The Cider House Rules

Homer helped her to the hospital entrance of the boys' division. Nurse Edna prepared Candy while Homer went to talk to Dr. Larch, who was waiting in Nurse Angela's office.

"I deliver this one," Larch said. "There are certain advantages to detachment. Fathers are a bother in the delivery room. If you want to be there, just mind your own business."

"Right," said Homer Wells. He was fidgeting, uncharacteristically, and Dr. Larch smiled at him.

Nurse Edna was with Candy, while Nurse Angela scrubbed for Dr. Larch. Homer had already put his mask on when he heard a commotion from the boys' sleeping room. He left the mask on when he went to investigate. One of the John Larches or the Wilbur Walshes had got up and gone outside to pee against a trash barrel--with considerable noise. This in turn had disturbed a large raccoon, busy at the trash, and the coon had startled the peeing orphan into wetting his pajamas. Homer tried to sort this out, calmly; he wanted to get back to the delivery room.

"Peeing indoors is better, at night," he observed to the room at large. "Candy's having her baby, now."

"What's she havin'?" one of the boys asked.

"Either a boy or a girl," said Homer Wells.

"What will you name it?" another one asked.

"Nurse Angela named me," Homer said.

"Me, too!" several of them said.

"If it's a girl, I'm naming her Angela," said Homer Wells.

"And if it's a boy?"

"If it's a boy, I'll name him Angel," Homer said. "That's really just Angela without the last A."

"Angel?" someone asked.

"Right," said Homer Wells and kissed them all good night.

As he was leaving, someone asked him, "And will you leave it here?"

"No," mumbled Homer Wells, having pulled his mask back up.

"What?" the orphans shouted.

"No," Homer said more clearly, pulling down the mask.

It was hot in the delivery room. The warm weather had been unexpected; because no one had put the screens on, Larch refused to open any windows.

At the knowledge that the child, one way or another, would be named after her, Nurse Angela wept so hard that Larch insisted that she change her mask. Nurse Edna was too short to reach the sweat on Larch's forehead; she missed some of it. As the baby's head emerged, a drop of Larch's sweat baptized the child squarely on its temple--literally before it was entirely born--and Homer Wells could not help thinking that this was not unlike David Copperfield being born with a caul.

When the shoulders did not follow quickly enough to please Larch, he took the chin and occupit in both hands and drew the infant downward until, in a single, easy, upward motion, he delivered the posterior shoulder first. Homer Wells, biting his lip, nodded his approval as the anterior shoulder--and the rest of the child--followed.

"It's an Angel!" Nurse Edna announced to Candy, who was still smiling an ether smile. Nurse Angela, who had soaked through another mask, had to turn away.

Only after the placenta was born did Dr. Larch say, as he sometimes did, "Perfect!" Then, as he never before had done, he kissed Candy--albeit through his mask--squarely between her wide-open, out-of-ether eyes.

The next day it snowed, and snowed--an angry April snowstorm, desperate not to relinquish the winter--and Homer looked at his newly planted apple orchard with concern; the frail, snow-covered trees reminded him of the luckless geese who'd made an ill-timed landing in the mill pond.

"Stop worrying about the trees," said Wilbur Larch. "They're on their own now."

So was Angel Wells--eight pounds, seven ounces and neither an orphan nor an abortion.

One week short of May, there was still too much snow in St. Cloud's for it to be mud season yet. Homer Wells had shaken the individual branches of each of his apple trees; and mouse tracks around one particularly vulnerable-looking Winter Banana had caused him to scatter poison oats and poison corn. Every tree had a metal sleeve around its slender trunk. Deer had already nibble

d the row of Macs planted nearest the woods. Homer put out a salt lick for the deer, deeper into the woods, in hopes that the salt would keep them there.

Candy was nursing Angel, whose crusty remnant of an umbilical had fallen off cleanly and whose circumcision had healed. Homer had circumcised his son.