St. Louis. Much better to be there in the shack by herself. In the evening, with her potatoes roasting outside. Doane used to push a spud out of the fire with a stick, and they’d toss it one to another until one of them could stand to hold on to it, and then it was his. One of Arthur’s boys, always. They’d just go to sleep when it got dark. She should buy some candles, maybe even a kerosene lamp, so she could read and practice her writing if she felt like it. But light did draw bugs. And it was better if no one saw the shack at night. Not that people passing by wouldn’t notice her fire. But light made you blind in the dark and there might be something you really needed to see out there. The evening was peaceful. But she couldn’t stop wondering about that letter. She might just light a cigarette. She might strike another match to read the first few words. They were: Dear Lila (if I may), You asked me once why things happen the way they do. Well, she wasn’t really expecting that. I have felt considerable regret over my failure to respond to your question. She shook out the match. He wasn’t asking for his umbrella back anyway.
The next morning she took her tablet and copied, as neatly as she could, You must have thought that it has never occurred to me to wonder about the deeper things religion is really concerned with, the meaning of existence, of human life. You must have thought I say the things I do out of habit and custom, rather than from experience and reflection. I admit there is some truth in this. It is inevitable, I suppose. She wrote it ten times. Well, what did old Ezekiel say next? And their feet were straight feet; and the sole of their feet was like the sole of a calf’s foot; and they sparkled like burnished brass. She wrote this ten times. Salted babies, sparkling calves’ feet. Strange as it was, there was something to it. Well, there was the strangeness of it. That old man had no idea. Let us pray, and they all did pray. Let us join in hymn number no matter what, and they all sang. Why did they waste candles on daylight? Him standing there, talking about people dead who knows how long, if the stories about them were even true, and most of the people listening, or trying to listen. There was no need for any of it. The days came and went on their own, without any praying about it. And still, everywhere, meetings and revivals, people seeing the light. Finding comfort where there was no comfort, just an old man saying something he’d said so many times he probably didn’t hear it himself. It was about the meaning of existence, he said. All right. She knew a little bit about existence. That was pretty well the only thing she knew about, and she had learned the word for it from him. It was like the United States of America — they had to call it something. The evening and the morning, sleeping and waking. Hunger and loneliness and weariness and still wanting more of it. Existence. Why do I bother? He couldn’t tell her that, either. But he knows, she could see it in him. Why does he want more of it, with his house so empty, his wife and child so long in the ground? The evening and the morning, the singing and the praying. The strangeness of it. You couldn’t stop looking. He would walk up the hill to that sad place and find them all covered in roses. If he knew, and if he didn’t know, who had made them bloom that way, he would think it was strange and right. There was no need for roses.
Marcelle chose that name for herself after she heard some women talking in a beauty parlor. When he started turning mean, Doane began calling her Marcelle in a way that let you know it wasn’t her real name. When he did that, it made her cry sometimes. She pretended, but she always had, and they had always wanted her to. Lila and Mellie loved to watch when she opened the little box where she kept her powder and rouge and lip rouge, her eyebrow pencil. She almost never opened it, it was so precious. The stale sweet smell of it. Sometimes she let them brush out her hair. They did all think she was pretty. They felt a little pleasure and a little envy at the way Doane favored her. He would take her arm to help her through a muddy place in the road. Once, he bought ribbons at a carnival and tied one in her hair and one in a bow around her neck, and wound one around her wrist and one around her ankle, kneeling right on the ground to do it and setting her foot on his bent knee. Doll said, “They’re married people.” Lila had no particular notion of what the word “married” meant, except that there was an endless, pleasant joke between them that excluded everybody else and that all the rest of them were welcome to admire. It was that way before times got hard. After that, Doane seemed almost angry at Marcelle because there wasn’t much he could spare her. Still, he looked for her and he stood beside her, even when he had no word to say. There are the things people need, and the things people don’t need. That might not be true. Maybe they don’t need existence. If you took that away, everything else would go with it. So if you don’t
