Lila: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

leaving, so she decided she would talk to that preacher. There were a hundred reasons why she would never go to his house, in that same old dress, and ask him a question. She was never one to put herself forward. But there was no way to keep the mice out of that shack. The fields around it were going all to tansy. In St. Louis they gave them tansy tea, and she hated the smell of it. So she had decided to leave. Then why not ask him? He would just say, That crazy woman came to my door with something on her mind, and then I never saw her again after that. Soon enough he’d forget it ever happened. He wouldn’t know what to tell her. But who else was she ever going to ask?
    When he saw her at the door he looked surprised and not surprised, as if he had no reason to expect her and there she was anyway. He was in his shirtsleeves and house slippers, looking older than he did in the pulpit, and she thought she had come too early in the morning. But what did it matter.
    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