She hadn’t been at that kind of work more than a month before she heard them saying Missy was going to have a baby. “She’s so fat she didn’t know it herself.” Laughing, of course. “She was bawling all day yesterday, Mrs. is so mad at her. She don’t want to tell where her sister is, so Mrs. got to get rid of it, and she don’t like that one bit!”
“I guess we won’t be seeing Mack around for a while.”
“She’ll just take it to the nuns is all.”
“You ever see one of them nuns? I never did.”
“Best not to wonder about it. There used to be an old man come around in the middle of the night.”
“And then he took ’em to the nuns.”
“Can’t say he didn’t. I wouldn’t bet no money on it, though.”
“What else he going to do with a baby, fool?”
“Well, you going to believe what you want to believe, fool.”
And the other girl started crying. No end to the meanness.
That was when Lila started thinking she might just steal a child for herself. Nobody would mind. She could pick it up and walk out the door with it, for all they cared. Just so long as she waited till dark. And left through the back door. People don’t like to think about babies coming out of a house like that, so she’d be careful and wait till the street was empty. The gentlemen didn’t want to hear one word about babies. But that would just make everything easier. Mrs. would think it was her own idea. It would save her trouble, maybe a little money. So that would make up for most of whatever Lila still owed her. And the child would never be an orphan, because Lila would always be there looking after it, keeping it beside her. No tangled hair, no rickety legs. No cussing. She could hardly even sleep nights for the thought of it. She’d be out in the weather again, hugging a baby under her coat, watching for the minute that child would laugh, watching it play with a milkweed pod, a bit of string. Don’t take much to please a child, if that’s what you want to do. If Missy ever happened to find out what had come of her, she would be glad Lila took her, because Lila would show her every good thing she could think of, everything Doll had shown her. She would teach her how to get by. There was nothing so hard about it if you could read a little and you knew how to make change. All at once Lila was only there at that house waiting to leave it, waiting to take a child out into the good, cold night and show it the moon and the stars. Or out into the rain. It wouldn’t matter. All at once it was only the child that mattered to her, and all that sadness and meanness wasn’t her life at all. She could just walk away from it, taking with her one thing that would be worth the very worst of it. The surprise of it all made her laugh. She thought, Well, when was the last time I did that?
Lila had thought about what it might be like having a child of her own, but it never happened. Something must have gone wrong sometime and her body just wouldn’t do it. Maybe that was what came of being a feeble child herself, that her body didn’t wish that kind of life on anyone else. Or it could have been all the hard work. Once, in the old days, Mellie had gotten very curious about Arthur’s boy Deke, so Lila was, too. Doane told him to stop bothering those girls, which really meant those girls should stop bothering him. When Doll found out what they’d been up to, she told them they were asking for a world of trouble messing around with boys. By then Mellie had found out whatever it was she wanted to know and had gone on to something else, trying to play an old fiddle somebody gave her. It had taken Lila a little longer. But no trouble had come of it for either one of them, maybe because Doane had put an end to it, maybe because Lila, at least, couldn’t have that kind of trouble if she wanted to.
No matter. There was another way to get a child. If it happened to be one nobody else wanted around, then it was a good thing to take it up, tend to it. Who could know that better than she did. At the time she was thinking about this, making her plan, she’d had no idea there was anything about that written down anywhere. All she knew about the Bible was what she heard at the revival meetings she went to sometimes, in those days after Doll told her to go out on her own and live as she could, and she was so lonely that the crowds and the singing were a comfort to her.
