The Lord's Work 18 page

Herb Fowler's girlfriend, Louise Tobey, was doubtlessly professional in handling Herb's prophylactics. When Homer touched himself, he thought about Squeeze Louise—he imagined her dexterity with a prophylactic, her fast and nimble fingers, the way she held a paint brush and clenched her teeth, slapping the paint on thick on the apple-mart shelves, blowing a lock of her hair off her forehead with a puff of breath that was bitter with cigarettes.

Homer didn't allow himself to masturbate when Candy was on his mind. He lay not touching himself in \'7b308\'7d Wally's room, with Wally breathing deeply and sleeping peacefully beside him. Whenever Homer did imagine that Candy was sleeping beside him, they were never touching each other intimately—they were just holding tightly to each other in a grip of chaste affection. ('Nothing genital,' as Melony used to say.)

Candy smoked, but she was so mannered and exaggerated that she often dropped her cigarette in her lap, jumping up and furiously brushing away the sparks, always laughing.

'Oh, what a clod!' she'd cry. If so, thought Homer Wells, only when you're smoking.

Louise Tobey wolfed in a cigarette; she sucked in a cloud of smoke and blew so little back, Homer wondered where it went. The older apple-mart women were constant smokers (all except Grace Lynch, who had resolved not to part her lips—not for any reason), but Florence and Irene and Big Dot Taft had been smoking so long, they appeared off-handed about it. Only Debra Pettigrew, Dot's kid sister, smoked with Candy's infrequency and awkwardness. Squeeze Louise smoked with a quick, sure violence that Homer imagined must have been inspired by Herb Fowler's rough-and-ready use of rubbers.

In all of Heart's Rock and Heart's Haven—from the briny gurgle of lobstering life to the chlorine security of the Haven Club pool; from the bustle of the making ready in the apple mart to the work in the fields—there was nothing that caused Homer a single, sharp reminder of St. Cloud's, nothing until the first rainy day, when they sent him, with a small crew of scrubbers and painters, to the cider house.

Nothing about the building, from the outside, prepared him. On or in various farm vehicles, he had lumbered past it often—a long, thin, one-story, shed-roofed building in the shape of an arm held at a right angle; in the elbow of the building, where there was a double-door entrance, were the cider mill and the press (the grinder, \'7b309\'7d the pump, the pump engine and the grinder engine, and the thousand-gallon tank).

One wing of the building was studded with refrigeration units; it was a cold-storage room for the cider. In the other wing was a small kitchen, beyond which were extended two long rows of iron hospital-style beds, each with its own blanket and pillow. Mattresses were rolled neatly on each of the more than twenty beds. Sometimes a blanket on wire runners enclosed a bed, or a section of beds, in the semi-privacy that Homer Wells associated with a hospital ward. Unpainted plywood shelves between the beds formed primitive but stable wardrobe closets, which contained those twisted, gooses-necked reading lamps wherever there was the occasional electrical outlet. The furniture was shabby but neat, as if rescued or rejected from hospitals and offices where it had been exposed to relentless but considerate use.

This wing of the cider house had the functional economy of a military barracks, but it had too many personal touches to be institutional. There were curtains, for example, and Homer could tell that they would have been adequate, if faded, at the Worthingtons' diningroom windows—which was where they'd come from. Homer also recognized a particularly exaggerated peacefulness in a few of the flowery landscape paintings and animal portraits that were hung on the plasterboard walls—in such unlikely places (at times, too high; at times, too low) that Homer was sure they'd been hung to hide holes. Maybe boot holes, maybe fist holes, perhaps whole-head holes; there seemed to Homer Wells to radiate from the room a kind of dormitory anger and apprehension he recognized from his nearly twenty years in the boys' division at St. Cloud's.

'What is this place?' he asked Meany Hyde, the rain pelting on the tin roof above them.

'The cider house,' said Meany.

'But who sleeps here—who stays here? Do people live here?' Homer asked. It was remarkably clean, yet the \'7b310\'7d atmosphere of use was so prevalent, Homer was reminded of the old bunkrooms in St. Cloud's where the woodsmen and sawyers had dreamed out their exhausted lives.

