The Lord's Work 5 page

The cluttered dispensary afforded him some privacy for his ether frolics. How Larch Hiked the heft of that quarter-pound can. Ether is a matter of experience and technique. Imbibing ether is pung;ent but light, even though ether is twice as heavy as air; inducing ether anesthesia—bringing one's patients through the panic of that suffocating odor—is different. With his more delicate patients, Larch often preceded his ether administration with five or six drops of oil of orange. For \'7b115\'7d himself, he required no aromatic preparation, no fruity disguise. He was always conscious of the bump the ether can made when he set it on the floor by the bed: he was not always conscious of the moment when his fingers lost their grip on the mask; the cone—by the force of his own exhalations—fell from his face. He was usually conscious of the limp hand that had released the cone; oddly, that hand was the first part of him to wake up, often reaching for the mask that was no longer there. He could usually hear voices outside the dispensary—if they were calling him. He was confident that he would always have time to recover.

'Doctor Larch?' Nurse Angela or Nurse Edna, or Homer Wells, would ask, which was all Larch needed to be brought back from his ether voyage.

'Right here!' Larch would answer. 'Just resting.'

It was the dispensary, after all; don't the dispensaries of surgeons always smell of ether? And for a man who worked so hard and slept so little (if he slept at all), wasn't it natural that he would need an occasional nap? It was Melony who first suggested to Homer Wells that Dr. Larch possessed certain remote habits and singular powers.

'Listen, Sunshine,' Melony told Homer, 'how come your favorite doctor doesn't look at women? He doesn't —believe me. He won't even look at me, and every male everywhere, every time, looks at me—men and boys look at me. Even you, Sunshine. You look at me.' But Homer Wells looked away.

'And what's the smell he carries around?' Melony asked.

'Ether,' said Homer Wells. 'He's a doctor. He smells like ether.'

'You're saying this is normal?' Melony asked him.

'Right,' said Homer Wells.

'Like a dairy farmer?' Melony asked slyly. 'He's supposed to smell like milk and cowshit, right?'

'Right,' said Homer Wells, cautiously. \'7b116\'7d

'Wrong, Sunshine,' Melony said. Tour favorite doctor smells like he's got ether inside him—like he's got ether instead of blood.'

Homer let this pass. The top of his dark head measured up to Melony's shoulder. They were walking on the treestripped and eroded riverbank in the part of St. Cloud's where the abandoned buildings had remained abandoned; the river there had eroded not only the bank but also the foundations of these buildings, which in several cases did not have proper foundations or even cellar holes—some of these buildings were set on posts, which were visible and rotting in the gnawing water at the river's edge.

The building Homer and Melony preferred had a porch that had not been designed to overhang the river, though it hung over the river now; through the porch's broken floorboards, Homer and Melony could watch the bruisecolored water rush by.

The building had been a kind of dormitory for the rough men who worked in the saw mills and lumberyards of the old St. Cloud's; it was not a building of sufficient style for the bosses or even the foremen—the Ramses Paper Company people had kept rooms in the whore hotel. It was a building for the sawyers, the stackers, the yardmen— the men who broke up the logjams, who drove the logs downstream, who hauled the logs and cut lumber overland; the men who worked the mills.

Usually, Homer and Melony stayed outside the building, on the porch. Inside, there were only an empty communal kitchen and the countless, sordid bunkrooms —the ruptured mattresses infested with mice. Because of the railroad, hoboes had come and gone, staking out their territory in the manner of dogs, by peeing around it, thus isolating the mattresses least overrun by the mice. Even with the window glass gone and the rooms half filling with snow in the winters, there was no ridding the inside of that building from the smell of urine.

One day, when the weak spring sun had lured a blacl \'7b117\'7dsnake, sluggish with cold, to warm itself on the floorboards of the porch, Melony said to Homer Wells, 'Watch this, Sunshine.' With surprising quickness of hand for such a big girl, she seized the napping snake behind its head. It was a milk snake—almost three feet long, and it twined around Melony's arm, but Melony held it the proper way, tightly, behind the head, not choking it. Once she had caught it, she seemed to pay no attention to it; she watched the sky as if for a sign and went on talking to Homer Wells.

