The Cider House Rules

There were no movements wasted in what movement there was to be seen by Mr. Rose--a quality that Homer Wells had formerly associated only with Dr. Larch; surely Dr. Larch had other, quite different qualities, as did Mr. Rose.

Back at the apple mart, the harvest appeared at a momentary standstill, held up by the rain, which Big Dot Taft and the mart women watched sourly from their assembly-line positions along the conveyor tracks in the packing line.

No one seemed very excited by the cider Homer brought. It was very bland, as the first cider usually is, and too watery--composed, typically, of early Macs and Gravensteins. You don't get a good cider until October, Meany Hyde had told Homer, and Mr. Rose had confirmed this with a solemn nod. A good cider needs some of those last-picked apples--Golden Delicious and Winter Banana, and the Baldwins or Russets, too.

"Cider's got no smoke before October," said Big Dot Taft, inhaling her cigarette listlessly.

Homer Wells, listening to Big Dot Taft, felt like her voice--dulled. Wally was away, Candy was away, and the anatomy of a rabbit was, after Clara, no challenge; the migrants, whom he'd so eagerly anticipated, were just plain hard workers; life was just a job. He had grown up without notic

ing when? Was there nothing remarkable in the transition?

They had four days of good picking weather at Ocean View before Meany Hyde said there would be a night press and Mr. Rose again invited Homer to come to the cider house and "get the feel of it." Homer had a quiet dinner with Mrs. Worthington and only after he'd helped her wash the dishes did he say he thought he'd go to the cider house and see if he could help with the pressing; he knew they would have been hard at work for two or three hours.

"What a good worker you are, Homer!" Olive told him appreciatively.

Homer Wells shrugged. It was a cold, clear night, the very best weather for McIntosh apples--warm, sunny days, and cold nights. It was not so cold that Homer couldn't smell the apples as he walked to the cider house, and it was not so dark that he needed to keep on the dirt road; he could go overland. Because he was not on the road, he was able to approach the cider house unobserved.

For a while he stood outside the range of the lights blazing in the mill room and listened to the sounds of the men working the press, and talking, and laughing--and the murmur of the men who were talking and laughing on the cider house roof. Homer Wells listened for a long time, but he realized that when the men were not making an effort to be understood by a white person, he couldn't understand them at all--not even Mr. Rose, whose clear voice appeared to punctuate the other voices with calm but emphatic interjections.

They were also pressing cider at York Farm that night, but Melony wasn't interested; she wasn't trying to understand either the process or the lingo. The crew boss, Rather, had made it clear to her that the men resented her working the press, or even bottling; it cut into their extra pay. Melony was tired from the picking, anyway. She lay on her bed in the bunkroom of the cider house, reading Jane Eyre; there was a man asleep at the far end of the bunkroom, but Melony's reading light didn't disturb him--he had drunk too much beer, which was all that Rather allowed the men to drink. The beer was kept in the cold-storage room, right next to the mill, and the men were drinking and talking together while they ran the press.

The friendly woman named Sandra, who was Rather's wife, was sitting on a bed not far from Melony, trying to mend a zipper on a pair of one of the men's trousers. The man's name was Sammy and he had only one pair of trousers; every so often he'd wander in from the mill room to see how Sandra's work was progressing--an overlarge, ballooning pair of undershorts hanging almost to his knobby knees, his legs below the knees like tough little vines.

Sandra's mother, whom everyone called Ma and who cooked plain but large meals for the crew, lay in a big lump on the bed next to Sandra, more than her share of blankets piled on top of her--she was always cold, but it was the only thing she complained about.

Sammy came into the bunkroom, sipping a beer and bringing with him the apple-mash odor of the mill room; the splatter from the press dotted his bare legs.

"Legs like that, no wonder you want your pants back," Sandra said.

"What are my chances?" Sammy asked.

"One, your zipper is jammed. Two, you tore it off your pants," Sandra said.

"What you in such a hurry with your zipper for?" Ma asked, without moving from her lumped position.

"Shit," Sammy said. He went back to the press. Every once in a while the grinder caught on something--a thick stem or a congestion of seeds--and it made a noise like a circular saw gagging on a knot. When that happened, Ma would say, "There goes somebody's hand." Or, "There goes somebody's whole head. Drunk too much beer and fell in."

Over it all, Melony managed to read. She wasn't being antisocial, in her view. The two women were nice to her once they realized she was not after any of the men. The men were respectful of her work--and of the mark upon her that was made by the missing boyfriend. Although they teased her, they meant her no harm.

She had lied, successfully, to one of the men, and the lie, as she knew it would, had gotten around. The man was named Wednesday, for no reason that was ever explained to Melony--and she wasn't interested enough to ask. Wednesday had asked her too many questions about the particular Ocean View she was looking for and the boyfriend she was trying to find.

She had snagged her ladder in a loaded tree and was trying to ease it free without shaking any apples to the ground; Wednesday was helping her, when Melony said, "Pretty tight pants I'm wearing, wouldn't you say?"

Wednesday looked at her and said, "Yeah, I would."

"You can see everything in the pockets, right?" Melony asked.

Wednesday looked again and saw only the odd sickle shape of the partially opened horn-rim barrette; tight and hard against the worn denim, it dug into Melony's thigh. It was the barrette that Mary Agnes Cork had stolen from Candy, and Melony had stolen for herself. One day, she imagined, her hair might be long enough for the barrette to be of use. Until such a time, she carried it like a pocket knife in her right-thigh pocket.

"What's that?" Wednesday asked.

"That's a penis knife," Melony said.

"A what knife?" Wednesday said.

"You heard me," Melony said. "It's real small and it's real sharp--it's good for just one thing."

"What's that?" Wednesday asked.