The Lord's Work 11 page

Grace had arrived in the early evening, just after dark; as was customary, she'd not been housed with the expectant mothers; she'd been so jittery that Dr. Larch's sedation had not affected her very much and she'd been awake through the night, listening to everything. It had been before Homer's days as an apprentice, so if Homer had seen her, he would never remember her, and when —one day—Grace Lynch would see Homer Wells, she wouldn't recognize him.

She'd had the standard D and C at a proper and safe time in her pregnancy, arid there'd been no complications —except in her dreams. There had never been any serious complications following any abortion Dr. Larch had ever performed, and no permanent damage from any of the operations—unless it was something so interior, so very much in the mind, that Dr. Larch couldn't have been responsible for it.

Still—though Nurse Edna and Nurse Angela had made her feel welcome, and Larch had been, as Grace had told Wally, gentle—Grace Lynch hated to think of St. Cloud's. It was not so much for her own experience, or because of her own trouble, but because of the atmosphere of the place in the long night she'd stayed awake. The dense air hung like a great weight, the disturbed river smelled like death, the cries of the babies were weirder than the cries of loons—and there were owls, and someone peeing, and someone walking around. There was a far-off machine (the typewriter), and a shout from another building—just one long wail (possibly, that had been Melony). \'7b204\'7d

After Wally had visited with her, Grace balked at finishing the pie oven job. She felt sick to her stomach—it was like the cramps she'd had that time—and she went out to the apple mart and asked the women there if they'd finish the oven for her; she just didn't feel well, she said. Nobody teased Grace. Big Dot Taft asked her if she'd like a ride home, and Irene Titcomb and Florence Hyde (who had nothing to do, anyway) said they'd tackle the oven 'in two shakes,' as they say in Maine. Grace Lynch went to find Olive Worthington; she told Olive she wasn't feeling well and was going home early.

Olive was her usual kind self regarding the matter; when she saw Vernon Lynch later, she gave Vernon a glare—hard enough for Vernon to feel discomforted by it. He was cleaning the nozzle for the spray gun down at Number Two when Olive cruised past him in the faded pickup. Olive's look was such that Vernon wondered for a moment if he'd been fired, if that look was all the notice he was going to get. But the thought quickly passed, the way thoughts tended to pass through Vernon Lynch. He looked at the muddy tracks left by Olive's pickup and said something typical.

'Suck my dick, you rich bitch,' Vernon Lynch said. Then he continued to clean out the spray-gun nozzle.

That night Wally sat on Ray Kendall's dock with Candy and told her what little he knew about St. Clouds. He didn't know, for example, that there was an apostrophe. He'd not bothered to apply to Harvard; his grades weren't good enough to get him into Bowdoin; the University of Maine, where he was halfheartedly majoring in botany, hadn't taught him a thing about grammar.

'I knew it was an orphanage,' Candy said. That's all I knew.'

It was clear to them both that no good excuse could be invented for their being gone overnight, so Wally arranged to borrow Senior's Cadillac; they would have to leave very early in the morning and return in the \'7b205\'7d evening of the same day. Wally told Senior it was: the best time of year to explore the coast, and maybe drive a little inland; the coast would have more tourists as the summer progressed, and inland it would get too hot for a comfortable drive.

'I know it's a workday,' Wally told Olive. 'What's one day matter, Mom? It's just to have a little adventure with Candy—just a day off.'

Olive wondered if Wally would ever amount to anything.

Ray Kendall had his own work to worry about. He knew Candy would be happy to take a drive with Wally. Wally was a good driver—if a trifle fast—and the Cadillac, Ray knew better than anyone, was a safe ear. Ray did all the work on it.

The night before their trip, Candy and Wally went to bed early, but each of them was awake through the night. Like most truly loving young couples, they found themselves worrying about what effect this experience would have on the other. Wally worried that an abortion would make Candy unhappy, or even uncomfortable with sex. Candy wondered if Wally would feel the same way about her after all this was over.

That same night Wilbur Larch and Hornet Wells weren't sleeping either. Larch sat at the typewriter in Nurse Angela's office; through the window, he saw Homer Wells walking around outside, with an oil lamp in the darkness. What is the matter now? Larch wondered, and went to see what Homer was doing.

