Always the same thoughts. The Reverend was still in his study, but she believed there might be comfort for her in lying down in his bed, and there was. She took his pillow and gave him the other one, and that felt better. When he came in he must have thought she was asleep, because he whispered, Bless your heart. He lay down with his arm across her waist, and she touched his hand to her lips. If he took it for a kiss, that was his business. He settled closer against her, and that felt very nice.
* * *
It was October when the child began stirring. Lila had pinched off some sprigs of ivy and put them in water glasses to sprout roots, and when they did she had taken them up to the cemetery for the boy John Ames and his sisters. She was clearing away leaves from them when she felt the child move. She said, “Well, child! I been waiting on you.” The sun was brightly mild. There was the crisp sound of maple leaves just ripe enough to fall, and leathery oak leaves that would cling until a wind took them, and the smell from the fields of all the life that had burned through all those crops until it spent itself down like a fire. It was almost the smell of smoke. She said, “This town’s called Gilead, child. That’s a Bible name. We going to stay here till you’re born. I figure we’re safe here. We’ll see what happens.” She said, “I’m going to be a little bit more careful about what I say, that’s one thing.” The old man would have liked to be told that she felt the child moving, but she wouldn’t tell him yet. It lived in her and knew her, and if her thoughts were dread or regret or anger or anything that stirred her heart, it knew her thoughts.
She had forgotten how it felt not to be by herself, as she was still, till that very moment, no matter what the old man said or did. Kind as he was. She put her hand on her belly and she said, “You got a pa who is a preacher. His brother and sisters are here, and his mother and father, and his wife and her baby. The whole family lying here together. We come up now and then to see to them because who else do we have? Just Doll, and I don’t know where to look for her. I might figure it out sometime. I’m going to get me some crocus bulbs. There’s folks who bring in the best corn crop you could imagine, but they’re just useless when it comes to a flower garden. You can see that, looking around up here. Irises would be nice, too.” Three women came up the path. Lila said, “I spose they’ll think I’m talking to myself.” She nodded to them, and then she walked down the hill and through the quiet evening streets to the preacher’s house. Gilead was the kind of town where dogs slept in the road for the sun and the warmth that lingered after the sun was gone, and the few cars that there were had to stop and honk until the dogs decided to get up and let them pass by. They’d go limping off to the side, lamed by the comfort they’d had to give up, and then they’d settle down again right where they were before. It really wasn’t much of a town. You could hear the cornfields rustling almost anywhere in it, they were so close and it was so quiet. She said, “You’ll like it here well enough, child. For a while.”
The old man came out on the front porch and smiled at her with his head to one side, the way he did when there was something he wasn’t going to ask her, so she said, “We been up to the graveyard, looking after things a little.” She said we and he didn’t ask about it, so she said, “Me and the child. Seems like there’s two of us, now it’s moving around a little.”
“Two of you,” he said. “That makes three of us, I believe. The three of us should probably have our supper.” And he held the door for her.
* * *
Doll would have loved that kitchen. It was all painted white, and the curtains were white. Sunlight came in in the morning. Lila polished it every day, the way Doll did that kitchen in Tammany. It was strange, but if Lila pretended she was just there to do the cleaning it made things easier. She knew how to do it, and she could stop thinking about what else might be expected of her. Like cooking. She took cuttings from some red geraniums she saw at the
