'What community?' he howled.

Oh yes, he thought, I could have asked the stationmaster to offer them religious instruction-to speak to them about the terrifying chaos of homeless souls hovering in every niche of the sky. I could have asked that worthy gentleman to display his underwear catalogues, too.

I could have asked the family of child beaters from Three Mile Falls to come once a week and give lessons. could have detained a few of the women having abortions and asked them to reveal, to all of us, why they didn't want to have children at that particular moment in their lives; or I could have invited a few of the mothers back -they could have explained to the children why they were left here! That would have been instructive! Oh God, thought Wilbur Larch, what a community we could have been-if only I'd been more youthful, more energetic!

Oh yes, I have made some mistakes, he thought; and for a black hour or two, he remembered some of them. If only I knew how to build a breathing machine, he thought-if only I could have come up with a different set of lungs for Fuzzy. {384}

And maybe Homer Wells will tell them that he was not 'adequately prepared' for his first view of the fetus on the hill. And had there been a way to prepare Homer for Three Mile Falls, for the Drapers of Waterville, or for the Winkles being swept away? What was my choice? wondered Wilbur Larch. I suppose that I could have not apprenticed him.

'We are put on this earth to be of use,' Wilbur Larch (as Fuzzy Stone) wrote to the board of trustees. 'It is better to do than to criticize,' wrote that young idealist, Fuzzy Stone. 'It is better to do anything than to stand idly by.' You tell 'em, Fuzzy! thought Dr. Larch. And so Fuzzy Stone told the board of trustees that the hospital at St. Cloud's was a model of the form. 'It was Larch who made me want to be a doctor,' Fuzzy wrote. 'That old guy, Larch-he's an inspiration. You talk about energy: the guy is as full of pep as a teen-ager.

'You better be careful about sending young people to St. Cloud's-old Larch will work them so hard, they'll get sick. They'll get so tired out, they'll retire in a month!

'And you think those old nurses don't do a day's work? Let me tell you, when Nurse Angela is pitching for stickball, you'd think you were competing in an Olympic event. You talk about affectionate-that's them, all right. They're always hugging and kissing you, but they know how to shake some sense into you, too.

'You talk about supervised,' Fuzzy Stone wrote. 'Did you ever find out that you were being watched by owls? That's Nurse Edna and Nurse Angela-they're owls, they don't miss a thing. And some of the girls used to say that Mrs. Grogan knew what they did before they did it- before they even knew they were going to do it!

'And you talk about community,' wrote Fuzzy Stone. 'St. Cloud's was something special. Why, I remember people would get off the train and walk up the hill just to look the place over-it must have been because we were such a model community, for that area. I just remember {385} these people, coming and going, coming and going- they were just there to look us over, as if we were one of the marvels of Maine.'

One of the marvels of Maine? thought Wilbur Larch, struggling to get control of himself. A stray puff of wind blew in the open window in Nurse Angela's office, carrying some of the black smoke from the incinerator with it; the smoke brought Larch nearer to his senses. I'd better stop, he thought. I don't want to get carried away.

He rested in the dispensary after his historical effort. Nurse Edna looked in on him once; Wilbur Larch was one of the marvels of Maine to her, and she was worried about him.

Larch was a little worried himself, when he woke. Where had the time gone? The problem is that I have to last, he thought. He could rewrite history but he couldn't touch time; dates were fixed; time marched at its own pace. Even if he could convince Homer Wells to go to a real medical school, it would take time. It would take a few years for Fuzzy Stone to complete his training, I have to last until Fuzzy is qualified to replace me, thought Wilbur Larch.

He felt like hearing Mrs. Grogan's prayer again, and so he went to the girls' division a little early for his usual delivery of Jane Eyre. He eavesdropped in the hall on Mrs. Grogan's prayer; I must ask her if she'd mind saying it to the boys, he thought, then wondered if it would confuse the boys, coming so quickly on the heels: of, or just before, the Princes of Maine, Kings of New England benediction. I get confused myself sometimes, Dr. Larch knew.

'Grant us a safe lodging, and a holy rest,' Mrs. Grogan was saying, 'and peace at the last.'

Amen, thought Wilbur Larch, the saint of St. Cloud's, who was seventy-something, and an ether addict, and who felt that he'd come a long way and still had a long way to go. {386}

When Homer Wells read the questionnaire sent him by the St. Cloud's board of trustees, he did not know exactly what made him anxious. Of course Dr. Larch and the others were getting older, but they were always 'older' to him. It did occur to him to wonder what might happen to St. Cloud's when Dr. Larch was too old, but this thought was so troubling that he tucked the questionnaire and the return envelope to the board into his copy of Practical Anatomy of the Rabbit. Besides, it was the day the migrants arrived; it was harvest time at Ocean View, and Homer Wells was busy.

He and Mrs. Worthington met the picking crew at the apple mart, and led them to their quarters in the cider house-more than half the crew had picked at Ocean View before and knew the way, and the crew boss was what Mrs. Worthington called 'an old hand.' He looked very young to Homer. It was the first year that Mrs. Worthington dealt directly with the picking crew and their boss; the hiring relationship, by mail, had been one of Senior Worthington's responsibilities, and Senior had always maintained that if you kept a good crew boss, year after year, all the hiring-and the necessary takingcharge of the crew during the harvest-would be conducted by the boss.

His name was Arthur Rose, and he looked about Wally's age-just barely older than Homer-although he must have been older; he'd been the crew boss for five or six years. One year Senior Worthington had written to the old man who'd been his crew boss for as long as Olive could remember and Arthur Rose had written back to Senior saying he was going to be the crew boss now-'the old boss,' Arthur Rose had written, 'he's dead tired of traveling.' As it turned out, the old boss was just dead, but Arthur Rose had done a good job. He brought the right number of pickers, and very few of them ever quit, or ran off, or lost more than a day or two of good work because of too much drinking. There seemed to be a firm control over the degree of fighting among them-even {387} when they were accompanied by a woman or two. And when there was an occasional child among them, the child behaved. There were always pickers who fell off ladders, but there'd been no serious injuries. There were always small accidents around the cider press-but that was fast, often late-night work, when the men were tired or drinking a little. And there was the predictable clumsiness or drinking that led to the infrequent accidents involved in the almost ritualistic use of the cider house roof.

Running a farm had given Olive Worthington a warm feeling for the daylight hours and a grave suspicion of the night; the most trouble that people got into, in Olive's opinion, was trouble that they encountered because they stayed up too late.

Olive had written Arthur Rose of Senior's death, and told hirn that the picking-crew responsibility of Ocean View had now fallen to her. She wrote him at the usual address-a P.O. box in a town called Green, South Carolina-and Arthur Rose responded promptly, both with his condolences and with his assurance that the crew would arrive as always, on time and in correct numbers.