Rock Island Line. David Rhodes
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just an ordinary fish. A smart one.”
“I see what you mean, I think,” said Sarah. That would be nice, she thought, lying in the deep holes during the day, sleeping on the bottom and watching the watery things . . . in a kind of liquid dream, the sunlight shimmering on the rocks, greenish yellow, all sounds soft and low—cows in the distance. Then going out at night into the shallows, hunting for smaller fish like a cunning, silent submarine, feeling the faster water carry you downstream, in among the roots of the shore . . . seeing the moon from underneath and hearing the oars of the Dark Lords in their long black boats, their footsteps on the bank, their fires winking across the tops of the ripples, deer drinking. Woodchucks eating green shoots. Leaves and water insects on the surface.
Their clothing inundated with smoke, an insect deterrent, they set off in search of birds, taking with them both binoculars, the thermos and the wildlife book. Sarah carried the blanket around her shoulders. She frequently let her thoughts be carried away by merely walking, or by the embroidery of the grasses. They waded in the stream, and she found smooth stones with color veins and put them in her pocket as remembrances. John saw a bobolink. They tried to catch crayfish until he became obsessed with finding an owl’s nest, and they tramped over what seemed to her several miles. But the reward so outweighted the walk she could hardly contain herself and broke into laughter when she raised the glasses and saw as though directly above her two huge, round, dusty white horned owls frowning at her. “Who,” she said. “Who. Who.” That made her laugh more. John was so excited he could do nothing but talk about how owls’ eyes were made and how, per square inch of flying surface, they were lighter than all other birds, their feathers softer, and how they had asymmetrical, adjustable ears nearly as long as their whole head. He read out loud from their book every scrap of information about them, and remarked that because there were two, it was a good year for owls and was an indication that the land would support them even through the winter. They seemed so comical because of their size, helplessness, dumb interest and aloofness—their unshakable faith in their own invulnerability at that height. They were also going to sleep.
Reading and thinking about owls made John want to find a place they could sit until it was dark in hope of seeing the parents hunting, gliding over with wild, burning eyes. They drank the last of the iced tea. They found a tall hayfield and lay down in it so that they would be invisible except from directly overhead. But despite the spectacle of the cloud formations, as subtle as frozen breath, with the darkening air came the bugs, and they were forced to give up the vigil and return to the fireplace. Several broken logs placed on top of the coals soon revived John’s defeated spirit and they sat against the nearest elm and watched the flames. Darkness descended around them with the cooler air. Sarah went over to the fire and put on more wood and let the warmth saturate her clothing until just that point where it was too hot, and moved back, turned and began on the front side.
John looked at her silhouetted against the leaping colors, then at the colors themselves, and began to daydream. The daydream tapered back to the fire and he found himself looking at Sarah again. He went back to daydreaming but returned again to the seat of the denim pants; and when she gave a little jump back from the heat, her face glowing red, the air full of her smell, he felt his desire rise. Unsuspecting, she came back to the tree, stretched and sat down. He put his arm around her, and she moved closer, still unknowing. He sat with his desire for a few minutes to see if it would stand the test of time, then unbuttoned her pants. “Oh, John!” she said. “Not here.”
“Why not?”
Sarah’s senses (already inflamed by fear and embarrassment) nearly exploded, like a barrel of fish dumped into a river, when she felt her pants being drawn off and her bare skin exposed to the open air. She began to loosen John’s buckle and pull his shirt down his arms. In his search for something to put under her buttocks, to protect her from the hard ground and to get her a little way up in the air, he found the blanket. “Oh, John,” she cried. “Love me. Love me,” closed her eyes on tentacled Hercules, and let her passion carry her to the other side of the doors of death, primeval darkness, and back again. Afterward, sweat rolling from where their bodies had touched, they dressed and made coffee, boiling water in a tin pail. They sweetened it and poured in cream from the little canister. Contented, and at the table, they sipped it.
I knew we’d want the cream, thought Sarah.
In 1941 there was a war. John was troubled, though he did not talk about it. The next year, in February, he told Sarah that he was going to enlist. It was supposed that he wouldn’t be accepted because of his age; but he was gone within weeks. He was a faithful letter writer, though the neighbors were disappointed because the letters contained no war news. That year he came home for Christmas and stayed twenty days, then was home again a year later for a shorter visit.
The idea of Sarah Montgomery being alone was at first thought to be an imminent danger. It was even suggested to Della that she should insist her daughter-in-law move in with her and Wilson in the country. Della was excited at the idea, and asked her right away. Sarah declined, and would accept no sympathy, denying as she did that there was even the slightest gloom in her life, and maintaining that she was perfectly safe—or as perfectly safe as anyone else. Remington Hodge’s father said: “I used to think at night sometimes, walking out to the barn maybe, or listening to the radio—of the image of that woman alone in her own house, sitting and reading, sewing, cooking for herself. I’d think about that and wonder, picturing myself there, see, standing knocking at the door, her opening it and . . . then I would force my thoughts away from it.” On September 18, 1943, Sarah gave birth to a boy, July Montgomery.
The adult congregation of the Sharon Center Baptist Church was spread out on the front lawn and steps. Wilson stood with some men on the landing before the opened door and their voices rang with short, tenorous bursts of laughter. They were dressed in suits and sports jackets, white shirts and ties, and their manner of talking seemed to be influenced gently by wearing them, as though they were children in front of a great dollhouse, pretending to be grownup. Many of their faces were nut brown from working exposed to the summer sun. Sarah was virtually surrounded by the other women on the grass, protecting her, it appeared, from the unwanted looks of the men. They talked about gardens. The lawn sloped away from them toward a pair of soft maples and an overhead wind rattled and turned the silver underside of their leaves so that the foliage of the two shimmered in the late morning light. Their trunks, despite great breadth, looked as though they had at one time partially melted and the flat pieces of bark undulated over them in waves. Underneath these giants, in the cool shade, sat the children on thick little wooden chairs, the seats of which were no more than a foot off the ground and on the backs were decals of red bears, giraffes and smiling rabbits. They all sat in a cluster facing a slightly larger but by no means full-size chair, on which Della Montgomery perched like a gold-finch with a Bible opened in her lap. Their eyes were glued to her as though she and not what she was teaching them was a marvel of unexpected creation, and perhaps in their inchoate minds they half suspected that in an exuberant expression she would fly away in a flash of color, huge blue-and-white wings sprout from her polka-dotted dress and disappear behind a cloud.
July Montgomery sat in the very front, wearing his new pair of cowboy boots and a shirt with snaps instead of buttons. He was three and his dark eyes burned in intense concentration, growing slowly into a frown of bitter hatred, his small hands knotted together in fists. Della, interrupting her story, asked a question:
“And do you know what happened then?”
July answered as though there were no one else there, only he and his grandmother, as though the question were only for him. “They hung a sign up,” he said darkly.
“And what did it say?”
“It said, ‘Here’s the king of Jews.’ ”
“Then what happened?”
“He died—because no water and they pushed a spear in Him.” July could hardly talk now, and began to stutter when he tried to go on.
Della continued. “That’s right, the soldiers killed Jesus with a spear and they took Him down from the cross and put Him in a tomb like a cave, and in front of the cave they rolled a great big rock that took all the soldiers to push,