He was quite hungry by midafternoori, but before it was dark he heard a logging truck coming nearer and nearer; he knew it was a full one because of the straining sound of the gears. It was also a piece of luck (on the order of his not knowing how to swim, and therefore not joining the Winkles in their sport) that the truck was going Homer's way.

'Saint Cloud's,' he told the baffled driver, who was impressed with the shotgun.

It was a Ramses Paper Company truck, and Dr. Larch was at first furious to see it pull up to the hospital entrance. 'Unless this is an absolute emergency,' he told the smitten Nurse Edna, 'I will not do a stitch of work on anyone from that company!' Larch was actually disappointed {54} to see Homer Wells, and alarmed to see the shotgun. Homer had the bewildered expression on his face of the many patients Larch had observed emerging from the spell of ether.

'You didn't give the Winkles much of a chance, Homer,' Dr. Larch said gravely. Then Homer explained why he'd come back so soon.

'You mean the Winkles are gone?' Dr. Larch asked.

'Swept away,' said Homer Wells. 'Whoosh!'

That was when Wilbur Larch gave up on finding Homer Wells a home. That was when Dr. Larch said that Homer could stay at St. Cloud's for as long as Homer felt he belonged there. That was when St. Larch said, 'Well, then, Homer, I expect you to be of use.'

For Homer Wells, this was easy. Of use, he felt, was all that an orphan was born to be. {55}

2. The Lord's Work

A child of Maine, Wilbur Larch was born in Portland in 186 the son of a sullen, tidy woman who was; among the staff of cooks and housekeepers for a man named Neal Dow, the mayor of Portland and the so-called father of the Maine law that introduced Prohibition to that state. Neal Dow once ran for the presidency as the candidate of the Prohibition Party, but he won barely ten thousand votes-proving that the general voter was wiser than Wilbur Larch's mother, who worshiped her employer and saw herself more as his co-worker for temperance reform than as his servant (which she was).

Interestingly, Wilbur Larch's father was a drunk- no small feat in the Portland of Mayor Dow's day. It was permitted to advertise beer in the shop windows-Scotch ale and bitter beer, which Wilbur Larch's father consumed copiously; it was necessary, he claimed, to drink these weak brews by the bucketful in order to get a buzz on. To young Wilbur, his father never looked drunk-he never staggered or fell or lay in a stupor, he never shouted or slurred his speech. Rather, he had about him the appearance of one perpetually surprised, of one given to frequent and sudden revelations that would stop him in his tracks or in midsentence, as if something had just come to him (or had just escaped him) that had preoccupied him for days.

He shook his head a lot, and all his life dispensed this misinformation: that the nineteen-thousarid-ton ship the Great Eastern, which was built in Portland, was destined {56} to sail the North Atlantic between Europe and Maine. It was the opinion of Wilbur Larch's father that the two best wharves in Portland Harbor had been built specifically for the Great Eastern, that the new and huge hotel in Portland had been built expressly to house the Great Eastern's passengers, and that someone evil or at least corrupt or just plain foolish was responsible for keeping the Great Eastern from returning to her home port in Maine.

Wilbur Larch's father had worked as a lathe operator during the building of the Great Eastern, and perhaps the complaining noise of that machinery and the constant buzz he felt from all the beer he consumed had deceived him. The Great Eastern had not been built for voyages to and from Portland; she was originally intended for the route to Australia, but the many delays in getting her to sea drove her owners to bankruptcy and she was purchased for use on the North Atlantic route for which she proved unsuitable. She was, in fact, a failure.

So Wilbur Larch's father had an addled memory of his days as a lathe operator, and he had considerable loathing for temperance reform, his wife's beliefs and his wife's employer, Mayor Neal Dow himself. In the opinion of Wilbur Larch's father, the Great Eastern didn't return to Portland because of Prohibition-that curse which had limited him to a bilious dependency on Scotch ale and bitter beer. Since Wilbur knew his father only in the man's later years, when the Great Eastern was gone and his father was a porter in the Portland station of the Grand Trunk Railway, he could only imagine why working a wood-turning machine had been the high point of his father's life.

As a boy, it never occurred to Wilbur Larch that his father's missing fingers were the result of too many Scotch ales and bitter beers while operating the lathe-'just accidents,' his father said-or that his mother's zeal for temperance reform might be the result of a lathe operator's demotion to porter. Of course, {57} Wilbur realized later, his parents were servants; their disappointment made Wilbur become what his teachers called a whale of a student.

Although he grew up in the mayor's mansion, Wilbur Larch always used the kitchen entrance and ate his meals with the great prohibitionist's hired help; his father drank his meals, down at the docks. Wilbur Larch was a good student because he preferred the company of books to overhearing his mother's talk of temperance with Mayor Dow's servants.

He went to Bowdoin College, and to Harvard Medical School-where a fascination with bacteria almost deterred him from practicing medicine, almost turned him into a laboratory animal, or at least a bacteriologist. He had a gift for the field, his professor told him, and he enjoyed the careful atmosphere of the laboratory; also, he had a burning desire to learn about bacteria. For nearly a year of medical school young Wilbur carried a bacterium that so offended and pained him that: he was driven by more than scientific curiosity to discover its cure. He had gonorrhea: a gift, indirectly, from his father. The old man, in his beer buzz, had been so proud of Wilbur that he sent him to medicine school in 188-with a present. He bought the boy a Portland whore, setting up his son with a night of supposed pleasure in one of the wharf side boardinghouses. It was a present the boy had been too embarrassed to refuse. His father's selfish nostalgia allowed him so few gestures toward his son; his mother's bitter righteousness was selfish in her own way; young Wilbur was touched that his father had offered to give him anything.

In the boardinghouse-the wood dry with salt and a sea-damp clinging to the curtains and to the bedspread -the whore reminded Wilbur of one of his mother's more attractive servant-colleagues; he shut his eyes and tried to imagine that he was embarking on a forbidden romance in a back room of the mayor's mansion. When he opened his eyes, he saw the candlelight deepening the {58} stretch marks across the whore's abdomen; he didn't know they were stretch marks, then. The whore seemed unconcerned whether Wilbur noticed the stretch marks or not; in fact, as they fell asleep with his head on her stomach, he was vaguely wondering if the woman's wrinkles would transfer to his face-marking him. A sharp, unpleasant smell awakened him and he moved quickly off the woman, without disturbing her. In a chair in the room, the one where she'd put her clothes, someone was smoking a cigar-Wilbur saw the end glow brighter with each inhalation. He assumed that a man- the whore's next customer-was politely waiting for him to leave, but when he asked if there was a fresh candle to light (he needed to locate his clothes), it was a young girl's voice that answered him.