Lila: A Novel (26 page)

Well, she better start shoveling the coal. She was only used to a wood fire. So she’d have to be careful not to put too much in too fast. Stir the coals and then build up the fire so she could see what she was doing. She knew a boiler could burst if something happened, it got too hot or heated up too fast. Then the coals would fly everywhere and the whole damn house would burn down, probably. She could fill it up, leaving just enough room for her to crawl in after and close the door. Boom! She’d go flying, a flaming piece of her right into that girl’s face, that Peg, and another one into Rita’s lap, where she was always picking at her fingernails until they were bloody, and another one into the room where they kept the dress-up clothes when the gentlemen weren’t around. And Mack would see her, all fire like that, and he’d probably be laughing, thinking he’d done it. He’d touch her cheek and the fire would come away on his hand and he’d probably just lick it off. He’d say, Now, that’s the kind of girl a man would marry! Telling that damn lie again just to see if she could burn any hotter than fire.

Doll said, “You’re standing here in a cellar, barefoot in the dark, talking to yourself. This ain’t how I brought you up.”

Lila said, I got that plan about working around the place.

“You know how I got this scar? A girl just as crazy as you’re getting to be heated up an iron skillet as hot as she could make it, and then when I come in the kitchen she hit me with it. Broke the bone in my cheek and who knows what all. I was as good as dead for a long time, and when I woke up, I had this face for the rest of my life.”

Lila thought, How do I know that? Did she tell me sometime?

“You was a sickly child, and I told you old stories because my voice was a comfort to you. You remember.”

I’m talking to myself. Seeing things in the dark. Slipping away. Maybe it don’t matter.

Doll said, “Well, I tell you what. If I was still living I wouldn’t waste it standing around in no cellar wishing I was dead. You sure never learned that from me. I’m surprised you can hold up your head.”

Most times I can’t.

Do it anyway. That was her way of speaking.

There she was, missing Doll again. For so many years she had belonged to somebody. The cow and her calf. That was all right, because Doll wanted her there beside her. The way they used to laugh together, half the joke being that nobody else would know what the joke was. Now here she had this preacher, maybe the kindest man in the world, and no idea what to do with him. And here she had his baby, and what did she know about bringing up his child? She was reading the Bible, thinking she might understand what he was talking about sometimes, what he and old Boughton were laughing about, arguing over, but her mind would go off on its own and she’d be back in the cellar, farther away than ever. Or she’d be slipping off with that child in her arms, and she’d be whispering right in her ear, her cheek against the child’s hair, telling her what there was growing by the road that was good to eat and what was good to heal a sore, and they’d be whispering and laughing together when they found a way to get out of the rain, singing old songs together, the ones everybody knew that still felt like secrets when you taught them to a child. Sometime they’ll begin singing, and these are the words, you know them, too. Shall we gather at the river.

She had thought about all that, stealing off with a child, in the house in St. Louis. She came up out of the cellar that first morning and went straight to the kitchen, filthy as she was, and began scrubbing. Everything was greasy, and there was food scorched onto the pots and pans so they gave off smoke every time they were put on the stove. Everything was dusky with old smoke. Mice in the pantry. Mrs. came in and watched what she was doing for a minute or two. Lila saw that shrewd look on her face she expected to see, as if the whole thing were her idea. A cleaning woman came in now and then and wiped up just a little, since Mrs. hardly paid her anything at all. But Lila was working off a debt, so there was still a savings for her, small as it was. “The floor needs mopping,” Mrs. said, which meant what Lila was doing was all right with her. After a few days she decided to look around in the closets and drawers to find her own dress, and then she could go outside to beat the rugs. It made things nicer, so there was pleasure in it.

She hadn’t been at that kind of work more than a month before she heard them saying Missy was going to have a baby. “She’s so fat she didn’t know it herself.” Laughing, of course. “She was bawling all day yesterday, Mrs. is so mad at her. She don’t want to tell where her sister is, so Mrs. got to get rid of it, and she don’t like that one bit!”

