Lila: A Novel (19 page)

You could see pelicans by the hundreds sometimes. It was late in the season for them, but winter was late, so she might still see some. There was a wide place in the river where people went to look at them, so that’s what she’d say if anyone asked her where she was going. She’d seen those birds all her life and never had a name for them, because they had nothing to do with getting by. She’d never once heard of anybody eating one. Ducks, for sure, but never pelicans. They were white as anything could be, flying up off the water together and spreading their wings so wide you couldn’t believe it, and then settling together on the water again, sliding along. They just came when the weather started to change, and then they were gone till the next year. It was the old man who told her what they were called. There was one of them carved into Mrs. Ames’s gravestone. After Lila stopped at the shack she’d go on down to the river so she could tell him where she’d been without lying.

She’d never thought before how strange a cornfield can look so late in the year, all the stalks dead where they stand. The country had always just been work waiting to be done. Now she saw the dim shine of sunlight on the leaves, and how the stalks were all bent one way, the tops of them. The wind had bent them and then left them rigid, with their old tattered leaves hanging off them. But it was as if they had all heard one sound and they all knew what it meant, or were afraid they did, and every one of them waited to hear it again, to be sure, every one of them still with waiting. She said, “It don’t mean nothing,” speaking to the child. “It’s the wind.”

The shack was there, the field in front of it filled with the same old weeds, blanched and beaten down or poking up this way and that. The path she had worn from the road was pretty well overgrown. Somebody had been there, had come and gone just enough to bruise the grass. Somebody might still be there. She knew it wasn’t smart to look in the door. You can get in a set-to so fast you don’t even know what happened. Nobody harder to deal with than a thief, once he decides you’re trying to steal from him. She had this baby now to think about. So she stood a way off and picked up a rock and threw it against the wall. It made a good, solid thunk. Nobody looked out the window or the door. She found two more rocks and threw them. Nobody. So she decided it would be safe to look inside.

She could see from the stoop that there was a blanket in the corner. That was about it. A few empty tin cans. Her canning jar, empty. Well, she should have known. She would look under that loose plank, to be sure. One jar does look just like the next one. But there was nothing there except the Reverend’s handkerchief with the raspberry stains on it. She shook off the dirt and cobwebs and put it in the pocket of her coat. She said to the child, “What a day that was.” Him out there in the field picking sunflowers for her. After she told him she wouldn’t marry him. Maybe someday she’d be saying, Once, back in Iowa, your papa gathered flowers for me, from a field that was all gone to weeds. Before you was even born. She never thought a preacher would act that way. Every morning when he left for the church she stood on the porch and watched him walk down the road. He’d turn around to wave at her. If she kissed her fingers and held up her hand—she had seen women do that—he would clutch his hat to his chest and tilt his head to the side like a lovestruck boy in a movie. And she’d hear herself laughing. It would have been nice to give him a present. He wouldn’t expect that.

She was sitting on the stoop in the sun, just for a minute, thinking about things. How good the sunlight felt on a chilly morning, and how familiar that old parched wood smell was, and how strange it seemed to be at peace where she had been so lonesome before, to be more at peace than in the old man’s house, kind as he always was. She opened her coat to the sun so the baby could feel it warming her lap. She might even have fallen asleep, because there was a boy standing at a distance watching her, there for a while at least without her noticing him, she could tell by the way he was shifting his weight from one foot to the other, shifting a little bundle he had from one hand to the other. When she saw him he looked away. She said, “Morning.”

He said, “That there’s my shack. I been using it. Got my stuff in it.” He was small, but he had hair on his face. He looked like something that came up in a drought and bloomed the best it could and never got its growth. There was a crack of sadness in his voice, or worry, and that made it seem like a boy’s voice, younger than the rest of him. Still, you never know. He looked pretty desperate. Best let him have the money.

She said, “I was just sitting here for a minute, catching my breath. I was going down to the river to look at them birds.” She stood up and found her little bag of groceries. “I’ll be going. Didn’t mean to trouble you.”

He said, “Mainly folks don’t come here.”

“I know. I was using this shack most of the summer.”

