The Cider House Rules

The package from St. Cloud's, arriving so exactly on the day of Melony's visit, startled Homer. He almost didn't want to open it. The old man has probably sent me enema bags! Homer Wells thought. He was shocked to see the black leather doctor's bag; the leather was scuffed and soft, and the brass clasp was so tarnished that its luster was as dull as the cinch buckle of an old saddle, but everything that was worn and used about the bag's appearance only made the gold initials that much brighter.

F.S.

Homer Wells opened the bag and sniffed deeply inside it; he was anticipating the hearty and manly smell of old leather, but mixed with the leather smell were the feminine traces of ether's tangy perfume. That was when--in one whiff--Homer Wells detected something of the identity that Dr. Larch had fashioned for Fuzzy Stone.

"Doctor Stone," Homer said aloud, remembering when Larch had addressed him as if he were Fuzzy.

He didn't want to walk back to the house to put the doctor's bag away, but he didn't want to leave the bag in the office, either; when he came back to the office to turn out the light, he thought he might forget the bag. And the thing about a good doctor's bag is that it's comfortable to carry. That was why he took it with him to the cider house. The bag was empty, of course--which didn't feel quite right to Homer--so he picked some Gravensteins and a couple of early Macs on his way to the cider house and put the apples in the bag. Naturally, the apples rolled back and forth; that didn't feel quite authentic. "Doctor Stone," he mumbled once, his head nodding as he took high steps through the tall grass.

Candy had been waiting for him for a while, long enough so her nerves were shot. He thought that if it had happened the other way around--if she'd been the one to break things off--he would have been as upset as she was.

It was heartbreaking for him to see that she had made up one of the beds. The clean linen and the blankets had already been put in the cider house in anticipation of the picking crew's arrival, the mattresses rolled an

d waiting at the opposite ends of the beds. Candy had made up the bed the farthest from the kitchen doorway. She'd brought a candle from the house, and had lit it--it gave the harsh barracks a softer light, although candles were against the rules. Recently, Homer had found it necessary to emphasize candles on the list; one of the pickers had started a small fire with one some years ago.

PLEASE DON'T SMOKE IN BED--AND NO CANDLES, PLEASE!

was the way he'd written that rule.

The candlelight was faint; it couldn't be seen from the fancy house.

Candy had not undressed herself, but she was sitting on the bed--and she had brushed her hair out. Her hairbrush was on the apple crate that served as a night table, and this commonplace article of such familiarity and domesticity gave Homer Wells (with the black doctor's bag in his hand) a shiver of such magnitude that he envisioned himself as a helpless physician paying a house call to someone with not long to live.

"I'm sorry," he said softly to her. "We've tried it--we've certainly tried--but it just doesn't work. Only the truth will work." His voice was croaking at his own pomposity.

Candy sat with her knees together and her hands in her lap; she was shivering. "Do you really think Angel's old enough to know all this?" she whispered, as if the flickering room were full of sleeping apple pickers.

"He's old enough to beat off, he's old enough to know what drive-ins are for--I think he's old enough," said Homer Wells.

"Don't be coarse," Candy said.

"I'm sorry," he said again.

"There's always so much to do during harvest," Candy said; she picked at her white, summery dress as if there were lint on it (but it was spotlessly clean), and Homer Wells remembered that Senior Worthington had this habit--that in Senior's case it was a symptom of his Alzheimer's disease and that Dr. Larch had even known the name for the symptom. What did the neurologists call it? Homer tried to remember.

"We'll wait and tell them after the harvest, then," Homer said. "We've waited fifteen years. I guess we can wait another six weeks."

She stretched out on her back on the thin bed, as if she were a little girl waiting to be tucked in and kissed good night in a foreign country. He went to the bed and sat uncomfortably on the edge of it, at her waist, and she put her hand on his knee. He covered her hand with his hand.

"Oh, Homer," she said, but he wouldn't turn to look at her. She took his hand and pulled it under her dress and made him touch her; she wasn't wearing anything under the dress. He didn't pull his hand away, but he wouldn't allow his hand to be more than a deadweight presence against her. "What do you imagine will happen?" she asked him coolly--after she realized that his hand was dead.

"I can't imagine anything," he said.

"Wally will throw me out," Candy said, blandly and without self-pity.

"He won't," Homer said. "And if he did, I wouldn't--then you'd be with me. That's why he won't."

"What will Angel do?" Candy asked.

"What he wants," Homer said. "I imagine he'll be with you when he wants, and with me when he wants." This part was hard to say--and harder to imagine.

"He'll hate me," Candy said.

"He won't," said Homer Wells.

She pushed his hand away from her and he returned the dead thing to his own lap; in another moment, her hand found his knee again, and he held her hand lightly there--at the wrist, almost as if he were taking her pulse. At his feet, the shabby doctor's bag, heavy with apples, crouched like a cat drawn in upon itself and waiting; in the flickering room, the doctor's bag looked like the only natural object--that bag would look at home wherever anyone took it; it was a bag that belonged wherever it was.

"Where will you go?" Candy asked him after a while.