Rock Island Line

by David Rhodes

  “I agree, John,” she said. “I agree. Take him home.”

  “Good God, it doesn’t make sense, Sarah. It never makes sense. I can remember when Dad and Mom—”

  “Yes it does, don’t think about it now. You’re tired.”

  That was all July heard then.

  The front door gave the slightest bang, and July sat up in bed. Nearly a full moon outside, the ground silver with frost. He got up and went quickly downstairs. The door to his grandmother’s room stood wide open, the bed empty and flat. He went through the porch and looked outside. Della was crossing the road. He ran barefoot after her, careful not to let her hear him. The cold was not noticeable in his excitement.

  Della walked across the intersection, her feet leaving dark prints on the road. She went into the Collins’s yard and up to the house. She stood for a moment in front, then went around to the side and let herself in. July caught up to her halfway through the cluttered, foul-smelling living room and, all his life having been afraid of the people who lived there, took hold of her arm and whispered, “Grandma, Grandma, come back home.” She turned and looked at him as if he weren’t there, moving her mouth imperceptibly, knocking over a straight-backed chair. They were locked fast where they stood, she in a spell of her own and he in fear. There was a noise. Then another. Old man Collins, wearing a pair of pants, came out of a door. “What the hell!” he said in a deep, menacing voice. July pulled on his grandmother’s arm, but she was like a half-driven nail.

  “You shouldn’t be in here.” Della spoke in her own, unhurried voice. July let go of her. “This room is too cold. The wind comes through the wall.”

  Old man Collins had come over to them; July started to come between him and his grandmother, but stopped. Collins’s voice, as he recognized them, was no longer menacing but unbelievably tender—more unexpected to July than if he had taken out a gun and shot them both.

  “Ma’am,” he said. “It must have slipped your mind, but you don’t live here any more. You ain’t lived here for years—way back since this was a store. The front room’s been torn down. Years ago.”

  “You shouldn’t be in here,” said Della, looking from him to July. “This room’s too cold to sleep in. The wind comes through the wall. Despite the tape, you can’t keep the wind out.” She looked at the space the door would have occupied if it had been closed, not seeing through to outside.

  “Ma’am,” he began again, “you don’t live here now. I’m old man Collins. Your house is across the street. You better be gettin’ on back now or somebody’s going to be gettin’ worried about you.”

  Then it slowly happened that Della became aware of her error, her momentary jog in time. She realized it, but not like waking up from a dream—more like realizing within a dream that she was dreaming.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, and stood staring at the walls.

  “Hell,” said old man Collins, “it doesn’t make no difference to me. Any time you want to come over, just come on over. But why don’t you let this boy here take you on back now—or maybe I better call up Mr. Montgomery. Do your parents know your grandma’s out of the house, boy?”

  July was trying to speak, but all of a sudden Della turned directly around, as fast as an insulted soldier in uniform, her thin body sticking out of her nightgown in legs no bigger around than arms, and marched out the door. “Come on, Wilson,” she called to July.

  Later, back in the house, she said to him, “I know you’re not Wilson. I know who you are and that you think Wilson isn’t here. But don’t you see it matters to me?” Again the loneliness and the deep, layered sadness.

  “Milk, Grandma,” said July. “Let’s get some milk.”

  July looked upon the memory of this night with some hostility, and for several weeks running he waited out his waking hours upstairs and did not venture down for fear he would again find her going out across the yard. He excused this behavior because of not hearing any noises. But when one night he clearly heard the front door bang, he knew he’d have to get up. Once out beyond his room he felt the grip of helplessness, and knocked on his parents’ door. His father came immediately out into the hall in his pajama trousers, his bare arms powerful and the muscles in his shoulders standing out like hammered iron. “Grandma,” said July, and his father ran downstairs, waiting neither for more information nor for him to follow. One look at her opened door and the unruffled bed and John was out into the yard, just in time to see her go into the house across the street.