'It's crew quarters, for the pickers,' Meany Hyde said. 'Durin' the harvest, the pickers stay here—the migrants.'

'It's for the colored folks,' said Big Dot Taft, plopping down the mops and pails. 'Every year, we make it nice for them. We wash everythin' and we give everythin' a fresh coat of paint.'

'I gotta wax the press boards,' Meany Hyde said, sliding away from what he thought was the women's work —although Homer and Wally would perform it regularly most rainy days of the summer.

'Negroes?' Homer Wells asked. 'The pickers are Negroes?'

'Black as night, some of them,' said Florence Hyde. 'They're okay.'

'They're nice!' called Meany Hyde.

'Some of them are nicer than others,' said Big Dot Taft.

'Like other people I know,' Irene Titcomb said, giggling, hiding her scar.

'They're nice because Mrs. Worthington is nice to them!' Meany Hyde yelled from the spattered vicinity of the cider press.

The building smelled like vinegar—old cider that had turned. It was a strong smell, but there was nothing stifling or unclean about it.

Debra Pettigrew smiled at Homer over the bucket they were sharing; he cautiously returned her smile while wondering where Wally was working today, in the rain, and imagining Ray Kendall at work. Ray would either be out on the choppy sea in his glistening sou'wester or else working on the wiring of the International Harvester in the building called Number Two.

Grace Lynch was scrubbing the linoleum counters in the kitchen of the cider house; Homer marveled that he had not noticed her there before, that he hadn't even \'7b311\'7d known she was part of their crew. Louise Tobey, sucking a cigarette down to its nub and flicking the butt out the picking crew-quarters' door, remarked that her mop wringer was 'out of joint.'

'It's jammed, or somethin',' Squeeze Louise said crossly.

'Louise's mop wringer is out of joint,' Big Dot Taft said mockingly.

'Poor Louise—jammed your mop wringer, huh?' said Florence Hyde, who laughed, which caused Big Dot Taft to roar.

'Oh, cut it out!' Louise said. She kicked her mop wringer.

'What's going on out there?' called Meany Hyde.

'Louise has got an overworked wringer! said Big Dot Taft. Homer looked at Louise, who was cross; then he looked at Debra Pettigrew, who blushed.

'Are you overusin' your poor wringer, Louise?' Irene Titcomb asked.

'Louise, you must be stickin' too many mops in your wringer, darlin',' said Florence Hyde.

'Be nice, all of you!' cried Meany Hyde.

'Too much of one mop, that's for sure,' said Big Dot Taft. Elven Louise found that funny. When she looked at Homer Wells, he looked away; Debra Pettigrew was watching him, so he looked away from her, too.

When Herb Fowler came by, at the lunch break, he walked into the cider house and said, 'Whew! You can smell niggers in here a whole year later.'

'I think it's just vinegar,' Meany Hyde said.

'You tellin' me you can't smell niggers?' Herb Fowler asked. 'You smell 'em?' Herb asked Louise. She shrugged. 'How about you?' Herb asked Homer. 'Can't you smell 'em?'

'I can smell vinegar, old apples, old cider,' Homer said.

He saw the rubber sailing toward him in time to catch it.

'You know what niggers do with those?' Herb asked him. He flipped another rubber to Louise Tobey, who \'7b312\'7d caught it without the slightest effort—she expected prophylactics to be flying in her direction hourly. 'Show him what a nigger does with it, Louise,' Herb said. The other women were bored; they'd seen this demonstration all their lives; Debra Pettigrew looked nervously at Homer Wells and deliberately away from Louise; Louise herself seemed nervous and bored at the same time. She ripped the rubber out of its wrapper and stuck her index finger in it—her fingernail poked out the rubber, her nail's fine edge next to the nipplelike end.

'One year I told the niggers that they should just stick their joints into these rubbers if they didn't want to be catchin' diseases or havin' any new babies,' Herb said. He grabbed Louise's finger in the rubber sheath and held it out for everyone to see. 'And the next year, all the niggers told me that the rubbers didn't work. They said they stuck their fingers in there, like I showed 'em, and they still got diseases and new babies every time they turned around!'

