Rock Island Line Page 5

  “Forget that. Listen, Marion said Sy Bontrager picked up that anvil with one hand—by grabbing ahold of the horn. That true?”

  “I saw him do it.”

  “It seems impossible.”

  “I know.”

  “How could someone be that strong?” asked Wilson, and focused his eyes down into John’s face.

  John blushed. “I don’t know . . . he’s big.”

  He won’t admit it, thought Wilson. He won’t admit it. It’s like he’s ashamed. Very odd. If I could do that, everyone would know. I’d have the anvil put out by the road and once a week I’d lift it up; and if someone came into the store who had never seen me lift it, I’d pick it up again. And if I could do it with my right hand, then I’d learn to do it with my left, and then by holding it backhanded. (All of these thoughts he had while looking at the anvil.)

  “Will you and Mom come to church this Sunday?”

  “We already talked about that, John. If you want to, that’s fine. But there’s no reason to try to include me and your mother. Besides, I don’t see anything to it. The whole thing is too . . . superficial. No, that’s not quite right. Self-righteous is a better word. Vanity.”

  “That’s not right, Dad.”

  “We don’t go to church. Our lives are happy and full without it. Each worships in his own way . . . that’s what I think. And besides, Della is dead set against it.”

  “I know. That’s why you have to convince her.”

  “Foolishness. And anyway, Saturday night I’m going fishing.”

  “That’s no excuse. Go some other time.”

  “What could be closer to God than being on the river? If there’s anything in religion that belittles fishing or being outdoors in order to promote sitting in a building singing foolish songs and looking righteous—it can’t be of any value.”

  “There’s a difference between enjoying God’s gifts and paying for them.”

  “Enjoying them is paying for them. It’s neglect that falls in the red. And gifts are gifts.”

  “Despite how you feel, come anyway.”

  “I don’t like your reverend.”

  “No excuses. You must come. I’ve decided it now. You must come.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “You must. Don’t be childish; there’s something to it, you’ll see.”

  “Maybe. Where are those field glasses you bought? Della said she looked through them.”

  “Sure, they’re in the house, and are really exciting, though I think I would have been better off to get seven-by-thirty-fives instead of eight-by-forties. It’s too much magnification for using in the field. They’re fine for sitting still or using on the porch looking at wind hoverers, harriers and kingbirds, though. They say the Germans made a better pair of eight-by-forties.” They crossed over to John’s house, leaving the pumps on and the doors to the garage wide open. “Now I remember what I was going to tell you,” John almost shouted. “I saw an eagle the other day! An immature bald eagle. I couldn’t believe it. I was walking along in back of Mortimers’ pasture land and ...”

  Wilson thought, He can be more excited about seeing some old birds than anyone I ever knew. But he did have an interest in the glasses, and later, at the very moment he looked through them and focused them down, he decided he would get a pair of his own.

  “Turn them around, Dad,” said John, smiling, “if you really want to see something strange!” He had decided that subconsciously his father had given in, and would come to church, and would even talk his mother into coming once. The Bible and the experience of God were undeniably the biggest, most complete feeling he had ever had, and he wanted his parents to have it.

  John Montgomery’s religious knowledge was nothing more than a fundamental, very ordinary kind of experienced knowledge. There were two parts to it: the Bible and God, though the two were sometimes so closely related, for him, that studying one was comparable to learning more of the other. He thought the Bible taught him about God. He thought of it being the same kind of book (though of a much higher quality) as a bird book, which gave him information; and after he’d studied about each individual bird, his experience of seeing one was greater because he would know what to look for, and appreciate more the beauty of the bird as it related to how he knew they lived—in the brush, forest, grub-eaters, fly-catchers and foragers, their migratory habits and natural predators. So his secondhand knowledge (from the book) added directly to his personal experience, even though the two were very separate. Could anyone think a picture and a short paragraph describing a bird the same thing as seeing one? So the Bible presented an accurate description of God which, the more he knew of it, heightened his personal encounters.

