hed to feeling lucky? And if Larch (as Homer had been told) was named from a tree, God (whom Homer heard a lot about in Waterville) seemed to be named from even tougher stuff: maybe from mountain, maybe from ice. If God was sobering in Waterville, the Draper Thanksgiving was--to Homer's surprise--a drunken occasion.

The professor was, in Mom's words, "in his cups." This, Homer deduced, meant that the professor had consumed more than his normal, daily amount of alcohol--which, in Mom's words, made him only "tipsy." Homer was shocked to see the two married daughters and the married son behave as if they were in their cups, too. And since Thanksgiving was special and he was allowed to stay up late--with all the grandchildren--Homer observed that nightly occurrence he had previously only heard as he was falling asleep: the thudding, dragging, shuffling sound, and the muffled voice of reason, which was the professor slurring his protest of the fact that Mom forcibly assisted him upstairs and with astonishing strength lifted him to and deposited him upon the bed.

"Value of exercise!" shouted the grown and married son, before toppling from the green chaise and collapsing upon the rug--beside old Rufus--as if he'd been poisoned.

"Like father, like son!" said one of the married daughters. The other married daughter, Homer noted, had nothing to say. She slept peacefully in the rocking chair; her whole hand--above the second knuckle joints--was submerged in her nearly full drink, which rested precariously in her lap.

The unmanaged grandchildren violated the house's million rules. The professor's passionate readings of various riot acts were seemingly ignored for Thanksgiving.

Homer Wells, not yet ten, crept quietly to his bed. Invoking an especially sad memory of St. Cloud's was a way he frequently forced sleep upon himself. What he remembered was the time he saw the mothers leaving the orphanage hospital, which was within view of the girls' division and which adjoined the boys' division--they were architecturally linked by a long shed, formerly a storage room for spare blades to the circular saw. It was early morning, but it was still dark out and Homer needed the coach lights in order to see that it was snowing. He slept badly and was often awake for the arrival of the coach, which came from the railroad station and delivered to St. Cloud's the kitchen and cleaning staff and the first hospital shift. The coach was simply an abandoned railroad car; set on sled runners in the winter, it was a converted sleigh, pulled by horses. When there wasn't enough snow on the dirt road, the sled runners struck sparks against the stones in the ground and made a terrible grating noise (they were reluctant to change the runners for wheels until they knew the winter was over). A bright light, like a flare, sputtered by the heavily blanketed driver on the makeshift carriage seat; softer lights winked inside the coach car.

This morning, Homer noted, there were women waiting in the snow to be picked up by the coach. Homer Wells didn't recognize the women, who fidgeted the whole time it took the St. Cloud's staff to unload. There seemed to be a certain tension between these groups--the women waiting to board appeared shy, even ashamed; the men and women coming to work seemed, by comparison, arrogant, even superior, and one of them (it was a woman) made a rough remark to the women waiting to leave. Homer couldn't hear the remark, but its effect drove the waiting women away from the coach like a blast of the winter wind. The women who boarded the coach did not look back, or even at each other. They didn't even speak, and the driver, who struck Homer as a friendly man who had something to say to nearly everyone in any weather, had no words for them. The coach simply turned around and glided across the snow to the station; in the lit windows, Homer Wells could see that several of the women had their faces in their hands, or sat as stonily as the other kind of mourner at a funeral--the one who must assume an attitude of total disinterest or else risk total loss of control.

He had never before seen the mothers who had their unwanted babies at St. Cloud's and then left them there, and he didn't see them very clearly this time. It was unquestionably more meaningful that he first saw them as they were taking their leave rather than arriving, full-bellied and undelivered of their problems. Importantly, Homer knew they did not look delivered of all their problems when they left. No one he had seen looked more miserable than those women; he suspected it was no accident that they left in darkness.

When he tried to put himself to sleep, Thanksgiving night with the Drapers in Waterville, Homer Wells saw the mothers leaving in the snow, but he also saw more than he'd actually seen. On the nights he couldn't sleep, Homer rode in the coach to the station with the women, he boarded the train with them, he went to their homes with them; he singled out his mother and followed her. It was hard to see what she looked like and where she lived, where she'd come from, if she'd gone back there--and harder still was to imagine who his father was, and if she went back to him. Like most orphans, Homer Wells imagined that he saw his missing parents often, but he was always unrecognized by them. As a child he was embarrassed to be caught staring at adults, sometimes affectionately, other times with an instinctual hostility he would not have recognized on his own face.

