Marilynne Robinson - Lila

“Well, I wouldn’t mind if tomorrow was a little different from today.”

“That’s a prayer, too.”

“Now wait. It has to be different no matter what. One more day just like this one will be worse. More worrying, for one thing. That wears on a person. So it will be different even if nothing changes. Nice as it is right now.”

“True. It is nice now.”

“Old Boughton struggling through one more day.”

“Ah!”

“Me trying to figure out what this child is up to. Not that I mind so much what he decides, so long as he waits till the road is plowed.”

The old man sighed. “It’s all a prayer.”

“For you it is. I tried praying a couple times and nothing came of it.”

“You’re sure nothing came of it?”

“Well, how do you know anything ever does come of it? Boughton’s roof won’t fall because it’s stronger than you think it is. He won’t even try to light a kerosene lamp because he knows what might happen if he did. He’s sitting in his morris chair, bundled up in that old buffalo robe, waiting for his children to come and take care of us all. And they will, whether he’s praying or not. On snowshoes if they have to.” Why did she talk to him like this? Here she was snuggled up against him, wearing his socks. She said, “The best things that happen I’d never have thought to pray for. In a million years. The worst things just come like the weather. You do what you can.”

He said, “ Family is a prayer. Wife is a prayer. Marriage is a prayer.”

“Baptism is a prayer.”

“No,” he said. “Baptism is what I’d call a fact.”

“Because you can’t just wash it off.”

He laughed. “Nope. Not with all the water in the West Nishnabotna.”

Well. So he knew what she’d done, unbaptizing herself. She probably had that river smell all over her that afternoon and he figured it out when she asked him later. And now the river was frozen and snowed under, and she wished she could see it, all pillowed like that, tucked in. By the time it thawed she would have her body to herself and she could walk in it barefoot if she wanted to, on those slippery rocks. She and Mellie used to pretend they were herding minnows, with their pant legs rolled up above their knees and wet anyway. Here she was, forgetting that there would be a child. It frightened her when she forgot. She must have started awake.

“What?” he said. The worrying had worn him out. He gave a sermon once about the disciples sleeping at Gethsemane because they were weary with grief. Sleep is such a mercy, he said. It was a mercy even then.

“I’ve just never had the care of a child.”

“We’ll be fine.” He nestled against her. That sound of settling into the sheets and the covers has to be one of the best things in the world. Sleep is a mercy. You can feel it coming on, like being swept up in something. She could see the light in the room with her eyes closed, and she could smell the snow on the air drifting in. You had to trust sleep when it came or it would just leave you there, waiting.

She was thinking about the spring, how clear and stinging cold the water would be with snow still on the rocks and the sandbars. And summer. She might take the baby with her to the river. Little as it would be. Just to pick a few raspberries. And she might put it down in the grass by the road, just for a minute, just while she was picking berries. And then she forgot to come back soon enough, how long was she gone? and had to put it in a pail of river water because you never know. He would say, Why did you do this? Looking at her as if he didn’t recognize her at all.

That woke her up. Her first thought was, I have to get that knife off the table. She’d been having her worst dream, with the Reverend’s arm carefully across her where her waist would be, with the Reverend breathing at her ear. She thought, There’s a whole world of water in the West Nishnabotna. It’s not the Mississippi, but it never begins and it never ends. Wife is a prayer. Because I’m his wife. I better think about that.

Sometimes when they were together in the kitchen, when he was drinking his coffee and reading the newspaper, he would fiddle with that knife, taking it up in his hand. He might have done the same with a piece of driftwood, with any harmless thing, just feeling how smooth it was, the shape wear had given it. She never got used to seeing it in his hand, but she never said a word about it except one time when he opened the blade. She said, “Maybe you shouldn’t do that,” and was surprised herself when she heard the words. She said, “It’s awful sharp,” thinking probably that the knife was like a snake, that it was in its nature to do harm if you trifled with it. She used to keep it by her when she slept, open, stuck into the floor so she could just grab it if she needed to. It was such a mean-looking thing, and if she had ever used it on anybody it would have been the knife that did it, because it was that kind of knife. Some dogs bite. So you keep them away from people. You can’t just get rid of them for being the way they are. And now and then you can be glad to have them around, to snarl the way a good dog never does.

Say she took that knife away, put it out of sight. Would he notice and wonder what it meant? Would he ask her what she had done with it, look for it in her dresser drawer? Under her pillow? Could she put it anywhere at all that he might not just come across it and think, This is strange, why has she hidden it here? She had thought it through a hundred times. That knife was the difference between her and anybody else in the world. Ugly old Doll hunched over in the firelight, spitting on her bit of whetstone, sharpening and wearing the blade till the edge of it curved like a claw, readying herself for whatever fearful thing she turned over in her mind while she was working at it. And, knowing that the fearful thing might take even Doll, who stole her and carried her away from whatever she could have had of place and name and kin, Lila watched her, hoping the knife would take on the witchy deadliness she was conjuring for it.

Fear and comfort could be the same thing. It was strange, when she thought of it. The wind always somewhere, trifling with the leaves, troubling the firelight. And that smell of damp earth and bruised grass, a lonely, yearning sort of smell that meant, Why don’t you come back, you will come back, you know you will. And then the stars, and Mellie probably awake, lying there thinking about them.

Lila could tell by the smell that the sheets had frozen on the clothesline. Then Mrs. Graham or whoever had the time had ironed them. But there was still that good, cold smell that made her think of the air after a lightning storm. New air, if there was such a thing, that the rain brought down, or the snow. She was still the preacher’s bride, and those women still starched her pillowcase, blessing his happiness, praying for it. All those years of his loneliness were a weight on their hearts. Then he took a wife and he fathered a child, even if it wasn’t born yet, and what else could they do? What more could they do? It made her think of the old days, when she lived her whole life just for the hours she spent at the movies, when everybody in the audience would sigh and weep and laugh for those beautiful ghosts in that unreachable place where people lived lives strangers could care about. She had a dream once that a woman’s giant face turned and her giant eyes stared at her, and Lila was scared to death because, sitting there in the dark, nobody along with everybody else, she knew she was real to that woman. The look meant, Should I know you? as if to say, Who are you to be watching me like that? Now here she was under the covers with this man anybody in Fremont County knew better than she did, knew when he was first a married man and a father. All of them probably wondered now and then how the two of them passed the time together, what in the world they could find to talk about, different as they were. All of them thinking how sad any sadness that came to him would be, how sweet any happiness, the poor old fellow. And here they were, the two of them, waking and sleeping through the long afternoon, in the crisp sheets that smelled like snow, the baby stirring a little sometimes, the old man young in his sleep and his comfort and she as still as could be, wanting nothing. Those women, looking on at their life, would say oh, and ah, when the curtains stirred and let whiter light into the pale room. Doll there, too, watching. Damn that knife.