'And one night one of them got so drunk and sweaty, running the press, that he passed out in the cold! storage and woke up with pneumonia,' Debra Pettigrew said.

'You don't exactly “wake up with” pneumonia,' said Homer Weils. 'It's more complicated than that.'

'Excuse me,' Debra said sulkily.

'Anyway, nobody pays no attention to them rules,' Big Dot Taft said. 'Every year Olive writes them up, and every year nobody pays no attention.'

'All the pickin' crews we've ever had are just children,' said Florence Hyde. 'If Olive didn't go shoppin' for them everyday, they'd starve.'

They never get themselves organized,' Irene Titcomb said.

'One of them got his whole arm caught in the grinder,' Big Dot Taft recalled. 'Not just his fool hand-his whole arm.'

'Yuck,' said Debra Pettigrew.

'Yuck is what his arm was, all right,' said Florence Hyde.

'How many stitches?' asked Homer Wells.

'You're really curious, you know that?' Debra Pettigrew asked him.

'Well, they don't do no harm, except to themselves,' {354} said Irene Titcomb philosophically. 'What's it matter if they want to drink too much and roll off the roof? Wasn't nobody ever killed here, was there?'

'Not yet,' said Grace Lynch's tight, thin voice, her words strangely amplified because she was speaking from the bottom of the thousand-gallon vat. The combination of the strangeness of her voice and the rareness of her making a contribution of any kind to their conversation made them all silent.

Everyone was just working away when Wally drove up in the green van with Louise Tobey; he dropped Louise off with her own bucket and brush and asked the rest of them if they needed anything-more brushes? more paint?

'Just give me a kiss, honey,' said Florence Hyde.

'Just take us to the movies,' said Big Dot Taft.

'Just propose to me, just propose!' cried Irene Titcomb. Everyone was laughing when Wally left. It was almost lunchtime, and everyone knew that Squeeze Louise had come to work particularly late. She usually arrived with Herb Fowler, more or less on time. Louise looked especially pouty this morning, and no one spoke to her for a while.

'Well, you can be havin' your period, or somethin', and still say good mornin',' said Big Dot Taft after a while.

'Good mornin',' said Louise Tobey.

'La-de-da!' said Irene Titcomb. Debra Pettigrew bumped Homer in the side; when he looked at her, she winked. Nothing else happened until Herb Fowler drove by and offered to take everyone to the Drinkwater Road diner for lunch.

Homer looked at the vat, but Grace Lynch made no appearance over its rim; she just continued her scratching and hissing noises in the vat's bottom. She wouldn't have accepted the invitation, anyway. Homer was thinking he probably should accept it, to get away from Grace Lynch, but he had promised himself to investigate the {355} roof of the cider house-he wanted to find the spot that had glinted to him so mysteriously in the moonlight; and now that he'd heard about the cider house rules and that you could see the ocean-and the Cape Kenneth Ferris wheel!-from the roof, he wanted to climb up there. Even in the rain.

He went outside with all the others, thinking that Grace Lynch might assume he'd gone with them, and then he told Herb Fowler out in the driveway that he was going to stay. He felt a finger hook him in his blue jeans pocket, one of the front ones, and when Herb and the others had gone, he looked in his pocket and discovered the rubber. The prophylactic's presence in his pocket urged him up on the cider house roof in a hurry.

His appearance there surprised the gulls, whose sudden and raucous flight surprised him; he had not noticed them huddled on the slope of the roof that faced away from him-and away from the wind. The roof was slippery in the rain; he had to grip the corrugated grooves with both hands and place his feet very close to each other as he climbed. The pitch of the roof was not too steep, or he wouldn't have been able to climb it at all. To his surprise, he found a number of planks-old two-byfours -nailed to the seaward side of the roof's apex. Benches! he thought. Even at an angle, they were; at least more comfortable to sit on than the tin. He sat there in the rain and tried to imagine the pleasure of the view, but the weather was much too stormy for him to be able to see the farthest orchards; the ocean was completely obscured, and he had to imagine where, on a clear night, the Ferris wheel and the carnival lights in Cape Kenneth would be.

He was getting soaked and was about to climb down when he saw the knife. It was a big switchblade, the blade end stuck into the two-by-four at the top of the roof alongside him; the handle, which was fake horn, was cracked in two places, and when Homer Wells tried to extract the blade from the wood, the handle broke in two {356} in his hands. That was why it had been left there, apparently. With the handle broken, the knife wouldn't close properly; it wasn't safe to carry that way-and, besides, the blade was rusted. The whole roof was rusted, Homer noticed; there was no single spot shiny enough to have reflected the moonlight back to Wally's window. Then he noticed the broken glass; some larger pieces were caught in the corrugated grooves in the tin. It must have been one of those pieces of glass that caught the moon, Homer thought.

Beer bottle glass and rum bottle glass, whiskey bottle glass and gin bottle glass, he supposed. He tried to imagine the black men drinking at night on the roof; but the rain had soaked him through, and the wind now thoroughly chilled him. Inching his way back down the roof -to the edge where the ground was the safest jump-he cut his hand, just a small cut, on a piece of glass he didn't see. By the time he went back inside the cider house, the cut was bleeding freely-quite a lot of blood for such a small cut, he thought, and he wondered if perhaps there was a tiny piece of glass still inside the cut. Grace Lynch must have heard him rinsing the wound in the kitchen sink (if she hadn't heard him on the roof). To Homer's surprise, Grace was still in the thousand-gallon vat.

'Help me,' she called to him. 'I can't get out.'

It was a lie; she was just trying to draw him to the edge of the tank. But orphans have a gullible nature; orphanage life is plain; by comparison, every lie is sophisticated. Homer Wells, although he approached the rim of the cider vat with trepidation, approached steadily. The quickness of her thin hands, and the wiry strength with which they gripped his wrists, surprised him; he nearly lost his balance-he was almost pulled into the tank, on top of her. Grace Lynch had taken all her clothes off, but the extreme definition of her bones struck Homer more powerfully than anything forbidden in her nakedness. She looked like a starved animal contained in a more or {357} less humane trap; humane, except that it was evident, from her bruises, that her captor beat her regularly and hard. The bruises on her hips and thighs were the largest; the thumbprint bruises on the backs of her arms were the deepest purple hue and there was a yellow-to-green bruise on one of her small breasts that looked especially angry.

'Let me go,' said Homer Wells.

'I know what they do where you come from!' Grace Lynch cried, tugging on his wrists.

'Right,' said Homer Wells. Systematically, he began to peel back her fingers, but she scrambled nimbly up the side of the vat and bit him sharply on the back of his hand. He had to push her, then, and he might have hurt her if they both hadn't heard the splashy arrival of Wally in the green van. Grace Lynch let Homer go and scurried to put on her clothes. Wally sat in the van in the drenching rain and pumped the horn; Homer ran outside to see what he wanted.

'Get in!' Wally shouted. 'We've got to go rescue: my stupid father-he's in some kind of trouble at Sanborn's.'