“I guess we won’t be seeing Mack around for a while.”

“She’ll just take it to the nuns is all.”

“You ever see one of them nuns? I never did.”

“Best not to wonder about it. There used to be an old man come around in the middle of the night.”

“And then he took ’em to the nuns.”

“Can’t say he didn’t. I wouldn’t bet no money on it, though.”

“What else he going to do with a baby, fool?”

“Well, you going to believe what you want to believe, fool.”

And the other girl started crying. No end to the meanness.

That was when Lila started thinking she might just steal a child for herself. Nobody would mind. She could pick it up and walk out the door with it, for all they cared. Just so long as she waited till dark. And left through the back door. People don’t like to think about babies coming out of a house like that, so she’d be careful and wait till the street was empty. The gentlemen didn’t want to hear one word about babies. But that would just make everything easier. Mrs. would think it was her own idea. It would save her trouble, maybe a little money. So that would make up for most of whatever Lila still owed her. And the child would never be an orphan, because Lila would always be there looking after it, keeping it beside her. No tangled hair, no rickety legs. No cussing. She could hardly even sleep nights for the thought of it. She’d be out in the weather again, hugging a baby under her coat, watching for the minute that child would laugh, watching it play with a milkweed pod, a bit of string. Don’t take much to please a child, if that’s what you want to do. If Missy ever happened to find out what had come of her, she would be glad Lila took her, because Lila would show her every good thing she could think of, everything Doll had shown her. She would teach her how to get by. There was nothing so hard about it if you could read a little and you knew how to make change. All at once Lila was only there at that house waiting to leave it, waiting to take a child out into the good, cold night and show it the moon and the stars. Or out into the rain. It wouldn’t matter. All at once it was only the child that mattered to her, and all that sadness and meanness wasn’t her life at all. She could just walk away from it, taking with her one thing that would be worth the very worst of it. The surprise of it all made her laugh. She thought, Well, when was the last time I did that?

Lila had thought about what it might be like having a child of her own, but it never happened. Something must have gone wrong sometime and her body just wouldn’t do it. Maybe that was what came of being a feeble child herself, that her body didn’t wish that kind of life on anyone else. Or it could have been all the hard work. Once, in the old days, Mellie had gotten very curious about Arthur’s boy Deke, so Lila was, too. Doane told him to stop bothering those girls, which really meant those girls should stop bothering him. When Doll found out what they’d been up to, she told them they were asking for a world of trouble messing around with boys. By then Mellie had found out whatever it was she wanted to know and had gone on to something else, trying to play an old fiddle somebody gave her. It had taken Lila a little longer. But no trouble had come of it for either one of them, maybe because Doane had put an end to it, maybe because Lila, at least, couldn’t have that kind of trouble if she wanted to.

No matter. There was another way to get a child. If it happened to be one nobody else wanted around, then it was a good thing to take it up, tend to it. Who could know that better than she did. At the time she was thinking about this, making her plan, she’d had no idea there was anything about that written down anywhere. All she knew about the Bible was what she heard at the revival meetings she went to sometimes, in those days after Doll told her to go out on her own and live as she could, and she was so lonely that the crowds and the singing were a comfort to her. The preaching and praying were just something she put up with because she liked the rest of it. The best time to get a bag of popcorn. At one of those meetings she met a couple of girls who were on their own, too, and the three of them wandered around together for a while, looking for work, finding it sometimes, sharing what they had, going to the matinee, to the dance hall. There was a lonely kind of excitement about it because they knew it would only last for a while. Then one of them took up with a fellow and married him, the other one got a job working nights in a bakery, and Lila started clerking in a store. Things worked out more or less the way they had hoped, and that was the end of that.

