Lila: A Novel by Marilynne Robinson Read Free Book Online Page B

to for a while. They always gave her work, even if it was only something a child could do, like cutting kindling, and she didn’t want to burden anyone by coming there too often.
    That morning Mrs. Graham had some clothes for her, a skirt and two blouses that she said her daughter had left when she moved to Des Moines. They’d just been hanging in the closet. Lila might as well have them if she could use them. Lila thought, This is the very worst part of being broke. Everybody can see how broke you are. It seems like this whole town is making a project of knowing every damn thing I don’t have. If I left here, I could wear these things and nobody would give it a thought. If I stay, I’m walking around in somebody else’s old clothes, somebody’s charity. Mrs. Graham was watching her face, a little pleased with herself, and regretful, and embarrassed. She said, “You needn’t take them if you don’t have any use for them, dear. I just thought they might be your size.”
    Lila said, “They look about right. I could probly use them. Sure.” She should have said thank you, she knew it, but she never asked anybody for anything except work, and if they gave her something else they did it for their own reasons. She wasn’t beholden to them, because being beholden was the one thing she could not stand. She wouldn’t even look at the clothes, though she knew Mrs. Graham hoped she would. So they must be all right, she thought. Nothing too wore out anyway. And then she did Mrs. Graham’s ironing, thinking about those clothes and how she would probably wear them to church, since that would feel better, at least, than wearing the same old dress. Even if the preacher noticed, and that made her feel beholden to him, and they all knew it. So when she was done at Mrs. Graham’s house she took the bag of clothes and walked up to the cemetery. There was the grave of the John Ames who died as a boy, with a sister Martha on one side and a sister Margaret on the other. She had never really thought about the way the dead would gather at the edge of a town, all their names spelled out so you’d know whose they were for as long as that family lived in that place. And there was the Reverend John Ames, who would have been the preacher’s father, with his wife beside him. It must be strange to know your whole life where you will be buried. To see these stones with your own name on them. Someday the old man would lie down beside his wife. And there she would be, after so many years, waiting in sunlight, all covered in roses.
    She couldn’t stay in the shack when the weather changed. There would be no way to keep warm. Wind came through the walls and rain came through the roof. That woman had offered her a spare room, but she might have changed her mind since the week or so when everybody in the church was offering her something. If she was going to leave town, she should do it before travel got too hard. She would probably have to decide between a bus ticket and a winter coat. And her shoes were about gone. No point thinking about it. She would decide one way or another for one reason or another, save up what she could while she could, and whatever she did, she’d get by, most likely.
    Lila had lived in a real house before. Not the one in St. Louis. A respectable boardinghouse in the town of Tammany, Iowa. Doll took a job there so Lila could go to school for a year, long enough to learn how to read and do some figures. Mrs. Marker, whose house it was, did the cooking, but Doll did the cleaning and laundry and looked after the poultry and the gardens, and Lila helped with all of it. Doll wanted her to know what it was to have a regular life. Not that Doll knew much about it herself, but Mrs. Marker would yell about everything she did wrong, so she got better at it with time, until school was almost out. Then she told Lila, “I’m tired of listening to that woman. She can hang her own damn wash.” And they just gathered up what was