Читать книгу Rock Island Line - David Rhodes - Страница 8

TWO

Though for some reason Della had not had children until fairly late in life—late according to the usual age for becoming a mother (she was twenty-nine) and many of her close friends were worried about her welfare because of her bones being too old to stretch—it seemed that after she got started she never stopped, and she was either just getting ready to have one and people would comment, “She sure is round, have you noticed?” or she was carrying a new one and giving it to Wilson or Mrs. Miller to look after while she went off to teach school. Many people told her not to do it—that they could find someone else to fill in at the school until everything settled down—but she wouldn’t agree and claimed that Mrs. Fitch would do what she could, but that she (Della) was the only one who knew exactly where each of the children was and what kind of progress they could be expected to make, emotionally and intellectually. And whatever sacrifice they imagined Della was making, to have her there instead of anyone else was what they really wanted anyway.

One of the boys was named John, after Wilson’s great-grandfather. If Della could be said to have favorites—and of course she couldn’t, and didn’t, but still if someone were to have to say which one she liked the best, if she were forced to give an answer other than all of them—it would be him. There was a hidden fierceness in him, lacking in the others.

John Montgomery did not stand out as an unusual boy until he was almost ten—mostly because he had always been shy. Even in school where his own mother taught he would blush whenever he spoke. He looked pretty much like a direct cross between his older brother Alex and his sister Rebecca, though more withdrawn than either. At first, that was all there was to him. Then he began to stand out. It was noticed that at infrequent unpredictable times he would slip into moments of self-absorbing sensuality, as though he could not contain himself and was overpowered by pleasure, like being carried away by a joke—an image so dramatic it suggested a personality split. But then it was also noticed that the shyness returned immediately afterward and he would look very guilty. And this, though it explained in a minor way the shyness, presented a question of its own; because it was not natural that a boy of that young age would have learned what it is about emotions that he should be ashamed of. He would certainly not have learned it from Della and Wilson. It was just as though he had been born with the two coincidental characteristics: his tremendous capacity for feelings, and the accompanying guilt.

He was well liked, though not comfortable to be with during the few times when he would fall to enjoying his lunch to such an extent that everyone sitting across from him at the lunch table would be forced to admit that their own enjoyment of eating must be a very shallow thing in comparison. Also because of an icy chill in the room in which he greedily cut off contact with everything else but himself and his sandwiches—turning from the world of reason, communication and people to the world of his own swirling emotions and sensations. It was unpleasant to be so ruthlessly ignored; but the shyness, which he retained throughout his life, compensated and endeared him to people. It seemed he was always afraid someone would find out, and because those times were known to everyone, the knowledge was an intimacy, arising from knowing more of him than he might have wished.

As John grew up, automobiles began to replace horses, and the huckster wagon was abandoned after it became less time-consuming for families to get to the store themselves (the bigger stores in Iowa City as well). But cream still flowed through Wilson’s grocery store like water. The road to Hills was widened, and the fences were set back several feet on each side. A hardtop was set down and became Highway 1, crossing the road to Hills in the middle of Sharon Center. A garage was made out of Barns’ store, with two tall, thin pumps close to the highway. A high school was built across from the Masonic Lodge.

John’s older brother Alex was old enough to be accepted into the Army at the same time the United States decided to enter its first war with Germany, without the approval of his mother. Wilson had no opinions, either on the war or his son’s desire to be in it, and silently drove him to the recruiting station in Iowa City in the wagon. They shook hands, and as Wilson left he watched Alex being taken in by the other boys there, laughing nervously and talking about military weapons. At home Della told him, “I can feel that it was a mistake, Wilson.” Of course this was not a judgment of the war—only the way she chose to tell him that, as far as she was concerned, their son would never come home.

“You can’t know that,” said Wilson.

“Yes I can.”

John Montgomery had already decided that, and watching his brother ride away in the wagon with his bag of belongings, talking excitedly to his father, he said goodbye to him. He removed his brother from his active mind and put him into memory, where he remained forever. So the news of Alex’s patriotic death (he had died by personally carrying a very sensitive bomb into a house with thick walls, taking with him into small fragments seven German officers, four flunkies, three long-nose machine guns and a naked whore) had little effect on him, because the fact and story of Alex’s death had no connection with John’s own memories of him, which he had already decided would be all there would ever be. His lack of emotion was not noticed in the house at that time because of all the others.