'Your favorite doctor, Sunshine,' Melony said. 'He knows more about you than you know. And more about me than I know, maybe.'

Homer let this pass. He was wary of Melony, especially now that she had a snake. She could grab hold of me just as quickly, he was thinking. She could do something to me with the snake.

'You ever think about your mother?' Melony asked, still searching the sky. 'You ever wish you knew who she was, why she didn't keep you, who your father was— you know, those things?'

'Right,' said Homer Wells, who kept his eyes on the snake. It wound itself around Melony's arm; then it uncoiled itself and hung like a rope; then it thickened and thinned, all by itself. Tentatively, it explored around Melony's big hip; appearing to feel more secure, it settled around her thick waist—it could just reach.

'I was told I was left at the door,' Melony said. 'Maybe so, maybe not.'

'I was born here,' said Homer Wells.

'So you were told,' Melony said.

'Nurse Angela named me,' Homer offered in evidence.

'Nurse Angela or Nurse Edna would have named you if you'd been left,' Melony said. She still watched the sky, she remained indifferent to the snake. She's bigger than I am, she's older than I am, she knows more than I do, thought Homer Wells. And she has a snake, he reminded himself, letting Melony's last remark pass. \'7b118\'7d

'Sunshine,' Melony said absently. 'Just think about it: if you were born here in Saint Cloud's, there's got to be a record of it. Your favorite doctor knows who your mother is. He's got to have her name on file. You're written down, on paper. It's a law.'

'A law,'Homer Wells said flatly.

'It's a law that there's got to be a record of you,' Melony said. 'In writing—a record, a file. You're history, Sunshine.'

'History,' said Homer Wells. He had an image of Dr. Larch sitting at the typewriter in Nurse Angela's office; if there were records, that was where they would be.

'If you want to know who your mother is,' Melony said, 'all you got to do is look her up. You just look up your file. You could look me up while you were at it. A smart reader like you, Sunshine—it wouldn't take you much time. And any of it would make more interesting reading than Jane Eyre. My file alone is more interesting than that, I'll bet. And who knows what's in yours?'

Homer allowed himself to be distracted from the snake. He looked through a hole in the porch floorboards at some passing debris; a broken branch, perhaps, or a man's boot—maybe a man's leg—was swept by in the river. When he heard a whistling sound, like a whip, he regretted taking his eyes from the snake; he ducked; Melony was still concentrating on the sky. She was swinging the snake around and around her head, yet her attention was entirely on the sky—not on any sign that appeared, there, either, but on a red-shouldered hawk. It hung above the river in that lazy-seeming, spiral soaring of hawks when they are hunting. Melony let the snake sail out over the river, the hawk following it; even before the snake struck the water and started swimming for its life, for shore, the hawk began to dive. The snake didn't fight the current, it raced with it, trying to find the angle that would bring it safely under the eroded bank or into the tangled bracken.

'Watch this, Sunshine,' Melony said. A long ten yards \'7b119\'7d offshore the hawk seized the swimming snake and carried it, writhing and striking, aloft. 'I want to show you something else,' Melony said, already turning her attention from the sky, now that the outcome was clear.

'Right,' said Homer Wells—all eyes, all ears. At first the weight and movement of the snake appeared to make the hawk's rising a struggle, but the higher the hawk rose, the more easily it flew—as if the higher air had different properties from the air down where the snake had flourished.

'Sunshine!' Melony called impatiently. She led him inside the old building and upstairs to one of the darker bunkrooms. The room smelled as if there might be someone in it—possibly, someone alive—but it was too dark to see either the mice-invaded mattresses or a body. Melony forced open a ragged shutter hanging by one hinge and knelt on a mattress against a wall that the open shutter had brought to light. An old photograph was tacked to the wall, in line with what had once been the head of someone's bed; the tack had rusted and had bled a rusty path across the sepia tones of the photograph.

