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 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
