about being in love,” Wally said to Angel, “is that you can’t force anyone. It’s natural to want someone you love to do what you want, or what you think would be good for them, but you have to let everything happen to them. You can’t interfere with people you love any more than you’re supposed to interfere with people you don’t even know. And that’s hard,” he added, “because you often feel like interfering—you want to be the one who makes the plans.”

  “It’s hard to want to protect someone else, and not be able to,” Angel pointed out.

  “You can’t protect people, kiddo,” Wally said. “All you can do is love them.”

  When he fell asleep, Wally felt the movement of the raft on the Irrawaddy. One of his friendly Burmese rescuers was offering to catheterize him. First he dipped the bamboo shoot in the brown river, then he wiped it dry on one of the strips of silk that bound up his head basket, then he spat on it. “You want to pees now?” the Burmese asked Wally.

  “No, thank you,” Wally said in his sleep. “No piss now,” he said aloud, which made Angel smile before he fell asleep, too.

  Upstairs, in the master bedroom, Homer Wells was wide awake. He’d volunteered to have Baby Rose for the night. “Because I’ll be up all night, anyway,” he said. He’d forgotten how much he enjoyed having a baby to look after. Babies reminded Homer of himself; they were always wanting something in the middle of the night. But after he’d given Baby Rose her bottle, the child went back to sleep and left Homer Wells alone again; it was nonetheless a pleasure having the little girl to look at. Her black face in the bed beside him was no bigger than his hand, and occasionally her hands would reach up and her fingers would open and close, grasping at something she saw in her sleep. The presence of another breather in the room reminded Homer Wells of the sleeping quarters in St. Cloud’s, where he had some difficulty imagining the necessary announcement.

  “Let us be happy for Doctor Larch,” Homer said softly. “Doctor Larch has found a family. Good night, Doctor Larch.” He tried to imagine which one of them would have said it. He imagined it would have been Nurse Angela, and so it was to her that he sent the letter.

  Now that Dr. Larch had died, Mrs. Goodhall’s pleasure at the thought of replacing the old, nonpracticing homosexual was less intense; it did stimulate her, however, to imagine replacing him with that young missionary who had antagonized him so. Dr. Gingrich saw some faint justice appear on the horizon at the thought of replacing Larch with someone who’d clearly driven the old man crazy, but Dr. Gingrich was not so interested in the outcome of the situation in St. Cloud’s as he was fascinated with his secretive study of Mrs. Goodhall’s mind, in which he found such a complex broth of righteous delusion and inspired hatred.

  Of course, Dr. Gingrich and the other board members were eager to meet young Dr. Stone, but Dr. Gingrich was particularly eager to observe Mrs. Goodhall at such a meeting. Mrs. Goodhall had developed a tic—whenever someone provided her with unusual pleasure or displeasure, the right side of her face suffered an involuntary muscular contraction. Dr. Gingrich imagined that, upon meeting the missionary doctor, Mrs. Goodhall would enter a phase of nearly constant spasm, and he could not wait to observe this.

  “You must stall the board,” Homer wrote to Nurse Angela. “Tell them that your efforts to reach Dr. Stone are hampered by the doctor being in transit between two of the mission’s hospitals in India. Say Assam is one, say New Delhi is the other. Say you don’t expect to be able to communicate with him for a week or more, and that—if he was willing to consider the position at St. Cloud’s—he couldn’t possibly be available before November.”

  Homer Wells hoped that this would allow him the time to tell Angel everything, and to be finished with the harvest.

  “You’ll have to convince the board that you are competent midwives, in addition to being good nurses, and that you’ll be able to recognize the patients who should be referred to a physician,” Homer wrote to Nurse Angela. “You must forgive me for needing all this time, but perhaps I will seem more believable to the board of trustees if everyone has to wait for me. It takes time to leave Asia.”

  He also requested that they send him the available history of Fuzzy Stone, and tell him anything that Larch might have omitted—although Homer could not imagine that St. Larch had left out anything. It was with the shortest possible sentence that Homer told Nurse Angela that he had loved Larch “like a father,” and that they had “nothing to fear from Melony.”

  Poor Bob, who had broken her nose and her arm, had plenty to fear from Melony, however, but Bob wasn’t smart enough to be afraid of her. When the cast would come off her arm, and when her nose looked more or less normal again, Melony and Lorna would cruise the old, familiar spots—the pizza bar in Bath, among them—and Bob would have the charmless instinct to annoy them again. Melony would disarm him with her shy smile—the one that humbly revealed her bad teeth to him—and while Bob turned his oafish attention to Lorna, Melony snipped off the top half of his ear with her wire-cutters (the electrician’s common and trusty tool). Then Melony broke several of Bob’s ribs and his nose and beat him unconscious with a chair. She had her heart in the right place, regarding St. Cloud’s, but Melony was an eye-for-an-eye and a tit-for-tat girl.

  “My hero,” Lorna called her. It was a touchy word to use around Melony, who had long thought that Homer Wells was made of hero stuff.

