The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope (15 page)

Yet the boys were interested—in both of us—and most often approached us in pairs, walking us home from Momma’s or church or inviting us on double dates. But there was no one in particular that either one of us wanted to keep seeing. The men who fought in the war were either shell-shocked or they had an unsettling urgency about them. The boys who had been too young to go to war or had not made it to the action, seemed naive, more boy than man.

All of them took Addie’s direct gaze as an invitation. But they were like house cats stalking a wild turkey, confident and focused at first, then shying away as they got closer and saw that she was not the jay or wren their instincts and abilities were prepared for.

Once some mill-village boys borrowed an old car and drove me and Addie west for a picnic, a rare midday Sunday excursion outside the county and Addie’s first time in the mountains. I saw one of the boys kiss Addie. The heat of jealousy bolted up my gut through my chest and coiled there painfully for the day. That was all that happened, as far as I knew, and Addie seemed no different. New mountain landscape seemed to impress her much more than the kiss did.

M
onths later, Baby Bud, the first grandchild in the family, arrived only seven months after Joe and Mary’s wedding. Babies often came early then and were, without the benefit of medical intervention, miraculously healthy and well-formed in their premature state.

Thanksgiving dinner at Momma’s house was Baby Bud’s big debut. When I passed through on my way to the bathroom, I found Mary sitting on the bed, her back to the door as she nursed Bud.

“Come here, Evelyn.” She patted the bed. Little Bud had just finished feeding, his eyes rolled back, and his full lips parted, showing the small nursing blister. Mary was still exposed, her big pink nipple flattened and wet.

“Look at him. It’s like there’s a sleeping potion in my milk,” she whispered. “He does this every time, passes right out. Here, hold him. You’re the only one who hasn’t yet. Go on, he won’t bite.”

He felt surprisingly light and warm in my hands. He sighed and squirmed. I felt the strength of his tiny body and, when he yawned, smelled his milky breath. Mary got herself back into her blouse. I stared at Bud, lifting his little fist with my finger, when I felt a hand on my shoulder.

“You want one,” Addie whispered so close I could feel her breath on my cheek.

She was right. I did want one. Like all girls then, I assumed I would have children one day. I naturally imagined myself married and with kids. It was not something I’d ever questioned. I had never felt the physical urge to have a baby, the way I had felt an urge toward Cole, toward the land I lived on, or toward Addie herself. But I felt it then, holding Bud, touching that perfect soft skin and breathing in the moist sweetness of him.

“You’ll need a man first,” Mary said. “Both of you.”

“We’ll get one then,” Addie whispered back, sitting down beside us.

Mary pulled Bud’s little sprouts of hair up into a peak with her fingers. “Better get two. You two can’t share everything.”

Little Bud wiggled again, pulled himself into a ball, turned red, and audibly shit. I felt the force of it in my hand and half-expected that he had gone through his diaper, the gown, and the blankets. Mary looked at my face and laughed. Bud woke. Calm and wide-eyed, he stared up at us.

For days after, Addie was quiet and subdued, often taking long rides alone. She spent a Sunday afternoon at Cole’s house learning how to drive. Then she somehow talked his momma into letting her borrow the family’s old Ford truck the next weekend. She told me she was going “up into the mountains” as if she was doing more than changing geography. And she was going alone. She packed an old pup tent borrowed from Joe and two days’ worth of food. When I saw her fold the tent and put it in the back of the truck, anxiety snaked through my gut. I waited until she came back outside with blankets, the same ones I had first wrapped her in two years before.

“Don’t go.” I took her arm. “Why are you going? What are you going to do up there?”

She rubbed her forehead. “I don’t know what I’ll do. But I need to go.”

Her eyes had the focused, faraway look of someone already on her way. She caught me staring at her, worried, and snapped back into the present.

“Don’t worry. It’ll be okay, Evelyn. I’m coming back. Just tell everyone I’ve gone hunting.” Then she laughed that staccato laugh that reminded me of Joe.

I did not want to, but I let her go.

Two days later, she came back as she had left, without explanation, herself again.

I
felt the pressure to marry and have a family—that was the expectation of my community, my family, and my body. I was content with Addie. But the ripeness of my body was not something I could resist or suppress.

