The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope (12 page)

But no one ever accused her. No one stopped us. No one tried to take her away.

Gradually, I saw that everyone would treat Addie as people have always treated their relatives and neighbors with embarrassing but essentially harmless traits. They would ignore the trait. Or, in Addie’s case, the question of her father.

My mother was the only rupture in the acceptance of my lies about Addie. Momma was rarely on the farm alone with me and Addie. She didn’t drive. Usually, Daddy or Joe stayed after they drove her to the farm. Bertie was in high school by then and was too busy with her hair and her schoolmates for anything but the most necessary farm chores. Rita often tagged along, happy to shadow the “big girls,” as she referred to me and Addie.

But on this day it was only the three of us—Momma, Addie, and me. Daddy dropped Momma off at Mildred’s down the road and she had walked from there. She planned to stop on her way back and pick up some quilting scraps Mildred had prepared for her.

Momma and I were in the kitchen doing dishes. In the yard, Addie groomed Cole’s gray mare. The horse had somehow gotten loose, shown up that morning, and followed Addie in from the field. We could see them out the window over the sink.

Momma nodded her head. “She has a way with that horse.” She studied Addie a little longer. “I like Addie, but I can’t figure her. There’s something unusual about her,” Momma said, handing me a pot to dry.

I felt a jolt in my chest and belly and almost dropped the heavy pot.

She hadn’t taken her eyes off Addie since she first spoke. Outside, Addie mounted the mare bareback. “Her momma never told her who her real daddy is?”

I shook my head.

“Well, somebody in the McMurrough family was involved, from the looks of her. Doris might not have known she was already pregnant when she left with that Hardin boy.”

I didn’t speak. I didn’t breathe. She passed me another pot and the milk pitcher, washing the dishes by touch, keeping her eyes on Addie.

“Momma, she’s a good girl. A good person.”

She turned to me then, the same eyes Addie had. “I know, Evelyn. She’s got a good heart and a good head. She’s a good worker for you, too. I’m glad she’s here on the farm with you. And, in the long run, that’s all that matters.”

The tightness in my chest eased. I wanted to tell her the truth, to confess my lie. I wanted company.

Momma glanced out the window again. Addie headed for the porch, the mare followed. Momma turned back to me, her eyes moving over my face, judging me, weighing something. “I guess we all have our secrets.”

Hot, bright fear surged up my chest again, higher. My neck and ears burned. “Momma . . . Momma?” was all I could get out.

“Oh, Evelyn, don’t cry now.” She put her arm around me and kissed my temple. “I didn’t mean anything. It’s okay. You and Addie are both good girls. Everything’s fine.”

Addie opened the door and stomped the dirt off her shoes. She looked at us and I felt a very faint hum as she bent to brush the clay dust off her pant leg.

“I was just telling Evelyn what a fine job you girls are doing on the farm.” Momma took me by the shoulders and turned me toward Addie and the door. “Now, walk me down the hill to Mildred’s before it gets dark.”

The three of us strolled down the road in silence. The sky flushed velvet-pink above us as dusk settled. Birds called from the spring bud of the trees. I wanted Momma to say more but feared what she might say or know. Addie was quiet. I thought she sensed something and listened, too. I felt a twinge of guilt at my relief a few moments later when Momma latched Mildred’s wire gate behind her and waved good-bye.

Momma never said another thing like that about Addie. She was always good to Addie and comfortable enough around her, but I sometimes would catch her watching us, comparing. Addie had become a wedge between me and Momma. Not Addie herself, but the lies I told about her. I’d always been able to tell Momma everything. Not quite everything. Not Cole. But even that I felt I would have eventually told her—maybe years later, after I was married, with my own kids, and it would be something she would understand, maybe laugh about. She was a forgiving, understanding woman. To have to keep something so strange and so important from her seemed an affront to those cherished qualities. Not being able to confide in her made a difference between us, more of a difference because I feared what she might already know about Addie. Maybe she had seen something, more than just the resemblance between me and Addie. I wanted to know what she knew, but we kept our silence—both of us.

