Lila: A Novel

by Marilynne Robinson

  That was the day she walked out with a pew Bible. They would have been so happy to give her one that she couldn’t bear the thought. They’d take it wrong. She wasn’t getting religion, she just wanted to know what he was talking about. For her own reasons. And someday, when she had decided to leave, she’d probably bring it back. It made her feel better to be interested in something. That much less time for the thoughts that worried her.

  But she wanted him to know she wasn’t such a fool as he might have thought she was. Since he did seem to think about her. So she began tending that grave. There was writing on it. We wept that one so lovely should have a life so brief. Must be from the Bible. Let’s see if he thinks it was God who scraped the moss off the headstone and put the ivy there. Who cut back the yew shrubs so some light could get through. Who would make the roses bloom. And she had noticed that the garden behind his house was running to weeds, so she began tending that, too. Once, he found her working there—looking after her potato plants, though he didn’t seem to notice. Picking the beetles off and dropping them in a tin can. He said, “You have done so much. It looks wonderful. I would like to give you something for it.” He had his wallet in one hand, his hat in the other.

  She said, “I owe you a kindness.”

  “No,” he said. “No. You certainly don’t owe me anything.”

  “I best decide that,” she said.

  “Yes. Well, if there is ever—anything at all. That you need— If you ever want to talk again, I might do better this time.” He shrugged. “I can’t promise, but I’ll try.”

  She said, “I ain’t making any promises,” and he laughed. Then she said, “I’m thinking about it. Thank you.” He was a beautiful old man. His brow was heavy, but his eyes were kind. Why should he care what she thought, whether she stayed or left, what became of her? She knew what she looked like, with her big hands and her rangy arms, and her face that had been burned a hundred times, more, and her scorched hair and her eyes the sun had faded. In St. Louis they had made a sort of game of it, trying to pretty her up. Everything looked wrong. Just pretend you’re pretty. Mainly she’d cleaned up around the place, helped the others with their clothes and their hair. When she tried to pretend, they’d laugh. He did have a way of looking at her, when he looked at her at all. She had to admit it. But if she let herself start thinking like that, he would begin to matter to her, and the times she had let that happen, those two or three times, nothing had come of it but trouble. She had a habit now of putting questions to him in her mind. What do you ever tell people in a sermon except that things that happen mean something? Some man dies somewhere a long time ago and that means something. People eat a bit of bread and that means something. Then why won’t you say how you know that? Do you just talk that way because you’re a preacher? This kind of thinking made a change in her loneliness, made it more tolerable for her. And she knew how dangerous that could be. She had told herself more than once not to call it loneliness, since it wasn’t any different from one year to the next, it was just how her body felt, like hungry or tired, except it was always there, always the same. Now and again she had distracted herself from it for a while. And it always came back and felt worse.

  But she began to think about getting herself baptized. She thought there might be something about that water on her forehead that would cool her mind. She had to get through her life one way or another. No reason not to take any comfort the world seemed to offer her. If none of it made sense to her now, that might change if she let it. If none of it meant anything, after all, no harm done. Then he told her that they would be having a class, and she would be very welcome to join them. She was still making up her mind, just walking past the church because she thought she might be early or she had come the wrong evening, because she had walked past twice before and had not seen anyone going in. She never really knew the time, and she could lose track of the days. But then there was the preacher coming along the street toward her, so she just stood there where she was and waited. Nothing else to do. He had taken off his hat when he saw her, so he probably meant to speak to her. She had not thought what she might say to him, had not expected to speak to him at all, only to sit in the row farthest from him and listen and keep her questions to herself.

  He said, “Good evening. I’m happy to see you here.”

  And she said, “I figure I better get myself baptized. No one seen to it for me when I was a child.” Realizing as she heard herself say the words that after all her thinking she felt almost in the habit of speaking her mind to him. Didn’t she know better than to let herself think like that? Hadn’t she told herself a hundred times? This is what was bound to come of it. He didn’t even look quite the way he looked to her in her thoughts, and still she had spoken to him as if she knew him. That’s what came of living the way she did.

  “Well,” he said. “Yes. We’ll take care of that. Certainly.”

  Everything she said seemed to surprise him a little. No wonder, when it surprised her, too. She thought, How do I know what I’ll be saying with all them church people watching me? She said, “I can’t come tonight. I got to work.” And she turned and walked away, instantly embarrassed to realize how strange she must look, hurrying off for no real reason into the dark of the evening. The lonely dark, where she could only expect to go crazier, in that shack where she still lived because it was hard for her to be with people. It would be truer to say hid than lived, since about the only comfort she had in it was being by herself. If she didn’t go back now, before the full ache of shame set in, she knew she would never set foot in that church again. The best thing about church was that when she sat in the last pew there was no one looking at her. She could come a little late and leave a little early, when she wanted to. She could listen to the sermon and the singing. People might wonder why she was there, but they never asked. And it was just interesting to hear the old man talk about being born and dying and the rest of it, things most folks are pretty quiet about. Not much else was keeping her in that town. So she decided she would go back to the church and walk in the door the way she meant to do in the first place. But when she did walk in, he stood up, so she left, and those ladies followed her out into the street. They must have been talking about her. So what? They could have let her go if they’d wanted to. If she felt like a fool, so what? He stood up like he did before, and he smiled and said, “I’m glad you could be here, after all.” She said, “Thank you.” And after that it was easier. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus. Abraham, Isaac, Jacob. At least she was beginning to learn a little.

