The Cider House Rules Read Online Free PDF

was at least warm and dry there, and there was a fold-out cot, which in the summers was used for camping trips.
    There were also lots of wet shoes—a pair of which even belonged to Homer. Some of the wet socks were almost dry, and fit him. And the assortment of wet snowsuits and hardy tramping clothes gave Homer an adequate selection. He dressed himself in warm, outdoor clothes, which were—for the most part—nearly dry. He knew that Mom and the professor thought too highly of family ever to send him back to St. Cloud’s over a mere buggery; if he wanted to go back, and he did, he’d have to leave on his own initiative.
    In fact, Mom had provided Homer with a vision of how his alleged buggery would be treated and, doubtlessly, cured. She’d made him kneel before the fold-out cot in the furnace room.
    “Say after me,” she said, and repeated the professor’s strange version of grace. “ ‘I am vile, I abhor myself,’ ” Mom said, and Homer had said it after her—knowing that every word was untrue. He’d never liked himself so much. He felt he was on the track to finding out who he was, and how he could be of use, but he knew that the path led back to St. Cloud’s.
    When Mom kissed him good night, she said, “Now, Homer, don’t mind what the professor has to say about this. Whatever he says, you just take it with a grain of salt.”
    Homer Wells didn’t wait to hear the text of the professor’s lesson regarding buggery. Homer stepped outside; even the snow didn’t stop him. In Waterville, in 193_, it was no surprise to see so much snow on the ground for Thanksgiving; and Professor Draper had very carefully instructed Homer on the merits and methods of snowshoeing.
    Homer was a good tramper. He found the town road fairly easily, and the bigger road after that. It was daylight when the first truck stopped; it was a logging truck. This seemed, to Homer, appropriate to where he was going. “I belong to Saint Cloud’s,” he told the driver. “I got lost.” In 193_ every logger knew where St. Cloud’s was; this driver knew it was in the other direction.
    “You’re going the wrong way, kid,” he advised the boy. “Turn around and look for a truck going the other way. What are you, from Saint Cloud’s?” the driver asked. Like most people, he assumed that orphans were always running away from the orphanage—not running to it.
    “I just belong there,” Homer Wells said, and the driver waved good-bye. In Dr. Larch’s opinion, this driver—in order to be so insensitive as to let a boy go off alone in the snow—simply had to be an employee of the Ramses Paper Company.
    The next driver was also driving a logging truck; it was empty, it was heading back to the forest for more logs, and St. Cloud’s was more or less on the way.
    “You an orphan?” the driver asked Homer, when he said he was going to St. Cloud’s.
    “No,” Homer said. “I just belong there—for now.”
    In 193_, it took a long time to drive anywhere in Maine, especially with snow on the roads. It was growing dark when Homer Wells returned to his home. The quality of the light was the same as the early morning when he’d seen the mothers leaving their babies behind. Homer stood at the hospital entrance for a while and watched the snow fall. Then he went and stood at the entrance to the boys’ division. Then he went back and stood outside the hospital entrance, because there was better light there.
    He was still thinking of exactly what to say to Dr. Larch when the coach from the railroad station—that unmerry sleigh—stopped at the hospital entrance and let out a single passenger. She was so pregnant that the driver at first appeared concerned she might slip and fall; then the driver appeared to realize why the woman had come here, and it must have struck him as immoral that he should actually help a woman like that through the snow. He drove off and left her making her careful way toward the entrance, and toward Homer Wells.