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

the church was filled. Cars were stopped on the road and people in dark clothes walked along the ditch. Two long black cars with gray curtains on steel rails pointed outward, opened in the rear, less than a heavy stone’s throw from the iron railing of the front step. The naked sun nailed July’s eyes.

The lush smell of bought, manicured flowers filled the church. He was squeezed in between his two aunts, the third row back from the altar. Beyond the first row were two caskets, lids down. The room (though he had been in it every Sunday since he could remember) seemed twice or three times as large, the people larger, the stained-glass windows as big as a house, the altar like a mausoleum. An undertaker unclipped the little chain at the end of their pew, let himself in and refastened it, causing the small plaque suspended in the middle to swing. reserved for family. He inched over to Uncle Sid. They talked in short, breathless whispers. Once his uncle gestured to the caskets. The undertaker held his hand down several feet from the floor, as though indicating water level. His uncle smiled. They shook hands and the undertaker went outside the aisle, walked around the front, surveying the crowd like a large, unruly family, then went back toward the entrance hallway, where he met another undertaker and disappeared. Finally, as the silence became deafening, the minister came out and, with a white fleshy hand gesture, brought the group to a standing position. The organist hit a sinking chord and hymn number 107 tonelessly filled the air. July could feel Aunt Becky singing, her great sides heaving, but he could not find her voice in the sound. He felt very small. Then the minister let them down with his hands.

July began to reason. He realized that ever since he’d come home from school four days ago he hadn’t had a reasonable thought about anything. Now he was beginning to put thingstogether. It was the tone of the minister’s voice that first presented a clue. It was deep and sincere, emotional and slow—but many of the phrases jolted July. He’d heard them before—sitting with his parents, he’d heard them before—shutting his eyes and leaning his head against his father’s hard arm, he’d heard them before. The realization was like a slap in the face. He listened to the voice more closely: it was the same voice, a little slower maybe, and more deliberate, but that was pretense . . . the voice was the same! He quickly looked to his Aunt Becky. Her eyes were lowered to the floor as though wrapped in prehistoric thought. But he could see—he could tell that the full importance of the caskets and who was in them had not even bruised her and never would. Snapped thoughts yammered through him. He stole a quick, furtive look behind him and sat for long afterward with the vivid impression of the faces. Sad faces. But he could see . . . he could tell. There was only one person there who thought something was wrong, and that was him. One lady next to the organist stood up and began a song, then had to sit back down when her voice choked her. But no one besides himself felt there was anything wrong—terribly unfortunate, but not wrong. The old world was still clicking away. Waves of understanding passed through him.

I was deceived, he thought. Somehow, though the blame is mostly mine, I was deceived into believing nothing terrible would ever happen to me. Everyone else knew . . . that all it takes is one bit of bad luck—the tiniest quirk of fate, and zip, bring in two caskets, if the little fool was running, we’d hear ’im. He believed he understood why everyone seemed to be staring at him—it wasn’t that they wanted him to explode before their eyes—it was just a casual interest in if he was a fool or if he wasn’t. Just curiosity. Look in his eyes and see if he’s one of the fools, the halfwits, who believe nothing bad is ever going to happen to them—who believe their parents will live forever.

Then the minister called for a moment of silence, broken shortly by the sinking sounds of the organ. The feet began shuffling. The church filed out with low, murmured talking.

Soon the long, black-headed snake line was curling its way over to the cemetery, where from just over the top of the hill you could make out the imported angel. An opened book at her feet contained a short quotation from a letter John had sent to Becky several years ago: No one could be happier than we are. Today, the twenty-first of April, there are over two hundred birds in our yard, each one singing and eating from our three feeders like there was no tomorrow.

“That’s some stone,” said Uncle Perry, and Sid smiled as though he’d made it himself. Clearly, there was nothing anywhere near its size—a giant among tombstones.

July was glad he was able to leave before they began filling in the dirt.

That night, at the table with Becky, Perry, Aunt Franny and Uncle Sid, he ate something.

“Tomorrow you must go back to school,” he was told. He spent the rest of the evening in his room reading comic books. Most of them he’d read before, but some were new, presents from the parents of his school friends. He read both the new and the old with the same enjoyment. He let the words run slowly into sentences and understood them with little interest. He let the pictures flash onto an opaque screen just in front of his mind—an area where there was almost no thought—looked at them one at a time, then let them disappear. He realized that he was reading only at the beginning and end of each book. He read a Bible Stories comic (something which he normally could hardly stand) three times, and