After Addie and I returned from walking Momma down to Mildred’s that evening, she returned Cole’s mare to the Starneses. She rode her bareback—the high-strung, mean horse that none of the Starnes men could handle. To hear Cole tell about it at church the next Sunday, Mr. Starnes had been more than impressed. Addie continued visiting the mare at the fence, and the horse galloped to Addie whenever she saw her.

A couple of weeks after the mare’s first visit, we were out in the field hoeing the corn. The mare spotted Addie when we were a good ways from the Starneses’ pasture. The work was hot and tiresome. We pushed ourselves. Every time Addie glanced up, that mare paced the fence and called to her.

By the time we got within thirty feet of the fence, the mare was farther off in the pasture. “Looks like she’s finally tired of you,” I said.

“I don’t think so.” Addie peered across the field, shading her eyes.

Then I heard the mare coming, a full, hard run.

She cleared the fence in a leap that seemed to stop for a second in midair, all grace. It was a beautiful thing to see, the kind of thing that stays with you. The mare, which she renamed Darling on the spot, followed Addie up and down the rows of corn, docile as a dog, oblivious to the four-foot corn tight against her flanks. I’d never seen anything like it.

Dark had fallen by the time we finished our work, so we stabled the mare overnight.

A few days later, Cole came by. From the garden, I saw him stroll confidently up to the back porch where Addie was bent over the washtub, singing. Her hair, now as long as mine, hung down her shoulders. He reached out to touch it. But when she glanced up and smiled that smile at him, he jumped back awkwardly.

As I joined them, Addie was telling him when she could be at his house to meet with him and his daddy. Cole jumped again when he realized I stood next to him. His eyes darted toward me, then quickly away.

I understood his confusion, the strangeness of seeing her face, so similar to mine. It was still a small shock to me if I saw us in a mirror. I longed to smooth things for him, put him at ease, but I didn’t want to lead him on. My offer of tea sounded lame, almost formal, and I felt a twinge of relief when he refused. His eyes flitted awkwardly back and forth between me and Addie as if he couldn’t decide where to look. With a tight, cordial smile, he muttered something about needing to get back home, then he left.

Addie studied his back as he limped away. “He’ll be okay, Evelyn.”

After supper, she saddled our Becky and left for the Starneses, an extra bridle in hand.

When she returned, Darling belonged to her, and Mr. Starnes was entitled to a quarter of our hay plus the hay for his livestock that he’d been promised in exchange for the use of his tractor. Addie had her first horse.

Her ease around animals, especially large animals, amazed me. I managed Becky and the cows well enough. But I could never shake my awareness of their size and power or my assumption that they longed for the herd, the open plain, and an undomesticated sky above them. A part of me always braced for their revolt.

Now there were two things—ordinary things—that we did not share: the fiddle and Darling. It felt right to have our vast, less obvious difference reflected in such public talents.

A
fter several months with Addie, I calmed down a bit. I had no choice. I forced myself to eat more and eventually I put some weight back on. I was able to sleep a full night. My monthly cycle returned. Gradually, the world lost some of its bright hues and became more ordinary. But I often felt as if I lived in dual worlds. One eye saw everything and everyone as they had always been and the other eye perceived a world in which anything might suddenly, impossibly give forth, transforming itself as Addie had. Some days, I felt crazy and alarmingly innocent.

Addie, in contrast, retained her own unique take on things. After I showed her how to fold the soft cotton rags and safety-pin them to the inside of her underwear for her first period, she pulled her pants up, pressed her hand over her womb, then gave her hips a little shake. “It feels different. The emptying of it. Too bad we can’t stop and start it, like peeing or spitting.”

I laughed. I’d never thought of it that way. I dreaded my monthly. The rags we used were washed and hung out on the line to dry and be ignored along with all the other “unmentionables,” then reused the next month. But Addie took it all in with her normal aplomb.

There were, of course, other facts of life. I did my best to explain the biology of boys and babies. I thought I’d completed the job, but one day Addie came striding out of the field with my little sister close behind. Rita, a long, knobby twelve-year-old by then, adored Addie, following her around like a chick does a mother hen when she came to the farm. They both had a look of concern on their faces.

“We saw a stallion in the Starneses’ pasture,” Addie announced. Then she put her arm protectively around Rita and nodded. “Go ahead, ask her.”

