Lila: A Novel (7 page)

She was back the next morning. The farmer had brought in eggs for their breakfast, and there was ham. They told her she had answered their prayers, and what was she supposed to say to that? After a few days they gave her a ten-dollar bill and a plucked chicken and a decent pair of shoes. And they said they were pretty well out of money until they got a check from their son, who was sometimes a little late with it but almost never forgot. And they gave her a carpetbag with some old clothes in it. So that’s the end of that, she thought. Well, it ain’t the only farm.

There was a red blouse in that carpetbag. It looked almost new. It had long sleeves and a collar and a ruffle down the front. Never in her life before had she worn anything bright red. As soon as she took it out, as soon as she had tried the length of a sleeve against her arm, she decided she might as well take a day off tomorrow and go over to town, maybe with ten dollars in her pocket, just for the feeling of having a little money. Tired as she was, she didn’t sleep. She bathed in the river in the morning dark, then she sat in the doorway waiting for enough light to let her do her copying.
And there was evening and there was morning, one day.
She didn’t feel like spending much time on it. But she did write it out again and again, as she always did. Lila Dahl, Lila Dahl. Practice. And then she fell asleep. She had been sitting there in the morning sunlight when a sweet weariness came over her, and she had to lie down just for a little while. When she woke up the sun was high, the day half gone. But it is hard to regret sleep like that, even though it was looking forward to the day that had kept her awake all night. She combed out her hair and put on Mrs. Graham’s skirt and the red blouse.

At the store she bought some threepenny nails so she’d have a way to hang things up if she wanted to. The one nail someone else had put in a wall had that chicken hanging from it by the twine around its drumsticks. She’d roast it when she got home. She bought a box of matches. A can of milk. Then she thought she might walk past the church. There was a hearse idling there, and just as she was about to go by, the church doors opened and a coffin came out, four men carrying it, easing it down the stairs. Then the preacher came out after it, his black robe fluttering in the breeze, his Bible in his hands, his big, heavy old head bowed down. She knew it must be some friend of his who was dead. He had so many, one of them was always dying. The men slid the coffin into the hearse, but the preacher glanced up and saw her there and stopped where he was, on the step. The mourners stopped behind him, weeping, and not quite sure what to do, since they seemed to think they shouldn’t step around him. So they wept and hugged each other, and he just stood there, looking at her. The look was startled. It meant, So you’re here, after all! How could you let me think you had left! As if there was something between them that gave him the right to be hurt, the right to be relieved. And she hadn’t even missed church lately. So he was aware of her all the other days, knew somehow that she was close by, or that she was not, and it grieved him that she had been gone from Gilead even a little while. The widow or the mother or whoever she was said a word to him, and he nodded and went on. She saw him standing near the hearse, holding the mourners’ hands, touching their arms, murmuring to them. What do you say to them, she thought, when they stand around you like that, like they just
need
to hear it, whatever it is? I want to know what you say. She couldn’t walk up to them, stand there with them hearing the words he whispered, waiting for him to touch her hand. She didn’t even have much to cry about. That woman put her head on his shoulder, sobbing, and he put his arm around her and held her there. He pushed her hair away from her face. Lila blushed to think how good it must have felt to her, to rest her head that way.

Well, Lila thought, can’t stand here staring. He ain’t going to look my way again. The hearse had to follow the road up to the cemetery, but the old man and most of the mourners took the path. She wanted to wait for him somewhere so she could speak a word to him, but what would she say? I’m back, I ain’t going nowhere? That probably wasn’t even true. She couldn’t just stay around because she thought it might matter to him. Then the cold weather would come and he’d be thinking about something else entirely. Somebody else to feel sorry for. Her stuck in Gilead with no reason to be there and no place to stay, knowing he would never look at her that way again, if he ever really did even once. Staying on anyway because the thought of him was about the best thing she had. Well, she couldn’t let
that
happen. Doll said, Men just don’t feel like they sposed to stay by you. They ain’t never your friends. Seems like you could trust ’em, they act like you could trust ’em, but you can’t. Don’t matter what they say. I seen it in my life a hundred times. She said, You got to look after your
own
self. When it comes down to it, you’re going to be doing that anyway.