No one laughed; no one believed it; it was an old joke to all of them, except to Homer Wells; and the idea of people having babies every time they turned around was not especially funny to Homer.

When Herb Fowler offered to drive them all to the diner on Drinkwater Road for a hot lunch, Homer said he didn't want to go; Mrs. Worthington made his lunch, and Wally's, every morning, and Homer felt obliged to eat his—he always enjoyed it. He also knew the crew was not supposed to leave the orchards for a lunch break, especially not in any of the Ocean View vehicles, and Herb Fowler was driving the green van that Olive used most often. It wasn't a hard rule, but Homer knew that if Wally had been working in the cider house Herb wouldn't have suggested it.

Homer ate his lunch, appropriately, in the cider house kitchen; when he glanced into the long room with the two rows of narrow beds, he thought how much the rolled mattresses and blankets resembled people sleeping \'7b313\'7d there—except the shapes upon the iron beds were too still to be sleepers. They are like bodies waiting to be identified, thought Homer Wells.

Even though it was raining, he went outside to look at the collection of dead cars and junked tractor-and-trailer parts that festooned the dirt driveway in front of the cider house. In the back was a churned-up area of discolored weeds where the mash, or the pornace, was flung after the press. A pig farmer from Waldoboro drove all the way just to have it, Meany Hyde had told Homer; the mash was great for pigs.

Some of the dead cars had South Carolina plates. Homer Wells had never looked at a map of the United States; he had seen a globe, but it was crude one—the states weren't marked. He knew South Carolina was; a long way south; the Negroes came from there in trucks, Meany Hyde had said, or they drove their own oars, but some of their cars were so old and beaten up that they died here; Meany wasn't sure how all the Negroes got back to South Carolina.

'They pick grapefruits down in Florida, I think,' Meany said, 'and peaches when it's peach time somewhere else, and apples here. They travel around, just pickin'things.'

Homer watched a sea gull that was watching him from the roof of the cider house; the gull was so drawn in upon itself that Homer was reminded it was raining arid went back inside.

He rolled down one of the mattresses and stretched out on it, placing both the pillow and the blanket under his head. Something invited him to smell the blanket and the pillow, but he could detect nothing more than the aura of vinegar and a scent he categorized as simply old. The blanket and pillow felt more human than they :;melled, but the deeper he pushed his face into them, the more human their smell became. He thought about the strain on Louise Tobey's face, and how her finger had stretched itself out in the rubber, and the way her nail had looked \'7b314\'7d ready to slice through. He recalled the mattress in the sawyers' lodge in St. Cloud's, where Melony had introduced him to the way he felt now. He took himself out of his work jeans and masturbated quickly, the springs of the old iron bed creaking sharply. Something in his vision seemed clearer after he had finished. When he sat up on the bed, he spotted the other body that had taken the liberty of resting in the cider house. Even with her body curled so tightly in upon itself—like the gull in the rain or like a fetus or like a woman with cramps—Homer had no trouble recognizing Grace Lynch.

Even if she hadn't been watching him, even if she'd never been turned in his direction, she surely could not have mistaken the rhythm of the old bed springs—or even, Homer thought, the detectable sharpness of the odor of the semen he cupped in his hand. He stepped quietly outdoors and held his hand out in the rain. The sea gull, still huddled on the cider house roof, took a sudden interest in him—there was a history of successful scavenging associated with this place. When Homer went back in the cider house, he saw that Grace Lynch had fixed her mattress the way it had been and was standing by the window with her face pressed into the curtain. You had to look twice to see Grace Lynch; he wouldn't have seen her standing there if he hadn't already known she was in the room.

'I been there,' Grace Lynch said softly, without looking at Homer. 'Where you come from,' she explained. 'I been there—I don't know how you managed a night's sleep.'

Her thinness was especially sharp, even knifelike in what dead, gray light the rainy day provided at that window; she drew the faded curtain around her narrow shoulders like a shawl. She wouldn't look at Homer Wells, and nothing in her brittle, shivering stance could have been interpreted as beckoning, yet Homer felt himself drawn to her—in the way we are urged, especially in gloomy weather, to seek the familiar. In St. Cloud's, \'7b315\'7d one grew accustomed to victims, and the attitude of a victim shone stronger than reflected sunlight from Grace Lynch. Homer felt such a contradictory glow shining forth from her that he was impelled to go to her and hold her limp, damp hands.

