Marilynne Robinson - Lila

When she heard him stirring the way he did when he was waking up, she put the catalogue back on the shelf and set the table. Ham and eggs and a pot of coffee. Nothing hard about that. Toast and jam. He came downstairs whistling, scrubbed and shaved and combed. “Ah,” he said, “wonderful! And how are you two this morning?”

She said, “I guess this child of yours don’t want me to sleep. Maybe he don’t like my dreams or something.”

He helped her with her chair. “You’re having bad dreams? Here, I’ll get the coffee.” He poured her a cup. “Do you want to tell me about them?”

“They’re just dreams. You must have bad dreams sometimes. Maybe you don’t, being a preacher.”

He laughed. “I have had more than my share, it seems to me.” And he said, in that low, gentle voice he used to speak to widows, and knew that he did, “Sometimes it does feel better to talk about them.”

“Who you been talking to about them all these years? Old Boughton, I suppose.”

He nodded. “Boughton.”

“Jesus, I suppose.”

“Jesus.”

“You never told me nothing about your dreams. Anything.”

“I guess it’s been a while since I had any dreams worth talking about. Something’s chasing me and I don’t know which way to run. Then I wake up. That’s all most of them amount to. I’m just running like the devil. I haven’t really run like that since I was ten years old. And then I wake up with my heart pounding.”

“And that’s what you tell Jesus.”

He laughed. “The Lord is very patient. Something I learned from my grandfather. Well, from watching my grandfather. I used to wonder when I was a boy how the Lord could just listen to him going on the way he did. I suspected sooner or later He might stop coming around. I sort of hoped He would. I was a little scared of Him.”

“Maybe He’s what you was running away from. In your dream.” Now, why did she say that?

He shrugged. “What a thought. Now, wouldn’t that be something.” He toyed with his fork, considering.

She said, “I’ll tell you the truth, I’m scared of Him. I’m always dreaming that Doll’s trying to hide from Him. That’s why she don’t want no grave, so He can’t find her.”

“Well,” he said, “that’s a very sad dream. I’m sorry about it. You probably never would have dreamed such a thing before you came here and started listening to me. And Boughton.”

“Don’t worry about it. My dreams was already bad enough. It would have just been something else. There’s nothing good about her dying the way she did, Lord or no Lord.”

He looked at her, and he nodded.

“I didn’t mean nothing by that. No offense.”

“No, no, I’m just thinking.”

It seemed she was going to say any damn thing. “You’re kind of like your grandfather. You think the Lord is living here, in this house. It’s Him I might be offending. It don’t scare me, though, to have you thinking that. Couple of dreams is all.”

“Well, my thinking about these things isn’t really the same as my grandfather’s. I suppose I should say my experience is different from his.”

“But I know you still think you might offend Him. Jesus.”

He nodded. “True enough.”

She said, “I don’t know what started me talking like this. I don’t want to go on with it, I truly don’t.”

“That’s fine. I just want to say one thing, though. If the Lord is more gracious than any of us can begin to imagine, and I’m sure He is, then your Doll and a whole lot of people are safe, and warm, and very happy. And probably a little bit surprised. If there is no Lord, then things are just the way they look to us. Which is really much harder to accept. I mean, it doesn’t feel right. There has to be more to it all, I believe.”

“Well, but that’s what you want to believe, ain’t it.”

“That doesn’t mean it isn’t true.”

She thought, Don’t go hoping. Let’s see what comes of this child. Let’s see how long I keep this old man. What a body might hope for just ain’t in the way of things, most of the time. Never for long. She said, “I might try thinking about that. It’s a nice idea.” And he said his grace, and she bowed her head. Why did she talk to him that way? So that she could say when it ended she always knew it would. Not very long after he kissed her cheek and left for the church she put on her coat and walked down to the store as if a wedge of cheese and a box of crackers were all she had in mind, and then strolled along down the road, on past the edge of town, past the fields of dry cornstalks. It was a good coat, new and heavy and too warm for the weather, since the winter was a little late coming on, but she told herself it would be a kind of waste not to get all the use of it she could. It was a nice dark blue.

You could see pelicans by the hundreds sometimes. It was late in the season for them, but winter was late, so she might still see some. There was a wide place in the river where people went to look at them, so that’s what she’d say if anyone asked her where she was going. She’d seen those birds all her life and never had a name for them, because they had nothing to do with getting by. She’d never once heard of anybody eating one. Ducks, for sure, but never pelicans. They were white as anything could be, flying up off the water together and spreading their wings so wide you couldn’t believe it, and then settling together on the water again, sliding along. They just came when the weather started to change, and then they were gone till the next year. It was the old man who told her what they were called. There was one of them carved into Mrs. Ames’s gravestone. After Lila stopped at the shack she’d go on down to the river so she could tell him where she’d been without lying.

She’d never thought before how strange a cornfield can look so late in the year, all the stalks dead where they stand. The country had always just been work waiting to be done. Now she saw the dim shine of sunlight on the leaves, and how the stalks were all bent one way, the tops of them. The wind had bent them and then left them rigid, with their old tattered leaves hanging off them. But it was as if they had all heard one sound and they all knew what it meant, or were afraid they did, and every one of them waited to hear it again, to be sure, every one of them still with waiting. She said, “It don’t mean nothing,” speaking to the child. “It’s the wind.”

The shack was there, the field in front of it filled with the same old weeds, blanched and beaten down or poking up this way and that. The path she had worn from the road was pretty well overgrown. Somebody had been there, had come and gone just enough to bruise the grass. Somebody might still be there. She knew it wasn’t smart to look in the door. You can get in a set-to so fast you don’t even know what happened. Nobody harder to deal with than a thief, once he decides you’re trying to steal from him. She had this baby now to think about. So she stood a way off and picked up a rock and threw it against the wall. It made a good, solid thunk. Nobody looked out the window or the door. She found two more rocks and threw them. Nobody. So she decided it would be safe to look inside.

She could see from the stoop that there was a blanket in the corner. That was about it. A few empty tin cans. Her canning jar, empty. Well, she should have known. She would look under that loose plank, to be sure. One jar does look just like the next one. But there was nothing there except the Reverend’s handkerchief with the raspberry stains on it. She shook off the dirt and cobwebs and put it in the pocket of her coat. She said to the child, “What a day that was.” Him out there in the field picking sunflowers for her. After she told him she wouldn’t marry him. Maybe someday she’d be saying, Once, back in Iowa, your papa gathered flowers for me, from a field that was all gone to weeds. Before you was even born. She never thought a preacher would act that way. Every morning when he left for the church she stood on the porch and watched him walk down the road. He’d turn around to wave at her. If she kissed her fingers and held up her hand — she had seen women do that — he would clutch his hat to his chest and tilt his head to the side like a lovestruck boy in a movie. And she’d hear herself laughing. It would have been nice to give him a present. He wouldn’t expect that.