But Lila could read, and Doll was glad of it, no matter what anybody thought. She said it would come in useful. Maybe it would sometime. Mostly Mellie was right — it told her what she’d have known anyway. NO HELP WANTED HERE. It had been good for knowing the names of towns that were too broke and forgotten to need names, which is why you had to read the sign to find it out. Still, when she was getting a can of beans and a spool of twine at the store, she had bought herself a tablet and a pencil. She was just curious to know what she hadn’t forgotten yet. She had turned down the corner of that page, and she copied out those words. And as for thy nativity, in the day thou wast born thy navel was not cut, neither wast thou washed in water to cleanse thee; thou wast not salted at all, nor swaddled at all. No eye pitied thee, to do any of these things unto thee, to have compassion upon thee; but thou wast cast out in the open field, for that thy person was abhorred, in the day that thou wast born. And when I passed by thee, and saw thee weltering in thy blood, I said unto thee, Though thou art in thy blood, live; yea, I said unto thee, Though thou art in thy blood, live. She thought, First time I ever heard of salting a baby. She made the letters slowly and carefully, not so easily even as she had made them as a child, but she told herself she would write a little every day. Practice, the teacher said, when her lessons were so clumsy-looking beside all the others that she was shamed almost to tears. You just need a little more practice.
And she began to look forward to morning. As soon as there was light enough, she sat at the door with the tablet on her knee and wrote. She copied words, because she wasn’t sure how to spell them, and this was a way to learn. Who would ever know if she spelled them wrong? Nobody ever came around. Still it shamed her to think how ignorant it might look to her if she weren’t too ignorant to know any better. So she wrote, In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. And the earth was waste and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. Waste and void. Darkness was upon the face of the deep. She would like to ask him about that. She wrote it all again, ten times.
She enjoyed a morning when the heat was coming on and she was still a little cold from washing in the river. At dawn the chant of the crickets and grasshoppers and the tree toads and cicadas was already slow. It was as if the heat and sunlight were taking more than they were meant to take, more damp, more smell, just because they could. They were so strong, and nothing else was really awake yet. There was a feeling of something like injury about the earth smell and the dew smell, the leaf smell. The tansy didn’t bother her so much anymore. Doane said deer hate tansy, and maybe that was why they hadn’t found the squash growing by the cabin, just a few seeds left lying by the stump other people had used to chop wood and clean fish and gut rabbits. She planted them, and now there were big, tented blooms, yellow as could be, and big vines trailing over the ground. She hoped the old man did not know where she was staying, and she knew he would never come there if he did. But if he ever did come, she hoped it would be in the morning. Those little white moths fluttering over it made that raggedy old meadow seem almost like a garden.
When they were children they used to be glad when they stayed in a workers’ camp, shabby as they all were, little rows of cabins with battered tables and chairs and moldy cots inside, and maybe some dishes and spoons. They were dank and they smelled of mice, and Marcelle made everybody sleep outside except when it rained, but they always had a cabin, and they kept everything they carried in it during the daytime. And Lila and Mellie and the boys, when they weren’t working, played that it was their house or their fort or their cave. They would search it for anything that might have been left there, and if they found half a bootlace or a piece of a broken cup they would make up stories about what it was and why they were lucky to find it. Once, Arthur’s boy Deke found a penny that had been left on a railroad track and squashed flat. He held it up to the door and put a nail through it. Somebody sometime had nailed a horseshoe above the door of a cabin they had for a week, and they felt this must be important.
