Rock Island Line

by David Rhodes

  “Stop it, you stupid. You don’t hate anybody.”

  “I do.”

  “You don’t.”

  “Leave me alone.”

  “You want a punch in the nose, or a pot of stew on your head?”

  “Stop making jokes.”

  Della took out a cracker, broke it into an oblong, and put it between her teeth and lips, frowned, opened her mouth into a false smile and said, “Grrrr.”

  “Stupid,” said Wilson, but the hostility passed out of his eyes, hid for several moments in his tightened jaw and then disappeared back into the dungeon of his feelings where he kept it nailed to the wall.

  Della let the cracker dissolve, then swallowed it. She opened the lid, poked the fork in at the potato lumps and took the lid off. “All ready,” she said. “Get that messy thing off the table.”

  Wilson took the grinder back into the pantry. He picked the paper up by two sides and let the coffee slide down into a container marked ground. Not quite all of it would fit in, and he sheepishly poured the rest into a jar lid and set it on the iron stove top above the heated water. He lifted the fire cover and stuffed the newspaper into the heart of the stove, where the flames danced around it for several moments as if wondering what kind of an object it was and if it was capable of burning, then savagely set upon it and reduced it in a matter of no time at all into a thin crust of ash, worthless and without weight. Wilson put the lid down.

  “Fire is brutal,” he said.

  Della lifted giant spoons of stew out of the iron skillet and filled up the plates.

  “Yes,” said Della. “It seems so ruthless and terrible.”

  “I’m famished,” said Wilson. “And besides that it’s easy to see how they thought in mythologies that it was stolen from the gods.”

  They began to eat.

  “I wouldn’t think that. That doesn’t make any sense to me.”

  “Of course it does. You’re just not thinking about it right. See, it doesn’t behave like anything else—anything. There’s nothing so thoroughly, painfully destructive. It makes no sense in the scheme of nature—it serves no function.”

  “I agree with that,” said Della. “But just for those reasons I would think it would seem all that more unnatural among gods, who were supposed to live in a more beautiful world. Don’t eat so fast.”

  “Once it finally gets down to the right temperature it’s driven your hunger within an inch of its life,” he said, and continued, “but think how uncivilized it would be without fire. Everything we think of as being refined is in direct correspondence with our not having to live in the snow.”

  “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with being civilized. And you can’t either,” said Della.

  “So it’s gotten to that!” cried Wilson.

  “Go ahead and eat as fast as you want.”

  Wilson went back into the store and returned with a honeydew melon, which they nearly devoured before the water on the stove began making sounds like tiny hammer blows on the sides of the pot. Wilson managed to talk her into carrying the coffee outside to the porch swing. Duke met them and tried to jump his 125 pounds up against Della’s 95. Wilson wrestled him down the steps and ran off into the yard with him, looking for something he could put between them and pull. Della looked out at the pale blue sky, the thin stratus clouds in the distance, the flat bottom parts lit golden and the rounded tops shaded dusty gray from the invisible sun below the horizon. The trees in the distance were beginning to fade into each other. Duke growled as he tried to pull an old shirt spotted with paint away from Wilson. Then they gave it up and began fighting with each other, Duke growling and Wilson laughing. I love you, she thought and her feelings rushed inside her. She tried momentarily to keep them in, then felt herself dissolve outward, farther than the yard, farther than the horizon, and as far as she could see into the sky, but his net drew her back.

  Wilson soon returned and they drank their coffee together, watching the darkening evening. There were too few clouds to keep the light herded around into view, and because the moon had not yet risen, stars quickly began to come, as though a pin were sticking tiny holes into the black cloth covering, letting small streams of light down from far above in a place where it was never dark. Soon they could see Boötes and Hercules with his four-star club, his right leg winding around in a circle. The Great Bear stalked across the horizon in all his sidereal glory. Above him, nearly at the zenith, the two milky streams of the Milky Way intersected.

  “What do you suppose the constellations mean?” asked Wilson.

  Della began, “My father used to think you could smell panthers.”

  “How so?” asked Wilson, finding it difficult to keep his thoughts from wandering.

