Lila

by Marilynne Robinson

  So she meant to sit in the rocking chair by the window with Job open in her lap and see what she could make of it. She did wonder why dust fell so evenly, more like rain than like snow, since the wind pushed snow into drifts. Well, the air in a good house is so still. There was the clock ticking, steady as could be, and time passing, and no sign of anything else happening at all, but then in two days there would be the shadow of dust again, anywhere you happened to look for it. She wiped it away, the room was perfect for a little while, and then she fell to thinking. Rocking for the sound it made, and thinking.

  The clock struck eleven. He always came home for lunch. If she met him at the door he put his arms around her. If there was rain on him he still might not even wait to take his coat off first before he kissed her forehead or her cheek, and she liked the coldness and the good smell. He never asked her how she had spent the morning, but she told him sometimes. Reading a little. Thinking about things. She felt good, and the baby was moving around more than ever, elbows and knees. The old man would look into her face for sadness or weariness, and she would turn her face away, since there was no telling what he might see in it, her thoughts being what they were. She’d been thinking that folks are their bodies. And bodies can’t be trusted at all. Her own body was so strong with working, for what that was worth. She’d known from her childhood there was no use being scared of pain. She was always telling the old man, women have babies, no reason I can’t do it. But they both knew things can go wrong. That’s how it is. Then there’d be poor old Boughton again, if he could even make it up the stairs this time, and there’d be Jesus, still keeping His thoughts to Himself. And she’d be thinking, Here’s my body, dying on me, when I almost promised him I wouldn’t let it happen. It might make her believe she was something besides her body, but what was the good of that when she’d be gone anyway and there’d be nothing in the world that could comfort him. She guessed she really was married to him, the way she hated the thought of him grieving for her. It might even make him give up praying. Then he’d hardly be himself anymore.

  Well. There was a man in the land of Uz, whose name was Job; and that man was perfect and upright, and one that feared God, and turned away from evil. All right. And there were born unto him seven sons and three daughters. But she kept thinking, What happens when somebody isn’t herself anymore? I seem to be getting used to things I never even knew about just a few months ago. Not wondering what in the world I’m going to do next, for one thing. Maybe it’ll be something the old man liked about me that will be gone sometime, and I won’t even know what it was. She found herself thinking she might stay around anyway. She thought she’d always like the feel of him, she’d probably always like to creep into bed beside him. He didn’t seemed to mind it.

  That boy, never meaning to kill his father, looking at his hands, almost wishing he could be rid of them. Rid of himself. She’d felt that way, too, plenty of times. That night or morning when she was trying to clean away all the blood, and Doll, who probably wasn’t in her right mind, saying, “He wasn’t your pa. I’m pretty sure. Maybe a cousin or something. An uncle, maybe.” And here was his blood all over Lila’s hands and her clothes, some in her hair. She had brushed a strand away from her eyes, and it fell back, wet and heavy. So much blood she knew he was dead, whoever he was. So, whoever he was, he took it with him. It died in his body. Doll said, “A grudge was all it come down to. They should’ve let me be. After all these years.”

  Lila said, “What was his name?”

  “Which one? There’s just so damn many of ’em.” And she gave Lila a look, puzzled and scared and tired of it all. Rolling her eyes, too old and spent to lift her head, still trying to settle on any sort of plan, what to do next.

  The name of the man she was fighting with.

  “You expect me to know? There must be a dozen of ’em. One meaner than the next.” She said, “I’m the only ma you ever had. You could’ve just died entirely, for all they was doing for you.”

  Lila knew. She remembered. But what was their name?

  “There was that one—I cut his hamstring. Years ago. I thought that might put an end to all the trouble he was causing me. But it give him a dreadful limp and his brothers got all riled up about it, so I just had more to worry me. His cousins. They thought they could catch me easy enough, a scar-faced woman with a child in hand.” She laughed. “I guess it weren’t so easy after all.”

  The folks at that cabin?

  “Don’t matter. They wasn’t your folks. You was just boarded out there.” She said, “Your pa got the idea he should take you back from me, after he’d left you behind like that. Then the whole bunch of ’em was looking for me, whenever any of ’em could spare a little time. Where was they when you was just scrawny and naked? Folks like a grudge. That’s all it comes to.”

  Lila said she wouldn’t mind knowing a name, though.

  “What? You going to go looking for ’em?”

  No. No point in it.

  “That’s the truth. I think they pretty well forgot about you anyway. Me laming that fellow was what mattered to ’em. Because he was so young, I suppose. Well, they shouldn’ta sent him after me. It was just the revenge they was after. This last one never asked me where you was. Not that I give him much chance.”

  So he might have been her pa.

  “He wasn’t your pa. He didn’t look like him, far as I could tell. It’d been a while. It was pretty dark.” So Lila had that blood all over her, and it was the first time she had heard a word about her father. And here was Doll, probably dying. For months Lila had had a decent room and a job clerking in a store, and she’d been thinking just that day how good it was of Doll to make sure she could read and figure. Now all that was done with. The more she tried to wash the blood away, the more of it there was. Blood had soaked into the rug and stained the floor. She wished everything was done with, every damn thing. That she could be rid of herself. Somebody was going to find her like this. But there was Doll to see to. She’d ripped her other dress into rags before she even thought how fouled the one she was wearing was. Oh, what to do next. How to live through the next damned hour. That has to be the worst feeling there is. She hated the way she could stand just anything. It was her body going on. Her body, her hands remembering how Doll used to comfort her.

