Lila Read online

  Doll came in and knelt down by her, smelling of sweat and sunshine, and lifted her into her lap. She whispered, “What you doing now, biting on that hand like a little baby!” The old woman brought the shawl, and Doll put it around her. And the old woman said, “She’s your child, Doll. I can’t do a thing with her.”

  * * *

  They never spoke about any of it, not one word in all those years. Not about the house Doll stole her away from, not about the old woman who took them in. They did keep that shawl, though, till it was worn soft as cobwebs. But she felt the thrill of the secret whenever she took Doll’s hand and Doll gave her hand a little squeeze, whenever she lay down exhausted in the curve of Doll’s body, with Doll’s arm to pillow her head and the shawl to spread over her. Years after she had become an ordinary child, if there were going to be people to deal with, Doll would whisper in her ear, “No cussing!” and they would laugh together, enjoying their secret. They didn’t even mention the nights they spent bedded down beyond the light of Doane’s fire, or the days walking behind Doane’s people, at a distance, as if they only happened to be going along on the same road.

  They could keep to themselves because they had a bag of cornmeal and a little pot to cook it in. Every night Doll made a fire. As she walked she’d be looking for things they could eat. She caught a rabbit in her apron and killed it with a stone, and cooked it that night with a mess of pigweed. She found a nest of bird’s eggs. She found chicory and roasted the roots, which were medicine, she said, a cure for the bellyache. Then finally one morning she took up the child and walked after Doane’s people into a field of young corn and started pulling weeds in the rows where their hoes couldn’t reach, and they didn’t say a thing to her about it. The child stayed beside her, holding on to her skirt. When Marcelle brought a pail of well water for the others, she brought it to them, too. Doll thanked her, and held the cup to the child’s lips, and then she wiped her hand on her dress and dipped her fingers into the cup to wet them and rinse dust from the child’s face. Cold drops ran down her chin and throat and into the damp of her dress, and she laughed. Doll said, surprised, “Well, listen to you now!”

  Marcelle was standing there, watching them, waiting to get the cup back. “I guess she been poorly for a while?”

  Doll nodded. “She been poorly.”

  “She could ride in the wagon. You got a lot to carry.”

  “I keep her by me.”

  “Then set your bedroll in the wagon.”

  Doll never did put herself forward, but the next morning, when she had everything bundled up, Doane came and took it and set it on the wagon bed. He said, “We got some spuds in the ashes, ma’am. If you care to join us.”

  And after that she and Doll were Doane’s people, too, most of the time, for as long as the times were decent. That would have been about eight years, counting backward from the Crash, not counting the year Doll made her go to school. Their own bad times started when the mule died, two years or so before everyone else started getting poorer and the wind turned dirty. It seemed like the whole world changed just at that time, the mule gone first, which made the wagon useless. They couldn’t even sell it, and they had to leave most of their things behind. The creature died on a lonely piece of road where they would not have been in the first place if it had shown any sign at all of what was about to happen to it. It just sank down on its knees and went over on its side while Arthur was trying to put it in the traces.

  * * *

  Lila heard about the Crash years after it happened, and she had no idea what it was even after she knew what to call it. But it did seem like they gave it the right name. It was like one of those storms you might even sleep through, and then when you wake up in the morning everything’s ruined, or gone. Most of the farmers that used to know Doane and Marcelle sold up and left, or just left, and the ones who stayed didn’t want any help, or couldn’t pay for it. But there were those few years when it seemed that they knew who they were and where they should be and what they should be doing. There were those few years when the child began to be strong and to grow, when Doll was still herself, when Mellie still pestered and played her pranks like some half-grown devil trying to mind its manners. Evenings Doane might be away from the camp a while, somewhere trading one thing for another for some small mutual advantage or settling terms with somebody for the work they would do. When he came back again he’d look for Marcelle, never saying a word, but when he saw her he would go and stand near her, and then whatever else might have been on his mind you could tell he was pretty well at peace.

  They all thought it was a fine thing to live the way they did, out in the open like that, when the weather was tolerable. It seemed true enough as long as the good times lasted. If they were tired and dirty it was from work, and that kind of dirt didn’t even feel like dirt. Work meant plenty to eat and a few pennies for candy or ribbons or a dime for a minstrel show when they passed through a town. They never camped by a stream without bathing, and washing their clothes if the weather was good and they could stay long enough to let things dry. That was before the times when they began to be caught in the dust, and it would make them cough and cough, and the wind would blow it right through the clothes on their backs. But in those days they were proud people. If they could, they patched and mended and hemmed whatever needed it. They looked after what they had. Anybody could see that.

  * * *

  Lila did like to work in the Reverend’s garden. He hardly ever set foot in it. It used to be that somebody from the church would come in now and then to keep the weeds down. When she came there at first to tend the roses and clean things up, she had made a little garden in a corner and planted a few potatoes, just for herself. A few beans. She didn’t see any reason to let a sunny spot like that go to waste, and the soil was good. It had been a while. She loved the smell of dirt, and the feel of it. She had to make herself wash it off her hands.

