Lila: A Novel (33 page)

That old black coat he always wore to preach in was the one he put over her shoulders one evening when they were walking along the road together and he was throwing rocks at the fence posts the way a boy would do, still shy of her. But on a Sunday morning, with the sermon in front of him he’d spent the week on and knew so well he hardly needed to look at it, he was a beautiful old man, and it pleased her more than almost anything that she knew the feel of that coat, the weight of it. She’d be thinking about it when she should have been praying. But if she ever had prayed in all the years of her old life, it might have been for just that, that gentleness. And if she prayed now, it was really remembering the comfort he put around her, the warmth of his body still in that coat. It was a shock to her, a need she only discovered when it was satisfied, for those few minutes. In those days she had all the needs she could stand already, and here was another one. So she said something mean to him. That’s how she used to be and how she might be again someday, if she was ever just barely getting by and somebody seemed to be about to make it harder just by making it different. They’d had their wedding by then, but she wasn’t married to him yet, so she still thought sometimes, Why should he care? What is it to him? That was loneliness. When you’re scalded, touch hurts, it makes no difference if it’s kindly meant. Now he could comfort her with a look. And what would she do without him. What would she do.

Doll was hard that way. All of them were. Talking to strangers was putting yourself within the reach of sudden harm. What might they say? What might they seem to be thinking? Then you were left with it afterward, like remembering a bad dream, and nothing to do about it except to hate the next stranger a little more. Those times she used to think, I have a knife in my garter, and you don’t know how you’re pressing up against the minute I decide to use it. Doll told her, Don’t cut nobody with it. You don’t want all that to deal with. Just give them a look at it. Most of the time, that’s plenty. But there were times when the merciless knife was a comfort to her. Even when she only thought somebody might have looked at her the wrong way, she’d tell herself she had that furious old knife and it had done the worst already. That was before she had a child to look after. You have to stay out of trouble for the sake of your child.

She still actually thought like that, when she let her thoughts sink down to where they rested. She had never taken a dime that wasn’t hers or hurt a living soul, to speak of. But that’s what her heart was like sometimes, secret and bitter and scared. She had stolen the preacher’s child, and she laughed to think of it. Making him learn his verses and say his prayers would be like a joke, when they were off by themselves, getting by as they could. She did steal that Bible, and she’d keep it with her, and she’d show him that part about the baby toiling in its blood, and she’d say, That was me, and somebody said, “Live!” I never will know who. And then you came, red as blood, naked as Adam, and I took you to my breast and you lived when they never thought you would. So you’re mine. Gilead has no claim on you, or John Ames either, or the graveyard that has no place for you anyway.

Oh, if the old man knew what thoughts she had! She could make a pretty good meat loaf now and a decent potato salad. He told her he’d never liked pie very much anyway. She could keep the house nice enough. People passing in the road stopped to admire her gardens. The boy was as clean and pretty as any baby in Gilead. A little small, but that could change. And the old man did look as though every blessing he had forgotten to hope for had descended on him all at once, for the time being.

She couldn’t lean her whole weight on any of this when she knew she would have to live on after it. She wouldn’t even want to see this house again after they left it, or Gilead, at least till the boy had outgrown the thought that they belonged there. So she thought about the old life. She never really hated it until Doll came to her all bloody and she went to St. Louis. But it was a hard way to bring up a child. And she would tell him he was a minister’s son, so he might blame her because she couldn’t give him what his father would have given him, the quiet gentleness in his manners, the way of expecting that people would look up to him. She surely couldn’t teach him that.

Still, there was this time, this waking up when the baby started fussing, this scrambling eggs and buttering toast in the new light of any day at all, geraniums in the windows, the old man with his doddering infant in his lap, propped against his arm, reading him the funny papers. So one morning, standing at the sink washing the dishes, she said, “I guess there’s something the matter with me, old man. I can’t love you as much as I love you. I can’t feel as happy as I am.”

“I know,” he said. “I don’t think it’s anything to worry about. I don’t worry about it, really.”