  She shouldn’t be thinking about any of this. Here I go, scaring the child. She said, “Your papa’s going to be coming home pretty soon. He just loves you so much.” When she hugged her belly the child might feel her holding it in her arms. It might feel safe. She said, “Now, you going to go kicking that book off my lap? What’s your papa going to say about that?” She had a child now, this morning, whatever happened. She had a husband. Maybe loneliness was something she’d get over, sooner or later, if things went well enough. That night on the stoop was the first time Doll ever took her up in her arms, and she still remembered how good it felt. Those shy little presents, made of nothing. The rag baby. That shawl she could have used to keep herself warm at night, but she put it over Lila when she came in and only took it away again just before she went out the door in the dark of the morning. Maybe she never would have been so fierce if she hadn’t been set on keeping the child she’d stolen. She could probably feel the life coming into the child, sleeping in her arms day and night. And the child could feel it, too. Now motherhood was forcing itself into Lila’s breasts. They ached with it.

  Here she was thinking again. Well, this Job was a good man and he had a good life and then he lost it all. And, behold, there came a great wind from the wilderness, and smote the four corners of the house, and it fell upon the young men, and they are dead. She’d heard of that happening, plenty of times. A wind could hit a town like Gilead and leave nothing behind but sticks and stumps. You’d think a man as careful as this Job might have had a storm cellar. It used to be that when the sky filled up with greenish light Doane would start looking around for a low place where they could lie down on the ground if the wind started getting str
ong. A barn was nothing but flying planks and nails if the wind hit it. The house fell upon the young men, and they are dead. Any tree could fall. The limbs would just fly off, even the biggest ones. There was that one time the wind came with thunder and rain and scared them half to death. The ground shook. There was lightning everywhere. Leaves and shingles and window curtains sailed over them, falling around them. Mellie lay on her back to watch, so Lila did, too, wiping filthy rain out of her eyes. There were things never meant to fly, books and shoes and chickens and washboards, caught up in the wind as if they were escaping at last, at last, from having to be whatever they were. The rain was too heavy sometimes to let her see much, and they all complained a little afterward about the cold and the mud. Doane combing leaves and mud out of Marcelle’s hair with his fingers, and both of them laughing the way they always did in those days, whenever things could have been worse. But for the next few days they heard that farms had been swept away, children and all, and for a while they minded Doane more than they usually did. Nobody knew what to say about sorrow like that. And the living creatures ran and returned as the appearance of a flash of lightning. She never expected to find so many things she already knew about written down in a book.

  So Job gets all covered with sores. Dogs licking them. That could happen. Dogs have that notion of tending to you sometimes. Maybe flies do, too, for all anybody knows. Strange the story don’t mention flies, when the man is sitting on a dung heap. She’d seen maggots in raw places on a horse’s hide, and Doane said they were good for healing. Just the sight of them makes your skin crawl, though. Horses spend their whole lives trying to keep the flies off, flicking their tails and shivering their hides. Squinting their eyes. You’d think a horse would know if they were good for anything.

  There were flies bothering her that day, after Doll came to her all bloody. You’d think the cold might have killed them, even houseflies, but there they were. That mess had roused them, and they were nuzzling at the stains on the rug, clinging to her skirt. She’d brush them away and they’d come right back. She had a coat that was long enough to cover the worst of it, so she put it on and put what money she had in her pocket and went off to a secondhand shop in a back street where a woman sold clothes cheap. The sheriff had already taken Doll away. The men that had come with him were a while finding a stretcher, so he said, Hell with it, and picked her up in his arms and carried her. “She don’t weigh no more than a cat,” he said, and the old woman folded her hands and seemed a little pleased with it all, looking at the sky.

  It was still early enough that Lila had to pound on the shop door. She was so desperate to get out of the dress she was wearing, it didn’t matter what she found there if she just had the money to pay for it. And then the woman said to her, when she had taken a look at her, tried to get a look at her face, So what happened? You had a baby? Lila said, No, I didn’t, and the woman studied her sidelong, the blood on her skirt where it showed below the hem of her coat, on her shoes, thinking she knew better, and said, Never mind. None of my business. Then she handed her a dress she said looked about right. That’ll be three dollars. Not much wear. Lila gave her the money and one cent more for a parched bit of soap, and was leaving, since she couldn’t try the dress without taking off her coat. The woman said, Wait, and wrote something on a scrap of paper and handed it to her. She said, There’s a lady in St. Louis takes in girls who’ve got trouble. You look like you could use some help. Lila knew what that was about, but she put it in her pocket just the same. She thought, I suppose now I know what’s going to happen next. Not that she could go anywhere so long as Doll was still living. But she thought a minute and then she stepped back inside that shop and said, “Then how’m I supposed to get to St. Louis?” She generally didn’t look at anybody directly, because Doll never did, and the woman was a little while deciding about her, but then she opened a cash box and gave her a ten-dollar bill. “You show me a bus ticket, and I’ll get you a suitcase, maybe a few things to put in it.” So, Lila thought, maybe I can do old Doll a little bit of good. Maybe even figure some way to get Doll on a bus. It wouldn’t be stealing if she paid the money back. That was her thinking at the time.

