The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope
The Enchanted Life
of Adam Hope
Rhonda Riley
For my mother, Sarah Louise Riley Auten Thomas, who was an exquisite and fortunate fit for me. I offer this as repayment for the stories she told on the front porch during countless summer evenings. She left too early. I am still listening.
This story is for her—a fiction, because, like her, I could not tell the whole truth or a single truth whole.
Contents
M
y husband was not one of us. He remains, after decades, a mystery to me. Inexplicable. Yet, in many ways, and on most days, he was an ordinary man.
With him I learned that, before all mysteries, surrender is inevitable. We all give way to our true natures. This is his story. It is, of course, also my story, for I am the one left to do the telling.
Now finally, after decades, I am writing this down for my daughters, for their children and the children after them, the act of writing my atonement for all I have not told them. Until now. For now I have proof. Sweet, indisputable proof.
Sarah, our youngest daughter, sent me a photograph weeks ago, a full year since she moved to China with her husband, Jian, and their son, Michael. In it, her hair is glossy dark brown and straight. Her eyes are a deep brown as well, and the folds of her eyelids now suggest Asian ancestry. Her curly red hair and gold-flecked green Irish eyes are gone; in her new skin, she is her father’s daughter. Lil, my daughter who lives with me now, insists that Sarah must have had plastic surgery and dyed her hair. She’s puzzled and disappointed that her sister would take such measures to fit in where she now lives. But I know the truth.
T
his truth begins on a Saturday in 1944. I was fresh out of high school and already tired of working at the cotton mill when I heard our car pull up in the backyard. Then Momma trudged through the door, hard news on her face.
Without taking her coat off, she slumped down into one of the dining chairs. She stared at the table, then opened her mouth as if to speak. I propped the iron up.
Every day brought news of boys missing or dead in the war. Momma and Daddy had been visiting my widowed aunt Eva. Two of Eva’s three sons were already dead. The third, Ricky, was overseas after lying about his age to sign up with the army. I braced myself, expecting Momma to announce Eva’s remaining child among them. Instead, she closed her mouth, hung her head, and covered her eyes as Daddy paused on the back porch to wipe his feet.
“It’s your aunt Eva, Evelyn. She’s gone,” he said.
Then Momma began to cry in earnest. Aunt Eva, the baby sister of my grandmother, was in spirit, if not in fact, the matriarch of our family. Closer to Momma than her own mother had been.
I unplugged the iron as Daddy went to find my sisters, Rita and Bertie.
“It’s okay, Momma. It’ll be okay.” I rubbed her back. I loved my stern and demanding aunt Eva. I could not imagine her energy stilled by death and the farm left empty. But I sensed, even then, that this change was larger than a single death, that it would radiate out from this single point.
Daddy returned, shepherding my sisters into the kitchen. Bertie held out a handkerchief for Momma. Rita blinked nervously. Tears were rare for our mother.
Momma wiped her face and sighed a deep, shuddering sigh. “I knew something must have been wrong. She hadn’t been into town in over a week. She always . . .”
I started to sit down again and reached for Momma’s hand.
Daddy stopped me. “You’re going to the farm with me. Eva’s cows haven’t been milked.”
I didn’t want to leave Momma, but he was right. I was the one who should go with him. My brother, Joe, had no interest in the farm. Bertie had never deigned to touch a cow’s teat, and any animal larger than a house cat intimidated Rita. I knew Aunt Eva’s farm better than I knew my own bedroom. I followed Daddy to the car and slid in beside him.
“Probably a heart attack,” he said. “I don’t think she suffered. Your momma found her on the parlor couch, pictures of her boys next to her.”
He offered no more and I didn’t ask. We had never been much for words, the two of us. I looked out at the houses we passed. Eva was gone. A wave of anger surged through me. I tried to console myself with the hard practical thought that the natural death of an old woman was better than one more boy dead.
Daddy muttered, cursing the roughness of the steep driveway and downshifting the old Ford.
“The coroner’s here,” Daddy announced as we pulled around behind the house. Eva’s dog, Hobo, barked a welcome then retreated. Two men slid Eva’s sheet-covered body, strapped down as if she might get away, into the back of an open ambulance. Daddy got out of the car and greeted a man in a suit, who approached us holding some papers. I walked away from their voices, turning my back on the face of Eva’s house and its door propped open like a gaping mouth.
The plow horse, Becky, whinnied and pawed as soon as I opened the barn door. Eva’s three cows bellowed. Their bags hung heavily, enormous and painfully pink. Manure soured by too much urine lay over the normal sweet barn smell. I started first with Maybell, the cantankerous one, working my hands gently along her bag, checking for lumps. For once, she seemed grateful for the milking.
Only then, leaning against her warm, firm side, listening to the rhythm of milk hit the tin bucket, breathing the sweetness of it rising, did I begin to cry for the woman who had taught me to milk. I cried for her and for what the war had taken. All those boys dead, a new one in the newspaper every day. Now the war was taking my refuge, the farm. It had fallen into such neglect. That would not have happened just with the death of Uncle Lester. It took the war biting off one son at a time until there were none.