Homer had looked at other photographs, in other rooms, though he had neglected this one. The ones he remembered were baby pictures, and pictures of mothers and fathers, he presumed—the kind of family photographs that are always of interest to orphans.

'Come look at this, Sunshine,' Melony said. She was trying to pick the tack loose with her fingernail, but the tack had been stuck there for years. Homer knelt beside Melony on the rotting mattress. It took awhile for him to grasp the content of the photograph; possibly, he was distracted by his awareness that he had not been as physically close to Melony since he'd la.st been tied to her in the threelegged race.

Once Homer had understood the photograph (at least, he understood its subject, if not its reason for existing), he found it a difficult photograph to go on looking at, especially with Melony so close to him. On the other hand, he \'7b120\'7d suspected he would be accused of cowardice if he looked away. The photograph reflected the cute revisions of reality engineered in many photographic studios at the turn of the century; the picture was edged with fake clouds, with a funereal or reverential mist; the participants in the photograph appeared to be performing their curious act in a very stylish Heaven or Hell.

Homer Wells guessed it was Hell. The participants in the photograph were a leggy young woman and a short pony. The naked woman lay with her long legs spreadeagled on a rug—a wildly confused Persian or Oriental (Homer Wells didn't know the difference)—and the pony, facing the wrong way, straddled her. His head was bent, as if to drink or to graze, just above the woman's extensive patch of pubic hair; the pony's expression was slightly camera-conscious, or ashamed, or possibly just stupid. The pony's penis looked longer and thicker than Homer Wells's arm, yet the athletic-looking young woman had contorted her neck and had sufficient strength in her arms and hands to bend the pony's penis to her mouth. Her cheeks were puffed out, as if she'd held her breath too long; her eyes bulged; yet the woman's expression remained ambiguous—it was impossible to tell if she was going to burst out laughing or if she was choking to death on the pony's penis. As for the pony, his shaggy face was full of faked indifference—the placid pose of strained animal dignity.

'Lucky pony, huh, Sunshine?' Melony asked him, but Homer Wells felt passing through his limbs a shudder that coincided exactly with his sudden vision of the photographer, the evil manipulator of the woman, the pony, the clouds of Heaven or the smoke of Hell. The mists of nowhere on this earth, at least, Homer imagined. Homer saw, briefly, as fast as a tremble, the darkroom genius who had created this spectacle. What lingered with Homer longer was his vision of the man who had slept on this mattress where he now knelt with Melony in worship of the man's treasure. This was the \'7b121\'7d picture some woodsman had chosen to wake up with, the portrait of pony and woman somehow substituting itself for the man's family. This was what caused Homer the sharpest pain, to imagine the tired man in the bunkroom at St. Cloud's, drawn to this woman and this pony because he knew of no friendlier image—no baby pictures, no mother, no father, no wife, no lover, no brother, no friend.

But in spite of the pain it caused him, Homer Wells found himself unable to turn away from the photograph. With a surprisingly girlish delicacy, Melony was still picking at the rusty tack—in such a considerate way that she never blocked Homer's view of the picture.

'If I can get the damn thing off the wall,' she said, 'I'll give it to you.'

'I don't want it,' said Homer Wells, but he wasn't sure.

'Sure you do,' Melony said. 'There's nothing in it for me. I'm not interested in ponies.'

When she finally dug the tack out of the wall, she noticed that she'd broken her nail and torn her cuticle; a fine spatter of her blood newly marred the photograph —quickly drying to a color similar to the streak of rust that ran down the pony's mane, across the woman's thigh. Melony stuck the finger with the broken nail in her mouth and handed the photograph to Homer Wells. Melony allowed her finger to tug a little at her lower lip, pressing it against her lower teeth. 'You get it, don't you, Sunshine?' she asked Homer Wells. 'You see what the woman's doing to the pony, right?'

'Right,' said Homer Wells.

