Lila Read online

  She thought of a story she would like to tell the old man. Once, when she was still a child, she and the others went to a camp meeting. Doane had been paid mostly in apples for some work they had done. The farmer said it was the best he could do—you can’t get blood from a turnip. Doane said it might be interesting to try, and Arthur nodded. But the man just shrugged—hard times—and Doane took the apples, after he had spilled them out on the grass and had the children look them over, so the farmer could take back any that were soft or bruised or too wormy and give them others that were sound. They had to carry the apples in two gunnysacks, since that was after they lost the wagon. They ate apples for breakfast and apples for supper, and still the sacks were a burden to carry, with everything else. So when they found out from people walking along the road that they were going to a camp meeting, Doane decided they would go there to sell what apples they could. The whole business made him disgusted, but he had the children to do the work for him, to talk a few cents out of the old women before they felt the spirit and put anything they had into some damn preacher’s pocket. He made them all clean up as well as they could and told them to behave, and then he just leaned against a tree with his arms folded while they chose the prettiest apples and shined them up a little against their pant legs, and took off into the thick of the crowds.

  They’d have hung back with Doane and watched those poor fools getting all worked up over nothing if they hadn’t had the apples to sell, which obliged them to talk to people and try to act as though they belonged there. Lila followed along after Mellie, who could somehow make those apples seem like something you would want. Lila carried them, her arms full, because Mellie had already come up with a baby somewhere, a nice baby with a big red bow in its hair. Mellie and the baby handed the apples around as if they were doing a kindness, and people gave Mellie their pennies and nickels, and then she sent Lila back to give the money to Marcelle—Doane was acting like he had nothing to do with any of it—and to get more apples.

  Families were pitching tents all over in the woods around the clearing. There were campfires, and people drifting from one to another, laughing and talking, shaking hands and slapping backs, sharing their pickle and crackers and taffy, sometimes singing together a little, since there were banjos and mouth organs and a guitar and a fiddle scattered here and there among the tents. Some of the women and girls were wearing nice dresses. Children in little packs stormed around from one place to another just burning off the excitement of it all. The ground where the meeting would be held was pretty well covered in sawdust, which made it seem strangely clean and gave it a good, pitchy smell. If men spat their tobacco on it you wouldn’t notice. There was a stage set up with yellow bunting across the front of it, and there were some wooden chairs on it. And of course they were by a river, and there were people there fishing in it, a little downstream.

  Lila and Mellie had seen Arthur’s boys feeding their apples to the horses and mules and then sneaking down to the river to skip rocks, so Mellie gave back the baby and they went, too. Arthur was there already, skipping rocks, and when he saw his boys he said he was going to tan their hides if they didn’t tell him what they’d been up to. So they started scrapping, without Doane to make them stop. Some of the men tried after a while, when Arthur started bleeding from a cut over his eye, and that got the three of them mad at those men and the fighting went on until an old preacher came tottering down the rocky slope and stepped in among them. He asked what had happened, and then he said that Arthur and his boys seemed not to be in the right spirit for a meeting of this kind and it would be best for them to move along. He was a scrawny old fellow with a croaky voice, but though they dragged their feet about it and glowered past him at the others, they were glad enough to oblige him, since more and more men and boys were coming to take the other side. They walked off into the woods like men who don’t forget an insult just because they might have to wait a while to settle up. Then they walked around to the back of the crowd, Arthur with blood down the front of his shirt and Deke with a bloody nose, but other than that as respectable as anybody. None of them wanted to leave, but they knew Doane would want to. They kept moving around because he wouldn’t go to the trouble of finding them all. He’d probably ask Mellie to find them, so she was careful to stay out of his sight. Doll and Marcelle had gotten a fire together and were making a supper of their own, which could only be the pone and fatback they’d been eating their whole lives, it seemed like, maybe a little more of it than usual, since those woods smelled like every good thing and people like to have a part in whatever is going on. Mellie had found herself another baby, and its mother brought them sweet bread with blueberry jam in the middle of it and icing on it. People were roasting ears of corn and handing them out to anybody who passed by, even if they passed by more than once. There was hot fry bread with sugar on it.

