Gail Godwin - Flora

“Come down,” he called.

“No, I can’t.”

“Yes you can. It’s fabulous down here.” He was still dancing the jig with a look of mad ecstasy. From where I stood above, the hair on his head looked like sharp little orange spikes sticking up in a field of flesh. For all I knew he might still have mental problems.

“Come on, I’ll help you. See that young sassafras? Grab hold of it and swing down until you’re standing on the root below.”

“I really can’t .” I wondered whether it might not be wisest to run away and leave him there.

“You can, you can. Come on, it’s great!” He had stopped the dancing, and his sunlit green eyes glittered up at me. He raised his arms, beckoning with his fingers. “Trust me, I’ll catch you.” It seemed important to him that I trust him. He would dismiss me as a child if I ran away. My hand was already on the young sassafras. How did he know to call it that? I didn’t know anything but the limited world of my “strange childhood.”

“Now keep hold of it and step onto the root—”

One blue Ked on the root, then the other. Two blue Keds. What would Mrs. Huff think if she were watching me right this minute?

“Now grab my hand and ye’re down.”

My knees were wobbly, my heart was thumping, yet somehow I gripped his hand and was down.

“Good girl.” He shook my hand before releasing me. “I’m proud of you.”

The whole thing felt overdramatic. It was not that far down, really.

“Now what?” I tried to act blasé, though I was still shaking.

“What do you mean, now what?”

“What do we do now that we’re in this hole?” I sounded just like my father.

“What do we do?” he cried incredulously. “We admire it. Man, what I could have done with this hole. And I didn’t even have to dig it. It dug itself. Just imagine, all those days and nights and years since the uprising, since your father was sixteen, this amazing thing was quietly creating itself, slowly sinking and shifting and forming itself into this lovely shelter. Why, a body could set up housekeeping here. There’s spaces for little side rooms, and that lovely moss for the floor, even some little flowers for natural wallpaper, and twining vines for curtains. And smell the lovely earth odors, all the odors coming from the pores of the earth. And so dry. In a foxhole like this I would not have come down with pneumonia.”

I was getting worried. Not only was I standing in a hole in the woods with a man I barely knew but he might be crazy. He’d admitted himself he’d had mental problems after the collapsed lung.

“Well, I don’t think my grandfather had it in mind to create a foxhole,” I said, taking on the voice of reason. “Or even a future foxhole. This would all have to be filled in if we were going to fix the path.”

Elation and playfulness drained from his countenance. “Ah, yes,” he said. “Your wanting to surprise your father. I got somewhat carried away, didn’t I?”

“Oh, no… I can see… I mean, if someone’s just come back from having to dig their own foxholes in the war, this must seem like…” I trailed off, unable to think of a comparison. “I better be getting back,” I said. “Flora will be worrying.” For good measure I added untruthfully, “She gets really upset if I go out of her sight.”

With relief I watched him reassume his adulthood. “Then, up you go,” he said, giving me a boost till my foot was firmly on the root. I grasped the slim trunk of the sassafras tree, and realized I could probably climb up and down by myself whenever I wanted. It would be fun to show someone. Like Brian, who I was sure had never climbed into or out of a hole in his life. But Brian would probably never climb anywhere, up or down, again.

We hurried along the paved road to Finn’s motorcycle. “I hope we won’t have upset Flora too much,” he said.

“We’d better not say anything about going in the crater,” I said. “It’ll worry her and she’ll cry. My cousin has the gift of tears.”

“God forbid we make your lovely cousin cry,” he said. “If you ride behind me on the seat, we’ll get you home that much faster.”

“Oh, I couldn’t possibly—”

“Ah, you can do anything you set your mind to, Helen. I’ve seen you in action now. So climb up and hold on tight.”

How are you settling into your new room?” Mrs. Jones asked. It was Tuesday again and I was helping her change the linens on Nonie’s bed.

“Oh, fine.”

“Have you… dreamed anymore?”

I knew from her wistful tone she meant had I dreamed about Nonie. The answer was yes, but, as it had been a hideous nightmare, I weaseled.

“I’ve heard her voice a couple of times. And one night I woke up really sad and so I did this strange thing.”

Mrs. Jones smoothed down the top sheet on her side and companionably waited.

“I got her new hat out of the closet. She was trying it on when she had her heart attack, you know.”

“That’s right.”

“Then I put it on. I sat down in front of the three-way mirror and pinned it on. It still had her hatpin in it. She always carried this pin in her purse in case she felt like trying on hats downtown.”

“How did it look on you?”

“Well, I tried it different ways but none of them looked right and then I saw if I scrunched down far enough so I couldn’t see my shoulders, it was just the hat on a person’s head. And it was like she was there.”

Mrs. Jones sighed.

“It was like she was showing me how she looked just before she died. I mean how she would have looked if I had been standing behind her.”

We each plumped our pillow in its fresh case and then together folded the counterpane over them.

“That’s wonderful about that hatpin,” she said at last. “What did you do with it?”

“Oh, I put it right back in the hat afterwards and put everything back in the box.”

“That’s exactly what I would have done!” Mrs. Jones raised her eyes to the ceiling and seemed to be recalling some precious item belonging to Rosemary that she had cared for in a particular way. After a minute she added, “That little girl died, you know.”

“What little girl?”

“The one who came down with polio the same time as your friend. It was in the paper. How is your friend doing?”

“They may let him go home, but it will be a long road to recovery.” I was quoting Father McFall. The rector had “dropped by” the house on his way to the hospital and sat and talked to Flora while I finally wrote a letter to Brian that he could handdeliver. “He has been asking about you,” Father McFall explained, just short of scolding, “and I know you’ll both feel better if you send him a few lines on paper. Something he can keep and reread.”

“Unlucky little fellow,” said Mrs. Jones. “And they’re saying now it was just the two cases, not an epidemic. They may even reopen the lake for the fireworks on the Fourth.”

Would my father lift our quarantine when he heard there was no epidemic? Somehow I doubted it. He liked us where we were. “Getting on a-okay here,” he had scrawled on the back of a postcard of the American flag. “I am much more suited to this kind of work. You and Flora stay on your hill. That way I know you’re safe. Will try to call soon. Harry.”

Flora had received a second rejection and spent that day in tears, but the following day she was offered a job teaching fifth grade in a county school in Dothan, Alabama, and was now making lesson plans upstairs on the porch outside the Willow Fanning room. After my great adventure with Finn, we had had the okra fried crunchily in egg and bread crumbs and she had bemoaned her “stupid mistake” of being in the tub when Finn had brought me home. I hadn’t believed my luck when Finn had helped me down from the motorcycle and Flora hadn’t come flying out the door, but I was beginning to think it might have been better to get it over then. Because now she wanted to go over and over everything that had been done and said in my first free hour away from her.