Marilynne Robinson - Lila

Oh, if the old man knew what thoughts she had! She could make a pretty good meat loaf now and a decent potato salad. He told her he’d never liked pie very much anyway. She could keep the house nice enough. People passing in the road stopped to admire her gardens. The boy was as clean and pretty as any baby in Gilead. A little small, but that could change. And the old man did look as though every blessing he had forgotten to hope for had descended on him all at once, for the time being.

She couldn’t lean her whole weight on any of this when she knew she would have to live on after it. She wouldn’t even want to see this house again after they left it, or Gilead, at least till the boy had outgrown the thought that they belonged there. So she thought about the old life. She never really hated it until Doll came to her all bloody and she went to St. Louis. But it was a hard way to bring up a child. And she would tell him he was a minister’s son, so he might blame her because she couldn’t give him what his father would have given him, the quiet gentleness in his manners, the way of expecting that people would look up to him. She surely couldn’t teach him that.

Still, there was this time, this waking up when the baby started fussing, this scrambling eggs and buttering toast in the new light of any day at all, geraniums in the windows, the old man with his doddering infant in his lap, propped against his arm, reading him the funny papers. So one morning, standing at the sink washing the dishes, she said, “I guess there’s something the matter with me, old man. I can’t love you as much as I love you. I can’t feel as happy as I am.”

“I know,” he said. “I don’t think it’s anything to worry about. I don’t worry about it, really.”

“I got so much life behind me.”

“I know.”

“It was nothing like this life.”

“I know.”

“I miss it sometimes.”

He nodded. “We aren’t so different. There are things I miss.”

She said, “I might have to go back to it sometime. The part I could go back to, what with the child.”

“Yes,” he said. “I’ve given that some thought. I know you’ll do the best you can. The best that can be done. I’ll be leaving you on your own. We’ve both always known that. I can’t tell you how deeply I regret it.”

“You have told me, plenty of times. But for now,” she said, “things are good. If hard times are coming, I’d just as soon wait to start worrying. That’s not really the problem.” The problem is, she thought, that if someday she opened the front door and there, where the flower gardens and the fence and the gate ought to be, was that old life, the raggedy meadows and pastures and the cornfields and the orchards, she might just set the child on her hip and walk out into it, the buzz and the smell and the damp of it, the breath of it like her own breath, her own sweat. Stepping back into the loneliness, a dreadful thing, like walking into cold water, waiting for the numbness to set in that was the body taking the care it could, so that what you knew you didn’t have to feel. In the dream it was always morning, and the sun already a little too hot. She was glad she had seen the boy brand new, red as fire, without a tear to give to the world, no ties to the world at all, just that knot on his belly. Then he was at her side, at her breast, a human child. The numbness setting in. But it never sinks right to the bone. That orphan he was first he always would be, no matter how they loved him. He’d be no child of hers, otherwise. She said, “What is it you’re missing?”

He shrugged. “Pretty well everything. You. This old fellow.” He patted the baby’s leg. “Evening. Morning.”

“You aren’t as old as you think you are, Reverend.”

He said, “It’s just arithmetic. That’s what it comes down to. Boughton has married four or five of his children. Baptized a dozen grandchildren by now. And maybe I’ll teach this fellow to tie his shoelaces. The years of a man’s life are threescore years and ten, give or take. That’s how it is.” He said, “I feel like Moses on the mountain, looking out on the life he will never have. Then I think of the life I do have. And that starts me thinking about the life I won’t have. All that beautiful life.” He shrugged. “I guess I’m pretty hard to please.”

“I’m going to make us some more coffee. Did I ever say that? That I love you? I always thought it sounded a little foolish. But the way you talk, sometime I might regret putting it off.”

“I believe you said it a minute ago. You can’t love me as much as you do love me. Something to that effect. Which I thought was interesting.” He said, “All those years, were you as sad as you were sad? As lonely as you were lonely? I wasn’t.”

“Me neither. I’d have died of it.”

“I had the church, of course, and Boughton. I had my prayers and my books. ‘And my ending is despair, Unless I be relieved by prayer, Which pierces so that it assaults Mercy itself and frees all faults.’ Quite a life, really. A very good life. But there was such a silence behind it all. Over it. Beneath it. Sometimes I used to read to myself out loud, just to hear a voice.”

“You do that now.”

“Do I? Well, by now it’s just habit.”

“And I think about Doll.” Then she said, “I’m keeping that knife. I’ll put it out of sight somewhere, but I’m keeping it.”

“Fine.”

“It ain’t very Christian of me. Such a mean old knife. I hate to think he could want it sometime, but he could.”

The old man nodded.

Here she was practically calling herself a Christian, because when the Reverend had baptized their infant at the church that day and put him into her arms, he touched the water to her head, too, three times. He turned his back to the people and murmured to her, “I don’t really know what I’m doing here. I should have asked you first. But I wanted you to know that we couldn’t bear — we have to keep you with us. Please God.” That late new snow made the window light very cool and pure, and she was a little faint from standing, so soon after the birth. Mrs. Graham took her into the study to wait with her for the service to end.

She sat down in the preacher’s chair and held the baby against her, and she thought, Did I say, It’s all right with me, I guess? thinking that if she’d said it she wasn’t sure she’d meant it, and if she hadn’t said it she was sorry she had not. The old coat he had put over her shoulders when they were walking in the evening was as good to remember as the time Doll took her up in her arms. She thought it was nothing she had known to hope for and something she had wanted too much all the same. So too much happiness came with it, and happiness was strange to her. He said, We have to keep you with us. In that eternity of his, where everybody will be happy, how could he feel the lack of her, the loss of her? She had to think about that. Sometime she would ask him about it. It must always be true that there are the stragglers, people somebody couldn’t bear to be without, no matter what they’d been up to in this life. That son of Boughton’s.

And then there were the people no one would miss, who had done no special harm, who just lived and died as well as they could manage. That would have been Lila, if she had not wandered into Gilead. And then she thought, I couldn’t bear to be without Doll, or Mellie, or Doane and Marcelle. Even Arthur and his boys — not that they had mattered so much to her when she was a child, but because fair was fair and none of them ever had any good thing that the others didn’t have some right to, even Deke. If there was goodness at the center of things, that one rule would have to be respected, because it was as important to them as anything in this world.