Rock Island Line

by David Rhodes

  “He’s possessed by his emotions.”

  “Life without emotions is nothing.”

  “He’s simply mad.”

  The miserable weather improved. Melting from underneath, the levels of snow ran into the swirling and thick streams. Water oozed from everywhere. Scorpio began his climb in the south, splashing his tail down below the horizon. Mayapples and jack-in-the-pulpits began to come up through the snow with single-minded, wonderful lust for the warm air. The red-scaled buds of the maple tree beside the fence puffed up with a sense of awareness and caution. The grass reclaimed its rightful pigment and the bleak ground erupted in tempting, wild smells. Driving to work, July couldn’t go slow enough. He seemed always to be missing something. Every day brought too many changes to keep up with, and he wondered if it was better to linger over several instead of trying to catch them all—the question of questions.

  Mal found painting on the open porch inspiring. She had never painted outside much and it was as enjoyable as drawing had been to her when she was little. Surround yourself with real color, she decided, then paint.

  The first meadowlark to sit on the wire by the barn and announce the beginning of spring brought back the answers to July. What was he doing here? He was living here. Why here? Because this was where he was born. This was where his father was born. This was where his grandparents Della and Wilson had elected to stay. Why? Because there was something about it—the land and the weather and the feel of it—that had made them happy and at ease. He felt the same way. Why had he brought Mal? Because if she could love him, then she could love it too.

  Their house felt much better now that the space heater wasn’t running continuously, and the lights weren’t always on, and the hot-water heater didn’t have to work so hard, and there was no more snow to be heavy on the roof, and the rats had left for the fields, and the smudgy storm windows were gone; fresh air in the living room, singing birds perching along the eaves, goldfinches waiting for the dandelions to come up, robins grabbing grubs, and the pleasant sound of the back screen door as it banged.

  Before, it had seemed to Mal that the house tried to eject them, having been alone so long that it had become distrustful of people; but now it opened up to them, outstretched enfolding arms and was eager to be preened and fussed over and made “homey.”

  Planting a garden was like something from outer space. The seeds were so small, so perfectly inert-looking (with the exception of beans) and the idea that one could follow the little instruction booklet that she’d found in a newspaper—planting this one so far down, so many inches apart, this other one another way, cover them all up and of their own accord they’d start growing into huge plants bearing fruits you could eat—seemed almost too much to believe, like the most exciting, well-thought -out sales pitch that could possibly be imagined. On top of that, the seeds—if they did one one-hundredth of what was claimed—were cheap. And for what reason? Because of warmth, water and length of days. Ridiculous.

  “Of course it’ll work,” said July. “How do you think farmers grow—”

  “I know that!” she exclaimed, a little hurt that he’d not been able to see what she meant. “Just it’s so hard to believe it will work. Of course it will work. But the idea seems so impossible—I mean, why should it?”

  “Evolution.”

  “Oh, you’re hopeless. Now keep making the trench with your hoe.”

  “We’ve got enough beans.”

  “You can never have enough beans, or pumpkins.”

  “That guy should’ve done a better job plowing this. There’s weeds here.”

  “Well then, you’ll just have to hoe them out.”

  “Get away from there, Holmes.”

  Butch, like the house, had taken a while to adjust. Right away he’d decided he didn’t like Holmes, and kept being amazed that day after day she stayed around, annoying as she was. When the inevitable realization came that, for all her unpleasant and rough mannerisms, Holmes was here forever, Butch decided the best thing to do was completely ignore it.

  Each month seemed to double the size of the brute; but as she grew, her mannerisms became more predictable and mellow, and though she was clearly of a threatening size with teeth a whole inch long, Butch had less and less cause to be afraid of her. In fact, he began to enjoy her company—especially when they’d lie together on the porch, he on the little railing and Holmes at the top of the step. And every noisy car that went by, every unsettling sound brought her up on her big feet, bristling with her instinctual protectiveness, which made Butch feel very safe, and he spent many afternoons sitting in the warm sun smiling and feeling like an old king. Then sometimes they’d walk about the barnyard together, looking things over and messing about in the hay.

  Mal needed little urging to quit her job. The first time July mentioned that they might take a month or two off and enjoy the spring and early summer, she agreed wholeheartedly. The restaurant was more upset to learn of Mal leaving than was the cab company, which let July go the very second he voiced his desire. Mal finished out the week at The Ranch and said she would probably be back looking for work at the beginning of fall—maybe even before. (She wasn’t as optimistic as July about how cheaply they could live in the summer.)

  The days drew out longer. Little speckles of lettuce popped up through the ground. Their secondhand lawnmower chopped through the weeds in the yard, and grass did seem to take hold, even though the rough stalks of the burdock, chicory and buttonweeds never seemed to give up. On the first good sunny day (the ground wet and soft from rain the night before) they dressed in their bathing suits and began digging and pulling them out. A thankless job it seemed, but a little color came into their skin and they had to admit when they were through that they felt better about the yard. July hung a swing from the maple tree and they painted the fence and mowed around the barn. Day lilies grew in the ditch in front. They built a large window box just off the porch and planted cosmos. Mal finished a painting that seemed to be a turning point.