  The Bible was indispensable. The experience of someone seeing a lone bird without ever having heard of birds before and having nothing to relate it to, though powerful, would be a very shallow experience compared to that of a man who had seen millions, and who knew how each one lived and how particular and sacred each kind was in its own way. Naturally, that first experience would be a complete blow to the mind; at the same time, it would be recognized as superficial by those who have had not only that experience but many more after it, who clearly recognize the urgency and wonder with which the first comes but know it is not just the urgency that is important, but something else.

  Then came the Depression, and Wilson was trapped by it. The farmers (though the price of seed had gone up so that they couldn’t afford it, the machinery that they had bought on time from the bank was repossessed, no one could borrow money, roving bands of destitute people roamed through the cities) still counted on selling their eggs, butter, milk, cakes and dried beans to Wilson’s grocery. And Wilson knew that if they could, if they possibly could, they would come in and buy meat and canned goods to keep up their half of the bargain. But they just couldn’t. They didn’t have enough money. Yet he felt responsible and when they brought in their cans of milk (being careful to bring no more than before, when they had been shopping there too, and usually less) he would smile and pay them from his cash register and joke with them. For several years he did this. Some of them bought enough to keep him from losing money.

  He was almost forced to close. A stranger from Iowa City came once, then twice, and then regularly twice a week, buying more than one family could ever eat, or even two. This went on for several months until Wilson followed him back into the city to a big grocery store, where what he had sold the stranger was unloaded, brought inside, and sold to a man in a glassed-in box beside the checkout line. He talked to one of the two carry-out boys and learned that some fellow who ran a garage in Sharon Center hired it done in order to keep his old man in business.

  Wilson put his store up for sale, and though Sy Bontrager was there at the auction trying to hold on to it so that it could stay in the community and maybe be opened again later, in better times, he couldn’t outbid an old German named Sehr, who went over him on it and on the house on the corner across from it. Then Wilson and Della moved out to their country home and lived with their four-year-old wolf. At this time they began going to church and, after the Depression lifted, continued to go. They accepted an old automobile from John, because they were so far out, and in case one of them would be sick. Wilson began helping out farmers, working for them for nothing, and Remington Hodge’s father says that “One morning when we were real little and were going out, wondering how we would ever be able to get in all the hay before it rained, Della and Wilson came driving down the lane and went out with us without a word, and they must have known they couldn’t be given anything, not even a sack of corn. We did give them some bread, but it wasn’t anything, not for what they did.”

  Wilson’s fishing buddies, Sam and Dave, died, and Wilson waited a long time before he began going again, alone. Della continued to teach school, and in 1935 began being paid enough so that she and Wilson could live on the salary and save the rest of the money from the store, what little there was. Wilson’s health wasn�
�t good, and though his spirit remained unruffled, still he slept more, became weaker and lived under the continual din of a bad heart, which Della told John (who watched after them like a mother hen) sounded like it was trying to peck its way outside his chest.

  Sharon Center eased out of the Depression. Loans became available. Everyone invested in freezers full of food and put them in their basements, which seemed better insurance than any other kind that they would never be caught wanting again. John had one put in his parents’ house. People wished that the store would be reopened, and eventually, in ‘39, Sehr rented it out to some owl from Iowa City, who set it up more to sell ice cream than staples, and in the middle of winter disappeared completely, leaving the building locked and the shelves full. Men who worked for banks came in the spring and opened it up. Rats had eaten into the corners of the boxes, and the smell was unbearable. Sehr accepted no responsibility, because, as he said, the rent had been paid for an entire year. The windows of the store part were boarded up in house siding, and a family named Collins moved into it. They never mingled with anyone, and for the ten years they lived there were looked upon with suspicion.