Since I’d been old enough to carry a bucket or wield a hoe, I had done my best to help Eva. But blinded by grief, she had let the place go. A dull darkness slipped over me as if, in her death, Eva’s sorrows had shifted to my shoulders.
After a few minutes, Daddy joined me. He snorted in disgust and stomped the manure off his shoes, then set to work on Beulah next to me. He offered nothing more about Eva’s death. He hated the farm. He had grown up poor on a farm and had vowed never to go back to one. I couldn’t see that we were any better off, the six of us living paycheck to paycheck crowded into the tiny mill-village house, but Daddy trusted the steady income of the textile mills. To him, farmers were a lot to be pitied. “Farmers are at the mercy of nature’s whims,” he liked to say. We finished the milking and started the feeding. While Daddy watered the hogs and chickens, I went into the house, drawn to it now that the coroner was gone. I pulled the screen door closed. Eva hated flies getting in the house. The stove was cold and held the same stillness that permeated the house. A saucer sat on the table, a half-eaten square of corn bread on it, a cup of coffee next to it, a spoon left in the cup. Such a puny breakfast—nothing like the ham, eggs, and biscuits she had always made for Uncle Lester, her boys, and me. I took the dishes to the sink and put them down soundlessly, not wanting to disturb the silence. I lay my hand on the pump handle, letting the cool of it into my palm. Through the window over the sink, I saw Daddy, bent at the hog pen, emptying a bucket of water into the trough. I imagined Aunt Eva behind me at the table, overwhelmed by a sudden urge to see her boys and, taking uncharacteristic leave of her breakfast and chores, going to look at their pictures in the parlor. Or had she known what was coming and decided to die there with them?
I followed her path down the dark-wood hall past the bedrooms. A stench surprised me before I got to the parlor. I sucked in my breath and I turned my head, but kept going. Her bedroom door stood open, the bed neatly made. She’d gotten that far. On the front porch, the rocking chairs sat motionless. I stood out at the edge of the yard where the land dropped to the railroad tracks. The air was calm and empty.
Then I felt the train, first in my feet—that faint, familiar vibration. The 5:40 out of Charlotte heading for the mill. I leapt and waved as the engine chugged rhythmically into sight, bursting into the air. I gave the engineer the bent-armed sign and pumped my elbow up and down. He saluted and obliged: two sharp blasts. The force reverberated in my breastbone, and I was a little girl for a moment, laughing and bouncing on my feet. The roar of the train swelled into a moving wall of sound as the long line of freight cars passed below. The ground shook.
The roar diminished as the train disappeared toward the mill and the quiet returned.
When Daddy called, I followed his voice to the parlor. He had maneuvered the sofa to the door and waited for my help. “It’s ruined. She must have lost control in the end.”
I held my hand up to shush him, a gesture my father normally would not have accepted from one of his children. I picked up my end and we worked the sofa down the hall. The smell was awful. Even in the dim light, the dark stain that ran half the length of the sofa was visible.
I kept my eyes on Daddy. Moving furniture was something he would normally do with my brother. Outside of his work at the mill, he was sedentary with his pipe and his rocking chair, already middle-aged, though still in his thirties. His strength and competence as we carried the big sofa through the kitchen surprised and pleased me. Sweat stuck my dress to my back by the time we got the heavy old sofa outside and, turning from the sight and smell of it, dropped it on the hard, bare clay beside the back porch.
A few minutes later, we drove away in the glow of the dashboard light. The dark shapes of trees slipped by in the dusk. I glanced at my father. His hands were on the wheel. Immutable and endlessly taciturn, he peered at the road ahead.
All my life, I had heard stories about my mother, both from her and her family. Illustrations of her stellar memory for numbers, her sly stubbornness, or her random gullibility. My youngest sister, Rita, pale and skittish as a feral cat, had always been transparent to me. Bertie, three years younger, was more complex but guileless and always willing to announce what was on her mind. My brother, Joe, born only eleven months after me and resembling Daddy as much as I resembled Momma, I knew in the thoughtless, unconscious way one knows a close sibling.
My father was a different story. I sometimes saw him laughing with other men, but at home he sat detached, his face vague behind the smoke of his pipe. Only blatant insubordination or dangerous stupidity on the part of us kids could animate him into flashes of authority. I never heard him tell a story.
Riding home from Eva’s, I glanced at him again. I wanted something from him, some sign of being touched by the same loss, a token of kinship. But we did not even look like kin. I had red, wavy hair and freckles. Like all the women of my mother’s family, I was tall. He was clear-skinned and compact, his dark hair straight.
We drove home in silence.
A
fter the funeral, Momma and I crowded into the small basement of the farmhouse, pulling dusty jars of Eva’s beans, jams, and relishes off the shelves, sniffing and checking them to make sure they were still good. The small room smelled of mold and dust. Shelves of jars lined each wall.