Lila Read online

  One other time she had been given a note, for Doll from that teacher. Lila read it to her because, Doll said, her hands was all wet and soapy. It said that she was a smart girl and would benefit from further schooling, and that the teacher would be happy to do whatever she could to help make this possible. “Lila is an unusually bright child.” Doll said, “Benefit,” and Lila told her it meant that it would do her good to stay in school another year. Doll said, “I already knew you was bright. I could’ve told you that.” That was all she said. It was so easy for Lila to forget that Doll had broken the law when she carried her away, and had set off a grudge, too, which was a good deal worse. And for a long time she hadn’t realized that the life they lived with Doane was one that would make them hard to find. Because people like them don’t talk to outsiders. And they all know that if somebody is on your trail, you can just slip into a cornfield. Once, Doll must have thought she saw somebody from the old place. She’d kept Lila with her a whole day in a hayloft, quiet as could be. That was before the corn was high. But to spend almost a year in a town was dangerous if anyone happened to be looking for them. Doll knew those people and Lila didn’t, so if Doll thought they might try to catch her for the sheer devilment of it, Lila guessed they really might have tried. But that was nothing the two of them mentioned even between themselves.

  She has made remarkable progress. Lila knew that note by heart. No point reading Doll the parts she wouldn’t understand. She was glad that teacher couldn’t see her now. What was this old man going to tell her in his note? Don’t matter. A letter makes ordinary things seem important. He was wearing a necktie. Expecting her, maybe, because she’d been at Mrs. Graham’s and might be wanting to thank him for the coat. Or maybe he waited for her every evening. She found herself sometimes listening for his steps in the road. People talk themselves into these things, and then nothing comes of it. They don’t even want to remember there was a time when it mattered to them. They hate you for mentioning it. Those women in St. Louis, the young ones, there was always somebody they were waiting for, or trying to get over. And the older ones would just laugh at them. They’d be laughing at her now. He probably had a meeting at the church, so he was wearing a necktie. You fool, Lila. Whatever it said, it would be kind. And if it wasn’t, he’d have found the kindest way to say it.

  St. Louis. Much better to be there in the shack by herself. In the evening, with her potatoes roasting outside. Doane used to push a spud out of the fire with a stick, and they’d toss it one to another until one of them could stand to hold on to it, and then it was his. One of Arthur’s boys, always. They’d just go to sleep when it got dark. She should buy some candles, maybe even a kerosene lamp, so she could read and practice her writing if she felt like it. But light did draw bugs. And it was better if no one saw the shack at night. Not that people passing by wouldn’t notice her fire. But light made you blind in the dark and there might be something you really needed to see out there. The evening was peaceful. But she couldn’t stop wondering about that letter. She might just light a cigarette. She might strike another match to read the first few words. They were: Dear Lila (if I may), You asked me once why things happen the way they do. Well, she wasn’t really expecting that. I have felt considerable regret over my failure to respond to your question. She shook out the match. He wasn’t asking for his umbrella back anyway.

  The next morning she took her tablet and copied, as neatly as she could, You must have thought that it has never occurred to me to wonder about the deeper things religion is really concerned with, the meaning of existence, of human life. You must have thought I say the things I do out of habit and custom, rather than from experience and reflection. I admit there is some truth in this. It is inevitable, I suppose. She wrote it ten times. Well, what did old Ezekiel say next? And their feet were straight feet; and the sole of their feet was like the sole of a calf’s foot; and they sparkled like burnished brass. She wrote this ten times. Salted babies, sparkling calves’ feet. Strange as it was, there was something to it. Well, there was the strangeness of it. That old man had no idea. Let us pray, and they all did pray. Let us join in hymn number no matter what, and they all sang. Why did they waste candles on daylight? Him standing there, talking about people dead who knows how long, if the stories about them were even true, and most of the people listening, or trying to listen. There was no need for any of it. The days came and went on their own, without any praying about it. And still, everywhere, meetings and revivals, people seeing the light. Finding comfort where there was no comfort, just an old man saying something he’d said so many times he probably didn’t hear it himself. It was about the meaning of existence, he said. All right. She knew a little bit about existence. That was pretty well the only thing she knew about, and she had learned the word for it from him. It was like the United States of America—they had to call it something. The evening and the morning, sleeping and waking. Hunger and loneliness and weariness and still wanting more of it. Existence. Why do I bother? He couldn’t tell her that, either. But he knows, she could see it in him. Why does he want more of it, with his house so empty, his wife and child so long in the ground? The evening and the morning, the singing and the praying. The strangeness of it. You couldn’t stop looking. He would walk up the hill to that sad place and find them all covered in roses. If he knew, and if he didn’t know, who had made them bloom that way, he would think it was strange and right. There was no need for roses.