Lila had money in her pocket. She went back to the store and bought a pack of Camels. On the way home she stopped and lighted one, cupping her hand around the flame, that old gesture. But it had been a long time, and whatever it is about cigarettes went straight to her head. Like I was a child! she thought. Oh! Well, I just got to do this more often. Here I am walking along the road all alone smoking a cig. They got hard names for women who do that kind of thing. I got to do it more often.

She had a habit of gathering up sticks, firewood, wherever she saw it, and she had a lot of it, so she could make a fire that would be hot enough when it burned down to roast that chicken. It was good of those people to pluck it and gut it before they gave it to her. She could put a stick through it and prop it up somehow, and spend the evening tending it, and eat it in the dark, in the doorway. She might go over to that farm the next morning and do some chores for them, because they gave her too much for the work she’d done. It didn’t set right. That would be Sunday morning.

It wasn’t the only time she’d felt like this, it surely wasn’t. Once, Doll went off by herself for a few days, after things started getting bad. When they were looking anywhere for work they must have wandered into a place Doll knew from before, and she had gone off on some business of her own and left Lila behind with the others. She’d never done that, not once. Lila had never spent an hour out of sight of her, except the time she spent at school, and then she hated to leave her and couldn’t wait to get back to her, just to touch her. Doll was always busy with one hand and hugging her against her apron with the other. That time she left Doane’s camp she didn’t tell any of them where she was going, but she did say she would be back as quick as she could. Lila had never really noticed before that the others didn’t talk to her much. She was always with Doll. Once, Marcelle called them the cow and her calf, and Doane smiled. That was after Tammany, when feelings were sore and even Mellie wouldn’t have much to do with her. Lila just kept very quiet and helped with whatever she could. By the second day she already felt them hardening against her, and by the third nobody looked at her, but they looked at each other. There was something they all understood and she should understand, too. On the fourth day, early in the morning, Doane said to her, Come along, and Arthur was with him and Mellie, and they walked down the road into some no-name town, right straight to the church. Doane said, Lila, now you sit on them steps and somebody will come along in a while. You stay there. Mellie don’t need to stay. You mind and you’ll be all right. Hear me, Lila?

She remembered Mellie peering at her the way she did when Lila had gotten a swat or a bee sting, curious to see if she would cry. She remembered them walking away, Arthur and Doane talking between themselves and Mellie tagging along after, and nobody looking back. They took Mellie along to calm her, like you would take an old dog along to quiet a horse or a cow you were going to sell, and Mellie understood, and it made her feel important. So Lila spent a long day in that no-name town, not even sure whether Doane meant they would come back for her, or Doll would, or whether they left her on the church steps because that’s where you ended up if you were an orphan. She walked up and down the street, two blocks, so she was always close enough to the church to see if anyone came looking for her. After a while a woman noticed her and brought her a piece of bread and butter. “You waiting for your mama, honey?” she said, and Lila couldn’t even look at her, couldn’t answer her. After a while the woman came back again. She said, “I got more work than I can do today. I’ll give you a dime if you’ll sweep up in front of my store.” Lila said, “Well, I got to stay by the church. That’s what they told me.” So the woman went and found the preacher. He was skinny and young. He looked like Arthur’s Deke playing at preacher. He bent down to ask her where her mother was, and who she was, and whether she had a mother, maybe a father, any family at all. She and Doll never answered questions like that. She said, “I figure I should just wait, I guess,” and the preacher said, “You’re welcome to wait here if you want to, and if you get tired of waiting you can let us know. We’ll find a place for you to sleep, if you decide you need one. We’ll get you some supper.” It was Doane who always told them not to trust preachers. This is how you got turned into an orphan. Then they put you in a place with other orphans and you can never leave. High walls around it. That’s what Mellie said. So she just shook her head, and he stood up and spoke with that woman about keeping an eye on her. And she could feel them keeping eyes on her, more and more of them, whispering about her and looking at her through their windows. Doane had waked her early that morning, so she was wearing the shabby clothes she slept in and hadn’t combed her hair.