After I held little Bud, I thought of these things more often. I couldn’t see how I would fit a man into the house Addie and I lived in. We would each have to find someone at the same time or share a single man. The former was unlikely, the latter seemed impossible. But that is just how it happened. We found a man.

Four

Adam

T
he morning sun shone bright and unseasonably warm, though it was still winter, with no sign of buds on the trees yet. Addie and I had just come from Sunday dinner at Momma’s. Logy from overeating, I chose an easy but prickly task for the afternoon—pruning dead stems off the blackberries. I perched high up on the bank where it began its drop from the road to the railroad track, my clippers in hand, when I heard whistling and then the crunch of shoes on the gravel skirting of the tracks below.

A man’s voice called out, “Hello! There a place around here I could get a drink of water?”

I glanced down, expecting to see one of the local boys, but a stranger peered up at me. The brim of his hat shaded his eyes. Too nicely dressed to be a hobo, he held a small, battered suitcase and a wrinkled, grease-stained brown paper sack in one hand. He needed a shave. His jacket was slung over one shoulder and his sleeves rolled up.

“Ma’am, is there a place nearby where I could get a drink of water?” he repeated. “That’s all I want is a drink of water.”

He pushed his hat back farther on his forehead, exposing his face. He was not much older than I. A lock of dark hair fell forward over his brown eyes.

“If you go down the track about another fifty feet there’s a path up the bank. Be careful you don’t get scratched by the blackberry briars. There’s a pump in the back of the house.” I pivoted and swept my hand toward the house.

“Thank you very much.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I watched him climb the bank. His shoulders and head were visible above the brambles. I judged him to be six foot two, maybe three. He reached the crest and paused. Silently, I pointed toward the house. He grinned, the grin of a man used to smiling at women, and continued. I followed, watching his shoulders move under his cotton shirt.

He set his suitcase down immediately and took a long drink from the ladle at the pump. After a second deep drink, he bent lower, scooping up the cold water with his hands, and rubbed it on his face and into his hair. Addie leaned out the back door, her arms folded across her chest.

The stranger pulled a white handkerchief out of his pocket and slowly dried his face, letting us watch him. He carefully folded his handkerchief and put it back in his pocket before regarding us.

“You two must be twins?” he said after he had taken us both in.

I shook my head.

“Sisters then?”

We both shook our heads. “Cousins.” I said.

He glanced quickly from me to her. Addie nodded.

“Must surely be more to it than that,” he said, grinning again and combing his wet fingers through his hair. A current went through me; I wanted to have my hand in his hair. Then he held out his hand and announced, “Roy Hope from Kentucky. On my way home from Jacksonville, Florida.”

Addie and I introduced ourselves.

He leaned back against the watering trough, resting his hips on the lip of it. “I should be sitting in a train on my way to Kentucky instead of walking the tracks. But some lucky bum is sitting in my place.”

We nodded our interest and he launched into his story. “I’m not a mining man and where my people come from in Kentucky is nothing but mining. I was gonna make something of myself. Jacksonville, Florida, seemed to be the place for that, but it didn’t work out that way. So I’m heading back home for a while. Then I think I’ll go out West.”

I studied him—the width of his wrists, the span of his neck where it joined his shoulder. He turned his hat in his hands, smoothing the brim as he told us about his brother in Jacksonville, who fought with his wife, and their baby, who woke up at all hours of the night. His opportunities and savings that had dwindled.

“The Florida beaches, though.” He whistled his amazement. “Clean white sand, fine as powder.” He rubbed his fingers and thumb together and laughed. “And on Saturday afternoons, girls. Girls everywhere in bathing suits.”

He was even younger than I had first thought—early twenties, maybe his late teens. He had not been in the war.

I watched his beautiful mouth and straight white teeth while he relayed the details of being robbed of a suitcase and train ticket when he napped in the Charlotte depot. “So, I’m broke now, with nothing left but this.” His foot nudged the little suitcase at his side. “Nothing to do but hoof it home.” He glanced at the chopping block. “If you ladies could use some help around here, I’d be happy to split some wood for my supper . . .” He paused and pulled a pack of cigarettes out of his breast pocket.