Wilson bought their brownstone house in the country three years after the war ended, and though he did not live in it full time until years later, he secretly kept two dogs there, fed by Remington Hodge, and visited them often with their other dog. (Duke had taken a disease which caused him to go blind and be in such discomfort that Wilson killed him.) He explained to Della that the extra dogs were probably from neighboring farms. Sometimes they spent Sundays in their country home with the younger children, leaving John and Rebecca to open the store Monday morning and mind it until afternoon.

John, during those times when his naturally suppressed sensuality would erupt, could drink more, cause more destruction and be less decent, more depraved, make more noise, attract more secretly wanton women, keep going longer and be more penitently sorry afterward than seemed realistic, and while he was attending the small high school he was the never ending topic of conversation and amazement. It was said that he had on one occasion, on a bet, gone into Iowa City to a house of prostitution and in a state of intoxication and without a cent in his pocket had entered and remained for nearly two and a half hours before rejoining his friends seated impatiently across the street drinking from a bottle in a paper bag, where he resumed drinking and set off to find a place with more gaiety.

The speculations concerning the course of events beginning at the time he entered without any money and closed the door and ending two and a half hours later were as varied as an entire month of The Arabian Nights. Some (Merv Miller was one of them) believed he must have collapsed due to the effects of the improperly and dangerously prepared whiskey as soon as he shut the door, and out of the kindness of their hearts they had let him sleep until he woke up. But it was hard to believe in the kindness of a prostitute’s or a prostitute’s manager’s heart, as they were all personally terrified by the mere idea of the place. “Perhaps they were afraid to throw him out for fear of drawing the attention of the police.” But for the same reason that it was difficult to imagine Betty’s Place housing generosity, it was impossible to imagine the hardened people inside being afraid of anything. So the line of thinking, naturally, continued from then on to the assumption that he was busy during that time, and exactly how many women one could assume to be in there, and how much they did what they did for money, and how much they would do for pleasure, and what kind of pleasure it was to take up two and a half hours. And then just as these problems were beginning to press less and less heavily on the imagination of the small town, two women somewhere in their twenties arrived in a worn, unsightly carriage—having driven themselves—and stopped at the gas station and asked with “rough, wild voices, and one had frizzy hair,” the whereabouts of John Montgomery. They were directed across the street to the store, where they went, stayed not longer than ten minutes and headed back in the direction of Iowa City. Nothing conclusive could be drawn from the visit, but even to explain it coincidentally was exciting and problematic, and vicarious pleasure flowed like water long after the six men in the station had stepped out into the clear afternoon and watched until the bare heads sank side by side out of view over the hill.

It was not long after this, during the time when John was being condemned, floated and exalted as being bound up in whoredom, that there arose an unexpected concern for his mind, which was imagined to be in great danger of giving up the ghost and splitting clean in two—the two parts of him being so widely distant and hostile to each other. He was watched very carefully for signs of dissociation, or ordinary madness. These new, more serious thoughts never had the required idle time to be lifted off the ground. Wilson had a stroke. Everything else was forgotten. Della found herself surrounded by her thousands of friends, who seemed to be sure that if they never let her alone, they could keep her from slipping away until Wilson would return with his spiritual net. And by the time he was back from the University Hospital he seemed (from all the evidence) to be his old self.

The issue of John’s breaching personality was forgotten, the two wild-voiced women had become thought of as a queer phenomenon of experience, and if he was imagined to be too full of life at times, it was also remembered that, for the most part, looking him in the eyes would make him blush. The serious thoughts about his father had pushed all the other, more trivial, mean thoughts back into perspective.

He was very popular with the girls at the high school, and it was said that a well-brought-up girl could share a happy evening with him and never once have her ideals compromised. There was some fear, of course, that while out with one of them he would all of a sudden change over, and no telling what would happen after that. The girls were supposed to be able to sense this frightful desire for lust beneath the surface of his gray eyes. His bashfulness made him nearly impossible to talk to, but the lurking suspicion that he might at any time get it into his mind to drag them off into a cement corner and rip away their clothes and not take no for an answer made him attractive for a long time. But, like an unfulfilled promise, it wasn’t enough, and when the girls were older and foresaw their lives being taken out of the school and stranded in the barren, sun-bleached world of their parents, they were quick to give him up and settle for fulfillment of a more normal kind.

