Rock Island Line

by David Rhodes

  “No, you’ll be wanting the house,” she said. “Of course you will. John and I felt the same way about the house across the street—but there was nothing we could ever do about that.”

  “No, no. This is what I did have in mind—if it’s all right—that is, I hoped we’d do—anyway, is there anyone living in Grandma’s house?”

  “Well . . . no.”

  “Then I propose Mal and I live there.”

  “But that old house hasn’t been lived in for years. It isn’t even modern. There were some Amish there for a couple of years and they just tore out everything. And that was five or six years ago. I tell you, I don’t think it’s fit for a person to live in at all.”

  “Is it that bad?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I’m sure it’s not all that bad. I’ve had my heart set on it.”

  “It’s not so bad,” said Frunt. “We’ve tried to keep it up.”

  “And the old Ford. I did sort of hope that I might have Dad’s old Ford.”

  “Of course, July. Don’t you understand—all of this belongs to you—legally. It’s all yours.”

  “Legally speaking,” said Frunt. “Down on paper it all comes under your name. Your poor aunt’s name and mine appear nowhere. But then there’s never such provisions. Thank goodness there’s such a thing as decency, though that seems to be going out in this new day and age.”

  “Enough, you old fool. Get out of the kitchen until we call you.”

  Perry obediently slunk away.

  “And I was wondering if I could have the bird feeder that Dad was making in the basement—if it’s still there.”

  “Of course you can.”

  “It’s yours, stupid,” said Mal.

  “The taxes,” Perry mumbled that night before he went to bed. “I suppose you’ll be wanting to pay the taxes from now on.”

  July was so excited that he couldn’t possibly wait until tomorrow to see his grandparents’ old house.

  “Oh, it’s ghastly, and it’d look so much more fearful at night,” said his Aunt Becky. “I just don’t think it’s fit for a person to live in.”

  “Come on, take us out there, please.”

  “We can wait till tomorrow, July.”

  “No we can’t. Bring a flashlight if you have one. We’ll go without if you don’t.”

  Perry was in bed. The three of them drove the five miles out into the country and parked in the overgrown driveway. In the moonlight they could see several broken windows in front. A brief flurry of wind moved the windmill blades around sixty degrees and the shaft groaned.

  “Let’s go back,” said Mal, but July had already disappeared into the high weeds in the yard. “Come on,” he said. “It’s only a little ways.”

  “There might be chiggers in there,” warned Aunt Becky.

  “What’re chiggers?” asked Mal.

  “The porch swing’s still here!” sang out July. “Hurry, bring the flashlight.”

  Both of them dutifully set off into the weeds and, reaching the steps at the same time, collapsed the bottom board with their combined weight. Mal gave a little scream.

  “I tell you,” whispered Becky, “I just don’t think this place is fit to be lived in.”

  Then July called from inside for the light and they went in.

  “Isn’t this something!” he exclaimed to Mal once he had the flashlight in his hand. “Look at that magnolia wallpaper! Look at the woodwork.”

  “It’s awful,” said Mal.

  “No it isn’t. Look at these light switches . . . see, you turn them like this. See that? I’ll bet you don’t know what that is.”

  “So what?”

  “It’s an air control for the furnace. All manual, but it acts like a heat control—it is a heat control.”

  They went into the kitchen.

  “Is there any water in the house?” asked Mal.

  “No,” said Becky from the living room. “The Amish who lived here tore it out.”

  “Well, I can see not using it. But why did they have to tear it out?”

  “I suppose somehow it got in the way.”

  I’m not living in a house with no water, Mal assured herself. If I’m expected to do that, I’m going back home. If there’s no water, no me.

  The idea of going back East made her less anxious. After all, she reasoned—whenever I decide to, just leave. Simple. Much of the wood was rotten where the counter was attached to the wall. Rot was in the windowsills, and cobwebs covered the dark ceilings. July saw a grate overhead he could remember dropping marbles down, watching, on hands and knees in the room above the tops of people’s heads. One could clearly tell that as far as he was concerned, he’d found his place.

