121. ROCK ISLAND LINE

David Rhodes 1975

The perseverance of July Montgomery, the main protagonist of this marvelous novel is utterly amazing. After a car accident kills his parents John and Sharon, he runs away from his once protected life in a small town in Iowa via the Rock Island Line to find a new life alone in Philadelphia. Barely ten years old, he finds his first home underneath a train station and his first job selling newspapers. But life is not to be smooth for him, and after a series of failed associations, and in spite of meeting and falling in love with Mal, he decides to go back to his old house in Iowa to build a new life together. July's surprisingly uplifting insightful view of life in spite of all his tragic experiences is truly astounding.

'The old people remember Della and Wilson Montgomery as clearly as if just last Sunday after the church pot-luck dinner they had climbed into their gray Chevrolet and driven back out to their country home, Della waiving from the window and Wilson leaning over the wheel, steering with both hands.'(opening line)

'After all, how odd is it really to have a momentary temper flare, where all the petty grievances of several months come together in a perfect pinnacle of outrage, actualize, exorcise, and afterward leave no trace? How odd is that? Not so very. Indeed, what would married life be without just such instantaneous outbursts, where a few spoken words become a symbol for absolute, incorrigible evil?'(9)

'As John grew older, he learned more about himself. From the very beginning he must have been aware of frightening inconsistency in the way experiences came to him. He must have felt (especially in moments of remorse) that his life was insubstantial because he could have two completely unrelated ways of viewing it-- two attitudes, neither of which could be said to be less valid or real. A feeling of disintegration-- drowning, with nothing to grab hold of that could float.'(35)

'Quickly, Sarah came over and sat beside him on the floor with his truck, and in her silent-fighter voice talked to him, and explained quite clearly and exactly how oldness, old age-- that time at the end of a person's long happy life-- that time just before they became dead-- made them act in ways different from people who were not at the end of their lives-- and that the whole thing, most importantly, the complete overall picture, was good and rejoiceful.'(108)

"You're both chicken," said Earl. "You're yellow."

'This taunt, which by itself has probably been responsible for more misdeeds among young people than any other, cut them to the quick. It's a wicked threat, one which almost anyone can wield with the same weight, one which is secretly used against oneself with terrible consequences. Its seriousness can never be overlooked-- the weapon of self-destruction, yet the foundation of noble action.'(158)

'I was deceived, he thought. Somehow, though the blame is mostly mine, I was deceived into believing nothing terrible would ever happen to me. Everyone else knew... that all it takes is one bit of bad luck-- the tiniest quirk of fate, and zip, bring in two caskets, if the little fool was running, we'd hear 'im. '(128)

'After spending a day with her parents, who generally didn't let her talk at all, this attention was welcome and it made her feel important; but better were the times when they laughed together, and best were the fleeting glimpses she had when he seemed a caricature of himself: because that was when she knew she had loved him from the first moment, as though his soul showed through him like a trapped, cloudy light wanting to come out, wishing for more air, always wanting only a couple of mouthfuls of clean air. It seemed he had somewhere inside him, bottled and smoldering though it might be, more life than in twenty of all other people she had known.' (277)

'With all these revolutionary things going on, it might be imagined that July found little time to think back on his previous life: that he would be completely occupied with the present. But such was not the case (nor was it likely to ever be). Each new emotion that he encountered seemed to let loose from his past, and the more expansive he became on the one hand, the more groundless he felt on the other, as in flying a kite, the brisker the wind, the easier to get up, but the harder to get down and the more likely to break a stick. Or so it seemed to him.'(281)

'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 fair as possible, realizing that staying had to mean more than waiting, and leaving meant forever.'(319)

"We should take more time to notice things," he continued. "We should look and be open to more-- because the better feelings aren't the ones that come naturally. They have to be worked for. They come when everything else is shut out."(323)

'The last was the large, weightless package for July, and with the help of the puppy July tore into it, only to find it empty but for a small piece of paper on which she'd written in crayon with large, clumsy letters, making it look as though a second-grader had made it at school, Will you marry me?'(331)

'If you ever could know how much I love you, you'd be frightened.'(338)

"All I mean is that I feel sometimes that there should be more-- something that we would always be working towards. What we're doing now, is that what everybody else does, and is it the same thing for them, so on blah blah? Doesn't it seem that somehow there must be more? Because this can't be really living. Really living must be something else entirely. But maybe there isn't such a thing-- oh, I hope you're understanding all this in the right way. Maybe there isn't such a thing as really living at all, only just being alive."(344)

'The ability to be with oneself, he decided, was something that reached further back than anything else. Each person must have his own way, for better or worse, but the ease with which it can be tolerated can only depreciate from lack of practice, and never improve beyond what it was originally meant to be.'(355)

'As the days wore on, he had felt the possibilities contracting. Coming to an intersection, he could see that one and sometimes two of the four channels were slowly being sealed up, like doorways being cemented over, and it wasn't easy to get into them any more. Before long it would be impossible. He knew very clearly the substance that was sealing these avenues, knew how it was getting there but had no idea how to stop it. Invariably, it was the channels containing the good feeling which were being closed. He had seen also that the beginning work on the bad had started, and that the future held almost exclusively nonfeeling channels, when his thoughts would roll straight through his mind like a bowling ball down a narrow alley and , deviating just the slightest bit, would fall into the gutter, slide all the way to the end and drop into the machine to be returned.'(398)

"Keep yourself headed forward. There's nothing easy in this world-- and to give up is to lose everything. Do what you feel you have to, but do it in order to improve yourself. No running. Learn how to suffer and nothing will ever be able to hurt you. Reach as far as you possibly can with pride. Be more than you are able."(408)

A Milkweed Edition 2008

408 pages

Book Owned

A great review @ Bibliophiliac's blog can be found here.