The Cider House Rules Read Online Free PDF Page A

full-bellied and undelivered of their problems. Importantly, Homer knew they did not look delivered of all their problems when they left. No one he had seen looked more miserable than those women; he suspected it was no accident that they left in darkness.
    When he tried to put himself to sleep, Thanksgiving night with the Drapers in Waterville, Homer Wells saw the mothers leaving in the snow, but he also saw more than he’d actually seen. On the nights he couldn’t sleep, Homer rode in the coach to the station with the women, he boarded the train with them, he went to their homes with them; he singled out his mother and followed her. It was hard to see what she looked like and where she lived, where she’d come from, if she’d gone back there—and harder still was to imagine who his father was, and if she went back to him. Like most orphans, Homer Wells imagined that he saw his missing parents often, but he was always unrecognized by them. As a child he was embarrassed to be caught staring at adults, sometimes affectionately, other times with an instinctual hostility he would not have recognized on his own face.
    “You stop it, Homer,” Dr. Larch used to say to him at those times. “You just cut it out.”
    As an adult, Homer Wells would still get caught staring.
    But on Thanksgiving night in Waterville, he stared so hard into his real parents’ lives that he almost found them before he fell asleep, exhausted. He was abruptly awakened by one of the grandchildren, an older boy; Homer had forgotten he was going to share his bed with him because the house was crowded.
    “Move over,” the boy said. Homer moved over. “Keep your pecker in your pajamas,” the boy told Homer, who had no intention of taking it out. “You know what buggering is?” the boy asked, then.
    “No,” Homer said.
    “Yes, you do, Pecker Head,” the boy said. “That’s what you all do at Saint Cloud’s. You bugger yourselves. All the time. I’m telling you, you try to bugger me and you’ll go back there without your pecker,” the boy said. “I’ll cut off your pecker and feed it to the dog.”
    “You mean Rufus?” Homer Wells asked.
    “That’s right, Pecker Head,” the boy said. “You want to tell me again you don’t know what buggering is?”
    “I don’t know,” Homer said.
    “You want me to show you, don’t you?” the boy asked.
    “I don’t think so,” Homer said.
    “Yes you do, Pecker Head,” the boy said, and he then tried to bugger Homer Wells. Homer had never seen or heard of anyone being so abused at St. Cloud’s. Although the older boy had learned his style of buggery at a private school—a very good one—he had never been educated in the kind of crying that Homer Wells had been taught by the family from Three Mile Falls. It seemed to Homer that it was a good time for crying, loudly—if one wanted to escape the buggery—and his crying immediately awakened the one adult in the Draper household who had merely gone to sleep (as opposed to passing out). In other words, Homer woke Mom. He woke all the grandchildren, too, and since several of them were younger than Homer, and all of them had no knowledge of Homer’s capacity for howls, his crying produced sheer terror among them—and even aroused Rufus, who snapped.
    “What in Heaven’s name?” Mom asked, at Homer’s door.
    “He tried to bugger me, so I let him have it,” said the private school boy. Homer, who was struggling to get his legendary howls under control—to send them back to history—didn’t know that grandchildren are believed before orphans.
    “Here in St. Cloud’s,” wrote Dr. Larch, “it is self-defeating and cruel to give much thought to ancestors. In other parts of the world, I’m sorry to say, an orphan’s ancestors are always under suspicion.”
    Mom hit Homer as hard as any representative of the failed family from Three Mile Falls ever hit him. She then banished him to the furnace room for the remainder of the night; it