Hannah Coulter Read Online Free Page B

shorthand. She could work in an office. She could work in one of the warehouses when the market opens. She would catch on. She can do anything.”
    When I looked at myself in the mirror at home, I saw myself as a grown woman, but out in the world that was asking me to come into it, I was still a girl. I didn’t know what to do or what to say. I had no knowledge of my own that would take me past Shagbark. I was inexperienced and unformed—malleable, I think, would be the word. Grandmam knew it. I was a piece of soft clay. I couldn’t be that way for long, but while I was she was determined to mold me into something that could stay alive.
    It was news to me that I wanted to live in Hargrave and get a job. But hearing Grandmam say so was a relief to me. All of a sudden I could feel myself taking form. I thought, “Yes, that would be all right. Yes, that is what I want to do.”
    â€œAnd she’s going to need a room,” Grandmam said.

4
    Virgil
    Dr. Finley had been dead only a little more than a year when I came to live at Miss Ora’s. He had been an old-fashioned general practitioner, giving whatever help he could wherever it was needed through the Depression, and taking, I gathered, pretty cheerfully just what he could get of what was owed him. His income gave him and Miss Ora a good life in their good house, but nothing extra. After his death Miss Ora started renting rooms, mostly to tobacco buyers who would be there only during the winter.
    So that I wouldn’t have to share a bathroom with the men, she rented me her only downstairs bedroom with a little bathroom of its own. It was a snug, pretty room, with a bureau and bed and easy chair, and two big windows looking out across the shady lawn to the house next door. If I angled my line of sight enough, I could see, beyond a beautiful copper beech and a weeping willow, the opening of the river valley. With my few possessions that I brought with me to Hargrave, I had only two keepsakes: a picture of my mother and father not long after they were married, and a beautiful piece of embroidery made by Grandmam’s mother. I kept them on the bureau, for they were a consolation. I have them yet.
    Miss Ora’s house and the two on either side made a sort of neighborhood.
There were no fences. Behind the three houses, the backyards mingled into one big garden, with hedges and arbors and lawns and trees and vegetable patches and flower borders that went back to the river bluff. From there you could see the river valley and the big river for a long way up and down. There were fern beds, and gateways with roses trellised over them, and tunnels through the hedges, and a pool with big goldfish, and a gazebo on the brink of the bluff.
    This was home to me during the simplest and in some ways the clearest little while of my life. I worked hard while I lived in Hargrave, but after I was settled it was an unworried time. I had never known such prettiness as I found at Miss Ora’s. Though she was not by any means a wealthy woman and was busy all the time herself, she had a wisdom that spread order and beauty around her. For me, Miss Ora’s was a place of rest. I can remember waking up there early in the morning in that quiet house and hearing the towboats sounding their whistles down in the fog, and a strange feeling of peace would come over me as if from another world.
    I had saved enough money to pay my rent and keep me eating for a while, I had enough presentable clothes, and if I ran short of anything I was to write to Grandmam. But I didn’t take anything for granted. The morning after I came to Miss Ora’s to live, I started looking for work.
    I was no good at it. I could work, I knew I could. I had worked at home all my life, and at school I had learned “secretarial skills.” As Grandmam had said, I was a good typist, pretty fast, and I knew shorthand. But as soon as I opened my mouth I sounded like I didn’t know