  “Isn’t brownstone a little uncommon in the country?” Mal said to Becky as July stamped about upstairs and they stood still, not wanting to go in any direction without a light for fear of bumping into something or falling into a hole.

  “Naturally,” said Becky. “That’s what we kids always thought. No one seems to know exactly how it happened. It’s a much older house than any others around. Even when Dad bought it, July’s grandfather Wilson, no one knew how it’d come to be here. The man he bought it from could show who he bought it from, and that man was dead. The record of deeds showed who he bought it from and nobody knew him, or’d heard of his family. The farm’d originally been homesteaded by a man with an odd last name . . . let me see, some kind of animal or something . . . wait—Kingbird. No, Kingfisher, that was it, Kingfisher, who’d homesteaded it back in the early eighteen hundreds. But how or why it came to be made out of brownstone is a mystery not likely to ever be turned over.”

  “And no one ever knew anything about Kingfisher?”

  “Well, not really. John, July’s father, was real interested in it for a while and he looked up all the old records he could find of a famous outlaw named Kingfisher, and it was his contention that it could’ve been the same one. But Dad, like the rest of us, thought it was a little far-fetched—especially because Kingfisher lived mostly farther west and south, and he would’ve had to’ve been in his eighties—and it showed that he kept it ten years.”

  “Does sound a little suspicious.”

  “Hey, come up here!” called July.

  “We haven’t got a l-i-g-h-t,” called Mal.

  “Oh, be right down.”

  July wanted to spend the night sleeping in the barn watching for owls, but he was coaxed back to the house in Sharon Center by way of going first to Iowa City and picking up Butch and their suitcases. Early the next morning he was outside, clearing away the cobwebs from the Ford, inflating the tires and throwing out the bird nests. The morning grew older. Not knowing much about mechanics, he was always running across the street for advice and tools, a battery, oil and gasoline. Late that evening it started and everyone but Perry took a ride around the block; they used the headlights on the last stretch of the road.

  Mal simply waited. Though usually not good at biding her time, she found herself content just to wait until what was going to happen began to show itself. All decisions were off until then. She found sitting in the yard so pleasant and whole afternoons sped by with such quickness that when it would seem she’d just come out, the sun would begin sinking toward the horizon, once noticed go faster, until the chill of the evening and Becky’s call to dinner forced her in. It’s good for color composition, she rationalized, not sure exactly how it would work, but convinced that because nature could blend colors so well, she would learn it simply by exposure. More than anything she missed having a place to paint without fear of being too obvious. Artists aren’t performers, she thought. They don’t like to be watched. But then actors were artists, weren’t they, sort of? Yes, but they were performing artists: a big difference.

  July told her that Becky had cornered him about being married and he’d had to tell her the truth: they weren’t. Then the pressure seemed to be on; waiting was interminable. Twice Mal was sure that comments were aimed at he
r like barbed hooks, to go in easy but catch and rip, and she was just ready to tell July the time had come to take her back to the depot when he decided to move to the country house, and then they were alone.

  At first it was too much to believe. Surely she wasn’t really living out in the middle of Iowa, more than fifteen miles from the nearest town over two thousand, in a house that leaked when it rained, with a piston-type water pump that July’d put in that had to be turned on by inching one’s way down into the damp basement and sticking a screwdriver into a little metal box at just the right place to snap the switch—for water that left rust spots when it sat overnight. There wasn’t a blade of grass in the yard. All giant weeds. After they’d cut them down with a sickle, they found an unpainted picket fence. Then the drain line plugged up and the basement began to fill with little splushes every time the toilet flushed, so they had to go out to the barn and sit on a rail when they wanted to go to the bathroom. “You’ll have to dig up the septic tank,” they were told, after a coiled wire they’d rented hadn’t been able to penetrate from the basement, six inches deep with brown water alive with bits of toilet paper and chunks of floating feces, to where the problem was. “It’ll be OK,” said July, “as soon as we know where to dig.” The broken windows still needed to be replaced. There were no storm windows, large cracks in the foundation, and winter was officially a month and a half away.

