Rock Island Line

by David Rhodes

  “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 m
ade 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 unin
terested 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—”