"You stop it, Homer," Dr. Larch used to say to him at those times. "You just cut it out."

As an adult, Homer Wells would still get caught staring.

But on Thanksgiving night in Waterville, he stared so hard into his real parents' lives that he almost found them before he fell asleep, exhausted. He was abruptly awakened by one of the grandchildren, an older boy; Homer had forgotten he was going to share his bed with him because the house was crowded.

"Move over," the boy said. Homer moved over. "Keep your pecker in your pajamas," the boy told Homer, who had no intention of taking it out. "You know what buggering is?" the boy asked, then.

"No," Homer said.

"Yes, you do, Pecker Head," the boy said. "That's what you all do at Saint Cloud's. You bugger yourselves. All the time. I'm telling you, you try to bugger me and you'll go back there without your pecker," the boy said. "I'll cut off your pecker and feed it to the dog."

"You mean Rufus?" Homer Wells asked.

"That's right, Pecker Head," the boy said. "You want to tell me again you don't know what buggering is?"

"I don't know," Homer said.

"You want me to show you, don't you?" the boy asked.

"I don't think so," Homer said.

"Yes you do, Pecker Head," the boy said, and he then tried to bugger Homer Wells. Homer had never seen or heard of anyone being so abused at St. Cloud's. Although the older boy had learned his style of buggery at a private school--a very good one--he had never been educated in the kind of crying that Homer Wells had been taught by the family from Three Mile Falls. It seemed to Homer that it was a good time for crying, loudly--if one wanted to escape the buggery--and his crying immediately awakened the one adult in the Draper household who had merely gone to sleep (as opposed to passing out). In other words, Homer woke Mom. He woke all the grandchildren, too, and since several of them were younger than Homer, and all of them had no knowledge of Homer's capacity for howls, his crying produced sheer terror among them--and even aroused Rufus, who snapped.

"What in Heaven's name?" Mom asked, at Homer's door.

"He tried to bugger me, so I let him have it," said the private school boy. Homer, who was struggling to get his legendary howls under control--to send them back to history--didn't know that grandchildren are believed before orphans.

"Here in St. Cloud's," wrote Dr. Larch, "it is self-defeating and cruel to give much thought to ancestors. In other parts of the world, I'm sorry to say, an orphan's ancestors are always under suspicion."

Mom hit Homer as hard as any representative of the failed family from Three Mile Falls ever hit him. She then banished him to the furnace room for the remainder of the night; it was at least warm and dry there, and there was a fold-out cot, which in the summers was used for camping trips.

There were also lots of wet shoes--a pair of which even belonged to Homer. Some of the wet socks were almost dry, and fit him. And the assortment of wet snowsuits and hardy tramping clothes gave Homer an adequate selection. He dressed himself in warm, outdoor clothes, which were--for the most part--nearly dry. He knew that Mom and the professor thought too highly of family ever to send him back to St. Cloud's over a mere buggery; if he wanted to go back, and he did, he'd have to leave on his own initiative.

In fact, Mom had provided Homer with a vision of how his alleged buggery would be treated and, doubtlessly, cured. She'd made him kneel before the fold-out cot in the furnace room.

"Say after me," she said, and repeated the professor's strange version of grace. " 'I am vile, I abhor myself,' " Mom said, and Homer had said it after her--knowing that every word was untrue. He'd never liked himself so much. He felt he was on the track to finding out who he was, and how he could be of use, but he knew that the path led back to St. Cloud's.

When Mom kissed him good night, she said, "Now, Homer, don't mind what the professor has to say about this. Whatever he says, you just take it with a grain of salt."

Homer Wells didn't wait to hear the text of the professor's lesson regarding buggery. Homer stepped outside; even the snow didn't stop him. In Waterville, in 193_, it was no surprise to see so much snow on the ground for Thanksgiving; and Professor Draper had very carefully instructed Homer on the merits and methods of snowshoeing.

Tags: John Irving Fiction
Source: readsnovelonline.net