Lila: A Novel

by Marilynne Robinson

  She could read. Doll had seen to that. She might sit on the porch with a magazine and wait for him there. Then he could ask her what she was reading, or she could tell him that there was a word she didn’t understand, as there certainly would be. So she was sitting with a copy of The Nation in her lap, when, hours after church would have ended, she saw the Reverend walking up the road, Boughton beside him, the two of them talking together as they always did, and listening to each other, as if, so far into their lives, some new thing might still be said, something not to be missed. Boughton saw her first and said a word to the Reverend, who glanced up, and then they stopped in the road to say goodbye and the old man came on alone. His body still had the habits of largeness and strength, as if he had learned to be a little slow when he moved, out of consideration for whatever might be around him, whatever he might bump or displace. Still, he was slower than usual, taking his time, approaching his own door with a reluctance she saw and regretted, since this time might be the time that he would not forgive her, or at least the time that he would have decided he did not want her to stay.

  He took off his hat as he came up the steps. Then he stood there a moment, turning the brim of it in his hands, just taking her in. “The Nation,” he said, as if that was as strange as anything else that had happened to him lately.

  So she said, “I got to do more reading. It’s something I been meaning to do for a while now.”

  After a moment he said, “Yes, well, that’s always worthwhile, I guess.” His voice was mild, almost amused. He shifted his weight, the way he did when something surprised him a little.

  So she said, “Seems like I’m carrying a child.” She had not meant to tell him then, but she couldn’t very well wait until he decided to be angry to tell him, or until he told her he just wanted his life to himself again, as she expected him to do any day. If that happened, her pride would make her leave, without a mention of it, and there was no telling what would become of her and the child, if there was a child.

  He said, “Really.” He sat down on the porch swing beside her, at a little distance from her. He said, “Is that a fact.” Then he said, “This is not at all how I thought this day would end.”

  She had not looked at his face yet. She was watching the wind move the trees. It was a soft evening wind, and the trees were darkening, filling with shadows. It would be time to stop working, not soon but sometime. A wind like that used to mean the day isn’t endless, sometime there’ll be supper and talk and sleep. So many things they knew together and never spoke about at all.

  He said, “So, then, you’ve decided to stay.”

  “I never did plan on leaving.” For a town it wasn’t such a bad place. The trees were big enough that it was almost like living in the woods. There was no reason not to make another garden. She could plant some flowers.

  After a minute he said, “When you go off like that, you might leave a note. I don’t always know what to think. You left your wedding ring.”

  “I just forget to put it on sometimes.”

  “Yes. I guess I knew that.”

  “I’m always wearing that locket you give me.”

  It seemed strange to her to wear a ring. It was a gold ring. She might harm it in some way. It might slip off her finger and be lost.

  “Lila,” he said, “I’m glad to know you aren’t planning to leave. But if you ever change your mind, I want you to leave by daylight. I want you to have a train ticket in your hand that will take you right where you want to go, and I want you to take your ring and anything else I have given you. You might want to sell it. That would be all right. It’s yours, not mine. It doesn’t belong here—I mean it wouldn’t—” He cleared his throat. “You’re my wife,” he said. “I want to take care of you, even if that means someday seeing you to the train.” He leaned forward and looked into her face, almost sternly, so she would know he meant what he said.

  She thought, We would be safe here. He would be good to a child. But if he was going to put her on the train, where would the child be then? Would he expect her to leave it behind when she left? Or did he think there wasn’t going to be any child? Well, sometimes you expect you’re going to have a baby, then nothing comes of it. You can’t set your heart on it.

  “I can’t yet know for sure,” she said. “Whether there’s going to be a baby.”

  “I understand that.”

  “You might think it’s a story I made up to smooth things over. If it don’t turn out to be true.” She didn’t want to have to worry about what he might think if a day came when he stopped trusting her. When that day came. She was sure it would.

  He said, very gently, “I would never suspect you of such a thing,” as if a lie like that would be too low for her even to think about.

  She thought, If it was a lie, and if it had come to mind, I just might have told it. It surely did smooth things over. She said, “I ain’t what you seem to think I am. I done some things in my life. Like I told you.” The time would come when he would understand that, too. Better that he shouldn’t be too surprised. She knew he wouldn’t ask for more particulars, not now.

  He was quiet, and then he said, “You are the only person in this world I want to have sitting here beside me. That isn’t what I think, it’s what I know. I guess it doesn’t explain anything. Have you had supper?”

  “Some bread and jam.”

  He patted her knee. “I wouldn’t call that supper. We have to take care of you.” The kitchen was empty, so he went to the neighbors and came back with a bottle of milk and a can of baked beans. He laughed. “We’ll do better tomorrow.” She knew about that other wife and that other baby. If she had given herself some time to think, she’d have realized they would be on his mind.

