At St. Cloud's, growth was unwanted even when it {306} was delivered-and the process of birth was often interrupted. Now he was engaged in the business of growing things. What he loved about the life at Ocean View was how everything was of use and that everything was wanted.

He even thought he loved Vernon Lynch, although he'd been told how Vernon beat his wife and Grace Lynch had a way of looking at Homer that did alarm him. He could not tell from her look if it was need or suspicion or simply curiosity that he saw-Grace gave out the kind of look you go on feeling after you've stopped looking back.

Vernon Lynch showed Homer how to spray. It was appropriate that Vernon Lynch was in charge of the pesticides, of extermination.

'As soon as there's leaves, there's trouble,' Vernon told him. That's in April. You start sprayin' in April and you don't stop till the end of August, when you're ready to start pickin'. You spray every week or ten days. You spray for scab and you spray for insects. We got two sprayers here, one's a Hardie and one's a Bean, and both of them hold five hundred gallons. You wear the respirator because you don't want to breathe the shit, and the respirator don't do you no good if it don't fit tight.' Saying this, Vernon Lynch tightened the respirator around Homer's head: Homer could feel his temples pound. 'If you don't keep washin' out the cloth in the mask, you could choke,' Vernon said. He cupped his hand over Homer's mouth and nose; Homer experienced airlessness. 'And keep your hair covered if you don't want to go bald.' Vernon's hand remained clamped over Homer's mouth and nose. 'And keep the goggles on if you don't want to go blind,' he added. Homer considered struggling, decided to conserve his strength, contemplated fainting, wondered if it was true or just an expression that lungs exploded. 'If you got what they call an open wound, like a cut, and the shit gets in there, you could get sterile,' said Vernon Lynch. 'That means no more {307} nasty hard-ons.' Homer tapped his shoulder and waved to Vernon, as if he were signaling something too complicated to be communicated by normal means. I can't breathe! Hello! I can't breathe! Hello out there!

When Homer's knees started to wobble, Vernon ripped the mask off his face-the head strap raking his ears upward and tangling his hair.

'Got the picture?' Vernon asked.

'Right!' Homer called out, his lungs screaming.

He even liked Herb Fowler. He'd been with Herb less than two minutes when the prophylactic sailed his way and struck him in the forehead. All Meany Hyde had said was, 'Hi, Herb, this here is Homer Wells-he's Wally's pal from Saint Cloud's.' And Herb had flipped the rubber at Homer.

'Wouldn't be so many orphans if more people put these on their joints,' Herb said.

Homer Wells had never seen a prophylactic in a commercial wrapper. The ones that Dr. Larch kepi: at the hospital, and distributed to many of the women, in handfuls, were sealed in something plain and seethrough, like wax paper; no brand names adorned them. Dr. Larch was always complaining that he didn't know where all the rubbers were going, but Homer knew that Melony had helped herself on many occasions. It had been Melony, of course, who had introduced Homer to prophylactics.

Herb Fowler's girlfriend, Louise Tobey, was doubtlessly professional in handling Herb's prophylactics. When Homer touched himself, he thought about Squeeze Louise-he imagined her dexterity with a prophylactic, her fast and nimble fingers, the way she held a paint brush and clenched her teeth, slapping the paint on thick on the apple-mart shelves, blowing a lock of her hair off her forehead with a puff of breath that was bitter with cigarettes.

Homer didn't allow himself to masturbate when Candy was on his mind. He lay not touching himself in {308} Wally's room, with Wally breathing deeply and sleeping peacefully beside him. Whenever Homer did imagine that Candy was sleeping beside him, they were never touching each other intimately-they were just holding tightly to each other in a grip of chaste affection. ('Nothing genital,' as Melony used to say.)

Candy smoked, but she was so mannered and exaggerated that she often dropped her cigarette in her lap, jumping up and furiously brushing away the sparks, always laughing.

'Oh, what a clod!' she'd cry. If so, thought Homer Wells, only when you're smoking.

Louise Tobey wolfed in a cigarette; she sucked in a cloud of smoke and blew so little back, Homer wondered where it went. The older apple-mart women were constant smokers (all except Grace Lynch, who had resolved not to part her lips-not for any reason), but Florence and Irene and Big Dot Taft had been smoking so long, they appeared off-handed about it. Only Debra Pettigrew, Dot's kid sister, smoked with Candy's infrequency and awkwardness. Squeeze Louise smoked with a quick, sure violence that Homer imagined must have been inspired by Herb Fowler's rough-and-ready use of rubbers.

In all of Heart's Rock and Heart's Haven-from the briny gurgle of lobstering life to the chlorine security of the Haven Club pool; from the bustle of the making ready in the apple mart to the work in the fields-there was nothing that caused Homer a single, sharp reminder of St. Cloud's, nothing until the first rainy day, when they sent him, with a small crew of scrubbers and painters, to the cider house.

Nothing about the building, from the outside, prepared him. On or in various farm vehicles, he had lumbered past it often-a long, thin, one-story, shed-roofed building in the shape of an arm held at a right angle; in the elbow of the building, where there was a double-door entrance, were the cider mill and the press (the grinder, {309} the pump, the pump engine and the grinder engine, and the thousand-gallon tank).

One wing of the building was studded with refrigeration units; it was a cold-storage room for the cider. In the other wing was a small kitchen, beyond which were extended two long rows of iron hospital-style beds, each with its own blanket and pillow. Mattresses were rolled neatly on each of the more than twenty beds. Sometimes a blanket on wire runners enclosed a bed, or a section of beds, in the semi-privacy that Homer Wells associated with a hospital ward. Unpainted plywood shelves between the beds formed primitive but stable wardrobe closets, which contained those twisted, gooses-necked reading lamps wherever there was the occasional electrical outlet. The furniture was shabby but neat, as if rescued or rejected from hospitals and offices where it had been exposed to relentless but considerate use.

This wing of the cider house had the functional economy of a military barracks, but it had too many personal touches to be institutional. There were curtains, for example, and Homer could tell that they would have been adequate, if faded, at the Worthingtons' diningroom windows-which was where they'd come from. Homer also recognized a particularly exaggerated peacefulness in a few of the flowery landscape paintings and animal portraits that were hung on the plasterboard walls-in such unlikely places (at times, too high; at times, too low) that Homer was sure they'd been hung to hide holes. Maybe boot holes, maybe fist holes, perhaps whole-head holes; there seemed to Homer Wells to radiate from the room a kind of dormitory anger and apprehension he recognized from his nearly twenty years in the boys' division at St. Cloud's.

'What is this place?' he asked Meany Hyde, the rain pelting on the tin roof above them.

'The cider house,' said Meany.

'But who sleeps here-who stays here? Do people live here?' Homer asked. It was remarkably clean, yet the {310} atmosphere of use was so prevalent, Homer was reminded of the old bunkrooms in St. Cloud's where the woodsmen and sawyers had dreamed out their exhausted lives.

'It's crew quarters, for the pickers,' Meany Hyde said. 'Durin' the harvest, the pickers stay here-the migrants.'