Marilynne Robinson - Lila

She said, “I guess you better discard.”

“Yes, I guess I’d better. Sorry.” But then he’d be studying her face, as if he’d never seen her before and there she was in his kitchen, and he had no idea what she might do next.

She said, “I feel fine. We’re both just fine.” And every time she took a breath she thought, when she was almost at the bottom of it, Will I tell him if it hurts, if there’s some new kind of pain? Could he stand to know it, when there was almost nothing he could do? And then she’d breathe again, deeply, carefully, hoping he would not notice. You always seem to need to touch the place it might hurt to touch. And not just once, either. Well, of course she felt different. Every day she felt different from the day before. There was somebody crouched under her ribs, shifting and fidgeting, growing. It was strange if you thought about it. She’d seen sows and ewes carrying young and birthing them. Hooves. That would be something. This was like a burden that had shifted and rubbed too long in one place. If there wasn’t quite room for her to breathe without an elbow being in the way of it, then a little pain wouldn’t mean a thing, especially since she would breathe again, then again, feeling for it. The old man was watching her.

She said, “I guess it’s my turn.” It was a little bit like a stitch in her side from running. It would go away if she stopped thinking about it, sooner if she could lie down. “Gin,” she said. “I don’t think your heart is in this card game, Reverend.”

He said, “I wouldn’t mind it if the wind died down a little. I never imagined it would be this bad. Just yesterday I saw crocuses coming up alongside the house.”

She thought, He’ll be worrying about old Boughton, too, wondering if he’s trying to look after Mrs. Boughton all on his own, hobbling around in the cold with all his joints froze up till he can’t strike a match. His children, except the one, were probably stuck in drifts along every road from wherever they lived to Gilead, trying to get to him, and he’d have that to worry about. The first break in the storm there’d be men and boys with shovels digging people out, but with the wind the way it was, they’d have to wait.

That wasn’t pain, she thought. The child just arched his back.

The old man said, “I’m not too sure about Boughton’s roof. He loses track of the time, the years. There must be three feet of new snow. I’m not sure it’s good for that much weight. I hate to think of him trying to light a lamp. Trying to deal with kerosene. Cold is such a torment for him.”

She meant to ask him sometime how praying is different from worrying. His face was about as strained and weary as it could be. White as it could be.

He said, “I thought once we made it to March we were probably all right.” Then he said, “As far as the weather is concerned.” And then he said, “Of course we’ll be all right. I didn’t mean we won’t be.” His old head sank down again.

So she fell to wondering how his dread was different from Doane’s, in those days when he began to realize that he had no way to look after them, stragglers who had no claim on him at all except that they had always trusted him. What would he have done with the hens that dog caught him stealing except to pluck them and gut them and roast them, handing the drumsticks around to the young ones as if it were just any ordinary supper in ordinary times, nothing so wonderful about it. He did have three silver dollars in his pocket, too, and he wouldn’t say a word about where they came from. He never did anything with what he had except to keep things together as well as he could. But stealing is stealing, Doll said, especially if you get caught at it.

Now here she was again, worrying over people who were long past help. You can’t even pray for someone to have his pride back when every possible thing has happened to take it away from him. She thought, Everything went bad everywhere and pride like his must have just drifted off the earth, more or less, as quiet as mist in the morning, and people were sad and hard who never were before. Looking into each other’s faces, their hearts sinking. If she ever took to praying it would be for that time and all those people who must have wondered what had become of them, what they had done to find themselves without so much as a good night’s rest to comfort them. She would call down calm on every one of them, on the worst and the bitterest ones first of all. Doane and Arthur walking away; Mellie, too, never looking back, leaving her an orphan on the steps of a church. Without the bitterness none of that would have happened. If Boughton dropped a lamp and set his house on fire, what would the Reverend say about that? He was looking at her then with as much fear in his eyes as she had ever seen anywhere, even counting those poor raggedy heathens who never thought the Almighty would have the least bit of interest in them.

That wasn’t a pain, but he saw her pause over it, consider it, whatever it was. It was like listening for a sound you might only have thought you heard. She said, “He’s frisky today. I guess he wants to be out in the snow.”

He smiled at her. “I hope he can wait for another day or two.”

That wasn’t a pain, either. She said, “I might just go upstairs and lay down a while.”

He stood up. “Yes.” He said, “It’s really cold up there. Those leaky old windows. I can put more blankets on the bed, but they’ll be cold, too. I should have thought to bring them down by the stove. I don’t know where my mind has been. I could have set up a cot here in the kitchen. This kind of weather — I didn’t give it a thought. You’d think I’d know better.” He might have said that if the child came then, he’d be earlier than they expected, or than he expected and she let on that she did. No, he’d never think that way.

“Well.” She stood up from her chair, and that felt better. “I’m just thinking I might lay down.”

“Yes.” He put his arm around her and brought her slowly up the stairs to his room. He took off her slippers and found a pair of his socks to put on her feet and then helped her into his bed, pulling the blankets up to her chin. His , she thought, because it reminded her of that old gray sweater, when she loved how his it was. Loneliness and mice and the wind blowing and then that woolly old thing against her cheek, smelling like him. She’d put her head on his shoulder that one time when he hardly knew her name. She laughed to remember.

“What?”

“Nothing. It just does feel good. Cold and all.”

“I’ll put the skillet to warm on the stove. I can use it to take some of the chill off. There used to be a warming pan around somewhere. A perfectly useful thing. But I suppose it’s ended up in the attic.”

“Don’t you go up in that attic.”

“No, I won’t. The skillet should work well enough.”

“I’d rather you just crawl under the covers here until I get warm. That’s the best thing you can do for me.” The windows were rattling and the curtains drifting a little on the cold air, and the room was full of the light of a snowy afternoon.

So he did. “Here we are,” he said. “It’s as if we’ve floated out to sea on an iceberg. The two of us all on our own.”

“The three of us.”

“Oh, my dear.”

She said, “Reverend, it seems to me you’re about to cry.”

He laughed. “I won’t if you won’t.”

“Fair enough.”

They were quiet for a while. He said, “I guess you’re all right?”

“I think he must be sleeping.”

Then he said, “It’s all a prayer. You don’t think to say, Let tomorrow be like today, because usually it is. For all purposes.”