Flora by Gail Godwin Page B

Her little dead daughter had spoken to her at the cemetery. “Momma, you don’t need to take the bus out here anymore, I’m not under this stone, I am at home with you.” The spirit of her uncle Al had begged Mrs. Jones’s forgiveness for wrongs he had done her as a child. “Say you forgive me, sweetheart,” he had said, “then open that window and let my spirit fly free.” Mrs. Jones had said aloud to him in her kitchen: “If you say so, I forgive you, Uncle Al, but you were always kind to me.” Then she had opened the window, and felt a great whoosh of air, and the next morning there was a big crow on the branch outside fixing her with its yellow eye. Mrs. Jones threw bread crusts out to it for several days, remembering how Uncle Al always brought her treats, and then one morning it made a strange triple caw that sounded exactly like “Bye, sweetheart,” looked her straight in the eye, and flew off for good.
    Tonight and tomorrow would be my last nights in this room of my childhood, and the room seemed to feel this because it wasn’t being unfriendly anymore. Its wistful sadness was like that of a friend who knows you’ve outgrown the friendship and need to move on.

VIII.
    After breakfast Monday morning Flora checked over our list for Grove Market.
    “Would you like to call it in, Helen?”
    “Not really.”
    I wished I’d said yes as soon as she began speaking to the person on the other end, who could not have been grouchy Mr. Crump because he would never have put up with such dalliance. Why couldn’t she just coolly read off the list, with pauses to let the other person write things down?
    “What, no fresh corn? We would have corn by now in Alabama. But then we planted our garden very early down there: corn, okra, spinach, peas, runner beans. I guess you wouldn’t have any okra this early either. No, I thought not. Too bad, we’ll have to do with canned corn, then. And does your meat market have something called chipped beef? Oh, in jars. How big are the jars? Maybe two jars then. And remember now, this all goes on Mr. Anstruther’s tab, he’s away doing important war work over in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. We’re going to be ordering whenever we need something, is that all right? He doesn’t want my little cousin to go into public places because of this poliooutbreak. Oh, and two quarts of milk for my cousin, she’s still growing—wait, let me see if she wants anything else. Helen, can you think of anything else?”
    I had gone beyond embarrassment. “Maybe some candy.”
    “What kind?”
    “Clark bars.”
    “How many?”
    “Five,” I risked.
    “Five Clark bars,” Flora relayed without batting an eye. “And can you tell us approximately when your delivery person will be coming? Not that we expect to be going anywhere! And you ought to know our driveway is a tiny bit rough.”
    Our big event of the morning was the walk down our tiny-bit-rough driveway to fetch the mail. Flora had two letters, I had nothing. She kissed the handwritten envelope (“Dear Juliet, at least somebody loves me!”) but ripped open the typewritten one first, scanned the contents, and began to cry.
    “What?” I said.
    “I expected it. But still—”
    “What?”
    “They said no, and it was my first choice.” Bravely she replaced the letter in its envelope and scrubbed her eyes with her fists like a child. “They say it’s because I don’t drive. The thing is, someone offered to drive me to that interview, but it would have been in a truck and I thought I’d make a better impression if I arrived alone on the bus. It was this darling little school in the middle of a field. Fifteen sixth graders. I could have handled it real well.”
    “But you had three interviews, so you still have two more chances.”
    “I wonder if I had told a lie about the driving—I couldhave learned to drive later. But this was probably their way of letting me off nicely. If I had said I could drive they would have had to have come