'How'd you like me to do to you what that woman is doing to that pony?' Melony asked him. She stuck her finger all the way into her mouth, then, and closed her lips around it, over the second knuckle joint; in this fashion she waited for his answer, but Homer Wells let the question pass. Melony took her wet finger out of her mouth, then, and touched its tip to Homer's still lips. Homer didn't move; he knew that if he looked at her \'7b122\'7d finger, his eyes would cross. 'If you'd like me to do that to you, Sunshine,' Melony said, 'all you've got to do is get me my file—get me my records.' She pressed her finger against his lips a little too hard.

'Of course, while you're looking up the file on me you can look up yourself—if you're interested,' Melony added. She took her finger away. 'Give me your finger, Sunshine,' she said, but Homer Wells, holding the photograph in both hands, decided to let this request pass. 'Come on,' Melony coaxed. 'I won't hurt you.' He gave her his left hand, keeping the photograph in his right; he actually extended his closed fist to her so that it was necessary for her to open his hand before she could slip his left index finger into her mouth. 'Look at the picture, Sunshine,' she told him; he did as he was told. She tapped his finger against her teeth while she managed to say, 'Just get me the file and you know what you'll get. Just keep the picture and think about it,' Melony said.

What Homer thought was that the anxiety of looking at the photograph with his finger in Melony's mouth, kneeling beside her on the mattress home of countless mice, would be eternal. But there was such a startling thump! on the roof of the building—like a falling body, followed by a lighter thump (as if the body had bounced) —that Melony bit down hard on his finger before he could, instinctively, retrieve it from her mouth. Still on their knees, they lurched into each other's arms; they hugged each other and held their breath. Homer Wells could feel his heart pound against Melony's breasts. 'What the hell was that?' Melony asked.

Homer Wells let the question pass. He was imagining the ghost of the woodsman whose photograph he clutched in his hand, the actual body of the sawmill laborer landing on the roof, a man with a rusty ripsaw in each hand, a man whose ears would hear, in eternity, only the whine of those lumberyard blades. In that thump! of dead weight upon the roof of the abandoned building, Homer himself heard the snarling pitch of \'7b123\'7d those long-ago saws—but what was that sharp, almost human noise he heard singing above the buzz? It was the sound of cries, Homer imagined: the paper-thin wails of the babies on the hill, those first orphans of St. Cloud's.

His hot cheek felt the flutter of the pulse in Melony's throat. The lightest, most delicate footsteps seemed to walk the roof—as if the body of the ghost, after his fall, were changing back to spirit.

'Jesus!' Melony said, shoving Homer Wells away from her so forcefully that he fell against the Avail. The noise Homer made caused the spirit on the roof to scurry, and to emit a piercing, two-syllable shriek—the easily identified whistle of the red-shouldered hawk.

'Kee-yer!' the hawk said.

The hawk's cry was apparently not recognizable to Melony, who screamed, but Homer knew instantly what was on the roof; he rushed down the stairs, across the porch to the wrecked rail. He was in time to see the hawk ascending; this time the snake appeared easier to carry —it hung straight down, as true as a plumb line. It was impossible to know if the hawk had lost control of the snake, or if the bird had dropped the snake intentionally —realizing that this was a sure, if not entirely professional, way to kill it. No matter: the long fall to the roof had clearly finished the snake, and its dead weight was easier to bear away than when it had lived and writhed in the hawk's talons and had repeatedly struck at the hawk's breast. Homer noted that the snake was slightly longer and not quite as thick as the pony's penis.

Melony, out of breath, stood on the porch beside Homer. When the hawk was out of sight, she repeated her promise to him. 'Just keep the picture and think about it,' she repeated.

Not that Homer Wells needed any instruction to 'think about it.' What a lot he had to think about!

'Adolescence,' wrote Wilbur Larch. 'Is it the first time in \'7b124\'7dlife we discover that we have something terrible to hide from those who love us?'

For the first time in his life, Homer Wells was hiding something from Dr. Larch—and from Nurse Angela and Nurse Edna. And with the photograph of the pony with its penis in the woman's mouth, Homer Wells was also hiding his first misgivings concerning St. Larch. With the photograph, he hid his first lust—not only for the woman who gagged on the pony's amazing instrument but also for the inspired promise Melony had made him. Hidden with the photograph (under his hospitalbed mattress, pinned against the bedsprings) were Homer's anxieties concerning what he might discover in the so-called files—in the imagined record of his birth at St. Cloud's. His own mother's history lay in hiding with that photograph, which Homer found he was more and more drawn to.

