The Cider House Rules Read Free Page A

evidence that the baby had been bitten, too. They made him cry longest by frightening him; they discovered that startling babies was the best way to frighten them. They must have been very accomplished at achieving the loudest and longest in order to have made Homer Wells's crying a legend in Three Mile Falls. It was especially hard to hear anyr thing in Three Mile Falls—not to mention how hard it was to make a legend out of anything there.
    The falls themselves made such a steady roar that Three Mile Falls was the perfect town for murder; no one there could hear ashotor ascream. If you murdered someone in Three Mile Falls and threw the body in the river at the falls, the body couldn't possibly be stopped (or even slowed down, not to mention found) until it went three miles downriver to St. Cloud's. It was therefore all the more remarkable that the whole town heard the kind of crying Homer Wells made. {23}
    It took Nurse Angela and Nurse Edna about a year before Homer Wells stopped waking up with a scream or letting out a wail whenever someone crossed his field of vision, or whenever he heard a human sound, even a chair being dragged across the floor, or even a bed creak, a window shut, a door open. Every sight and sound connected with a human being who might possibly be headed in Homer's direction produced a high, stammering shout and such tearful blubbering that anyone visiting the boys' division would have thought that the orphanage was, in fairy-tale fashion, a torture shop, a prison of child molestation and abuse beyond imagining.
    'Homer, Homer,' Dr. Larch would say soothingly— while the boy burned scarlet and refilled his lungs. 'Homer, you're going to get us investigated for murder! You're going to get us shut down.'
    Poor Nurse Edna and poor Nurse Angela were probably more permanently scarred by the family from Three Mile Falls than Homer Wells was, and the good and the great St. Larch never fully recovered from the incident. He had met the family; he'd interviewed them all—and been horribly wrong about them; and he'd seen them all again on the day he went to Three Mile Falls to bring Homer Wells back to St. Cloud's.
    What Dr. Larch would always remember was the fright in all of their expresions when he'd marched into their house and taken Homer up in his arms. The fear in their faces would haunt Dr. Larch forever, the epitome of everything he could never understand about the great ambiguity in the feelings people had for children. There was the human body, which was so clearly designed to want babies—and then there was the human mind, which was so confused about the matter. Sometimes the mind didn't want the babies, but sometimes the mind was so perverse that it made other people have babies they knew they didn't want. For whom was this insisting done? Dr. Larch wondered. For whom did some minds {24} insist that babies, even clearly unwanted ones, must be brought, screaming, into the world?
    And when other minds thought they wanted babies but then couldn't (or wouldn't) take proper care of them…well, what were these minds thinking? When Dr. Larch's mind ran away with him on the subject, it was always the fear in those faces of the family from Three Mile Falls that he saw, and Homer Wells's legendary howl that he heard. The fear in that family was fixed in St. Larch's vision; no one, he believed, who had seen such fear should ever make a woman have a baby she didn't want to have. 'NO ONE!' Dr. Larch wrote in his journal. 'Not even someone from the Ramses Paper Company!'
    If you had an ounce of sanity, you would not speak against abortion to Dr. Wilbur Larch—or you would suffer every detail there was to know about the six weeks Homer Wells spent with the family from Three Mile Falls. This was Larch's only way of discussing the issue (which was not even open to debate with him). He was an obstetrician, but when he was asked—and when it was safe—he was an abortionist, too.
    By the time Homer was four he