Addie looked at me and raised an eyebrow as he bent his head to light his cigarette. I smiled at her and she offered him some supper. I handed him the splitting maul and a wedge.

While Addie cooked, I stood at the kitchen door watching Roy split wood. She came and stood behind me. “You just gonna stand around and watch him?”

“There are worse things a girl could do,” I said.

“And I imagine you are thinking of at least one of them.”

“I don’t think he’s real smart,” I answered, then pitched my voice up into that high scratchiness of Granny Lou’s and quoted what she had said that day at church when she saw the Clemson boy making eyes at me and Addie. “He’s a fine example of a man. A woman could get good, healthy children off of him.” I giggled.

Addie snorted back at me and I repeated the phrase, pointing at him. I pulled her closer so she could get a better view. He put the maul down and headed toward the outhouse.

“Look at him, Addie. He is well-built: good shoulders, strong arms. Good-looking, too. For once, Granny would be right.”

Addie watched him till he disappeared behind the outhouse door. “Yep, she would be right about this one.”

Later, when we sat down to dinner, he ate quietly, all of his attention on his food. The lamplight made the slight cleft in his chin more apparent. He wiped his plate clean with the last of the corn bread as Addie and I cleared the serving bowls off the table.

Roy pulled a flask out of his back pocket. “You ladies mind?”

We shook our heads. He unscrewed the cap and took a long swallow, tilting his head back, exposing the movements of his throat.

When I came near the table where he sat smoking and drinking, I could smell the warm liquor on his breath and feel the heat of him. His situation grew darker and more dramatic the more he drank. By the time he finished the whiskey, he was railing against the mines, the unfriendliness of Jacksonville, and his sister-in-law. Even through my stupor of attraction, I could hear the bitterness in his voice. He caught my eye, tilted his shoulder my way when I passed by.

We let Roy sleep on the couch in the parlor. In the morning, he did not seem to be in much of a rush to leave. Addie and I discussed things and decided to offer him some money for his labor—not much, just two dollars, but it would have taken him pretty far back then. We worked him hard, dragging in some fresh-fall logs for firewood and replacing some boards on the back porch. In the afternoon, the three of us mucked the barn. All day I was aware of where he was and what he was doing.

After supper, when I returned from the outhouse, he stood on the back porch, his cigarette glowing in the dark. I passed him as I went up the steps and he pulled me toward him. His breath smelled of moonshine.

“Evelyn is a pretty name,” he said. “I’ve never known a girl named Evelyn.” He traced the line of my lower lip with his index finger, and I felt it all the way down my body. My hips curled involuntarily up and toward him.

“I can see it’s just the two of you out here all alone,” he whispered close to my face. Then he took my lower lip between his teeth and bit very gently, pressing his hips tight against me. I shuddered, and then pushed him away. It was too much, too fast.

Roy stumbled backward a step. “Go on then,” he said and patted me on the rear as I walked away from him. “I don’t need it no how.”

I rushed inside, trembling. Not from fear or anger, but from what I wanted to do.

“You all right?” Addie asked and took me by the wrist.

“I’m all right, but he’s getting pretty drunk. Did you show him where the whiskey was, the pints of shine Uncle Otis left us?”

“No, he must have found that on his own. I guess he figured we weren’t paying him enough. I’ll make sure he doesn’t get more than one.”

“Good. I’m going to bed,” I told her.

From where I lay trying to calm myself and sleep, I heard them—at first very faintly, then louder when they came inside into the parlor. The trace of his touch lingered on my lips.

I must have fallen asleep. I woke sometime later and reached across Addie’s side of the bed. My hand slid over cool, empty sheets. I heard some noises, faint voices, but no recognizable words. I tiptoed softly down the hall. The noises from the parlor became rhythmic as Addie’s voice rose in excitement. My heart jolted, then clattered in my chest till I could hardly hear. Numbly, I took the last steps up to the parlor door. Through a crack of the door, I saw the middle of Addie’s bare back, the curve of her behind, and, below her, the tops of Roy’s thick, open thighs. She moved up and down on him. I watched, my fist jammed into my mouth, the burn from my belly to my crotch doubling me over. Then they slid from the couch to the floor. He shifted to the top. I could see only his feet sticking out past the couch. Their rhythm increased until he sputtered and groaned to a stop.