Lila: A Novel (29 page)

It was a good-looking garden, though. A garden never really belongs to somebody else if you’re the one that takes care of it. The soil was nice as could be, and the plants had all those good smells. Just brushing by the tomato plants, getting that musk on them, made her clothes seem clean. She was still waiting to hear somebody say the name of the place. It was painted on the water tower, so coming to town she walked along looking up at that word, wondering what it was supposed to sound like. Of course it was a Bible word. The old man would tell her that.

She said to the child, “Now I been in Gilead a pretty long time. A lot longer than I expected. And you’re going to be born here. If I leave I’ll take you with me, I will for sure. I’ll tell you the name of the place, though. People should know that much about themselves anyway. The name of your father. Could be I won’t ever leave. The old man might not give me cause.” And then she almost laughed, because she knew he never would. She said, “That old man loves me. I got to figure out what to do about it.”

She never stayed away from church anymore, for one thing. It still reminded her of that first time, when she was sitting there, rain dripping off her hair, down her neck, cold rain soaked into her shoes, hoping he wouldn’t notice her. He was going on about baptism. A birth and a death and a marriage, he said. A touch of water and these children are given the whole of life. The sacraments remind us. She was thinking what sense did that make, but his eyes drifted across the congregation and rested on her face, as if he thought she might know what he meant and could say yes, it was true, what he meant if not the words he could find to put it in. Jesus drank from our cup and shared our baptism, he said, which meant He suffered and died like everybody else. And she was thinking how strange it was for them to be there singing songs to somebody who had lived and died like anybody. Doll would say, That’s the way it is. They could as well be singing about Doll. And then she was thinking of that song they used to like in St. Louis, what a night to go dreaming, and his eyes drifted back to her again, and he looked at her until he remembered not to. When she thought about it afterward, she knew she couldn’t have counted to five before he looked down at his papers and then at the people in front of him. Still.

Now that she was his wife he looked at her whenever he mentioned something they might have talked about, to let her know he thought about the questions she asked him, or questions she knew he asked himself. Sometimes he gave the sermon to her to read before he preached it. One morning he read to her at breakfast, something he had written during the night. “Very rough,” he said. “Half of it I’ve crossed out. And this was supposed to be the clean copy.” He cleared his throat. “So. ‘Things happen for reasons that are hidden from us, utterly hidden for as long as we think they must proceed from what has come before, our guilt or our deserving, rather than coming to us from a future that God in his freedom offers to us.’ My meaning here is that you really can’t account for what happens by what has happened in the past, as you understand it anyway, which may be very different from the past itself. If there is such a thing. ‘The only true knowledge of God is born of obedience,’ that’s Calvin, ‘and obedience has to be constantly attentive to the demands that are made of it, to a circumstance that is always new and particular to its moment.’ Yes. ‘Then the reasons that things happen are still hidden, but they are hidden in the mystery of God.’ I can’t read my own writing. No matter. ‘Of course misfortunes have opened the way to blessings you would never have thought to hope for, that you would not have been ready to understand as blessings if they had come to you in your youth, when you were uninjured, innocent. The future always finds us changed.’ So then it is part of the providence of God, as I see it, that blessing or happiness can have very different meanings from one time to another. ‘This is not to say that joy is a compensation for loss, but that each of them, joy and loss, exists in its own right and must be recognized for what it is. Sorrow is very real, and loss feels very final to us. Life on earth is difficult and grave, and marvelous. Our experience is fragmentary. Its parts don’t add up. They don’t even belong in the same calculation. Sometimes it is hard to believe they are all parts of one thing. Nothing makes sense until we understand that experience does not accumulate like money, or memory, or like years and frailties. Instead, it is presented to us by a God who is not under any obligation to the past except in His eternal, freely given constancy.’ Because I don’t mean to suggest that experience is random or accidental, you see. ‘When I say that much the greater part of our existence is unknowable by us because it rests with God, who is unknowable, I acknowledge His grace in allowing us to feel that we know any slightest part of it. Therefore we have no way to reconcile its elements, because they are what we are given out of no necessity at all except God’s grace in sustaining us as creatures we can recognize as ourselves.’ That’s always seemed remarkable to me, that we can do that. That we can’t help but do it. ‘So joy can be joy and sorrow can be sorrow, with neither of them casting either light or shadow on the other.’”

