The Cider House Rules

CHAPTER ONE

The Boy Who Belonged to St. Cloud's

In the hospital of the orphanage at St. Cloud's, Maine, two nurses - Nurse Edna and Nurse Angela - gave names to the new babies.

The director of the boys' division was a doctor. His name was Wilbur Larch. One of the nurses thought that Dr Larch was like the hard wood of the tree of that name3.

Nurse Edna imagined that she was in love with Dr Larch, and she often named babies John Larch, or John Wilbur (her father's name was John).

The boy was named Homer Wells by the other nurse. "Homer" had been the name of one of her family's many cats. "Wells" was associated with Nurse Angela's father's business - drilling wells - hard and honest work. Angela thought that her father had those qualities, which gave the word "wells" a deep aura.

St. Cloud's, Maine - the town - had been a logging camp for most of the nineteenth century. The first building was a saw mill. The first settlers were French Canadians - woodcutters; then the river bargemen came, then the prostitutes, and (at last) there was a church. The first logging camp had been called, simply, Clouds - because the valley was low and the weather was cloudy.

Dr Wilbur Larch - who was not only the doctor for the orphanage and the director of the boys' division (he had also founded the place) - was the historian of the town. According to Dr Larch, the logging camp called Clouds became St. Clouds only because of the Catholic instinct to put a Saint before so many things. But by the time it became St. Cloud's, it looked like a mill town. The forest, for miles around, was cleared.

There was never any spring in that part of Maine. The roads were impassable. The work of the town was shut down. The springtime river was so swollen, and ran so fast, that no one wanted to travel on it. Spring in St. Cloud's meant trouble: trouble of drinking and prostituting. Spring was the suicide season. In spring, the seeds for an orphanage were planted.

When the valley around St. Cloud's was cleared and when there were no more logs to send downriver, the saw mill was closed down.

And what was left behind? The weather, the sawdust, and the buildings: the mill with its broken windows; the whore hotel with its dance hall downstairs; the few private homes, and the church, which was Catholic, for the French Canadians.