'I couldn't sleep,' Homer told Larch.

'What is it this time?' Dr. Larch asked Homer.

'Maybe it's just an owl,' said Homer Wells. The oil lamp didn't project very far into the darkness, and the wind was strong, which was unusual for St. Cloud's. When the wind blew out the lamp, the doctor and his assistant saw that they were backlit by the light shining from the window of Nurse Angela's office. It was the only light for miles around, and it made their shadows gigan-\'7b206\'7d tic. Larch's shadow reached across the stripped, implanted plot of ground, up the barren hillside, all the way into the black woods. Homer Wells's shadow touched the dark sky. It was only then that both men noticed: Homer had grown taller than Dr. Larch.

'I'll be damned,' Larch muttered, spreading his arms, so that his shadow looked like a magician about to reveal something. Larch flapped his arms like a big bat. ''Look!' he said to Homer. I'm a sorcerer!'

Homer Wells, the sorcerer's apprentice, flapped his arms, too.

The wind was very strong and fresh. The usual density in the air above St. Cloud's had lifted; the stars shone bright and cold; the memory of cigar smoke and sawdust was missing from this new air.

'Feel that wind,' said Homer Wells; maybe the wind was keeping him up.

'It's a wind coming from the coast,' Wilbur Larch said; he sniffed, deeply, for traces of salt. It was a rare sea breeze, Larch was sure.

Wherever it's from, it's nice, Homer Wells decided.

Both men stood sniffing the wind. Each man thought: What is going to happen to me? \'7b207\'7d

5. Homer Breaks a Promise

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The stationmaster at St. Cloud's was a lonely, unattractive man—a victim of mailorder catalogues and of an especially crackpot mailorder religion. The; latter, whose publication took an almost comic book form, was delivered monthly; the last month's issue, for example, had a cover illustration of a skeleton in soldier's clothes flying on a winged zebra over a battlefield that vaguely resembled the trenches of World War I. The other mailorder catalogues were of a more standard variety, but the stationmaster was such a victim of his superstitions that his dreams frequently confused the images of his mailorder religious material with the household gadgets, nursing bras, folding chairs, and giant zucchinis he saw advertised in the catalogues.

Thus it was not unusual for him to be awakened in a night terror by a vision of coffins levitating from a picture-perfect garden—the prize-winning vegetables taking flight with the corpses. There was one catalogue devoted entirely to fishing equipment; the stationmaster's cadavers were often seen, in waders or carrying rods and nets; and then there were the undergarment catalogues, advertising bras and girdles. The flying dead in bras and girdles especially frightened the stationmaster.

The most particularly crackpot aspect of the mailorder religion was its insistence on the presence of the growing numbers of the restless, homeless, unsaved dead; in areas of the world more populated than St. \'7b208\'7d Cloud's, the stationmaster imagined that these luckless souls were crowding the sky. The arrival of Dr. Larch's 'Clara' fitted ominously into the stationmaster's pattern of night terrors and contributed to his especially stricken appearance upon the arrival of every new train— although Larch had assured the moron that there would be no new bodies arriving for at least a year or two.

To the stationmaster, the notion of Judgment Day was as tangible as the weather. He hated the first train of the morning the most. It was the milk train; and in any weather, the heavy cans were covered with a cold sweat. The empty cans, which were put on the train, produced a kind of death knell, a hollow bonging noise, as they tapped the wooden station platform or were handed up the iron stairs. The first train of the morning was the mail train, too; although the stationmaster was eager for new catalogues, he never lost his fear of the mail—of what might be coming his way: if not another cadaver, sloshing in embalming fluid, then the monthly warning from the mailorder religion that Judgment Day was at hand (always sooner than it was last expected, and always with more terrifying verve). The stationmaster lived to be shocked.

A hole in a tomato could cause him to escalate his predawn bouts of feverish prayer; dead animals (of whatever cause) made him tremble—he believed the creatures' souls clogged the air he needed to breathe or were capable of invading his body. (They were certainly capable of contributing to his sleeplessness, for the stationmaster was as veteran an insomniac as Wilbur Larch and Homer Wells and was without the benefit of ether, youth, or education.)