  By the time July got there his father was carrying her as weightlessly as if she were a large, realistic doll, her head moving from time, to time, staring. When she looked at July, he felt as though he were standing in someone else’s body, so completely did the gaze un-know him. Old man Collins, again with his sympathetic voice, was saying to John, “No, it ain’t any bother. We was just talkin’ the other night ’bout how hard it’d be on—”

  “If she ever comes over again,” his father brutally cut him off, “call me. Daytime, nighttime, call me. Don’t talk to her. Call me.” Then he left. Old man Collins looked hurt, and closed the door. It seemed to July that his father must have hated Collins; it seemed as though that was the only explanation, so from that moment on, July hated him too, and hated his children, Everett and Loren, and hated his cats and the heap of junk of a car he drove.

  This was when Della’s arteries began to harden. John took her to doctors in Iowa City. He slept on the sofa at night, and chased her back into her room whenever she came out. He refused to let her talk to him as if he were Wilson (something everyone else tolerated, even Mrs. Miller, of whom they said she wouldn’t let her own father use the name of anyone dead while in her presence). “You’re confused, Mom,” he would tell her. “Get hold of yourself”—as though all she needed to do was shake herself and the layers of years would fall off like the skin of a lizard.

  Remington Hodge’s father explained: “That was John’s undoing. All of us have our undoing—some more than others, some less, but that’s not the point. What’s important is that everyone has things which they can’t deal with reasonably. A more reasonable man than John would be hard to find—so reasonable that he seldom was able to choose sides. But the business with his mother reduced him to having no sense. He chose sides then, it might be said, but unreasonably, putting himself at odds with nature itself. See, he acted like he had no intention whatsoever of granting that everything must have an end. His reason simply failed him there, and he would chase off to Iowa City and lead doctors back to his mother by the throat, demanding that they put an end to her ailment, and they would tell him, sometimes right in front of her, ‘There’s nothing wrong but age. You’re getting along in your years, Mrs. Montgomery.’ And she would smile as though having received a compliment on a new hat. But John would shake in rage. ‘What do you mean!’ he would demand. ‘No one dies of old age. It’s something wrong that takes them, some malfunction. Fix it.’

  “But, like I say, that shouldn’t be held against anyone, because we all have our undoings—where reason’ll be cast to the wind. And don’t misunderstand me, I’m not saying here that I admire that or that it impresses me; for instance, in the case of my Aunt Winifred, who let the business with Jack and that girl from Plainsville poison her whole life. In fact, if there’s any principle to live by, it would be reason—live reasonably; a hundred times a day one should stop and ask, ‘Is this reasonable, what I’m doing?’ There simply can’t be enough reasonableness in someone’s life.”

  Despite John’s unceasing refusal to let it happen, his mother slid away one night in her sleep, and he found her curled up, the quilt tucked under her chin, the next morning. At first he didn’t react to it at all, closed the door and sat down on the twisted sheets and blankets covering the sofa. Then, when his true feelings began to clear in him, he had a terrific urge to drink, and went to the kitchen in search of a bottle. Underneath the sink, he thought. But there was none. He thought when he’d last seen it—the bottle of 86-p
roof bourbon. Then he remembered that he’d given it away. How long? Yes, that would have been to Myra’s boy—fourteen years ago. The realization let another increment of his true feelings loose, and he started back toward the couch. But the full impact came sooner than he expected, and he didn’t make it. As he looked at the door to his mother’s room, the thunderhead inside him ripped open. The downpour temporarily blinded him in deep purple, tears flowed like water on his face, and holding his shaking hand out toward the wall to support him, he cried like an animal shot through the stomach.

  Sarah and July came downstairs and it was hours before the shaking subsided.

  Later, after the funeral, July heard him say, “When I was a little boy, I used to lie in bed and imagine that my parents were dead. That very thought terrified me. They told me, ‘It’s just a make-believe worry. We’ll always be here,’ and that comforted me. But now it’s just like it happened then. It could be no worse. . . . Who will take care of me now?”

