Marilynne Robinson - Lila

Families were pitching tents all over in the woods around the clearing. There were campfires, and people drifting from one to another, laughing and talking, shaking hands and slapping backs, sharing their pickle and crackers and taffy, sometimes singing together a little, since there were banjos and mouth organs and a guitar and a fiddle scattered here and there among the tents. Some of the women and girls were wearing nice dresses. Children in little packs stormed around from one place to another just burning off the excitement of it all. The ground where the meeting would be held was pretty well covered in sawdust, which made it seem strangely clean and gave it a good, pitchy smell. If men spat their tobacco on it you wouldn’t notice. There was a stage set up with yellow bunting across the front of it, and there were some wooden chairs on it. And of course they were by a river, and there were people there fishing in it, a little downstream.

Lila and Mellie had seen Arthur’s boys feeding their apples to the horses and mules and then sneaking down to the river to skip rocks, so Mellie gave back the baby and they went, too. Arthur was there already, skipping rocks, and when he saw his boys he said he was going to tan their hides if they didn’t tell him what they’d been up to. So they started scrapping, without Doane to make them stop. Some of the men tried after a while, when Arthur started bleeding from a cut over his eye, and that got the three of them mad at those men and the fighting went on until an old preacher came tottering down the rocky slope and stepped in among them. He asked what had happened, and then he said that Arthur and his boys seemed not to be in the right spirit for a meeting of this kind and it would be best for them to move along. He was a scrawny old fellow with a croaky voice, but though they dragged their feet about it and glowered past him at the others, they were glad enough to oblige him, since more and more men and boys were coming to take the other side. They walked off into the woods like men who don’t forget an insult just because they might have to wait a while to settle up. Then they walked around to the back of the crowd, Arthur with blood down the front of his shirt and Deke with a bloody nose, but other than that as respectable as anybody. None of them wanted to leave, but they knew Doane would want to. They kept moving around because he wouldn’t go to the trouble of finding them all. He’d probably ask Mellie to find them, so she was careful to stay out of his sight. Doll and Marcelle had gotten a fire together and were making a supper of their own, which could only be the pone and fatback they’d been eating their whole lives, it seemed like, maybe a little more of it than usual, since those woods smelled like every good thing and people like to have a part in whatever is going on. Mellie had found herself another baby, and its mother brought them sweet bread with blueberry jam in the middle of it and icing on it. People were roasting ears of corn and handing them out to anybody who passed by, even if they passed by more than once. There was hot fry bread with sugar on it.

Evening was coming, a mild, clear evening. Men were hanging lamps in the trees, along the big old oak branches that reached out over the stage, and lighting them, and the banjos and fiddles that had come along in the crowd began to agree on a song, and the people began to sing it— Yes, we’ll gather at the river, The beautiful, the beautiful river. And then some preachers came up onto the stage and sat down on the chairs, except for one, who came to the front of it and raised up his hands. Everybody got quiet. He shouted, “We are gathered here to praise the Lord, the God of our salvation!” And they shouted back, “Amen!”

For a minute there was just the sound of the crickets and the river and the wind creaking the ropes those lamps were hanging from.

Then, “We are gathered here to confess our sins unto the Lord, who knows the thoughts of our hearts!”

“Amen!”

Quiet again. And then, “We are gathered here to rejoice in the Lord, for His mercy endureth forever!”

“Amen!”

Then all the preachers stood up and began singing the song about the river, and the whole crowd sang with them. Deke found Mellie and said, “He’s looking for you,” then stepped into the crowd again. Mellie handed back the baby and told Lila, “You don’t know where I am,” and slipped away. Somewhere she had come up with a kerchief to tie over her hair because it was so white that it would make her easy to see, even when the sun was almost down. So Lila just stayed there watching the lanterns sway and the light and the shadows move and move through the trees, huge shadows and strange light under a blue evening sky. The preachers went on and the crowd shouted their Amens and they all sang. Bringing in the Sheaves. She’d heard the song a number of times since then and she didn’t yet know what sheaves were. She had some ideas about salvation, and mercy, but the old man never once mentioned sheaves.

“The great gift of baptism which makes us clean and acceptable—” “Amen!”

Doll put her arm around her and said, “You come on now. Doane says so.” They were gathering up their things, to get away from the noise, so they could get some sleep and nobody would be tramping around, stepping over them. If Arthur and the boys didn’t show up just then, they’d find their camp soon enough. But nobody knew where Mellie was. So the rest of them had to go off down the road while Doane stayed there watching for her. Lila thought those lamps in the trees were the most beautiful things she had ever seen, and that fiddle was the most beautiful thing she had ever heard, and it didn’t seem right that Doane, who said he hated it all, should send them away while he stayed behind. But in those days they still minded him, and there was comfort in it.

Mellie turned up finally when the preaching was over. She came walking up the road, tagging after Doane. She was drenched head to foot. Her pant legs were scraping from the wet. She said, “I fell in.”

Doane said, “Was it one of them preachers pulled you out?”

“Don’t matter. I’m just glad somebody did. I coulda drownt.”

“Was it one of them preachers told you to step into the river in the first place?”

“Them rocks is slippery. I fell in.”

“So I guess you got yourself saved.”

“ I never said that.”

“I got a dollar says you’re still the same rascal you always been.”

“Well,” she said, “if you even got a dollar, it’s because I sold some of them damn apples.”

He laughed. “Sounds like I won my bet already.”

She said, “There wasn’t no bet. I fell in.”

If Lila told the old man that story he would laugh, and then he would probably wonder about it. She would tell him that Mellie always had to try whatever it was she saw other people doing. She was just curious. For the next few days she might have been checking to see if there was any change in her, because she would be mean for no reason, pinching and poking when no one was bothering her at all. Or she might have been letting Doane see that she wasn’t saved and didn’t want to be, either. Was she baptized or not? Say she walked into the water to be dunked and prayed over like the other people, just to see what it felt like. It was only her nature, poor ignorant child. What would the Good Lord have to say about that? If Lila had gone with her, she would probably have done the same thing, because she generally did what Mellie did, if she could do it. So there would have been the singing, and the lantern light sweeping out over the river, and some man with his hands under her back and her head, lowering her down into the water and lifting her out again, and then wiping the water away from her face as if it were tears, Hallelujah! Lila had seen it done any number of times. There were always meetings and revivals.