  Now that she was the Reverend’s wife she had made the garden much bigger. She could get all the seeds she wanted. She still liked to eat a carrot right out of the ground, but she knew that wasn’t what people did, so she was careful about it. She thought sometime she might just let the boy try it, to see how it tasted. (Two or three times she had even had the thought of stealing him, carrying him away to the woods or off down the road so she could have him to herself and let him know about that other life. But she imagined the old man, the Reverend, calling after them, “Where are you going with that child?” The sadness in his voice would be terrible. He would be surprised to hear it. You wouldn’t even know your body had a sound like that in it. And it would be familiar to her. She didn’t imagine it, she remembered that sadness from somewhere, and it was as if she would understand something if she could hear it again. That was what she almost wanted.)

  No, it was just a dream she had had a few times, two or three times, a kind of daydream. And it was the dream that stayed in her mind, not any real thought of taking the child away from his father. If he knew what she was thinking he would probably say, Soon enough you’ll have him all to yourself. Sometimes she wished he could know her thoughts, because she believed he might forgive them. Because the Good Lord would forgive them, practically for sure, she thought. If the old men knew anything about the Good Lord. If there was a Good Lord. Doll had never mentioned Him.

  Lila’s thoughts were strange sometimes. They always had been. She had hoped getting baptized might help with it, but it didn’t. Someday she might ask him about that. Well, Doll always said, Just do what you’re told and be quiet about it, that’s all anybody ever going to want from you. Lila had learned there was really more to it than that. But she was very quiet. He didn’t ask much of her, though. Anything, really. In those first weeks she could tell he was just glad to find her there at the house when he came home, or in the kitchen when he came down from his study. Even a little relieved. Maybe he knew her better than she thought he did. But then he might not have been so glad to find her there. She wished sometimes
he would tell her what to do, but he was always so careful of her. So she watched the other wives and did what they did, as well as she could figure it out.

  There was so much to get wrong. She came to that first meeting at the church, after he had asked her to come, and when she walked into the room, all ladies there except for him, he stood up. She thought he must be angry to see her, that he was going to tell her to leave, that she should have understood it was a joke when he invited her. So she turned around and walked out. But two of the ladies followed her right into the street to tell her how happy they were that she had come and how they hoped she could stay. Kindness like that might have made her angry enough to keep walking if she hadn’t had that idea in her mind about getting baptized. And when they came back in, he stood up again, because the kind of gentleman he was will do that when ladies come into a room. They almost can’t help it. How was she supposed to know? They have to be the ones to open a door, but then they have to wait there for you to go through it. To this very day, if the Reverend happened to meet her out on the street he took off his hat to her, even in the rain. He always helped her with her chair, which amounted to pulling it out from the table a little, then pushing it in again after she sat down. Who in the world could need help with a chair?

  People have their ways, though, she thought. And he was beautiful for an old man. She did enjoy the sight of him. He looked as if he’d had his share of loneliness, and that was all right. It was one thing she understood about him. She liked his voice. She liked the way he stood next to her as if there was a pleasure for him in it.

  Once, he took her hand to help her up the steps at Boughton’s house, and Boughton winked and said, “‘There are three things which are too wonderful for me, yea, four which I know not,’” and they both laughed a little. She thought to herself, No cussing. But the Reverend could see it bothered her when they talked that way, making jokes they knew she would not understand. So when they were home again he took the Bible off the shelf and showed her the verse: The way of an eagle in the air; the way of a serpent upon a rock; the way of a ship in the midst of the sea; and the way of a man with a maiden. That was the joke. A man with a maiden. They were laughing because he was an old preacher and she was a field hand, or would be if she could just find her way back to that time. And she was old, too. For a woman being old just means not being young, and all the youth had been worked out of her before it had really even set in. So Lila had been old a long time, but not in a way that helped. Well, she knew it was a joke. People were still surprised at him, that he had married her.

  She could see it surprised him, too, sometimes. He told her once when there was a storm a bird had flown into the house. He’d never seen one like it. The wind must have carried it in from some far-off place. He opened all the doors and windows, but it was so desperate to escape that for a while it couldn’t find a way out. “It left a blessing in the house,” he said. “The wildness of it. Bringing the wind inside.” That was just when she began to suspect she was carrying a child, so it frightened her a little to realize that he knew she might leave, that he might even expect her to leave. She only remembered afterward that the first time she crept into bed beside him it had been the dark of the moon. It was the black-haired girl who told her about that, the one who called herself Susanna. She had three or four children, all staying with her sister or her mother, she said, so maybe she didn’t know as much as she thought she did. Still, here Lila was with something more to worry about. The old man could have been telling her she should leave, she didn’t belong in his house. Maybe that’s how a gentleman would say it. If he wanted to, he could say, This was your idea, you’re the one who said I should marry you. Maybe a gentleman couldn’t say it. Sometime he might be angry, though, and forget about his manners, and that would be hard to live with. Doll always said, Just be quiet. Whatever it is, just wait for it to be over. Everything ends sometime. Lila thought, When you know it will end anyway, you can want to be done with it. But if you’re carrying a child, you’d best have a roof over your head. Any fool knows that.

