Rock Island Line by David Rhodes (i am reading a book TXT) 📕

want to live here! Nothing could be more awful. All along . . . he could see that from the very beginning she’d not wanted to stay. She was unhappy just being in this place. He’d brought her 967 miles to be in an unhappy place. He leaped out of the hole, throwing down his shovel, and ran into the house, tracking black mud across the thin red rug they’d bought at an auction for a dollar and talked all night about how it added just the perfect color to the room.

“Mal, Mal!” He found her in the dining room, sitting beside the window, ran to her and took her by the shoulders, turningher toward him. “I’m sorry. We’ll go back to Philadelphia this minute. We’ll pack right now. We’ll drive the Ford. Hurry. I guess I never really thought you didn’t like it here—basically. A few annoyances was all, I thought. Come on, we’ll pack right now.” He was pulling her up.

“Stop touching me!” she yelled, and shook herself free. Then after a period of red silence said, “The Ford wouldn’t get that far.”

“Sure it would.”

“It breaks down every other day. It’d never make it.”

“Then I’ll take you to the train and I’ll drive it out. Two days. Only two days and we’ll be together again. I care about you much more than living here. Never forget that. Come on.”

“We can’t.”

“Why not?”

“Because I spent all the money!” she said, just before bursting into tears and burying her face in her hands. July picked up her purse from the table, took out the little leather pouch where he knew she kept the “money to the East,” and opened it. A single dollar bill was all that was left, after it had been raided now and then for groceries or materials to fix up the house. He held it as a proof against him, undeniable evidence of his own selfishness. He put it down and tried to think. Mal continued to cry.

“Oh, it makes me so mad!” she screamed, and slammed her fists down on the tabletop.

July jumped back. “What?” he said.

“Crying. I hate it!”

“I do too. But wait—I have it!” and he ran upstairs, across the ceiling, back again and down.

“Here!” he said. “Here!” And dangling from a delicate white-gold chain was a diamond as big as the buttons on her blue dress. “All the money we’ll need.”

He put it into Mal’s hand. It seemed for an instant as if it were alive, the little chain quivering like a thin fish.

“It’s beautiful,” she said. “Where’d you get it?”

“I bought it a long time ago.”

“Is it real?”

“Sure it is. I bought it at Snells’ Jewelry, remember that place?”

“It’s real nice.”

“It’ll give us enough money to go back East and get a place and take a nice long vacation—say, through the winter.”

Mal carried the necklace to the mirror in the kitchen and put it on. Looking into her own eyes and admiring the reflection, she thought: Now I must decide to stay or leave. She thought very hard, trying to be as fair as possible, realizing that staying had to mean more now than waiting, and leaving meant forever.

July came into the kitchen and stood diffidently close to the refrigerator. Her time was up. Whatever she said would be what she decided.

“I’m not going. But you have to promise that we can be more practical.”

July agreed in an instant. But in the last ten minutes something had changed between them. He wasn’t sure what it was, or exactly what new conditions would be likely to grow from it. Yet something different was in the air. And he noted it.

They spent all of that evening planning, making lists on a piece of paper, adding figures that represented amounts of money, and taking each other’s clothes off, safe and happy that there was no one for miles, nothing to break their inchoate web of closeness. The diamond was too important, they decided, to sell outright, and they’d look for a place to borrow money on it. Then, with a reliable car and the things they had to have before winter set in, they could buy it back at a little each month. Because most of the work on the house would have to be done by July, Mal took it upon herself to find a job—part time if possible—something where she could earn the $185 they’d figured out they would need each month. One of the upstairs rooms was to become a studio, and July would put another window in the north wall to catch the reflected light. After they got a better car they could take the driving test in Iowa City.

But the septic tank remained foremost in July’s urgent thoughts, and after they obtained a loan and bought a new car (or at least a newer one than the Ford), a green Chrysler, and Mal was off looking for work, July dug as though he were possessed. He dug the six-foot round hole through the top two feet of black dirt, past a six-inch layer of small rocks, down to a sandier, browner soil, and into clay, which presented such a problem he was finally forced to stop. The clay was so wet and sticky that it wouldn’t come off his shovel when he threw it up out of the hole (now nearly seven feet deep) and it was easier to break away chunks and throw them out. This worked well enough for another six inches, but as the clay became more moist the pieces didn’t stay together as well, and by the time he pulled himself up with the rope fastened to a window frame of the house, he was nearly exhausted with anger and frustration. When Mal came home he had a bucket tied to a rope and they dug the next several feet together: July filling the bucket with his hands and helping her pull it up the first seven feet, and Mal taking it the rest of the