Lila: A Novel (34 page)

Authors: Marilynne Robinson

Tags: #Fiction - Drama, #Family & Relationships, #Iowa

BOOK: Lila: A Novel

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So when she told him she meant to keep that knife and he nodded, she could explain to herself why she meant to keep it. There was no way to abandon guilt, no decent way to disown it. All the tangles and knots of bitterness and desperation and fear had to be pitied. No, better, grace had to fall over them. Doll hunched in the firelight whetting her courage, dreaming vengeance because she knew someone somewhere was dreaming vengeance against her. Thinking terrible thoughts to blunt her own fear.

That’s how it is. Lila had borne a child into a world where a wind could rise that would take him from her arms as if there were no strength in them at all. Pity us, yes, but we are brave, she thought, and wild, more life in us than we can bear, the fire infolding itself in us. That peace could only be amazement, too.

Well, for now there were geraniums in the windows, and an old man at the kitchen table telling his baby some rhyme he’d known forever, probably still wondering if he had managed to bring her along into that next life, if he could ever be certain of it. Almost letting himself imagine grieving for her in heaven, because not to grieve for her would mean he was dead, after all.

Someday she would tell him what she knew.

ALSO BY MARILYNNE ROBINSON

FICTION

Home

Gilead

Housekeeping

NONFICTION

When I Was a Child I Read Books

Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State and Nuclear Pollution

The Death of Adam: Essays on Modern Thought

Absence of Mind: The Dispelling of Inwardness from the Modern Myth of the Self

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Marilynne Robinson
is the author of the novels
Home
,
Gilead
(winner of the Pulitzer Prize), and
Housekeeping
, and four books of nonfiction:
When I Was a Child I Read Books
,
Mother Country
,
The Death of Adam
, and
Absence of Mind
. She teaches at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.