John Montgomery seemed to have no intention of marrying, and accepted it as quite normal that his friends and finally even his sister and younger brothers settled into homes of their own (Rebecca to Iowa City and Henry to Duluth) while he remained alone and unattached and showed no indication that he would ever plan to do otherwise, and even left off stopping in on Mrs. Saunders, a young widow nearing thirty.

Bachelors were not unheard of in the area—in fact, it was remembered that the two relatives who had been the reason for Della and Wilson coming to Sharon hadn’t ever married. Nothing uncommon about it. Nothing bitter or morose, only personal choice. Because of his shyness, John had never been on close, intimate terms with anyone (except, perhaps, his older sister), though no one who had gone to school with him would deny that he was a friend. It was noted that bachelors were invariably of that same sort, so everything fitted into place—terribly sad, but natural.

In a magazine John saw an advertisement for a training school in Detroit for automobile mechanics. He talked the matter over with his father, and within a month arrived in Detroit and enrolled as an automotive-engineer trainee. He worked nights as a dishwasher in a night restaurant to pay the tuition. Once a week he wrote a full-page, small-margined letter home to his parents from his one-lamp room, and after the nine weeks Della had nine letters that had been read out loud before dinner, safely inside a cupboard drawer. “He’s always been so conscientious,” she told Wilson. Then he came back with a certificate, and a well-detailed plan to build a garage and fill it with steel six and twelve-point sockets, breaker bars, drop-forged impact wrenches, lock washers, cotter pins, ring compressors, two and three-claw bearing pullers, mill bastard files, feeler gauges, bench vises, taps and dies, drums of oil and flat-nose pliers. The bank in Hills loaned him the money, and a wild bunch of unemployed construction workers built him an enormous one-room building big enough for an airplane on top of a cement foundation, diagonally across from the grocery.

“They’ve made it big enough,” remarked Joe Miller, “to contain him.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Della with the nasty implication that it better not mean anything.

As John grew older, he learned more about himself. From the very beginning he must have been aware of a frightening inconsistency in the way experiences came to him. He must have felt (especially in moments of remorse) that his life was insubstantial because he could have two completely unrelated ways of viewing it—two attitudes, neither of which could be said to be less valid or real. A feeling of disintegration—drowning, with nothing to grab hold of that could float. When he was young he must have wished to be rid of his self-consciousness while coveting the reckless abandonment. He must have thought he would gladly cast off his usual shy self and emerge from under a dead skin, an authentic, brightly colored, fully human testimony of feeling. Then later, after he had come back from Detroit and swung up the wide wooden door opening into his warehouse-size garage, rented the late Dr. Bokin’s house across the street, joined a group called the Society for the Observation of Birds and begun reading the Bible at the rate of two chapters a day, interested, but not industrious enough to look up the word references along the middle of the page—he was convinced his life could become more wonderful if only there were not that uncontrollable center of emotional rampage. He began to resent it because of the feelings of shame it brought him later. And from that time on he was careful to live his life in such a way that when those times came—and they were less frequent as he grew older—he could keep it to himself without reaching out and including others. But he could not deceive, and everyone knew from his shyness and gray eyes that nothing was changed, and he was expected for years to be building up for a gigantic outburst.

But then everyone forgot. Because they didn’t see any evidence of his sensuality. After five or six years they forgot about it.

Remington Hodge’s father used to call on the name of the Lord to verify that John Montgomery could fix anything, and that it was common knowledge clear into Iowa City and through to Solon (which to him was tantamount to universal knowledge) that there’s a guy in Sharon who can really weld. To those old farmers there were three things: family, food and machinery. So here it is, the family belongs to Della, and Wilson is there for food, and what happens then but John is the best welder on earth and as long as he’s alive and either there’s a light on in the house across the street or the garage door is open it’s as good as a promise that everything will be all right. It’s impossible to say what a good mechanic means to people who have nothing to depend on but what they can touch.

John was by no means the first in Sharon Center to get an automobile for himself. Actually there were already so many by then that there was no reason for any notice at all, except everyone knew how Wilson felt about them, and the concern was to see how he would take it.

“If he wants to, that’s his business,” was all that he said.

