All this contributed to the special atmosphere that surrounded Senior's death at the end of the summer, shortly before the harvest; a sense of relief was far more prevalent than was a sense of grief. That Senior Worthington was on his way to death had been certain for some time; that, in the nick of time, he had managed to die with some honor-'…of a bona fide disease)' Bert Sanborn said-was a welcome surprise.

Of course, the residents of Heart's Rock and Heart's Haven had some difficulty with the term-Alzheimer was not a name familiar to the coast of Maine in 194-. The workers at Ocean View had particular trouble with it; Ray Kendall, one day, made it easier for everyone to understand. 'Senior got Al's Hammer disease,' he announced. Al's Hammer! Now there was a disease anyone could understand.

'I just hope it ain't catchin',' said Big Dot Taft.

'Maybe you got to be rich to get it?' wondered Meany Hyde.

'No, it's neurological,' Homer Wells insisted, but that didn't mean anything to anyone except Homer.

And so the men and women at Ocean View developed a new saying as they got ready for the harvest that year. 'You better watch out,' Herb Fowler would say, 'or you'll get Al's Hammer.'

And when Louise Tobey would show up late, Florence Hyde (or Irene Titcomb, or Big Dot Taft) would ask her, 'What's the matter, you got your period or Al's Hammer?' {363} And when Grace Lynch would show up with a limp, or with a noticeable bruise, everyone would think but never say out loud, 'She caught old Al's Hammer last night, for sure.'

'It seems to me,' Wally said to Homer Wells, 'that you ought to be a doctor-you obviously have an instinct for it.'

'Doctor Larch is the doctor,' said Homer Wells. 'I'm the Bedouin.'

Just before the harvest-when Olive Worthington had put fresh flowers in the bedroom wing of the cider house and had typed a clean page of rules (almost exactly the same rules from the previous years) and had tacked them next to the light switch by the kitchen door-she offered the Bedouin a home.

'I always hate it when Wally goes back to college,' Olive told Homer. 'And this year, with Senior gone, I'm going to hate it more. I would like it very much if you thought you could be happy here, Homer-you could stay in Wally's room. I like having someone in the house at night, ancl someone to talk to in the morning.' Olive was keeping her back to Homer while she looked out the bay window in the Worthingtons' kitchen. The rubber raft that Senior used to ride was bobbing in the water within her view, but Homer couldn't be sure if Olive was looking at the raft.

'I'm not sure how Doctor Larch would feel about it,' Homer said.

'Doctor Larch would like you to go to college one day,' Olive said. 'And so would I. I would be happy to inquire, at the high school in Cape Kenneth, if they'd work with you-if they'd try to evaluate what you know and what you need to learn. You've had a very…odd education. I know that Doctor Larch is interested in having you take all the sciences.' (Homer understood that her mind must have been recalling this from a letter from Dr. Larch.) 'And Latin,' said Olive Worthington.{364}

'Latin,' said Homer Wells. This was surely Dr. Larch's work. Cutaneus maximus, thought Homer Wells, dura mater, not to mention good old umbilicus. 'Doctor Larch wants me to be a doctor,' Homer said to Mrs. Worthington. 'But I don't want to be.'

'I think he wants you to have the option of becoming a doctor, should you change your mind,' Olive said. 'I think he said Latin or Greek.'

They must have had quite some correspondence, thought Homer Wells, but all he said was, I really like working on the farm.'

'Well, I certainly want you to keep working here,' Olive told him. 'I need your help-through the harvest, especially. I don't imagine you'd be a full-time student; I have to talk to the high school, but I'm sure they'd view you as something of an experiment.'

'An experiment,' said Homer Wells. Wasn't everything an experiment for a Bedouin?

He thought about the broken knife he'd found on the cider house roof. Was it there because he was supposed to find it? And the broken glass, a piece of which had signaled to him in his insomnia at Wally's window; was the glass on the roof in order to provide him with some message?

He wrote to Dr. Larch, requesting Larch's permission to stay at Ocean View. 'I'll take biology,' Homer Wells wrote, 'and anything scientific. But do I have to take Latin? Nobody even speaks it anymore.'

Where did he get to be such a know-it-all? wondered Wilbur Larch, who nevertheless saw certain advantages to Homer Wells not knowing Latin or Greek, both the root of so many medical terms. Like coarctation of the aorta, Dr. Larch was thinking. It can be a relatively mild form of a congenital heart disorder that could decrease as the patient grew older; by'the time the patient was Homer's age, the patient might have no murmur at all and only a trained eye could detect, in an X-ray, the slight enlargement of the aorta. In a mild case, the only {365} symtoms might be a hypertension in the upper extremities. So don't learn Latin if you don't want to, thought Wilbur Larch.

As for the best congenital heart defect for Homer Wells, Dr. Larch was leaning toward pulmonary valve stenosis. 'From infancy, and throughout his early childhood, Homer Wells had a loud heart murmur,' Dr. Larch wrote-for the record, just to hear how it sounded. 'At twenty-one,' he noted elsewhere, 'Homer's old heart murmur is difficult to detect; however, I find that the stenosis of the pulmonary valve is still apparent in an X-ray.' It might be barely detectable, he knew; Homer's heart defect was not for everyone to see-that was the point. What was necessary was that it just be there.

'Don't take Latin or Greek if you don't want to,' Dr. Larch wrote to Homer Wells. 'It's a free country, isn't it?'

Homer Wells was beginning to wonder. In the same envelope with Dr. Larch's letter was a letter Dr. Larch had forwarded to him from good old Snowy Meadows. In Wilbur Larch's opinion, Snowy was a fool, 'but a persistent one.'

'Hi, Homer, it's me-Snowy,' Snowy Meadows began. He explained that his name was now Robert Marsh-'of the Bangor Marshes, we're the big furniture family,' Snowy wrote.

The furniture family? thought Homer Wells.

Snowy went on and on about how he'd met and married the girl of his dreams, and how he'd chosen the furniture business over going to college, and how happy he was that he'd gotten out of St. Cloud's; Snowy added that he hoped Homer had 'gotten out,' too.

'And what do you hear from Fuzzy Stone?' Snowy Meadows wanted to know. 'Old Larch says Fuzzy is doing well. I'd like to write Fuzzy, if you know his address.'

Fuzzy Stone's address! thought Homer Wells. And what did 'old Larch' mean (that 'Fuzzy is doing well')? {366} Doing well at what? wondered Homer Wells, but he wrote to Snowy Meadows that Fuzzy was, indeed, doing well; that he had misplaced Fuzzy's address for the moment; and that he found apple farming to be healthy and satisfying work. Homer added that he had no immediate plans to visit Bangor; he would surely look up 'the furniture Marshes' if he was ever in town. And, no, he concluded, he didn't agree with Snowy that 'a kind of reunion in St. Cloud's' was such a hot idea; he said he was sure that Dr. Larch would never approve of such a plan; he confessed that he did miss Nurse Angela and Nurse Edna, and of course Dr. Larch himself, but wasn't the place better left behind? 'Isn't that what it's for?' Homer Wells asked Snowy Meadows. 'Isn't an orphanage supposed to be left behind?'

Then Homer wrote to Dr. Larch.

'What's this about Fuzzy Stone “doing well”-doing well at WHAT? I know that Snowy Meadows is an idiot, but if you're going to tell him some stuff about Fuzzy Stone, don't you think you better tell me, too?'