Rock Island Line by David Rhodes (most life changing books txt) 📗

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 wakinghours 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 ofyourself”—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