  * * *

  She was there in Gilead in the first place because once when she was walking along the road, probably hoping to get to Sioux City, tired of walking, tired of carrying her suitcase and her bedroll, she had noticed a little house sitting a way off by a cluster of cottonwood trees, a sort of cabin someone had built and abandoned along with the fields around it. So she thought she’d take a look. Then she knew for sure it was abandoned because people had camped there and left clutter behind, and broken up the stoop for firewood, and no one had ever fixed any of it or cleared it away. The people who left the mess might come back and tell her it was their place—just look at the beer cans and the snoose tins, who you think put them there? She had seen that happen before. You seen them spent cartridges out by the trees? You think it was squirrels dropped them? Nothing to do then but move on.

  But she had been there for weeks and so far no one had come. She knew how to get by so long as nobody bothered her. Plenty of fish in the river. There were dandelion greens. Mushrooms. You can chew pine sap if you want to. You can eat the roots of things. Cattails. Wild carrot. Nettles are very good if you know how to pick them and cook them. Doll said you just had to know what wouldn’t kill you. Most folks don’t eat squirrel, but you can. Turtles. Snakes, if need be. Lila couldn’t really live that way for very long, only until the weather turned cold. But she wanted to stay in one place for a while. The loneliness was bad, but it was better than anything else she could think of. It was probably loneliness that made her walk the mile or so into town every few days just to look at the houses and stores and the flower gardens. She never meant to talk to anybody. She had a dress she wore and a dress she saved, and she was wearing the good one, the clean one, the one she kept a little nice so that she could go walking where people might see her, when she got caught in the rain that Sunday and stepped into the church, just to save her dress. And there was that old man, speaking above the sound of the rain against the windows. He looked at her, and looked away again. “Blessed be the name of the Lord.”

  They didn’t really ask for money. They passed a plate, but nobody made you put anything in it. She began counting up the days, so she would know when it was Sunday again. She lost count once. People living the way she was could go crazy.
She began to wonder if that had already happened to her. She thought, If I’m crazy, I may as well do what I feel like doing. No point being crazy if you have to worry all the time about what people are thinking anyway. There were ten or twenty good reasons why she would not go to church. Doll never did. The place was full of strangers. She had only the one dress to wear. They all knew the songs, they knew what they were supposed to do and say and what it meant. They all knew each other. The preacher said things that bothered her, she couldn’t make sense of them. Resurrection. But she guessed she liked the candles and the singing. She guessed she didn’t have a better place to be.

  She was probably crazy, and she was probably leaving, so she decided she would talk to that preacher. There were a hundred reasons why she would never go to his house, in that same old dress, and ask him a question. She was never one to put herself forward. But there was no way to keep the mice out of that shack. The fields around it were going all to tansy. In St. Louis they gave them tansy tea, and she hated the smell of it. So she had decided to leave. Then why not ask him? He would just say, That crazy woman came to my door with something on her mind, and then I never saw her again after that. Soon enough he’d forget it ever happened. He wouldn’t know what to tell her. But who else was she ever going to ask?

  When he saw her at the door he looked surprised and not surprised, as if he had no reason to expect her and there she was anyway. He was in his shirtsleeves and house slippers, looking older than he did in the pulpit, and she thought she had come too early in the morning. But what did it matter.

  He said, “Hello. Good morning,” and waited, as if he expected her to explain herself. Then he said, “Please come in.” When she stepped inside the house, he began to apologize for how bare it was. “I’m not much for keeping things up. I suppose you can see that. Still—” and he gestured at the sofa, which was covered with papers and books. “Let me make a little space for you here. I don’t have much company. You can probably see that, too.” She didn’t know then that it would have embarrassed him to have her there, a woman alone with him, a stranger. But he didn’t want her to leave, she did know that. “Can I get you a glass of water? I could make coffee, if you have a few minutes.”

  She had a day, a week, a month. She said, “I got nowhere to be.”

  He smiled at her, or to himself, as if he saw that the mystery of her presence might just be something a few dollars could help with. He said, “Then I’ll make coffee.”

  She stood up. “I don’t even know why I come here.” She recognized that smile. She had hated people for it.

  “Well— We could talk a little. Sometimes that helps. I mean, helps make things clearer—”

  She said, “I don’t much like to talk.”

  He laughed. “Well, that’s fine, too. A lot of people around here feel that way. But they do enjoy a cup of coffee.”

  She said, “I don’t know why I come here. That’s a fact.”

  He shrugged. “Since you are here, maybe you could tell me a little about yourself?”

  She shook her head. “I don’t talk about that. I just been wondering lately why things happen the way they do.”

  “Oh!” he said. “Then I’m glad you have some time to spare. I’ve been wondering about that more or less my whole life.” He brought her into the kitchen and seated her at the table, and after he had made coffee they sat there together for a while, saying practically nothing. Yes, the weather had been fine. He traced a scratch on the table with his finger. And then he began to tell her about the brother and sisters who died before he was born, and how his mother said once that the stairs were scuffed by the children’s shoes because she could never keep them from running in the house. And when she found a scrawl in a book, she said, “One of the children must have done it.” There was a kind of fondness and sadness in her voice that he heard only when she mentioned them. So when he found a scratch or a mark on something, he still thought, One of the children. His brother Edward, the oldest, was spared the diphtheria that took the rest of them. So Edward knew the children, and he had stories about them. One, closest to him, was named John, a family name. Once, he heard his brother call him Non-John, thinking he was too young to understand. Because Edward missed the brother he had lost, he always did miss him. He was—very loyal to him. Their mother and father and grandfather seldom mentioned those children. They could hardly bear to think of them. “There’s been a good deal of sorrow in this old place,” he said. “Some of it mine. Some I used to wish were mine. So I sort of live with the question. Why things happen. I guess this isn’t much help.”