  One evening they went to old Boughton’s house and the two men talked about people she didn’t know and things she didn’t understand. What else was there, after all? But she didn’t mind listening. And soon enough they forgot she was listening. They had read about missionaries back from China, about how they had converted hundreds, and that was a drop in the bucket compared to all the people who had never heard a word of the Gospel and probably never would hear one. Boughton said it seemed to him like a terrible loss of souls, if that’s what it was. He was not one to question divine justice, though sometimes he did have to wonder. Anyone would. Which was really not the same as questioning. And the Reverend said, When you think of all the people who lived from Adam to Abraham. Boughton shook his head at the mystery of it. “We’re a drop in the bucket!” he said. “It’s an easy thing to forget!”

  The next day was a Sunday, and she had waked up early and slipped out of the house and walked away past the edge of town and followed the river to a place where the water ran over rocks and dropped down to a pool with a sandy bottom. She could watch the shadows of catfish there once the sun came up. She sat on the bank, damp and chilly, smelling the river and barely hearing the sound of it, hidden in the dark, not because she thought anyone would be there, but because she always liked the feeling that no one could see her even when she knew she was alone. The old man would wake up to an empty house, and he would dress and shave as he always did, and make his coffee and toast and gather up his papers and go off to church by himself to preach his sermon as he always did, and sing the hymns and pray the prayers and speak afterward with ladies who wouldn’t ask how she was or where she was, because they knew his marriage was a sorrow to him, one more sorrow.

  She meant to do better by him. He was always kind to her. But she felt strange in the church. And the night before, lying beside him in the dark, she had asked him a question about China. He tried to explain and she tried to understand. He said, “I believe in the grace of God. For me, that is where all these questions end. Why it’s pointless to ask them.” But he seemed to be telling her that Boughton might be right, that souls could be lost forever because of things they did not know, or understand, or believe. He didn’t like to say it, he had to try different words for it. So she knew he thought it might be true. Doll probably didn’t know she had an immortal soul. It was nothing she ever mentioned, if she ever thought about it. She probably wouldn’t even have known the words for it. All those people out there walking the roads all those years, hardly a one of them remembering the Sabbath. Who would know what day of the week it was? Who wouldn’t take work when there was work to be done? What use was there in calling a day by a certain name, or thinking of it as anything but weather? They knew what time of the year it was when the timothy bloomed, when the birds were fledging. They knew it was morning when the sun came up. What more was there to know? If Doll was going to be lost forever, Lila wanted to be right there with her, holding to the skirt of her dress.

  She had put on her own dress, not one of the nice ones from the Boughtons’ attic or the new ones from the Sears, Roebuck catalogue, and her own shoes. No need to worry she might dirty them. When she stepped out the door she felt that good chill, the dark of the morning she used to wake up to every day. The trees stirred in the darkness, and birds made those startled sounds they do when the stars are gone and there is still no sunrise. The river smelled like any river, fishy and mossy and shadowy, and the smell seemed stronger in the dark, with the chink and plosh of all the small life. She eased herself down to the edge of the water and put her hands in it. She took it up in her cupped hands, poured it over her brow, rubbed it into her face and into her hair. Then she did the same thing again, wetting the front of her dress. And again. Her hands were so cold she felt them against her face as if they weren’t hers at all. The river was like the old life, just itself. Nothing more to it. She thought, It has washed the baptism off me. So th
at’s done with. That must be what I wanted. Now, if I ever found Doll out there lost and wandering, at least she would recognize me. If there could be no joy for her in whatever was not life, at least she might remember for one second what joy had felt like. Lila thought about that for a while, seeing Doll walking ahead on some old dusty road, nothing on every side of her, and calling out her name so she would turn, and then running into her arms. No, Lila would be sitting on those steps, after it was dark, long after, and then Doll would be there, all out of breath, saying, “Child, child, I thought I was never going to find you!” When the sun had been up a little while she decided she could go back to the Reverend’s house. Maybe no one would see her. They would all be in church.

  She put on the blue dress she had found in the mail order catalogue he gave her. It was the first time she had taken the dress out of the box it came in. And she put on the white sandals, and she brushed her hair. In St. Louis one of the girls had said to her, Just pretend you’re pretty so they can pretend you’re pretty. The old man would come home, or stay in his study at the church. Someone might invite him to dinner, which they ate in the middle of the day on Sunday. And he might say yes rather than come back to his own house, which would still be empty, or where he would find her and have to think of a way to speak to her. When she did something wrong, something that made him unhappy, he was embarrassed by it, and he would smile and say, “Perhaps you could help me understand … you are so quiet…” But she would not know how to explain, and if she told him how strange and alone she felt, and wanted to feel, he would wonder why she stayed with him at all. Now that there might be a child she’d best try to act like she belonged there, at least for a while. Her hands still smelled like river water, and her hair. She still felt a little more like who she was. That was a help.