Rock Island Line

by David Rhodes

  Right away there was a keen sense of challenge. Several of the boys were clearly bigger and tossed bulky bales about with an obvious disregard for their weight, and though no hostility was ever shown and it was obvious that allowances were to be made for his lack of experience, still he felt that even the man on the tractor was anxious to see how he would work out and if he was just a weakling.

  “Here, use these,” said one of the boys beside him on the wagon, and handed him a pair of thin leather gloves. July looked quickly around, suspecting a special advantage had been turned his way, and noticed that the rest were wearing gloves and that his own hands were cut mercilessly from the rope and the clover ends. He soon discovered it wasn’t the weight of the bales so much as their bulky shape that made them hard to handle and exhausted him to such a degree. Three-fourths of his energy was working against itself. Also, he discovered arms could do very little work as compared to legs and back. By the beginning of the afternoon he could manage the bales with the rest of them, but his very bones seemed to ache, and at lunchtime he wished desperately for a place to catch fifteen minutes’ sleep. The other boys played baseball, and, finishing his sandwich, he got up and joined them.

  The air was so thick with hazy moisture that afternoon that it was like sticking your head into a hot, sticky pond and trying to breathe. The direct sun was almost unbearable and the backs of his arms ached from exposure. Some of the boys worked with their shirts off and were as brown as nuts with hard, lean stomach muscles.

  When the others came back from the barn with another empty wagon, they asked for someone else to come up in the mow. July could see that it must be a disagreeable job because no one volunteered, but he thought at least it would be out of the sun and went along with them.

  It turned out to be worse than anything he could ever have imagined. If it was a hundred degrees in the sun, it was an extra twenty or thirty in the barn, where there was no circulation of air whatsoever and the dark roof had had all morning to fry it. As for the humidity, there was simply no comparison. Out in the field was like a cool desert. Two other boys stood with him and waited, talking gloomily; one explained to the other the bad luck he’d been having with girls for the last three years. When July saw what was going to happen, his heart nearly folded up. Lifted by a pulley system pulled by a tractor, suspended from four large hooks, a bundle of eight bales came up, filling the upper door; it caught on the runners and moved into the loft, coming toward them, maybe twelve feet overhead. It came closer until it was almost directly above, then one of the boys beside him called, “Now,” and someone outside pulled the trip rope, releasing the hooks and letting the bales fall. A tremendous cloud of hay dust filled the entire barn, sticking to the sweat on their arms and faces and, except for the hairs in their noses, would have layered their lungs. The two boys rushed forward into the densest part of this cloud, dragging the bales away from where they’d fallen and stacking them along the sides of the barn. July followed suit and managed to get two of them at the expense of nearly twisting his ankle in a hole between two loosely stacked bales, as they were of course walking on layers of already stacked hay. No sooner had he pulled the two bales over to where the other boys had stacked theirs than one of them yelled, “Now,” and almost from nowhere there appeared eight more, which fell into the same places, and they rushed forward again to clear them away before the next bundle.

  “It gets better,” said one of them to July, his face almost completely black with gobs of the tiny pieces of leaf hanging from his nostrils, “when we get the level up so the bales don’t have to fall so far.” July looked. The mow was maybe fifty feet wide, and a third again that long. To go up only three and a half feet would take two layers of bales, 24,500 cubic feet of hay. They had just enough time, working as fast and hard as they could, nearly choking on the dust, to clear away the eight bales before another load fell down. July had made up his mind that each time he would carry three bales back, but there were many times when Jack and Bonesy would get the extra ones and he was thankful for that when it happened.

  After an unimaginably long time there came a shout from outside, telling them that the wagon was empty. It meant a ten-minute break while waiting for the next, and they scrambled down the ladder and outside. In the pump house they washed with the hose and drank long, deep mouthfuls, running the water through their hair and over the backs of their necks. Then they sat in the shade of the pump-house wall and July felt as though he’d never known real relief before. He also felt a great sense of comradeship with his two fellow workers and imagined they felt the same—which wasn’t actually true, he noticed later; when they talked together, it was different from when they talked with him. Furthermore, it was just another day for them.

