The Enchanted Life of Adam Hope (39 page)

It wasn’t that difficult to withhold information, even about where, exactly, we were living, and Joe didn’t press. Without Momma, our family had no center. Except for the day we cleaned Momma’s closets, I’d hardly seen Bertie or Rita. As Joe and I sweated, cramming headboard, tables, and chairs into the back of the truck, he told me about Rita’s move to Hickory, where her new boyfriend lived. She worked at a store there and rented a little apartment.

Like Daddy, Joe had somehow become middle-aged while still in his thirties. Since Momma’s death, he’d even taken up pipe-smoking and now smelled of the same sweet tobacco Daddy smoked. When we’d finished with the furniture and hitched the horse trailer to the truck, Joe hugged me, a rare thing for him. “Come back when you can.” His voice thickened. Of all of them, I felt he was the most likely to forgive Adam, the most likely to find a way to treat him like an ordinary man.

“Thank you, Joe. I will,” I whispered as he released me. I felt I should say more, but I didn’t trust myself. As I watched his car pull away and his hand sweep out the window in a final wave, I knew that I—we—would not be coming back.

As night fell, I leaned against the porch, surveying the pastures and star-filled sky above the stables. A stone of sorrow grew in my stomach. The cooling night air smelled of spring.

Only one task remained. For years, Adam and I had measured the height of our daughters each year in the dining-room doorway. Dozens of horizontal pencil marks, dates, and initials marked the door frame. The lowest mark was Jennie and Lil in early 1959, when they were toddlers. The highest was marked “Dad.” I was about three inches below him.

The nails that held the board to the door frame, hammered home long before I had been born, groaned as I pried them loose with a crowbar. I worked up one side and then down the other. By fractions of an inch, the nails released. Finally, the board clattered to the floor, its dual row of nails jutting up. By the back-porch light, I banged all the nails out except a center stubborn one, then wedged the board into the tight press of the furniture strapped into the truck bed.

After I made a final sweep of each room, I stood in the hall and sang, as steady as I could, for those empty, echoing rooms and all that had happened in them: “Don’t sit under the apple tree with anyone else but me.” Then the last stanzas of “Amazing Grace,” and my own voice disappeared into the house.

I made myself a pallet on the bare floor of the bedroom where our bed had once been. I waited for peace, but I felt only the weight of sorrow. Finally, I fell asleep. In the ballet of my dreams, Bud and Wanda’s furniture settled into the corners.

The next morning, after I loaded the horses in the trailer, I took a fresh jelly jar from the cellar shelf and filled it with clay from the spot where I had found Addie. I hesitated before screwing the lid on, then I went to the spot where Jennie had bled into the ground and added another fistful.

For the last time, I locked the door to a house that I owned but that was no longer mine. The footstool I had sat on as a girl when I pumped the butter churn for Aunt Eva was pressed against the back window of the truck, filling the rearview mirror as I drove away. A few moments later, I parked at the edge of the graveyard. The graves were neat, recently mown. The remains of water-stained, wilted pictures of flowers Sarah and Lil had torn out of magazines drooped against Jennie’s tombstone. I left a little yellow cup with a lamb embossed on the side, Jennie’s favorite when she’d been a baby.

Then I drove away to my husband and daughters.

M
onths passed before I stopped expecting a knock at the door. The escape from the hospital and those first days in Florida had burned a new kind of anxiety into my nerve cells. Gradually, the sense of constant vigilance slipped away. While I had no illusions that Clarion would ever be a safe or happy place for Adam again, I began to feel that we were safe where we were.

It was 1966 and the sorrow and loss of our family seemed to be reflected all around us. Kennedy had been assassinated, blacks marched for civil rights, and Vietnam splattered across the TV and newspapers every day. The world smoldered and soon would catch fire, fire of a very different sort than in my youth—the fire of protest and rebellion.

But we had found our refuge.

The change of place began the thaw of grief for all of us. If death had chilled our hearts, the heat of that first summer quickened our pulses. Much of what I felt was the exhilaration of relief at being away from all the problems of Clarion. The rest was sheer physical newness. I perceived the same new lightness in the girls and Adam. But I felt a new grief that was not reflected in their faces.

