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ne of the nurses thought that Dr Larch was like the hard wood of the tree of that name[3].

      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.

      And the people who were left behind? There were people: the prostitutes and the children of these prostitutes. Not one of the officers of the Catholic Church of St. Cloud's stayed.

      Anyway, in 190— Dr Wilbur Larch started to correct the wrongs of St. Cloud's. He had a lot of work. For almost twenty years, Dr Larch left St. Cloud's only once – for World War I. Dr Larch wanted to do something for the good of someone.

      In 192—, when Homer Wells was born and named, Nurse Edna (who was in love) and Nurse Angela (who wasn't) had a special name for St. Cloud's founder, physician, town historian, war hero, and director of the boys' division.

      They called him “Saint Larch,” – and why not?

      Homer's first foster parents returned him to St. Cloud's; they thought there was something wrong with him – he never cried. They thought this wasn't normal.

      His second foster family reacted differently to Homer's silence. They beat the baby regularly and Homer cried a lot. The boy's crying saved him. The stories of Homer's loud cries found their way to the orphanage. So Dr Larch brought the boy back to St. Cloud's.

      Homer Wells came back to St. Cloud's so many times, after so many unsuccessful foster homes, that the orphanage made St. Cloud's his home. It was not easy to accept, but Nurse Angela and Nurse Edna – and, finally, Dr Wilbur Larch – had to admit that Homer Wells belonged to St. Cloud's.

      “Well, then, Homer,” said St. Larch, “I expect that you will be of use.”

      In his journal – A Brief History of St. Cloud's — Dr Larch kept his daily record of the business of the orphanage. “Here in St. Cloud's,” Larch wrote in his journal, “we have only one problem. His name is Homer Wells. He is a true orphan, because his only home will always be at St. Cloud's. God forgive me. I have made an orphan; his name is Homer Wells and he will belong to St. Cloud's forever.”

      By the time Homer was twelve years old, he knew the place perfectly. He knew its laundry room, its kitchen, its corners where the cats slept. He knew the bells; in fact, he rang them. He knew who the tutors were. He knew ah the girls. The director of the girls' division was not a doctor, so when the girls were sick, they visited Dr Larch at the hospital or Larch went to the girls' division to visit them. The director of the girls' division was Mrs Grogan, although she never mentioned Mr Grogan.

      The three tutors came to St. Cloud's from a nearby small town. There was a woman who taught math; she was a bookkeeper for a textile mill. She preferred addition and subtraction to multiplication and division. (Dr Larch discovered one day that Homer had never learned the multiplication table).

      Another woman, a rich plumber's widow, taught grammar and spelling. Her method was chaotic. She gave her pupils long texts with uncapitalized, misspelled, and unpunctuated words, and told the children to put them into sentences, correctly punctuated and correctly spelled. She then corrected the corrections; the final document looked like a treaty between two illiterate countries at war which was revised many times. The text was always strange to Homer Wells, even when it was finally correct. This was because the woman took the texts from a book of hymns for the church, and Homer Wells had never seen a church or heard a hymn.

      The third tutor, a retired teacher, was an old, unhappy man who lived with his daughter's family because he couldn't take care of himself. He taught history, but he had no books. He taught the world from memory; he said the dates weren't important. He could talk about Mesopotamia for a full half hour, but when he stopped for a moment to drink some water, he continued to speak about Rome.

      So Homer liked doing chores more than education. His favorite chore was selecting the evening reading.

      Dr Larch read aloud twenty minutes every evening. Dickens was a personal favorite of Dr Larch. It took him several months to read Great Expectations[4], and more than a year to read David Copperfield[5].

      Almost none of the orphans understood the novels because the language was too difficult. But the evening reading helped them to fall asleep and those few who understood the words and the story could leave St. Cloud's in their dreams.

      Both Great Expectations and David Copperfield were about orphans. (“What else could you read to an orphan?” Dr Larch wrote in his journal.)

      2. The Lord's Work

      Wilbur Larch was born in Portland, Maine, in 186—. He was the son of a tidy woman who served a man named Neal Dow, the mayor of Portland and the so-called father of the Maine law that introduced Prohibition[6] to that state. Wilbur Larch's mother loved her employer and saw herself more as his co-worker for the reform than as his servant (which she was).

      Interestingly, Wilbur Larch's father was a drunk. To young Wilbur, his father never looked drunk – he never fell or lay in a stupor, he never shouted. But he always looked a little surprised, as if he had suddenly remembered (or had just forgotten) something important.

      When Wilbur was a boy, it never occurred to him that his father's missing fingers were the result of too many bottles of beer while operating the lathe – “just accidents,” his father said.

      Although he grew up in the mayor's mansion, Wilbur Larch always used the kitchen entrance. He studied hard because he preferred the company of books to his mother's talk with other servants.

      Wilbur Larch went to Bowdoin College, and to Harvard Medical School where he was an excellent student.

      In the same year, 188—, when Wilbur Larch became a doctor, Neal Dow died. In grief, Wilbur Larch's mother died soon, too. A few days later, Wilbur's father sold everything and went to Montreal, where he drank a lot and eventually died of cirrhosis. His body was returned to Portland on the same train that had carried him away. Wilbur Larch met the train and buried his father.

      Larch was an ether addict. He was an open-drop-method man. With one hand he held a mask over his mouth and nose. He made this mask himself: he wrapped many layers of gauze around a cone of stiff paper. With his other hand, he wet the cone with ether dropping from the can.

      Wilbur

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