One afternoon five or six farmers were at John’s, sitting on the machinery and talking and spitting, a little too far along into fall to be without jackets, when Sy Bontrager came up in his tractor and sat down with them. John had his hood and gloves on, and sparks flew like a roman candle. Corn-picking season had nearly arrived, and in the fields black scar marks showed on the tops of the plants where the skin had frozen. Naturally, they talked about weather and the approaching winter.

Sy had a piece of iron he wanted straightened, and when John tipped up his hood in order to see what he was working on in full light, Sy asked him where he kept the anvil. John told him in the back somewhere and closed down the hood and resumed welding. Sy went back to look, and because one man could spend all day looking back there, three or four of the others went to help. They found it behind two oil drums and a short block.

“Here, I’ll get back in there and hand it out,” said Brenneman.

“Just lift it on out,” said Henry Yoder, “from there.”

“No thanks.” Brenneman got back between the drums and set it up on the block.

Marion took it out and set it on the floor. “I heard,” he said, “that there was a fella in Clinton who could pick one of these up with one hand, by grabbin’ ahold of it by the horn.”

“I could do that,” said Sy.

“Come on.”

“I could. Bring it on out here where there’s plenty of air.”

Brenneman carried it out into a clearing beside the lane. “OK, go ahead.”

“Wait a minute. Now, just exactly what did this fella in Clinton do?”

“He’s hedging!”

“No. Just what did he do exactly?”

John had taken off his hood and come back. Marion told him that Sy was about to try to pick up the anvil by the horn.

“. . . . so he just lifted it off the ground. No further. Just off the ground.”

“Come on, Bontrager.”

But for all the joking it was noticed that Sy was nearly a giant, and that his hands were bigger than a normal head. But still it seemed impossible. Then he bent down and wrapped his sausage fingers around the end of the horn, tilted it up so that it pointed straight in the air and lifted. At first nothing, but it didn’t slip either; and then Marion, who had his face on the ground, shouted, “It’s off. Drop it, Sy, it’s off.” And he dropped it.

They congratulated him and he went off to find a hand sledge to straighten his piece of metal. Marion grabbed ahold of the horn, gave a little tug and shook his head. No one else wanted to know exactly how hard it would be. “In all your life you’ll never see that done again,” said Brenneman. “It’s incredible anyone could be that strong.”

“He always was big,” said Henry Yoder.

Then everything settled down. Brenneman got a set of leathers for his pump and left. Henry Yoder left with Marion in his car toward Marion’s place. Sy straightened his hitch and put it up behind his tractor seat and drove away. John worked on a small one-cylinder motor, taking off the flywheel to get at the points. Marion and Henry Yoder came back, parked across the street and went into the store.

“I tell you, he did,” they told Wilson. “He picked it right up off the ground, as easy as you please.”

“It’s impossible. Sy Bontrager?”

“ Yes.”

“Well, he’s big . . . No, it’s impossible. There’s a fly in the soup somewhere.”

“He did it.”

“It’s physically impossible,” and Wilson went over to the window next to the street and looked out. No one over there but John, walking around and looking into the street. Wilson looked absently out at him, thinking privately to himself about all the things he had to do before winter, the windows, the rain gutters, some of the roof, get bales around the foundation, install ... John walked across the garage again and looked out, oddly enough, Wilson thought, as though he wanted to be sure he was alone. Then he bent over, and from the store window and in a line clear down an aisle of tools and oil drums Wilson saw him lift his anvil with one hand by grasping the horn, straight up until it was several inches above the ground, behind which he could see the red Riley oil drum, then set it down and hurry back to the small engine.

Wilson’s mind raced. For the first time in his life, he thought: What can possibly be inside him? What is he made of to be able to do that when he’s no bigger than I am? There’s never been any indication of that. Muscles are muscles, and bones are bones; what could make someone so different?

“He did it, I tell you. He said he could and then he did it,” said Marion.

Yes, he probably did, thought Wilson. It’s possible. It’s not that strange if a big man can do it. But still he wondered; and after his store was empty, he closed the door and went over to the garage, thinking that he would have a better look at both the anvil and his son. He watched John putting tiny brass jets and springs into the carburetor of the Briggs and Stratton, and there was no indication there of anything. “Hello,” he said when John looked up, and tried to look casual and uninterested as he went over to where the anvil sat on its back, pointed straight up into the air. When John turned around he grabbed ahold of it with both hands and lifted. And stopped. He felt sure he could, if he really wanted to, with both hands, but one hand! It seemed impossible.

