He stroked her hands. Then he said, “I’ve been thinking, Lila — at my age I can’t really hope for a call to another church, but maybe we could move to another house, at least. The church could rent this one, to cover the cost. It would give us a fresh start. We could get rid of some things around here that I’ve been looking at for too long and just start over.”
She said, “Well, I tell you one thing. That’s the last time I’m going out looking for pelicans.”
“So you’re all right here?”
“I’m just fine.”
“You don’t mind all the scars and scratches? All the departed souls who left them behind? You don’t mind if the Lord’s in the parlor?”
“I believe I’d be lonesome without them.”
He said, “I think you’re being kind. I’m going to let you do it, though. I’m pretty sure I’d miss them.”
“’Course you would.” She rested her cheek against his hair. She thought, The child knows about this, too. Not just the dread I feel sometimes. Not just the cold.
It was probably Mrs. Ames he was thinking about. He never said her name. One so lovely. There was a wedding picture in his study he never showed to her and never hid from her. Him with his collar standing up, beside him a pretty girl in an old-fashioned dress, one hand in the bend of his elbow, the other holding a bunch of roses. The big front bedroom he kept for guests who never came, that would be where they made the child, and where Boughton in his unimaginable youth had stood weeping while he prayed, touching water to the tiny head. Two young men in that room, one of them Jesus. One of them hardly knowing what to think, the other knowing, leaving it to Boughton to find words if he could. Well, that was a thing she did not understand. But Boughton had taken up that child while it was still in its blood, held it and blessed it from his very heart, and she did understand that. She wished she could have done the same for that boy at the shack, done right by him, filthy thing that he was, all trembling at the thought of what he was. Teddy had gone out looking for him, walking the empty woods alone so the boy wouldn’t be afraid to be found. One day was all Teddy had to give to him, because he was studying to be a doctor, just home to check on his mother and old Boughton. Lila couldn’t go off wandering in the cold, what with the child she was carrying. So the boy would be on his own.
She went up to that bedroom with her Bible and sat in the rocking chair by the window. There was just the faintest shadow of dust on the dresser, but once she noticed it, it bothered her, so she found a cloth and wiped it off. Now that winter had come and there wasn’t much to do outside, she had started tending to the house a little, even though women from the church came in every week or two to take care of things, as they had done for years because he was alone, and as they still did because now they were looking after his wife and his child, doing all the heavy work, hoping to protect him. But there was always more dust, drifting down from somewhere.
When she told the old man that she thought she might start reading the Book of Job, saying it “job,” which is exactly the way it is spelled, he had all he could do to keep from laughing. He had to wipe tears from his eyes. He told her it was a man’s name, so it was pronounced differently, and this made her a good deal less interested in it. But she had to read it so he could pretend she wasn’t just making an ignorant mistake in the first place, though he knew perfectly well that she was. He said, “You really do have a way of finding the very hardest parts — for somebody starting out. For anybody. That’s fine. They’re Scripture, too.” And then he could let himself laugh a little, which must have been a relief.
So she meant to sit in the rocking chair by the window with Job open in her lap and see what she could make of it. She did wonder why dust fell so evenly, more like rain than like snow, since the wind pushed snow into drifts. Well, the air in a good house is so still. There was the clock ticking, steady as could be, and time passing, and no sign of anything else happening at all, but then in two days there would be the shadow of dust again, anywhere you happened to look for it. She wiped it away, the room was perfect for a little while, and then she fell to thinking. Rocking for the sound it made, and thinking.
The clock struck eleven. He always came home for lunch. If she met him at the door he put his arms around her. If there was rain on him he still might not even wait to take his coat off first before he kissed her forehead or her cheek, and she liked the coldness and the good smell. He never asked her how she had spent the morning, but she told him sometimes. Reading a little. Thinking about things. She felt good, and the baby was moving around more than ever, elbows and knees. The old man would look into her face for sadness or weariness, and she would turn her face away, since there was no telling