'Funny,' she whispered, still not looking at him. 'It was so awful there., I felt real safe.' She put her head on his chest and stuck her sharp knee between his legs, twisting her bony hip into him. 'Not like here,' she whispered. 'It's dangerous here.' Her thin bony hand slipped into his pants, as skittish as a lizard.

The noisy arrival of the green van containing the escapees—to a hot lunch—saved him. Like a startled cat, Grace sprang crazily away from him, When they all came through the door, she was digging the grit from a seam in the linoleum on the kitchen counter—using a wire brush that Homer hadn't noticed she'd had in her hip pocket. Like so much of Grace Lynch, it had been concealed. But the tension in the look she gave him at quitting time—when he rode back to the apple mart on Big Dot Taft's jolly lap—was enough to tell Homer Wells that whatever was 'dangerous' had not deserted Grace Lynch and that he could travel far but never so far that the victims of St. Cloud's would ever desert him.

The night after Grace Lynch attacked him, Homer had his first date with Debra Pettigrew; it was also the first time he went to the drive-in movie with Candy and Wally. They all went in Senior's Cadillac. Homer and Debra Pettigrew sat in the splotched back seat where only a couple of months ago poor Curly Day had lost control of himself; Homer was unaware that the purpose of drive-in movies was, ultimately, for losing control of oneself in the back seats of cars.

'Homer's never been to a drive-in before,' Wally announced to Debra Pettigrew when they picked her up. The Pettigrews were a large family who kept dogs—many \'7b316\'7d dogs, mostly chained; some were chained to the bumpers of the several undriven, believed-to-be-dead cars that so permanently occupied the front lawn that the grass grew through the drive shafts and the axle bearings. As Homer stepped gingerly around the snapping dogs en route to Debra's front door, the dogs lunged against the unbudging cars.

The Pettigrews were a large family in both numbers and in flesh; Debra's fetching chubbiness was but a slight reminder of the family's potential for girth. At the door, Debra's mother greeted Homer massively—she of the monstrous genes responsible for the likes of Debra's sister, Big Dot Taft.

'De-BRA!' shrieked Debra's mother. 'It's your BEAU! Hi, sweetie-pie,' she said to Homer. 'I've heard all about how nice you are, and what good manners you've got— please excuse the mess.' Debra, blushing beside her, tried to hurry Homer outside as forcefully as her mother wished to usher him in. He glimpsed several huge people —some with remarkably swollen faces, as if they'd lived half their lives underwater or had survived incredible beatings; all with wide, friendly smiles, which contradicted the untold viciousness of the dogs barking in such a frenzy at Homer's back.

'We have to go, Mom,' Debra whined, shoving Homer out the door. 'We can't be late.'

'Late for what?' someone cackled from the house, which shook with heavy laughter; coughs followed, which were followed by labored sighing before the dogs erupted in such force that Homer thought the noise of them would be sufficient to keep him and Debra from ever reaching the Cadillac.

'Shut up!' Debra yelled at the dogs. They all stopped, but only for a second.

When Wally said, 'Homer's never been to a drive-in before,' he had to shout to be heard over the dogs.

'I've never been to a movie before,' Homer admitted.

'Gosh,' said Debra Pettigrew. She smelled nice; she \'7b317\'7d was much neater and cleaner than she looked in her apple-mart clothes; Debra dressed with a certain pert orderliness for working, too. Her chubbiness was restrained, and as they drove to Cape Kenneth, her usual good nature emerged so warmly that even her shyness disappeared—she was a fun girl, as they say in Maine. She was nice-looking, relaxed, good-humored, hardworking and not very smart. Her prospects, at best, included marriage to someone pleasant and not a great deal older or smarter than herself.

