by Rhonda Riley
We were naked. My skin was on fire.
The congregation came with us to the graveside service. I noticed a few sideways glances. Then we all gathered at Momma’s for the covered-dish supper. The house swelled with people, their perfumes and sweat mingling with the odor of coffee and fried chicken. The men had their whiskey and cigarettes on the back porch. They parted to let us through, but no one spoke. Bile rose in my throat and I swallowed painfully.
Uncle Otis, already drunk, hugged everyone and told them how much he loved his big sister. I did not see Daddy. I handed Sarah to Adam. With a child in his arms, maybe someone would find him approachable.
I found Daddy in the bedroom, lifting the lid off Momma’s little jewelry box and then setting it back in place. Then he rearranged her comb and brush and lifted the lid of the jewelry box again. His shoulders, suddenly frail, slumped forward. I peeled his fingers off the box lid and laid it down. I held his face, forcing him to look at me. His head felt fragile between my hands. He was not my father, but he was the man who raised me. “Daddy, we’re going to go into the kitchen and you will eat your supper. You have to eat now.”
His watery, bloodshot eyes focused, but he didn’t see me.
He let me take his arm and lead him into the kitchen. I sat him at the head of the table, the bowls of neighbors’ offerings crowded in front of him. Rita made him a plate.
“Thanks.” Joe tried to smile at me. “None of us could get him to come out of the bedroom. Not even Bertie.”
After Daddy began to eat, I joined Adam. Mavis Montgomery had cornered him and chatted excitedly, praising the girls’ singing. She had been in the hospital during Jennie’s funeral. Even in the crowded house, a small space remained around them.
I stayed by Adam’s side until I thought I glimpsed Frank’s face through the packed living room. All I could see was that familiar brow turning away from me, but I was certain it was him. The shock of seeing him lurched to the surface of my skin. “Let’s go. Now,” I whispered to Adam. In a glance, I saw that Adam had not spotted Frank yet. Quickly, I gathered up the girls and we left.
The next morning, Adam departed for his mountain trip. He returned two days later, not jovial and refreshed as he normally was after his retreats, but home and safe.
The days ached. The sky bruised my eyes. Every minor detail of daily life—the crumpled, folded brown bags the girls carried their apples and snacks to school in; the small scar on one of the horse’s flanks; Adam’s muddy chaps drying on the back porch—all seemed a knot of meaning, dense and indecipherable and simultaneously devoid of meaning. I hated the sorrow that seemed to be slowly unhinging my world.
The sparse, damaged fibers still holding me together were worn thinner by Momma’s revelation. In my sleep, I met her in the white space of dreams, where I asked my questions and she answered. She spoke reluctantly. Her lips moved, but there was no sound. I woke in a hot, futile rage.
My biological father’s ignorance seemed unjust, unnatural. Men have an alien, physical capacity for innocence: their bodies can bring forth life that they know nothing of. Only in complete insanity or a coma could a woman do such a thing.
A week after Momma’s funeral, I told Adam I was going grocery shopping, and while Daddy worked his shift at the mill, I went through Momma’s things, spending hours investigating every corner of her house. I pulled out drawers and turned them upside down. Sweeping her dresses aside, I searched the closet corners. I held each book by its spine and shook it. Nothing. Thirty-nine years had wiped out any trace there might have been of him. Every trace but me.
The Sunday after my private search, Bertie, Rita, Mary, and I met at Momma’s to go through her clothes and jewelry. I lingered after they left, straightening the kitchen, then followed Daddy’s pipe smoke through the house to the front porch. I found him in his usual spot, sitting in his rocker, puffing on his pipe. A large oak tree spread its branches over the yard and the land sloped so that the mill was a hundred feet from the porch. All my life he had sat in that same spot on the porch, facing the mill.
Now he was my only source of information. His gaze, locked on the mill, held the vague softness of a man looking out to sea, expecting nothing. He had regained his color since the funeral, but none of the weight he had lost during the last months of Momma’s life. He was suddenly an old man.
