“I don’t think it’s worth it. Mom almost had brain damage worrying the other night when you were out feeling sorry over that dog, wandering around along the river.”
“My feelings are my own.”
“Maybe so, but maybe—”
“Forget that. Listen, Marion said Sy Bontrager picked up that anvil with one hand—by grabbing ahold of the horn. That true?”
“I saw him do it.”
“It seems impossible.”
“I know.”
“How could someone be that strong?” asked Wilson, and focused his eyes down into John’s face.
John blushed. “I don’t know . . . he’s big.”
He won’t admit it, thought Wilson. He won’t admit it. It’s like he’s ashamed. Very odd. If I could do that, everyone would know. I’d have the anvil put out by the road and once a week I’d lift it up; and if someone came into the store who had never seen me lift it, I’d pick it up again. And if I could do it with my right hand, then I’d learn to do it with my left, and then by holding it backhanded. (All of these thoughts he had while looking at the anvil.)
“Will you and Mom come to church this Sunday?”
“We already talked about that, John. If you want to, that’s fine. But there’s no reason to try to include me and your mother. Besides, I don’t see anything to it. The whole thing is too . . . superficial. No, that’s not quite right. Self-righteous is a better word. Vanity.”
“That’s not right, Dad.”
“We don’t go to church. Our lives are happy and full without it. Each worships in his own way . . . that’s what I think. And besides, Della is dead set against it.”
“I know. That’s why you have to convince her.”
“Foolishness. And anyway, Saturday night I’m going fishing.”
“That’s no excuse. Go some other time.”
“What could be closer to God than being on the river? If there’s anything in religion that belittles fishing or being outdoors in order to promote sitting in a building singing foolish songs and looking righteous—it can’t be of any value.”
“There’s a difference between enjoying God’s gifts and paying for them.”
“Enjoying them is paying for them. It’s neglect that falls in the red. And gifts are gifts.”
“Despite how you feel, come anyway.”
“I don’t like your reverend.”
“No excuses. You must come. I’ve decided it now. You must come.”
“I don’t want to.”
“You must. Don’t be childish; there’s something to it, you’ll see.”
“Maybe. Where are those field glasses you bought? Della said she looked through them.”
“Sure, they’re in the house, and are really exciting, though I think I would have been better off to get seven-by-thirty-fives instead of eight-by-forties. It’s too much magnification for using in the field. They’re fine for sitting still or using on the porch looking at wind hoverers, harriers and kingbirds, though. They say the Germans made a better pair of eight-by-forties.” They crossed over to John’s house, leaving the pumps on and the doors to the garage wide open. “Now I remember what I was going to tell you,” John almost shouted. “I saw an eagle the other day! An immature bald eagle. I couldn’t believe it. I was walking along in back of Mortimers’ pasture land and ...”
Wilson thought, He can be more excited about seeing some old birds than anyone I ever knew. But he did have an interest in the glasses, and later, at the very moment he looked through them and focused them down, he decided he would get a pair of his own.
“Turn them around, Dad,” said John, smiling, “if you really want to see something strange!” He had decided that subconsciously his father had given in, and would come to church, and would even talk his mother into coming once. The Bible and the experience of God were undeniably the biggest, most complete feeling he had ever had, and he wanted his parents to have it.
John Montgomery’s religious knowledge was nothing more than a fundamental, very ordinary kind of experienced knowledge. There were two parts to it: the Bible and God, though the two were sometimes so closely related, for him, that studying one was comparable to learning more of the other. He thought the Bible taught him about God. He thought of it being the same kind of book (though of a much higher quality) as a bird book, which gave him information; and after he’d studied about each individual bird, his experience of seeing one was greater because he would know what to look for, and appreciate more the beauty of the bird as it related to how he knew they lived—in the brush, forest, grub-eaters, fly-catchers and foragers, their migratory habits and natural predators. So his secondhand knowledge (from the book) added directly to his personal experience, even though the two were very separate. Could anyone think a picture and a short paragraph describing a bird the same thing as seeing one? So the Bible presented an accurate description of God which, the more he knew of it, heightened his personal encounters.
The Bible was indispensable. The experience of someone seeing a lone bird without ever having heard of birds before and having nothing to relate it to, though powerful, would be a very shallow experience compared to that of a man who had seen millions, and who knew how each one lived and how particular and sacred each kind was in its own way. Naturally, that first experience would be a complete blow to the mind; at the same time, it would be recognized as superficial by those who have had not only that experience but many more after it, who clearly recognize the urgency and wonder with which the first comes but know it is not just the urgency that is important, but something else.
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 and learned 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