Gail Godwin - Flora

“You mean,” Flora gasped, rubbing her arms like she did during our scary programs, “Helen’s father was making the bomb? That was the secret work?”

“Helping to make, along with thousands of others. Yes, that was the secret work, although they didn’t know. Only the scientists and some highly placed government and Army people were in on the whole picture. The best kept secret in the history of the world, they’re saying. But they’re speculating all kinds of wild things on the radio and calling it news. I wanted to assure you that nobody at Oak Ridge has been harmed by what was being made there and that nobody is in any danger.” He permitted himself a wintry laugh. “Chaplain Dudley said when the news first came through that they had made the biggest bomb in the history of the world, some workers packed up and hightailed it out of there because they were afraid the place might explode any minute.”

“Does this mean my father might be on his way home now?”

“He wouldn’t be one of those, Helen. He’d go right on with his job for the rest of the day. That’s what Chaplain Dudley is going to do. After all, it’s Monday, a workday. They’ll clock in and clock out, maybe celebrate some among themselves after work.” Father McFall shot up a black sleeve and consulted his wristwatch. “Actually, though it’s my day off, I have opened the church and put a sign on the door that we’ll have Evening Prayer at five. Parishioners will want to thank God that this long war is finally going to end. And they may want to pray we won’t misuse this frightening new power we have just unleashed on the world.”

As Flora and I were walking him to his car, we heard the phone. “I’ll get it,” I said. “It’s probably my father.”

“Well, be sure and tell him I was here,” said Father McFall.

But it was Finn. “Have you girls heard the news?”

“About the bomb? Yes, my father helped make it.”

A bump of silence. “Is it a joke with me you’re having?”

“No, it’s true. Father McFall was just here to tell us. He’s been on the phone with someone he knows at Oak Ridge.”

“Holy Mother of God.”

“Of course, my father didn’t know what he was making,” I felt I should add. “Only the scientists and a few top government people knew. It was the best kept secret in the history of the world, Father McFall says.”

“Have you talked to your father?”

“Not yet. He might—he just might —be coming home for my birthday tomorrow, but that’s a secret, too. Not even Flora knows.”

“Where is Flora?”

Flora rushed into the kitchen. “Is that your father? I want to speak to him.”

“No, it’s Finn. But I think he wants to talk to you.”

WE KEPT THEradio on while Flora finished her pantry rearrangement. I was given the job of wiping down each item with a damp dish towel before it was allowed back in, which unfortunately recalled to me the night I had wiped my father’s bloody brow after he had passed out on the kitchen floor. As Father McFall had warned us, there was all kinds of news. Between the national bulletins, some with gory details of what had been done to Hiroshima and its people, local citizens were interviewed and encouraged to express their reactions to the bomb, which was now being called the atomic bomb. Some of these reactions were pretty vindictive about how the Japs had it coming to them, but when some man, or woman, on the street went too far for good taste, the radio person quickly intervened, saying the loss of life was of course deplorable but think of the American lives saved because the war would end quickly now. Flora listened carefully to everything, occasionally uttering yips of pity and horror, whereas I was mainly interested in the mentions of Oak Ridge. I kept expecting to hear my father’s name.

After we had finished the pantry and admired it, Flora turned off the radio and said we needed to go for a walk.

“If I had these weeks to do over,” she said, as we skidded arm in arm down our driveway, “I would do some things differently.”

“What?” I was really curious.

“I would have got you out more.”

“But we couldn’t go anywhere.”

“We could have walked.”

“We have walked.”

“Oh, I don’t mean to the mailbox and back. Real walks. We could have gone on little hikes through the woods. Taken picnics.”

In the mailbox, along with the flighty black ant that seemed to have taken up residence there, was a single pink envelope addressed to me by an adult. Inside a birthday card with a picture of two rabbits hopping off together, Rachel Huff had written in her tortured script: “See you back at school!” My belated thank-you note had achieved its purpose: at least they weren’t my enemies anymore.

“Isn’t that nice of them,” said Flora.

“Mrs. Huff keeps a drawer full of cards for all occasions,” I informed her. “And she has this book with everybody’s address and their birthdays and anniversaries. All she had to do was pick a card, write my address, put on a stamp, and make Rachel write something.”

“Well, it was still thoughtful of them.”

I conceded it was. “Even though my birthday’s not till tomorrow.”

“You have to tell me what kind of cake you want. Did… your grandmother make you some special cake?”

“Please don’t say any more until tomorrow. It might be bad luck.”

“Oh, okay,” said Flora, as though she understood, which she didn’t. She had no idea about the hatpin under the pillow.

“Let’s walk up to the top of Sunset Drive,” she said. “I’ve never been that way.”

“There’s nothing up there but logging roads, but be my guest.”

“I blame myself for not getting you out more,” said Flora. “It’s my own lack of imagination. I didn’t grow up with all this land around me. And yet we walked more in a day in Alabama than you and I have done all summer. We walked to the grocery. Then if we needed something else, we walked there again. And then Daddy started what he called his regime.”

“What’s a regime?”

“He made himself walk a mile every day. The doctor said he was too sedentary, sitting around playing cards so much, and also he was getting fat. So Daddy started walking all the way around the roundhouse between fixing the engines. He worked out it would equal a mile if he walked it twice a day. He got so used to his walk that he went to the roundhouse on his days off and I would go with him. Though we only went around once, which was just half a mile.”

“Are you saying I’m getting fat?”

“Oh no, honey, I wasn’t. I’m talking about him. Oh, poor Daddy. I still catch myself thinking that when I get home he’s going to come out the door and hug me.” A brief spate of tears followed, but by now they were the expected thing, a part of Flora, like her childish feet with the too-friendly toenails. “Today I thought we’d look at that land Mr. Quarles was talking about. Where they cut down all the good trees and left a mess and he wants to build the houses for the GIs. What was it your father called him?”

“The Old Mongrel.”

“What had he done to deserve that?”

“You don’t have to do anything to be a mongrel. You just are one, like a dog without a pedigree.”

“My goodness,” said Flora, with an uneasy laugh, “I guess that must make me one.”

I was glad Finn no longer dressed up before he came to us. He had wet-combed his hair and he must have washed his body after his other deliveries because he didn’t have that smell like the day I rode behind him on the motorcycle. He wore his paratrooper boots, shined, with the pants tucked inside, and he had on that shirt with the eagle patch on the sleeve. He said people had waved to him on the street as though he had been part of what happened today.