My determination to confront him wavered, and my direct, rehearsed questions vanished. “You and Momma took care of all of us kids the same. I never felt I was treated worse. But you two always let me wander off on my own. I had more freedom. Why was that, Daddy?”
His rocking continued uninterrupted for so long, I thought he might ignore my question. Then he stopped and took his pipe out of his mouth. “You didn’t need any more than what you were given. You kept to yourself and took care of yourself. Even when you were a bitty little thing and kept wandering off. We didn’t let you go. You went. And you found your way around. Never snake-bit. Never hurt. The others—especially Rita—needed more watching, needed more discipline. You just didn’t need it—Would’a been a waste on you.” He put his pipe back in his mouth and began rocking again.
“Why do you think I was different?” My heart banged in my chest.
“That’s just how it was. I’m sure your girls are the same, some needing more than others. That’s all there is to it.”
I was not prepared for him to draw parallels between his situation and mine, but I pressed on. “That’s all there is to it?”
“Yep, that’s it.” He returned his pipe to his lips, took a long drag. His rocking chair squeaked dismissively as he squinted at the mill.
That old longing swelled in my throat. I’d always wanted more from him. More affection, more discipline, more stories, more touch. But, lately, I also felt the press of gratitude. He’d kept Momma from the wrath of her stern father and the scorn of a whole town. He was still protecting her.
I didn’t want to cry in front of him. I patted the arm of his rocker. “Well, I thank you for all of it” was the best I could do. I did not have the will or energy to goad my father for more. And what good would it have done? Long ago, he had chosen his path. I let the sleeping dog of my mother’s secret lie.
I was, in my own way, a perverse echo of her.
Before the deaths, Adam had remained, in some essential way, innocent. He had, as far as I knew, never been a child. He hadn’t been bent, while very young and still supple, by the knowledge of mortality that the death of a pet or a distant relative brings.
An uncharacteristic quietness enveloped him. He’d always been capable of a kind of absorbed, open calm, especially when working with a damaged horse or trying to quiet the girls, but now his stillness seemed vacant, no longer a sign of will and effort, but an absence of both. When the girls went to him or the horses turned to Adam, he opened his hands, blind hands brushing lightly over the world, his body operating on rote memory. The only time he seemed at peace and fully present was when he listened to his daughters singing.
When Jennie died, the girls mourned, but the ostracism of their father, followed by their grandmother’s death, propelled them into another level of isolation. We’d always been somewhat removed from life in Clarion and the mill-village, but now the four of them were far less interested in going into town or visiting cousins. With Momma’s death, they seemed to retract into a greater reliance on each other while simultaneously surrendering to their individual passions and quirks. At some point, most evenings, they would gather at the kitchen table with their homework. On the evenings they had no homework, they would linger there after dinner.
Gracie focused on academics, particularly history. Her grades had always been high but they rose to straight As. She became the family manager, spending more time with her younger sisters, helping me get them ready for school, checking on their homework, singing them to sleep at night when they needed it. Rosie continued riding as much as possible. Formerly the most volatile of her sisters, she became the most quiet and
cooperative, a change I could not read as wholly positive. Lil read voraciously, mostly fantasies in which good wizards and witches prevailed over evil. If she had no chores and nothing to read, she cleaned and cleaned the house. Each afternoon after school, she swept the front and back porches, jabbing at the boards of the floor until she banished every speck of dirt. Sarah, of course, continued to draw. Orange-haired girls, increasingly more detailed and realistically proportioned, crowded her drawings, their dresses blood-red. Their eyes wide circles. Their mouths open in an O of terror or song.
I still had not shared with Adam what Momma had told me. For the first time ever, I kept something from him. But Momma’s story of my father began to plague me. I grasped at it for some relief from the memories of Jennie on the ground, of Adam’s bloody hands on the steering wheel, and Momma’s gray face before she died. If I was imagining my biological father walking down a street, eating a sandwich, lying down next to his wife for an afternoon nap, or even buried on some faraway, strange hill, I was also less aware of Adam sleeping and unresponsive next to me.
