She could see it surprised him, too, sometimes. He told her once when there was a storm a bird had flown into the house. He’d never seen one like it. The wind must have carried it in from some far-off place. He opened all the doors and windows, but it was so desperate to escape that for a while it couldn’t find a way out. “It left a blessing in the house,” he said. “The wildness of it. Bringing the wind inside.” That was just when she began to suspect she was carrying a child, so it frightened her a little to realize that he knew she might leave, that he might even expect her to leave. She only remembered afterward that the first time she crept into bed beside him it had been the dark of the moon. It was the black-haired girl who told her about that, the one who called herself Susanna. She had three or four children, all staying with her sister or her mother, she said, so maybe she didn’t know as much as she thought she did. Still, here Lila was with something more to worry about. The old man could have been telling her she should leave, she didn’t belong in his house. Maybe that’s how a gentleman would say it. If he wanted to, he could say, This was your idea, you’re the one who said I should marry you. Maybe a gentleman couldn’t say it. Sometime he might be angry, though, and forget about his manners, and that would be hard to live with. Doll always said, Just be quiet. Whatever it is, just wait for it to be over. Everything ends sometime. Lila thought, When you know it will end anyway, you can want to be done with it. But if you’re carrying a child, you’d best have a roof over your head. Any fool knows that.
One evening they went to old Boughton’s house and the two men talked about people she didn’t know and things she didn’t understand. What else was there, after all? But she didn’t mind listening. And soon enough they forgot she was listening. They had read about missionaries back from China, about how they had converted hundreds, and that was a drop in the bucket compared to all the people who had never heard a word of the Gospel and probably never would hear one. Boughton said it seemed to him like a terrible loss of souls, if that’s what it was. He was not one to question divine justice, though sometimes he did have to wonder. Anyone would. Which was really not the same as questioning. And the Reverend said, When you think of all the people who lived from Adam to Abraham. Boughton shook his head at the mystery of it. “We’re a drop in the bucket!” he said. “It’s an easy thing to forget!”
The next day was a Sunday, and she had waked up early and slipped out of the house and walked away past the edge of town and followed the river to a place where the water ran over rocks and dropped down to a pool with a sandy bottom. She could watch the shadows of catfish there once the sun came up. She sat on the bank, damp and chilly, smelling the river and barely hearing the sound of it, hidden in the dark, not because she thought anyone would be there, but because she always liked the feeling that no one could see her even when she knew she was alone. The old man would wake up to an empty house, and he would dress and shave as he always did, and make his coffee and toast and gather up his papers and go off to church by himself to preach his sermon as he always did, and sing the hymns and pray the prayers and speak afterward with ladies who wouldn’t ask how she was or where she was, because they knew his marriage was a sorrow to him, one more sorrow.
She meant to do better by him. He was always kind to her. But she felt strange in the church. And the night before, lying beside him in the dark, she had asked him a question about China. He tried to explain and she tried to understand. He said, “I believe in the grace of God. For me, that is where all these questions end. Why it’s pointless to ask them.” But he seemed to be telling her that Boughton might be right, that souls could be lost forever because of things they did not know, or understand, or believe. He didn’t like to say it, he had to try different words for it. So she knew he thought it might be true. Doll probably didn’t know she had an immortal soul. It was nothing she ever mentioned, if she ever thought about it. She probably wouldn’t even have known the words for it. All those people out there walking the roads all those years, hardly a one of them remembering the Sabbath. Who would know what day of the week it was? Who wouldn’t take work when there was work to be done? What use was there in calling a day by a certain name, or thinking of it as anything but weather? They knew what time of the year it was when the timothy bloomed, when the birds were fledging. They knew it was morning when the sun came up. What more was there to know? If Doll was going to be lost forever, Lila