“I was sorry to hear about your dog,” said John, and blushed as he looked at his father.

“So was I,” he answered. “It’s been three days so far and I still can’t keep from thinking about her running around in the front yard the way she did, and the sound of her digging under the porch.”

“I think,” John began, very shyly, “that you shouldn’t get any more dogs. They’re not worth it. Something always happens—”

“They’re worth it! I’ve got a chance to get a wolf cub, anyway. A timber wolf. Marion said his brother shot the bitch in the middle of August and has three pups in the shed behind his house. I guess she was killing his sheep. But there’s nothing hereditary about wildness. It’s learned. They’ll be just like dogs—only wouldn’t it be fine to have a real wolf?”

“I don’t think it’s worth it. Mom almost had brain damage worrying the other night when you were out feeling sorry over that dog, wandering around along the river.”

“My feelings are my own.”

“Maybe so, but maybe—”

“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,” said 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.

“Do you cook?” she asked, staring at Sarah’s breasts, thinking in horror that such a natural shape could only mean she used no supports; but, forcing herself to be more composed, she realized it was only her imagination which saw the details, and the outline of the straps could be seen across Sarah’s back, though there seemed a kind of indecency in that as well. No, it wasn’t indecency. But something it was.

“Yes, I cook,” said Sarah, and smiled.

“What do you cook?”

“A little of this and a little of that.” She laughed.

They seated themselves, John and Sarah on the chairs and Wilson and Della in the swing. John’s gaze wandered frequently to his father, who looked to have aged eight years since he had gone away, and who said no more than four words the whole evening. Della saw sadness creep into her son’s eyes then, and thought to herself, He doesn’t understand that it’s not so bad to be old. Then she was drawn back to Sarah by her voice, and wondered why no one else had thought she was very strange. There had been a whole yard full of people talking about having seen her, and not one had said, “There’s something a little odd about her, attractive and frightening.” I must be mistaken about this, she thought. Feelings can be wrong. And to prove it she bombarded Sarah with countless questions to prove or disprove her normalcy, looking for her to either betray herself and confirm the suspicions or absolve them.

“How old are you?”

“Thirty-two.”

“How old is your mother?”

“Sixty-three. How old is yours?”

“My mother’s in heaven. Did you grow up in a city?”

“Well, yes and no. We lived in Mosstown when I was about twelve or thirteen.”

“Is this the first time you’ve been married?”

“Mother! What a question. Believe me, Sarah, usually my mother’s quite nice, keeps to herself. . . isn’t nosy. . . .”

“I don’t mind, John. I’ve been married before, Mrs. Montgomery.”

“Has Mom been feeling all right lately, Dad?”

“Yes,” said Wilson, smiling and looking at Sarah. “She has.”

“Two times,” said Sarah.

“Two times!” exclaimed Della, not wanting to show surprise, but unable to hide it. Two previous marriages seemed to pretty much confirm her suspicions, in some way not altogether clear.

“I know it seems like that,” said Sarah. “It strikes me like that too sometimes. But, believe me, it all sneaks up on you so slowly that the numbers have nothing to do with it.”

“Three husbands,” said Della, this time more in personal wonder than in surprise.

“Mother! What’s the matter with you?”

“No, John,” said Sarah, touching his arm. “Listen, Mrs. Montgomery,” and she looked intently into her eyes. Della tried to look away, but felt as though she couldn’t. “I was married when I was sixteen. I had a baby. The doctor said I would probably have no more. My husband was a roofer and worked early in the mornings before the heat of the afternoon but when the surface would be more dangerous because of the dew. We lived together a year and a half. Then he fell and was dead. That’s the way they told me: ‘He fell and he’s dead.’ That was all. Naturally, I couldn’t believe it at first. Even after I took everything out of the house that reminded me—his clothes, his guns—I sold his tools from the basement and cleaned up the piles of lumber he had taken off our old garage to make a boat with. Still it seemed he wouldn’t go away, but was always just in the next room, walking around, fooling with his harmonica or thinking about buying an automobile.”

Wilson began to fall asleep, and his rocking swing stopped.