Doll must have been following her from place to place somehow, even though Lila didn’t know herself where she would be from one day to the next. Doll wouldn’t have wanted Lila to see her panhandling, but it was hard to think how else she’d have been getting by. It might just have happened that Doll was in that town and saw her there, and watched to see where she lived. And it might just have happened that Doll and that old fellow had their knife fight there, close enough to Lila’s room that Doll could come to her when she had to. It could have been that the man, maybe her father, meant to find Lila, and Doll threw her husk of a body and her dreadful knife into making sure that didn’t happen. What might he have said to her, to Lila? She could only imagine him white as he was in that box, whiter at the bone of his nose. He’d stand there all slack in his joints like a zombie, stupefied by how dead he was, mumbling a little, and she would feel so sorry and so relieved that he couldn’t tell her what it was he came to tell her. Things like that happen in movies. That was probably where she got the idea. He might have wanted to tell her that he and her poor dear mother hadn’t meant to leave her long, but something happened. They were on the way to find her, and—what could he say?—the train went off a cliff and all their arms and legs were broken, and when they came to, they didn’t even know their own names. Years in the hospital. And while he was telling her some such thing Doll would come flying out of nowhere to cut him one more time. No wonder her thoughts were strange, considering what she had to think about.

But as long as the one thing on her mind was Missy’s baby, she was just plain happy. The best of everything she remembered became the whole dream of what she could look forward to. So when the memory of some pleasant day she had put out of sight came back to her, even the taste of a clover blossom or the smell of the wind at evening, the pleasure of it was a sort of shock, and if she forgot that she shouldn’t be talking out loud, she’d say, “Yes, yes,” as if time could be coaxed into getting on with itself. She made a little garden out behind the house, a row of peas and a row of carrots, and planted some marigolds by the front steps. There wasn’t really enough sunshine, the buildings were so close, but she wanted the feel of real dirt on her hands, not just the grime and mess she was always dealing with. The dirt would clean away the feeling and the smell of it. She walked a long way to find a store that sold seeds, the farthest she had been from Mrs. since she came there. It made her light-headed. Mrs. had begun talking about attracting a better class of customer now that the place had a little polish, and she mostly let Lila do whatever she wanted, pretending she was the one who had thought of it. The other girls wouldn’t even go down the block to buy a loaf of bread because they thought people looked at them, but Lila didn’t really care about that. She always felt strange in a town, but that was all right. It reminded her of the way she and Mellie used to steal a look at their reflections in a store window, waving their arms and making faces if they thought nobody was watching, laughing at the laughing ghosts of themselves for just the minute their pride let them risk, then walking on, thinking they had done something anyone else would notice or give a thought to, and laughing. Sometimes Lila walked away from that house as if she might just keep walking, block after block after block, imagining the night when she really would leave. Then she’d turn and go back to the house again, not because of Mrs., just waiting for the baby.

She hated to remember how swept up in it all she had been, how ridiculous she would have seemed to anyone who knew what she’d been thinking. That’s one good thing about the way life is, that no one can know you if you don’t let them. Oh, they noticed that she was acting different, and they tried to guess the reason for it, how she could have a boyfriend when she was so tough and wore out and never even curled her hair now that she was just a cleaning woman. Never you mind. He’s some old bum on the street. No business of yours. Probly found him picking through a trash can. They were just mean no matter what, so she didn’t even listen.

Lila spent her time waiting, working so far as anyone could see, but really just passing the time. Sometimes, when Missy didn’t want to go downstairs, bringing a little supper from the kitchen. Missy didn’t like her any better for it, but that was all right. She was so sad there was nothing she liked, nothing and nobody. Mack didn’t come around, and she never mentioned him. She knew better than to trust him at all, but he had favored her for a long time, and she must have missed him. It got so that Lila had to open the seams of the biggest nightgown she could find, and pin up the hem of it, too, since Missy was no taller than a child. She’d bring a basin of water for her feet, thinking whatever comforted Missy might comfort the child. She tried to sleep lightly enough to hear, over the noise there always was in that house at night, any sound that might mean the birth was coming. Then one morning she came up from the cellar, and there was Missy with a coat she’d never seen before thrown over her and holding a carpetbag, standing at the door with a short, plump woman who had one hand on the doorknob and the other on Missy’s elbow. “My sister,” she said. “We’re leaving. We don’t want no part of this place.”