  “I don’t understand,” said July.

  “What I mean is that now I can sense better what composition means. It’s interest. Composition means interest. Of course converging lines should be avoided, along with things cut in half, but that’s because they’re uninteresting. I guess what I’m trying to say is that there is no way, right or wrong. All painting is an attempt—no, that’s wrong—is made up of individual attempts to create interest.”

  “But some kinds of interest are better than others.”

  “Naturally.” On Mal’s easel was a red dog sitting in a green yard with yellow dandelions bigger than life size and an unpainted fence and a broken window with blue inside. It reminded July of her crab painting, but he didn’t say so. He liked it quite a lot and urged her to put it up in the living room. “It’s not finished,” she said happily and began adding more colors to the grass.

  July went for a walk down behind the barn into the oaks. Squirrels chattered at him from their leaf nests. He saw a bird in a mulberry tree stretching its wings and fanning out its tail, displaying its brilliant orange and white feathers, like a great butterfly. Not knowing, however, what kind of bird it was, he resolved to get a bird book and learn them all. There’s no excuse for ignorance, he thought—ignorance of natural things. And because there’re so many things to learn is all the more reason. His negative self tried to argue that just having fun was more important than learning, but he amazed himself with how easily he could push that begging objection aside. He was getting stronger, he felt. It was easier to decide on doing things—easier to deny the opiate of inactivity. His restful moments lately had been filled with laying the foundations for more projects.

  But just as he was settling down with his back to a large rock with moss and lichen growing on it, with a feeling of pleasant self-contentedness, he remembered that he felt left out: Mal had her painting and there was no denying how absorbing and forward-moving it was. It was work, learning and enjoyment all at once. And what
did he have? He could no more paint than fly to the moon.

  Perhaps I could learn to play a musical instrument, he thought. But the idea of making squawking noises off by himself in some room was very disheartening. I’d never be any good, he complained. Sure, I like music well enough, but people who’re good at something—who have it in them—don’t start out when they’re twenty-two; by then they’re well on their way.

  Wait a minute, he thought. The world wasn’t created only for artists. Others belong in it just as rightfully, and there was nothing that stood in his way any more than in anyone else’s which kept him from extracting its full pleasures. There was an obstacle but wasn’t it the same for everyone? Inactivity, stagnation and the unwillingness to delve into experiences for understanding. He resolved to get a book about trees as well, decided to build a lean-to so that they could sleep outside overnight and set about gathering poles to make it with and finding stones to lay in a circle for a fireplace—not rocks from the creek because those might explode.

  Later that afternoon Mal came down the hill looking for him and he had an opportunity to watch her unobserved as she walked along, concealed behind a small thicket of hawthorn. Her expression and movements were much less animated, as he imagined his were when he was alone. She stopped and looked at something on the ground and examined it seriously, then stood up and looked around for him. He called out, and together they finished piling the brush onto the lean-to and sat inside when it was finished.

  They went back to the house to eat dinner and get matches, returned, had a fire and listened to the whippoorwills and night insects. The yellow flames subsided, leaving only the redness of the glowing coals. The sky grew brighter. The wildness of their little woods seemed to surround them. They lay together without speaking, but July could sense Mal was ready to talk; something was bothering her—not to the degree of worry, but enough to keep her from the silent participation he was enjoying. He sat up and put on some more wood, giving her the opportunity to break the silence.

  “I was wondering,” she began. “I don’t know if I can find just the right words to say what I mean, but is this all there is?”

  “Is what?”

  “Our lives. I mean is this all there is to it, just working and keeping the house fixed up and having pets and sometimes enjoying things and sometimes not for this reason or another—is that all?”

  “Wow. Really, I don’t understand what you mean—or maybe I’m afraid to. Whenever I try to think about what you’re saying, it seems like something terrible.”

  “I knew you’d think that. It’s not that way. All I mean is that I feel sometimes that there should be more—something that we would always be working towards. What we’re doing now, is that what everybody else does, and is it the same thing for them, so on blah blah? Doesn’t it seem that somehow there must be more? Because this can’t be really living. Really living must be something else entirely. But maybe there isn’t such a thing as that—oh, I hope you’re understanding all this in the right way. Maybe there isn’t such a thing as really living at all, only just being alive.”

  “Maybe,” said July sorrowfully, looking down into the fire.

  “Oh no, silly. This isn’t anything against you or against the way we live. Can’t you understand that? It’s not really against anything. Here, let me ask you this: do you think we’re normal people?”

  “Sure.”

  “What do you mean, sure?”

  “Sure—of course we are—if the other choice is abnormal. We’re physically and mentally all here, therefore normal.”

  “Is that all normal means to you?”

  “What else can it mean?” There was a defensive tone to his voice, but at least, thought Mal, he’s arguing.

  “I’ve always thought we were sort of special.”

  “In what way?”

  “Very individual and one of a kind. Worthy of admiration just for what we are.”