  Mal simply couldn’t believe it.

  July learned from one of the men at the garage that the septic tank had been taken out—that there was nothing down there but a straight line of four-inch clay tile, nothing else. So six feet from the house July began to dig.

  “How deep does it have to be?” asked Mal.

  “It depends on how big the tank is. Anyway, it’s seven feet down to the basement, add another foot and the height of the tank and you have it.”

  “July?”

  “What?” Another shovelful of dirt flew up out of the three-foot hole.

  “We aren’t really going to live here, are we? We don’t know anybody—anybody our age. I feel like people must think we’re—well, that we’re sort of degenerates living here. They all stare when they drive by—I can see them.”

  “Nonsense. By next spring we’ll have the place in shape.”

  “We can only do so much. You can. I’m almost no help at all. We’re going to have to get jobs, and we can’t depend on that car”—referring to the old Ford. “We don’t have driver’s licenses for this state. Becky said it was against the law to put in a septic tank without a permit. The yard’ll never be a yard. It’s all weeds. We won’t have time to fix the roof before it snows, the nights are cold and I just feel so weighted down all the time—oh, forget it,” and she burst into tears and ran inside.

  July sat down in his hole and felt a pocket of nervous energy swelling up in his throat. Everything Mal had said was true . . . except about the yard. He was sure grass would eventually take over if you kept mowing everything down. Maybe I’m idealistic, he thought. Maybe it won’t be as easy as I’d hoped.

  Maybe I’m just a fool.

  Then he checked his impulse to run back into the house immediately: it was always better to take time and think things out before rushing ahead. Whenever other problems had sprung up between them and he hadn’t taken time to think, he’d ended up saying things he regretted and making a bad situation worse. Mal could always think much faster in a tense situation and whatever he said she could shoot holes through. This time he would let things settle before deciding on how to deal with them.

  The first realistic thought he had was that she might be right—it might be just the stupidest thing to be living out here. It might be completely obvious to everyone else that it couldn’t be done, without unhappiness. So what Mal had taken to be staring from the slow cars that drove by in front (and he’d seen them too) was in actuality looks of astonished wonder: How could anyone be so stupid as to try to live there ? Is it some kind of experiment? I wonder how long the girl’ll hold out.

  He reconsidered. No, it isn’t that way at all. They’re looking because they’re curious—generally curious—and Mal’s upset. This coincided with the facts as well, and had a better feel. It was more hopeful.

  What was Mal upset about? (Be careful, this one’s tricky—you’ve been fooled before.) Start with what she said: complaints about the house.

  Then it came to him. She didn’t like it here! He mentally shuddered. It wasn’t that she was in a bad mood, or mad at something he’d done, like the time he’d not really listened to what she’d said and had forgotten all about it—important things about painting; and it wasn’t that she just didn’t know what to do with herself—like not being in school or working. She didn’t want to live here! Nothing could be more awful. All along . . . he could see that from the very beginning she’d not wanted to stay. She was unhappy just being in this place. He’d brought her 967 miles to be in an unhappy place. He leaped out of the hole, throwing down his shovel, and ran into the house, tracking black mud across the thin red rug they’d bought at an auction for a dollar and talked all night about how it added just the perfect color to the room.

  “Mal, Mal!” He found her in the dining room, sitting beside the window, ran to her and took her by the shoulders, turning her toward him. “I’m sorry. We’ll go back to Philadelphia this minute. We’ll pack right now. We’ll drive the Ford. Hurry. I guess I never really thought you didn’t like it here—basically. A few annoyances was all, I thought. Come on, we’ll pack right now.” He was pulling her up.

  “Stop touching me!” she yelled, and shook herself free. Then after a period of red silence said, “The Ford wouldn’t get that far.”

