Lila: A Novel

by Marilynne Robinson

  She kept thinking, Wait. Don’t hope, just wait. She couldn’t help thinking how hard it would be for him to do these same things ever again if there happened to be no child. She had washed baptism off herself as well as she could. She had walked in the cold through those raggedy old cornfields that looked as though they had heard the first word of Judgment and couldn’t believe what they heard and couldn’t doubt it, either. She had thought a thousand times about the ferociousness of things so that it might not surprise her entirely when it showed itself again. She wished she could warn him, even though he knew about it, too, and dreamed about it. This child must know about it, because it lived there under her scared, wild heart. It might not want the world at all. She could show it things that might seem wonderful to her because it meant you could live so the world wouldn’t find you. Maybe heaven would be like that, with fields and fields of nettles and chicory, things anybody could take because nobody else would want them. Then if the thief on the cross went to heaven he could just thieve forever to his heart’s content, nobody the worse for it. She pictured him as the boy at the shack, nails through those big, dirty hands. Her heart felt like a weight that would burden the child. She thought to him, It won’t be that way for you. I promised your papa you’d know all the hymns.

  The old man kept moving the lights around, trying to get them even. “My grandfather said this was paganism, bringing in greenery in the middle of winter, making fires. He said there were people in Maine when he was growing up who wouldn’t have a thing to do with it. It’s true, no one really knows anything about when Jesus was born, the time of year. But there’s just a certain amount of exuberance that people have to burn off now and then, Christians and pagans. I like the idea—Druids rejoicing just because they felt like it. We took up where they left off. That’s all the sense it has to make.” Even his hair was rosy in that light. “Spring would seem like a better time to celebrate a birth. But it’s even better for resurrection. Everything coming back to life. And Jesus did die sometime around the Passover,” talking away because she wasn’t talking at all. But if she just sat there watching, eating a cookie now and then, he was happy enough. He’d been alone for a long time.

  He said, “A baby is born and the sky fills with angels. That seems about right. Calvin says every one of us has thousands of angels tending to us. There’s an old hymn about the human body—‘Strange that a harp of thousand strings should keep in tune so long.’ Because the body is so complicated. Lots of work for those angels. For Calvin, angels are the effective attention of God, not separate creatures.” And on he went.

  Well, that’s all fine, she thought. But I know there’s more to it, and so do you. She just wished it was over and she had a child or no child and she could stop thinking how hard it would be for him to keep up all this talk if it came down to old Boughton again, struggling up those stairs to weep and pray and dampen a small brow, his bony self half a step from the grave and still without a sensible word to say about any of it. But then her husband smiled at her, and she could see in his face that he had had every one of these thoughts, that he knew everything about them. These thoughts were waiting and familiar, like a house where you knew you belonged though you just hated to go there and doubted once you were there you’d ever leave. He said, “You and I—” and shrugged.

  She had to agree. There was night everywhere and snow, under a big moon. Beyond the few lights of Gilead the great white nowhere that the wind had all to itself, the frozen ponds and stricken cornfields and the ragtag sheds and shacks. The wind would be clapping shut and prying open everything that was meant to keep it out, bothering where it could, tired of its huge loneliness. Had she ever seen a windmill that hadn’t lost half itself to the wind, like a blown milkweed? Maybe Doll was out there in some place so much the same that it was like dreaming to remember she was far away, far beyond any number of places with different names but all just the same. And that boy. And Mrs. Ames with her baby. And here were the two of them together in this warm light, the same dread feeding on the same hope, married.

  * * *

  There was snow on the ground when the baby came. It will snow in April sometimes, so there’s nothing surprising about a blizzard or two in March. Still, it gave them a scare. One day they heard spring peepers, those same two notes, again and again, one higher, one lower. Then in the middle of the night it began to storm, and the next day they sat in the kitchen for the warmth and played gin rummy and listened to the wind howling. No one came to look in on them because the drifts were too deep to walk through and the wind was fierce. People can get lost in a storm like that and just die in the road outside their own gate the way they might if they were wandering through a country they’d never seen before, where nobody knew them at all, nobody was waiting for them. The old man would pretend he wasn’t praying, and then his head would sink down on his chest and she would have to wait until he remembered to deal the cards. The deck would just spill out of his hands as if he’d gone to sleep or died. Then he’d say he ought to clear a path to the road and even get up from his chair, but the road was so deep in drifts there’d be no point in it. There’d be nowhere to go if he ever got to the road. The telephone wires were down and the electrical lines, too, but they had the woodstove and a kerosene lamp and Mrs. Somebody’s meat loaf to warm in the oven. It would have been nice except that she was so pregnant and he was so old.

  She said, “I guess you better discard.”

  “Yes, I guess I’d better. Sorry.” But then he’d be studying her face, as if he’d never seen her before and there she was in his kitchen, and he had no idea what she might do next.