  Evening was coming, a mild, clear evening. Men were hanging lamps in the trees, along the big old oak branches that reached out over the stage, and lighting them, and the banjos and fiddles that had come along in the crowd began to agree on a song, and the people began to sing it—Yes, we’ll gather at the river, The beautiful, the beautiful river. And then some preachers came up onto the stage and sat down on the chairs, except for one, who came to the front of it and raised up his hands. Everybody got quiet. He shouted, “We are gathered here to praise the Lord, the God of our salvation!” And they shouted back, “Amen!”

  For a minute there was just the sound of the crickets and the river and the wind creaking the ropes those lamps were hanging from.

  Then, “We are gathered here to confess our sins unto the Lord, who knows the thoughts of our hearts!”

  “Amen!”

  Quiet again. And then, “We are gathered here to rejoice in the Lord, for His mercy endureth forever!”

  “Amen!”

  Then all the preachers stood up and began singing the song about the river, and the whole crowd sang with them. Deke found Mellie and said, “He’s looking for you,” then stepped into the crowd again. Mellie handed back the baby and told Lila, “You don’t know where I am,” and slipped away. Somewhere she had come up with a kerchief to tie over her hair because it was so white that it would make her easy to see, even when the sun was almost down. So Lila just stayed there watching the lanterns sway and the light and the shadows move and move through the trees, huge shadows and strange light under a blue evening sky. The preachers went on and the crowd shouted their Amens and they all sang. Bringing in the Sheaves. She’d heard the song a number of times since then and she didn’t yet know what sheaves were. She had some ideas about salvation, and mercy, but the old man never once mentioned sheaves.

  “The great gift of baptism which makes us clean and acceptable—” “Amen!”

  Doll put her arm around her and said, “You come on now. Doane says so.” They were gathering up their things, to get away from the noise, so they could get some sleep and nobody would be tramping around, stepping over them. If Arthur and the boys didn’t show up just then, they’d find their camp soon enough. But nobody knew where Mellie was. So the rest of them had to go off down the road while Doane stayed there watching for her. Lila thought those lamps in the trees were the most beautiful things she had ever seen, and that fiddle was the most beautiful thing she had ever heard, and it didn’t seem right that Doane, who said he hated it all, should send them away while he stayed behind. But in those days they still minded him, and there was comfort in it.

  Mellie turned up finally when the preaching was over. She came walking up the road, tagging after Doane. She was drenched head to foot. Her pant legs were scraping from the wet. She said, “I fell in.”

  Doane said, “Was it one of them preachers pulled you out?”

  “Don’t matter. I’m just glad somebody did. I coulda drownt.”

  “Was it one of them preachers told you to step into the river in the first place?”

  “Them rocks is slippery. I fell in.”

  �
�So I guess you got yourself saved.”

  “I never said that.”

  “I got a dollar says you’re still the same rascal you always been.”

  “Well,” she said, “if you even got a dollar, it’s because I sold some of them damn apples.”

  He laughed. “Sounds like I won my bet already.”

  She said, “There wasn’t no bet. I fell in.”

  If Lila told the old man that story he would laugh, and then he would probably wonder about it. She would tell him that Mellie always had to try whatever it was she saw other people doing. She was just curious. For the next few days she might have been checking to see if there was any change in her, because she would be mean for no reason, pinching and poking when no one was bothering her at all. Or she might have been letting Doane see that she wasn’t saved and didn’t want to be, either. Was she baptized or not? Say she walked into the water to be dunked and prayed over like the other people, just to see what it felt like. It was only her nature, poor ignorant child. What would the Good Lord have to say about that? If Lila had gone with her, she would probably have done the same thing, because she generally did what Mellie did, if she could do it. So there would have been the singing, and the lantern light sweeping out over the river, and some man with his hands under her back and her head, lowering her down into the water and lifting her out again, and then wiping the water away from her face as if it were tears, Hallelujah! Lila had seen it done any number of times. There were always meetings and revivals.