  July found that reflection upon any subject was impossible with such fatigue; that in itself was a novelty, and he indulged in having no thoughts and seeing the world through the eyes of an ox. That night he was almost too tired to eat and fell asleep in the rocking chair at eight o’clock. Getting up in the morning was unbearable, even at nine, but he managed it. The hay was still too wet from the dew to bale in the early morning.

  Three days later the work was as easy as that kind of work could ever be, and even working up in the barn with black dust hanging from his nose, he could think convoluted thoughts and daydream as regularly as when he was sitting on the back porch. He fitted into the schedule of staying up late and getting up just before rushing out of the house.

  They finished at the one farm and moved on to another. The crew felt more comfortable with him, and included him in the crudely intimate discussions of women, money, gadgetry, ambition and sports. Mal once asked him, “What do you talk about while you work? Give me an example of one of your conversations.”

  “What time of day? It depends a lot on what time it is.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, first thing in the morning nobody says much of anything, and even despite Jack and Bonesy, who’re especially noisy then, there’s a general sluggishness and irritability—usually centered around the weather or the particular difficulties of the day ahead—the heat, working for such and such who might be hard to get along with, and for the most part composed of short, biting comments. Everybody’s as a rule thinking about sleeping. But nobody talks of it because that makes the day get longer.

  “Then later on, when the noise of the machinery and tossing a few bales around has had a chance to jar you into being awake, nearing eleven, they all seem to want to talk out what happened the night before, and even the less memorable events get told—some at length, some only scantily, depending on who’s talking and their own bent for that kind of thing. A lot of interest seems to be focused on sex at this time, but it never gets really bawdy until the afternoon.

  “By lunchtime the talk is more about our cars and movies, famous basketball players or what a person might do if he had a lot of money. Lunchtime itself is pretty solemn—at least the first quarter of the hour; then it loosens up and everyone’s truly gregarious—even more so than just before quitting, which is friendly but a little selfish too, because all you can think about is getting home or wherever you’re going.

  “If there’s ever any trouble or arguments it’s always in the middle of the afternoon—say around three or four o’clock. Swearing and general hostility seems to be able to slip in naturally, ‘fuckin’ this,’ and talk of perverts and minority groups, and ‘that son of a bitch couldn’t figure his way out of a grocery store.’ It also tends toward a more vulgar view of the relationship between men and women, and gives way to that considerably. I guess it’s usually the hottest and most miserable then, and it’s difficult to get up the emotional energy to be charitable. It’s during these times that I always think of all the other things I should be doing with my life and how I need to read more and get among a better class of people: that’s my own way of participating in the mood.

  “Then as we can feel the air get cooler, and see the boss is beginning to think
about calling it a day and getting into some more comfortable shoes and sitting under his elm tree at home with a breeze blowing on his face, drinking ice tea made by leaving glass jars with tea bags and water in the sun—then a surge of vitality and good-heartedness begins to come. We start thinking about how close we are to being done if we can finish up a particular field, what entertainment the night holds, and a long-range excitement seems to take over: joy in being alive—pride in working—that sort of thing. Then it’s all waving and shouting and roaring the engines of our cars when we leave. The drive home is an unbelievable merriment, usually speeding, and with no regard for any seriousness but the immediate sensation of well-being.”

  “But what do you talk about just before you leave? No, don’t drop your head now, I’m almost finished.”

  July reorganized himself and Mal continued to sketch him against the porch railing.

  “Well, for instance, Bonesy might say to me—supposing we were working behind the baler at the time, and about every fifteen or twenty seconds another bale comes issuing out of the gate, ‘So, how do you like being married, July?’ And I might answer, ‘Oh, it’s all right if you like that kind of thing.’

