Lila: A Novel

by Marilynne Robinson

  When he finally took to stealing, it was a big dog that caught him at it. So he went to jail with his pant leg slit open to make room for the bandage and the swelling, and no stick to help him walk because it would have been a weapon. They scattered after that. Marcelle stayed as near to the jail as she could manage to, and so did Mellie, and Em, who was never good for much and by that time needed Mellie to look after her. Arthur and his boys had been stealing a little, and meant to do a little more stealing, so they took off. People remembered Doll for her face, and that made it a problem for them to travel together. It was the same whether the boys were recognized or she was and they were seen with her. So then it was just Lila and Doll. Arthur and his boys had no sense at all, and still it was a lonely thing to have them gone, too.

  How could it be that none of it mattered? It was most of what happened. But if it did matter, how could the world go on the way it did when there were so many people living the same and worse? Poor was nothing, tired and hungry were nothing. But people only trying to get by, and no respect for them at all, even the wind soiling them. No matter how proud and hard they were, the wind making their faces run with tears. That was existence, and why didn’t it roar and wrench itself apart like the storm it must be, if so much of existence is all that bitterness and fear? Even now, thinking of the man who called himself her husband, what if he turned away from her? It would be nothing. What if the child was no child? There would be an evening and a morning. The quiet of the world was terrible to her, like mockery. She had hoped to put an end to these thoughts, but they returned to her, and she returned to them.

  * * *

  Every Sunday after that one she went to church, her hand at the crook of the Reverend’s arm. Every Sunday she had swelled a little more, and people could think what they liked about it. He was fairly pleased with what he had planted, and shy as well. An old fellow like him, he said, had to expect a few remarks of one sort and another. He was kind to her in every way he could think of, always trying to find out what she liked and disliked and ready to spare her any annoyance, even though that meant seeing a little less of Boughton. Did she feel annoyance before she knew the name for it? Would she have felt she had the right to it? He did say that why things happen the way they do is essentially a theological question, at least a philosophical question, and she said she supposed he was right, since he would know.

  Once, when they were out walking, he asked her what was on her mind, because she had been so quiet, and she said, “Nothing, really. Existence,” which made him laugh with surprise and then apologize for laughing. He said, “I’d be interested to know your thoughts on it.”

  “I just don’t know what to think about it at all sometimes.”

  He nodded. “It’s remarkable, whatever else.” He picked up a few rocks from the road and tossed them at fence posts, hitting them sometimes.

  “Remarkable,” she said, considering the word. She has made remarkable progress. It had begun to seem to her that if she had more words she might understand things better. And it would take up the time. “You should be teaching me.”

  “I suppose. If you like.”

  The corn was head high, rustling its heavy, dusty leaves, and for a while anyway it had nothing to do with her. He would hardly let her clear the dishes.

  “I never meant to be ignorant my whole life. But there was never much I could do about it.” That was true enough. And they might have something to talk about besides how she was feeling from one day to the next. She was about to start making things up, just for the sake of conversation.

  He said, “I guess I should have realized. But I’ve never for a moment thought of you as ignorant, Lila. I couldn’t if I tried.”

  “Well, once you start teaching me you’re going to find out.”

  “We’ll see.”

  She said, “I had to learn that word ‘existence.’ You was talking about it all the time. It took me a while to figure out what you even meant by it.”

  He nodded.

  She said, “There’s a lot I haven’t figured out. Pretty well everything.”

  He took her hand and swung it as they walked, a happy man. “I feel exactly the same way. I really do. So this will be very interesting,” he said. “You’ll talk to me. I’ll find out what you think.”

  She shrugged. “Maybe.” And they laughed. If there was one thing she wished she could save from it all, it was the way it felt to walk along beside him.

  He said, “You know, there are things I believe, things I could never prove, and I believe them all day, every day. It seems to me that my mind would stop dead without them. And here, when I have tangible proof”—he patted her hand—“when I’m walking along this road I’ve known all my life, every stone and stump where it has always been, I can’t quite believe it. That I’m here with you.”

  She thought, Well, that’s another way of saying it ain’t the sort of thing people expect. She had heard the word “unseemly.” Mrs. Graham talking to someone else about something else. No one said her belly was unseemly, no one said a word about how the old man kept on courting her, like a boy, when she was hard and wary and mainly just glad there was a time in her life when she could rest up for whatever was going to happen to her next. She felt like asking why he couldn’t see what everybody else had seen her whole life. But what if that made him begin to see it? First she had to get this baby born. After that she might ask him some questions.

