would return with his spiritual net. And by the time he was back from the University Hospital he seemed (from all the evidence) to be his old self.
The issue of John’s breaching personality was forgotten, the two wild-voiced women had become thought of as a queer phenomenon of experience, and if he was imagined to be too full of life at times, it was also remembered that, for the most part, looking him in the eyes would make him blush. The serious thoughts about his father had pushed all the other, more trivial, mean thoughts back into perspective.
He was very popular with the girls at the high school, and it was said that a well-brought-up girl could share a happy evening with him and never once have her ideals compromised. There was some fear, of course, that while out with one of them he would all of a sudden change over, and no telling what would happen after that. The girls were supposed to be able to sense this frightful desire for lust beneath the surface of his gray eyes. His bashfulness made him nearly impossible to talk to, but the lurking suspicion that he might at any time get it into his mind to drag them off into a cement corner and rip away their clothes and not take no for an answer made him attractive for a long time. But, like an unfulfilled promise, it wasn’t enough, and when the girls were older and foresaw their lives being taken out of the school and stranded in the barren, sun-bleached world of their parents, they were quick to give him up and settle for fulfillment of a more normal kind.
John Montgomery seemed to have no intention of marrying, and accepted it as quite normal that his friends and finally even his sister and younger brothers settled into homes of their own (Rebecca to Iowa City and Henry to Duluth) while he remained alone and unattached and showed no indication that he would ever plan to do otherwise, and even left off stopping in on Mrs. Saunders, a young widow nearing thirty.
Bachelors were not unheard of in the area—in fact, it was remembered that the two relatives who had been the reason for Della and Wilson coming to Sharon hadn’t ever married. Nothing uncommon about it. Nothing bitter or morose, only personal choice. Because of his shyness, John had never been on close, intimate terms with anyone (except, perhaps, his older sister), though no one who had gone to school with him would deny that he was a friend. It was noted that bachelors were invariably of that same sort, so everything fitted into place—terribly sad, but natural.
In a magazine John saw an advertisement for a training school in Detroit for automobile mechanics. He talked the matter over with his father, and within a month arrived in Detroit and enrolled as an automotive-engineer trainee. He worked nights as a dishwasher in a night restaurant to pay the tuition. Once a week he wrote a full-page, small-margined letter home to his parents from his one-lamp room, and after the nine weeks Della had nine letters that had been read out loud before dinner, safely inside a cupboard drawer. “He’s always been so conscientious,” she told Wilson. Then he came back with a certificate, and a well-detailed plan to build a garage and fill it with steel six and twelve-point sockets, breaker bars, drop-forged impact wrenches, lock washers, cotter pins, ring compressors, two and three-claw bearing pullers, mill bastard files, feeler gauges, bench vises, taps and dies, drums of oil and flat-nose pliers. The bank in Hills loaned him the money, and a wild bunch of unemployed construction workers built him an enormous one-room building big enough for an airplane on top of a cement foundation, diagonally across from the grocery.
“They’ve made it big enough,” remarked Joe Miller, “to contain him.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” asked Della with the nasty implication that it better not mean anything.
As John grew older, he learned more about himself. From the very beginning he must have been aware of a 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. When he was young he must have wished to be rid of his self-consciousness while coveting the reckless abandonment. He must have thought he would gladly cast off his usual shy self and emerge from under a dead skin, an authentic, brightly colored, fully human testimony of feeling. Then later, after he had come back from Detroit and swung up the wide wooden door opening into his warehouse-size garage, rented the late Dr. Bokin’s house across the street, joined a group called the Society for the Observation of Birds and begun reading the Bible at the rate of two chapters a day, interested, but not industrious enough to look up the word references along the middle of the page—he was convinced his life could become more wonderful if only there were not that uncontrollable center of emotional rampage. He began to resent it because of the feelings of shame it brought him later. And from that time on he was careful to live his life in such a way that when those times came—and they were less frequent as he grew older—he could keep it to himself without reaching out and including others. But he could not deceive, and everyone knew from his shyness and gray eyes that nothing was changed, and he was expected for years to be building up for a gigantic outburst.
But then everyone forgot. Because they didn’t see any evidence of his sensuality. After five or six years they forgot about it.
Remington Hodge’s father used to call on the name of the Lord to verify that John Montgomery could fix anything, and that it was common knowledge clear into Iowa City and through to Solon (which to him was tantamount to universal knowledge) that there’s a guy in Sharon who can really weld. To those old farmers there were three things: family, food and machinery. So here it is, the family belongs to Della, and Wilson is there for food, and what happens then but John is the best welder on earth and as long as he’s alive and either there’s a light on in the house across the street or the garage door is open it’s as good as a promise that everything will be all right. It’s impossible to say what a good mechanic means to people who have nothing to depend on but what they can touch.
John was by no means the first in Sharon Center to get an automobile for himself. Actually there were already so many by then that there was no reason for any notice at all, except everyone knew how Wilson felt about them, and the concern was to see how he would take it.
“If he wants to, that’s his business,” was all that he said.
One afternoon five or six farmers were at John’s, sitting on the machinery and talking and spitting, a little too far along into fall to be without jackets, when Sy Bontrager came up in his tractor and sat down with them. John had his hood and gloves on, and sparks flew like a roman candle. Corn-picking season had nearly arrived, and in the fields black scar marks showed on the tops of the plants where the skin had frozen. Naturally, they talked about weather and the approaching winter.
Sy had a piece of iron he wanted straightened, and when John tipped up his hood in order to see what he was working on in full light, Sy asked him where he kept the anvil. John told him in the back somewhere and closed down the hood and resumed welding. Sy went back to look, and because one man could spend all day looking back there, three or four of the others went to help. They found it behind two oil drums and a short block.
“Here, I’ll get back in there and hand it out,” said Brenneman.
“Just lift it on out,” said Henry Yoder, “from there.”
“No thanks.” Brenneman got back between the drums and set it up on the block.
Marion took it out and set it on the floor. “I heard,” he said, “that there was a fella in Clinton who could pick one of these up with one hand, by grabbin’ ahold of it by the horn.”
“I could do that,” said Sy.
“Come on.”
“I could. Bring it on out here where there’s plenty of air.”
Brenneman
