Marilynne Robinson - Lila

“Robert, I hope I never have to be that serious again in this life.”

“I can say that you were distracted from it. Your intention. I know what Calvin said as well as you do! Better! Don’t even bother me with it!” Maybe you will remember how they sound when they argue about something,

Boughton thought it was all his fault, or he would have been the cause of any harm that came from it, which was just as bad. So when you were two weeks old we took you down to the church one cold Sunday, the first time you felt the air on your face. I carried you inside my coat, and I could see you peeking out at things. There you were, right against my heart, with a shawl around us both. Nobody but the two of us knew how plump and beautiful you were, because nobody knew what a pitiful thing you had been just a few days before, except Boughton, who was still scared to look at you and couldn’t think of a thing except making a Christian out of you while we had the chance. Teddy told him to stop coming around so much, worrying everybody, and mostly he minded. Teddy had to be back at school, but he called every day and then every other day and then once a week, and then we all forgot to be frightened of you. You turned into a perfectly fine baby. Maybe your father has enough years left in him to see you turn into a perfectly fine boy. And maybe not. Old men are hard to keep.

Lila knew what would really happen next. One day she and the child would watch them lower John Ames into his grave, Mrs. Ames on one side and his father, John Ames, on the other, and his mother and that boy John Ames and his sisters, a little garden of Ameses, all planted there waiting for the Resurrection. She knew it was ridiculous, but she always imagined them coming up some June day, right through the roses, not breaking a stem or bruising a petal. Shaking hands, patting backs, too taken up with it all to notice her flowers. Except Mrs. Ames, who might stoop down and pick one to show that baby, This is a rose. See how cool it is, how nice it smells. Holding it away from the baby’s hand because in the world as they left it there’d have been thorns. That day might come in a thousand years. But soon, before he was half grown, the boy would be standing beside her and he would ask where their places were, his and hers, because the plots were all taken up, and she would say, It don’t matter. We’ll just wander a while. We’ll be nowhere, and it will be all right. I have friends there.

She would keep every promise she had made, the boy would learn “Holy, Holy, Holy” and the Hundredth Psalm. He’d pray before he ate, breakfast, lunch, and supper, for as long as she had anything to say about it. Every day of every year they lived in Gilead she would be remembering what happened that very day, reciting it to herself in her mind so sometime she could say, One time when you weren’t even walking yet he took you fishing with him. He had his pole and creel in his hand and you in the crook of his arm and he went off down the road in the morning sunshine, striding along like a younger man, talking to you, laughing. He came back an hour later and set the empty creel on the table and said, “We propped the pole and watched dragonflies. Then we got a little tired.” And what a look he gave her, in the sorrow of his happiness. He might as well have said, When he is old enough to understand, tell him about the day we went fishing. So she said, “You might as well be writing things down.” Coming from him it would mean more. That was one of those days that is so mild and bright you know you’ll never see a better one. The weather just flaunting itself. She might wait for another day like it to tell the boy how his father couldn’t wait to have a son, because if you just say a day was fine, nobody makes much of it.

She could tell him how the old man looked standing in the pulpit, his hair pure white, his face all serious and gentle. He had looked into those faces in the pews for so many years, and couldn’t look at any one of them without remembering the day he buried a mother, christened a child, soothed a parting as well as he could. And sometimes rebuked where he should have comforted — mainly when he was young, he told her. But he never forgot that he’d done it, and he said no one who heard one of those stories ever forgot either. So he spoke with a tenderness he wasn’t even aware of anymore, that you could read if you knew how, like reading the bottom of a river from its pools and flows. He had paused over the word “widow” even before he knew her name, there were so many of them, but it was harder for him now. The word “orphan” troubled him after she told him a little about where she came from, and then after he had a child, he could hardly even say it. His preaching was a sort of pattern of his mind, like the lines in his face.

That old black coat he always wore to preach in was the one he put over her shoulders one evening when they were walking along the road together and he was throwing rocks at the fence posts the way a boy would do, still shy of her. But on a Sunday morning, with the sermon in front of him he’d spent the week on and knew so well he hardly needed to look at it, he was a beautiful old man, and it pleased her more than almost anything that she knew the feel of that coat, the weight of it. She’d be thinking about it when she should have been praying. But if she ever had prayed in all the years of her old life, it might have been for just that, that gentleness. And if she prayed now, it was really remembering the comfort he put around her, the warmth of his body still in that coat. It was a shock to her, a need she only discovered when it was satisfied, for those few minutes. In those days she had all the needs she could stand already, and here was another one. So she said something mean to him. That’s how she used to be and how she might be again someday, if she was ever just barely getting by and somebody seemed to be about to make it harder just by making it different. They’d had their wedding by then, but she wasn’t married to him yet, so she still thought sometimes, Why should he care? What is it to him? That was loneliness. When you’re scalded, touch hurts, it makes no difference if it’s kindly meant. Now he could comfort her with a look. And what would she do without him. What would she do.

Doll was hard that way. All of them were. Talking to strangers was putting yourself within the reach of sudden harm. What might they say? What might they seem to be thinking? Then you were left with it afterward, like remembering a bad dream, and nothing to do about it except to hate the next stranger a little more. Those times she used to think, I have a knife in my garter, and you don’t know how you’re pressing up against the minute I decide to use it. Doll told her, Don’t cut nobody with it. You don’t want all that to deal with. Just give them a look at it. Most of the time, that’s plenty. But there were times when the merciless knife was a comfort to her. Even when she only thought somebody might have looked at her the wrong way, she’d tell herself she had that furious old knife and it had done the worst already. That was before she had a child to look after. You have to stay out of trouble for the sake of your child.

She still actually thought like that, when she let her thoughts sink down to where they rested. She had never taken a dime that wasn’t hers or hurt a living soul, to speak of. But that’s what her heart was like sometimes, secret and bitter and scared. She had stolen the preacher’s child, and she laughed to think of it. Making him learn his verses and say his prayers would be like a joke, when they were off by themselves, getting by as they could. She did steal that Bible, and she’d keep it with her, and she’d show him that part about the baby toiling in its blood, and she’d say, That was me, and somebody said, “Live!” I never will know who. And then you came, red as blood, naked as Adam, and I took you to my breast and you lived when they never thought you would. So you’re mine. Gilead has no claim on you, or John Ames either, or the graveyard that has no place for you anyway.