  John was now nearly forty, and up until the day he drove away, locking his garage and house, it was not remembered that he had ever left for more than several days in the entire eighteen or twenty years since he had come back from Detroit. He climbed into his car and drove away, heading west; and from that direction he could have been going anywhere. It was late spring, and clear into summer the garage doors remained closed, and there was wonder concerning where he had gone, and what might have been in his mind to go there, and what might have happened to him. He stayed away until the middle of July, when at night Hercules spun directly overhead and the edge of his mace touched the Milky Way’s southern stream. Then all that had been forgotten about John was remembered. He came back married.

  Her name was Sarah. John never said what her last name had been, or where he had found her, or what he had said when he first met her, how he had come to . . . anything. This frightening lack of information (it was regretfully acknowledged) was due to no one being on intimate terms with him—no one who could learn the details in confidence and spread them around. They thought she must be from the south, though no one had been any farther down than Missouri except Jack Sanders, and he thought she came from somewhere around Duluth, Minnesota, where his brother had worked with a road crew and had said there were women there that affected you like that.

  Sarah was of normal height for a woman, and weighed in the area marked healthy in the penny-operated weight machines. Her hair was ordinary brown and not carefully kept, sprawling out in places. The dress she wore that first day in Sharon, walking around the yard and over to the garage and into the house and back again with laundry, was of coarse green cotton, covering even her arms down to the elbow. But none of these things were noticed.

  Six or seven men were at the garage that first day when she came and talked to John about where the clothespins were. From twenty feet away they could smell her skin. Every movement from under the green dress sent warm, pulsing sensations down their spines. The soft muscles in her neck screamed to be touched. Her hands seemed obviously designed for caressing, and to look at the delicate inside of her forearms made them all blush. Noticing her ankles, they thought, My God, they’re naked! as though the usual practice of women in July was to go about bound in mummy cloth. Her face, tanned by some foreign sun, glowed red in the cheeks. She talked to John and they understood only one or two words per sentence—because of that quality of half laughing and half sighing that danced through her voice. The faint outline of her naked body beneath the dress, the swell of her breasts and the roundness of her hips, made them continually swallow and rub their faces. Mike Calbraith said later, “I tell you, I couldn’t move. My eyes watered. I couldn’t hear. It was all I could do to keep from trying to touch her. My pecker was standing straight out like an iron poker, and she turned to leave and looked at us all and walked by. It was more than anyone could do not to watch, and, oh man, watching her walk! You could smell her, honest to God. She’s the real thing if you ever wanted to see it. A few years ago I think I’d a done anything for something like that. I’d a murdered for it.”

  When John introduced her and her voice sang out, “How do you do?” no one could say anything. Harold M. made gurgling noises. Remington Hodge smiled. The art of using words to talk with didn’t return until several minutes after she had crossed the street, entered the house and closed the door on herself. Naturally, one of the main questions in their minds was what John had ever said to her at first. What could anyone think of to say? Where did he find her? When you knew her as well as he must . . . wasn’t it more than you could stand? Did the fear go away? All these questions loomed around them, and they composed themselves and looked over to John, in hopes of finding some of the answers. But he blushed in his usual way and hid himself in his work.

  “You have a real pretty wife,” said Brenneman. “I imagine she cooks well enough.”

  “I guess so,” mumbled John, intent on loosening a nut.

  Anything else was too hard to ask, and would have been futile anyway, because he had never been one to offer much of himself in the conversation. It was remembered then about his capacities.

  A delegation formed and in three carloads went out to Della and Wilson’s in order to make sure they knew. They drove in, unloaded and knocked on the door. Wilson came out and looked at them bewilderedly.

  “Hello,” he said.

  “Hello,” said Marion. “We just thought we’d stop over.”

  “All of you?”

  “Oh. Well, I guess there is some number,” he said, looking behind him. “But just a social call. How have you been?”

  “Della!” Wilson called. “Della, come here!”

