Lila: A Novel (3 page)

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 that’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.

She could read. Doll had seen to that. She might sit on the porch with a magazine and wait for him there. Then he could ask her what she was reading, or she could tell him that there was a word she didn’t understand, as there certainly would be. So she was sitting with a copy of
The Nation
in her lap, when, hours after church would have ended, she saw the Reverend walking up the road, Boughton beside him, the two of them talking together as they always did, and listening to each other, as if, so far into their lives, some new thing might still be said, something not to be missed. Boughton saw her first and said a word to the Reverend, who glanced up, and then they stopped in the road to say goodbye and the old man came on alone. His body still had the habits of largeness and strength, as if he had learned to be a little slow when he moved, out of consideration for whatever might be around him, whatever he might bump or displace. Still, he was slower than usual, taking his time, approaching his own door with a reluctance she saw and regretted, since this time might be the time that he would not forgive her, or at least the time that he would have decided he did not want her to stay.

He took off his hat as he came up the steps. Then he stood there a moment, turning the brim of it in his hands, just taking her in. “
The Nation
,” he said, as if that was as strange as anything else that had happened to him lately.

So she said, “I got to do more reading. It’s something I been meaning to do for a while now.”

After a moment he said, “Yes, well, that’s always worthwhile, I guess.” His voice was mild, almost amused. He shifted his weight, the way he did when something surprised him a little.

So she said, “Seems like I’m carrying a child.” She had not meant to tell him then, but she couldn’t very well wait until he decided to be angry to tell him, or until he told her he just wanted his life to himself again, as she expected him to do any day. If that happened, her pride would make her leave, without a mention of it, and there was no telling what would become of her and the child, if there was a child.

He said, “Really.” He sat down on the porch swing beside her, at a little distance from her. He said, “Is that a fact.” Then he said, “This is not at all how I thought this day would end.”

She had not looked at his face yet. She was watching the wind move the trees. It was a soft evening wind, and the trees were darkening, filling with shadows. It would be time to stop working, not soon but sometime. A wind like that used to mean the day isn’t endless, sometime there’ll be supper and talk and sleep. So many things they knew together and never spoke about at all.

He said, “So, then, you’ve decided to stay.”

“I never did plan on leaving.” For a town it wasn’t such a bad place. The trees were big enough that it was almost like living in the woods. There was no reason not to make another garden. She could plant some flowers.

After a minute he said, “When you go off like that, you might leave a note. I don’t always know what to think. You left your wedding ring.”

“I just forget to put it on sometimes.”

“Yes. I guess I knew that.”

“I’m always wearing that locket you give me.”

It seemed strange to her to wear a ring. It was a gold ring. She might harm it in some way. It might slip off her finger and be lost.

“Lila,” he said, “I’m glad to know you aren’t planning to leave. But if you ever change your mind, I want you to leave by daylight. I want you to have a train ticket in your hand that will take you right where you want to go, and I want you to take your ring and anything else I have given you. You might want to sell it. That would be all right. It’s yours, not mine. It doesn’t belong here—I mean it wouldn’t—” He cleared his throat. “You’re my wife,” he said. “I want to take care of you, even if that means someday seeing you to the train.” He leaned forward and looked into her face, almost sternly, so she would know he meant what he said.

She thought, We would be safe here. He would be good to a child. But if he was going to put her on the train, where would the child be then? Would he expect her to leave it behind when she left? Or did he think there wasn’t going to be any child? Well, sometimes you expect you’re going to have a baby, then nothing comes of it. You can’t set your heart on it.