Then came the Depression, and Wilson was trapped by it. The farmers (though the price of seed had gone up so that they couldn’t afford it, the machinery that they had bought on time from the bank was repossessed, no one could borrow money, roving bands of destitute people roamed through the cities) still counted on selling their eggs, butter, milk, cakes and dried beans to Wilson’s grocery. And Wilson knew that if they could, if they possibly could, they would come in and buy meat and canned goods to keep up their half of the bargain. But they just couldn’t. They didn’t have enough money. Yet he felt responsible and when they brought in their cans of milk (being careful to bring no more than before, when they had been shopping there too, and usually less) he would smile and pay them from his cash register and joke with them. For several years he did this. Some of them bought enough to keep him from losing money.
He was almost forced to close. A stranger from Iowa City came once, then twice, and then regularly twice a week, buying more than one family could ever eat, or even two. This went on for several months until Wilson followed him back into the city to a big grocery store, where what he had sold the stranger was unloaded, brought inside, and sold to a man in a glassed-in box beside the checkout line. He talked to one of the two carry-out boys andlearned that some fellow who ran a garage in Sharon Center hired it done in order to keep his old man in business.
Wilson put his store up for sale, and though Sy Bontrager was there at the auction trying to hold on to it so that it could stay in the community and maybe be opened again later, in better times, he couldn’t outbid an old German named Sehr, who went over him on it and on the house on the corner across from it. Then Wilson and Della moved out to their country home and lived with their four-year-old wolf. At this time they began going to church and, after the Depression lifted, continued to go. They accepted an old automobile from John, because they were so far out, and in case one of them would be sick. Wilson began helping out farmers, working for them for nothing, and Remington Hodge’s father says that “One morning when we were real little and were going out, wondering how we would ever be able to get in all the hay before it rained, Della and Wilson came driving down the lane and went out with us without a word, and they must have known they couldn’t be given anything, not even a sack of corn. We did give them some bread, but it wasn’t anything, not for what they did.”
Wilson’s fishing buddies, Sam and Dave, died, and Wilson waited a long time before he began going again, alone. Della continued to teach school, and in 1935 began being paid enough so that she and Wilson could live on the salary and save the rest of the money from the store, what little there was. Wilson’s health wasn’t good, and though his spirit remained unruffled, still he slept more, became weaker and lived under the continual din of a bad heart, which Della told John (who watched after them like a mother hen) sounded like it was trying to peck its way outside his chest.
Sharon Center eased out of the Depression. Loans became available. Everyone invested in freezers full of food and put them in their basements, which seemed better insurance than any other kind that they would never be caught wanting again. John had one put in his parents’ house. People wished that the store would bereopened, and eventually, in ‘39, Sehr rented it out to some owl from Iowa City, who set it up more to sell ice cream than staples, and in the middle of winter disappeared completely, leaving the building locked and the shelves full. Men who worked for banks came in the spring and opened it up. Rats had eaten into the corners of the boxes, and the smell was unbearable. Sehr accepted no responsibility, because, as he said, the rent had been paid for an entire year. The windows of the store part were boarded up in house siding, and a family named Collins moved into it. They never mingled with anyone, and for the ten years they lived there were looked upon with suspicion.
John was now nearly forty, and up until the day he drove away, locking his garage and house, it was not remembered that he had ever left for more than several days in the entire eighteen or twenty years since he had come back from Detroit. He climbed into his car and drove away, heading west; and from that direction he could have been going anywhere. It was late spring, and clear into summer the garage doors remained closed, and there was wonder concerning where he had gone, and what might have been in his mind to go there, and what might have happened to him. He stayed away until the middle of July, when at night Hercules spun directly overhead and the edge of his mace touched the Milky Way’s southern stream. Then all that had been forgotten about John was remembered. He came back married.
Her name was Sarah. John never said what her last name had been, or where he had found her, or what he had said when he first met her, how he had