  She said, “I feel fine. We’re both just fine.” And every time she took a breath she thought, when she was almost at the bottom of it, Will I tell him if it hurts, if there’s some new kind of pain? Could he stand to know it, when there was almost nothing he could do? And then she’d breathe again, deeply, carefully, hoping he would not notice. You always seem to need to touch the place it might hurt to touch. And not just once, either. Well, of course she felt different. Every day she felt different from the day before. There was somebody crouched under her ribs, shifting and fidgeting, growing. It was strange if you thought about it. She’d seen sows and ewes carrying young and birthing them. Hooves. That would be something. This was like a burden that had shifted and rubbed too long in one place. If there wasn’t quite room for her to breathe without an elbow being in the way of it, then a little pain wouldn’t mean a thing, especially since she would breathe again, then again, feeling for it. The old man was watching her.

  She said, “I guess it’s my turn.” It was a little bit like a stitch in her side from running. It would go away if she stopped thinking about it, sooner if she could lie down. “Gin,” she said. “I don’t think your heart is in this card game, Reverend.”

  He said, “I wouldn’t mind it if the wind died down a little. I never imagined it would be this bad. Just yesterday I saw crocuses coming up alongside the house.”

  She thought, He’ll be worrying about old Boughton, too, wondering if he’s trying to look after Mrs. Boughton all on his own, hobbling around in the cold with all his joints froze up till he can’t strike a match. His children, except the one, were probably stuck in drifts along every road from wherever they lived to Gilead, trying to get to him, and he’d have that to worry about. The first break in the storm there’d be men and boys with shovels digging people out, but with the wind the way it was, they’d have to wait.

  That wasn’t pain, she thought. The child just arched his back.

  The old man said, “I’m not too sure about Boughton’s roof. He loses track of the time, the years. There must be three feet of new snow. I’m not sure it’s good for that much weight. I hate to think of him trying to light a lamp. Trying to deal with kerosene. Cold is such a torment for him.”

  She meant to ask him sometime how praying is different from worrying. His face was about as strained and weary as it could be. White as it
could be.

  He said, “I thought once we made it to March we were probably all right.” Then he said, “As far as the weather is concerned.” And then he said, “Of course we’ll be all right. I didn’t mean we won’t be.” His old head sank down again.

  So she fell to wondering how his dread was different from Doane’s, in those days when he began to realize that he had no way to look after them, stragglers who had no claim on him at all except that they had always trusted him. What would he have done with the hens that dog caught him stealing except to pluck them and gut them and roast them, handing the drumsticks around to the young ones as if it were just any ordinary supper in ordinary times, nothing so wonderful about it. He did have three silver dollars in his pocket, too, and he wouldn’t say a word about where they came from. He never did anything with what he had except to keep things together as well as he could. But stealing is stealing, Doll said, especially if you get caught at it.

  Now here she was again, worrying over people who were long past help. You can’t even pray for someone to have his pride back when every possible thing has happened to take it away from him. She thought, Everything went bad everywhere and pride like his must have just drifted off the earth, more or less, as quiet as mist in the morning, and people were sad and hard who never were before. Looking into each other’s faces, their hearts sinking. If she ever took to praying it would be for that time and all those people who must have wondered what had become of them, what they had done to find themselves without so much as a good night’s rest to comfort them. She would call down calm on every one of them, on the worst and the bitterest ones first of all. Doane and Arthur walking away; Mellie, too, never looking back, leaving her an orphan on the steps of a church. Without the bitterness none of that would have happened. If Boughton dropped a lamp and set his house on fire, what would the Reverend say about that? He was looking at her then with as much fear in his eyes as she had ever seen anywhere, even counting those poor raggedy heathens who never thought the Almighty would have the least bit of interest in them.

  That wasn’t a pain, but he saw her pause over it, consider it, whatever it was. It was like listening for a sound you might only have thought you heard. She said, “He’s frisky today. I guess he wants to be out in the snow.”

  He smiled at her. “I hope he can wait for another day or two.”

  That wasn’t a pain, either. She said, “I might just go upstairs and lay down a while.”

  He stood up. “Yes.” He said, “It’s really cold up there. Those leaky old windows. I can put more blankets on the bed, but they’ll be cold, too. I should have thought to bring them down by the stove. I don’t know where my mind has been. I could have set up a cot here in the kitchen. This kind of weather—I didn’t give it a thought. You’d think I’d know better.” He might have said that if the child came then, he’d be earlier than they expected, or than he expected and she let on that she did. No, he’d never think that way.

  “Well.” She stood up from her chair, and that felt better. “I’m just thinking I might lay down.”

  “Yes.” He put his arm around her and brought her slowly up the stairs to his room. He took off her slippers and found a pair of his socks to put on her feet and then helped her into his bed, pulling the blankets up to her chin. His, she thought, because it reminded her of that old gray sweater, when she loved how his it was. Loneliness and mice and the wind blowing and then that woolly old thing against her cheek, smelling like him. She’d put her head on his shoulder that one time when he hardly knew her name. She laughed to remember.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. It just does feel good. Cold and all.”

  “I’ll put the skillet to warm on the stove. I can use it to take some of the chill off. There used to be a warming pan around somewhere. A perfectly useful thing. But I suppose it’s ended up in the attic.”