  “He said they smelled sweet and warm—that if you were walking at night—especially if you were afraid, because animals have a haunting sense of fear—and you smelled a sweet, warm smell which as it grew in strength made you forget your fear and drew you toward it—that was a panther. Also he said they sound just like a woman screaming, and they only scream at night, and sometimes scream from the tops of trees in order to drive you mad with fear. He told me panthers love blood, and in the moonlight they cast a shadow of a man on the ground, and that if they died a normal death then an evil child would be born, but if they were killed then their souls could rest. He said the smell was a mixture of sweet clover and animal warmth, with sometimes a little clove. He shot one once.”

  They remained long after they had set the empty cups away from them on the porch floor. Della got up once to begin the dishes, but Wilson drew her back and promised to do them himself, tomorrow. He suspected Della knew more about her father than she was willing to share with him; but as they grew older and their faces looked more alike, each time he asked her about him she would offer more. He already knew of the smell of panthers, though she had forgotten telling him, and was waiting, as she talked, for something he hadn’t heard. He thought momentarily about life and its problems but his thoughts wandered, and before devoting himself completely to a new theme that he had come upon, he acknowledged that, no, he didn’t care as much for the problems and questions of life as he had when he was younger, though he felt it was not that he was incapable (that his wits had slowed), but that it seemed increasingly of little consequence and a full life could be accomplished just as well without them. “If it’s all right,” he said, “I’m going to go fishing Saturday night with Sam and Dave.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “Down to the English River, I guess . . . for catfish.”

  “Fine,” she said. “Can you take me over to Clara’s before you go?”

  “We’re going to be out almost all night. We’ve got Dave’s boat and we’re going to use bank lines.”

  “Good. Then I can ask Clara to come stay with me. I want to find out if something’s wrong at their house. I get a feeling from Meg that things aren’t going well. The poor girl seems to sulk all day and never talks to the other kids.” She went inside. Wilson remained for another half-hour talking to Duke and thinking of flatheads lying in mud-bottom holes in the river. In the morning Della saw a tree covered with Monarchs bunched for migration, so thick that the tree, except for the trunk, did not exist at all, and was only butterflies.

  Wilson left early in the evening, before Clara Hocksteader arrived, though Della had made her promise to come before dark. He wondered if he shouldn’t go a mile and a half out of his way to the river to make sure she was on her way, so if she wasn’t coming, he could return home and tell his wife, because sooner or later she would begin to worry. But he didn’t. He took his team out of the cover of Sharon’s trees, exposed them to the face of the twilight sky and watched the mouth of the road to the Hocksteaders’ yawn open on his left, beckoning him to be sure first of all of Della’s feelings, and he went past it, forgiving himself at the same moment because of his tearing desire to be in the boat. The night grew darker. He put on a jacket and felt to see if he had brought
matches for his pipe. He breathed the heavy air, and lay imaginative plans for the crafty big fish. His team went at a slow trot, and felt Wilson tug back on them every now and then, though Sam and Dave were already there waiting. Purposely he was going slowly because he was putting himself ready to fish. Thinking slow, deliberate thoughts, moving with extreme caution and exacting precision, he was trying to think like a flathead. Sam and Dave, waiting for him at the water, were not talking, but were, like Wilson, fixing themselves to fish. It was late enough in the fall so that the mosquitoes and biting flies, gnats and chiggers were gone. In the timber, barred owls sounded like a dinner table of laughing, howling dwarfs.

  At the bridge, Wilson got out and dropped the shaft away from the team and took them down into the ditch, where his first thought was to leave them in harness; then he decided there was no excuse for that and went back to the buggy for the halters and tethering rope. Returning the harness to behind the seat, he took out the leeches and one hand pole and was aware, while climbing down beneath the bridge, of the still unbroken reflection of the moon on the water, like an unblinking eye. Below the wooden planks in the shadows along the bank were Sam and Dave, their gray hats muting their faces, straight sharp gold hooks and spoons sunk farther than the barb into their blocked crowns. Around his neck Dave had lengths of line, some longer than others, and some weighted with shot, making a kind of mane falling down-below his waist. When he moved, the hooks rattled faintly together like frozen teeth. Sam had the gaff and a lantern, and he held it up above his head in order to help Wilson make his way along the bank through the brown stalks of weeds. The water seemed to be not moving at all.

