Then she would put on the nightdress again, walk back to the cabin, brush the litter of leaves and sticks off her feet as well as she could, wrap herself in her blanket, and lie awake, her body slowly warming the damp of the dress, and she would think about the way things happened. One night, because she had found those words in the Bible, thinking about how it could have happened that she was born and had lived. Sickly as she was when Doll took her up. Then how to imagine whoever it was that had bothered with her even that much, to keep body and soul together. It was nothing against Doll to think there had to have been someone there before her, someone who held her and fed her. She thought of the preacher’s wife, that girl with her newborn baby in her arms. The woman who told her about them said, “She just slipped away, and in a few hours the baby followed her.” And the preacher was left all alone.
What had become of Mellie, who was never scared? She could ask him about that. Mellie’d poke a snake with a stick just to get a better look at it. Once, she climbed from a fence railing onto the back of a young bull calf, hanging on with her arms around its neck. Doane saw what she was doing and came over to the fence and climbed up and lifted her off the thing before it could really decide how to get rid of her. It had scraped her leg against a post and left it raw enough that the flies bothered it, but she just said she had a notion that if you rode a bull every day from the time it was young you could ride it when it was growed. Then you could go anywhere and folks would say, Here she comes, riding on that bull. Doane said, “Well, that ain’t your bull. Four, five days we’ll be gone from here.” And she said, “I coulda stayed on that thing if you’d let me. I know that much.” He laughed. “You know, if he’d decided to, he’d of broke that leg. For a start. Then, when you’re useless, who’s sposed to look after you?” She said, “My leg don’t even hurt that bad!”
He was always telling her she was going to break her neck sometime and they’d have to just go on and leave her lying beside the road. She never paid any mind to that at all. And she never broke her neck, though sometimes she did seem to be trying to. She saw some town girls skipping rope and found a piece of rope herself and figured out how to do it better than they did, crossing her arms, hopping on one foot. She tried a sort of handspring, but without her hands, since they had to be holding the rope. She’d fall in the road and come right back up again, and she’d say, “I pertinearly done it that time.” A skinny, freckled child with her white brows drawn together and her raggedy white hair flying, meaning to make herself the best rope jumper there ever was. If she saw an outhouse she’d go into it, looking for a catalogue, and if she found one she’d come back with a few pages and study them for days, trying to decide what things were and what they were good for. She’d say, “I can’t quite make out the words yet. I’m working on it.” Doll called it all tomfoolery, and she’d say to Lila, “I’m glad you don’t go acting like that,” even before Lila was strong enough to have tried to, even though she never showed any sign of wanting to. She was Doll’s girl, always at her side if she could be. Mellie had walked the same roads every summer, and she could wander away without getting lost. She would try now and then to make a chum of Lila, telling her she knew where there were huckleberries, or that she would show her how to catch a fish in her bare hands, but Lila always wanted Doll near her, at least in her sight.
What could the old man say about all those people born with more courage than they could find a way to spend, and then there was nothing to do with it but just get by? And that was when the times were decent. She had always been jealous of Mellie because the others took pleasure from her pranks and her notions. She was always making them laugh. Once, Mellie