This time it was the wind that awakened him, he was sure; something like a bat was blown off-course and struck his house. He was convinced that a flying animal had died violently against his wall and that its rabid soul was circling around outside, seeking entry. Then the wind made a moaning sound as it funneled through the \'7b209\'7d spokes of the stationmaster's bicycle. A sudden gust knocked the bicycle off its kick-stand; it clattered on the brick path, its little thumb bell dinging feebly—as if one of the world's restless souls had failed in an attempt to steal it. The stationmaster sat up in bed and screamed.

He had been advised in the monthly mailorder religious publication that screaming was of some, if not certain, protection against homeless souls. Indeed, the stationmaster's scream was not without effect; its shrillness dislodged a pigeon from the eaves of the house, and (since no pigeon desires to fly at night) (.he bird hopped and scrabbled its way noisily across the stationmaster's roof looking for a quieter corner. The stationmaster lay on his back, staring straight up at his roof; he expected the wandering soul to descend at any moment upon him. The pigeon's coo was the; cry of another tortured sinner, the stationmaster was sure. He got up and stared out of his bedroom window, his nightlight weakly illuminating the small plot he had recently tilled for his vegetable garden. The freshly turned earth shocked him; he mistook it for a ready grave. It gave him such a turn that he quickly dressed himself and tramped outside.

Another thing he had learned from his mailorder religion was that the souls of the dead cannot invade an active body. You mustn't be caught sleeping, or even standing still; that was the main thing. And so the stationmaster boldly set out for a brisk walk through St. Cloud's. He muttered threateningly at the would-be ghosts he saw everywhere. 'Go away,' he growled—at this building, at that sound, at every unclear shadow. A dog barked in one house. The stationmaster surprised a raccoon busy with someone's garbage, but live animals didn't bother him; he hissed at the coon and appeared satisfied when the coon hissed back. He chose to stay away from the abandoned buildings where, he remembered, that fat nightmare of a girl from the orphanage \'7b210\'7d had caused so much damage. He knew that in those buildings the lost souls were both numerous and fierce.

He felt safer around the orphanage. Though he was frightened of Dr. Larch, the stationmaster became fairly aggressive in the presence of children and their imagined souls. Like most easily frightened people, the stationmaster was something of a bully when he perceived that he had the upper hand. 'Damn kids,' he muttered, passing the girls' division. He had trouble thinking of the girls' division without imagining doing terrible things with that great big ruffian-girl—the destroyer, he called her. He'd had more than one night terror regarding her; she was often the model of the many bras and girdles in his dreams. He paused only briefly by the girls' division, sniffing deeply—he thought he might catch some scent of Melony, the building wrecker—but the wind was too strong; the wind was everywhere. It is a Judgment Day wind! he thought, and walked quickly on. He was not going to stand still long enough for some terrible soul to enter him.

He was on the wrong side of the boys' division to see the lighted window in Nurse Angela's office, but he could look over the building, up the hillside, and see the light from the window illuminating the eroded, unplanted hill. He couldn't see where the light was coming from and this disquieted him; it seemed eerie how a light from nowhere was making the stripped hill glow all the way into the black edge of the woods.

The stationmaster could have wept at his own timidity, but he cursed himself instead; so much of his sleep was lost to fear, and the first train of the morning was such an early train. For most of the year, the train arrived when it was still dark. And those women who were on it, sometimes…the stationmaster shuddered. Those women in the loose clothes, always asking where the orphanage was—some of them back the same evening, their faces like ash, the color of so many of the faces in the stationmaster's night terrors. Very nearly, he \'7b211\'7d thought, the color of Clara's face, though the stationmaster didn't know her name. His one look at Clara had been so brief that it was unfair he should be doomed to see her so many times since; and each time, he saw more of her—in his dreams.

When the stationmaster heard what he thought were voices, he looked over the boys' division at the lit hillside above St. Cloud's, and that was when he saw the towering shadows of Wilbur Larch and Homer Wells— stretching, in the case of one, to the woods' dark edge and, in the case of the other, stretching into the sky. The two giant figures flapped their huge, hill-spanning arms; whipped by the wind, the stationmaster caught the word 'sorcerer!' It was then he knew that he could walk, or even run, all night—but he would not escape, not this time. The last thought that the stationmaster had was that the time for him, and for all the world, had come.