“I thought it was more than I could bear. Then my baby died, and without reason. Just one morning when I went over to lift her from her crib, she was dead. We lived on the edge of town then and I ran in to our doctor and brought him, and he told me, ‘She’s dead.’ It was a fact then. Dead. Now she could be buried. Dead; that meant she was no longer. That meant that something that had been wasn’t any longer, come and gone. And I told myself that, and tried to keep eating, and tried to sleep, and found a job in a factory, and gave the house back to the bank and rented a room from an old lady, and lived for several years like I was dreaming. Several years, Mrs. Montgomery. One year, then two, then three. Month after month, never going out, having no friends, waiting quietly with Mrs. Wokey, and sitting in my room listening to her, peaceful until she went to bed and her footsteps carried by my door, because then it seemed like I would be alone. The sound of that old woman’s footsteps was the most precious thing I had. So I always tried to be asleep before that. Many nights I would try to calm myself with self-imposed peaceful thoughts, then her terrible mounting of the staircase would begin and I would listen to the living, last sounds carrying by my door, wide awake. My light burned all night.”

Della began to shake her head.

“No,” Sarah continued. “The more despairingly I tell it, the more accurate. I lived for years like that. At first I tried to withstand the temptation of talking to myself, but gave in when my thoughts became much like talking themselves and the only way I could keep from saying little things endlessly to myself, like ‘What are you going to do tonight?’ was to say them out loud. So I conversed with myself about the daily routines of my life. Then two months after starting this the bus driver of the bus I took to work in the morning asked me while handing back my change if I wouldn’t go to a movie with him that weekend. I looked at him and he smiled. I was frightened, but, looking into his face while he smiled, I felt like I had never seen what a smile was before, or what it meant. It meant simply, I am happy, and wish you to be.’ It’s a wonderful thing to smile—showing one’s teeth. It’s a guarantee that the world is what we make it, and not by definition ugly. He saw that I was frightened. . . . I’d never looked at him before. That will show you how I was those years. Three years of riding that bus and I’d never looked at the driver. He said I could tell him the next morning and his mustache twitched. So all that night I thought about nothing else. I talked it over with myself after Mrs. Wokey went to bed. I didn’t go to work the rest of the week, so that I wouldn’t have to answer.

“Sometime after my twenty-first birthday (birthdays have always been important to me) I did go out with him. He owned his own automobile, and after the movie (which made me laugh and picture myself as the heroine) we drove out into the country, and the wind came in the windows, and I could put my head out and watch the night reel by, my hair blowing back against the rear window. I was nearly delirious with private joy, and I was afraid he would see it on my face and would think it meant something. It seemed like we were flying. I know at one time he said we were going fifty miles an hour. That seems slow now, but nothing will ever be so fast. My mind was secretly racing. I imagined myself flying recklessly, casting all caution to the wind, putting my life on the line for a few moments of mad, frantic thrills. I had never felt like that before. I thought if Mrs. Wokey were to see me she would be shocked and scold me and tell me to get out of her house, though that would hurt her very much because she loved me and desperately wanted to keep me close to her old, quiet ways. I felt they were evil thoughts. Cecil drove me home and I rushed inside, ran upstairs to my room and watched him drive away. I sat by my little table until I was sure I had my pounding heart under control, and went downstairs. Mrs. Wokey was reading one of her magazines and I went out and got a bowl of ice cream and ate the whole thing. I thought what it would be for me to flip out a cigarette and light it—what she would think.

“ ‘Thing’s are mighty quiet around here tonight,’ I said to Mrs. Wokey.

“ ‘Well, yes they are,’ she returned and looked at me from over her magazine.

“ ‘Very quiet,’ I said. ‘Of course there’s no reason for anything to be really jumping.’ And I ran upstairs, feeling her eyes following me, went into my room and looked at my merry self in the mirror. But the next night, Sunday, I could not fall asleep before the footsteps came by the door, and the fear returned.

“Two years later—two years of falling back into my old fears and dreaming ways, and rising up above them for moments of happiness, only to fall back again, and finally leveling out—Cecil and I were married.

“The first several weeks of living with him, I remembered Bill and wondered if I shouldn’t run away. But that was mostly when I was alone, and when Cecil came home I felt better, and then I didn’t remember Bill any more.