My blood and bones, the tonality of my voice, the shape of my fingernails, my love of reading, even the roundness of my hips, might have been given to me by a man I’d never met. What else did I not know? The thought of my ignorance about my paternity made me shudder. I lived daily with the secret of having chosen a stranger to father my own children. How could I brush aside this news about my father? His blood ran in the veins of my daughters, mingling with Adam’s.
By 1965, the Piedmont Hotel, where my mother and Benjamin Mullins had been lovers, reeked of poverty and full ashtrays. An old, unshaven man slumped in an overstuffed chair in the lobby. The thin-necked clerk at the counter reluctantly put down his comic book to survey my plain dress and my lack of luggage.
“Is there still a stairway in the back?” I asked. “Can I see one of the second-floor rooms?”
He hesitated, then led me down a dank, uncarpeted hall and up a flight of narrow stairs, retracing my mother’s footsteps.
“Here, this one.” I stopped him at the first door.
He said nothing, just shrugged and unlocked the door.
The vertically striped wallpaper had faded to yellows and grays. A dark old bureau leaned in one corner, its missing leg replaced by a brick. Morning light, stark and unkind, shone through two dirty windows, illuminating a clot-colored bedspread. The curtains, a geometric patterned fabric from the fifties, were the one attempt at new décor.
Nothing of my young mother remained in the room. Nothing to explain how she could have let me grow up without such crucial knowledge.
“You want this room, lady?”
“No!” I ran from the room and out the back door.
I’d longed for some repercussion from Momma’s confession, some recognition from Daddy, some change in demeanor in Joe or my sisters. Anything that would convey that I was not alone in what I knew. But there was nothing, no difference.
What was an earthquake for me was undetectable in everyone around me. What I now knew estranged me, the very thing Momma in her secrecy had sought to protect me from. Leaning against the wall of the Piedmont Hotel, gulping the sharp, fresh air that seemed to splinter in my lungs, I saw again the anguish on her face as she’d admitted what she had kept from me. That shame, I suddenly realized, was the core of the matter for me, not the nature of the man who had fathered me, not any nuanced shifts in my relationships with my siblings.
My mother was ashamed of the circumstances of my conception. That was the stone I could not swallow or balance against all I knew of us, of what she had been to me.
And now she was gone. No longer accountable, she had surrendered me to my own resources.
That night, I made Adam accept my touch as I had the night before Momma’s funeral. Forcing intimacy on my husband was a strange cruelty on my part. A kind of fear filled his face and eyes as he lay stretched out under me. But that was the only time grief loosed its grip on him. It was exorcism, and we needed it; otherwise, we would have been lost to each other. Those were the only nights that he slept the whole night without waking. I knew I was taking unfair advantage of how well I knew his body and its responses, knowledge that he had given in trust. But I wanted the contact. I needed it. Tears—his and mine—were preferable to distance and silence.
In the months following Momma’s death, I was afraid for all of us. An unraveling had begun. Even the farm, my refuge since I was a girl, seemed dissonant, indifferent. The same mute slopes, the same red earth, and the same sky above the distant tree line. The apple tree bare now as it was every winter. The place where Frank ran over Jennie was visible from the back porch. I could have walked the exact trail of her blood across the field to the driveway. That part of the field and the top of the driveway, where the truck was stopped when I saw that last pulse in her neck, were my view from the kitchen window over the sink. These had been my two favorite places to look out over the farm.
Beyond the farm were the people I had grown up with—people who now shunned my husband. My anger at them seemed to backwash, flooding the very land I had so loved, leaving me helpless and poorer.
We had been approached several times about selling some of the land. There were no malls in Clarion then. Everyone still shopped downtown, but with the interstate on the northern boundary of the land and the state road on the east, we were sitting on prime commercial real estate. The first offer was so high we ignored it as a mistake.