  Clean and acceptable. It would be something to know what that felt like, even for an hour or two.

  Well, she might start going to church again. Then she would feel better about taking her beans and her potatoes, and besides, she had let the weeds get out of hand. It’s best to weed after a good rain. The next day was a Monday, and she could always find somebody who wanted help with the wash. And she’d be done by evening, so she could stop by the preacher’s and do a little gardening, and have a nice supper afterward. If he walked out along her road, he’d see she was all right.

  She read over the page she had been copying from. There were the same words over and over— He saw that it was good, And the evening and the morning. So she turned to the page she had dog-eared, and found the beginning of that book, the Book of Ezekiel. Now it came to pass in the thirtieth year, in the fourth month, in the fifth day of the month, as I was among the captives by the river Chebar, that the heavens were opened, and I saw visions of God. She wrote it ten times. Her bedroll had been hanging from a nail, so it wasn’t really damp, and she had that sweater for a pillow. People start work early on wash day. She’d be awake in the dark as she always was. She’d practice her writing at dawn and be in Gilead while it was still barely morning.

  * * *

  She had bathed and waked the second time as she warmed herself in her blanket, thinking about things, and when there was light enough she took her tablet into her lap and opened her Bible beside her on the floor. She wrote, And I looked, and, behold, a stormy wind came out of the north, a great cloud, with a fire infolding itself, and a brightness round about it, and out of the midst thereof as it were glowing metal, out of the midst of the fire. Well, that could have been a prairie fire in a drought year. She had never seen one, but she had heard stories. And out of the midst thereof came the likeness of four living creatures. And this was their appearance: they had the likeness of a man. And every one had four faces, and every one of them had four wings. Well, she didn’t know what to make of that. A dream somebody had, and he wrote it down, and it ended up in this book. She copied it ten times, still trying to make her letters smaller and neater. Lila Dahl, Lila Dahl, Lila Dahl. She had four letters in each of her names, and he had four letters in each of his. She had a silent h in her last name, and he had one in his first. There were graves in Gilead with his name written out on them, and there was no one anywhere alive or dead with her name, since the first one belonged to the sister she never saw of a woman she barely remembered and the second one was just a mistake. Her name had the likeness of a name. She had the likeness of a woman, with hands but no face at all, since she never let herself see it. She had the likeness of a life, because she was all alone in it. She lived in the likeness of a house, with walls and a roof and a door that kept nothing in and nothing out. And when Doll took her up and swept her away, she had felt a likeness of wings. She thought, Strange as all this is, there might be something to it.

  Doll was gone those four days, she told Lila finally, to see how the folks at the old place were getting on. The times were so hard by then that she was having trouble keeping the child fed and keeping clothes on her back, and she had the thought that things might be better where her people were, farther east. She’d expected some of the worst of them might have died off. She said, “Somebody shoulda shot that Hank long since.” Who was Hank? “Never you mind.” Doll had to be careful, so she asked around the neighborhood—that took a while, since folks don’t like to talk to outsiders—and she walked past the old place a few times to see for herself. She said, “It seemed about the same. Nothing you could go back to.” Lila said, “If things’d been better, would you a gone back there, too?” And Doll said, “I couldn’t. They know I taken you in the first place, so if I come back with you there’d be hell to pay.” Doll told her this because Lila wasn’t the same to her after what happened while she was gone. She said, “I done it because I wasn’t finding no way to look after you.” If Doane had ever bothered to explain, he’d have said the same thing. They were just figuring out where to leave her. For her own good. Where to tell her, stay, and wait, and somebody will come along. So after that she couldn’t love Doll like she did all those years. For a while she couldn’t. She’d never thought she might be sitting on that stoop again, at night probably, watching Doll sneak off into the woods. One way or another, it comes out the same. Can’t trust nobody.

  They found Doane and the others again. It was evening, after supper, and there was a fat, soft, embery fire in the middle of the clearing. Doll picked up the skillet and tossed it into the fire. Flame roared up and embers flew. “How could you do that!” she said. “Leave my child sitting on the steps of some church! I might never a found her! I told you I was coming back!” She was yelling at Doane mainly, but there was no one there she didn’t glare at. Only Mellie glared back.