  Homer was a hero in Rose Rose’s eyes; she spent all of Monday in the bed in Angel’s room, with Candy bringing her baby to her from time to time, and Angel visiting with her every chance he could get.

  “You’re going to love this room,” Angel told her.

  “You plain crazy,” Rose Rose told him. “But I already love it.”

  It was a day that hurt the harvest; Mr. Rose wouldn’t pick and half the men were sore from falling off the bicycles. Homer Wells, who never would master the terrible machine, had a puffy knee and a bruise between his shoulder blades the size of a melon. Peaches refused to go up a ladder; he would load the trailers and pick drops all day. Muddy groaned and complained; he was the only one among them who had actually learned to ride. Black Pan announced that it was a good day for a fast.

  Mr. Rose, it appeared, was fasting. He sat outside the cider house in the weak sun, wrapped in a blanket from his bed; he s
at Indian-style, not talking to anyone.

  “He say he on a pickin’ strike,” Peaches whispered to Muddy, who told Homer that he thought Mr. Rose was on a hunger strike, too—“and every other kind of strike they is.”

  “We’ll just have to get along without him,” Homer told the men, but everyone pussyfooted their way past Mr. Rose, who appeared to have enthroned himself in front of the cider house.

  “Or else he planted hisself, like a tree,” Peaches said.

  Black Pan brought him a cup of coffee and some fresh corn bread, but Mr. Rose wouldn’t touch any of it. Sometimes, he appeared to be gnawing on one of the pacifiers. It was a cool day, and when the faint sun would drift behind the clouds, Mr. Rose would draw the blanket over his head; then he sat cloaked and robed and closed off completely from any of them.

  “He like an Indian,” Peaches said. “He don’t make no treaty.”

  “He want to see his daughter,” Muddy informed Homer at the end of the day. “That what he say to me—it all he say. Just see her. He say he won’t touch her.”

  “Tell him he can come to the house and see her there,” Homer Wells told Muddy.

  But at suppertime, Muddy came to the kitchen door alone. Candy asked him in, and asked him to eat with them—Rose Rose was sitting with them, at the table—but Muddy was too nervous to stay. “He say he won’t come here,” Muddy told Homer. “He say for her to come to the cider house. He say to tell you they got they own rules. He say you breakin’ the rules, Homer.”

  Rose Rose sat so still at the table that she was not even chewing; she wanted to be sure to hear everything Muddy was saying. Angel tried to take her hand, which was cold, but she pulled it away from him and kept both her hands wound up in her napkin, in her lap.

  “Muddy,” Wally said, “you tell him that Rose Rose is staying in my house, and that in my house we follow my rules. You tell him he’s welcome to come here anytime.”

  “He won’t do it,” Muddy said.

  “I have to go see him,” Rose Rose said.

  “No, you don’t,” Candy told her. “You tell him he sees her here, or nowhere, Muddy,” Candy said.

  “Yes, ma’am. I brung the bicycles back,” Muddy said to Angel. “They a little banged up.” Angel went outside to look at the bicycles, and that’s when Muddy handed him the knife.

  “You don’t need this, Angel,” Muddy told the boy, “but you give it to Rose Rose. You say I want her to have it. Just so she have one.”

  Angel looked at Muddy’s knife; it was a bone-handled jackknife, and part of the bone was chipped. It was one of those jackknives where the blade locks in place when you open it so it can’t close on your fingers. The blade was almost six inches long, which would make it prominent in anyone’s pocket, and over the years it had seen a lot of whetstone; the blade was ground down very thin and the edge was very sharp.

  “Don’t you need it, Muddy?” Angel asked him.

  “I never knew what to do with it,” Muddy confessed. “I just get in trouble with it.”

  “I’ll give it to her,” Angel said.

  “You tell her her father say he love her, and he just wanna see her,” Muddy said. “Just see,” he repeated.

  Angel considered this message; then he said, “I love Rose Rose, you know, Muddy.”

  “Sure I know,” Muddy said. “I love her, too. We all love her. Everybody love Rose Rose—that part of her problem.”

  “If Mister Rose just wants to see her,” Angel said, “how come you’re giving her your knife?”

  “Just so she have one,” Muddy repeated.

  Angel gave her the knife when they were sitting in his room after supper.

  “It’s from Muddy,” he told her.

  “I know who it from,” Rose Rose said. “I know what knife everyone got—I know what they all look like.” Although it was not a switchblade, it made Angel jump to see how quickly she opened the knife using only one hand. “Look what Muddy do,” she said, laughing. “He been sharpenin’ it to death—he wore it half away.” She closed the knife against her hip; her long fingers moved the knife around so quickly that Angel didn’t notice where she put it.

  “You know a lot about knives?” Angel asked her.

  “From my father,” she said. “He show me everythin’.”

  Angel moved and sat on the bed next to her, but Rose Rose regarded him neutrally. “I told you,” she began patiently. “You don’t wanna have no business with me—I could never tell you nothin’ about me. You don’t wanna know ’bout me, believe me.”