“Cecil had a terrible temper, and though he was never violent around me, and tried to hide it, I could tell when he would bump his head or see something he didn’t like that his true reactions, if he didn’t keep them hidden and falsify them, would be abnormally brutal. Sometimes he would even look at me like an animal when I’d done something he didn’t like. Yet those times were very rare. . . . It’s just that he lived in sort of a set way. He always sat in the same chair, slept on the same side, approached any problems with the same attitude, wouldn’t eat certain foods that he had decided long ago were distasteful regardless of the way they were fixed, listened to the same programs on the radio, went to bed within a half-hour of the same time every night and generally planned out every waking hour according to a long schedule.

“After a year they put him on night shift. He was very angry about that, and said there were plenty of other drivers with less seniority, and that there were only two night buses. So he had to work Saturday nights, which was his bowling night, and there was no end to the pain that caused him. I tried to get him to quit driving, and even offered to go back to the factory while he found another job, because after two months he still resented it as much as he had when he’d first been notified of his shift change. But he said he wouldn’t let me work, and for some reason refused to look for another job in the afternoon after he had gotten up. It became frustrating, because he seemed so miserable, yet didn’t seem to want to do anything about it. . . .

“Maybe I better stop.”

“No, no,” said Della, “go on. I can’t tell you how interested I am.”

“You’re so kind. I knew she would be wonderful,” she said to John, and put out her arm. He turned to her, away from watching his sleeping father, and smiled as though he’d been listening. On the horizon, an exhausted rim of pink was all that remained of the daylight, which stretched, yawned and finally slid unannounced below the dark line of the ground.

“Then after leaving home on a Saturday night at a little before eleven so that he could be at work at a quarter after and have a cup of coffee at the station before beginning the eleven-thirty run, he didn’t come home. I waited clear through Sunday, Sunday night and Monday morning. Monday afternoon I became frantic and telephoned Bart Lewis, a bowling friend of his. But he hadn’t seen him, and sounded like he resented being called—as though my husband’s business shouldn’t concern him. At eleven thirty I called the station. The man from the bus company, in a voice like a radio announcer, told me that Cecil had not driven a bus since over six months ago. He elaborated to say, ‘It was December and Cecil was upset about the shift change. We explained to him that it was only for a reorganizational period of two weeks while the new drivers and new routes were worked out. He got angry, demanded his money for the last week and quit, so soon that he never learned that because of so much protest the reorganization plan had been discontinued and the company agreed to have the training period of the new drivers be completed on the night buses. But he’d got his money and left, and never came back. Who did you say was calling?’

“I set the phone down into its cradle and looked at the floor. The green specks in the linoleum swirled around. I felt like I was drowning. December. For over three months Cecil’d been leaving home every night at ten minutes to eleven and coming home at seven thirty in the morning, sometimes as late as eight, but never as late as eight thirty. Every week he gave me money for the groceries, my own allowance, and paid the bills. Nearly every night he would complain about having to go to work just as the rest of the folks were beginning to have a good time.

“It was more than a betrayal or a lie. It had no explanation that I could discover. It was like someone saying to you, ‘What you know isn’t true.’ And when, in indignation, you turn to your storehouse of undeniable facts to prove yourself, you find they’ve shifted just enough to make you out to be a fool.

“Then the shame: trying to find out what one’s husband has been doing every night of the week, and Saturdays too, for three months. The bowling was a ruse as well, and alleged friendships . . . everything. His mother’s address in St. Louis belonged to a trucking company. The high-school ring in his drawer turned out to be authentic, but the few years he’d spent there twenty-five years ago were gone from the memory of the teachers and only dimly remembered by others, who were able, however, to point out where he had lived with his parents. So I stood there and looked at the house, and realized how foolish I must have seemed to them, and to the people inside looking out the windows.

“I did everything in my power to discover the long circumstances that brought about the disappearance of my husband, and everything failed. Some mornings, on their way to work, neighbors reported to have seen him driving home, sometimes from the west, on Sutherland Drive, sometimes from the north from East Fourteenth Street and sometimes down the back alleys of Woodville. The matter was turned over to the police and they went about for several weeks with pictures in their shirt pockets, asking, ‘Have you seen this man, this Cecil Baynard? He’s disappeared from his wife.’ And ‘When did you last see him? Did he have any friends? Did he have a girlfriend that you might know of or have heard mentioned?’ Simply nothing.

