Wouldn’t it be a shame, Flora thought, the box of True American Diamond Matches rattling in her hand, wouldn’t it be a shame if the old place burned down?
The cool night air tugged at Flora’s apron, somewhere down the way a dog barked. Biltmore Ave. was deserted except for her, even the drunks and other ne’er-do-wells long since hunkered down to sleep in a corner somewhere. Old Mr. Meyers had told her just yesterday he was losing the building. Foreclosure. Like so many other properties since the crash three years back. Like so many of Flora’s own properties. Land throughout Asheville that she had purchased piecemeal, first this, then that, renting out rooms and houses to make ends meet, to pay the taxes owed, to put together her own meager living. Until she couldn’t anymore. Until she lost them, one by one, until all she had left was the room she lived in at the boarding house on Biltmore Ave. that she leased from Old Mr. Meyers. And now she didn’t even have that.
It was utter nonsense, she realized, calling Morris Meyers “old.” He was younger than her by a few years. But Flora had never gotten used to thinking of herself as old, even as her youth melted into middle age, even now as she pushed deeper into her 70s. She wasn’t old. Old women didn’t work. And Flora never stopped working. Women without safety nets couldn’t stop working.
There had been a short while in her life, those few years when she was married to Marcellus, that she had experienced something like security. He came from a family with land and money—far less of it after the War Between the States, especially after they had to pay the Negroes they had once owned to work the fields. Marcellus was a kind man, and had a good head on his shoulders, especially when it came to business. He had no taste for farming and instead used the money his father left him to start a grocery business in Raleigh.
Those years had been happy ones for Flora. The marriage produced no children, but Flora didn’t really mind. She was one of ten children, and had already had quite enough of child-rearing by the time she left her parents’ home. Marcellus was enough for her.
And then very early one Spring morning Marcellus fell over dead in the kitchen. Not even 40 years old. The years of her life stretched out long and empty in front of Flora then, and any feeling of safety and security—even comfort and happiness—that she’d experienced with Marcellus evaporated with his last breath. He’d left everything to her, except one hundred dollars each to his brothers, sister, and mother. But even that wouldn’t be enough for her to live on for the rest of her long, solitary life. She had no interest in marrying again, and who would marry a barren, middle-aged woman, anyway?
So, she decided to leave. And she made another decision. When Marcellus died it felt like the life they built together had burned down around her—why not the house, too? Why leave it standing, a mausoleum for her marriage, for strangers to live in? Three months after she buried Marcellus, she left the door to the stove in the kitchen open so that the hot coals spilled out onto the floor in the same spot where Marcellus had gasped his last. And then, for good measure, she took a match to the curtains, to the furniture, to anything that she thought would take hold. The house went up even quicker than she thought, and she stood in the yard, and then the street, and then the neighbor’s porch, and watched everything she owned burn to the ground.
It had been the first time since Marcellus died that she smiled.
She stood now in front of 100 Biltmore Ave. and imagined watching the flames make every window glow orange. The exterior walls were stone, so it likely wouldn’t come down as completely and satisfyingly as her old home had. There would be an empty skeleton left, gaping and charred. But perhaps it would still give her that same feeling, a clean break from a life now irreparably changed. The kind of freedom that can only come from destruction. Rebirth.
What did Meyers care about the old place, anyway? He had his department store downtown, his businesses to keep him afloat through these troubled years. Losing this old house meant nothing to him. If the place disappeared in a puff of smoke, say, it wouldn’t be any skin off his nose. Might even get him some insurance money. Better him than the bank.
Flora didn’t really hold it against Meyers. She liked the old man, for the most part. There were those around here that would call him a carpetbagging Jew, and some might call him worse, but Flora didn’t truck in that kind of talk. He’d been a decent landlord all these years, never charged her more than what was fair.
But fair didn’t matter anymore. Nothing was fair, it seemed, once the market crashed. Asheville had been a different place when Flora first moved here. A boomtown. The railroad arrived, Vanderbilt had just finished his big French chateau just down the road from Biltmore Ave, people moved to the city in droves. Sick people came hoping the cool, clean mountain air would heal the tuberculosis in their lungs. Rich people came to escape the heat. Schools and courthouses and city buildings went up. Flora took a job supervising the resident students at the Asheville Young Women’s College, but when the school closed down a year later, she looked at the bright, burgeoning city around her and saw opportunities. She leased Meyer’s building at 100 Biltmore Ave. and ran it as a boarding house.
She rented out rooms primarily to young working women—nurses, seamstresses, secretaries. She kept a clean house and strict rules about gentlemen visitors, which was to say they weren’t allowed. Her boarding house had a good, honest reputation, and she was proud of it. She started every seasonable morning watering the purple petunias she kept in the window boxes, and every evening sweeping clean the front porch. In between she cooked and cleaned and looked after the boarders, their comings and goings and needs throughout the day. Some stayed longer than others, but of course no one stayed forever. They all moved on to their real lives, eventually. Except for Flora. This was where she intended to stay for the rest of her natural life. This was her home.
And then the crash came. Asheville seemed immune to it, at first, somehow. But eventually the debt the city had been running up caught up to them; Mayor Gallatin Roberts and the city had been taking out bonds. Then he used some of that money to prop up Central Bank, to keep the whole thing afloat a little longer, but eventually it collapsed as so many others had. People’s money was just gone. Lives were ruined. Lives were lost—just last year Roberts himself committed suicide over it.
Flora had no patience for suicide. Her own brother, Charles, had taken his life some 15 years ago. Got some bad news from the doctor and a few weeks later put a bullet through his heart in the summer house of the Raleigh Country Club. At least, ill health is what everyone blamed. The only note he left was for his wife, Loula, saying he was going away. Flora always wondered if the whole thing had something to do with money. Everything did, it seemed.
A person wasn’t supposed to have a favorite brother, Mama said, but Flora did, and it had been Charles. And Charles had always favored her, too. Even named his second daughter after her. But they had fallen out of touch, as happens when people get old and busy and caught up in their own lives. Charles’ death wounded Flora not only because of the loss of her beloved brother, but because of the feeling of betrayal it brought with it. Had they grown so far apart that he no longer felt he could call on her in his time of need?
The coward’s way out, they called it. The way out her brother had taken, and the Mayor too, and plenty of others. Taken by those who felt they had nothing left to lose. Flora shook the matchbox in her hand. She had nothing left now, not once the building was lost to foreclosure. Wouldn’t it be a shame if the old place burned down while she was in it? The outcry would be louder for this old house than it would for the loss of a penniless, childless old woman. Her obituary probably wouldn’t even make the Asheville Citizen. But a fire downtown? That would make headlines.
And then what? The world would turn, a new day would push in to replace the old one, the newspaper would discard the old stories for fresh ones, and all would be forgotten. Flora wasn’t a coward. She wasn’t taking any way out. She would keep on, push forward as she always had. The old stone boarding house could make its own way through the troubles. She told herself all these years that fire had freed her from her old life, from the pain of losing Marcellus. It had given her the illusion that a new Flora, a different Flora, had moved to Asheville and made her own life there. But she was neither new, nor different. She could not escape the things that had happened to her. They were part of her. They made her. They had kept her going, and would keep her going now, whatever happened next.
Flora slipped the matches back into the pocket of her apron.