When it was evening and again when it was night the preacher came to see how she was doing. The first time he brought a plate of food and set it down next to her, and the second time he brought a blanket. He said, “It can get chilly, sitting out here in the dark. If you’d like, I can spell you for a while. I’d sure like to have a word with these folks you’ve been waiting for. No? Well, I’ll ask again in an hour or so.”

And then she was just sitting there on the steps, wrapped up in the blanket, the town all quiet and the moon staring down at her, and there was Doll with her arms around her, saying, “Oh, child, I thought I never
was
going to find you!” Lila couldn’t quite wake up from what she had been remembering, and Doll knew what she was remembering, so she kept saying, “Oh, child, oh, child, this never should have happened! I never thought anything like this was going to happen! Four
days
I was gone!” And she kept hugging the child and stroking her face and her hair. Late as it was, the preacher was still keeping an eye on her, because he stepped out the door just then. He said, “You’re the mother, I take it?” and Doll said, “None of your damn business.” She probably wouldn’t have spoke so rough if he hadn’t been a preacher.

“Who are you?” he said. “I’d like to know who’s carrying off this child.”

She said, “I spose you would. Come on, Lila.”

But Lila couldn’t move. She wanted to rest her head on a bosom more Doll’s than Doll herself, to feel trust rise up in her like that sweet old surprise of being carried off in strong arms, wrapped in a gentleness worn all soft and perfect. “No,” she said, and drew herself away.

The preacher said, “This better wait till morning. I’d like Lila to have a chance to think this over.”

Doll said, “Mister, you ain’t nothing to her, and you ain’t nothing to me. Lila, you want to stay here?”

So the girl stood up and let herself be hugged, and let herself be guided down the walk. The preacher said, “She can keep the blanket.”

And Doll said, “
I
take care of her. She has what she needs.”

Lila would not cry. She could see Doll’s grief and pity and regret, and she took a bitter, lonely pride in the fact that she could see them and not forgive her and not cry.

She was sitting there remembering those times, and then she thought she heard someone out in the road. Footsteps. The scatter of gravel. She had a knife, but it wasn’t much use in the dark, because folks couldn’t see it. It was good only for scaring them off. If you cut somebody you were in a world of trouble no matter what the story was. Still, she eased toward it, where it was stuck in the floor behind her bedroll. She didn’t hear anything more for a minute or two, and then she heard steps again, whoever it was walking away. She thought, He found out what he wanted to know. I’m here, and I have a fire and supper. That greasy old hen must have smelled like a kind of prosperity. The thought pleased her. Now he’ll think I don’t need nothing from him. If it was him.

Doane must have decided that if the world was turning mean he might as well go along with it. He wasn’t a big fellow. He looked a lot like Hoagy Carmichael, though they didn’t know it at the time. But he always could look mean when he wanted, and Arthur would stand right behind him, at his shoulder, looking pretty mean, too, so someone might think if anything started he’d be right there to back him up. Before the times got hard they generally knew who they were dealing with, so they’d act that way only if a stranger came along and they didn’t like the look of him, if he showed up after dark, or if he just rubbed Doane the wrong way for no reason anybody needed to know. Doane always kept them safe and they trusted him. They knew he had a knife. Everybody else had one, too, but the way they thought of his knife made them think he probably had a gun. He could be as dangerous as he might ever need to be, they were sure of it. They never saw a gun, and he used his knife to whittle and to cut his meat just like they did. Still. Sometimes Arthur’s boys would start scuffling, then they’d get serious about it and they’d start scrapping, trying to do some harm. If Arthur stepped into it they’d just go after Arthur. But Doane would say, “That’s enough,” and they’d stop. Arthur might cuff them a little because he was their father and he had to teach them respect, but the fight was over when Doane said, “Enough.” He’d say, “Someday you’re going to hurt yourselves so bad you won’t be good for nothing, and then we’ll just leave you lying alongside the road.”