“Well, that’s fine!” The woman rubbed her hands on her apron. “I’m behind on the weeding! I was hoping for a little rain yesterday or today, but nothing, so I thought I might as well get to it! If you could help with the onions,” as hasty about it as if she might miss an opportunity. So Lila at least might have a door she could come to, someone who knew her name. The woman made such a point of not looking her over that Lila could see what she must have thought of her. “Lila! What a pretty name!”
It was a good-looking garden, though. A garden never really belongs to somebody else if you’re the one that takes care of it. The soil was nice as could be, and the plants had all those good smells. Just brushing by the tomato plants, getting that musk on them, made her clothes seem clean. She was still waiting to hear somebody say the name of the place. It was painted on the water tower, so coming to town she walked along looking up at that word, wondering what it was supposed to sound like. Of course it was a Bible word. The old man would tell her that.
She said to the child, “Now I been in Gilead a pretty long time. A lot longer than I expected. And you’re going to be born here. If I leave I’ll take you with me, I will for sure. I’ll tell you the name of the place, though. People should know that much about themselves anyway. The name of your father. Could be I won’t ever leave. The old man might not give me cause.” And then she almost laughed, because she knew he never would. She said, “That old man loves me. I got to figure out what to do about it.”
She never stayed away from church anymore, for one thing. It still reminded her of that first time, when she was sitting there, rain dripping off her hair, down her neck, cold rain soaked into her shoes, hoping he wouldn’t notice her. He was going on about baptism. A birth and a death and a marriage, he said. A touch of water and these children are given the whole of life. The sacraments remind us. She was thinking what sense did that make, but his eyes drifted across the congregation and rested on her face, as if he thought she might know what he meant and could say yes, it was true, what he meant if not the words he could find to put it in. Jesus drank from our cup and shared our baptism, he said, which meant He suffered and died like everybody else. And she was thinking how strange it was for them to be there singing songs to somebody who had lived and died like anybody. Doll would say, That’s the way it is. They could as well be singing about Doll. And then she was thinking of that song they used to like in St. Louis, what a night to go dreaming, and his eyes drifted back to her again, and he looked at her until he remembered not to. When she thought about it afterward, she knew she couldn’t have counted to five before he looked down at his papers and then at the people in front of him. Still.
Now that she was his wife he looked at her whenever he mentioned something they might have talked about, to let her know he thought about the questions she asked him, or questions she knew he asked himself. Sometimes he gave the sermon to her to read before he preached it. One morning he read to her at breakfast, something he had written during the night. “Very rough,” he said. “Half of it I’ve crossed out. And this was supposed to be the clean copy.” He cleared his throat. “So. ‘Things happen for reasons that are hidden from us, utterly hidden for as long as we think they must proceed from what has come before, our guilt or our deserving, rather than coming to us from a future that God in his freedom offers to us.’ My meaning here is that you really can’t account for what happens by what has happened in the past, as you understand it anyway, which may be very different from the past itself. If there is such a thing. ‘The only true knowledge of God is born of obedience,’ that’s Calvin, ‘and obedience has to be constantly attentive to the demands that are made of it, to a circumstance that is always new and particular to its moment.’ Yes. ‘Then the reasons that things happen are still hidden, but they are hidden in the mystery of God.’ I can’t read my own writing. No matter. ‘Of course misfortunes have opened the way to blessings you would never have thought to hope for, that you would not have been ready to understand as blessings if they had come to you in your youth, when you were uninjured, innocent. The future always finds us changed.’ So then it is part of the providence of God, as I see it, that blessing or happiness can have very different meanings from one time to another. ‘This is not to say that joy is a compensation for loss, but that each of them, joy and loss, exists in its own right and must be recognized for what it is. Sorrow is very real, and loss feels very final to us. Life on earth is difficult and grave, and marvelous. Our
