Rock Island Line. David Rhodes
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Della understood the reason for Eleanor’s concern with her. Her eyes lit up, she smiled and made a motion as if she were going to clap her hands. “Oh, that,” she said. “That’s just me and finding things. I’ve always been able to do that. Wilson always says that he can never—”
“Do you mean you knew, when you came out here with them, that you would be able to find them so easily?”
“Well, yes and no. First of all, I guess I never think about it. Then there have to be some to find. Once Wilson lost one of his nails he uses for putting tobacco in his pipe and was so sure it was in the store that he made me look for it there. It’s a very special nail. But I knew it wasn’t there. And it wasn’t.”
“How did you know? And aren’t you saying that even before you came out with the children, you had a fairly good idea that there would be some of those four- and five-leafed clovers out here?”
“No, no,” exclaimed Della. “I know what you’re thinking now, and it’s not true. I know it looks that way, but it isn’t. I assure you, it isn’t. It’s only my way. I find things. It’s the way I’ve always been. When I was a little girl, I found things. If you were me, everything would be common and very ordinary.”
“This seems so odd, Mrs. Montgomery, to be talking like this, if you know what I mean, about such things. But, truly, you must sometimes feel that there are great forces. Yet what must it be to feel that and still know the way you do about, well, magic. It must be a mystery partially revealed.”
“No, no, you didn’t understand me.”
“Yes. You were trying to tell me that life for you is dull, and that’s not true, but I know why you’re trying to say it. You think I’m foolish.”
“No. I think there is only the feeling—the feeling of mystery about what you know nothing about. Those things you understand are no good to you for that feeling. I imagine, Eleanor, when I watch you drive up, what it must be to control such an animal, and how proud you must feel knowing you can do it without any help. And what it must be to be so tall and straight.”
“It doesn’t seem the same thing. Those things are . . . ordinary.”
“Do you mean to say—” Smiling.
“No, life is not ordinary, Mrs. Montgomery, and I feel that I am making a spectacle of my own narrow nature. But before we stop—and I don’t wish you to do anything but answer—tell me of other things that you know about, like finding things.”
“That’s all.”
“I don’t believe it. I’ve always felt that you were very special.”
“No, no, please—”
“Stop. We will talk no more of it. There’s no excuse for leaving the children alone so long. It makes demands on them that they aren’t ready for. They can only be quiet so long—and they want to be good—but they are forced by their natures to become unruly, and the conflict isn’t good for them.”
She turned and began walking toward the schoolhouse, through the clover, which hid her thin ankles.
Wilson arrived at the schoolyard five minutes before four, and waited until the door was thrown open and students scattered across into the road like bats from the small mouth of a cave. Their noise followed them around the corner and they were hidden by the green-and-gold corn. Della fitted the key to its lock, turned it, tossed her shawl one final time onto her shoulder and came to the wagon. Wilson lifted her up and they set off toward home. The humidity, together with the afternoon heat, wrung beads of sweat out of their bodies and into their clothes. Wilson remarked that he felt “clammy” and that, breathe as he might, he could not seem to get enough air, because he was suffocating all over. White, soapy lather formed between their horse and her harness straps and breast plate. The sounds of her steel shoes on the dirt were perfect thuds—thud, thud, thud—accompanied by the creaks and shudders of the weather-swelled buckboard. Tiny chips of mud clung to the wheels and fell away.
“What we need, you know,” said Wilson, “is one good gully-washer, and enough of this drizzling. It’s almost like not rain at all—just the air becoming so sticky and wet that loud noises shake water out of it. Oh, by the way, did you know that the amount of water in the air and on the ground never changes? I read that the other day. Doesn’t that seem amazing, that it’s always the same? But of course when you think about it, then you see it’s obvious.”
“Obvious things are always the most amazing.”
“Come on now, there you go again.”
“Wilson, that’s different. There’s some truth in that. It’s not one of my usual generalizations.”
“Oh no,” laughed Wilson. “Just because it’s got some truth in it doesn’t mean it’s true. Besides, all generalizations contain some truth, or they’d be complete nonsense and you couldn’t understand them.”
“What makes you think, Wilson, you can be the judge of how much truth is enough? That seems pretty presumptuous. Why does it have to be so hot today?”
“That’s what makes it so hot, because it doesn’t have to be. There can’t be any reason for it. And even if there was a reason, it couldn’t be a good enough one.”
“Poor Wilson,” said Della and laughed.
“I don’t see what’s so funny,” said Wilson, looking as though he were trying to be brave about his suffering. “You shouldn’t belittle someone trying to find peace, and unable to because of the weather.”
“Oh no,” said Della, laughing much louder now. “What a terrible thing I’ve done. If I only could have known. Wilson, can you ever forgive me?”
“My own family, mocking me.”
“I’m sorry, Wilson.”
“My own wife yet. Oh, it’s terrible.”
“Wilson.” Della was reaching over to him, shaking in laughter. “Please . . .
“No,” he complained, “I’ll be all right. In time. I’ll forget someday.” They were driving into town now. Women were raking grass cuttings out of their yards and piling them along the road, watching the Montgomerys pass and listening to them. Della waved, and continued trying to appease Wilson, who was hot and would not forgive. After the Montgomerys’ voices were gone, still Della’s laughing cut through the sound of the wishing rakes. Pulling a stuck stick from hers, Mrs. Miller resumed humming.
At home, Wilson opened up the store for Mrs. Wecksler and sold her some buttons and a spool of thread, though in her own sly way she complained of not having a better color selection to choose from, which Wilson accepted, but he got a little mad and indulged, after she left, in a prolonged moment of self-satisfying spite. He straightened a new display of pipes that he had bought from a salesman a week before—pipes that were made by a doctor and could be broken down into three parts. The doctor himself was pictured in the display, with a beard, and explaining that his pipe was a “remarkable scientific discovery—a modern, scientific adaptation of age-old principles, handed down from the aboriginal knowledge of good smoking enjoyment.” Then Wilson locked the front door, turned the sign in the window around so that it read closed and went back into his house. Up from the basement with a bottle of homemade beer, he sat at the table and talked to Della as she worried over a slow-bubbling stew and ate soda crackers one at a time.
“Did that Byron Bernard come back and pay his bill yet?” she asked.
“No, but he’ll come.”
“I don’t trust him much. He’s supposed to owe money to a lot of people. Joan Taylor says Mark isn’t going to sell seed to him any more.”
“I’ll bet he does.”
“Why should he? Why should others have to pay for him.”
“I’ll still bet he does.