  Soon she would hear the old man at the front door. He’d come in smelling all clean from the cold, his cheek would be cold, and his lips. If she put her face against the lapel of his coat, it would be cool, but if she slipped her hand under it, there would be the starch of his shirt and his warmth and his heart beating. She’d been thinking about herself hiding that filthy dress under her coat the best she could, all sweaty even in the cold, knowing anybody who saw her would think what that woman did. Guilty of the saddest crime there is. Nobody surprised to know she had that scrap of paper in her pocket. Old shame falling to her when it had been worn to rags by so many women before her. She could almost forget that the shame wasn’t really hers at all, any more than any child was hers, not even a child cast out and weltering in its blood, God bless it. Well, that was a way of speaking she had picked up from the old man. It let you imagine you could comfort someone you couldn’t comfort at all, a child that never even had an existence to begin with. God bless it. She hoped it would have broken her heart if she had done what that woman thought she had, but she was hard in those days. Maybe not so hard that she wouldn’t have left it on a church step. How did that woman know it wasn’t back at her room, bundled up in a towel and crying for her, waiting for her voice and her smell, her breast? The sound of her heart. God bless it. And she so desperate to give it comfort, aching to. Frightened for it, just the sight of so much yearning reddening a little body, darkening its face almost blue. Maybe that was weltering.

  She told the old man she’d been thinking about existence, that time they were out walking, and he didn’t laugh. Could she have these thoughts if she had never learned the word? “The mystery of existence.” From hearing him preach. He must have mentioned it at least once a week. She wished she’d known about it sooner, or at least known there was a name for it. She used to be afraid she was the only one in the world who couldn’t make sense of things. Why that shame had come down on her, out of nowhere. It might have been because for once she felt almost like somebody with something to say about herself, a girl with such an ordinary kind of trouble that there would be a bus ticket ready and a suitcase, a place to go because there was no place else to go. Knowing what to do next, even if it was the one thing Doll warned her against more than any other thing. “You think my face always looked like this?” Lila hid her own face half the time anyway. It wasn’t much to look at. What matter if it had a scar, too. That’s how she felt then, with the paper in her pocket and nobody in the world but poor old Doll, who was probably dying. If the Reverend had seen her then, she thought. Well, she’d have crossed the street to make sure that didn’t happen. She’d have hidden her face in her hands. And he’d have followed her, and he’d have taken some of the shame away just by the way he touched her sleeve, “Lila. If I may.” Strange to imagine him there, all those years ago, in that miserable damn place. She’d be young and he would not be old. He’d have on his preacher clothes, newer then, and his shoes would be polished for her sake, and he’d know the stain on her dress just meant she’d had to be kind. She wouldn’t even have to tell him about it. And he’d walk along beside her, her hand in the crook of his arm. If only she’d known then what comfort was coming, she’d have spared herself a little. You can say to yourself, I’m just a body that thinks and talks and seems to want its life, one more day of it. You don’t have to know why. Well, nothing could ever change if your body didn’t just keep you there not even knowing what it is you’re waiting for. Not even knowing that you’re waiting at all. Just there on the stoop in the moonlight licking up tears.

  She remembered how she felt that morning that she went walking by the jail, just to see if she could find out how Doll was doing, and there she was, bundled up in an Indian blanket, rocking in the chair the sheriff had set outside his office door for her, looking at the tr
ees. The wind was taking the last few leaves. There was a little crowd of people watching her, since she was a curiosity, and a couple of men who were angry as could be to see her sitting there peaceful and at ease for all they could tell, though Doll never did give a stranger a sign that anything troubled her. The sheriff was standing on the step, talking with those men, already irritated with them.

  One of them shouted, “You ought to be hanging her!”

  “Doubt I can do that. She don’t weigh nothing.”

  “Then shoot her.”

  The sheriff laughed. “I guess I wasn’t brought up that way. To go shooting old women.”

  “Well, I’d be more than happy to do it for you.”

  The sheriff said, “Now, shooting a big fellow like you, I wouldn’t have a problem with that at all. And you’re about exactly the right size for hanging. Fine with me either way. You might want to keep that in mind.”

  “This town is a disgrace to the whole damn country, that’s what it is! You’re a disgrace to that damn badge! I never heard of such a thing in my whole life! Setting a killer outside where she can rock and watch the world go by, like somebody’s dang grandma. If that don’t beat all. And this ain’t the only crime she ever done.” He glanced at Lila. “She stole our baby girl, just took off with her. It was out of pure spite that she done it. We been looking for the two of them all these years.”

  The sheriff shrugged. “I wouldn’t know about that. She’s in enough trouble without adding to it. Just now she’s gaining strength for her trial. Judge’s orders. Gotta try her, you know. You’re getting ahead of yourself with all this talk about hanging.”