He took it out from under the mattress and looked at it three or four times a day; and at night, when he couldn't sleep, he looked at it in candlelight—a drowsy light in which the woman's eyes appeared to bulge less violently, a light in the flicker of which Homer imagined he could see the woman's cheeks actually move. The movement of the candlelight appeared to stir the pony's mane. One night when he was looking at the picture, he heard John Wilbur wet his bed. More often, Homer looked at the picture to the accompaniment of Fuzzy Stone's dramatic gasps—the cacophony of lungs, waterwheel and fan seemed appropriate to the woman-and-pony act that Homer Wells so fully memorized and imagined.

Something changed in Homer's insomnia; Dr. Larch detected the difference, or else it was the deception within him that made Homer Wells conscious of Dr. Larch's observations of him. When Homer would tiptoe down to Nurse Angela's office, late at night, it seemed to him that Dr. Larch was always at the typewriter—and that he would always notice Homer's careful movement in the hall. \'7b125\'7d

'Anything I can do for you, Homer?' Dr. Larch would ask.

'Just can't sleep,' Homer would reply.

'So what's new?' Dr. Larch would ask.

Did the man write all night? In the daytime, Nurse Angela's office was busy—it was; the only room for interviews and phone calls. It was full of Dr. Larch's papers, too—his correspondence with other orphanages, with adoption agencies, with prospective parents; his noteworthy (if occasionally facetious) journal, his whatnot diary, which he called A Brief History of St. Cloud's. It was no longer 'brief,' and it grew daily—every entry faithfully beginning, 'Here in St. Cloud's…' or, 'In other parts of the world…'

Dr. Larch's papers also included extensive family histories—but only of the families who adopted the orphans. Contrary to Melony's belief, no records were kept of the orphans' actual mothers and fathers. An orphan's history began with its date of birth—its sex, its length in inches, its weight in pounds, its nurse-given name (if it was a boy) or the name Mrs. Grogan or the girls' division secretary gave it (if it was a girl). This, with a record of the orphans' sicknesses and shots, was all there was. A substantially thicker file was kept on the orphans' adoptive families—knowing what he could about those families was important to Dr. Larch.

'Here in St. Cloud's,' he wrote, 'I try to consider, with each rule I make or break, that my first priority is an orphan's future. It is for his or her future, for example, that I destroy any record of the identity of his or her natural mother. The unfortunate women who give birth here have made a very difficult decision; they should not, later in their lives, be faced with making this decision again. And in almost every case the orphans should be spared any later search for the biological parents; certainly, the orphans should, in most cases, be spared the discovery of the actual parents.

'I am thinking of them, always of them—only of the \'7b126\'7dorphans! Of course they will one day, want to know; at the very least, they will be curious. But how does it help anyone to look forward to the past? How are orphans served by having their past to look ahead to? Orphans, especially, must look ahead to their futures.

'And would an orphan be served by having his or her biological parent, in later years, regret the decision to give birth here? If there were records, it would always be possible for the real parents to trace their children. I am not in the business of reuniting orphans with their biological beginnings! That is the storytelling business. I am in the business for the orphans.'

That is the passage from A Brief History of St. Cloud's that Wilbur Larch showed to Homer Wells, when he caught Homer in Nurse Angela's office going through his papers.

'I was just looking for something, and I couldn't find it,' Homer stammered to Dr. Larch.

'I know what you were looking for, Homer,' Dr. Larch told him, 'and it is not to be found,'

That is what the note said, the one Homer passed to Melony when he went to the girls' division to read Jane Eyre. Each night they had repeated a wordless habit: Melony would stick her finger in her mouth—she appeared to stick it halfway down her throat, her eyes bulging in mockery of the woman with the pony—and Homer Wells would simply shake his head, indicating that he hadn't found what he was looking for. The note that said “Not to Be Found” provoked a look of profound suspicion on Melony's restless countenance.

