Gail Godwin - Flora

“Why did it need washing?”

“There was dried blood on it. He said something about you hurting your knee, and I cleaned it off, too. How are you feeling?”

“My head hurts. I want you to tell me where everyone is.”

Mrs. Jones pulled over Nonie’s dressing table bench and sat down close to me. She was not the sort of person to plop down on your bed. The stoic slabs of her cheeks lay calm and flat against her bones. Her gray gaze was direct without being probing or judging. “Your father is in the hospital. The preacher from your church is with him and will be coming to tell you how he is. Mr. Finn has seen your father, too.”

“Where is Finn now?”

“There’s arrangements have to be made. Mr. Finn is tending to those.”

“What kind of arrangements?”

“Well, he had to get in touch with her people. And fix up things with the railroad to get her home. Oh dear, I never did know what to call her.”

“You mean get her body home.”

“That’s what I mean. Would you like me to bring you something or would you rather go to the kitchen?”

“Thank you, I’m not hungry.”

“I squeezed lemon juice all around those spill marks on the sofa cushion and put it out in the sun. What was spilled on it?”

“I spilled some milk.”

“Well, it ought to dry up fine, then. The drawing books didn’t fare as well, but you can still see the pictures. One of them of her is real good, it’s a pity it got spoiled.”

“What time is Father McFall coming?”

“Right after the hospital, he said.”

“I better get dressed.”

“I’ll be in the kitchen,” said Mrs. Jones.

Beryl Jones, Nonie said, was one to answer your questions or carry out instructions “and stop right there. She doesn’t elaborate, argue, or say what she would do. Would there were more like her!”

You could trust Mrs. Jones to give you her candid responses and respectfully desist from opinions, whereas Father McFall was not one to hold back when he thought you were in error, which is why I thought it safest to be fully dressed and on my guard to receive whatever he deemed me ready for.

But when he arrived, he didn’t treat me as sternly as I had anticipated. Taking my hands in his, he asked almost humbly, “Helen, how can I serve you? Tell me what I can do.” For the first time I noticed how the dry, wrinkled folds of his neck hung down like an old dog’s over his clerical collar. Though it was the kind of thing you expected to hear from waiters or gas station attendants, his choice of words for the occasion completely disarmed me.

“I n-need,” I began. Then harsh, barking sobs burst out of me and I had to wait for them to run their course. “Nobody will tell me anything,” I began again, “and I need to know .”

“What do you need to know, Helen?”

“Is my father going to die?”

“He’s pretty banged up and there are some problems, but thanks to that young soldier’s quick thinking, he’s not going to die.”

“What did Finn do?”

“He packed his shirt against the ruptured artery and then he stood on top of it with his heavy boot till the ambulance came.”

“Can I go and see my father?”

“Not just yet, but I’ll come and see you every day, maybe twice a day, and bring you reports. Why don’t we go in the living room and sit down?”

“Not the living room!”

“Here in the kitchen, then.”

“No, not here, either.”

“Well, where would you like to go?”

“Let’s go out of the house.”

But when we got outside I couldn’t think where we should go. My mind had lost its power of decision. Father McFall seemed to understand this and started walking slowly around the circular drive that Finn and I had cleared. I followed along beside him. It was going to be a warm day. I had not forgotten it was my birthday, but thought it would sound crass to bring it up.

Presently he asked, “Is there anything else you want to know, Helen?”

“Where is she now?”

“At the funeral home.”

“Was she dead when I fell over her, or did she die at the hospital? Finn made me go back home when the second ambulance was coming.”

“It appears to have been instant. She was hit by a car.”

“Was it my father’s car?”

“We think so, but he’s in no condition to be asked yet.”

“What was she doing out in the middle of the dark road?”

“Finn said that, as far as he could tell, she had walked down to see if he had found you yet.”

Finn did not come that day. In the middle of the afternoon, Mrs. Jones said she had to drive into town for a few things. She returned with some groceries and a bakery cake with HELEN written on it in pink and eleven candles waiting to be lit. We had beef stew for dinner and then afterward the cake. The icing wasn’t chocolate, but of course I didn’t say anything. “Rosemary always loved a bakery cake,” Mrs. Jones said, apologetically adding, “though maybe it was because I was no great shakes at baking.” The stew was filling, though without the benefit of Juliet Parker’s famous herbs.

“Will you be spending the night again?” I asked her.

“I’ll be staying with you until we get things figured out. For now, I’m in your old room, I hope that’s all right. When your father comes home, he’ll have to be down here for a while.”

She had a present for me. Its plain brown wrappings reminded me of Finn’s present the evening before, when Flora had gone to take her bath and change into the blue dress.

“I bought it off the librarian,” said Mrs. Jones. “She had ordered it for the young people’s library, but someone on the board said it was too pessimistic and not Christian. But the librarian assured me it was a wonderful book, she had read it as a teenager, and thought you were old enough for it. And the pictures in this one are real beauties.”

It was the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám , the Fitzgerald translation, with color illustrations by Dulac. I still have it on my shelves, with “All best wishes on yr. 11th birthday, from Beryl M. Jones” inscribed on the flyleaf. If I balance it by the spine in the palm of my hand and joggle it lightly back and forth, it falls open to a familiar page.

The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ,

Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit

Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,

Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

Finn did come the next day, but Father McFall came earlier and brought the morning newspaper. PARATROOPER SAVES LIFE OF A-BOMB WORKER. It wasn’t as flashy as the story about the lady in a nearby town whose son was a bombardier on the plane that dropped the bomb, but both stories were on the front page, grouped beneath the caption LOCAL HEROES. There was a head shot of my father, with his acerbic smile, taken when he was promoted from assistant principal to principal of the high school, which made the picture the same age as myself. Next to it was an Army photo of Pvt. D. P. Finn with a frowning blur of a face, in full paratrooper gear, cradling his helmet next to his chest. You could see that his image had been lifted out of a group picture, which reminded me of the story of my mother cutting herself out of the Alabama photo. Though I prided myself on my rapid reading skills, Father McFall standing over me made me nervous and I had to keep doubling back over lines before they made sense.

They referred to my father as “the esteemed principal of Mountain City High,” which would make him snort when he got well enough to read this, and went so far as to name the building (K-25) his crew had been working on at Oak Ridge. Then came a quote from an Oak Ridge barber describing how everyone in the government town of 75,000, built in 1942, was bound to secrecy: “My customers and I talked about everything under the sun except the project.” The story said my father had been on his way home for his daughter’s (no name) birthday the next day. Could this information have come from the telephone operator who had kept me on the phone asking more questions? She probably had a sideline of calling in things like this to some contact at the newspaper. Annie would have known for sure. Finn had been quoted as saying, “I only did what I could. In combat training they taught us to use what we had in an emergency, and I had a shirt and a boot.” It said that until recently he had been a convalescent at the local military hospital, and that was all.