Lila

what it was, why they kept it. It was useless, except for the use they made of it, remembering together. There wasn’t much that felt worse than losing that shawl. There is no speech nor language; their voice is not heard. That’s true about things. It’s true about people. It’s just true. So the knife was lying there where the old man had put it, on the kitchen table next to the sugar bowl, which was missing its cover and a handle because one of the children broke it, the boy John Ames. His mother and father remembered the day. The children were at home and inside because of a blizzard, and they were all in the kitchen because it was the warmest room in the house. There was bread baking. Days like that make children rambunctious, eager to be out in the snow. The old man said he always wished he remembered that day, too. Not that there weren’t always more blizzards, more days in the kitchen. But they made his father serious and his mother sad, so there wasn’t much pleasure in them. Lila told the child, “The world has been here so long, seems like everything means something. You’ll want to be careful. You practically never know what you’re taking in your hand.” She thought, If we stay here, soon enough it will be you sitting at the table, and me, I don’t know, cooking something, and the snow flying, and the old man so glad we’re here he’ll be off in his study praying about it. And geraniums in the window. Red ones.

Don’t go wanting things. She said that to herself. Doll hated snow.

She was still thinking about Ezekiel, as much as anything. The man takes up the baby that’s been thrown out in the field. Then washed I thee with water; yea, I thoroughly washed away thy blood from thee, and I anointed thee with oil. The blood is just the shame of having no one who takes any care of you. Why should that be shame? A child is just a child. It can’t help what happens to it, or doesn’t happen. The woman’s voice calling after them from the cabin, Lila probably made that up. She could never ask. Doll said, Nobody going to come looking for her. And for a while nobody did. There must have been someone Lila hoped would call after them, someone a little sorry she’d be gone.

Why did it matter? Doll had washed away her shame, some part of it, when she took her as a child. And then that night, when she hadn’t even seen her for a month, didn’t even know she was in the same town, Doll came to her all bloody. The scrawnier Doll got, the more time she’d spent on that knife, whetting it long after it was as sharp as it ever would be. Sometimes Lila would hear that sound, be waked by it, when Doll had trouble sleeping. Doll carried it open, tied to her leg, so there wouldn’t be any problem in using it fast if she had to. When Doll came to her finally, white and trembling, it took Lila a lot of washing even to find her wounds, because she had been hiding all day until it was dark, with her dress loosened so the blood wouldn’t dry the cloth onto the cuts. And the blood wasn’t all hers, either. Probably most of it wasn’t. The poor old woman seemed positively ashamed she hadn’t died. She said, “I do hate to trouble you, child.” She said, “When him and me went to it, I thought that would be the end of me for sure. I expected I might die this morning, or die on the way over here. I don’t know.” So Lila tried to be gentle and Doll tried to be brave, and there was just blood all over everything. The sheriff came the next morning. He said, “I never thought I’d see a woman your age mixed up in a knife fight,” and Doll mustered the strength to say, “He wasn’t no spring chicken hisself.” He laughed. “Looks like you won for sure. He lost, no doubt about that. Too bad for the both of you.” He was amusing himself with the strangeness of it all, and Doll knew it. But her face and hands were washed and her hair was brushed, and the rags were hidden away under the bed so some of the awfulness was put out of sight. Lila had slit Doll’s dress open with that filthy knife, and then pinned it closed again over the bandage, so she was covered, at least. They brought a stretcher for her.

The sheriff said, “This your mother?”

Lila said, “No, just trying to help. She come to my door.” And Doll was watching her. Maybe Lila’d just gotten tired, but by then she’d started saying the first damn thing that came to mind, even if it was true.

“You have her knife?”

“I didn’t see no knife. I guess she wasn’t carrying it with her.”

“Well,” he said, “we’ll want to be sure about that. That thing must be sharp as the very devil.”

It would have been just like Lila to say, I got the nasty thing here in my stocking, right against my leg, the first place any girl in Missouri would have hid it. The first place I’d expect you to look. She might even have said, If you don’t mind, I’d be glad to be rid of it. But she took the trouble to lie because Doll was looking right at her. When the sheriff said, “Somebody go get the stretcher, I guess we got to get her over to the jail,” Doll closed her eyes and set her lips and folded her hands and was satisfied. She didn’t even