Lila

need to exist, then there is no reason to think about other things you don’t need as if they didn’t matter. You don’t need somebody standing beside you. You don’t, but you do. Take away every pleasure — but you couldn’t, because there can be pleasure in a sip of water. A thought. There was no reason for Doane to tie a ribbon on Marcelle’s wrist, and that was why she laughed when he did it, and loved him for it. Why they all loved them both. There was no reason to let an old man dip his hand in water and touch it to your forehead, as if he loved you the way people do who would touch your face and your hair. You’d have thought those babies were his own. All right, she thought. All right.

I have worried that you might think I did not take your question as seriously as I should have. I realize I have always believed there is a great Providence that, so to speak, waits ahead of us. A father holds out his hands to a child who is learning to walk, and he comforts the child with words and draws it toward him, but he lets the child feel the risk it is taking, and lets it choose its own courage and the certainty of love and comfort when he reaches his father over — I was going to say choose it over safety, but there is no safety. And there is no choice, either, because it is in the nature of the child to walk. As it is to want the attention and encouragement of the father. And the promise of comfort. Which it is in the nature of the father to give. I feel it would be presumptuous of me to describe the ways of God. Those that are all we know of Him, when there is so much we don’t know. Though we are told to call Him Father. And I know it would be presumptuous to speak as if the suffering that people feel as they pass through the world were not grave enough to make your question much more powerful than any answer I could offer. My faith tells me that God shared poverty, suffering, and death with human beings, which can only mean that such things are full of dignity and meaning, even though to believe this makes a great demand on one’s faith, and to act as if this were true in any way we understand is to be ridiculous. It is ridiculous also to act as if it were not absolutely and essentially true all the same. Even though we are to do everything we can to put an end to poverty and suffering.

I have struggled with this my whole life.

I still have not answered your question, I know, but thank you for asking it. I may be learning something from the attempt.

Sincerely,

John Ames

Well, he forgot he was writing to an ignorant woman. She’d have hated him for remembering. Still, she’d have to study this a little. A letter written to her. Lila, if I may.

Then what was she supposed to do? Write him a letter? She’d shame herself. Those big, ugly words on a piece of tablet paper, nothing spelled right. But then she’d shamed herself before and he never seemed to mind. Planting her spuds in his flower garden. Knocking at his door before the sun was well up to ask him her one question. Throwing her arms around him. Taking off with his sweater. It should have pained her to remember, but every time she rested her head on that old sweater she was just glad for it all. She had even thought about putting it in the fire, because it worried her how it kept him on her mind. Then maybe she could catch that bus. She certainly did wonder about herself. He should be thinking she’s crazy for sure by now. No sign of it in that letter, though. She thought, How can he forget what I am?

But she hadn’t yet put things right with those people who gave her the chicken. She could spend the morning there and then go down to the river and wash out some of her clothes. She’d better get started. Doane used to say that if you start after sunrise, you’ve wasted the day. The woman was still just as sickly, so Lila cleaned house for a while and then she chopped weeds for a while in the kitchen garden, and then, when no one was looking, she put the hoe in the shed and walked away. Now they were even.

She liked to do her wash. Sometimes fish rose for the bubbles. The smell of the soap was a little sharp, like the smell of the river. In that water you could rinse things clean. It might be a little brown after a good rain, soil from the fields, but the silt washed away or settled out. Her shirts and her dress looked to her like creatures that never wanted to be born, the way they wilted into themselves, sinking under the water as if they only wanted to be left there, maybe to find some deeper, darker pool. And when she lifted them out, held them up by their shoulders, they looked like pure weariness and regret. Like her own flayed skin. But when she hung them over a line and let the water run out, and the sun and the wind dry them, they began to seem like things that could live. At the church once they read the story about how the Queen of Egypt came down to a river and found a baby floating in a basket, and after that it was her baby. Live. The mother was supposed to kill the