by Gail Godwin
“Do you have to go so fast?” I cried. “You’re hurting my wrist.”
“Sorry,” he said, stopping to let me catch my breath but not letting go of my wrist. “It’s only that I want to get you home. The poor girl is beside herself with worry. She takes it mortally seriously, you know, being left in charge of you, and now she’s terrified she’s let your father down. I had a feeling you might come here, but she thought you could have gone back to that place you walked to. That land on top of the hill that old Mr. Quarles wants to buy.”
“Why on earth would I want to go back there? The loggers have ruined it. That’s why he wants to buy it, he loves making a profit on other people’s losses.”
“Well, you weren’t there to tell us that, were you? She said you seemed to have enjoyed the walk, so we tried that first.”
“Enjoyed! How stupid can you get?”
“A pity, isn’t it, how stupid we all are.”
“I didn’t mean you. But Flora’s simpleminded, you must have realized that by now.”
“I must be simpleminded myself because no, I hadn’t. I think you are confusing simpleminded with simple-hearted.”
“I’m not sure I know what ‘simple-hearted’ means,” I said haughtily.
“When there’s no deceit or malice in your heart. Most of us have some; it protects us. People without it are rare. My friend Barney came close, but he’d built up a layer of sludge to protect his heart against his mother. That’s why Flora is so rare, it’s just her heart she offers, with none of the sludge to wade through.”
“You sound like you love her,” I remarked scornfully, but his answer, if he gave one, was drowned out by a shriek of braking tires, headlamps dancing crazily toward us, as though someone thought it might be fun to drive into the woods and run us down, then veering off wildly at the last minute to hit something else up ahead with a crack and crush of metal.
“God in Heaven,” said Finn, letting go of my hand.
“It’s because they shot out the streetlight again,” I said, feeling a surge of excitement accompanied by shameful relief. An accident would surely wipe my misconduct from Finn’s memory of this night. “Will we go and help out?” I was starting to talk like him.
“From the sound of things, we need to get an ambulance. You’re going to run up that hill as fast as you can and tell Flora to phone. She’s waiting at the house in case you come back. Tell them exactly where, on Sunset Drive.”
“But I want to help you.”
“Who’ll go and call for the ambulance, then? Who is being simpleminded now?”
“But shouldn’t we go and look first? We don’t even know how badly—”
“Christ almighty, Helen, is it your morbid curiosity we must satisfy before we get help?”
“I need to see!” I screamed. “It might be my father. He’s coming for my birthday! What if he decided to come tonight? You can’t keep me from my father.”
I was already running ahead of him toward the trees broken by the crash. Finn had hurt and insulted me, and I had screamed what I did in order to punish him and win my point, but when I got closer to the wreck it seemed that I had wreaked a hideous magic. The crumpled, steaming car, whose innocent headlights still beamed reliably ahead into the woods, was my father’s Chevy coupe and the numbers on the license plate were the ones I knew by heart.
XXVIII.
Annie Rickets’s claim that her parents were privy to secret information because they worked for the telephone company was not a total fabrication.
My grandfather had installed one of the earliest phone lines in town for Anstruther’s Lodge, and our three-digit number had remained the same, though most people had five-digit numbers by this time. In 1945, you still took the receiver off the hook and an operator, often one whose voice you’d heard before, said, “Number, please.” You said the number—Annie’s was 34598—and the operator said, “Thank you” or “I’ll connect you” (and sometimes both) and she would plug you into the right hole on her switchboard and the number you wanted would ring. If someone didn’t pick up after a certain number of rings, the operator would say, “I’m sorry, but your party doesn’t answer, will you try again later?” Annie’s family was on a party line, and sometimes when we were talking a petulant woman’s voice would break in with “Are you little chatterboxes ever going to get off?” “Oh, dry up, you old bag,” Annie once shot back, and the party complained to the operator, who told Annie’s parents. They made her phone the old bag and apologize. Until the dial system came in, the voice of the operator was an integral part of all telephone intercourse. Talking to callers, the operator could learn about things that were happening and make further calls on her own and thus contribute to the outcome of events.
In an emergency, it was enough to tell the operator what it was and she would plug you into the proper service, or you could just tell her what was the matter and she would contact the service and relay your message.