In the summers, the Pettigrews occupied one of the new houses on the overcrowded, mucky shore of Drinkwater Lake; they'd managed to make the new place look lived-in—on its rapid way to ramshackle—almost instantly. The lawn had appeared to grow its dead cars overnight, and the dogs had survived the move from the Pettigrews' winter house in Kenneth Corners without losing a bit of their territorial savagery. Like all the cottages around Drinkwater Lake, the Pettigrews' had been named—as if the houses themselves were orphans, delivered incomplete and in need of further creation. The Pettigrews' house was named 'All of Us!'

'The exclamation point is what kills me,' Wally had said to Homer when they pulled up at the car-and-dog lot. 'As if they're proud of their overpopulation.' But Wally was very respectful once Debra joined them in the car.

This mannerism of what he'd seen of society struck Homer Wells quite forcefully; people, even nice people —because surely, Wally was nice—would say a host of critical things about someone to whom they would then be perfectly pleasant. At St. Cloud's, criticism was plainer—and harder, if not impossible, to conceal.

The drive-in movie in Cape Kenneth was nearly as new to Maine as the Haven Club's heated pool and was a lot less practical. Drive-in movies would never be a great idea for Maine; the night fog along the coast lent to many \'7b318\'7d a joyful film the inappropriately ghoulish atmosphere of a horror movie. In later years, people groping for rest rooms and the snack bar would fail to find their cars when they attempted to return to them.

The other problem was mosquitoes. In 194-, when Homer Wells went to his first drive-in movie, the hum of the mosquitoes in the night air of Cape Kenneth was far more audible than the sound track. Wally was relatively successful in preventing the mosquitoes from taking over the. car because he always brought with him an aerosol pump sprayer with which he frequently doused the car —and the air surrounding the cars. The pump can was loaded with the insecticide they sprayed the apples with. Thus the air in and surrounding the Cadillac was rendered poisonous and foul but fairly free of mosquitoes. The hiss and stench of the spray aroused frequent complaints from Wally's fellow moviegoers in the cars nearest the Cadillac—until they were being bitten so badly by mosquitoes that they stopped protesting; some of them politely asked if they could borrow the device for the purpose of poisoning their own cars.

There was no snack bar at the Cape Kenneth drive-in in 194-, and there were no rest rooms. The men and boys took turns urinating against a dank cement wall at the rear of the drive-in pit; atop the wall were perched several small and uncouth boys (Cape Kenneth locals, too young or too poor for cars), who used the wall to watch the movie even though they were well beyond the possibility of hearing it. Occasionally, when the movie was dissatisfying, they peed from the top of the wall onto the luckless people who were peeing against it.

Girls and women were not expected to pee at the drive-in, and consequently were better behaved than the men and boys—the women drank less, for example, although their behavior inside the cars could not be monitored.

It was wondrous—this whole experience—for Homer Wells. He was especially acute at noticing what human \'7b319\'7d beings did for pleasure—what (there could be no mistake about it) they chose to do—because he had come from a place where choice was not so evident, and examples of people performing for pleasure were not plentiful. It amazed him that people suffered drive-in movies by choice, and for pleasure; but he believed that, if he failed to see the fun in it, it was entirely his failure.

What he was most unprepared for was the movie itself. After people honked their horns and blinked their headlights and exhibited other less endearing forms of impatience — heard what was, unmistakably, the sound of someone vomiting against a fender—a gigantic image filled the sky. It is something's mouth! thought Homer Wells. The camera backed, or rather, lurched away. Something's head—a kind of horse! thought Homer Wells. It was a camel, actually, but Homer Wells had never seen a camel, or a picture of one; he thought it was a horribly deformed horse—a mutant horse! Perhaps some ghastly fetus-phase of a horse! The camera staggered back farther. Mounted by the camel's grotesque hump was a black-skinned man almost entirely concealed in white wrapping—bandages! thought Homer Wells. The ferocious black Arab nomad brandished a frightening curved sword; whacking the lumbering camel with the flat of the blade, he drove the beast into a faulty, staggering gallop across such endless sand dunes that the animal and its rider were soon only a speck on the vast horizon. Suddenly, music! Homer jumped. Words! The titles, the names of the actors were written in the sand by an invisible hand.

'What was that?' Homer asked Wally. He meant: the animal, its rider, the desert, the credits—everything!

