"That'll be about Mother's Day," Olive observed.
"Right," said Homer Wells; he kissed Olive, whose skin was cool and smelled like ash.
Meany Hyde and Herb Fowler helped him load the pickup.
"You gonna plant a whole forty-by-forty by yourself?" Meany asked him. "You better hope the ground unfreezes."
"You better hope your back holds out," Herb Fowler said. "You better hope your pecker don't fall off."
"How's Candy?" Big Dot Taft asked Homer. Almost as big as you are, Homer thought.
"Just fine," he said. "But busy."
"I'll bet," said Debra Pettigrew.
In the furnace room, under the lobster tank, Ray Kendall was building his own torpedo.
"What for?" Homer asked.
"Just to see if I can do it," Ray said.
"But what will you fire it at?" Homer asked. "And what will you fire it from?"
"The hard part is the gyroscope," Ray said. "It ain't hard to fire it--what's hard is guidin' it."
"I don't understand," said Homer Wells.
"Well, look at you," Ray said. "You're plantin' an apple orchard at an orphanage. You been there five months, but my daughter's too busy to visit me for a day. I don't understand everythin', either."
"We'll be back about blossom time," Homer said guiltily.
"That's a nice time of year," said Ray.
On the drive back to St. Cloud's, Homer wondered if Ray's coolness, or evasiveness, was intentional. He decided that Ray's message was clear: if you keep things from me, I won't explain myself to you.
"A torpedo!" Candy said to Homer, when he arrived with the baby trees. "What for?"
"Wait and see," said Homer Wells.
Dr. Larch helped him unload the trees.
"They're kind of scrawny, aren't they?" Larch asked.
"They won't give much fruit for eight or ten years," Homer said.
"Then I doubt I'll get to eat any of it," said Wilbur Larch.
"Well," Homer said, "even before there are apples on the trees, think how the trees will look on the hill."
"They'll look scrawny," said Wilbur Larch.
Near the top of the hill the ground was still frozen; Homer couldn't work his spade down far enough. And at the bottom, the holes he dug filled with water--the runoff from the snow that was still melting in the woods. Because he would have to wait to plant the trees, he worried about the roots mildewing, or getting savaged by mice--but mainly he was peeved that he could not control, exactly, the calendar of his life. He'd wanted to plant the trees before Candy delivered. He wanted the hillside entirely planted when the baby was born.
"What did I do to you to make you so compulsively neat?" asked Wilbur Larch.
"Surgery is neat," said Homer Wells.
It was the middle of April before Homer could dig the holes and plant the forty-by-forty orchard--which he did in three days, his back so stiff at night that he slept as restlessly and uncomfortably as Candy, tossing and turning with her. It was the first warm night of the spring; they were much too hot under the winter-weight blanket; when Candy broke water, they both, for a second, confused the puddle with their sweat.