  She might tell him some things, too. Why she maybe thought of marrying him. Once, Doll wanted her to marry another old man. What would he think of that? Doll heard somewhere about a widower who might be looking for a wife. She sent Lila to his house, with ribbons in her hair. The times were so bad then, and Doll wouldn’t stay anywhere long, so she couldn’t marry him herself. He had new overalls on, and his hair combed to the side, and he was sitting there on the porch waiting for her. The shanks of his legs were just two white bones with hair on them, and his boots were big and worn and one not quite like the other. They made her think of two very old dogs from the same litter. He told her his wife was dead and his children were gone, that he owned his house and a few acres outright, and that he would enjoy a little help around the place and a little company. She couldn’t say a thing. Then his voice rose and he said, “None of this was my idea. I’m a decent man. Have been all my life. You can ask anybody. That woman with the mark on her face, she knows it, too. She’s been talking to the neighbors. She said she couldn’t take care of you anymore. I should have just told her in the first place it was ridiculous. Well, you wait here a minute.” He went into the house and came back with a silver dollar. He held it out to her and she took it. “Now, goodbye,” he said. Then she went to find Doll. She said, “He give me this.” She wasn’t crying. Doll said, “You shouldn’ta took it.” And then she said, “He would’ve been good to you. That’s what matters. You got to do the best you can, and be grateful for whatever comes of it.” And, after looking at her for a moment, mildly and sadly, she said, “If there was just something about you.”

  By then she was helping Doll, not being taken care of by her, and that was one of the reasons Doll wanted to be rid of her. Poor child, she would say. She had to lean on Lila’s arm just to walk up a rise in the road. She couldn’t do any heavy work at all. There was no strength left in her. So she was anxious to get the girl settled somehow, before the things could happen that did happen.

  I’m a decent man. The Reverend could have said the same thing to her. Not because she was young anymore but because she was rough and ignorant. And then what would she have done? What could have made her take such a chance? Sometimes she thought she wanted the worst thing to come finally, a shame that would kill her. Why else did she say, You ought to marry me? Did she think he would laugh? Maybe she didn’t want him to say, I will. She never thought he would. She didn’t believe him when he did. Maybe she meant to go back to that leaky old cabin and feel ache and sting down to her bones and nothing else. To put everything else away
from her, because that ache was, first and last, where she came from and what waited for her. Maybe she slipped into his bed to see if she really was the wife of this decent man, not just a stray he had taken in out of pity. And now she had this belly, and he was always at her elbow saying, This is my wife, this is Lila, my wife. You see, Doll, I did what you said. So many times she had thought, if she had just said a word to that old man, if she hadn’t stood there staring at his boots, Doll could have stayed somewhere nearby, and Lila would have taken food to her and made sure she was warm, sneaking out at night to find her. They’d have laughed with the pleasure of the secret.

  The Reverend let her think her thoughts, waiting until she looked up from them to speak. He said, “You still don’t trust me at all.”

  And she said, “No. Can’t really say that I do. No reason you should trust me, either. There are things I ain’t told you.”

  He nodded. “I know. Maybe you should just tell me those things, whatever they are, and you’d see that I didn’t care about them, and then you could trust me.”

  She said, “Not till I get this baby born.”

  He laughed and put his arm around her. “Well, isn’t it a beautiful evening? Hardly a cloud. Are you warm enough?” He took off his jacket and put it over her shoulders. “We might not be having many more warm nights.” Then he said, “‘The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth his handiwork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth knowledge.’”

  “I guess that’s the Bible.” When he was happy he was always saying something from the Bible.

  “Psalm 19. ‘There is no speech nor language; their voice is not heard.’”

  “That’s another thing I don’t understand.”

  “Maybe nobody does, entirely. But it’s beautiful.”

  Pretty nearly anybody must understand more than she did. She said, “What is the firmament?” It was easier to ask questions, walking along in the dark like that, her arm in his, in the warmth of his old black coat, his preacher coat.

  “The sky the way it looks to us. As if there were something like a dome over us, like a glass bowl turned over—”

  She thought, Then I guess there ain’t. He told her that the moon is much closer than the sun, falling stars aren’t really stars. She and Mellie had wondered about those things, why some stars came unstuck and the others didn’t, where they landed when they fell, whether all of them would fall down sometime, even the moon. It was nice to be talking about the stars. She could hardly think of them apart from the sound of cicadas and the smell of damp and clover, whispering with Mellie because they should have been asleep. Children come up with these notions, and then after a while they forget to wonder about it all, because what does it matter, what does it have to do with them, things are what they are. So the only ideas she had were a child’s ideas, and she knew how they would sound to him. He’d try not to smile, and his voice would be very kind. But he seemed to know she had to be told everything, that she wouldn’t know what to ask. The earth goes around the sun. It spins and it tips. All right.

  Once, when she was new at the school in Tammany, the teacher asked her what country they lived in. The corn was tall, the sun was hot, the river was high for that time of year, so she said, “Looks to me like pretty decent country.” That is what Doane would have said about it. And the children laughed, and some of them leaned out of their desks to wave their arms, and they whispered the answer loud enough that the teacher would hear even if she didn’t call on them. “The United States of America!” Yes, the teacher said, the United States. What state? What county? And Tammany was an Indian chief who was kind to William Penn. Every day Lila stood off by herself during recess and lunch, but that day the teacher asked her to stay in to help her clean the blackboards, so she wouldn’t be teased, probably. She said, “You mustn’t be sad over a little thing like that, Lila. You’ll catch up soon enough.”

