“You was a sickly child, and I told you old stories because my voice was a comfort to you. You remember.”
I’m talking to myself. Seeing things in the dark. Slipping away. Maybe it don’t matter.
Doll said, “Well, I tell you what. If I was still living I wouldn’t waste it standing around in no cellar wishing I was dead. You sure never learned that from me. I’m surprised you can hold up your head.”
Most times I can’t.
Do it anyway. That was her way of speaking.
There she was, missing Doll again. For so many years she had belonged to somebody. The cow and her calf. That was all right, because Doll wanted her there beside her. The way they used to laugh together, half the joke being that nobody else would know what the joke was. Now here she had this preacher, maybe the kindest man in the world, and no idea what to do with him. And here she had his baby, and what did she know about bringing up his child? She was reading the Bible, thinking she might understand what he was talking about sometimes, what he and old Boughton were laughing about, arguing over, but her mind would go off on its own and she’d be back in the cellar, farther away than ever. Or she’d be slipping off with that child in her arms, and she’d be whispering right in her ear, her cheek against the child’s hair, telling her what there was growing by the road that was good to eat and what was good to heal a sore, and they’d be whispering and laughing together when they found a way to get out of the rain, singing old songs together, the ones everybody knew that still felt like secrets when you taught them to a child. Sometime they’ll begin singing, and these are the words, you know them, too. Shall we gather at the river.
She had thought about all that, stealing off with a child, in the house in St. Louis. She came up out of the cellar that first morning and went straight to the kitchen, filthy as she was, and began scrubbing. Everything was greasy, and there was food scorched onto the pots and pans so they gave off smoke every time they were put on the stove. Everything was dusky with old smoke. Mice in the pantry. Mrs. came in and watched what she was doing for a minute or two. Lila saw that shrewd look on her face she expected to see, as if the whole thing were her idea. A cleaning woman came in now and then and wiped up just a little, since Mrs. hardly paid her anything at all. But Lila was working off a debt, so there was still a savings for her, small as it was. “The floor needs mopping,” Mrs. said, which meant what Lila was doing was all right with her. After a few days she decided to look around in the closets and drawers to find her own dress, and then she could go outside to beat the rugs. It made things nicer, so there was pleasure in it.
She hadn’t been at that kind of work more than a month before she heard them saying Missy was going to have a baby. “She’s so fat she didn’t know it herself.” Laughing, of course. “She was bawling all day yesterday, Mrs. is so mad at her. She don’t want to tell where her sister is, so Mrs. got to get rid of it, and she don’t like that one bit!”
“I guess we won’t be seeing Mack around for a while.”
“She’ll just take it to the nuns is all.”
“You ever see one of them nuns? I never did.”
“Best not to wonder about it. There used to be an old man come around in the middle of the night.”
“And then he took ’em to the nuns.”
“Can’t say he didn’t. I wouldn’t bet no money on it, though.”
“What else he going to do with a baby, fool?”
“Well, you going to believe what you want to believe, fool.”
And the other girl started crying. No end to the meanness.
That was when Lila started thinking she might just steal a child for herself. Nobody would mind. She could pick it up and walk out the door with it, for all they cared. Just so long as she waited till dark. And left through the back door. People don’t like to think about babies coming out of a house like that, so she’d be careful and wait till the street was empty. The gentlemen didn’t want to hear one word about babies. But that would just make everything easier. Mrs. would think it was her own idea. It would save her trouble, maybe a little money. So that would make up for most of whatever Lila still owed her. And the child would never be an orphan, because Lila would always be there looking after it, keeping it beside her. No tangled hair, no rickety legs. No cussing. She could hardly even sleep nights for the thought of it. She’d be out in the weather again, hugging a baby under her coat, watching for the minute that child would laugh, watching it play with a milkweed pod, a bit of string. Don’t take much to please a child, if that’s what you want to do. If Missy ever happened to find out what had come of her, she would be glad Lila took her, because Lila would show her every good thing she could think of, everything Doll had shown her. She would teach her how to get by. There was nothing so hard about it if you could read a little and you knew how to make change. All at once Lila was only there at that house waiting to leave it, waiting to take a child out into the good, cold night and show it the moon and the stars. Or out into the rain. It wouldn’t matter. All at once it was only the child that mattered to her, and all that sadness and meanness wasn’t her life at all. She could just walk away from it, taking with her one thing that would be worth the very worst of it. The surprise of it all made her laugh. She thought, Well, when was the last time I did that?
Lila had thought about what it might be like having a child of her own, but it never happened. Something must have gone wrong sometime and her body just wouldn’t do it. Maybe that was what came of being a feeble child herself, that her body didn’t wish that kind of life on anyone else. Or it could have been all the hard work. Once, in the old days, Mellie had gotten very curious about Arthur’s boy Deke, so Lila was, too. Doane told him to stop bothering those girls, which really meant those girls should stop bothering him. When Doll found out what they’d been up to, she told them they were asking for a world of trouble messing around with boys. By then Mellie had found out whatever it was she wanted to know and had gone on to something else, trying to play an old fiddle somebody gave her. It had taken Lila a little longer. But no trouble had come of it for either one of them, maybe because Doane had put an end to it, maybe because Lila, at least, couldn’t have that kind of trouble if she wanted to.
No matter. There was another way to get a child. If it happened to be one nobody else wanted around, then it was a good thing to take it up, tend to it. Who could know that better than she did. At the time she was thinking about this, making her plan, she’d had no idea there was anything about that written down anywhere. All she knew about the Bible was what she heard at the revival meetings she went to sometimes, in those days after Doll told her to go out on her own and live as she could, and she was so lonely that the crowds and the singing were a comfort to her. The preaching and praying were just something she put up with because she liked the rest of it. The best time to get a bag of popcorn. At one of those meetings she met a couple of girls who were on their own, too, and the three of them wandered around together for a while, looking for work, finding it sometimes, sharing what they had, going to the matinee, to the dance hall. There was a lonely kind of excitement about it because they knew it would only last for a while. Then one of them took up with a fellow and married him, the other one got a job working nights in a bakery, and Lila started clerking in a store. Things worked out more or less the way they had hoped, and that was the end of that.
Doll must have been following her from place to place somehow, even though Lila didn’t know herself where she would be from one day to the next. Doll wouldn’t have wanted Lila to see her panhandling, but it was hard to think how else she’d have been getting by. It might just have happened that Doll was in that town and saw her there, and watched to see where she lived. And it might just have happened that Doll and that old fellow had their knife fight there, close enough to Lila’s room that Doll could come to her when she had to. It could have been that the man, maybe her father, meant to find Lila, and Doll threw her husk of a body and her dreadful knife into making sure that didn’t happen. What might he have said to her, to Lila? She could only imagine him white as he was in that box, whiter at the bone of his nose. He’d stand there all slack in his joints like a zombie, stupefied by how dead he was, mumbling a little, and she would feel so sorry and so relieved that he couldn’t tell her what it was he came to tell her. Things like that happen in movies. That was probably where she got the idea. He might have wanted to tell her that he and her poor dear mother hadn’t meant to leave her long, but something happened. They were on the way to find her, and — what could he say? — the train went off a cliff and all their arms and legs were broken, and when they came to, they didn’t even know their own names. Years in the hospital. And while he was telling her some such thing Doll would come flying out of nowhere to cut him one more time. No wonder her thoughts were strange, considering what she had to think about.