“Oh. You was using it. Why’d you come back? Maybe you left something here?”

“This,” she said. She took the handkerchief out of her pocket. “I know it don’t look like much. But since I was walking by.”

He glanced at the shape of her now that she was standing, and then he looked away. “Maybe you ain’t done resting. Don’t matter to me. Nothing here I need. I was going to be doing something else anyways.” He took a few steps back.

“Well, I was tired a little while ago, so I rested. And now I’m hungry. I got some cheese and crackers here. Plenty for both of us, if you’d like to join me.”

“No,” he said, “I best not.”

Maybe he thought it was all she had. She said, “I’m real hungry, and I never could eat in front of folks. So I guess you’re just going to let me starve.”

He laughed, and he came a few steps closer to her. She could tell he hoped she would persuade him.

She said, “Sit here on the stoop. The sun is nice.” No point saying he looked cold. She flattened out the paper bag and put the cheese on it and unwrapped it and opened a packet of crackers. She broke off a piece of cheese, and he came close enough to take it from her fingers. His hands were as dirty as could be, too big for him and brown with callus. His pants didn’t reach his ankles and his shoes were all broken down. He was the kind of people Doane used to tell them they were not, the kind that didn’t wash. Doll was after her with a wet rag all the time so she wouldn’t slip away into that tribe, the ones who never touched a comb to their hair and who always had shadows of grime on their necks and wore unmended clothes till they were falling off them. They probably were her tribe, and that was why Doll kept such a close eye on her and never even told her where she came from. They ain’t people you want hanging around. That’s what she’d have said about a boy like this. No matter. Here he was licking his grimy fingers. She said, “Take some more.”

And he said, “Don’t mind if I do.” He was happier than he wanted to be, with the food and the kindness. He sat down on the lowest step and put his little bundle on the ground beside him.

He had wandered there from somewhere south, probably Missouri, maybe Kansas. “I guess I’m heading the wrong way, this time of year. I shoulda thought about that, I guess.” He laughed and glanced at her, shy of her. “I don’t want to go back the way I come, that’s for sure. So, I don’t know. I’ll do something.” He laughed. He said, “There was some trouble down there, so I guess I won’t be going back.” He shook his head, but he looked up at her as if he wouldn’t entirely mind her asking him about it. Maybe he was just surprised by it, lonely with it, not used to the idea that any important thing could be true of him. She thought, He should be careful. She was a stranger, and in his mind she was like someone who would listen and not blame him too much. His mother, maybe.

She said, “Well, sounds like you better keep it to yourself, whatever it was.”

“Yeah,” he said, and laughed. “I better.” After a minute he said, “You ever had a dog? I did once. Then he took off after a rabbit or something and he never come back. So how you come to be living here?”

“Same as you. Drifting.” She said, “Then this man wanted to marry me. So I said all right.”

“Sounds like you making that up.”

“I spose it does. And he’s a preacher.”

The boy laughed. He could tell things by looking at her, too.

“I ain’t joking. He’s a big old preacher.”

“Well,” he said, “maybe so. That his child you got there?”

“You bet it is.”

“So you’re all right.”

“Yes, I am.”

“Because,” he said, “I was thinking you was maybe back here looking for that money I found. Was you the one hid it there?”

“That was my money.”

“Then how much was it?”

“It was almost forty-five dollars. Three fives, a lot of ones, and change. I had it in that canning jar, with the handkerchief. You can keep it.”

He nodded. “That’s about the most money I ever seen in my life.”

“I was saving up. Thinking about California.”

“If I give you half, that would still mean I had about twenty bucks.”

“That’s all right. You can keep it all. I was just going to buy some kind of a present for my old preacher. But he don’t need nothing. He’d be the first to say. Better you keep it.”

“I got it hid away in a good spot.”

“Figured you might.”

“Well, it would be safe there, if somebody was meaning to steal it.” He looked up at her. Kindness was something he didn’t even know he wanted, and here it was. It made him teary and restless, and he was trying to seem to repay it by pretending he’d hid the money partly for her sake.

She said, “Can’t be too careful.”

