Doll was hard that way. All of them were. Talking to strangers was putting yourself within the reach of sudden harm. What might they say? What might they seem to be thinking? Then you were left with it afterward, like remembering a bad dream, and nothing to do about it except to hate the next stranger a little more. Those times she used to think, I have a knife in my garter, and you don’t know how you’re pressing up against the minute I decide to use it. Doll told her, Don’t cut nobody with it. You don’t want all that to deal with. Just give them a look at it. Most of the time, that’s plenty. But there were times when the merciless knife was a comfort to her. Even when she only thought somebody might have looked at her the wrong way, she’d tell herself she had that furious old knife and it had done the worst already. That was before she had a child to look after. You have to stay out of trouble for the sake of your child.
She still actually thought like that, when she let her thoughts sink down to where they rested. She had never taken a dime that wasn’t hers or hurt a living soul, to speak of. But that’s what her heart was like sometimes, secret and bitter and scared. She had stolen the preacher’s child, and she laughed to think of it. Making him learn his verses and say his prayers would be like a joke, when they were off by themselves, getting by as they could. She did steal that Bible, and she’d keep it with her, and she’d show him that part about the baby toiling in its blood, and she’d say, That was me, and somebody said, “Live!” I never will know who. And then you came, red as blood, naked as Adam, and I took you to my breast and you lived when they never thought you would. So you’re mine. Gilead has no claim on you, or John Ames either, or the graveyard that has no place for you anyway.
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.”