The next morning, the sea breeze still stirred St. Cloud's. Even Melony noticed it; her usual grouchiness was suspended —she had trouble waking up, although she'd passed a wakeful night. She'd had the impression that all night an animal was prowling the grounds of the girls' division, probably getting into the trash. And she'd been able to observe the two women walking up the hill from the train station in the predawn glow. The women were not speaking to each other—they probably didn't know each other; they had certainly guessed each other's circumstances. The women walked head down. They were both overdressed for the spring; Melony watched the wind press their baggy winter coats against the women's bodies. They don't look pregnant, Melony observed; she reminded herself to be on hand, at her favorite window, to watch the women heading down the hill for the evening train. With what they were giving up, Melony thought, one might expect their returning stepis to be lighter; and, after all, they were heading downhill. But every time, the women walked more heavily down the 212 hill than they had walked up it—it appeared they'd been given something to carry away with them. Their gait was quite the contrary from what one might expect in the gait of women who'd been, truly, scraped clean.

Scraped not so clean, maybe, Melony thought. Although Homer Wells had told her nothing, what trouble could exist that Melony couldn't see? Whatever there was that glimmered of wrong, that shone of mistake—of loss, of hope abandoned, of the grim choices that were possible—Melony had an eye expertly trained to see this, and more.

She'd not yet set foot outdoors but she could tell something different was in the wind. She could not see the body of the stationmaster; he had fallen in the weeds by the delivery entrance to the boys' division—which was little used; there was a separate delivery entrance for the hospital.

From his window-on-the-world, from Nurse Angela's office, Dr. Larch could not have seen the weeds where the stationmaster lay stiffening, either. And it was not the stationmaster's departed soul that troubled Larch that morning. He'd had other sleepless nights; sea breezes were rare, but he had felt them. There'd been a fight in the girls' division that had required some stitching in one girl's lip and in another girl's eyebrow, but Wilbur Larch wasn't worried about those girls. Homer Wells had done a very neat job with the lip; Larch had handled the eyebrow, which presented more of a problem with permanent scarring.

And the two women who were waiting for their abortions were very early in their respective pregnancies, and—in Nurse Edna's judgment—both seemed robust and sane. And there was an almost cheerful woman from Damariscotta—she'd just begun her contractions, which appeared perfectly normal; she'd had one previous delivery, very routine, and so Larch anticipated no difficulty with her. He was thinking he'd have Homer deliver the Damariscotta woman because it looked straightforward \'7b213\'7d and because the woman, Nurse Angela had said, had taken a particular liking to Homer; she had talked up a storm to him every second he'd been around her.

So what's wrong? thought Wilbur Larch. Or if not wrong, different?

So what if the mail was late and the dining hall said there'd been no milk delivery? Larch didn't know— and wouldn't have cared—that the train station had been more than usually disorganized in the stationmaster's absence; he didn't know that the stationmaster was missing. Wilbur Larch had noticed no disturbance among the souls crowding the sky above St. Cloud's. With the work he felt was his calling, Dr. Larch could not afford too rigorous a contemplation of the soul.

Previous to this morning, Homer Wells had not been presented with an occasion to contemplate the soul. A study of the soul had not been a part of his training. And since there were no windows in the room where Homer conducted his studies of Clara, it was not the stationmaster —or his soul—that suddenly presented itself to Homer Wells.

Dr. Larch had asked Homer to prepare a fetus for an autopsy.

A woman from Three Mile Falls had been stabbed, or she had stabbed herself; this was not unusual in Three Mile Falls but the pregnancy of the woman was nearly full-term—and the possibility of delivering a live baby from the dead woman had been unusual, even for Dr. Larch. He had attempted to rescue the child but the child—or, rather, the embryo, nearly nine months— had not escaped one of the stab wounds. Like its mother, the child (or the fetus, as Dr. Larch preferred) had bled to death. It would have been a boy—that much was clear to Homer Wells, or even to the untrained eye; whatever one called it, it was very nearly a fully developed baby. Dr. Larch had asked Homer to help him \'7b214\'7d determine (more exactly than 'bled to death') the source' of the fetus's bleeding.

