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

realized how foolish I must have seemed to them, and to the people inside looking out the windows.

“I did everything in my power to discover the long circumstances that brought about the disappearance of my husband, and everything failed. Some mornings, on their way to work, neighbors reported to have seen him driving home, sometimes from the west, on Sutherland Drive, sometimes from the north from East Fourteenth Street and sometimes down the back alleys of Woodville. The matter was turned over to the police and they went about for several weeks with pictures in their shirt pockets, asking, ‘Have you seen this man, this Cecil Baynard? He’s disappeared from his wife.’ And ‘When did you last see him? Did he have any friends? Did he have a girlfriend that you might know of or have heard mentioned?’ Simply nothing.

“By then I was twenty-three. I suppose many of my neighbors thought that I went into shock, because for a long time I didn’t venture outside my house except for the barest necessities, and even then at the checkout lines I would ignore their eyes. But it wasn’t that. I was simply making up my mind. I knew how much money I had, how long I could keep paying the bills, how long the creditors would take after I quit paying before they would refuse to absorb any more loss at the request of their conscience, turn off the electricity, snip off my heat supply and demand the three keys which allowed free, unobstructed coming and going from the house. I knew that when this time came I would have to be prepared to move and go on, but I didn’t intend to be fooled into picking out a direction before I’d made up my mind how I was going to feel about what’d happened to me. I refused, in other words, to let the experience have any direct control overmy life for the worse, and sat down to decide, practically speaking, just how things were with me.

“There were two things which struck me with particular force. First: the lunch pail. He never went to work without a packed lunch pail. I always filled it after the news and I couldn’t remember a time when he’d forgotten to take it. And every time I’d arrive at an explanation for his disappearance and secret activities, I was reminded of the lunch pail.” She stopped talking.

“Go on,” said Della.

“He never forgot his lunch pail. The second thing was when after the police sounded the river—I believe that’s the term—anyway, with hooks and such they brought up a body from the mud bottom, a man with pockets filled with sand and small rocks. He had no identification on him and they wanted me to see if he held any resemblance to my husband. So I went down to the morgue with them, but when we arrived and before we were inside, an inspector stepped out, helping a middle-aged woman by supporting her arm. She was in tears, and he quietly told the policeman who had brought me that they already had positive identification and that I could go home. It wasn’t my husband. It was then, looking at that other woman, that I was reminded that I knew what it felt like to have someone dead: Cecil was not, and could not be, dead. Because I knew what that felt like. I knew that feeling too well, and if Cecil had been dead though outside my immediate knowledge, I would have known. That night he’d left his lunch pail. Something had been in his mind.

“So with these two things—the knowledge of his living, and the knowledge of him and lunch pails—I did the only thing to save my own pride. I quit caring and divorced him. I moved again, and lived by myself, working at a button factory. I expected to never have anything to do with marriage or men for as long as I lived.”

John reached out and touched her, imposing silence. Wilson’s breathing was heavy. Every once in a while he would jerk, movingin some faraway dream, keeping ahead of the foxes. Della looked at Sarah in the smoky night light and thought, There’s still something not revealed—something that you’ve kept from me. You’ve not explained it all.

What happened in Della’s mind was unusual. She took it upon herself to get to the bottom of Sarah’s strangeness, and spent the next several years visiting her and watching her closely. She talked to her friends incessantly about how Sarah did this and Sarah did that, as though trying to prove by a lengthy induction that her son’s wife was completely human. And they listened to her, half out of not wanting to be unkind and half out of interest in hearing some passing clue that would solve the mystery in everyone else’s mind: What was she like when the shades were pulled and she turned her attention to her senses? It was many, many years before this idea even dawned upon Della—that the secret could be in the flesh, in Sarah’s hips and thighs and arms and hands, and not inside. She looked for something beneath the skin, something in Sarah’s personality to explain it, not thinking for a moment that there was personality and something else, different and completely made up of senses. Her discovery of this came much later. Her neighbors in town never took it upon themselves to invite her over to their houses on Saturday night, or any other night that it might start, to listen to the joyous moaning, screaming cat howls that came from John’s house and went on for as long as several hours, each wavering note cutting through the stillness. Nor did they explain to her that they’d gotten to enjoy lying in bed, listening and wondering. On infrequent Sunday afternoons when the air would be full, their children would ask, “Mommy, why does she make those noises? They frighten me.” “There’s no reason