  But once in the boat and away from the hard mud, a strong, deep current caught ahold of the bottom of the boat and carried them downstream. And still the surface seemed unruffled. The moon’s reflection stretched out into a thin yellow line in front of them, coming to one end of the johnboat and disappearing. They fought with the oars and rowed slowly upstream, no faster than a walking dog. Sam had put the lantern in the bow, lighting only the ends of the plants along one bank. Deep, silent strokes of the oars, making noise only from the creaking oarlocks. They passed up the river, around Four-Mile Corner. No talking or moving except for the oars. Here they could hear the shallows. Once in them, the water noise was deafening. Then they kept to the south bank, where it was deeper, and went on. One hundred yards upstream the river broadened and there was a gravel bank extending halfway across. Wrinkled circles of swirling water were lit by the lamp. The noise of the shallows was gone. Wilson, sitting in the stern, saw Dave light a cigar, and every time he inhaled Wilson could see his face.

  At first Wilson had felt he would rather not have the lamp, because on the ride from home he’d had the pleasant sensation of slipping unobserved through the night, drawn by sounds which were not his own. At first he’d felt that the light was not fitting and, at the very point where it became of use, became too bright and destroyed the feeling of selflessness and unity. But by the time they had cleared the shallows he’d decided that the light was better—that it was more honest for three men on a river to carry a lantern, confessing their intrusion and adding something which, viewed from a distance, was impelling, mysterious and beautiful. It was a way of offering themselves for inspection, and though they were not, and could never be, part of the natural world of night, by doing it they could feel accepted. It is better to admit that, thought Wilson, and to stay away from fantasy. They heard several ducks get up from an unseen backwater, and a whippoorwill. Bats flying above the surface of the water passed through the wingspread of their yellow light, searching frantically for what remained of the summer’s insects.

  A creek willow stood out over the water, and onto several of its branches they tied weighted lines, baited with leeches which smaller fish could chew on without damaging them and without hooking themselves. They broke off three dozen branches of varying lengths, and as Dave rowed on farther upstream in the silent, quick water, Wilson and Sam tied on the lines and threaded the brown leeches. Then in places Dave would pull over close to the shore and Sam and Wilson would jab the thick end of one of the limber poles a half-foot into the bank so that the line fell into the water just at the edge. One quarter-mile upstream they were out of poles and lines. They pulled the bow of the johnboat up onto a sandbar and several minutes later had a fire burning next to the water. All of them smoked, sitting on logs. The wood was dry (shag-bark hickory) and it burned clear and bright, and the pockets of air exploding in the dead cells of the wood, sending sparks upward, was the only sound they could hear. The moon was below the trees on the opposite side of the river.

  Then downstream a channel cat broke water, and its thrashing filled the silence. Wilson got into the boat and Sam pushed him away from the bank and he floated downstream. The lantern still burned resolutely in the front. He found the fish, anchored, and brought him in with the help of the gaff, unfastened the hook from his mouth and threw the undisturbed leech and line back into the water. Being careful to avoid the horns, he fastened the fish onto the stringer and tossed him into the water. Maybe three pounds, he thought, or maybe less. Then another began thrashing twenty yards upstream and he got that one too, rebaited the line, reset the pole in a new area of the bank and rowed back toward the fire, where he soon saw Sam and Dave, both of them nearly sixty, sitting and looking at the orange fire. The whippoorwill again, then a screech owl, then two. I should do this more often, thought Wilson, it’s foolish not to when the experience is so satisfying.

  Dave pulled him back up on shore, and they fastened the stringer to the bank. He had barely sat down when another, louder, thrashing began. Dave took this one, and Wilson watched him floating effortlessly down the dark water until he could no longer see him or the lantern, and Sam sat down and they began to talk about famous dogs, their courage and resourcefulness. Sam regretted the death of Jumbo, and they recalled several nights of running fox. The light of the fire enclosed them like a room.

  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.