  July’s only real interest in his grandmother’s death was in the mechanics of it. He had wanted to (though he didn’t) go into her room and look at her—if, indeed, she was still there—to see if she looked any different. Sarah told him that “Grandma’s body—her dead body—is all that’s left. Grandma herself is gone.” So he knew that behind the door lay something, but that something wasn’t his grandma. Then at the funeral he got to see into the casket, and he wasn’t nearly as horrified as he had thought he might be, looking at a personless body. The unrealness of death—the chalk color and closed eyes—was so completely uninteresting. He realized Della couldn’t possibly be lying on the pink pillow, which had been his only fear—that somehow everyone was wrong and she hadn’t been able to get away and was imprisoned inside her dead self. But he could see that wasn’t true, and he could see everyone else at the funeral knew that (except maybe his father). The minister talked of heaven and Della being with Wilson, herald angels and the mansion in the sky. Naturally, July accepted it all.

  For several weeks, maybe as long as several months, he was troubled by his father, who didn’t at all seem to be acting in accordance with the way things were. He acted oddly, as though he hadn’t even known Della was just an old lady and was ready to die soon, and now she had and that was good. July could see no reason to be very upset—not nearly so upset as when their cat had been run over. Old people die and that’s that. But his father acted as though he didn’t know that.

  Then slowly the depression lifted, and the face shadow, which had at one time been dark gray, turned ashen, but never went away. From that time on, the past had hold of John, and though he could still be “reasonable,” he no longer desired to go forward. He wanted to go back. Instead of creating, he wanted to recapture. Instead of dreaming, he wanted to remember.

  Many times during those first several months John took time off from work to be with his family—even afternoons when he refused to return to the garage after lunch, though his lot was filled with people waiting for him. He gave up working Saturdays altogether. He told July, then seven and a half, of a man named Kingfisher. They’d gone for a ride and stopped just before dark in a small diner in Liberty. John ordered a cup of coffee and the tired waitress brought that and a strawberry malted milk to their square, mean table next to the window. The blue star of lights above the diner reflected onto them from a silent pool of rainwater next to their car in the gravel parking lot. A young couple by the jukebox hollered at each other and played records. The waitress smoked cigarettes down to her fingers at the counter. The cook, her broad forehead covered with sweat, took the stone to the grill.

  “I can remember my father telling me about a man his father had told him about,” John said, in the same quiet voice he’d been using all afternoon. July sat, taking it all in, the voice, the words, the reflection, the music, the smoke and the cold, wonderful taste of the malt up through two paper straws which he held in his mouth like fangs.

  “. . . named Kingfisher. I guess he was born somewhere in the East, Connecticut or Rhode Island, and it was suspected that his mother had been part, if not all, Indian. The first time someone tried to kill him he was ten years old. His dad was a foreman of a crew of indentured lumberjacks—prisoners, that is they were, men who were brought over to this country to work. America was so wild then that the only thing that lay between them and freedom was a matter of several miles of forest. One morning some of these fellows got a chance to overcome a guard and get rid of their irons. Another guard came out of the underbrush unexpectedly and three of them were shot before they overpowered him. They wanted food more than guns, and they figured to make it to the foreman’s cabin near the settlement, get the stuff and hightail it west. They didn’t plan on Kingfisher’s father being there, and he got more of them before they came in, and the sight of the blood and their desperate hope of escaping filled them with reckless, unreasonable ferocity. One of them saw the small boy running out toward the settlement through the trees. ‘Get him,’ said the leader, and two of the escapees took after him with a double-edged ax, two knives and a muzzle-loaded hand gun.