Homer Wells borrowed Dr. Larch's sternum shears before he realized that a pair of heavy scissors was all he needed to open the fetus's sternum. He cut straight up the middle, noticing immediately the slashed pulmonary artery; to his surprise, the wound was less than half an inch away from a wide-open ductus—in the fetus, the ductus arteriosus is half the size of the aorta, but Homer had never looked inside a fetus before; in the born, within ten days, the ductus becomes nothing but a ! fibrous thread. This change is initiated not by any mystery but by the first breath, which closes the ductus and opens the lungs. In the fetus, the ductus is a shunt—the blood bypasses the lungs on its way to the aorta.

It should not have been a shock for Homer Wells to see the evidence that a fetus has little need for blood in its lungs; a fetus doesn't breathe. Yet Homer was shocked; the stab wound, at the base of the ductus, appeared as a second eye alongside the little opening of the ductus itself. The facts were straightforward enough: the ductus was wide open because this fetus had never taken its first breath.

What was the life of the embryo but a history of development? Homer attached a tiny, needle-nosed clamp to the severed pulmonary artery. He turned to the section in Gray's devoted to the embryo. It was another shock for him to remember that Gray's did not begin with the embryo; it ended with it. The embyro was the last thing considered.

Homer Wells had seen the products of conception in many stages of development: in rather whole form, on occasion, and in such partial form as to be barely recognizable, too. Why the old black-and-white drawings should have affected him so strongly, he could not say. In Gray's there was the profile view of the head of a human embryo, estimated at twenty-seven days old. Not quick, as Dr. Larch would be quick to point out, and not \'7b215\'7d recognizably human, either: what would be the spine was cocked, like a wrist, and where the knuckles of the fist (above the wrist) would be, there was the ill-formed face of a fish (the kind that lives below light, is never caught, could give you nightmares). The undersurf ace of the head of the embryo gaped like an eel—the eyes were at the sides of the head, as if they could protect the creature from an attack from any direction. In eight weeks, though still not quick, the fetus has a nose and a mouth; it has an expression, thought Homer Wells. And wüth this discovery—that a fetus, as early as eight weeks, has an expression —Homer Wells felt in the presence of what others call a soul.

He displayed the pulmonary artery of the baby from Three Mile Falls in a shallow, white enamel examining tray; he used two clamps to hold the chest incision open, and one more clamp to lift and expose the lacerated artery. The baby's cheeks appeared deflated; someone's invisible hands appeared to press its small face at its sides; it lay on its back, resting on its elbows—its forearms held stiffly perpendicular to its chest. The tiny fingers of its hands were slightly open—as if the baby were preparing to catch a ball.

Homer Wells did not care for the tattered appearance of the stump of the umbilical cord, which was also too long; he clipped it again, and tied it off neatly. There wa's a little caked blood on the tiny penis, and Homer cleaned this away. A spot of old blood on the bright white edge of the enamel tray came off easily with just a cotton swab dabbed with alcohol. The color of the dead baby, especially against the whiteness of the tray, was of something sallow-going-gray. Homer turned to the sink and vomited rather deftly in it. When he ran the faucet to clean the sink, the old pipes pounded and howled; he thought it was thepipes, or his dizziness, that made the room—thewhole building—tremble. He wasn't thinking about the wind from the coast—how strong it was!

He wasn't blaming Dr. Larch, either. Homer felt there \'7b216\'7d was nothing as simple as anyone's fault involved; it was not Larch's fault—Larch did what he believed in. If Wilbur Larch was a saint to Nurse Angela and to Nurse Edna, he was both a saint and a father to Homer Wells. Larch knew what he was doing—and for whom. But that quick and not-quick stuff: it didn't work for Homer Wells. You can call it a fetus, or an embryo, or the products of conception, thought Homer Wells, but whatever you call it, it's alive. And whatever you do to it, Homer thought—and whatever you call what you do—you're killing it. He looked at the severed pulmonary artery, which was so perfectly displayed in the open chest of the baby from Three Mile Falls. Let Larch call it whatever he wants, thought Homer Wells. It's his choice—if it's a fetus, to him, that's fine. It's a baby to me, thought Homer Wells. If Larch has a choice, I have a choice, too.

