Marilynne Robinson - Lila

Then she would put on the nightdress again, walk back to the cabin, brush the litter of leaves and sticks off her feet as well as she could, wrap herself in her blanket, and lie awake, her body slowly warming the damp of the dress, and she would think about the way things happened. One night, because she had found those words in the Bible, thinking about how it could have happened that she was born and had lived. Sickly as she was when Doll took her up. Then how to imagine whoever it was that had bothered with her even that much, to keep body and soul together. It was nothing against Doll to think there had to have been someone there before her, someone who held her and fed her. She thought of the preacher’s wife, that girl with her newborn baby in her arms. The woman who told her about them said, “She just slipped away, and in a few hours the baby followed her.” And the preacher was left all alone.

What had become of Mellie, who was never scared? She could ask him about that. Mellie’d poke a snake with a stick just to get a better look at it. Once, she climbed from a fence railing onto the back of a young bull calf, hanging on with her arms around its neck. Doane saw what she was doing and came over to the fence and climbed up and lifted her off the thing before it could really decide how to get rid of her. It had scraped her leg against a post and left it raw enough that the flies bothered it, but she just said she had a notion that if you rode a bull every day from the time it was young you could ride it when it was growed. Then you could go anywhere and folks would say, Here she comes, riding on that bull. Doane said, “Well, that ain’t your bull. Four, five days we’ll be gone from here.” And she said, “I coulda stayed on that thing if you’d let me. I know that much.” He laughed. “You know, if he’d decided to, he’d of broke that leg. For a start. Then, when you’re useless, who’s sposed to look after you?” She said, “My leg don’t even hurt that bad!”

He was always telling her she was going to break her neck sometime and they’d have to just go on and leave her lying beside the road. She never paid any mind to that at all. And she never broke her neck, though sometimes she did seem to be trying to. She saw some town girls skipping rope and found a piece of rope herself and figured out how to do it better than they did, crossing her arms, hopping on one foot. She tried a sort of handspring, but without her hands, since they had to be holding the rope. She’d fall in the road and come right back up again, and she’d say, “I pertinearly done it that time.” A skinny, freckled child with her white brows drawn together and her raggedy white hair flying, meaning to make herself the best rope jumper there ever was. If she saw an outhouse she’d go into it, looking for a catalogue, and if she found one she’d come back with a few pages and study them for days, trying to decide what things were and what they were good for. She’d say, “I can’t quite make out the words yet. I’m working on it.” Doll called it all tomfoolery, and she’d say to Lila, “I’m glad you don’t go acting like that,” even before Lila was strong enough to have tried to, even though she never showed any sign of wanting to. She was Doll’s girl, always at her side if she could be. Mellie had walked the same roads every summer, and she could wander away without getting lost. She would try now and then to make a chum of Lila, telling her she knew where there were huckleberries, or that she would show her how to catch a fish in her bare hands, but Lila always wanted Doll near her, at least in her sight.

What could the old man say about all those people born with more courage than they could find a way to spend, and then there was nothing to do with it but just get by? And that was when the times were decent. She had always been jealous of Mellie because the others took pleasure from her pranks and her notions. She was always making them laugh. Once, Mellie said, “I believe my knees have been skint my whole life. My elbows, too.” Doane laughed and said, “Then I guess you must of been born that way. If ever anybody was.” And where would a girl like that find any kind of life that asked more of her than just standing up to hardship? Something an animal could do better, a mule. Doll said, Whatever happens, just be quiet and it’ll pass, most likely. But those weren’t thoughts Lila wanted to have, and when she began to think that way she might as well get up and wait for the dawn to come. She might as well start deciding where she would go for work that day, what house she hadn’t gone to for a while. They always gave her work, even if it was only something a child could do, like cutting kindling, and she didn’t want to burden anyone by coming there too often.

That morning Mrs. Graham had some clothes for her, a skirt and two blouses that she said her daughter had left when she moved to Des Moines. They’d just been hanging in the closet. Lila might as well have them if she could use them. Lila thought, This is the very worst part of being broke. Everybody can see how broke you are. It seems like this whole town is making a project of knowing every damn thing I don’t have. If I left here, I could wear these things and nobody would give it a thought. If I stay, I’m walking around in somebody else’s old clothes, somebody’s charity. Mrs. Graham was watching her face, a little pleased with herself, and regretful, and embarrassed. She said, “You needn’t take them if you don’t have any use for them, dear. I just thought they might be your size.”

Lila said, “They look about right. I could probly use them. Sure.” She should have said thank you, she knew it, but she never asked anybody for anything except work, and if they gave her something else they did it for their own reasons. She wasn’t beholden to them, because being beholden was the one thing she could not stand. She wouldn’t even look at the clothes, though she knew Mrs. Graham hoped she would. So they must be all right, she thought. Nothing too wore out anyway. And then she did Mrs. Graham’s ironing, thinking about those clothes and how she would probably wear them to church, since that would feel better, at least, than wearing the same old dress. Even if the preacher noticed, and that made her feel beholden to him, and they all knew it. So when she was done at Mrs. Graham’s house she took the bag of clothes and walked up to the cemetery. There was the grave of the John Ames who died as a boy, with a sister Martha on one side and a sister Margaret on the other. She had never really thought about the way the dead would gather at the edge of a town, all their names spelled out so you’d know whose they were for as long as that family lived in that place. And there was the Reverend John Ames, who would have been the preacher’s father, with his wife beside him. It must be strange to know your whole life where you will be buried. To see these stones with your own name on them. Someday the old man would lie down beside his wife. And there she would be, after so many years, waiting in sunlight, all covered in roses.

She couldn’t stay in the shack when the weather changed. There would be no way to keep warm. Wind came through the walls and rain came through the roof. That woman had offered her a spare room, but she might have changed her mind since the week or so when everybody in the church was offering her something. If she was going to leave town, she should do it before travel got too hard. She would probably have to decide between a bus ticket and a winter coat. And her shoes were about gone. No point thinking about it. She would decide one way or another for one reason or another, save up what she could while she could, and whatever she did, she’d get by, most likely.

Lila had lived in a real house before. Not the one in St. Louis. A respectable boardinghouse in the town of Tammany, Iowa. Doll took a job there so Lila could go to school for a year, long enough to learn how to read and do some figures. Mrs. Marker, whose house it was, did the cooking, but Doll did the cleaning and laundry and looked after the poultry and the gardens, and Lila helped with all of it. Doll wanted her to know what it was to have a regular life. Not that Doll knew much about it herself, but Mrs. Marker would yell about everything she did wrong, so she got better at it with time, until school was almost out. Then she told Lila, “I’m tired of listening to that woman. She can hang her own damn wash.” And they just gathered up what was theirs and walked away.