“I got so much life behind me.”

“I know.”

“It was nothing like this life.”

“I know.”

“I miss it sometimes.”

He nodded. “We aren’t so different. There are things I miss.”

She said, “I might have to go back to it sometime. The part I could go back to, what with the child.”

“Yes,” he said. “I’ve given that some thought. I know you’ll do the best you can. The best that can be done. I’ll be leaving you on your own. We’ve both always known that. I can’t tell you how deeply I regret it.”

“You have told me, plenty of times. But for now,” she said, “things are good. If hard times are coming, I’d just as soon wait to start worrying. That’s not really the problem.” The problem is, she thought, that if someday she opened the front door and there, where the flower gardens and the fence and the gate ought to be, was that old life, the raggedy meadows and pastures and the cornfields and the orchards, she might just set the child on her hip and walk out into it, the buzz and the smell and the damp of it, the breath of it like her own breath, her own sweat. Stepping back into the loneliness, a dreadful thing, like walking into cold water, waiting for the numbness to set in that was the body taking the care it could, so that what you knew you didn’t have to feel. In the dream it was always morning, and the sun already a little too hot. She was glad she had seen the boy brand new, red as fire, without a tear to give to the world, no ties to the world at all, just that knot on his belly. Then he was at her side, at her breast, a human child. The numbness setting in. But it never sinks right to the bone. That orphan he was first he always would be, no matter how they loved him. He’d be no child of hers, otherwise. She said, “What is it you’re missing?”

He shrugged. “Pretty well everything. You. This old fellow.” He patted the baby’s leg. “Evening. Morning.”

“You aren’t as old as you think you are, Reverend.”

He said, “It’s just arithmetic. That’s what it comes down to. Boughton has married four or five of his children. Baptized a dozen grandchildren by now. And maybe I’ll teach this fellow to tie his shoelaces. The years of a man’s life are threescore years and ten, give or take. That’s how it is.” He said, “I feel like Moses on the mountain, looking out on the life he will never have. Then I think of the life I do have. And that starts me thinking about the life I won’t have. All that beautiful life.” He shrugged. “I guess I’m pretty hard to please.”

“I’m going to make us some more coffee. Did I ever say that? That I love you? I always thought it sounded a little foolish. But the way you talk, sometime I might regret putting it off.”

“I believe you said it a minute ago. You can’t love me as much as you do love me. Something to that effect. Which I thought was interesting.” He said, “All those years, were you as sad as you were sad? As lonely as you were lonely? I wasn’t.”

“Me neither. I’d have died of it.”

“I had the church, of course, and Boughton. I had my prayers and my books. ‘And my ending is despair, Unless I be relieved by prayer, Which pierces so that it assaults Mercy itself and frees all faults.’ Quite a life, really. A very good life. But there was such a silence behind it all. Over it. Beneath it. Sometimes I used to read to myself out loud, just to hear a voice.”

“You do that now.”

“Do I? Well, by now it’s just habit.”

“And I think about Doll.” Then she said, “I’m keeping that knife. I’ll put it out of sight somewhere, but I’m keeping it.”

“Fine.”

“It ain’t very Christian of me. Such a mean old knife. I hate to think he could want it sometime, but he could.”

The old man nodded.

Here she was practically calling herself a Christian, because when the Reverend had baptized their infant at the church that day and put him into her arms, he touched the water to her head, too, three times. He turned his back to the people and murmured to her, “I don’t really know what I’m doing here. I should have asked you first. But I wanted you to know that we couldn’t bear—we have to keep you with us. Please God.” That late new snow made the window light very cool and pure, and she was a little faint from standing, so soon after the birth. Mrs. Graham took her into the study to wait with her for the service to end.

