The Cider House Rules

Or else, she said to the foreman, he could call the police and she'd tell the police how she'd been attacked. The woman whose husband had assaulted Melony was pale and silent, but the other woman said to the foreman what she'd said earlier: "She's just a tramp. What do you want to listen to her for?"

"I can do everything you do, too," Melony said to the woman. "Especially everything you do on your back. You look like you're shit on your back," Melony said, and she flicked the flat end of the belt toward the woman, who jumped away as if the belt were a snake.

"Hey, that's Charley's belt," the foreman said.

"Right," said Melony; this echo of Homer Wells nearly brought tear

s to her eyes. "Charley lost it," she added. She went to the truck and took out her bundle--her few things, which were all wrapped in Mrs. Grogan's coat. She used the belt to cinch the coat and its contents more securely together.

"I can't fire those guys," the foreman told her. "They've worked here all their lives."

"So call the police, then," Melony said.

"She's threatening you," the fat man's wife said to the foreman.

"No shit," Melony said.

The foreman got Melony settled comfortably in the cider house.

"You can stay here, at least until the pickin' crew comes," he said. "I don't know if you want to stay here when they're here. Sometimes there's women with them, and sometimes there's kids, but if it's just men, I don't think you want to stay here. They're Negroes."

"It'll do for now, anyway," Melony said, looking around.

There were fewer beds than there were in the Worthingtons' cider house, and it was a lot less neat and clean. York Farm was a much smaller, poorer orchard than Ocean View, and there was no one there who cared very much about the style and shape of the quarters for the migrants; York Farm was without an Olive Worthington. The vinegar smell was stronger in the York Farm cider house, and behind the press were dried clots of pomace that clung to the wall like apple scab. There was no stove in the kitchen section--just a hot plate, which tended to blow the old fuses. There was one fuse box for the pump and grinder and the low-watt, overhead bulbs; the light in the refrigerator was out, but this at least made the mold less visible.

It was fine for Melony, who had contributed, lastingly, to the history of the many wrecked rooms in both the abandoned and the lived-in buildings of St. Cloud's.

"This Ocean View--the one you're lookin' for?" the foreman asked. "How come you're lookin' for it?"

"I'm looking for my boyfriend," Melony told him.

She has a boyfriend? the foreman wondered.

He went to see how the men were doing. The fat man, whose wife had accompanied him to the hospital (although she had not spoken to him, and wouldn't for more than three months), sat rather placidly through his stitches, but he grew quite excited when the foreman told him that he'd fixed Melony up in the cider house and had given her a job--at least through the harvest.

"You gave her a job!" the fat man cried. "She's a killer!"

"Then you better keep the fuck out of her way," the foreman told him. "If you get in her way I'll have to fire you--she damn near made me, already."

The fat man had a broken nose and needed a total of forty-one stitches, thirty-seven in his face and four in his tongue where he had bitten himself.

The man called Charley was better off in the stitches department. He required only four--to close the wound in his ear. But Melony had cracked two of his ribs by jumping on him; he had received a concussion from having his head stamped on; and his lower back would suffer such repeated muscle spasms that he would be kept off a ladder through the harvest.

"Holy cow," Charley said to the foreman. "I'd hate to meet the son-of-a-bitch who's her boyfriend."

"Just keep out of her way," the foreman advised him.

"Has she still got my belt?" Charley asked the foreman.

"If you ask her for your belt back, I'll have to fire you. Get yourself a new belt," the foreman said.

"You won't see me askin' her for nothin'," Charley said. "She didn't say her boyfriend was coming here, did she?" he asked the foreman, but the foreman said that if Melony was looking for her boyfriend, the boyfriend must not have given her any directions; he must have left her. "And God help him if he left her," the foreman said--over and over again.

"Well," said the woman in the apple mart who had called Melony a tramp. "If you had a woman like that, wouldn't you try to leave her?"

"In the first place," the foreman said, "I wouldn't ever have a woman like that. And in the second place, if I did have her, I'd never leave her--I wouldn't dare."

In the cider house at York Farm--somewhere inland from York Harbor, somewhere west of Ogunquit, with several hundred miles of coastline between her and Homer Wells--Melony lay listening to the mice. Sometimes they scurried, sometimes they gnawed. The first mouse bold enough to race across the foot of her mattress was swatted so hard with the buckle end of Charley's belt that it flew across four beds, all in a row, and struck the wall with a soft thud. Melony promptly retrieved it--it was quite dead, its back broken. With the aid of a pencil without a point, Melony was able to prop the dead mouse into a sitting position on her night table, an inverted apple crate, which she then moved to the foot of her bed. It was her belief that the dead mouse might function as a kind of totem, to warn other mice away, and--indeed--no mouse bothered Melony for several hours. She lay in the weak light reading Jane Eyre--the empty, dark orchard ripening all around her.