  “Sure it would.”

  “It breaks down every other day. It’d never make it.”

  “Then I’ll take you to the train and I’ll drive it out. Two days. Only two days and we’ll be together again. I care about you much more than living here. Never forget that. Come on.”

  “We can’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because I spent all the money!” she said, just before bursting into tears and burying her face in her hands. July picked up her purse from the table, took out the little leather pouch where he knew she kept the “money to the East,” and opened it. A single dollar bill was all that was left, after it had been raided now and then for groceries or materials to fix up the house. He held it as a proof against him, undeniable evidence of his own selfishness. He put it down and tried to think. Mal continued to cry.

  “Oh, it makes me so mad!” she screamed, and slammed her fists down on the tabletop.

  July jumped back. “What?” he said.

  “Crying. I hate it!”

  “I do too. But wait—I have it!” and he ran upstairs, across the ceiling, back again and down.

  “Here!” he said. “Here!” And dangling from a delicate white-gold chain was a diamond as big as the buttons on her blue dress. “All the money we’ll need.”

  He put it into Mal’s hand. It seemed for an instant as if it were alive, the little chain quivering like a thin fish.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said. “Where’d you get it?”

  “I bought it a long time ago.”

  “Is it real?”

  “Sure it is. I bought it at Snells’ Jewelry, remember that place?”

  “It’s real nice.”

  “It’ll give us enough money to go back East and get a place and take a nice long vacation—say, through the winter.”

  Mal carried the necklace to the mirror in the kitchen and put it on. Looking into her own eyes and admiring the reflection, she thought: Now I must decide to stay or leave. She thought very hard, trying to be as fair as possible, realizing that staying had to mean more now than waiting, and leaving meant forever.

  July came into the kitchen and stood diffidently close to the refrigerator. Her time was up. Whatever she said would be what she decided.

  “I’m not going. But you have to promis
e that we can be more practical.”

  July agreed in an instant. But in the last ten minutes something had changed between them. He wasn’t sure what it was, or exactly what new conditions would be likely to grow from it. Yet something different was in the air. And he noted it.

  They spent all of that evening planning, making lists on a piece of paper, adding figures that represented amounts of money, and taking each other’s clothes off, safe and happy that there was no one for miles, nothing to break their inchoate web of closeness. The diamond was too important, they decided, to sell outright, and they’d look for a place to borrow money on it. Then, with a reliable car and the things they had to have before winter set in, they could buy it back at a little each month. Because most of the work on the house would have to be done by July, Mal took it upon herself to find a job—part time if possible—something where she could earn the $185 they’d figured out they would need each month. One of the upstairs rooms was to become a studio, and July would put another window in the north wall to catch the reflected light. After they got a better car they could take the driving test in Iowa City.

  But the septic tank remained foremost in July’s urgent thoughts, and after they obtained a loan and bought a new car (or at least a newer one than the Ford), a green Chrysler, and Mal was off looking for work, July dug as though he were possessed. He dug the six-foot round hole through the top two feet of black dirt, past a six-inch layer of small rocks, down to a sandier, browner soil, and into clay, which presented such a problem he was finally forced to stop. The clay was so wet and sticky that it wouldn’t come off his shovel when he threw it up out of the hole (now nearly seven feet deep) and it was easier to break away chunks and throw them out. This worked well enough for another six inches, but as the clay became more moist the pieces didn’t stay together as well, and by the time he pulled himself up with the rope fastened to a window frame of the house, he was nearly exhausted with anger and frustration. When Mal came home he had a bucket tied to a rope and they dug the next several feet together: July filling the bucket with his hands and helping her pull it up the first seven feet, and Mal taking it the rest of the way to the oak two-by-twelve laid across the top—and from there to the side where the mixture of clay and water could be dug out and the bucket lowered back down. The rope grew slippery with the clay. Darkness finally sent them tired and hungry back into the house, where they ate a silent meal of pot pies and milk and went straight to bed.