He said, “Hello. Good morning,” and waited, as if he expected her to explain herself. Then he said, “Please come in.” When she stepped inside the house, he began to apologize for how bare it was. “I’m not much for keeping things up. I suppose you can see that. Still—” and he gestured at the sofa, which was covered with papers and books. “Let me make a little space for you here. I don’t have much company. You can probably see that, too.” She didn’t know then that it would have embarrassed him to have her there, a woman alone with him, a stranger. But he didn’t want her to leave, she did know that. “Can I get you a glass of water? I could make coffee, if you have a few minutes.”
She had a day, a week, a month. She said, “I got nowhere to be.”
He smiled at her, or to himself, as if he saw that the mystery of her presence might just be something a few dollars could help with. He said, “Then I’ll make coffee.”
She stood up. “I don’t even know why I come here.” She recognized that smile. She had hated people for it.
“Well— We could talk a little. Sometimes that helps. I mean, helps make things clearer—”
She said, “I don’t much like to talk.”
He laughed. “Well, that’s fine, too. A lot of people around here feel that way. But they do enjoy a cup of coffee.”
She said, “I don’t know why I come here. That’s a fact.”
He shrugged. “Since you are here, maybe you could tell me a little about yourself?”
She shook her head. “I don’t talk about that. I just been wondering lately why things happen the way they do.”
“Oh!” he said. “Then I’m glad you have some time to spare. I’ve been wondering about that more or less my whole life.” He brought her into the kitchen and seated her at the table, and after he had made coffee they sat there together for a while, saying practically nothing. Yes, the weather had been fine. He traced a scratch on the table with his finger. And then he began to tell her about the brother and sisters who died before he was born, and how his mother said once that the stairs were scuffed by the children’s shoes because she could never keep them from running in the house. And when she found a scrawl in a book, she said, “One of the children must have done it.” There was a kind of fondness and sadness in her voice that he heard only when she mentioned them. So when he found a scratch or a mark on something, he still thought, One of the children. His brother Edward, the oldest, was spared the diphtheria that took the rest of them. So Edward knew the children, and he had stories about them. One, closest to him, was named John, a family name. Once, he heard his brother call him Non-John, thinking he was too young to understand. Because Edward missed the brother he had lost, he always did miss him. He was — very loyal to him. Their mother and father and grandfather seldom mentioned those children. They could hardly bear to think of them. “There’s been a good deal of sorrow in this old place,” he said. “Some of it mine. Some I used to wish were mine. So I sort of live with the question. Why things happen. I guess this isn’t much help.”
She liked to hear people tell stories. The saddest ones were the best. She wondered if that meant anything at all. Of course, when people talked about themselves that way, they were usually trying to get you to talk about yourself in the same way. That would be what this preacher wanted. But she and Doll had a secret between them. The old woman who took them in said, “Doll, you know you can go to jail for stealing a child. And I can go to jail for helping you do it.” She said, “You’re flirting with the worst kind of trouble.” So Lila couldn’t think of breathing a word, even now. Stealing a child, when Doll had come to her like an angel in the wilderness. The Reverend talked about angels, and the notion helped her to think about certain things. She was swept up and carried away, with that old shawl around her.
He said, “I don’t often talk about this. I don’t often talk to anyone who doesn’t know about it already. You’ve come here to ask me a question, and I’ve been going on about myself.”
She said, “I liked that story.”
He looked away from her and laughed. “It is a story, isn’t it? I’ve never really thought of it that way. And I suppose the next time I tell it, it will be a better story. Maybe a little less true. I might not tell it again. I hope I won’t. You’re right not to talk. It’s a sort of higher honesty, I think. Once you start talking, there’s no telling what you’ll say.”
She said, “I wouldn’t know about that.”
“Apparently not. I do. I’ve spent my life talking— But you have that question. Maybe you could help me understand it a little better. Tell me how it came to be on your mind. In a few words.”
She said, “I got time to myself. I think about things.”
“Yes. Clearly you do. Interesting things.”
“I spose everybody thinks about ’em.”
He laughed. “Right. But that’s interesting, too.”
“On Sundays you talk about the Good Lord, how He does one thing and another.”
“Yes, I do.” And he blushed. It was as if he expected that question, too, and was surprised again that the thing he expected for no reason was actually happening. He said, “I know that I am not — adequate to the subject. You have to forgive me.”
She nodded. “That’s all you going to say.”
“No. No, it isn’t. I think you are asking me these questions because of some hard things that have happened, the things you won’t talk about. If you did tell me about them, I could probably not say more than that life is a very deep mystery, and that finally the grace of God is all that can resolve it. And the grace of God is also a very deep mystery.” He said, “You can probably tell I’ve said these same words too many times. But they’re true, I believe.” He shrugged, and watched his finger trace the scar on the table.
After a minute she said, “Well, all right. I better go now.” She didn’t always remember yet to say thank you for the coffee, thank you for your time and your trouble. He walked her to the door and opened it for her, and she forgot to thank him for that. He looked tired, and as though he was sorry the conversation had ended. He said, “Thank you for coming by. It has been interesting. For me.” Then he said, “Whatever it is, or was, that you didn’t tell me, I regret it. Very much.”
Still, she believed she must have turned him against her, when she thought back on it. Showing up at his door like that. But the next few days people she didn’t know would stop her on the road and offer her work, even a spare room. One lady invited her for a supper at the church, and she went, hoping the Reverend wouldn’t be there. They said they expected him, but he didn’t come. That was the lady who told her about the wife and the child, speaking very softly out of respect for the sadness of the story. She said it was something he never talked about to anyone. Reverend Boughton, of course, but no one else. “He forgets things, like he did the supper tonight,” she said. “He’s always been that way.”
If she stayed in Gilead, she could earn some money. She could buy some things at the store. Soap, and thread, and a box of salt. She could be in out of the weather when she wanted. All they asked her to do was a little gardening, a little washing and ironing, and she could do those things as well as anybody. So it wasn’t really charity. They didn’t bother her with talk. They gave her Sundays to herself. If she left she had nowhere to go especially, except not St. Louis. She decided she might as well stay for a while, putting a little aside to make things easier when she changed her mind. It was one of those Sundays, after church, that she thought to walk up to the cemetery. She found the wife and child there, sure enough. The grass was mowed, but nobody had thought to prune the roses.