I’m a decent man. The Reverend could have said the same thing to her. Not because she was young anymore but because she was rough and ignorant. And then what would she have done? What could have made her take such a chance? Sometimes she thought she wanted the worst thing to come finally, a shame that would kill her. Why else did she say, You ought to marry me? Did she think he would laugh? Maybe she didn’t want him to say, I will. She never thought he would. She didn’t believe him when he did. Maybe she meant to go back to that leaky old cabin and feel ache and sting down to her bones and nothing else. To put everything else away from her, because that ache was, first and last, where she came from and what waited for her. Maybe she slipped into his bed to see if she really was the wife of this decent man, not just a stray he had taken in out of pity. And now she had this belly, and he was always at her elbow saying, This is my wife, this is Lila, my wife. You see, Doll, I did what you said. So many times she had thought, if she had just said a word to that old man, if she hadn’t stood there staring at his boots, Doll could have stayed somewhere nearby, and Lila would have taken food to her and made sure she was warm, sneaking out at night to find her. They’d have laughed with the pleasure of the secret.
The Reverend let her think her thoughts, waiting until she looked up from them to speak. He said, “You still don’t trust me at all.”
And she said, “No. Can’t really say that I do. No reason you should trust me, either. There are things I ain’t told you.”
He nodded. “I know. Maybe you should just tell me those things, whatever they are, and you’d see that I didn’t care about them, and then you could trust me.”
She said, “Not till I get this baby born.”
He laughed and put his arm around her. “Well, isn’t it a beautiful evening? Hardly a cloud. Are you warm enough?” He took off his jacket and put it over her shoulders. “We might not be having many more warm nights.” Then he said, “‘The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament showeth his handiwork. Day unto day uttereth speech, and night unto night showeth knowledge.’”
“I guess that’s the Bible.” When he was happy he was always saying something from the Bible.
“Psalm 19. ‘There is no speech nor language; their voice is not heard.’”
“That’s another thing I don’t understand.”
“Maybe nobody does, entirely. But it’s beautiful.”
Pretty nearly anybody must understand more than she did. She said, “What is the firmament?” It was easier to ask questions, walking along in the dark like that, her arm in his, in the warmth of his old black coat, his preacher coat.
“The sky the way it looks to us. As if there were something like a dome over us, like a glass bowl turned over—”
She thought, Then I guess there ain’t. He told her that the moon is much closer than the sun, falling stars aren’t really stars. She and Mellie had wondered about those things, why some stars came unstuck and the others didn’t, where they landed when they fell, whether all of them would fall down sometime, even the moon. It was nice to be talking about the stars. She could hardly think of them apart from the sound of cicadas and the smell of damp and clover, whispering with Mellie because they should have been asleep. Children come up with these notions, and then after a while they forget to wonder about it all, because what does it matter, what does it have to do with them, things are what they are. So the only ideas she had were a child’s ideas, and she knew how they would sound to him. He’d try not to smile, and his voice would be very kind. But he seemed to know she had to be told everything, that she wouldn’t know what to ask. The earth goes around the sun. It spins and it tips. All right.
Once, when she was new at the school in Tammany, the teacher asked her what country they lived in. The corn was tall, the sun was hot, the river was high for that time of year, so she said, “Looks to me like pretty decent country.” That is what Doane would have said about it. And the children laughed, and some of them leaned out of their desks to wave their arms, and they whispered the answer loud enough that the teacher would hear even if she didn’t call on them. “The United States of America!” Yes, the teacher said, the United States. What state? What county? And Tammany was an Indian chief who was kind to William Penn. Every day Lila stood off by herself during recess and lunch, but that day the teacher asked her to stay in to help her clean the blackboards, so she wouldn’t be teased, probably. She said, “You mustn’t be sad over a little thing like that, Lila. You’ll catch up soon enough.”
Lila said, “Don’t seem like it. Maybe I won’t. Maybe I don’t even want to.”
And the teacher said, “Well, I want you to.