  Doane said, “You was gone a while. We sorta gave up on you.”

  “Now, why would you do that! I keep my word! Has there ever been a time I didn’t, in all the years?”

  Doane said, “Well, Doll, you can hold your grudge or you can come along. If you’re going to be around, I don’t want to hear another word about this. None of it.”

  Marcelle said, “We kept your stuff.”

  “I just bet you did!” Doll said, and Doane gave her a look.

  He said, “We thought about dropping it in the fire. But Marcelle wouldn’t stand for it. It mighta been the best thing.” He walked over and picked up Lila’s bedroll. That shawl was wrapped around it. He pulled it loose, and he smiled, and he went over and sort of dangled it over the fire, and the flames climbed right up it toward his hand. So that was gone. They stayed with Doane’s people, Doll having no better idea what to do. They never said another word about what had happened. It was just like before, and everything was different. You best keep to yourself, except you never can.

  * * *

  Mrs. Graham wanted help with her wash. She was a cheerful woman. Friendly. She enjoyed talking. She never seemed to notice that Lila didn’t enjoy talking, or listening, and that was all right. They’d worked together times enough that Lila knew how she wanted things done, and that seemed to make the day go faster. Mrs. Graham made them a nice lunch of tuna-fish sandwiches with chocolate cake for dessert. She had a nice house. There were white curtains in the kitchen with strawberries along the hem. Little green stitches to look like seeds. The washing machine was on the back porch. It was a good machine, electric, you didn’t even have to crank
the wringer. Lila didn’t let herself look into the parlor, at the piano and the sofa and the rest, which reminded her a little of St. Louis except that none of it was so big and fine, and the drapes were open.

  At the end of the day she had a five-dollar bill and a waterproof coat with a hood. Lila said, “The Reverend told you to give me this,” and Mrs. Graham said, “Well, he worries about you, dear. He’s a good-hearted man. And it was just hanging in the closet, no use to anybody.” She smiled shyly, kindly. Lila didn’t ask whose closet it had been hanging in, how many women in the church or in Gilead had been asked if they could spare a coat before this one turned up, or how there could be no one else but her who could use it. Maybe no one was as broke as she was, but there were some people who must come pretty close. He should be worrying about them, too. Well, all right, she thought, so all I got to do now is save up for that bus ticket, save up a little traveling money. I can’t wait to get out of this town. She folded the coat and put it into her carpetbag, the five-dollar bill in a pocket, and then she walked up to the cemetery. The roses on the grave were blooming, and the weeds were, too. She said, “Well, I’m sorry, Mrs. Ames. I been staying away too long. I never meant to let this happen.” She loved them. The likeness of a woman, and in her arms the likeness of a child.

  It was evening when she opened the gate to the preacher’s garden. She picked some beans and groped under the plants for some potatoes. There was light from an upstairs window and no other light in the house. Let him be—all right. That seemed like a decent prayer. Let him stop making me feel so damn broke all the time. That was a good one. Better to tell him that one herself. She could do it right now if she wanted. Maybe she hadn’t been as quiet as she thought, because he knew she was there. He opened the front door as she was walking to the gate. He said, “I’ve written you a note. I thought I might give it to you. Well, of course I will give it to you. There wouldn’t be much point—” He laughed. “I hope—well, obviously. I mean, if there is anything in it you find disagreeable, that will be despite my best efforts. To the contrary. If you see—” He handed her an envelope. “Good evening. It’s a fine evening.” He went back into the house. The envelope wasn’t sealed, and when she was out of sight of his house she opened it just enough to see that there was no money in it, only the note. She had to laugh at a pinch of something like disappointment. She was close now to having enough money to be able to leave. Maybe it was more than enough. A couple of weeks ago she’d have thought it was. The more you have, the more you want. If he had given her money, there’d have been anger and shame to get her on that bus. She could have stopped thinking about it.