“By then I was twenty-three. I suppose many of my neighbors thought that I went into shock, because for a long time I didn’t venture outside my house except for the barest necessities, and even then at the checkout lines I would ignore their eyes. But it wasn’t that. I was simply making up my mind. I knew how much money I had, how long I could keep paying the bills, how long the creditors would take after I quit paying before they would refuse to absorb any more loss at the request of their conscience, turn off the electricity, snip off my heat supply and demand the three keys which allowed free, unobstructed coming and going from the house. I knew that when this time came I would have to be prepared to move and go on, but I didn’t intend to be fooled into picking out a direction before I’d made up my mind how I was going to feel about what’d happened to me. I refused, in other words, to let the experience have any direct control over my life for the worse, and sat down to decide, practically speaking, just how things were with me.

“There were two things which struck me with particular force. First: the lunch pail. He never went to work without a packed lunch pail. I always filled it after the news and I couldn’t remember a time when he’d forgotten to take it. And every time I’d arrive at an explanation for his disappearance and secret activities, I was reminded of the lunch pail.” She stopped talking.

“Go on,” said Della.

“He never forgot his lunch pail. The second thing was when after the police sounded the river—I believe that’s the term—anyway, with hooks and such they brought up a body from the mud bottom, a man with pockets filled with sand and small rocks. He had no identification on him and they wanted me to see if he held any resemblance to my husband. So I went down to the morgue with them, but when we arrived and before we were inside, an inspector stepped out, helping a middle-aged woman by supporting her arm. She was in tears, and he quietly told the policeman who had brought me that they already had positive identification and that I could go home. It wasn’t my husband. It was then, looking at that other woman, that I was reminded that I knew what it felt like to have someone dead: Cecil was not, and could not be, dead. Because I knew what that felt like. I knew that feeling too well, and if Cecil had been dead though outside my immediate knowledge, I would have known. That night he’d left his lunch pail. Something had been in his mind.

“So with these two things—the knowledge of his living, and the knowledge of him and lunch pails—I did the only thing to save my own pride. I quit caring and divorced him. I moved again, and lived by myself, working at a button factory. I expected to never have anything to do with marriage or men for as long as I lived.”

John reached out and touched her, imposing silence. Wilson’s breathing was heavy. Every once in a while he would jerk, moving in some faraway dream, keeping ahead of the foxes. Della looked at Sarah in the smoky night light and thought, There’s still something not revealed—something that you’ve kept from me. You’ve not explained it all.

What happened in Della’s mind was unusual. She took it upon herself to get to the bottom of Sarah’s strangeness, and spent the next several years visiting her and watching her closely. She talked to her friends incessantly about how Sarah did this and Sarah did that, as though trying to prove by a lengthy induction that her son’s wife was completely human. And they listened to her, half out of not wanting to be unkind and half out of interest in hearing some passing clue that would solve the mystery in everyone else’s mind: What was she like when the shades were pulled and she turned her attention to her senses? It was many, many years before this idea even dawned upon Della—that the secret could be in the flesh, in Sarah’s hips and thighs and arms and hands, and not inside. She looked for something beneath the skin, something in Sarah’s personality to explain it, not thinking for a moment that there was personality and something else, different and completely made up of senses. Her discovery of this came much later. Her neighbors in town never took it upon themselves to invite her over to their houses on Saturday night, or any other night that it might start, to listen to the joyous moaning, screaming cat howls that came from John’s house and went on for as long as several hours, each wavering note cutting through the stillness. Nor did they explain to her that they’d gotten to enjoy lying in bed, listening and wondering. On infrequent Sunday afternoons when the air would be full, their children would ask, “Mommy, why does she make those noises? They frighten me.” “There’s no reason to be frightened. It’s all very natural.” But the only thing they could promise was that it didn’t have to be frightening, if you kept your wits about you when you heard it come ripping through the quick evening air.

They never talked about it to Della, and seldom among themselves, because the shrieking cat howls cut deep into them, like the voice of hidden, repressed desires, fantasies not actualized, abandoned but not forgotten. Hearing her was like listening to the screams of your own imprisoned passions.

Wilson had only one dog left—a fourteen-year-old beagle named Cindy, who still carried herself with dignity, though her legs were stiff and crooked and hardly held her up when she ate.