  If she thought about the preacher so she wouldn’t think about other things, she could just as well be remembering the old times, when she had Doll. No point wondering about that cabin Doll took her from, or who it was that had kept her alive when she was newborn and helpless. She had picked up the Bible and read at the place it fell open, and she found this: In the day thou wast born thy navel was not cut, neither wast thou washed in water to cleanse thee … No eye pitied thee. And she fell to thinking that somebody had to have pitied her, or any child that lives. I passed by thee, and saw thee weltering in thy blood. Lila had seen children born. They were just as naked and strange as some bug you would dig up out of the ground. You would want to wash the child and wrap it up in something to hide it, out of pity. Hard as she tried, all she could remember were skirts brushing against her, hands not so rough as other hands. That might have been the one who made her live. What did it matter. In the evenings when it was too dim to read she wrapped herself in her blanket, huddled up in a corner so that her face and her feet were covered, and thought or dreamed, slept or lay awake. If Doll was her mother she wouldn’t have had to steal her, so Lila knew that much. What could matter any less than where she came from? Well, she thought, where I’m going might matter less. Or maybe why I’m here by myself in the dark wondering about it. She didn’t mind the dark or the crickets or even the scurry of mice, really, and it pleased her to think that the stars were there, just outside an open win
dow. In the dark of the morning, in her nightdress, with her bar of soap, she walked down to bathe in the river. No one could see her. She could hardly see herself. She liked the smell of the soap. She felt the stones and the silt at her feet, but there was a good sting of cold in the water sliding over her skin. It made her take gasping breaths that left the taste of air in her throat. Doll used to say, “Now you’re just as clean as a body can be.”

  Then she would put on the nightdress again, walk back to the cabin, brush the litter of leaves and sticks off her feet as well as she could, wrap herself in her blanket, and lie awake, her body slowly warming the damp of the dress, and she would think about the way things happened. One night, because she had found those words in the Bible, thinking about how it could have happened that she was born and had lived. Sickly as she was when Doll took her up. Then how to imagine whoever it was that had bothered with her even that much, to keep body and soul together. It was nothing against Doll to think there had to have been someone there before her, someone who held her and fed her. She thought of the preacher’s wife, that girl with her newborn baby in her arms. The woman who told her about them said, “She just slipped away, and in a few hours the baby followed her.” And the preacher was left all alone.

  What had become of Mellie, who was never scared? She could ask him about that. Mellie’d poke a snake with a stick just to get a better look at it. Once, she climbed from a fence railing onto the back of a young bull calf, hanging on with her arms around its neck. Doane saw what she was doing and came over to the fence and climbed up and lifted her off the thing before it could really decide how to get rid of her. It had scraped her leg against a post and left it raw enough that the flies bothered it, but she just said she had a notion that if you rode a bull every day from the time it was young you could ride it when it was growed. Then you could go anywhere and folks would say, Here she comes, riding on that bull. Doane said, “Well, that ain’t your bull. Four, five days we’ll be gone from here.” And she said, “I coulda stayed on that thing if you’d let me. I know that much.” He laughed. “You know, if he’d decided to, he’d of broke that leg. For a start. Then, when you’re useless, who’s sposed to look after you?” She said, “My leg don’t even hurt that bad!”

  He was always telling her she was going to break her neck sometime and they’d have to just go on and leave her lying beside the road. She never paid any mind to that at all. And she never broke her neck, though sometimes she did seem to be trying to. She saw some town girls skipping rope and found a piece of rope herself and figured out how to do it better than they did, crossing her arms, hopping on one foot. She tried a sort of handspring, but without her hands, since they had to be holding the rope. She’d fall in the road and come right back up again, and she’d say, “I pertinearly done it that time.” A skinny, freckled child with her white brows drawn together and her raggedy white hair flying, meaning to make herself the best rope jumper there ever was. If she saw an outhouse she’d go into it, looking for a catalogue, and if she found one she’d come back with a few pages and study them for days, trying to decide what things were and what they were good for. She’d say, “I can’t quite make out the words yet. I’m working on it.” Doll called it all tomfoolery, and she’d say to Lila, “I’m glad you don’t go acting like that,” even before Lila was strong enough to have tried to, even though she never showed any sign of wanting to. She was Doll’s girl, always at her side if she could be. Mellie had walked the same roads every summer, and she could wander away without getting lost. She would try now and then to make a chum of Lila, telling her she knew where there were huckleberries, or that she would show her how to catch a fish in her bare hands, but Lila always wanted Doll near her, at least in her sight.