He picked up the spotless tray and carried it into the hall, like a proud waiter carrying a special dish to a favorite guest. Curly Day, forever snot-nosed, was cruising in the corridor between the dispensary and Nurse Angela's office. He was not allowed to be playing there, but Curly Day had a bored-every-minute look about him; he had the attention span of a rabbit. At the moment, Curly was dragging a cardboard carton through the corridor. It was the carton the new enema bags had come in; Homer recognized the carton because he had unpacked it.

'Whatcha got?' Curly Day asked Homer, who held the tray and the dead baby from Three Mile Falls at shoulder level; Curly Day came up to Homer's waist. When Homer got close to the carton, he saw that it was not empty; David Copperfield, Junior, was in the bottom of the carton— Curly Day was giving him a ride.

'Get out of here, Curly,' Homer said.

'Comer!' cried David Copperfield.

'It's Homer, you idiot,' Curly Day said.

'Comer!' David Copperfield cried.

'Get out of here, please,' Homer told them. \'7b217\'7d

'Whatcha got?' Curly asked Homer, He reached upward, for the edge of the tray, but Homer picked off his dirty little hand; he grabbed Curly at the wrist and twisted Curly's arm behind his back. Homer balanced the tray and its content expertly; Curly Day tried to struggle.

'Ow!' Curly cried. David Copperfield tried to stand up in the bottom of the carton, but he lost his balance and sat down.

Homer lifted Curly Day's arm behind his back—just slightly higher than the right-angle mark—which caused Curly to bend over and rest his forehead on the edge of the enema-bag carton. 'Cut it out,' Curly said.

'You're leaving, Curly—right?' Homer asked.

'Yeah, yeah,' Curly said, and Homer let him go.

'Tough guy,' Curly said.

'Right,' said Homer Wells.

'Comer!' David Copperfield managed to say.

Curly Day wiped his nose on his disheveled sleeve. He jerked the carton so suddenly that David Copperfield rolled on his side. 'Ack!' little Copperfield cried.

'Shut up,' Curly said to his cargo. He shuffled away from Homer Wells, to whom he gave a look of peevish sorrow, of aimless complaint—nothing more. His body bobbed from side to side as he made his way with the carton containing David Copperfield. Homer noted that Curly's shoes were on the wrong feet, and one of them was untied, but he decided it would be unworthy criticism to mention this to Curly, who was as buoyant as he was messy—and wasn't his buoyancy more important than his carelessness, especially since he was an orphan?

'Good-bye, Curly,' Homer said to the boy's slouched back; Curly's untucked shirt hung to his knees.

'See ya, Homer,' Curly said, keeping his face turned away. When he passed the dispensary door, Nurse Edna appeared and scolded him,

'You're not supposed to be playing here, Curly,' she said. \'7b218\'7d

'Yeah, yeah,' Curly said. I'm going, I'm going.'

'Medna!' David Copperfield cried in a muffled voice from the bottom of the enema-bag carton.

'Its Edna, you little scum,' Curly said.

Then Homer was at the door of Nurse Angela's office, which was open. He could see Dr. Larch at the typewriter; the doctor wasn't writing; there wasn't even any paper in the machine. Dr. Larch was just looking out the window. In the doctor's trancelike expression Homer recognized the peaceful distance that ether provided in those moments when Homer had found the doctor 'just restinG' In the dispensary. Perhaps the state of mind that ether occasionally allowed Dr. Larch to enjoy was, increasingly, a state of mind that Larch could summon by just looking out a window. Homer assumed that Dr. Larch used a little ether because he was in some kind of pain; he suspected that almost everyone in St. Cloud's was in some kind of pain, and that Larch, as a doctor, was especially qualified in remedying it. The smell of ether was so cloying and nauseating to Homer Wells that it was no remedy he would have chosen. It hadn't yet occurred to him what an addiction was. The state of a dream was so present on Wilbur Larch's face that Homer Wells paused in the doorway before continuing his gruesome presentation; he almost turned around and took the baby from Three Mile Falls away with him.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 655