  “But I love you,” Angel pleaded with her.

  After she kissed him—and she allowed him to touch her breasts—she said, “Angel. Lovin’ someone don’t always make no difference.”

  Then Baby Rose woke up, and Rose Rose had to attend to her daughter. “You know what I namin’ her?” she asked Angel. “Candy,” Rose Rose said. “That who she is—she a Candy.”

  In the morning, on the downhill side of the harvest, everyone got up early, but no one got up earlier than Rose Rose. Angel, who had more or less been imagining that he was guarding the house all night, noticed that Rose Rose and her daughter had gone. Angel and Homer got in the Jeep and drove out to the cider house before breakfast—but there was nowhere they could go that morning that Rose Rose hadn’t been to ahead of them. The men were up and looking restless, and Mr. Rose was already maintaining his stoical sitting position in the grass in front of the cider house—the blanket completely covering him, except for his face.

  “You too late,” Mr. Rose said to them. “She long gone.”

  Angel ran and looked in the cider house, but there was no sign of Rose Rose or her daughter.

  “She gone with her thumb, she say,” Mr. Rose told Homer and Angel. He made the hitchhiking sign—his bare hand emerging from the blanket only for a second before it went back into hiding.

  “I didn’t hurt her,” Mr. Rose went on. “I didn’t touch her, Homer,” he said. “I just love her, was all. I just wanna see her—one more time.”

  “I’m sorry for your troubles,” Homer Wells told the man, but Angel ran off to find Muddy.

  “She say to tell you you was the nicest,” Muddy told the boy. “She say to tell your dad he a hero, and that you was the nicest.”

  “She didn’t say where she was going?”

  “She don’t know where she goin’, Angel,” Muddy told him. “She just know she gotta go.”

  “But she could have stayed with us!” Angel said. “With me,” he added.

  “I know she thought about it,” Muddy said. “You better think about it, too.”

  “I have thought about it—I think about it all the time,” Angel said angrily.

  “I don’t think you old enough to think about it, Angel,” Muddy said gently.

  “I loved her!” the boy said.

  “She know,” Muddy said. “She know who she is, too, but she also know you don’t know who you is, yet.”

  Looking for her and thinking about her would help Angel to know that. He and Candy would drive south along the coast for an hour; then they would drive north, for two. They knew that even Rose Rose would know enough about Maine not to go inland. And they knew that a young black woman with a baby in her arms would be quite exotic among the hitchhikers of Maine; she certainly would have less trouble than Melony getting a ride—and Melony always got rides.

  Mr. Rose would maintain his almost Buddhist position; he made it through lunch without moving, but in the afternoon he asked Black Pan to bring him some water, and when the men were through picking that day, he called Muddy over to him. Muddy was very frightened, but he approached Mr. Rose and stood at a distance of about six feet from him.

  “Where your knife, Muddy?” Mr. Rose asked him. “You lose it?”

  “I didn’t lose it,” Muddy told him. “But I can’t find it,” he added.

  “It around, you mean?” Mr. Rose asked him. “It around somewhere, but you don’t know where.”

  “I don’t k
now where it is,” Muddy admitted.

  “Never do you no good, anyway—do it?” Mr. Rose asked him.

  “I never could use it,” Muddy admitted. It was a cold and sunless late afternoon, but Muddy was sweating; he held his hands at his sides as if his hands were dead fish.

  “Where she get the knife, Muddy?” Mr. Rose asked.

  “What knife?” Muddy asked him.

  “It look like your knife—what I seen of it,” said Mr. Rose.

  “I gave it to her,” Muddy admitted.

  “Thank you for doin’ that, Muddy,” Mr. Rose said. “If she gone with her thumb, I glad she got a knife with her.”

  “Peaches!” Muddy screamed. “Go get Homer!” Peaches came out of the cider house and stared at Mr. Rose, who didn’t move a muscle; Mr. Rose didn’t look at Peaches at all. “Black Pan!” Muddy screamed, as Peaches went running off to get Homer Wells. Black Pan came out of the cider house and he and Muddy got down on their knees and peered at Mr. Rose together.

  “You all stay calm,” Mr. Rose advised them. “You too late,” he told them. “No one gonna catch her now. She had all day to get away,” Mr. Rose said proudly.

  “Where she get you?” Muddy asked Mr. Rose, but neither he nor Black Pan dared to poke around under the blanket. They just watched Mr. Rose’s eyes and his dry lips.

  “She good with that knife—she better with it than you ever be!” Mr. Rose said to Muddy.

  “I know she good,” Muddy said.

  “She almost the best,” said Mr. Rose. “And who taught her?” he asked them.

  “You did,” they told him.

  “That right,” said Mr. Rose. “That why she almost as good as me.” Very slowly, without exposing any of himself—keeping himself completely under the blanket, except for his face—Mr. Rose rolled over on his side and tucked his knees up to his chest. “I real tired of sittin’ up,” he told Muddy and Black Pan. “I gettin’ sleepy.”