John looked at her silhouetted against the leaping colors, then at the colors themselves, and began to daydream. The daydream tapered back to the fire and he found himself looking at Sarah again. He went back to daydreaming but returned again to theseat of the denim pants; and when she gave a little jump back from the heat, her face glowing red, the air full of her smell, he felt his desire rise. Unsuspecting, she came back to the tree, stretched and sat down. He put his arm around her, and she moved closer, still unknowing. He sat with his desire for a few minutes to see if it would stand the test of time, then unbuttoned her pants. “Oh, John!” she said. “Not here.”
“Why not?”
Sarah’s senses (already inflamed by fear and embarrassment) nearly exploded, like a barrel of fish dumped into a river, when she felt her pants being drawn off and her bare skin exposed to the open air. She began to loosen John’s buckle and pull his shirt down his arms. In his search for something to put under her buttocks, to protect her from the hard ground and to get her a little way up in the air, he found the blanket. “Oh, John,” she cried. “Love me. Love me,” closed her eyes on tentacled Hercules, and let her passion carry her to the other side of the doors of death, primeval darkness, and back again. Afterward, sweat rolling from where their bodies had touched, they dressed and made coffee, boiling water in a tin pail. They sweetened it and poured in cream from the little canister. Contented, and at the table, they sipped it.
I knew we’d want the cream, thought Sarah.
In 1941 there was a war. John was troubled, though he did not talk about it. The next year, in February, he told Sarah that he was going to enlist. It was supposed that he wouldn’t be accepted because of his age; but he was gone within weeks. He was a faithful letter writer, though the neighbors were disappointed because the letters contained no war news. That year he came home for Christmas and stayed twenty days, then was home again a year later for a shorter visit.
The idea of Sarah Montgomery being alone was at first thought to be an imminent danger. It was even suggested to Della that she should insist her daughter-in-law move in with her and Wilson in the country. Della was excited at the idea, and asked her rightaway. Sarah declined, and would accept no sympathy, denying as she did that there was even the slightest gloom in her life, and maintaining that she was perfectly safe—or as perfectly safe as anyone else. Remington Hodge’s father said: “I used to think at night sometimes, walking out to the barn maybe, or listening to the radio—of the image of that woman alone in her own house, sitting and reading, sewing, cooking for herself. I’d think about that and wonder, picturing myself there, see, standing knocking at the door, her opening it and . . . then I would force my thoughts away from it.” On September 18, 1943, Sarah gave birth to a boy, July Montgomery.
The adult congregation of the Sharon Center Baptist Church was spread out on the front lawn and steps. Wilson stood with some men on the landing before the opened door and their voices rang with short, tenorous bursts of laughter. They were dressed in suits and sports jackets, white shirts and ties, and their manner of talking seemed to be influenced gently by wearing them, as though they were children in front of a great dollhouse, pretending to be grownup. Many of their faces were nut brown from working exposed to the summer sun. Sarah was virtually surrounded by the other women on the grass, protecting her, it appeared, from the unwanted looks of the men. They talked about gardens. The lawn sloped away from them toward a pair of soft maples and an overhead wind rattled and turned the silver underside of their leaves so that the foliage of the two shimmered in the late morning light. Their trunks, despite great breadth, looked as though they had at one time partially melted and the flat pieces of bark undulated over them in waves. Underneath these giants, in the cool shade, sat the children on thick little wooden chairs, the seats of which were no more than a foot off the ground and on the backs were decals of red bears, giraffes and smiling rabbits. They all sat in a cluster facing a slightly larger but by no means full-size chair, on which Della Montgomery perched like a gold-finch with a Bible opened in her lap. Their eyes were glued toher as though she and not what she was teaching them was a marvel of unexpected creation, and perhaps in their inchoate minds they half suspected that in an exuberant expression she would fly away in a flash of color, huge blue-and-white wings sprout from her polka-dotted dress and disappear behind a cloud.
July Montgomery sat in the very front, wearing his new pair of cowboy boots and a shirt with snaps instead of buttons. He was three and his dark eyes burned in intense concentration, growing slowly into a frown of bitter