The first few months in the house on the Warren ranch, everything seemed an affront to my expectations, to everything I knew. Our dirty clothes stained in grays and blacks instead of red Carolina clay. The strange view out the windows. The damp, odd odors of the house. I kept expecting the low, gentle slopes, the house, even the horses to be taken down and carried away like cardboard props so we could all stop the pretense. So we could go home. Then I would remember the empty rooms of the farm, Jennie bleeding in the truck, the faces of everyone I knew as we left her funeral, and it would hit me: this strange, surreal place
was
my home. My heart stumbled from the blow.

While Adam and the girls fell quickly into their daily routines of school and job, I now had nothing to do but housework, and that was finished by noon each day. There was no bookkeeping to be done. There were no hogs, chickens, or cows, no garden to tend.

On the farm, the stable had been within shouting distance. Now Adam spent his days in stables that were rectangles on the horizon, far past the sound of my voice. Gracie and Rosie, both in high school, had begun gathering up their small privacies for the life they would have when they left home. Boys collected around them, calling and dropping by the house, practicing nonchalance in their new men’s bodies, their voices as deep as Adam’s. Lil and Sarah studied their sisters for clues of what was to come.

What should have been a time of leisure and solitude for me lay heavy, solid as a blanket over my face, and I had no energy to throw it off. Nights, I lay awake next to Adam in the un-air-conditioned house, the mid-spring air already thick with moisture. As spring turned to the full heat of summer, it seemed we slept in the mouth of God, the air already breathed by some huge being. I tossed in the heat, listened for the relief of rain. I thought of everyone in North Carolina: Joe and the rest of my family, Marge and Freddie, and Wallace. I longed to see their faces, but my longing for the land surpassed all other desires. I ached for the sunrise view down the hill. In the swelling heat of Florida, I lusted for the crunch of fall leaves underfoot, the hard grip of the cold under my nightgown as I went out to milk in the morning. I hungered to take that curve where the road dipped to the mill-village houses and Momma’s. I would have given almost anything then to press myself into the farm’s embrace, to match my contours to hers.

I tried to turn my heart to the living, to the place I was, but putting seed in land not owned by me or my family seemed alien. The sandy, gray-white soil looked like dirty beach sand, not fit for growing anything. It smelled like dust. Yet weeds and trees and wildflowers grew along the roads. When we drove into town, we passed dense, impenetrable woods and fields of corn, peas, and peppers. Such new combinations of seemingly poor soil and happy flora puzzled me. Everywhere I went, I picked up the dirt, examining it for clues. Bringing anything out of such soil would require a whole new language on my part. I imagined that there must be something richer and darker under the gray sand, or some trick the farmers all knew. Trick or no trick, what I had always been able to do well now seemed inaccessible. Still, I searched the yard around our house for the best spot to plant my fall garden.

Meanwhile, with my hands and a good part of my days literally empty, I found myself turning again to Momma’s revelation. I circled the question of how could she have kept such a secret from me for so long. Often a second, unbidden, question followed: How could
I
? My daughters did not know their father’s origin. A dark, tender anxiety filled me.

One Saturday morning, I found Sarah sleeping next to a family portrait she’d drawn, a stair-step line of bright dresses and toothy smiles. Her nightmares were rare now and she could go to sleep without a light on, but she still slept with her art supplies and drew each night. In this newest drawing, I counted six of us girls and assumed she’d included Jennie. Since our move, the bloodiness had disappeared from her drawings, but so had Jennie, though Lil sometimes appeared outlined in ways that suggested a shadowy figure behind her. I was relieved to see Jennie whole and smiling among us. But I wondered why Sarah had left her father out. Then I saw penciled in below the two largest figures “Momma” and “Daddy.”

My gasp must have awakened her, for she stretched, then sat up to peer over at the portrait. Pointing to the tallest figure, she said, “This one is Daddy when he used to be a girl.” She regarded my startled face, then made a face at her drawing. “Should he have brown hair?”

