Lila: A Novel Read Online Free PDF

understand that, too. Better that he shouldn’t be too surprised. She knew he wouldn’t ask for more particulars, not now.
    He was quiet, and then he said, “You are the only person in this world I want to have sitting here beside me. That isn’t what I think, it’s what I know. I guess it doesn’t explain anything. Have you had supper?”
    “Some bread and jam.”
    He patted her knee. “I wouldn’t call that supper. We have to take care of you.” The kitchen was empty, so he went to the neighbors and came back with a bottle of milk and a can of baked beans. He laughed. “We’ll do better tomorrow.” She knew about that other wife and that other baby. If she had given herself some time to think, she’d have realized they would be on his mind.
    *   *   *
    She was there in Gilead in the first place because once when she was walking along the road, probably hoping to get to Sioux City, tired of walking, tired of carrying her suitcase and her bedroll, she had noticed a little house sitting a way off by a cluster of cottonwood trees, a sort of cabin someone had built and abandoned along with the fields around it. So she thought she’d take a look. Then she knew for sure it was abandoned because people had camped there and left clutter behind, and broken up the stoop for firewood, and no one had ever fixed any of it or cleared it away. The people who left the mess might come back and tell her it was their place—just look at the beer cans and the snoose tins, who you think put them there? She had seen that happen before. You seen them spent cartridges out by the trees? You think it was squirrels dropped them? Nothing to do then but move on.
    But she had been there for weeks and so far no one had come. She knew how to get by so long as nobody bothered her. Plenty of fish in the river. There were dandelion greens. Mushrooms. You can chew pine sap if you want to. You can eat the roots of things. Cattails. Wild carrot. Nettles are very good if you know how to pick them and cook them. Doll said you just had to know what wouldn’t kill you. Most folks don’t eat squirrel, but you can. Turtles. Snakes, if need be. Lila couldn’t really live that way for very long, only until the weather turned cold. But she wanted to stay in one place for a while. The loneliness was bad, but it was better than anything else she could think of. It was probably loneliness that made her walk the mile or so into town every few days just to look at the houses and stores and the flower gardens. She never meant to talk to anybody. She had a dress she wore and a dress she saved, and she was wearing the good one, the clean one, the one she kept a little nice so that she could go walking where people might see her, when she got caught in the rain that Sunday and stepped into the church, just to save her dress. And there was that old man, speaking above the sound of the rain against the windows. He looked at her, and looked away again. “Blessed be the name of the Lord.”
    They didn’t really ask for money. They passed a plate, but nobody made you put anything in it. She began counting up the days, so she would know when it was Sunday again. She lost count once. People living the way she was could go crazy. She began to wonder if that had already happened to her. She thought, If I’m crazy, I may as well do what I feel like doing. No point being crazy if you have to worry all the time about what people are thinking anyway. There were ten or twenty good reasons why she would not go to church. Doll never did. The place was full of strangers. She had only the one dress to wear. They all knew the songs, they knew what they were supposed to do and say and what it meant. They all knew each other. The preacher said things that bothered her, she couldn’t make sense of them. Resurrection. But she guessed she liked the candles and the singing. She guessed she didn’t have a better place to be.
    She was probably crazy, and she was probably