  Marcelle chose that name for herself after she heard some women talking in a beauty parlor. When he started turning mean, Doane began calling her Marcelle in a way that let you know it wasn’t her real name. When he did that, it made her cry sometimes. She pretended, but she always had, and they had always wanted her to. Lila and Mellie loved to watch when she opened the little box where she kept her powder and rouge and lip rouge, her eyebrow pencil. She almost never opened it, it was so precious. The stale sweet smell of it. Sometimes she let them brush out her hair. They did all think she was pretty. They felt a little pleasure and a little envy at the way Doane favored her. He would take her arm to help her through a muddy place in the road. Once, he bought ribbons at a carnival and tied one in her hair and one in a bow around her neck, and wound one around her wrist and one around her ankle, kneeling right on the ground to do it and setting her foot on his bent knee. Doll said, “They’re married people.” Lila had no particular notion of what the word “married” meant, except that there was an endless, pleasant joke between them that excluded everybody else and that all the rest of them were welcome to admire. It was that way before times got hard. After that, Doane seemed almost angry at Marcelle because there wasn’t much he could spare her. Still, he looked for her and he stood beside her, even when he had no word to say. There are the things people need, and the things people don’t need. That might not be true. Maybe they don’t need existence. If you took that away, everything else would go with it. So if you don’t need to exist, then there is no reason to think about other things you don’t need as if they didn’t matter. You don’t need somebody standing beside you. You don’t, but you do. Take away every pleasure—but you couldn’t, because there can be pleasure in a sip of water. A thought. There was no reason for Doane to tie a ribbon on Marcelle’s wrist, and that was why she laughed when he did it, and loved him for it. Why they all loved them both. There was no reason to let an old man dip his hand in water and touch it to your forehead, as if he loved you the way people do who would touch your face and your hair. You’d have thought those babies were his own. All right, she thought. All right.

  I have worried that you might think I did not take your question as seriously as I should have. I realize I have always believed there is a great Providence that, so to speak, waits ahead of us. A father holds out his hands to a child who is learning to walk, and he comforts the child with words and draws it toward him, but he lets the child feel the risk it is taking, and lets it choose its own courage and the certainty of love and comfort when he reaches
his father over—I was going to say choose it over safety, but there is no safety. And there is no choice, either, because it is in the nature of the child to walk. As it is to want the attention and encouragement of the father. And the promise of comfort. Which it is in the nature of the father to give. I feel it would be presumptuous of me to describe the ways of God. Those that are all we know of Him, when there is so much we don’t know. Though we are told to call Him Father. And I know it would be presumptuous to speak as if the suffering that people feel as they pass through the world were not grave enough to make your question much more powerful than any answer I could offer. My faith tells me that God shared poverty, suffering, and death with human beings, which can only mean that such things are full of dignity and meaning, even though to believe this makes a great demand on one’s faith, and to act as if this were true in any way we understand is to be ridiculous. It is ridiculous also to act as if it were not absolutely and essentially true all the same. Even though we are to do everything we can to put an end to poverty and suffering.

  I have struggled with this my whole life.

  I still have not answered your question, I know, but thank you for asking it. I may be learning something from the attempt.

  Sincerely,

  John Ames

  Well, he forgot he was writing to an ignorant woman. She’d have hated him for remembering. Still, she’d have to study this a little. A letter written to her. Lila, if I may.

  Then what was she supposed to do? Write him a letter? She’d shame herself. Those big, ugly words on a piece of tablet paper, nothing spelled right. But then she’d shamed herself before and he never seemed to mind. Planting her spuds in his flower garden. Knocking at his door before the sun was well up to ask him her one question. Throwing her arms around him. Taking off with his sweater. It should have pained her to remember, but every time she rested her head on that old sweater she was just glad for it all. She had even thought about putting it in the fire, because it worried her how it kept him on her mind. Then maybe she could catch that bus. She certainly did wonder about herself. He should be thinking she’s crazy for sure by now. No sign of it in that letter, though. She thought, How can he forget what I am?

  But she hadn’t yet put things right with those people who gave her the chicken. She could spend the morning there and then go down to the river and wash out some of her clothes. She’d better get started. Doane used to say that if you start after sunrise, you’ve wasted the day. The woman was still just as sickly, so Lila cleaned house for a while and then she chopped weeds for a while in the kitchen garden, and then, when no one was looking, she put the hoe in the shed and walked away. Now they were even.

  She liked to do her wash. Sometimes fish rose for the bubbles. The smell of the soap was a little sharp, like the smell of the river. In that water you could rinse things clean. It might be a little brown after a good rain, soil from the fields, but the silt washed away or settled out. Her shirts and her dress looked to her like creatures that never wanted to be born, the way they wilted into themselves, sinking under the water as if they only wanted to be left there, maybe to find some deeper, darker pool. And when she lifted them out, held them up by their shoulders, they looked like pure weariness and regret. Like her own flayed skin. But when she hung them over a line and let the water run out, and the sun and the wind dry them, they began to seem like things that could live. At the church once they read the story about how the Queen of Egypt came down to a river and found a baby floating in a basket, and after that it was her baby. Live. The mother was supposed to kill the child, but she couldn’t. She put it in the river, and the queen lifted it out. But then it grew up and turned into a man, and he decided he didn’t want to be her child. Or maybe she had died, and her father didn’t take to him, but that’s not in the story. Well, Lila thought, I hope she did die before he could treat her that way. She should have been able to trust him. Here I am thinking that way again. Can’t trust nobody. That’s what I’m thinking all the time. If I’m ever going to try it, it might as well be now, when I can leave if I have to and I’m still young enough to get by for a while. When it won’t much matter if it don’t work out.

