Rock Island Line. David Rhodes

sound is the only difference. Then she went away from the window and fell into an ancient, uninvaded sleep which carried her past breakfast.

      It must be remembered that July grew up in a house like this one. His father worked across the street, and if July needed him, was always there, even in the daytime. Sometimes the two of them would go into Iowa City together and walk through the wide-aisled stores, where July would be looking quickly at everyone, thinking that all of them were seeing his father the way he saw him—strong, wise and very funny. And when they went with Grandma, he thought everyone thought she was Grandma. He very simply thought that there was nothing his father couldn’t do, or know how to do, and nothing his mother couldn’t eventually forgive and forget. His father could protect him from anything that could walk or crawl, anything that was physical and might come to get him, and his mother could protect him from his own terrifying thoughts, and the darkness in the hall closet and disease.

      They knew him in school then as a friendly yet quiet boy, someone whom all enjoyed being with, and who could play baseball very well, but who wasn’t particularly wanted on your team in a spelling contest. He was better in math. He’d inherited his father’s strength, but it seemed to work more through his determined ruthless will than through his shoulders and arms—an enduring runner, but lacking the speed in short sprints.

      One thing everyone remembers about him was the difficulty in getting him to change his mind. If he decided, as he once did in second grade, that yes, it was possible to see air, there wasn’t any moving him. No, the teacher told him, air is clear. You can see everything clearly through it. You can see it on radiators, and coming up from a pavement. That’s heat, they told him. That’s heat waves. No, it’s hot air. And for all the reasoning, he wouldn’t budge, no matter how wrong he was. Most of the teachers would simply tell him that he was just being stubborn, and keep him quiet in that way. Sometimes it would turn out that his ideas were sound; but, good or bad, he would hang on to them with the same tenacity, and weeks later when you would try to bring up an incident in a light way, giving him a chance to take back what he’d said—like eating fish eyes can be a cure for blindness—he would jump into the argument as though he had spent the whole time thinking up more reasons to hurl at you.

      Simply, he was one of us, and like us all, in his own way. Only a little more confident, perhaps, because of the great faith he had in his parents and their ability to manage all parts of his life that were out of his own control, allowing him to be very open and personable and radiate good humor and be obstinate.

      He’d never known his grandfather except from what his parents told him, and Della (who, though she did not talk about him constantly, always said we; we did this or went over there, or we thought that was funny. This we, his mother explained to him later, was completed by the no-longer-present figure of his grandfather, a living, breathing person who was dead. The bodies of the dead went back to the ground. The living got old, and when they were finished, they were dead. His grandmother, he was told, was getting old).