'Homer,' Dr. Larch had said, 'I don't remember your mother. I don't even remember you when you were born; you didn't become you until later.'

'I thought there was a law,' Homer said. He meant Melony's law—a law of records, or written history— but Wilbur Larch was the only historian and the only law at St. Cloud's. It was an orphanage law: an orphan's life began when Wilbur Larch remembered it; and if an \'7b127\'7dorphan was adopted before it became memorable (which was the hope), then its life began with whoever had adopted it. That was Larch's law. After all, he had taken the necessary responsibility to follow the common law regarding when a fetus was quick or not yet quick; the rules governing whether he delivered a baby or whether he delivered a mother were his rules, too.

'I've been thinking about you, Homer,' Dr. Larch told the boy. 'I think about you more and more, but I don't waste my time—or yours—thinking about who you were before I knew you.'

Larch showed Homer a letter he was writing—it was still in the typewriter. It was a letter to someone at The New England Home for Little Wanderers, which had been an orphanage even longer than St. Cloud's.

The letter was friendly and familiar; Larch's correspondent appeared to be an old colleague if not an old friend. There was in the tone of Larch's argument, too, the sparkle of frequent debate—as if the correspondent were someone Larch had often used as a kind of philosophical opponent.

The reasons orphans should be adopted before adolescence is that they should be loved, and have someone to love, before they embark on that necessary phase of adolescence: namely deceitfulness,' Larch argued in the letter. 'A teenager discovers that deceit is almost as seductive as sex, and much more easily accomplished. It may be especially easy to deceive loved ones—the people who love you are the least willing to acknowledge your deceit. But if you love no one, and feel that no one loves you, there's no one with the power to sting you by pointing out to you that you're lying. If an orphan is not adopted by the time he reaches this alarming period of adolescence, he may continue to deceive himself, and others forever.

'For a terrible time of life a teenager deceives himself; he believes he can trick the world. He believes he is invulnerable. An adolescent who is an orphan at this phase is in danger of never growing up.' 128

Of course, Dr. Larch knew, Homer Wells was different; he was loved—by Nurse Angela and Nurse Edna, and by Dr. Larch, in spite of himself—and Homer Wells not only knew that he was loved, he also probably knew that he loved these people. His age of deceit might be blessedly brief.

Melony was the perfect example of the adolescent orphan Larch described in his letter to The New England Home for Little Wanderers. This also occurred to Homer Wells, who had asked Melony—before he gave her the note that her history was “Not to Be Found”—what she wanted to find her mother for.

To kill her,' Melony had said without hesitation. 'Maybe I'll poison her, but if she's not as big as I am, if I'm much stronger than she is, and I probably am, then I'd like to strangle her.'

'To strangle her,' repeated Homer Wells uncontrollably.

'Why?' Melony asked him. 'What would you do if you found your mother?'

'I don't know,' he said. 'Ask her some questions, maybe.'

'Ask her some questions!' Melony said. Homer had not heard such scorn in Melony's voice since her response to Jane Eyre's 'gleams of sunshine.'

Homer knew that his simple note—“Not to Be Found” —would never satisfy her, although Homer had found Dr. Larch, as usual, to be convincing. Homer was also holding back; he was still deceiving Dr. Larch, and himself, a little. The photograph of the woman with the pony was still pinned between his mattress and his bedsprings; it had grown almost soft with handling. Frankly, Homer was full of regret. He knew he could not produce Melony's history and that without it he would be denied the pony's seemingly singular experience.

'What does he mean, “Not to Be Found?” Melony screamed at Homer; they were on the sagging porch of the building where the woman and the pony had spent so many \'7b129\'7dyears. 'What he means is, he's playing God—he gives you your history, or he takes it away! If that's not playing God, what is?'

Homer Wells let this pass. Dr. Larch, Homer knew, played God in other ways; it was still Homer's cautious opinion that Dr. Larch played God pretty well.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 751