  “ ‘We all like that kind of thing,’ he continues, ‘It’s the matter of the same kind of thing day in day out that some don’t agree on.’

  “I suppose.’

  “I really thought Jack and MacLean was going to get into it yesterday, didn’t you?’

  “ ‘No. Jack ain’t one for fighting, I don’t think.’

  “ ‘He looked pretty mad.’

  “ ‘That’s a whole lot different thing. You ever been inside that tavern in Kalona?’

  “ ‘A couple times. It ain’t much of a place. Closes at six o’clock. Too many old geezers in there. Why?’

  “ ‘Just wondered.’

  “ ‘Didn’t you say you had a ’32 Ford?’

  “ ‘I still have it. Everything in it’s original.’

  “ ‘Did you do it yourself?’

  “ ‘No. My dad did it.’

  “ ‘Boy, I really like old cars.’

  “ ‘So do I.’

  “ ‘They’re just so much better than the newer ones. There seems to be so much more sense to them—everything is so obvious as to what it’s for. You should’ve seen this old Cadillac I had once. Man, driving that down the road really made you feel like something. Steel gray mine was, and I got some of those real wide white-walls and put them on, and a big old spotlight just outside the vent for bushwhacking.’

  “Then we might talk a bit about going fishing somewhere or buying a motorcycle, drinking beer, the fact that marijuana grows wild but is illegal, what drug fiends must be like, or the loose morals of hippies living in overcrowded houses with mattresses on the floor, or the government. As it gets later, both of us might start feeling pretty good about each other and make plans to go swimming together at the reservoir, or go to a drive-in with you and his wife. But we sort of know even when we’re talking that we won’t.”

  “There, all finished,” she said, and turned her pad so he could see his own likeness in it.

  When the baling crew moved on toward Hills, July quit, spent a whole week around the house with Mal, sleeping outside nearly every night, and hired himself out to help cultivate, driving the fat-tired tractors down between the rows of corn and beans and digging up the weeds with curved, flat metal fingers.

  This job was altogether different from haying, and being entirely alone for long, long stretches at a time reminded him of something out of his distant youth in Philadelphia, and before. The ability to be with oneself, he decided, was something that reached further back than anything else. Each person must have his own way, for better or worse, but the ease with which it can be tolerated can only depreciate from lack of practice, and never improve beyond what it was originally meant to be.

  The thoughts that accompanied July’s solitude were, he felt, almost like no thoughts at all—like being dumbly aware of awareness itself—consciousness at its lowest level. This was something of a revelation to him, as he’d always thought before of mere consciousness being more closely associated with entertainment than thinking, and seeing now that these two were somehow one and the same thing, working in and out of each other mysteriously and irrevocably, he felt he was just about to burst upon a new level of understanding. But when he talked about it with Mal that evening he couldn’t make himself completely understood, and where he’d been able to see the distinctions so clearly before, now all his thoughts, in words, seemed meaningless and foolish. It was then he realized, though he didn’t try to communicate it, that he had come to an even greater understanding than he’d at first thought: mere consciousness was the very act of putting things together in one’s mind. Making sense of something was the act of sensing itself.

  He worked at cultivating for several weeks and then helped Isaac Bontrager build fence. It looked as if in the summertime he wouldn’t ever have to go out looking for work again, because he’d become known as a friendly, good worker and the farmers would stop over occasionally if they needed help, and if they didn’t he stayed at home and read or went swimming with Mal, or sat on the back porch with Holmes and Butch, watching the rain and trying to experience the sort of things he imagined the Indians back in the seventeen hundreds might have when the oaks and prairies were an endless, inviting expanse of uninterrupted nature.

  Mal went back to work at the restaurant in late August. The baling crew came through the Sharon Center area for the second cutting of hay and July got on it again.