“First thing I done when I seen that board was loose was I looked under it. First thing anybody’s going to do.” She thought, It comes with the whiskers, that idea that they know how things are. They get a lot of happiness out of it.

He was looking out over the field, as if there were something to see out there. “Yeah,” he said. “I knew a fellow had a hunting dog. It’d do any damn thing he said. A hundred things.”

She said, “You planning on getting a dog?” He had never cut that beard, never shaved. It was reddish and curly at the edges, and then it was straight and brown, what there was of it. And his hair was reddish, matted like sheep’s wool. He’d scratch at it. And his skin was milky white. She’d seen that before. Like the sun just didn’t shine on him the way it did on most people. His big hands were lying on his knees, palms up, and he was looking at them as if he’d never really gotten used to them.

He glanced up at her. He might have been about to say, The way I am ain’t your business. It was you told me to sit down here. And that was true enough. So she looked away. He shrugged. “Thought about getting one.” Then he said, “I been thinking I might give that money to my pa. He’d be glad to see me then, that’s for sure.” He laughed. “He was always telling me I was too puny to be worth keeping. Well, he’d think I stole it, anyhow. He’d tan me for it, too. Like he never done any stealing. But he’d be glad to have the money.”

She said, “Then you’ll be going back where you come from, I guess.”

He said, “Probly not. My pa and me was fighting, and I hit him with a piece of firewood. I don’t know. I think I killed him. If I didn’t, he would have killed me, soon as he woke up. So I just took off.” He looked at her. That dirty, weary child face with a beard stuck on it like a mean joke. “I don’t know where I’ll go. I don’t even know where I am now!” He laughed.

She said, “Well, you’re in Iowa. And the winter here is even worse than it is everyplace else. So you better not try staying on in this shack. You must be freezing already. For sure you won’t last till the spring.”

He shrugged. “Might not anyway. Might not want to. I hated my pa about half the time, but I sure never thought I’d end up killing him.”

“Maybe he ain’t dead.”

“I sure did mean to kill him. I hit him three or four times. Hard as I could. Him laying there.” Tears were running down his cheeks. “I think back on how it was, and I figure I must have killed him. I remember the sound it made when I hit him.” He rested his head on his folded arms and wept.

After a while she said, “Well, you got to get some warm clothes and some good shoes. The preacher keeps things like that in a box somewhere. I can bring them out here tomorrow. Then you spend that money on a bus ticket.”

He said, “After what I done to him, I know he wouldn’t let me come back anyways.”

“Then you figure out where else you want to go.”

“This is the first time I ever been away from home,” he said. “First time. I can’t hardly even sleep nights.”

“I guess you better get used to it.”

He laughed. “Don’t think I will.” He looked at her. His face was a mess of grief, so she gave him the handkerchief.

“You have folks?”

“My pa. That’s all. So.” He shrugged and gazed out at the field again, calm for no reason except that he was done crying. “You ever talk to a killer before?”

“One. That I know of. She really did kill somebody, too. No doubt about it.”

“Why’d she do it?”

“He’d have killed her. That’s as much as I know. She got the jump on him, so they said she murdered him. I keep the knife she used right there on the old man’s kitchen table.”

“Why?”

“She was a friend of mine. About the only one I had. She give it to me.”

“The preacher know about that knife?”

“I told him.”

He nodded. “So you never turned against her after what she done.”

“I did regret it.”

He was quiet for a while, and then he said, “I tell you what happened. My pa was drunk, and he was yelling at me about nothing, some little thing I done, so I said I was going to run off and leave him. He followed me out to the road, and he was saying ‘Git!’ and throwing sticks and rocks at me, the way you’d chase off a dog. I come back to the house later and he was laying there asleep, and I took a piece of firewood, about yay big.” He made a circle with his hands. “It just come over me.”

“I can see how it might.”

He looked at her. “So now I don’t know
what
I’m going to do.”

“Well,” she said, “you stay here tonight, and then tomorrow I bring you some clothes, and you get yourself a ticket somewhere. And you better start telling yourself you don’t know if you killed him, ’cause you don’t. No point making it worse than it has to be. And you sure better stop talking to strangers about it.”