TWO
Though for some reason Della had not had children until fairly late in life—late according to the usual age for becoming a mother (she was twenty-nine) and many of her close friends were worried about her welfare because of her bones being too old to stretch—it seemed that after she got started she never stopped, and she was either just getting ready to have one and people would comment, “She sure is round, have you noticed?” or she was carrying a new one and giving it to Wilson or Mrs. Miller to look after while she went off to teach school. Many people told her not to do it—that they could find someone else to fill in at the school until everything settled down—but she wouldn’t agree and claimed that Mrs. Fitch would do what she could, but that she (Della) was the only one who knew exactly where each of the children was and what kind of progress they could be expected to make, emotionally and intellectually. And whatever sacrifice they imagined Della was making, to have her there instead of anyone else was what they really wanted anyway.
One of the boys was named John, after Wilson’s great-grandfather. If Della could be said to have favorites—and of course she couldn’t, and didn’t, but still if someone were to have to say which one she liked the best, if she were forced to give an answer other than all of them—it would be him. There was a hidden fierceness in him, lacking in the others.
John Montgomery did not stand out as an unusual boy until he was almost ten—mostly because he had always been shy. Even in school where his own mother taught he would blush whenever he spoke. He looked pretty much like a direct cross between his older brother Alex and his sister Rebecca, though more withdrawn than either. At first, that was all there was to him. Thenhe began to stand out. It was noticed that at infrequent unpredictable times he would slip into moments of self-absorbing sensuality, as though he could not contain himself and was overpowered by pleasure, like being carried away by a joke—an image so dramatic it suggested a personality split. But then it was also noticed that the shyness returned immediately afterward and he would look very guilty. And this, though it explained in a minor way the shyness, presented a question of its own; because it was not natural that a boy of that young age would have learned what it is about emotions that he should be ashamed of. He would certainly not have learned it from Della and Wilson. It was just as though he had been born with the two coincidental characteristics: his tremendous capacity for feelings, and the accompanying guilt.
He was well liked, though not comfortable to be with during the few times when he would fall to enjoying his lunch to such an extent that everyone sitting across from him at the lunch table would be forced to admit that their own enjoyment of eating must be a very shallow thing in comparison. Also because of an icy chill in the room in which he greedily cut off contact with everything else but himself and his sandwiches—turning from the world of reason, communication and people to the world of his own swirling emotions and sensations. It was unpleasant to be so ruthlessly ignored; but the shyness, which he retained throughout his life, compensated and endeared him to people. It seemed he was always afraid someone would find out, and because those times were known to everyone, the knowledge was an intimacy, arising from knowing more of him than he might have wished.
As John grew up, automobiles began to replace horses, and the huckster wagon was abandoned after it became less time-consuming for families to get to the store themselves (the bigger stores in Iowa City as well). But cream still flowed through Wilson’s grocery store like water. The road to Hills was widened, and the fences were set back several feet on each side. A hardtopwas set down and became Highway 1, crossing the road to Hills in the middle of Sharon Center. A garage was made out of Barns’ store, with two tall, thin pumps close to the highway. A high school was built across from the Masonic Lodge.
John’s older brother Alex was old enough to be accepted into the Army at the same time the United States decided to enter its first war with Germany, without the approval of his mother. Wilson had no opinions, either on the war or his son’s desire to be in it, and silently drove him to the recruiting station in Iowa City in the wagon. They shook hands, and as Wilson left he watched Alex being taken in by the other boys there, laughing nervously and talking about military weapons. At home Della told him, “I can feel that it was a mistake, Wilson.” Of course this was not a judgment of the war—only the way she chose to tell him that, as far as she was concerned, their son would never come home.
“You can’t know that,” said Wilson.
“Yes I can.”
John Montgomery had already decided that, and watching his brother ride away in the wagon with his bag of belongings, talking excitedly to his father, he said goodbye to him. He removed his brother from his active mind and put him into memory, where he remained forever. So the news of Alex’s patriotic death (he had died by personally carrying a very sensitive bomb into a house with thick walls, taking with him into
