Well. There was a man in the land of Uz, whose name was Job; and that man was perfect and upright, and one that feared God, and turned away from evil. All right. And there were born unto him seven sons and three daughters. But she kept thinking, What happens when somebody isn’t herself anymore? I seem to be getting used to things I never even knew about just a few months ago. Not wondering what in the world I’m going to do next, for one thing. Maybe it’ll be something the old man liked about me that will be gone sometime, and I won’t even know what it was. She found herself thinking she might stay around anyway. She thought she’d always like the feel of him, she’d probably always like to creep into bed beside him. He didn’t seemed to mind it.
That boy, never meaning to kill his father, looking at his hands, almost wishing he could be rid of them. Rid of himself. She’d felt that way, too, plenty of times. That night or morning when she was trying to clean away all the blood, and Doll, who probably wasn’t in her right mind, saying, “He wasn’t your pa. I’m pretty sure. Maybe a cousin or something. An uncle, maybe.” And here was his blood all over Lila’s hands and her clothes, some in her hair. She had brushed a strand away from her eyes, and it fell back, wet and heavy. So much blood she knew he was dead, whoever he was. So, whoever he was, he took it with him. It died in his body. Doll said, “A grudge was all it come down to. They should’ve let me be. After all these years.”
Lila said, “What was his name?”
“Which one? There’s just so damn many of ’em.” And she gave Lila a look, puzzled and scared and tired of it all. Rolling her eyes, too old and spent to lift her head, still trying to settle on any sort of plan, what to do next.
The name of the man she was fighting with.
“You expect me to know? There must be a dozen of ’em. One meaner than the next.” She said, “I’m the only ma you ever had. You could’ve just died entirely, for all they was doing for you.”
Lila knew. She remembered. But what was their name?
“There was that one — I cut his hamstring. Years ago. I thought that might put an end to all the trouble he was causing me. But it give him a dreadful limp and his brothers got all riled up about it, so I just had more to worry me. His cousins. They thought they could catch me easy enough, a scar-faced woman with a child in hand.” She laughed. “I guess it weren’t so easy after all.”
The folks at that cabin?
“Don’t matter. They wasn’t your folks. You was just boarded out there.” She said, “Your pa got the idea he should take you back from me, after he’d left you behind like that. Then the whole bunch of ’em was looking for me, whenever any of ’em could spare a little time. Where was they when you was just scrawny and naked? Folks like a grudge. That’s all it comes to.”
Lila said she wouldn’t mind knowing a name, though.
“What? You going to go looking for ’em?”
No. No point in it.
“That’s the truth. I think they pretty well forgot about you anyway. Me laming that fellow was what mattered to ’em. Because he was so young, I suppose. Well, they shouldn’ta sent him after me. It was just the revenge they was after. This last one never asked me where you was. Not that I give him much chance.”
So he might have been her pa.
“He wasn’t your pa. He didn’t look like him, far as I could tell. It’d been a while. It was pretty dark.” So Lila had that blood all over her, and it was the first time she had heard a word about her father. And here was Doll, probably dying. For months Lila had had a decent room and a job clerking in a store, and she’d been thinking just that day how good it was of Doll to make sure she could read and figure. Now all that was done with. The more she tried to wash the blood away, the more of it there was. Blood had soaked into the rug and stained the floor. She wished everything was done with, every damn thing. That she could be rid