I had been preparing my message as I ran uphill, a stitch in my side: Operator, you’ve got to help me, my father’s had a bad wreck on Sunset Drive and we need an ambulance quick. She connected me and stayed on the line while the hospital took down the information. Hairpin curve, near the top. Thrown through the windshield. The person with him said a severed artery in the neck.
The ambulance was on its way, but the operator kept talking to me until I told her I really had to go. How old was I? Was there anyone with me? I told her I was eleven and that my father had been one of the people at Oak Ridge helping make the bomb, only we hadn’t known what he was doing, he himself hadn’t known, it was so secret. He had been driving home to be with me on my birthday tomorrow.
Where was Flora? I had yelled for her as I ran into the house. She must have gone out looking for me some more. I was glad she hadn’t been there to make the phone call. She would have included who knew what unnecessary digressions.
(“For God’s sake—run!” croaked a bare-chested Finn, spotlit by the faithful headlights that hadn’t seemed to register that the rest of the car was smashed. I had left him kneeling over my father’s crumpled form, stuffing his own shirt, already blood-soaked, against the side of my father’s neck. “And stay in the house with Flora. You’re under orders!”)
Quickly I circled the downstairs—no Flora, though at some point she had found time to work on the milk damage. Wet kitchen towels had been carefully laid across the sofa cushion, and the assaulted sketch pads placed facedown on a dry towel. I stopped by my room long enough to change into my Keds, which were better for running up and down hills, and then galloped upstairs to check out all the rooms so I could truthfully say I’d looked everywhere. If someone wasn’t in the house, you could hardly be under orders to stay in it with them.
There were two hospitals in town, St. Benedict’s on the south side, and Mission on our side. Mission was only twelve blocks from the entrance to Sunset Drive, and as I skidded down our driveway—this descent less effortless than the one when the cognac was fresher—I could already hear the approaching ambulance.
My father could not die because Finn had been on the spot to save him. And why had he been on the spot? Because he had been out looking for me. My mind raced ahead, binding up the wounds and preparing a desirable outcome. I had worried that my father would find fault with Finn, but how could you find fault with the person who had saved your life? They would become fast friends, the Starling Peake room would be the Devlin Patrick Finn room, Finn would help repair Old One Thousand and drive me to school and attend the local junior college. Even if he didn’t get his status revised and be eligible for the GI Bill, my father would pay the tuition. If only there was more money! But we would manage somehow. In five years, when I turned sixteen, I’d have my driver’s license and could get an after-school job.
When I rounded the first curve I saw the parked ambulance below with its front spotlight trained on the woods. There was a police car, as well, and a fire truck was just arriving. Men tumbled out of vehicles
and shouted back and forth and carried handheld searchlights toward the spot where my father lay. From my invisible vantage point above the activity, I seemed to split in half. One half could not suppress the thrill of elation rising in my throat at the enthralling spectacle of human beings organizing themselves to save a life, while the other recoiled from the possibility that my father might die, or indeed was already dead, and that my life would be completely changed.
Now they were carrying him out of the woods. Bare-chested Finn, holding one of the searchlights, followed, directing the high-powered beam on them loading the stretcher into the back of the ambulance. Unable to make out whether they had covered up my father’s face (which I knew from the movies was a bad sign), I edged closer. Still invisible in the dark on the other side of the road, I risked another couple of yards until I could make sure that I really did see the oxygen mask over the face and white wrappings around the neck.
Now that they were getting ready to close the doors, I felt it would be all right to declare myself. Finn couldn’t begrudge me speaking to the men who were carrying away my own father.
I stepped forward to cross to their side of the road, tripped over something substantial, and fell down with a cry. Now the light was on me as I picked myself up from the pavement.
“Another one!” a man cried as the light moved away from my face and shone on the crumpled body of a woman in a blue dress.
XXIX.
“I let you sleep as long as you could,” Mrs. Jones said, opening the blinds in Nonie’s room to let in the bright, sunny day.
“What time is it?”
“Almost ten.”
“Where is Finn?”
“He left last night. After I came. Don’t you remember?”
“Yes, but tell me again.”
“Well, he phoned and said for me to come—you’d said where to find my number—and I got here as quick as I could. You were here on the bed, with the blanket over you. He said you had refused to get undressed in case you were needed. Do you remember me helping you get into your pajamas and washing your face?”
“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.
