John Irving by The Cider House Rules

Author:The Cider House Rules [Rules, The Cider House]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2011-07-29T11:05:29+00:00

When Homer Wells read the questionnaire sent him by the St. Cloud's board of trustees, he did not know exactly what made him anxious. Of course Dr. Larch and the others were getting older, but they were always 'older' to him. It did occur to him to wonder what might happen to St. Cloud's when Dr. Larch was too old, but this thought was so troubling that he tucked the questionnaire and the return envelope to the board into his copy of Practical Anatomy of the Rabbit. Besides, it was the day the migrants arrived; it was harvest time at Ocean View, and Homer Wells was busy.

He and Mrs. Worthington met the picking crew at the apple mart, and led them to their quarters in the cider house—more than half the crew had picked at Ocean View before and knew the way, and the crew boss was what Mrs. Worthington called 'an old hand.' He looked very young to Homer. It was the first year that Mrs. Worthington dealt directly with the picking crew and their boss; the hiring relationship, by mail, had been one of Senior Worthington's responsibilities, and Senior had always maintained that if you kept a good crew boss, year after year, all the hiring—and the necessary takingcharge of the crew during the harvest—would be conducted by the boss.

His name was Arthur Rose, and he looked about Wally's age—just barely older than Homer—although he must have been older; he'd been the crew boss for five or six years. One year Senior Worthington had written to the old man who'd been his crew boss for as long as Olive could remember and Arthur Rose had written back to Senior saying he was going to be the crew boss now—'the old boss,' Arthur Rose had written, 'he's dead tired of traveling.' As it turned out, the old boss was just dead, but Arthur Rose had done a good job. He brought the right number of pickers, and very few of them ever quit, or ran off, or lost more than a day or two of good work because of too much drinking. There seemed to be a firm control over the degree of fighting among them—even {387} when they were accompanied by a woman or two. And when there was an occasional child among them, the child behaved. There were always pickers who fell off ladders, but there'd been no serious injuries. There were always small accidents around the cider press—but that was fast, often late-night work, when the men were tired or drinking a little. And there was the predictable clumsiness or drinking that led to the infrequent accidents involved in the almost ritualistic use of the cider house roof.

Running a farm had given Olive Worthington a warm feeling for the daylight hours and a grave suspicion of the night; the most trouble that people got into, in Olive's opinion, was trouble that they encountered because they stayed up too late.

Olive had written Arthur Rose of Senior's death, and told hirn that the picking-crew responsibility of Ocean View had now fallen to her.

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