Red-faced, Rita whispered, “How big does a man’s thing get?”

I held my hands out about a foot and a half apart.

Rita gasped, covering her mouth. Her eyes widened and she blanched.

Amazement flashed across Addie’s face, then her eyes traveled from my hands up to my face. “Evelyn!”

I bit my lip to keep from laughing. They scowled. I brought my hands closer, to about six inches apart.

Addie glanced at Rita then back at me. “Does your momma really call it a doolywhacker?”

“Yes!” Rita and I crowed. Then we all exploded, laughing till we cried.

Later, I watered the horses as Addie and Rita finished the evening milking. Addie, squatting at Maybell’s side, muttered, “Doolywhacker!”

From the side of the other cow, Rita giggled.

From then on, if Rita was in one of her glum moods, Addie could make her smile by simply mouthing the word “Doolywhacker.”

A
ddie eventually had more personal questions about sex. When I first told her I had slept with Cole, she’d simply shrugged and raised her eyebrows as if to say “of course.” But weeks later, as we pumped water for the livestock, she asked, “What was it like with Cole? What was different from being with me?”

I waddled to the hog’s trough, the bucket of water sloshing at my side. Addie followed with a second bucket. The morning was crisp with the first hint of fall, but sunny as midsummer.

Talking about sex so directly made me uncomfortable. I laughed. “I can’t slop a hog while I think about doing that. With you. Or Cole.”

She waited patiently, her face serious.

“Well, you and Cole are very different from one another . . . I don’t know, Addie. Other than the different body parts, everything else is sort of the same. Kissing. Touching. But all I know is him and you. With Cole, it was always over pretty fast. You and I have so much more time together. You smell different. You touch me differently. You fill up the whole room. And when I touch you, I know what it feels like to you. We’re alike.”

She had been tapping her chest lightly as she listened to my answer.

I stopped her hand. “Except for that. No one else has a voice like yours.”

She glanced down at my hand on her breastbone. “I can see how I’m different from Cole. And you’re right. I don’t think anyone else can do this.” She covered my hand with hers. “You inspire me.” She smiled as she drew me close, but I thought I saw a spark of sadness in her eyes.

I didn’t pursue that spark. But I wondered how she bore her gifts, her differences. What costs there might have been for her. I had no means to measure my choice in turning Cole from my bed, from a possible future. I had no scale, no map for the territory I found myself in.

It was Addie’s gift—not the private gift of her voice or her origins, but her gift with horses—that brought Cole back to our door with his own question. A few days after his daddy gave Darling to Addie, he rode up into the yard on his daddy’s mild old gelding. I waved him down from the garden before he got to the house.

“I came to find out how Addie got the mean out of that horse. I can’t figure it,” he called as he rode up.

“She’s in the barn. Ask her.”

He glanced at the barn, but did not leave. His hat shaded his face.

I squinted up and shielded my eyes against the sun. “How’re you doing, Cole. How’s your leg?”

He dismounted, smoother, more confidently. “Anything changed?”

“No.”

“She still sleeps in the same bed as you?”

I nodded.

“Just checking.” He gave me a long look, his mouth in a grim line. “My leg still gives me some trouble, but it’s healed.” He squared his shoulders and strolled away, his leg stiff as he tried to hide his limp.

When I finished cutting the okra, I joined them in the barnyard.

Addie had led Darling out to him. “She handles real smooth now. Be firm and gentle with her and she’ll do what you want. She’s like new now. Don’t think about what she was.” Addie handed him Darling’s reins.

“I’m ready,” he said softly, his face still and determined, the same expression I’d seen when he showed up at my door months before. He vaulted into the saddle and walked her in a slow, broad circle.

“Take her out,” Addie called. “She’s easy now. Talk sweet to her. Stay loose. Don’t clinch. Don’t pull.”

Cole waved his hat and urged Darling up to a trot along the field.

Addie smiled at me. “He’ll be okay. I talked to her.”

“Talked?”

“Like I do with you only . . .” her lips parted. “Hear anything?”

I heard Becky paw in the barn. Hobo barked a single sharp response from somewhere behind me.