“When I was a child. I was thinking about old times the other day.” She wouldn’t have told him even that much except that she saw the blush deepen when she said once she knew a man.
He nodded. “I see.” The Reverend never asked her to talk about old times. He didn’t seem to let himself wonder where she had been, how she had lived all the years before she wandered into the church dripping rain. Doane always said churches just want your money, so they all stayed away from churches, walked right past them as if they were smarter than the other people. As if they had any money for the churches to want. But the rain was bad and that day was a Sunday, so there was no other doorway for her to step into. The candles surprised her. It might all have seemed so beautiful because she’d been missing a few meals. That can make things brighter somehow. Brighter and farther away. As if when you put your hand out you would touch glass. She watched him and forgot she was in the room with him and he would see her watching. He baptized two babies that morning. He was a big, silvery old man, and he took each one of those little babies in his arms as gently as could be. One of them was wearing a white dress that spilled down over his arm, and when it cried a little from the water he put on its brow, he said, “Well, I bet you cried the first time you were born, too. It means you’re alive.” And she had a thought that she had been born a second time, the night Doll took her up from the stoop and put her shawl around her and carried her off through the rain. She ain’t your mama, I can tell.
It seemed like that girl knew everything. Mellie. She could bend over backward till her hands were flat on the ground. She could do cartwheels. She said, “I know that woman ain’t your mama. She telling you things your mama would have told you already. Don’t go sucking on your hand? Like you was a baby? You probly an orphan.” She said, “I used to know an orphan once. Her legs was all rickety. Same as yours. She couldn’t talk neither. That’s probly why she was an orphan. She sort of turned out wrong.”
Mellie was curious about them, if the others were not. She would drift back to walk with them, and she would put her face close up to the child’s face, to stare at her. “She got that sore on her foot. That’s one thing. Put some dandelion milk on it. I got some here. I bet I could carry her. I could.” She’d be eating the bloom of a dandelion, the yellow part, or chewing red clover. She was pretty well brown with freckles, and her hair was almost white from the sun, even her eyebrows and eyelashes. “I hate these old coveralls. The boys about wore ’em out and now I’m wearing ’em. They’re mostly just patches. Doane says they’re better for working. I got a dress. My ma’s going to let the hem down.” And then she’d be off, walking on her hands.
Doll said, “She likes to pester. Don’t you mind.”
Lila didn’t talk then. Doll said, “She can. She just don’t want to.” It was partly that Doll gave her anything she needed. She still woke her up in the night sometimes to give her a morsel of cold mush. And Lila never even knew there was such a thing as cussing, till that old woman told her. It just meant leave me alone, most of the time. Once, she told that old woman she wisht she was in hell with her back broke, and the old woman yanked her up and gave her a swat and said, You got to stop that cussing. She’d gone off somewhere and come back with a little bottle of medicine for the sore on the child’s foot that didn’t heal, and it did smart when she put it on, but it hurt her feelings that the child would be hateful about it. Lila didn’t know where to hide, so she just went into a corner and curled up as small as she could, with her eyes shut tight. The old woman said, “Oh, mercy! Doll, come in here! She’s back in the corner again. Was there ever such a child!”
Doll came in and knelt down by her, smelling of sweat and sunshine, and lifted her into her lap. She whispered, “What you doing now, biting on that hand like a little baby!” The old woman brought the shawl, and Doll put it around her. And the old woman said, “She’s your child, Doll. I can’t do a thing with her.”
* * *
They never spoke about any of it, not one word in all those years. Not about the house Doll stole her away from, not about the old woman who took them in. They did keep that shawl, though, till it was worn soft as cobwebs. But she felt the thrill of the secret whenever she took Doll’s hand and Doll gave her hand a little squeeze, whenever she lay down exhausted in the curve of Doll’s body, with Doll’s arm to pillow her head and the shawl to spread over her. Years after she had become an ordinary child, if there were going to be people to deal with, Doll would whisper in her ear, “No cussing!” and they would laugh together, enjoying their secret. They didn’t even mention the nights they spent bedded down beyond the light of Doane’s fire, or the days walking behind Doane’s people, at a distance, as if