As he was reading, sitting across from her in his robe and slippers with his hair rumpled and his glasses unpolished and a silvery shadow on his jaw, he glanced up at her from time to time. He said, “It’s very rough. I had a thought in the middle of the night, and I had to get up and write it out. Half the time when I write something that way it turns out the next morning to be nonsense. The sobering effects of daylight. But this still makes sense to me. It seems obvious, if anything. I believe. Of course it’s early yet.”

“Well,” she said. “Near as I can tell, you were wanting to reconcile things by saying they can’t be reconciled. I guess I know what you mean by reconcile.”

He laughed. “Yes, clearly you do know. And I see your point. An excellent point.” He was pleased with her. He’d mention it to Boughton.

She said, “You been worrying about Mrs. Ames.” That poor girl.

“Yes. Yes, I have. I had an idea that I would be eternally loyal to her. I said as much to her. That was important to me for many years. The bride of my youth, and so on. After a while it may have been my loyalty I was loyal to. But I did the best I could.”

“Then I come along.”

“Yes, you came along. Thank the Lord.”

She said, “If you thought dead was just dead, then you wouldn’t have to worry about any of this.”

“I guess that’s true. It could be true. When I talk with people who aren’t religious, I’m often surprised by what they tell me, though. I’m not sure anyone has ever said that to me, dead is just dead. They’re loyal, too. Not like I was. But that was unusual. I believe I may have taken a certain pride in it.”

“You’re still loyal. You’re up all night writing to her.”

“Well, yes. In a way I suppose that’s true. And writing to you. You asked me that question.”

“It don’t matter. She must have been a sweet girl.”

He nodded. “She was. She was.” He said, “So you covered her grave with roses. That was a wonderful thing.”

She shrugged. “No folks of my own.”

“I can’t tell you what I felt when I saw that. I don’t think there’s a name for it.”

“You didn’t know it was just me doing it.”

“Just you,” he said. “If it had been a miracle, if an angel had done it, then there’d have been no one to walk with in the evening, no one to give that old locket to.”

“No one to come creeping into your bed.”

He laughed and colored. “True enough.”

“No baby.”

“Also true.”

They were quiet for a while. Then he said, “God is good.”

“Well,” she said, “some of the time.”

“All of the time.”

She said, “I’ve been tramping around with the heathens. They’re just as good as anybody, so far as I can see. They sure don’t deserve no hellfire.”

He laughed. “Well, that baby you talk about, cast out and weltering in her blood, the Lord takes her up. He looks after the strays. Especially the strays. That story is a parable, about how He bound himself to Jerusalem when He told her, ‘Live.’ It’s like a marriage. More than a marriage.”

“And then she takes to whoring.”

“That means she starts worshipping false gods. Idols. And He’s still faithful to her. To their marriage. That’s the important point. Because in the Bible, marriage—” He said, “I used to think it was supposed to be eternal. Like the faithfulness of God.”

“What do you think now?”

He was quiet for a minute. “I think I’m married to Lila now. Extremely married to her. And faithful as I know how to be. Not that that can mean much, I’m so old. And you’ll want to make another life for yourself when I’m gone. I’ll want you to do that. Especially if there’s a child.” He shook his head. “Since there will be a child.”

“No,” she said. “I’m going to have just the one husband.” One was more than she’d ever expected.

“Well, you know, that’s good of you to say, but it’s not always wise to make promises. There can be a lot more involved in keeping them than it seems at the time.”

She said, “That’s not a promise. It’s just a fact.”

He laughed. “Even better.”

And then he went upstairs to make himself into the presentable old preacher all those people had passed on the street every day of their lives, seeing him change and never thinking of it because his life never changed, all those years she was off somewhere or other getting by any way she could. And her life was just written all over her, she knew it without looking, because that’s how it was with all the women she used to know. And somehow she found her way to the one man on earth who didn’t see it. Or maybe he saw it the way he did because he had read that parable, or poem, or whatever it was. Ezekiel. The Bible was truer than life for him, so it was natural enough that his thinking would be taken from it. Maybe it never was normal thinking, since there were preachers in this house his whole life, quarreling about religion and talking to Jesus.

