Marilynne Robinson - Lila

Doll touched the soap and tears off the child’s face with the hem of her apron. “Never had the heart to scold her. Them’s about the only words I ever heard her say.” They made her a couple of dresses out of flour sacks with holes cut in them for her head and arms. They were stiff at first and smelled of being saved in a chest or a cupboard, and they had little flowers all over them, like Doll’s apron.

* * *

It seemed like one long night, but it must have been a week, two weeks, rocking on Doll’s lap while the old woman fussed around them.

“You don’t have enough trouble, I guess. Carrying off a child that’s just going to die on you anyway.”

“Ain’t going to let her die.”

“Oh? When’s the last time you got to decide about something?”

“If I left her be where she was, she’da died for sure.”

“Well, maybe her folks won’t see it that way. They know you took her? What you going to say when they come looking for her? She’s buried in the woods somewhere? Out by the potato patch? I don’t have troubles enough of my own?”

Doll said, “Nobody going to come looking.”

“You probly right about that. That’s the spindliest damn child I ever saw.”

But the whole time she talked she’d be stirring a pot of grits and blackstrap molasses. Doll would give the child a spoonful or two, then rock her a little while, then give her another spoonful. She rocked her and fed her all night long, and dozed off with her cheek against the child’s hot forehead.

The old woman got up now and then to put more wood in the stove. “She keeping it down?”

“Mostly.”

“She taking any water?”

“Some.”

When the old woman went away again Doll would whisper to her, “Now, don’t you go dying on me. Put me to all this bother for nothing. Don’t you go dying.” And then, so the child could barely hear, “You going to die if you have to. I know. But I got you out of the rain, didn’t I? We’re warm here, ain’t we?”

After a while the old woman again. “Put her in my bed if you want. I guess I won’t be sleeping tonight, either.”

“I got to make sure she can breathe all right.”

“Let me set with her then.”

“She’s clinging on to me.”

“Well.” The old woman brought the quilt from her bed and spread it over them.

The child could hear Doll’s heart beating and she could feel the rise and fall of her breath. It was too warm and she felt herself struggling against the quilt and against Doll’s arms and clinging to her at the same time with her arms around her neck.

* * *

They stayed with that old woman for weeks, maybe a month. Now it was hot and moist in the mornings when Doll took her outside, holding her hand because her legs weren’t strong yet. She walked her around the dooryard, cool under her bare feet, smooth as clay. The dog lay in the sun with his muzzle on his paws, taking no notice. She touched the hot, coarse fur of his back and her hand was sour with the smell of it. There were chickens strutting the yard, scratching and pecking. Doll had helped to start the garden, and how had she done that, when the child thought there had always been someone holding her? But the carrots were up. Doll pulled one, no bigger than a straw. “It’s soft as a feather,” she said, and she touched the child’s cheek with the little spray of greens. She wiped the dirt off the root with her fingers. “Here. You can eat it.”

There was an ache in the child’s throat because she wanted to say, I guess I left my rag baby back there at the house. I guess I did. She knew exactly where, under the table in the farthest corner, propped against the table leg like it was sitting there. She could just run in the door and snatch it and run off again. No one would have to see her. But then maybe Doll wouldn’t be here when she came back, and she didn’t know where that house was anyway. She thought of the woods. It was just an old rag baby, dirty from her hand, because mostly she kept it with her. But they put her out on the stoop before she could get it and the cats wouldn’t even let her touch them and then Doll came and she didn’t know they would be leaving, she didn’t understand that at all. So she just left it where it was. She never meant to.

Doll took the child’s hand away from her mouth. “You mustn’t be biting on yourself like that. I told you a hundred times.” They put mustard on her hand once, vinegar, and she licked them off because of the sting. They tied a rag around her hand, and when she sucked on it the blood came up and showed pink. “You might help me with the weeding. Give you something to do with that hand.” Then they were just quiet there in the sunlight and the smell of earth, kneeling side by side, pulling up all the little sprouts that weren’t carrots, tiny plump leaves and white roots.

The old woman came out to watch them. “She don’t have no color at all. You don’t want her getting burned. She’ll be scratching again.” She put out her hand for the child to take. “I been thinking about ‘Lila.’ I had a sister Lila. Give her a pretty name, maybe she could turn out pretty.”

“Maybe,” Doll said. “Don’t matter.”

* * *

But the old woman’s son came home with a wife, and there really wasn’t enough work around the place for Doll to be able to stay there anymore. The old woman bundled up as many things as Doll could carry and still carry the child, who wasn’t strong enough yet to walk very far, and her son showed them the way to the main road, such as it was. Then after a few days they found Doane and Marcelle. Doll might have been looking for them. They all said Doane had a good name, he was a fair-minded man, and if you hired him you could trust him to give you a day’s work. Of course it wasn’t just Doane. There was Arthur with his two boys, and Em and her daughter Mellie, and there was Marcelle. She was Doane’s wife. They were a married couple.

* * *

There was a long time when Lila didn’t know that words had letters, or that there were other names for seasons than planting and haying. Walk south ahead of the weather, walk north in time for the crops. They lived in the United States of America. She brought that home from school. Doll said, “Well, I spose they had to call it something.”

Once, Lila asked the Reverend how to spell Doane. What had he thought she meant? Done? Down ? Maybe don’t , since she didn’t always sound her t ’s? He was never sure what she knew and didn’t know, and it pained him for her sake when he guessed wrong.

He paused and then he laughed. “Mind putting it in a sentence?”

“There was a man called himself Doane. I knew him a long time ago.”

“Yes. I see,” he said. “I knew a Sloane once. S-L-O-A-N-E.” Old as he was, the Reverend still blushed sometimes. “So it might be the same. With a D .”

“When I was a child. I was thinking about old times the other day.” She wouldn’t have told him even that much except that she saw the blush deepen when she said once she knew a man.

He nodded. “I see.” The Reverend never asked her to talk about old times. He didn’t seem to let himself wonder where she had been, how she had lived all the years before she wandered into the church dripping rain. Doane always said churches just want your money, so they all stayed away from churches, walked right past them as if they were smarter than the other people. As if they had any money for the churches to want. But the rain was bad and that day was a Sunday, so there was no other doorway for her to step into. The candles surprised her. It might all have seemed so beautiful because she’d been missing a few meals. That can make things brighter somehow. Brighter and farther away. As if when you put your hand out you would touch glass. She watched him and forgot she was in the room with him and he would see her watching. He baptized two babies that morning. He was a big, silvery old man, and he took each one of those little babies in his arms as gently as could be. One of them was wearing a white dress that spilled down over his arm, and when it cried a little from the water he put on its brow, he said, “Well, I bet you cried the first time you were born, too. It means you’re alive.” And she had a thought that she had been born a second time, the night Doll took her up from the stoop and put her shawl around her and carried her off through the rain. She ain’t your mama, I can tell.