  They had a list of thirty-eight different birds they’d seen during the summer, and could identify most of the trees along the roads and down the hill behind their barn. Mal was getting together twelve paintings which she’d decided to take around to the shops in Iowa City and see if they would display them.

  Wally, Leonard and his half-brother Billy Joe sat in the front of their Mercury sedan eating slices of peaches from a can Billy Joe, the mute, had stolen in a grocery store along the Coralville Strip. Wally, the driver, was twenty-six; Leonard was from a little town along the Mississippi and was wanted for burglary and assault in Cedar Rapids, and was twenty. Between them, Billy Joe, released one month ago from the state reformatory in Eldora, was almost seventeen, and had shared the same mother as Leonard. The parking lot in the Wardway Plaza was hot, but they had the windows rolled up to keep out the flies.

  “God damn it, Billy Joe, don’t spill none a that on the pictures!” said Leonard, and pulled the Zap comic book away from the peach syrup dripping from his hands.

  “Slobbing bastard,” said Wally. “Hold it over here closer,” and he pulled the comic book closer to him. “And fuck, don’t eat all of ’em, I only got two so far.”

  “Billy Joe got ’em,” said Leonard carefully, not wanting to anger the older, bigger boy, but wanting to plead his half-brother’s right to at least an equal share of the sweetened peaches. “An’ you already read it once.”

  “God damn it, get your fuckin’ finger out a there!” And Wally hit Billy Joe’s arm, causing peach juice to spill onto his lap and the pictures and making him begin crying with sucking sounds.

  “You di’n’ need ta hit ’im!” shouted Leonard.

  “Fuck if I di’n’. Son-of-a-bitch keeps puttin’ his finger into the rip in the dashboard ‘n’ tears out all the packin’.” He bent the torn corner back to hide the hole and tried to smooth it over.

  “You di’n’ need ta hit ’im.”

  “Do more’n that too if he don’ cut it out. Slobby bastard. We should never’ve brought him along.”

  “He don’t hurt none. Got the peaches, di’n’ he?”

  “Fuck peaches.”

  Billy Joe had stopped crying and tried to wipe the pages off with his pants.

  “Careful,” said Leonard, and took it from him. “Pages break easy if you got ’em wet.”

  “Shit. We got to get us some money.” And Wally pounded the steering w
heel. “We ain’t got but a quarter-tank of gas.”

  “I thought you said we’d just make it down to your friend’s place. Didn’t he say we could stay there?”

  “That’s what I said, di’n’ I? And that’s what I meant. But we can’t go down there flat broke. Hell, ain’t you got no class at all? Don’t you got no style? We got to give him somethin’. Shit, if I wasn’t with you little punks, I’d do me somethin’.”

  “What?”

  “I don’t know. But I’d do me somethin’. There’s always ways ta get a little coin together, or snatch, I might get me some snatch. There’s plenty a cunt in this town for a guy who knows how to do it.”

  “What’re we goin’ a do, Wally? Son-of-a-bitch, there’s a patrol car! He’s comin’ over here!”

  “For Christ sakes, try to be cool. Jesus, what a couple of punks. Don’ go lookin’ like that or he’ll know somethin’s up, you dumb fuck. Just sit there. Can’t no cop do nothin’ to ya if you’re just sittin’ there.” The police car drove by and Wally sneered at the men inside it from the corners of his eyes, his mouth curled at one edge, as though daring them not to stop. They went by.

  “What’re we goin’ ta do, Wally?”

  “First we got to get some more food—then we think. Send Billy Joe back in for somethin’ else, an’ no more fuckin’ fruit. Get some ice cream.”

  “He went the last time.”

  “Well, he’s got a do somethin’. We di’n’ have to bring ’im.”

  “I’ll go myself,” said Leonard, and got out of the car. He pawed through the trash barrel in front of the grocery store, took out a discarded green bag from the drugstore and entered through the automatic doors. Billy Joe slid over and sat next to the window sharpening his knife.