'Some dumb Bedouin. I think,' Wally said.

A Bedouin? thought Homer Wells.

'It's a kind of horse?' he asked.

'What horse?' asked Debra Pettigrew.

'The animal,' Homer said, sensing his mistake.

Candy turned around in the front seat and looked at \'7b320\'7d Homer with heartbreaking affection. That's a camel, Homer,' she said.

'You've never seen a camel!' Wally shouted.

'Well, where would he see a camel?' Candy snapped at him.

'I was just surprised,' Wally said defensively.

'I've never seen a Negro, either,' Homer said. 'That was one, wasn't it?—on the camel.'

'A Negro Bedouin, I guess,' Wally said.

'Gosh,' said Debra Pettigrew, who looked at Homer a little fearfully, as if she suspected him of simultaneously existing on another planet, in another life-form.

Then the credits were over. The black man on the camel was gone and would never be seen again. The desert was also gone; apparently, it had served its uncertain function—it would never be seen again, either. It was a pirate movie. Great ships were blasting each other with cannons; swarthy men with uncut hair and baggy pants were doing terrible things to nicer-looking men, who were better-dressed. None of the men was black. Perhaps the camel's rider had been a kind of omen, thought Homer Wells. His exposure to storytelling, through Charles Dickens and Charlotte Bronte, had ill prepared him for characters who came from and traveled nowhere—or for stories that made no sense.

The pirates stole a chest of coins and a blond woman from the ship of pleasanter aspect before they sank the ship and sailed away in their own foul vessel, on which they coarsely attempted to make merry with drunkenness and song. They appeared to enjoy leering at the woman, and taunting her, but some mysterious and totally unseen force kept them from actually harming her—for a whole hour, during which they harmed nearly everyone else and many of themselves. The woman, however, was reserved for more teasing, yet she protested her fate bitterly, and Homer had the feeling that he was supposed to lament for her.

A man who apparently adored the complaining \'7b321\'7d woman pursued her across the ocean, through burning harbor towns and charmless inns of suggested but never visualized lewdness. As the fog rolled in, there was much of the movie that was never visualized, although Homer remained riveted to the image in the sky. He was only partially aware that Wally and Candy were uninterested in the movie; they had slumped from sight in the front seat and only occasionally did Candy's hand appear, gripping—or lolling on—the back of the seat. Twice Homer heard her say, 'No, Wally,' once with a firmness he had never heard in her voice before. W ally's frequent laughter continued at intervals, and he whispered and murmured and gurgled in his throat.

Homer was occasionally aware of Debra Pettigrew being less interested in the pirate movie than he was; when he looked at her, he was surprised to find her looking at him. Not critically but not very affectionately either. She appeared to be more and more amazed to see him, as the picture went on and on. Once she touched his hand; he thought she wanted something, and regarded her politely. She just stared at him; he looked back at the movie.

The blond woman was forever barring her door against her captors, and they were always breaking into her room despite her efforts; they seemed to break into her room for the single purpose of demonstrating to her that she couldn't bar them out. Once in the room, they taunted her in the usual fashion and then retreated—whereupon she attempted to bar their way again.

'I think I've missed something,' Homer Wells announced after more than an hour had passed. Candy sat up in the front seat and looked at him, her genuine concern quite apparent despite the wild tangle her hair was in.

'What have you missed?' Wally asked—sleepily, Homer thought.

Debra Pettigrew, prettily, leaned close to Homer and \'7b322\'7d whispered in his ear. 'I think you've missed me,' she said. 'I think you've forgotten I'm here.'

Homer had meant he'd missed something in the story; he stared at Debra in a particularly uncomprehending way. Debra kissed him, very neatly—very dryly—on his mouth. She sat back in the seat and smiled at him.

'Your turn,' she said.

Wally, at this moment, opened the front door and sprayed lethal fumes all around the Cadillac—much of the stuff drifting back through the open door. Candy and Wally, and Debra, too, coughed in a very dramatic fashion, but Homer stared at Debra Pettigrew—the idea of the drive-in movie slowly coming to him.

Date: 2015-02-03; view: 583