  Della came out and rescued him, and let him wander off by himself back in the trees beyond the barn. It was becoming so that no one ever saw him, except on Sunday at church. When he did speak, it couldn’t be depended on to make much sense. Della said sometimes he was like a child and had to be watched, because he was always leaving the refrigerator door open, and would get lost when he went fishing. Sometimes in his periods of obstinacy or when he would start throwing things she had to threaten to spank him in order to get him out of the rain or to go to bed. The doctor said it was arteries and the oxygen in his blood. Wilson said it was nothing and that he was the same as he’d ever been—as well as he could remember. But some things, he admitted, were easier to remember than others.

  “Come in,” said Della.

  “No, no. We can’t stay. We just dropped by to say hello. We were going for a ride and decided to pull in.”

  “Gracious me!”

  “John’s home,” said Clara Hocksteader.

  “I know. He came out last night. His sister will be glad to hear he’s back. She’s such a worrier. I must remember to write her a letter.”

  “Then you’ve seen her!”

  “Who?”

  “His wife—what’s her name?”

  “Sarah. No, we haven’t seen her. She was busy with something at home. But they’re both coming out tonight.”

  “Were you surprised that he got married after all these years?” asked J. Yoder.

  “Well, yes and no. I’m glad he is, though. I’d always thought he would be so lonely by himself. Have you met her?”

  “ Yes.”

  “Are you sure you don’t want to come inside? . . . Or, I know, I’ll get some chairs and bring them out.”

  “No, please don’t bother. We can’t stay. . . . Then you didn’t see her?”

  “No. What do you think of her? Is she nice? How old is she, would you guess?”

  “Not over twenty”—“Young thirties”—“Twenty-four”—“Twenty-seven”—“Forty,” they answered together.

  “It’s hard to say,” said Marion.

  “Age isn’t important,” said Clara.

  “Not really,” sai
d Mrs. Bontrager.

  “That’s so, of course,” said Della. “What else do you know about her?”

  “Nothing,” said Marion. “We didn’t really talk to her ... just sort of saw her.”

  “Oh.”

  “She’s . . . real pretty.”

  “Oh. John said she was pretty.”

  “What? He said what?” asked Lewis Neal from several people back.

  “I said he said she was pretty.”

  “What else did he say?”

  “Where did she come from?”

  “Goodness, I don’t know. I don’t remember that he talked much about her at all. He was here for such a short time. He just came and checked the freezer and the car battery, said hello and went home. Why?”

  “Nothing.” Then there was a great discomfort as everyone began noticing how many had really come. It was also realized that if Della had not yet seen Sarah, she couldn’t possibly understand. Later, then they would be curious to see what she thought. And because she hadn’t, there was no reason to be there in such an overpowering number. They all left as quickly as they had come, giving excuses and promising recipes and so on. Della waved to them from the porch step as they drove away and went around back to find Wilson and get him in the house, though his odd behavior usually didn’t begin until several hours after dinner, since she had to get him to take a nap.

  John and Sarah came that night to visit, arriving before it was dark. A slow wind blew through the leftover afternoon air, and was laden with peach blossom, hyacinths, freshly cut grass, sweet clover, livestock dung, old fish from Wilson’s cleaning shed, the compost heap, day lilies and a wide mixture of unidentifiable variables. So when Sarah walked up through the yard, Della thought it was only the wind and its pleasant mixture of wildflowers and earth. John introduced her. She put out her hand, and Sarah took it between both of hers. Della’s feelings exploded. She knew then that the warm, sweet smell was Sarah’s body. The touch of Sarah’s hand sent shivers down Della’s arm and she immediately jerked her own hand halfway out of her grasp, then put it back, realizing it would be rude, and snatched it back without a thought when Sarah gently pressed it. John took Sarah over to his father. Della watched as Wilson’s eyes lit up, and she went over to him and got him to take his hand out of Sarah’s by politely laughing and backing into his arm. They smiled at each other. Whenever Sarah looked away, Della’s eyes darted all over her body. Once John put his arm around her waist, and Sarah wriggled just the slightest bit into it, so that it rested a half an inch lower than where he had first put it, in the beginning swell of her hip. Della’s face flushed bright red, and she rushed off inside, returning with wicker porch chairs.