  “Don’t you go up in that attic.”

  “No, I won’t. The skillet should work well enough.”

  “I’d rather you just crawl under the covers here until I get warm. That’s the best thing you can do for me.” The windows were rattling and the curtains drifting a little on the cold air, and the room was full of the light of a snowy afternoon.

  So he did. “Here we are,” he said. “It’s as if we’ve floated out to sea on an iceberg. The two of us all on our own.”

  “The three of us.”

  “Oh, my dear.”

  She said, “Reverend, it seems to me you’re about to cry.”

  He laughed. “I won’t if you won’t.”

  “Fair enough.”

  They were quiet for a while. He said, “I guess you’re all right?”

  “I think he must be sleeping.”

  Then he said, “It’s all a prayer. You don’t think to say, Let tomorrow be like today, because usually it is. For all purposes.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t mind if tomorrow was a little different from today.”

  “That’s a prayer, too.”

  “Now wait. It has to be different no matter what. One more day just like this one will be worse. More worrying, for one thing. That wears on a person. So it will be different even if nothing changes. Nice as it is right now.”

  “True. It is nice now.”

  “Old Boughton struggling through one more day.”

  “Ah!”

  “Me trying to figure out what this child is up to. Not that I mind so much what he decides, so long as he waits till the road is plowed.”

  The old man sighed. “It’s all a prayer.”

  “For you it is. I tried praying a couple times and nothing came of it.”

  “You’re sure nothing came of it?”

  “Well, how do you know anything ever does come of it? Boughton’s roof won’t fall because it’s stronger than you think it is. He won’t even try to light a kerosene lamp because he knows what might happen if he did. He’s sitting in his morris chair, bundled up in that old buffalo robe, waiting for his children to come and take care of us all. And they will, whether he’s praying or not. On snowshoes if they have to.” Why did she talk to him like this? Here she was snuggled up against him, wearing his socks. She said, “The best things that happen I’d never have thought to pray for. In a million years. The worst things just come like the weather. You do what you can.”

  He said, “Family is a prayer. Wife is a prayer. Marriage is a prayer.”

  “Baptism is a prayer.”

  “No,” he said. “Baptism is what I’d call a fact.”

  “Because you can’t just wash it off.”

  He laughed. “Nope. Not with all the water in the West Nishnabotna.”

  Well. So he knew what she’d done, unbaptizing herself. She probably had that river smell all over her that afternoon and he figured it out when she asked him later. And now the river was frozen and snowed under, and she wished she could see it, all pillowed like that, tucked in. By the time it thawed she would have her body to herself and she could walk in it barefoot if she wanted to, on those slippery rocks. She and Mellie used to pretend they were herding minnows, with their pant legs rolled up above their knees and wet anyway. Here she was, forgetting that there would be a child. It frightened her when she forgot. She must have started awake.

  “What?” he said. The worrying had worn him out. He gave a sermon once about the disciples sleeping at Gethsemane because they were weary with grief. Sleep is such a mercy, he said. It was a mercy even then.

  “I’ve just never had the care of a child.”

  “We’ll be fine.” He nestled against her. That sound of settling into the sheets and the covers has to be one of the best things in the world. Sleep is a mercy. You can feel it coming on, like being swept up in something. She could see the light in the room with her eyes closed, and she could smell the snow on the air drifting in. You had to trust sleep when it came or it would just leave you there, waiting.

  She was thinking about the spring, how clear and stinging cold the water would be wit
h snow still on the rocks and the sandbars. And summer. She might take the baby with her to the river. Little as it would be. Just to pick a few raspberries. And she might put it down in the grass by the road, just for a minute, just while she was picking berries. And then she forgot to come back soon enough, how long was she gone? and had to put it in a pail of river water because you never know. He would say, Why did you do this? Looking at her as if he didn’t recognize her at all.

  That woke her up. Her first thought was, I have to get that knife off the table. She’d been having her worst dream, with the Reverend’s arm carefully across her where her waist would be, with the Reverend breathing at her ear. She thought, There’s a whole world of water in the West Nishnabotna. It’s not the Mississippi, but it never begins and it never ends. Wife is a prayer. Because I’m his wife. I better think about that.

  Sometimes when they were together in the kitchen, when he was drinking his coffee and reading the newspaper, he would fiddle with that knife, taking it up in his hand. He might have done the same with a piece of driftwood, with any harmless thing, just feeling how smooth it was, the shape wear had given it. She never got used to seeing it in his hand, but she never said a word about it except one time when he opened the blade. She said, “Maybe you shouldn’t do that,” and was surprised herself when she heard the words. She said, “It’s awful sharp,” thinking probably that the knife was like a snake, that it was in its nature to do harm if you trifled with it. She used to keep it by her when she slept, open, stuck into the floor so she could just grab it if she needed to. It was such a mean-looking thing, and if she had ever used it on anybody it would have been the knife that did it, because it was that kind of knife. Some dogs bite. So you keep them away from people. You can’t just get rid of them for being the way they are. And now and then you can be glad to have them around, to snarl the way a good dog never does.