A few months after Momma died, Clyde Brewer, the oldest brother in a family of local realtors came puffing up to the front door. He spread his map out on the front-porch table, pointed to the corner acre, and quoted us a price that was twice what we had been offered before—enough to support us for two years. His client, some company from out of town, wanted to open a new kind of store—a “convenience” store.
Even then we didn’t realize what the land would eventually be worth. We didn’t foresee the malls, movie theaters, and restaurants that would one day crowd the highway. We had no intention of selling the farm. We didn’t need the cash. We raised most of our own food, had no rent or mortgage. With that and what Adam earned, we were doing well. But Clyde Brewer wanted just an acre, as far from the house as it could be. Out of curiosity, we added ten percent to his offer and called him back. He took it in a heartbeat. Fate had taken with one hand and now gave with the other.
I was waiting. Waiting for Adam to come back to himself, for people to forget what he had done, for the land around us to take on new associations and cease being sorrow’s postcards.
Late that winter, a light, sticking snow fell one morning after the kids had left for school. I’d baked cookies for Sarah’s teacher’s birthday. The scents of cinnamon and ginger permeated the house as I packed the treats. On the way to the elementary school, I dropped by to see Daddy and leave him some of the beef stew we’d had for supper the night before. After I dropped off the cookies, I headed home.
As I turned off the road and up the driveway to the farm, Wallace leapt off the front porch, waving both arms. I pulled up behind the house. The stable door stood open. Inside the door, dark red blood puddled in a small oval on the floor. Nearby, a long smear of red and two bloody footprints.
“Adam?” I called. “Adam!”
Wallace jogged up behind me. “They took him to the hospital!” He tapped himself in the middle of his sternum. “He got kicked in the chest, then fell back and banged his head. He went down and I couldn’t get him to come to. He was bleeding bad. You know I don’t have my car with me. I called the ambulance. They took him to Mercy Hospital.” Wallace talked faster as we ran back to the truck, telling me how he’d been leading out one of the stallions when something spooked the horse. A single kick had knocked Adam up against a stall post.
I sped away. Adam had never been to a doctor or a hospital.
A pretty, stout nurse pushed a clipboard at me. “Here.” She handed me a pen. “These are just standard forms. They should have been si
gned when he was admitted, but he was unconscious.”
I stared at the forms, then signed.
She took the clipboard, then thrust another form at me. “This release, too,” she said as she dove for the telephone.
I hesitated, blinking at the words, but could not focus.
The nurse muttered impatiently into the phone, then put her palm over the receiver. “Honey, could you go ahead and sign? I’ve got to get this one and there’s a call light on.”
I signed the rest of the forms and pushed them toward her, hoping she would tell me where my husband was. Instead, she asked me to sit in an ugly, blue-gray waiting room until Adam was sent up from X-ray. Finally, another nurse appeared, smiling at me as if I were a celebrity, and announced Adam’s room number.
Adam slept propped up on pillows, his head back and his mouth open. A bandage circled his head above his eyebrows. Another covered him from his armpits almost down to his navel. His sickly pale color alarmed me. Was there a looseness about his features? I opened the curtains to let some natural light in. Except for a yellow tint to his color, he looked normal.
I lightly touched the bandage on his chest. A nurse charged in, jerked the curtains closed again, cranked his bed up a notch higher, and started to take his blood pressure. “Don’t put any pressure there, honey.” She pointed at my hand on his chest, muttered her approval at his blood pressure, and then marched out.
“Adam?” I touched his face. “Wake up. Please wake up!” Nothing. I squeezed his hand, then shook it a little. Nothing. I held his hand and watched his chest rise and fall. The walls were close. Slowly, a wave of panic rose from the base of my spine up through my stomach. What would they find out about him and what would they do with him? To him?
I could hardly breathe as I called Bertie and asked her to pick the girls up after school and take them to her house for supper.
Adam slept peacefully. I prayed, appealing to the God I doubted. Please don’t take Adam, too. Outside, the afternoon sun fell. The hospital lights shimmered on the thin snow below.