It could be that the wildest, strangest things in the Bible were the places where it touched earth. Doane said once that he saw a cyclone cross a river. It took the water in its path up into itself and crossed on dry ground, and it was just as white as a cloud, white as snow. Something like that would only last for a minute, but it showed you what kind of thing can happen. It would shed that water and take up leaves and branches, cats and dogs, cows if it wanted to, grown men, and it would change everything they thought they knew. Those women in St. Louis, they stepped into a place that looked like any old house and there was Mrs. and the damn credenza and the dress-up clothes that smelled like sweat and old perfume. And all you had to do was pierce your ears and rouge your cheeks and pretend not to hate the gentlemen more than they would stand for. It was as if that house had been picked up by a black cloud and turned around and dropped down again in the very same spot. Everything in it was still there, but it was changed, wrong, and from then on everybody in it knew too much about the worst that could possibly happen, even if they couldn’t say what it was. Then it might be that she seemed to him as if she came straight out of the Bible, knowing about all those things that can happen and nobody has the words to tell you.
And I looked, and, behold, a stormy wind came out of the north, a great cloud, with a fire infolding itself, and a brightness round about it, and out of the midst thereof as it were glowing metal, out of the midst of the fire.
It says right there that even fire isn’t hot enough to give you any idea.

*   *   *

It got to be Christmas time. They put a big wreath on the church door. Snow fell. People came to the house with plates of cookies and sat in the parlor for fifteen minutes talking about nothing. Lila’s belly was rounder every day. The women told her that since she carried high it would probably be a boy. That wasn’t how she’d imagined, but all right. One lady brought her two pleated smocks, one red and one green, both with rickrack around the pockets, which made her think of that dress she’d bought cheap, as she thought at the time. She wondered how much Mrs. figured she’d left still owing her. That woman would know down to the dime.

The deacons brought in a pine tree and set it up, so she offered them some of the cookies their own wives had brought the day before, and they sat in the parlor for fifteen minutes. And then the Reverend went up in the attic and brought down a box with ornaments in it. He said, “It’s been—I don’t know how many years!” There was a tree in the church, and that used to be all he needed, those years when he was alone. He spent an hour untangling the strings of lights, and then he plugged them in, and when they didn’t come on he started working through them to find the bad bulbs. He said, “This used to take a lot of the charm out of Christmas for me. When I was young and impatient.” Finally they did light up, and he strung the tree with them and turned off the lamps. “I’d almost forgotten,” he said. The room did look very pretty. “Next year we’ll have somebody here to help us enjoy it.” At the bottom of the box there were ornaments made of thread spools and colored paper and walnut shells. The children. “Nothing here we can use,” he said. “I’ll stop by the dime store tomorrow.” And then he carried the box up to the attic again.

She just watched. He was thinking about next year, daring to say out loud that they’d have brought a new little Christian into the world who would take these things in with his baby eyes and believe them to be the way things are. For unto us is born this day in the City of David a Savior. A day so very long ago. Who is David? What is a Savior? He might never think to ask. It would seem to him that he’d known it all from the beginning. That’s why we have to hang lights all over everything, and tinsel. That’s why we sing all those songs. It was very nice, in some ways. People would come to the door, singing. The Methodists and the Catholics and the Lutherans, people they barely knew.

Sometimes in St. Louis a few of the gentlemen would stand outside singing, things that didn’t sound much like Christmas. Mrs. closed the house for the holiday, out of respect, she said, but also because she thought she might get shut down for good if she didn’t. She kept the shades drawn and the lights off so no one would come to the door. She made the girls live on cold beans and cheese sandwiches so no cooking smells could drift into the street. She took the radio into her own room and turned it so low they could barely hear it. Those men knew they could devil her half to death and she couldn’t even open the door to yell at them for it. So Christmas for the girls was just pinochle in the twilight of the drawn shades and then, when the sun went down, fighting and weeping and telling old stories everybody had heard and nobody believed except the ones who were just plain simple. Peg would be singing along with the dirty songs they could hear from the street sometimes, in that way she had of pretending she was in on the joke. Doane never said a word about Christmas, and Doll didn’t either. They were always just somewhere trying to get through the winter. It was better for Lila while she worked at the hotel, but she never really liked it. Now here she was with an old man dreaming about his baby and humming “Silent Night.” He was happier than he wanted to be. Someone knocked at the door with a plate of cookies, and when he brought it in, he said, “Gingerbread!” as if that was supposed to mean something to her. Somebody had put frosting buttons and collars and smiling mouths on them, as if they had the child there with them already.