  Lila said, “Don’t seem like it. Maybe I won’t. Maybe I don’t even want to.”

  And the teacher said, “Well, I want you to. And I’m going to see to it.”

  The teacher was just a girl herself, a gentle girl. She helped Lila read and write, add and subtract, the things she would most need to be able to do, because Lila was the kind of child who would leave school the minute she could, or the minute her mother decided she had to. The teacher let Lila stay in the classroom working on her spelling and numbers when the other children played outside. She was glad to be by herself with something to do. She hated the other children because they had laughed at her, because they were town children, because she would never stay there anyway and they knew it. The teacher said she was a bright girl, and called on her to spell words or do sums in front of the class as soon as she knew Lila would probably get the right answers. That was all that made her bother learning them, but it made her like learning them because she was good at it. At the front of the room there was a map of the United States of America. A painting of George Washington. A flag with forty-eight stars and thirteen stripes. These things had a kind of importance about them that Lila had never even heard of before. She’d thought the world was just hayfields and cornfields and bean fields and apple orchards. The people who owned them and the people who didn’t. And towns. Doll wanted to give her another kind of life. She didn’t know how to go about it, rough and ignorant as she was, but she did try.

  She heard herself say, “There was a woman who took care of me. She wanted me to marry an old man. But I couldn’t. A young girl just has other ideas. She told me there wasn’t no more for me to expect.”

  He said nothing. They walked the rest of the way home, neither speaking a word. She felt the old loneliness seize on her from one heartbeat to the next, the old, hard awkwardness of her body. How could a child stay alive in a body that felt so dead? Best that it shouldn’t. There was no place for her to be alone now except in his house. She would leave the next morning, before he was awake, before it was light. There was nothing left in that cabin. She’d take a blanket off her bed, and a kitchen knife. Maybe her money was still out there where she hid it.

  He opened the door for her and switched on the light. His face was slack and his lips were pale. He took the coat from her shoulders and hung it up. Then he just stood and looked at her. He said, “I’m at a loss. But you’re right.” His voice broke, so he cleared his throat. “You should stay here until the baby comes. After that, of course, you can do whatever you think is best.”

  What could she say? She said, “You know how I stole that sweater? I done it because it had your smell on it.”

  He laughed. “Why, thank you, Lila. I mean, I guess that’s a sort of compliment.”

  “Then I was sleeping with it for a pillow.”

  “I’m honored.”

  “I used to make believe you was there and I was talking to you. I was thinking about you all the time. Seemed like I was going crazy.”

  “And I was thinking about you. And wondering about myself. So what do we do now?”

  She shrugged. “Just what we been doing, I’d say.”

  “So maybe I’m not just any old man?”

  She said, “You surely ain’t.”

  “Well. That’s a relief.” Then he said, “Do you still pretend you talk to me? Now that I’m here and all? Do you ever think of telling me the things you used to imagine you were telling me?”

  “Asking, more like. And you just seen what happens. Whenever I talk.”

  He said, “I liked the part about the sweater. That was worth all the rest of it.”

  So she put her arms around him. So she put her head on his chest. “You’re a good-hearted man,” she said, enjoying the feel of his shirt. Of him stroking her hair.

  “I believe that’s true enough, most of the time. And very trustworthy. So there’s no need to cry.”

  She said, “Yes, there is. I just now come near scaring myself to death.”

  “Hmm. We can’t let that happen. We’re supposed to be taking
care of you.” He kissed her forehead and touched tears off her cheeks, and then he said he had to go to his study to finish a little work. She thought, You mean, to do a little praying. Because I come near scaring you to death, too. So you have to talk me over with the Lord. Better Him than Boughton, I suppose.

  But she had told him the truth about something, and it had turned out well enough. Now all she had to do was give up the other thought, that if she had minded and married the first old man, maybe Doll would be alive. He was probably about as ignorant as they were. At least he might not have known any more about the Judgment than they did. Then even if Doll had died, Lila wouldn’t have to think of her standing there all astonished and ashamed, in the same raggedy clothes she was probably buried in, if she was buried, because why would they even bother to straighten her back and take the weariness out of her face if they was just going to say “Guilty” anyway? That voice above the firmament. Doane was nothing but an ignorant little thief, his clothes all filthy with his own blood. The judge said, “I guess that dog got the better of you, fella. Looks like he took a pretty good bite. You got anything to say for yourself?” And what could he say? It was all the pride he had left just to say nothing. Doll had her pride, too, ugly as she was. She cared for a child. Yes, she stole it—away from death, probably. Away from loneliness. And she brought it up to be a fairly decent woman who wasn’t afraid of a day’s work. The way they used to laugh together! It was better than anything. But all that wouldn’t count, because Doll cut somebody. Maybe more than once. So there was nothing she could say for herself, not a thing. When Lila pictured it in her mind, it was a preacher looking down from the firmament, judging. That would be hell enough for Doane, no matter what came after it.