I hadn’t heard Adam in the hall, but there he was, listening. He came over, searched her blankets, and held up the orange crayon. “This is what I remember having, Sarah. Orange hair, like yours and Momma’s, when I was a girl.”

“I remember, too, Daddy.” She nodded solemnly at him. “I like your hair now. I like you being a boy.” She took his hand. “Can I have oatmeal this morning with syrup?”

They both looked at me.

“Sure, oatmeal.” I felt dizzy as she rushed past me down the hall.

All children, when they are very young, confuse the male and female. Joe’s son had once asked me if I’d liked fishing when I was a boy. But Sarah was seven years old now, past the age for such confusions. She was correct, not confused.

In ways I could not pinpoint, she’d always seemed the one most like Adam, or rather Addie. She often seemed to know things she had no discernible way of knowing.

One evening, not long after we saw Sarah’s drawing, I asked Adam if he had ever told the girls—particularly Sarah—anything about himself and Addie. Adam had just returned from his shower. “No, I haven’t tried to explain anything to them.” He shrugged. “I can’t answer
your
questions. How would I answer theirs?”

He stepped into his boxers and climbed into bed with me.

“What should we tell them?” I asked.

“You could tell them about finding me, since you remember it better than me. And I guess I could tell them something about becoming who I am now. But not everything.”

“What did you do with Roy Hope in that hotel for two weeks?”

“Everything a body can do to know another body.” We both thought about that a moment.

“No.” I laughed. “You wouldn’t want to tell them about that. But what should we tell them and when?”

“Not now. They’re all too young. And they should all be told at the same time so they have company. You would be the best judge of when. When do you think Momma should have told you about your father?”

I had no answer.

A
dam’s hair had grown out quickly, covering the scar on his head. The wound on his chest provided the smile for the happy face Sarah drew on him with a permanent marker. Each night, as he undressed, I saw that the circle and two dots had grown fainter, nearly vanishing, until she redrew them and the process began again.

While I puzzled over the soil and flat pastures, Adam was buoyant. He threw himself at Florida as if it was the Second Coming and redemption was at hand. For him, it
was
a kind of redemption, and his contagious enthusiasm pulled us all in. Even Gracie, who had begun dating, willingly joined in on her father’s explorations of Florida.

Adam studied Florida as he had my body when we first met. His interest quickly shifted from tourist attractions to geography and state parks. He familiarized himself with the local bookstores and libraries. On Saturday nights, he scattered the dining room and bedroom with books, maps, and pamphlets, covering every surface as he planned the next day’s outing. Somewhere, he found a huge geographical map of Florida and taped it to the dining-room wall. A changing constellation of bright red destination tacks dotted it. “Karst,” he said to me one night as he read at the dining-room table. He repeated the new word happily, savoring it. “Karst. That’s the name for this place. Limestone and water. That’s why the land feels so different here.”

With luck, he could be finished at the Warrens’ by ten on Sunday mornings and we would take off for a day’s excursion as soon as he walked in the door.

“Beats church,” Rosie said one Sunday morning as she helped me pack our picnic lunch.

“But won’t we go to hell for missing church and going off to do other stuff?” Sarah asked as she poured more cereal into her bowl. She was very interested in rules and the consequences of their violation.

“Not if we sing hymns while we’re on our way to the parks. That makes it the Church of Florida,” Rosie retorted.

“The Church of Florida” sounded good to all of us. So, on the way to beaches, caves, springs, parks, swamps, rivers—anywhere we could get to and back home in one day—we sang our way through every hymn we knew and saved our souls. We collected Steinhatchee scallops, canoed the Sewanee, and fished at Cedar Key. All the girls learned to snorkel. Adam and Rosie even learned to scuba-dive. Late Sunday nights, we drove home, the girls asleep around us, Adam and I alone in the lights of the dashboard.

Cool water obsessed us those first long, hot months. There were the dark, tannin-stained rivers and cold, crystal-clear rivers, their waters originating in swamps or from deep underground. Unlike the rivers of the Appalachian Mountains, these brooked no boulders, few rocks, no white-water rapids, no muddied rust-colored rise of spring thaw. Florida’s rivers were at peace with gravity, sliding along its belly instead of tumbling down into its embrace.