  She liked to hear people tell stories. The saddest ones were the best. She wondered if that meant anything at all. Of course, when people talked about themselves that way, they were usually trying to get you to talk about yourself in the same way. That would be what this preacher wanted. But she and Doll had a secret between them. The old woman who took them in said, “Doll, you know you can go to jail for stealing a child. And I can go to jail for helping you do it.” She said, “You’re flirting with the worst kind of trouble.” So Lila couldn’t think of breathing a word, even now. Stealing a child, when Doll had come to her like an angel in the wilderness. The Reverend talked about angels, and the notion helped her to think about certain things. She was swept up and carried away, with that old shawl around her.

  He said, “I don’t often talk about this. I don’t often talk to anyone who doesn’t know about it already. You’ve come here to ask me a question, and I’ve been going on about myself.”

  She said, “I liked that story.”

  He looked away from her and laughed. “It is a story, isn’t it? I’ve never really thought of it that way. And I suppose the next time I tell it, it will be a better story. Maybe a little less true. I might not tell it again. I hope I won’t. You’re right not to talk. It’s a sort of higher honesty, I think. Once you start talking, there’s no telling what you’ll say.”

  She said, “I wouldn’t know about that.”

  “Apparently not. I do. I’ve spent my life talking— But you have that question. Maybe you could help me understand it a little better. Tell me how it came to be on your mind. In a few words.”

  She said, “I got time to myself. I think about things.”

  “Yes. Clearly you do. Interesting things.”

  “I spose everybody thinks about ’em.”

  He laughed. “Right. But that’s interesting, too.”

  “On Sundays you talk about the Good Lord, how He does one thing and another.”

  “Yes, I do.” And he blushed. It was as if he expected that question, too, and was surprised again that the thing he expected for no reason was actually happening. He said, “I know that I am not—adequate to the subject. You have to forgive me.”

  She nodded. “That’s all you going to say.”

  “No. No, it isn’t. I think you are asking me these questions because of some hard things that have happened, the things you won’t talk about. If you did tell me about them, I could probably not say more than that life is a very deep mystery, and that finally the grace of God is all that can resolve it. And the grace of God is also a very deep mystery.” He said, “You can probably tell I’ve said these same words too many times. But they’re true, I believe.” He shrugged, and watched his finger trace the scar on the table.

  After a minute she said, “Well, all right. I better go now.” She didn’t always remember yet to say thank you for the coffee, thank you for your time and your trouble. He walked her to the door and opened it for her, and she forgot to thank him for that. He looked tired, and as though he was sorry the conversation had ended. He said, “Thank you for coming by. It has been interesting. For me.” Then he said, “Whatever it is, or was, that you didn’t tell me, I regret it. Very much.”

  Still, she believed she must have turned him against her, when she thought back on it. Showing up at his door like that. But the next few days people she didn’t know would stop her on the road and offe
r her work, even a spare room. One lady invited her for a supper at the church, and she went, hoping the Reverend wouldn’t be there. They said they expected him, but he didn’t come. That was the lady who told her about the wife and the child, speaking very softly out of respect for the sadness of the story. She said it was something he never talked about to anyone. Reverend Boughton, of course, but no one else. “He forgets things, like he did the supper tonight,” she said. “He’s always been that way.”

  If she stayed in Gilead, she could earn some money. She could buy some things at the store. Soap, and thread, and a box of salt. She could be in out of the weather when she wanted. All they asked her to do was a little gardening, a little washing and ironing, and she could do those things as well as anybody. So it wasn’t really charity. They didn’t bother her with talk. They gave her Sundays to herself. If she left she had nowhere to go especially, except not St. Louis. She decided she might as well stay for a while, putting a little aside to make things easier when she changed her mind. It was one of those Sundays, after church, that she thought to walk up to the cemetery. She found the wife and child there, sure enough. The grass was mowed, but nobody had thought to prune the roses.

  He had given a sermon, “‘Let your light shine before men; that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven.’” He said it meant that when you did a good thing it should seem to come from God, not from you. It should not feel to other people like your goodness, and it should not feel that way to you, either. Any good thing is less good the more any human being lays claim to it. She thought, All right, that’s why he told these other people to help me out. That’s why he can’t look at me. You’d think he was ashamed of something. Ever since that morning I went to his house and he could see well enough I was on hard times, he’s hardly said a word to me. Well, that’s all fine, except it don’t seem honest. I spose he wants me to think it’s God been putting money in my pocket, when it’s just him. It might even be his money they been paying me with. Church money. Doane said they did things in churches to make people believe what they told them.