  “Hearing them behind him (and knowing he could be outrun), he left the well-worn path. He went for the settlement by relying on his size and ability to scramble through the brush and briers and fallen trees. He went on wildly, thorns cutting into his face and hands without his noticing. He could hear them crashing behind him but falling behind farther. He ran on, feeling he’d make it. The ground grew rockier, rising sharply. He went up, and then discovered that he’d trapped himself. Ahead, directly down from him, was a sheer drop of more than thirty feet. There was no way to turn back without running toward the noise of the men. He looked around, wanting more than anything to begin crying, his heart pounding like a warring drum. The crashing came closer. He found a large rock, as big around as a muskmelon, pried it loose from the ground and began climbing up a maple tree, placing the rock up before him on each succeeding branch. He climbed as far as he could before he saw the men, then stopped and tried to hug close to the trunk.

  “ ‘Look, he must be around here,’ shouted one of them, between panting. ‘No one could get down there,’ and he motioned to the drop-off.

  “Kingfisher watched them walk beneath his tree, going over to the edge.

  “ ‘He’s around here,’ said the other. ‘Go back and make sure we didn’t miss him and he isn’t sneaking back down.’

  “ ‘No, he’s around here close by. Has to be. We’d hear him—’

  “ ‘Go on down and check, you idiot. If he gets—’

  “ ‘OK, OK.’ The one with the ax went back down. The other walked along the rim of the ledge, making sure there was no way down and hoping to find him tucked away behind a stump or log. After the time it took to fully regain his breath, going on a hunch, he went back and started, methodically, to check the ground for signs, thinking, If the little fool was running, we’d hear ’im. He wasn’t that far ahead. The idea came to him, just at the moment he saw the matted underbrush around the tree, that he might be up there . . . and he looked up maybe one full second before the muskmelon-sized rock, dropped from twenty feet in the air, smashed his head. Kingfisher scrambled down the tree and peeled the pistol from the man’s hand, stepping on and off his wrist to make death release its hold. Already he could hear the other man coming back.

  “He ran to the edge of the ledge and hid behind an obvious rock, and—he couldn’t help it—began to cry.

  “The sight of more blood brought the urgency of the situation back to the remaining escapee. The fear of capture and inevitable doom. These things and the ever louder sound of the boy’s hysterical crying unfortunately made him forget about the gun, and he went over. With his eyes watery and his nose running, sitting down, Kingfisher shot him....”

  John went on talking in detail, leaving his coffee untouched. But July wasn’t listening closely any more. His attention had been rerouted into the image of Kingfisher behind the rock, crying uncontrollably, holding a gun with
a hole in the barrel as big around as an eye. And though he continued drinking the malt up into both sides of his mouth, staring straight forward, his head was completely taken over by the scene. Behind the rock, a character half himself and half a wild, dark-skinned ten-year-old, holding that gun and crying and then letting him have it. His interest wandered back again just as John was saying, “. . . so the mayor was explaining to his marshal that Kingfisher, then eighteen years old, had been seen sleeping in the canyon and that he was to go get him and, if he was alive, take him over to Carson City, when the marshal took off his gun belt and badge and put them on the desk. ‘I quit.’ “ Then July’s head refilled with the image of behind the rock—only this time it was totally himself that crouched there crying.

  “. . . they sent twenty men on horses out into the hills after him, hoping to recover the money and collect the state’s reward. They had no intention of bringing him back alive, and had food and ambition enough to be gone several months. They assumed Kingfisher would not expect so many, and that they would have a chance to get a couple of slugs into the gray before he could begin his run. The excitement was like a fever. After several days they located him and he began to run. Two days later they had him trapped somewhere in Plum Valley, his horse dead. The twenty riders formed a line, not more than thirty yards between each man, like for driving deer, and started into the valley. Four hours later, two of them rode out, one with a bullet in his chest. The other one, just as they were leaving the valley, looked back and for the first time in his life saw the great Kingfisher, on foot, leading one of their horses, going up into the hills, a rifle on his shoulder and a dagger which reflected the sunlight in his hand.