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his journal.)
    And so Homer Wells was familiar with the vision of that gibbet in the marshland—“with some chains hanging to it which had once held a pirate”—and Homer’s imagination of the orphan, Pip, and the convict, Magwitch . . . the beautiful Estella, the vengeful Miss Havisham . . . provided him with sharper details when, falling asleep, he would follow the ghostly mothers who left St. Cloud’s in the cover of darkness, and boarded the horse-drawn coach car, or, later, the bus which replaced the coach, and gave Homer Wells his first sensation of the passage of time, of progress. Soon after the bus replaced the coach, all bus service in St. Cloud’s was discontinued. Thereafter, the mothers walked; this gave Homer further understanding of progress.
    The mothers he saw in his sleep never changed. But the men who had not bothered to accompany them to St. Cloud’s—where were they? Homer liked the part in Great Expectations when Pip is just starting out and he says that “the mists had all solemnly risen . . . and the world lay spread before me.” A boy from St. Cloud’s knew plenty about “mists”—they were what shrouded the river, the town, the orphanage itself; they drifted downriver from Three Mile Falls; they were what concealed one’s parents. They were the clouds of St. Cloud’s that allowed one’s parents to slip away, unseen.
    “Homer,” Dr. Larch would say, “one day you’ll get to see the ocean. You’ve only been as far as the mountains; they’re not nearly as spectacular as the sea. There’s fog on the coast—it can be worse than the fog here—and when the fog lifts, Homer . . . well,” said St. Larch, “that’s a moment you must see.”
    But Homer Wells had already seen it, he’d already imagined it—“the mists . . . all solemnly risen.” He smiled at Dr. Larch and excused himself; it was time to ring a bell. That was what he was doing—bell-ringing—when his fourth foster family arrived at St. Cloud’s to fetch him. Dr. Larch had prepared him very well; Homer had no trouble recognizing the couple.
    They were, in today’s language, sports-oriented; in Maine, in 193_, when Homer Wells was twelve, the couple who wanted to adopt him were simply thought fanatical about everything that could be done outdoors. They were a white-water-canoeing couple, an ocean-sailing couple—a mountain-climbing, deep-sea-diving, wilderness-camping couple. A one-hundred-mile (at forced-march-pace) tramping couple. Athletes—but not of organized sports; they were not a sissy-sport couple.
    The day they arrived at St. Cloud’s, Homer Wells rang the bell for ten o’clock fourteen times. He was transfixed by them—by their solid, muscular looks, by their loping strides, by his safari hat, by her bushwacking machete in a long sheath (with Indian beads) at her cartridge belt. They both wore boots that looked lived in. Their vehicle was a homemade pioneer of what would years later be called a camper; it looked equipped to capture and contain a rhino. Homer instantly foresaw that he would be made to hunt bears, wrestle alligators—in short, live off the land. Nurse Edna stopped him before he could ring fifteen o’clock.
    Wilbur Larch was being cautious. He didn’t fear for Homer’s mind. A boy who has read Great Expectations and David Copperfield by himself, twice each—and had each word of both books read aloud to him, also twice—is more mentally prepared than most. Dr. Larch felt that the boy’s physical or athletic development had been less certain. Sports seemed frivolous to Larch when compared to the learning of more necessary, more fundamental skills. Larch knew that the St. Cloud’s sports program—which consisted of indoor football in the dining hall when there was bad weather—was inadequate. In good weather, the boys’ and girls’ divisions played tag, or kick the can, or sometimes Nurse Edna or Nurse Angela pitched for stickball. The ball was composed of several