  What could the old man say about all those people born with more courage than they could find a way to spend, and then there was nothing to do with it but just get by? And that was when the times were decent. She had always been jealous of Mellie because the others took pleasure from her pranks and her notions. She was always making them laugh. Once, Mellie said, “I believe my knees have been skint my whole life. My elbows, too.” Doane laughed and said, “Then I guess you must of been born that way. If ever anybody was.” And where would a girl like that find any kind of life that asked more of her than just standing up to hardship? Something an animal could do better, a mule. Doll said, Whatever happens, just be quiet and it’ll pass, most likely. But those weren’t thoughts Lila wanted to have, and when she began to think that way she might as well get up and wait for the dawn to come. She might as well start deciding where she would go for work that day, what house she hadn’t gone to for a while. They always gave her work, even if it was only something a child could do, like cutting kindling, and she didn’t want to burden anyone by coming there too often.

  That morning Mrs. Graham had some clothes for her, a skirt and two blouses that she said her daughter had left when she moved to Des Moines. They’d just been hanging in the closet. Lila might as well have them if she could use them. Lila thought, This is the very worst part of being broke. Everybody can see how broke you are. It seems like this whole town is making a project of knowing every damn thing I don’t have. If I left here, I could wear these things and nobody would give it a thought. If I stay, I’m walking around in somebody else’s old clothes, somebody’s charity. Mrs. Graham was watching her face, a little pleased with herself, and regretful, and embarrassed. She said, “You needn’t take them if you don’t have any use for them, dear. I just thought they might be your size.”

  Lila said, “They look about right. I could probly use them. Sure.” She should have said thank you, she knew it, but she never asked anybody for anything except work, and if they gave her something else they did it for their own reasons. She wasn’t beholden to them, because being beholden was the one thing she could not stand. She wouldn’t even look at the clothes, though she knew Mrs. Graham hoped she would. So they must be all right, she thought. Nothing too wore out anyway. And then she did Mrs. Graham’s ironing, thinking about those clothes and how she would probably wear them to church, since that would feel better, at least, than wearing the same old dress. Even if the preacher noticed, and that made her feel beholden to him, and they all knew it. So when she was done at Mrs. Graham’s house she took the bag of clothes and walked up to the cemetery. There was the grave of the John Ames who died as a boy, with a sister Martha on one side and a sister Margaret on the other. She had never really thought about the way the dead would gather at the edge of a town, all their names spelled out so you’d know whose they were for as long as that family lived in that place. And there was the Reverend John Ames, who would have been the preacher’s father, with his wife beside him. It must be strange to know your whole life where you will be buried. To see these stones with your own name on them. Someday the old man would lie down beside his wife. And there she would be, after so many years, waiting in sunlight, all covered in roses.

  She couldn’t stay in the shack when the weather changed. There would be no way to keep warm. Wind came through the walls and rain came through the roof. That woman had offered her a spare room, but she might have changed her mind since the week or so when everybody in the church was offering her something. If she was going to leave town, she should do it before travel got too hard. She would probably have to decide between a bus ticket and a winter coat. And her shoes were about gone. No point thinking about it. She would decide one way or another for one reason or another, save up what she could while she could, and whatever she did, she’d get by, most likely.

  Lila had lived in a real house before. Not the one in St. Louis. A respectable boardinghouse in the town of Tammany, Iowa. Doll took a job there so Lila could go to school for a year, long enough to learn how to read and do some figures. Mrs. Marker, whose house it was, did the cooking, but Doll did the cleaning and laundry and looked after the poultry and the gardens, and Lila helped with all of it. Doll wanted her to know what it was to have a regul
ar life. Not that Doll knew much about it herself, but Mrs. Marker would yell about everything she did wrong, so she got better at it with time, until school was almost out. Then she told Lila, “I’m tired of listening to that woman. She can hang her own damn wash.” And they just gathered up what was theirs and walked away.

  Lila liked school. She liked sheets and pillowcases. They had a room of their own, with curtains and a dresser. They ate their supper at a table in the kitchen, where Lila did her lessons while Doll washed the dishes. Doll never did complain, so Lila was surprised when she said they were going to leave, but she didn’t say a word and she didn’t look back, though the house had seemed pretty to her. It was where she had learned to tend roses. But that was their pride, to tolerate whatever they could and not one bit more, to give no sign of wanting or regretting, and for the children to show the grown-ups respect in front of strangers. It was spring, so there would be work, and Doll knew more or less where to look for Doane’s people. They were two days finding them and a week waiting to be asked to eat with them again. Things were always different after their year in Tammany. It was as if they had been disloyal and were never quite forgiven for it. When Lila read a sign to Mellie, GENERAL STORE, Mellie would say, “Well, anybody can see that’s a general store, so what them words going to say? County jail? It don’t look like nothing else but a store, does it?” If Lila read DRY GOODS or NOTIONS AND SUNDRIES, Mellie would say, “Ah, you just making that up. It don’t even mean anything.”