Marilynne Robinson - Lila

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 strong. 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.