She sat down in the preacher’s chair and held the baby against her, and she thought, Did I say, It’s all right with me, I guess? thinking that if she’d said it she wasn’t sure she’d meant it, and if she hadn’t said it she was sorry she had not. The old coat he had put over her shoulders when they were walking in the evening was as good to remember as the time Doll took her up in her arms. She thought it was nothing she had known to hope for and something she had wanted too much all the same. So too much happiness came with it, and happiness was strange to her. He said, We have to keep you with us. In that eternity of his, where everybody will be happy, how could he feel the lack of her, the loss of her? She had to think about that. Sometime she would ask him about it. It must always be true that there are the stragglers, people somebody couldn’t bear to be without, no matter what they’d been up to in this life. That son of Boughton’s.

And then there were the people no one would miss, who had done no special harm, who just lived and died as well as they could manage. That would have been Lila, if she had not wandered into Gilead. And then she thought, I couldn’t bear to be without Doll, or Mellie, or Doane and Marcelle. Even Arthur and his boys—not that they had mattered so much to her when she was a child, but because fair was fair and none of them ever had any good thing that the others didn’t have some right to, even Deke. If there was goodness at the center of things, that one rule would have to be respected, because it was as important to them as anything in this world.

She thought maybe, just by worrying about it, Boughton would sweep up China into an eternity that would surprise him out of all his wondering. God is good, the old men say. That would be the proof.

Can a soul in bliss feel a weight lift off his heart? She couldn’t help imagining— Oh, here you are! Your dear weariness and ugliness as beautiful as light! That boy, weeping over what he was, his big, dirty hands that had done something he couldn’t quite believe, and then there he would be, fresh from the gallows, shocked at the kindness all around him, which was the last thing he expected. He’d had the idea “father.” That was what made him so desperate that his father in this life never said a gentle word to him. And there that mangy old father would be, too, because the boy couldn’t bear heaven without him. He’d say, See, you was lucky to have me for a son, after all! Look what I done for you! And, Ain’t this better than anything! Better than money! He’d be as proud of heaven as if he’d come up with it all on his own.

So it couldn’t matter much how life seemed. The old man always said we should attend to the things we have some hope of understanding, and eternity isn’t one of them. Well, this world isn’t one either. Most of the time she thought she understood things better when she didn’t try. Things happen the way they do. Why was a foolish question. In a song a note follows the one before because it is that song and not another one. Once, she and Mellie tried to count up all the songs they knew. How could there be so many? Because every one was just itself. It was eternity that let her think this way. In eternity people’s lives could be altogether what they were and had been, not just the worst things they ever did, or the best things either. So she decided that she should believe in it, or that she believed in it already. How else could she imagine seeing Doll again? Never once had she taken her to be dead, plain and simple. If any scoundrel could be pulled into heaven just to make his mother happy, it couldn’t be fair to punish scoundrels who happened to be orphans, or whose mothers didn’t even like them, and who would probably have better excuses for the harm they did than the ones who had somebody caring about them. It couldn’t be fair to punish people for trying to get by, people who were good by their own lights, when it took all the courage they had to be good. Doane tying that ribbon around Marcelle’s ankle. If that wasn’t good or bad, it was something she was glad to have seen. Mellie singing to soothe some borrowed baby.

That’s what she was thinking. The Reverend couldn’t bear to be without her. Nothing against Mrs. Ames and her baby. Eternity had more of every kind of room in it than this world did. She could even think of wicked old Mack in the light of that other life, looking it over, wondering what the catch was, what the joke was, somehow knowing that she had brought him there. And his child. She couldn’t bear to be without them. It was eternity that let her think like that without a bit of shame.

There was no end to it. Thank God, as the old men would say.

But the baby started fussing and Mrs. Graham took him and jostled him a little in her arms and let him suck her finger—such a good boy, such a good boy—and Lila heard the final hymn and the benediction. Then the Reverend came in, looking a little worried as he always did when he thought he might not have been attentive enough, and then she realized how tired she was. But she knew she would come back to what she’d been thinking about. And also to “the peace that passeth all human understanding,” which was the blessing he said over his flock as they drifted out into Gilead, the small, frail, ragtag work of their hands.