  “That’s just the way you think of yourself.”

  “No, both of us. We’re together. But what I was trying to say is that I used to think we were special, and now I see us sometimes as being ordinary—just another couple living in the country, getting by—”

  “Do you mean we should have financial careers, or see more of the world and have more friends, or have children, or what?”

  “None of those things—they’d just be more of the same.”

  “Somehow I can’t help thinking that what you’re saying is very snobbish.”

  “But it’s not!”

  “You’d probably like to live around more painters.”

  “You’re the one who feels snobby about painting, not me. I just like to do it. You think it’s so important.”

  “I was thinking about it today,” admitted July, “and wondered for a while if I shouldn’t learn how to play a banjo—so I could have something. But I decided to learn more and do more instead. I’m going to get some books on birds and trees.”

  “You always think so constructively,” laughed Mal. “I guess that’s my trouble. I always tend to blame things outside myself instead of finding something to do about bad feelings. . . . Why not learn how to play the banjo?”

  “Because it isn’t something that interests me. I only thought it up to have something artful to do.”

  “That’s nonsense.”

  “I know.”

  “It’s just sometimes I get afraid that I’ll become bored with everything, and that nothing will be able to satisfy me. You must feel like that at times.”

  “I did some in the winter. But not now.”

  “I was thinking that earlier tonight.” She put her arms around him. “But I don’t now. You don’t pay enough attention to me, I guess.”

  Then she added, “If we weren’t together, what do you think would be different about you?”

  “I’d be miserable and stupid.”

  “No, I mean objectively.”

  “I’d probably still have three cars, but I wouldn’t take the time to mow the yard.” Then their clothes came off and the evening fell away to libertine delights and sensations well beyond any regard for efficiency, a shameless display of even their most hidden, wanton desires.

  ELEVEN

  July’s idea was that he’d work as a farmhand for their neighbors, baling hay, cultivating and such. He had a keen interest in knowing exactly how each phase of the farming operation was carried out, as well as a belief in the possibility that the way the men lived their lives might offer him an insight into a better way to live his own. So while he was driving their tractors he’d also be stealing glimpses into their souls.

  Mal accused him of a kind of elitism. “You imagine yourself mingling with the common people, or thinking of them as being very quaint.”

  “I don’t.”

  “Then how can you take that kind of interest in them? Why should you care at all for seeing into their homes?”

  “I’m interested. I want to know what they’re like.”

  “Why do you think they’re not just like everybody else? What could possibly be different with them?”

  “They’re more isolated—and a lot of them always have been.”

  “That’s it. You think of them like children. You suppose them to be nobly simple.”

  “Nothing of the sort. I’m just interested. I wonder if I could get a job with some of the Amish.”

  “See!”

  “See what? You must admit they’ve probably got the right idea. If we just would live like that, we’d be better off.”

  “But they can’t be said to be ‘in society.’ They’ve merely retreated from it.”

  “There’s no way you can escape being in society, unless, I suppose, you lived by yourself in a submarine. Look, no automobiles, no electricity, no television, no movies, no smoking, no drinking or taking drugs, plain-dress code and a community to live in. Reduce the number of anxiety-producing elements and you reduce the anxiety level.”

  “They live with plenty of anxiet
y, you can bet on that. That much isolation breeds anxiety.”

  “You can’t say that. You don’t have any way of knowing.”

  “They can only live the way they do because there’s the rest of the world to take care of what they don’t do.”

  “Which just proves they’re in society.”

  “Well, if everybody lived like them—they just couldn’t. For one, there’s not enough land. There’d be no jobs.”

  “Now you’re asking them to live in a way nobody can be asked—to live in a way where if everyone else were just like them the world would be better. Certainly we’re no models ourselves.”

  “We make no pretensions.”

  “Who said they do?”

  “Well, they just seem to imply it, by being so . . . different, and pious.”

  “That’s just because their living code is a little stricter than ours.”

  “A little! Besides, you couldn’t ever give up listening to music, or reading—reading, how would you like to be told what you could read and what you couldn’t?”

  “Who said they do that?”

  “I’ll bet they do.”

  “I didn’t say I believed in all their personal religious beliefs—only that their basic way of life was good.”

  “Way of life, can’t be separated from the beliefs that give rise to it.”

  “Now you’re just arguing to be arguing, Mal.”

  “I guess you’re right. But I do want to go to the movies tonight.”

  “All right. But I think we should fix up a wood-burning heater to burn some of these dead elms . . . to save on the fuel bill.”

  July’s first job was with a baling crew, consisting of fourteen or fifteen boys mostly his own age or younger and two older overseers. They accepted him immediately but with great reserve, and only murmured pleasantries like probing fingers whenever he was around. There was never an introduction of any kind, and he had merely been told by the boss on his first day, “You work with them,” indicating five of the boys who were getting into a one-ton truck. And although it seemed everyone knew his name already and where he lived and that he was married, it was left up to him to listen for their names as they spoke together, because, as he guessed, it was assumed that he knew theirs.