  So.

  She’d get herself together as well as she could, walk to the church, to that little room where people came when they wanted to talk to him, and she’d knock on the door. And then she would say to him that she did want to get baptized after all and she was sorry she forgot to come to them classes. Then he’d say something. She would tell him that was a real nice letter. He’d say something else. And what would any of it amount to? She saw them all talking to each other all the time. Laughing. Doll used to say, “No cussing!” and they would laugh because of all the things they knew and nobody else did. But if you’re just a stranger to everybody on earth, then that’s what you are and there’s no end to it. You don’t know the words to say.

  She went to Mrs. Graham’s to see if she needed help with the ironing, and she did. That took the morning and most of the afternoon. She wanted some things from the store, so she had to walk past the church. He was out in front of it, with his hands on his hips, looking up at the roof. But he turned and saw her and said, “Good afternoon.” She nodded and kept on walking. He caught up with her and fell into step beside her, a little out of breath. He said, “I’m glad to see you.”

  “Why?”

  He laughed. “Well, that’s what people say sometimes. Besides, I am glad to see you.”

  They walked on like that, right past the store. She said, “Why?”

  He laughed again. “You ask such interesting questions.”

  “And you don’t answer ’em.” He nodded. It felt very good to have him walking beside her. Good like rest and quiet, like something you could live without but you needed anyway. That you had to learn how to miss, and then you’d never stop missing it. “I quit coming to them classes. So I guess I don’t get baptized.”

  “Yes, I’ve given that some thought. There are things we do hope the person being baptized will understand well enough to affirm.”

  “Affirm? I don’t even know that word. I can’t half understand that letter you give me. I’m an ignorant woman. Seems like you can’t understand that.”

  He stopped, so she did. He looked into her face. “I think I would understand it if it were true. But I don’t believe it is. So I don’t see the point in acting as if I do.” He shrugged. “Knowing a few words more or less—”

  “It ain’t that simple.”

  He nodded. “It isn’t the least bit simple. But if you are at church this Sunday and you want to accept baptism, then—I will do it with perfect confidence in the rightness of it. That’s all I can say.”

  She said, “I got to get some things at the store.” So they turned and walked back into Gilead.

  He said, “I suppose you still don’t trust me at all.”

  “I just don’t go around trusting people. Don’t see the need.” They walked on a while.

  “The roses are beautiful. On the grave. It’s very kind of you to do that.”

  She shrugged. “I like roses.”

  “Yes, but I wish there were some way I could repay you.”

  She heard herself say, “You ought to marry me.” He stopped still, and she hurried away, to the other side of the road, the flush of shame and anger so hot in her that this time surely she could not go on living. When he caught up with her, when he touched her sleeve, she could not look at him.

  “Yes,” he said, “you’re right. I will.”

  She said, “All right. Then I’ll see you tomorrow.” Why did she say that? What was she planning on doing tomorrow? He just stood there. She could feel him watching her. Of all the crazy things she had ever done. It was that feeling that she had had walking along beside him that put the notion in her mind. It comes from being alone too much. Things matter that wouldn’t if you had a regular life. Just walking along beside that old man, past the edge of town, not even talking most of the time, with the cot
tonwoods shining and rustling and shading the road. She never really looked at him, but he was beautiful, gentle and solid, his voice so mild when he spoke, his hair so silvery white. If she ever thought of herself marrying anybody, it would have been a man who was young enough not to mind a day’s work. Being a preacher was a kind of work, though. And he had that house to live in. Gardens around it. Gone to weed.

  What was she thinking about? It was never going to happen. She might be crazy, but he wasn’t. She tried to remember that he said those words—You’re right. I will—in a way that really meant, That’s the strangest thing anybody ever said to me in my whole life. It wasn’t hard to hear them that way, except from him. He always seemed to say what he meant. Near enough. But she could see how it might’ve been different this time. She lifted the loose plank and took out the jar where she kept her money. She had the five dollars Mrs. Graham paid her, since, upset as she was, she didn’t trust herself to go into the store and buy the tin of deviled ham she’d had on her mind. So all together it came to about forty-five dollars. If she hadn’t been buying things, cigarettes, margarine, there’d have been more. Still, forty-five dollars would take her a long way on a bus. She could go to California, where there wouldn’t be winter to worry about. Crops coming in all year long. Doane and Marcelle had always talked about going to California. That was a nice thing to think about. She could do it on her own. Nobody to trust. She knew he wouldn’t come to her place, and she couldn’t go to his. He might be looking for her, since it was tomorrow, or he might not be looking for her. She would go in to town in the next few days to get her ticket, so if he happened to see her he wouldn’t make much of it. She might never know—maybe he meant what he said, but if he didn’t, and she saw him again, she wouldn’t be able to stand the shame. Or she would, and that would be another, harder shame. It would be best if she could just say, I’m leaving, like I was meaning to do the whole time.