She sat down in the preacher’s chair and held the baby against her, and she thought, Did I say, It’s all right with me, I guess? thinking that if she’d said it she wasn’t sure she’d meant it, and if she hadn’t said it she was sorry she had not. The old coat he had put over her shoulders when they were walking in the evening was as good to remember as the time Doll took her up in her arms. She thought it was nothing she had known to hope for and something she had wanted too much all the same. So too much happiness came with it, and happiness was strange to her. He said, We have to keep you with us. In that eternity of his, where everybody will be happy, how could he feel the lack of her, the loss of her? She had to think about that. Sometime she would ask him about it. It must always be true that there are the stragglers, people somebody couldn’t bear to be without, no matter what they’d been up to in this life. That son of Boughton’s.
And then there were the people no one would miss, who had done no special harm, who just lived and died as well as they could manage. That would have been Lila, if she had not wandered into Gilead. And then she thought, I couldn’t bear to be without Doll, or Mellie, or Doane and Marcelle. Even Arthur and his boys — not that they had mattered so much to her when she was a child, but because fair was fair and none of them ever had any good thing that the others didn’t have some right to, even Deke. If there was goodness at the center of things, that one rule would have to be respected, because it was as important to them as anything in this world.
She thought maybe, just by worrying about it, Boughton would sweep up China into an eternity that would surprise him out of all his wondering. God is good, the old men say. That would be the proof.
Can a soul in bliss feel a weight lift off his heart? She couldn’t help imagining— Oh, here you are! Your dear weariness and ugliness as beautiful as light! That boy, weeping over what he was, his big, dirty hands that had done something he couldn’t quite believe, and then there he would be, fresh from the gallows, shocked at the kindness all around him, which was the last thing he expected. He’d had the idea “father.” That was what made him so desperate that his father in this life never said a gentle word to him. And there that mangy old father would be, too, because the boy couldn’t bear heaven without him. He’d say, See, you was lucky to have me for a son, after all! Look what I done for you! And, Ain’t this better than anything! Better than money! He’d be as proud of heaven as if he’d come up with it all on his own.
So it couldn’t matter much how life seemed. The old man always said we should attend to the things we have some hope of understanding, and eternity isn’t one of them. Well, this world isn’t one either. Most of the time she thought she understood things better when she didn’t try. Things happen the way they do. Why was a foolish question. In a song a note follows the one before because it is that song and not another one. Once, she and Mellie tried to count up all the songs they knew. How could there be so many? Because every one was just itself. It was eternity that let her think this way. In eternity people’s lives could be altogether what they were and had been, not just the worst things they ever did, or the best things either. So she decided that she should believe in it, or that she believed in it already. How else could she imagine seeing Doll again? Never once had she taken her to be dead, plain and simple. If any scoundrel could be pulled into heaven just to make his mother happy, it couldn’t be fair to punish scoundrels who happened to be orphans, or whose mothers didn’t even like them, and who would probably have better excuses for the harm they did than the ones who had somebody caring about them. It couldn’t be fair to punish people for trying to get by, people who were good by their own lights, when it took all the courage they had to be good. Doane tying that ribbon around Marcelle’s ankle. If that wasn’t good or bad, it was something she was glad to have seen. Mellie singing to soothe some borrowed baby.
That’s what she was thinking. The Reverend couldn’t bear to be without her. Nothing against Mrs. Ames and her baby. Eternity had more of every kind of room in it than this world did. She could even think of wicked old Mack in the light of that other life, looking it over, wondering what the catch was, what the joke was, somehow knowing that she had brought him there. And his child. She couldn’t bear to be without them. It was eternity that let her think like that without a bit of shame.
There was no end to it. Thank God, as the old men would say.
But the baby started fussing and Mrs. Graham took him and jostled him a little in her arms and let him suck her finger — such a good boy, such a good boy — and Lila heard the
